The Energy Challenge 2004 - Solar

by Murray Duffin

[Like previous articles in this series, the following article is somewhat technical. Nevertheless I decided to post it because solar energy is important in the overall discussion of the Energy Challenge. Bill Totten]

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Solar

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (November 04 2004)


Solar energy is our most abundant renewable resource. An analysis of insolation in the USA southwest shows that using only the 1% of the land area considered, that has a slope of less than 1% and more than 7 kilowatt hours per square meter per day insolation, concentrated solar (CSP) can provide power of approximately thirty gigawatts electric. With effective storage (as for solar towers) this potential could provide at least three times the total productive energy of today's economy.

Solar energy generation can be considered in three categories, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic (PV), and solar thermophotovoltaic (TPV). As TPV is still a far future technology, only the first two will be considered here. 2004 may have been the watershed year for the development of solar renewable energy, although that may not become obvious for several more years. While there has been little progress in installations in some years, technology has continued to improve, and with rising costs of coal oil and natural gas, interest in solar energy is now growing rapidly.


The new economic driver

North American production of natural gas is reported to have declined by more than 3% in 2003 versus 2002, and based on reports by the major producers in America, production in 2004 seems to have declined at least 3% in the first half, and as much as 10 to 12% in the third quarter year-on-year. Hurricane damage can account for less than 40% of third quarter decline, so it seems that decline of mature fields is accelerating. Against earlier forecasts of natural gas prices below $5 per million btu for the second half of 2004, recent cash prices have been above $7, at a time when demand is low, and storage is at record levels.

At the same time export demand for coal has caused prices to more than double, on average, for all but Powder River Basin coal; and we have seen oil prices rise 70% in a few months and are going into winter with heating oil stocks low and prices high. With possible brief respites, these trends appear irreversible.


Solar Thermal Overview

There are 2 major sets of solar thermal, (1) direct heating and cooling and (2) electricity generation.

Each can be split into flat plate and concentrating (CSP) <1> subsets although for electricity generation CSP is the economic choice for all but small-scale applications.

- Direct heating and cooling

The mature technology is water heating for home hot water, space heating and swimming pool heating. Flat plate technology is common, inexpensive and effective and has been used successfully with gradual growth for at least fifty years. Efficiency can be in the 25 to 50% range, depending on design. More recent technology that is growing rapidly, and is the preferred choice for larger installations like hotels and public swimming pools is evacuated tube heating systems which provide much more heat per unit area, remain effective even during light overcasts, and can reach 60% conversion efficiency.

Recently compound parabolic concentrators (CPC) have begun to be industrialized, proving very effective in evacuated tube systems. The advantage of CPC is that, by concentrating sunlight it can raise liquid temperature in pressurized systems to over 300 degrees fahrenheit, enabling economic absorption chillers for cooling systems. CPC is also effective over a very wide angle of illumination, eliminating the need for a tracker in a concentrator system. The California Energy Commission retrofitted and optimized a twenty-ton conventional double effect (2E) LiBr/water absorption chiller to be solar hot water driven, and have estimated that such a system can be supplied commercially for under $4500 per ton, with a net reduction in electricity demand of 1.3 kilowatts per ton. Depending on hours per year of operation and peak electricity costs, an economic payback of 4 to 8 years can be expected.

Direct heating and cooling systems have the effect of displacing electricity, to use Amory Lovin's term, providing "negawatts" instead of megawatts, and generally at lower cost than increased generating capacity.

- Electricity generation (CSP) <2>

Thermal power generation is being addressed in several ways - and for different sizes of installation:

<> Solar dish concentrators driving Sterling engine generators.

<> Trough concentrators heating a liquid to gas system driving a turbine generator.

<> Solar towers using large reflector (heliostat) arrays to heat molten salts which, through a heat exchanger, drive steam turbines.

<> Solar chimneys using rising air from a large ground level greenhouse to drive turbines at the base of a kilometer-high chimney.


CSP Details

Dish/Sterling systems tend to be aimed at tens of kilowatt applications for grid connected distributed power, and reach conversion efficiencies near 30%. Cost of electricity is still high, though there is a wide range of estimates. Widespread use seems likely to be well in the future.

Trough concentrators get into the hundreds of kilowatts to tens of megawatts range, good for locally sighted factory power also at attractive efficiencies. The best-known examples are the SEGS series (now up to SEGS 9) in California. Recent projects have been commissioned in Nevada and Arizona. It has been estimated that a 100 mile square in the Nevada desert could provide about 500 gigawatts electric, roughly equal to the USA installed electric power base. Up to now such applications have limited storage ability, so they are unsuitable to 24 hour operation and dispatched power. CPC concentrators might overcome that drawback. These systems approach 14% efficiency today and are projected to get to 17% by about 2015.

Solar towers (Power Towers) are megawatt-sized for utility type supply and have the advantage of retaining heat for 24-hour operation. Solar 1 was operated near Barstow California in the 1980s as proof of concept. Solar 2, a 10 megawatt electric upgrade of Solar 1 operated from 1992 to 1999, demonstrating the feasibility of storing heat for dispatchable power and 24 hour operation. Solar Tres (17 megawatt electric) has been planned for Spain, originally to go into operation by late 2003, but now delayed to 2006, seemingly by bureaucracy. Towers in the 100 megawatt range are projected. Solar towers are about 23% efficient in conversion of incident energy to electricity, and can realize up to 70% capacity factor. Current experience indicates a space demand of ten acres per megawatt, with promise of at least a 20% reduction.

Solar chimneys <4,5> are only theoretical so far, and seem to have captured most attention in Australia. They can be designed to heat water during the day to provide energy at night. Efficiency is estimated as 3%, but it seems likely that this can be at least doubled. Proposed designs have fresh air drawn into the heating area at ground level. Drawing in air near the tower top would augment generation with the sinking column of cooler air. In dry climates it should be possible to inject water vapor into intake air to further cool the descending air column. Current projected design is for 200 megawatts and requires about 23 acres per megawatt. Capital cost of $2 per peak watt is projected, but seems quite optimistic.

For utility scale electricity generation, the best choices today are trough concentrator and solar tower systems. An excellent 2003 analysis for trough concentrators <2> (based on 2002 data and projections) considers a necessary competitive target price for electricity of $4.50 per million btu, assuming a floor fixed at that level by liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now can be sure that LNG will not be a major factor for at least a decade, and even then will set a floor above $6 per million btu. This analysis showed trough systems becoming competitive at 10 gigawatts electric installed capacity and 6 cents per kilowatt hour. It now seems more likely that 7-8 cents per kilowatt hour will be good which can be reached at 5-6 gigawatts electric installed. Another late 2003 report <3>, using well reviewed data and analysis developed independently be Sunlab and Sargent & Lundy gives present electricity costs of 10 to 12.6 cents per kilowatt hour now, going down to 3.5 to 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour before 2020 for trough and tower systems. Growing fossil fuel shortages seem certain to accelerate progress relative to these studies.


Photovoltaic (PV)

Historically PV has been seen as much too expensive for widespread use, having been represented as "the energy of the future and always will be". 2003 saw a novel development that should change that conclusion. All of the pieces now seem to be in place for PV to breakthrough all the barriers of demand, cost and capacity that have been holding it back, but it seems that no one in the North American PV or electric utility industries has seen all the pieces yet, let alone put them together to make a picture.

Recent natural gas demand growth is largely for electricity generation. From 1993 through 2003 nearly 300 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity was installed in the USA, about 90% of which is fired by natural gas, both to meet Clean Air Act requirements and to add flexible capability to meet peak loads. Base load demand is estimated to grow at least 1.5% per year (6 gigawatts per year), but seems to have shot up by at least 5% in 2004 versus 2003. Therefore supply fired by natural gas, intended for peaking, is being converted to base load supply, leaving a growing shortage of peaking capacity. Now declining supply of natural gas means that peaking demand growth can no longer be met by adding new capacity fired by natural gas. However peak demand coincides with peak insolation, making PV an attractive alternative.

So, we have demand, at least if the cost is not too high. Can needed costs be met, and can there be adequate supply? In Renewable Energy World, December 2002, Auliche and Schulze estimated worldwide polysilicon feedstock capacity for electronic grade silicon at 26,000 metric tons per year, with production estimated at 14,000 metric tons per year. With such a large excess capacity, polysilicon suppliers have been happy to sell electronic grade silicon for PV production at very attractive prices ($20 to 25 per kilogram), enabling PV producers to lower their prices. As Maycock noted in Solar Today, January/February 2004, PV producers have sold cells and modules at cost, enabling very rapid industry growth in 2001-2003. System quotes as low as $4 per peak watt installed have been mentioned. Total world silicon PV production in 2003 was about 0.7 peak gigawatts, having grown 32% worldwide while actually shrinking in the USA.

Auliche and Schulze estimated that about 2000 metric tons each of "off spec" and "non-prime" electronic grade silicon were supplied to the PV industry in 2000. At 17 metric tons per peak megawatt that was enough to produce 235 peak megawatts in 2000. Maycock shows 2000 production at 288 peak megawatts, which implies another 1000 metric tons from capacity dedicated specifically for PV. With perhaps 8000 metric tons excess capacity in 2000, suppliers have had no incentive to add capacity. However, production of more than 700 peak megawatts in 2003 has surely consumed the excess capacity, even if price may not yet have been attractive for the polysilicon producers. In parallel, while technology is reducing the share of off spec and non-prime silicon being produced, microelectronics demand for silicon is growing rapidly. As a result, in the last twelve months the price of polysilicon has gone from $20 to 25 per kilogram to over $30 per kilogram and is projected to go to $40 to 60 per kilogram. These price increases push bottom prices for PV installations back to the range of $6-7 per peak watt.

While there may still have been some stockpiles from prior years to work off in 2004, it is probably safe to say that PV growth will now be limited by polysilicon capacity and price. To aggravate the situation, during the 2000-2003 period, polysilicon producers experienced very low ROI, making it difficult now to attract the large increments of capital needed for conventional "Siemens process" polysilicon production capacity. Unless there are dramatic technical advances, this condition is likely to persist for several years. John Schumacher has pointed out (Solar Today, January/February 2004), that breakthroughs are needed in both polysilicon capacity capital and production costs, and in ways to get more collector surface per ton of polysilicon. Fortunately, it seems that the technology now exists to meet both needs, and the only delay factor is time to recognition and industrialization.

Schumacher <7> has already operated a "proof of concept" facility for a new polysilicon process that has a capital cost about 40% of that for the Siemens process and projected product price of under $15 per kilogram. Existing, possibly surplus, CZ pullers can be adapted to use the output of this new process with a probable increase in throughput at lower energy input, further lowering the cost of PV wafers.

In December 2003, Origin Energy of Australia <8>, in conjunction with the Australian National University (ANU) announced a new "sliver cell" <6> approach to making PV cells from silicon wafers that is a classic example of "lateral thinking". Origin claims a twelve-fold increase in collector surface per ton of silicon, and a thirty-fold potential increase in peak watts per wafer. My calculations do not confirm these claims, but taking all yield factors into account, they can probably get to more than six-fold increase in collector surface per ton, which is still a sufficient breakthrough.

In 2004 ANU delivered a paper <6> on sliver cells in concentrator applications, showing a 21% conversion efficiency at 20 suns. The Fraunhofer Institute has also worked with very thin silicon for PV and show 24% efficiency at 60 suns. Even at 20 suns and six-fold yield per ton, polysilicon scarcity ceases to be a restraint.

In writing a National Energy Policy "primer" for the House and Senate Energy Committees in 2001 (which regrettably, but not surprisingly, they totally ignored), I estimated that we would need the output of fifty large factories for twenty years to install enough collector surface at 20 suns to produce 10 quads of PV solar energy per year. The sliver cell will enable 5 quads in twenty years with only four factories. What seemed quite impractical in 2001, now appears quite feasible.


Sliver Cell Whole System Pluses

ANU notes that the cells can readily be connected in series, reducing the need for protective diodes and eliminating the transformer from the inverter. In addition to lowering system cost, these changes would also improve conversion efficiency to alternating current significantly, thus reducing the needed collector area for a given peak watt. Taking all of these factors into account (Schumacher's polysilicon + six-fold surface increase per metric ton + elimination of diodes and transformer + light weight deriving from thin slivers + system efficiency) it seems likely that PV could get to an installed cost of $1.50 per peak watt before 2010. (ANU has estimated $1.80 peak watt, but it's not clear that they took all factors into account.)

In a concentrator system, when used for peaking power in conjunction with a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT), the concentrator could also preheat water for the steam turbine stage, potentially increasing CCGT output by at least 3%, at no additional cost. If a 500 megawatt CCGT installation needed 100 megawatts for peaking, the extra 15 megawatts of thermal energy would lower the total investment per effective peak watt to about $1.30. With regulated utility type financing (cost of money 3% above inflation) the resulting peaking electricity could be provided at a cost near 13 cents per kilowatt hour. Historic PV electricity cost estimates have typically been quoted (see the Wall Street Journal Special Report September 2001) as 22 to 40 cents per kilowatt hour.

The average retail price of electricity in the USA in 2002 was 7 cents per kilowatt hour, and is surely higher now. Peak electricity price can be at least 3 times higher, making conventional PV historically uncompetitive. (In some California districts, base rates are 12 cents per kilowatt hour and conventional PV is marginally competitive for peak power now). At a base cost of 13 cents per kilowatt hour, even after markup for maintenance and overhead, PV would be attractive for peaking supply across the southern tier. This base cost leaves room for attractive profit margins for everyone. I would expect suppliers of power fired by natural gas to start pushing very hard to have these technologies industrialized as rapidly as possible.


Conclusions

Solar thermal energy for hot water has long been attractive, and recent developments now make it attractive for air conditioning as well. Widespread use could reduce electricity demand in the USA by at least 10%, and this degree of reduction will probably become necessary as supply of natural gas declines.

Concentrated solar (CSP) for electricity production begins to look attractive with rising cost of fossil fuels and very long permitting and construction times for nuclear. The technology is now well understood and poised for rapid development with corresponding cost reductions. We now need an intelligent National Energy Policy, with relatively modest subsidies to kick-start the needed development. We can be very confident of successful exploitation.

A major breakthrough in PV technology has now raised the potential of PV to the level of practicality. Production capacity is still a limiting factor. Lack of awareness is also a barrier. Again, an intelligent National Energy Policy is the key to further progress.

Reliance on imported fossil fuel energy, with its attendant cost, security risk and negative payments balance could realistically be overcome in less than twenty years, with a government driven "Apollo Program" for energy, focused on efficiency, conservation, renewables and nuclear. Renewable solar energy is now positioned to make its contribution.

References:

1) http://www.energylan.sandia.gov/sunlab

2) http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/pdfs/3solar_henryprice.pdf

3) http://www.energylan.sandia.gov/sunlab/PDFs/Assessment.pdf

4) http://www.sbp.de/de/html/projects/solar/aufwind/pages_auf/principl.htm

5) http://www.visionengineer.com/env/solar_flue2.shtml

6) http://solar.anu.edu.au/pages/publications2004.html

7) http://jcschumacher.com/

8) http://www.originenergy.com.au/news/news_detail.php?newsid=233&pageid=82

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=864
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

A Scandal of Secrecy and Collusion

Why have we paid GBP 93 million for a GBP 15 million bridge?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 28 2004)

One of the ways in which the government can avoid the freedom of information laws, which come into force at the end of this week, is to classify public business as private business. Under the act, information can be withheld from the public if its disclosure would "prejudice the commercial interests of any person". <1> Wherever the government has entered into partnership with a private company, it can argue that it would damage the company's interests if it told us what it was doing. So unless there is a public inquiry, we might never discover why a bridge that should have cost no more than GBP 25 million to build has now cost GBP 93 million.

Last week the people of the island of Skye won a remarkable victory. For nine years they had been fighting for the removal of the tolls on the bridge to the mainland. The bridge, built at the behest of the Conservative government, was Britain's first privately financed public project. Under the Private Finance Initiative, public works such as roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are built and run by private companies, then rented back to the government. Because, the government claims, private companies are more efficient than the public sector, Private Finance Initiative schemes cost less.

On the day the bridge was opened (October 16 1995), the government stopped the ferry service it ran between Skye and the mainland, thus granting the consortium that built the bridge a monopoly; there was no other means of getting on and off the island. <2> The consortium was able to charge the islanders what are believed to be the highest tolls per mile of road in the world. They rose to GBP 5.70 each way for a one-mile crossing. (After massive public pressure, the Labour government gave the residents a discount, but only if they bought tickets in books of twenty.) After nine years of what was to have been a 27-year contract, the companies that built the bridge have reaped GBP 33 million from motorists. <3>

This is bad enough. But before the bridge was built, the government threw in GBP 13 million of sweeteners. Desperate to make its showcase project work, it spent GBP 6 million on building the approach roads (a few hundred metres of tarmac); <4> another GBP 3 million on hiring consultants and buying land; and a further GBP 4 million as "compensation" to the consortium for the costs of construction delays and design changes (which, if you believe the government's claims about "risk transfer", should have been carried by the consortium itself). <5>

The European Investment Bank lent a further GBP 13 million to help finance the bridge. This loan breached the bank's own investment criteria. The bank's purpose is to fund projects that boost the livelihoods of people in the less developed parts of Europe. It is legally bound to lend money only when "funds are not available from other sources on reasonable terms" <6> and to support only those schemes that do not "distort competition". <7> The tolls have damaged people's livelihoods by discouraging tourists. Private investors, who know a good thing when they see it, were falling over themselves to buy a stake in the project. <8> The closure of the ferry service on the day the bridge opened did not distort competition: it eliminated it.

The discount for books of twenty tickets was financed by the government, not the consortium. So to help reduce the cost of the tolls (which would not have been levied at all had the bridge been built at public expense), the government has paid a further GBP 7.6 million. <9> Now the tolls are being removed and the contract is being bought back from the companies by the Scottish executive at a cost of GBP 27 million.

The bridge, in other words, appears to have cost the public GBP 93.6 million. If we accept the consortium's account of how much it cost to build - GBP 25 million - we have paid for it 3.7 times. Even this could be an underestimate: independent engineers suggest that it shouldn't have cost more than GBP 15 million. <10>

So what was in the contract? I have no idea, and nor does anyone who was not involved in negotiating it. Though it was giving away our money, though there was no possible security argument for keeping it secret, both the Tory and Labour governments have hidden the contract behind the excuse of "commercial confidentiality". Unless an inventive challenge can be launched, governments will continue to do so, using the loophole in the act.

The lesson of the Skye bridge fiasco is obvious. If we are not allowed to see what's being done in our name, there's a pretty good chance we are being ripped off.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Freedom of Information Act 2000. Part II, section 42.

2. For a fuller account of the Skye Bridge story, see George Monbiot, 2000. Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. Macmillan, London.

3. David Ross, 22nd December 2004. Tolls end on the bridge over troubled water. The Herald.

4. GBP 6 million is the figure cited in the tender document by Scottish Office Roads Directorate/JMP Consultants, 1989: A Bridge to Skye - Information for prospective tenderers (RD15) and in the Scottish Office, May 1992 report of the public inquiry into the Skye Bridge Crossing, section 8, paragraph 31. The website of the Miller Group, which built the bridge, claimed in February 1999 that the cost may have been GBP 7 million (http://www.miller.co.uk). An earlier report by JMP Consultants (1988, Report to the Highland Council: Skye Bridge Revised Traffic and Economic Feasibility Report - RD12) suggests that the total cost of land and approach roads should have been GBP 1,640,600.

5. Skye and Kyle Against Tolls, 1997. Project Report 1; Skye and Kyle Against Tolls Press Release 16th October 1998. Eilean Ban Hand-Over: Who Got the Missing GBP 200,000?; House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 1998: Forty-second Report. The Skye Bridge. Minutes of Evidence, page 18.

6. European Investment Bank statute, article 18(1), cited in Skye and Kyle Against Tolls, 1997. Project Report 2.

7: Article 130 of the Treaty of Rome, cited in Skye and Kyle Against Tolls, 1997. Project Report 2.

8. The bridge ended up 70% over-financed. Skye and Kyle Against Tolls, 1997. Project Report 2.

9. David Ross, ibid.

10. A civil engineer who studied the bridge told me it should not have cost more than GBP 12 million. The Scotsman's analysis suggests GBP 15 million.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/12/29/a-scandal-of-secrecy-and-collusion/

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Harper's Index

Harper's Magazine (December 2004)


Number of terrorism trials brought before a jury since September 11, 2001 : 1

Number of terrorism convictions resulting : 2

Number of them dismissed in June due to a "pattern of mistakes" by the prosecution : 2

Revenue generated by Halliburton under CEO Dick Cheney from business deals with Iraq under Saddam Hussein : $30,000,000

Estimated revenue generated by Halliburton last year through subsidiaries in Iran : $63,506,000

Value of the Halliburton shares owned by New York City's Fire Department Pension Fund : $3,359,095

Number of times since 2002 the city has filed a shareholders' resolution questioning the risk of doing business in Iran : 3

Number of companies in which Tom Ridge holds stock that have a contract with the Department of Homeland Security : 7

Number of overseas bullet suppliers the Army contracted with last year and this year, respectively : 1,5

Minimum number of bullets the military purchased for use this year : 1,500,000,000

Average number of bullets per Iraqi this represents : 58

Number of major weapons systems the Pentagon has under development : 77

Ratio of the original estimate of these programs' total cost to the estimate today : 1:2

Ratio of arms dealers' campaign contributions made since January 2001 to Democrats to those made to Republicans : 1 :2

Number of states with a Libertarian Party presidential candidate on the ballot last month : 48

Number with a Reform, Green, and/or Socialist Workers Party candidate on the ballot, respectively : 35,28,14

Weeks the Green Party's vice-presidential candidate spent staying in homeless shelters as part of her campaign tour : 2

Average number of clothing items an adult American acquired in 2002 : 52

Estimated average amount of textiles thrown out by each household in 2001, in pounds : 66

Percentage salary cut that Delta's CEO announced this fall that he would take through the end of the year : 100

Percentage of 30-year-old American men who were married, self-supporting fathers in 1960 and 2000, respectively : 65,31

Number of levels of executive positions in the federal government in 1960 and this year, respectively : 17,58

Total number of federal executives in each of those years : 451,2592

Percentage of poor Americans who lived in the suburbs in 1959 and last year, respectively : 17,39

Ratio of the number of poor Americans living in cities to the number who live in suburbs : 21:20

Number of the 20 fastest-growing counties that are coastal : 17

Number of body bags a New Orleans suburb secured for this year's hurricane season : 10,000

Estimated number of Britons sent government warnings last fall of their increased chance of having mad cow disease : 6,000

Minimum number of countries with a greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than Iraq at the time of the invasion : 35

Ratio of spending on Iraq each week to total aid to Sudan since February 2003 : 2:1

Minimum number of tribes and ethnic groups in Sudan's Darfur region : 80

Chances that an adult male citizen of Pitcairn Island has been arrested for a sex-related crime this year : 2 in 5

Minimum number of those arrested who are direct descendants of mutineer Fletcher Christian : 4

Estimated average price of a female newborn in a Bulgarian infant-selling ring busted this summer : $6,000

Estimated average price of a male newborn : $18,000

Average black-market price in Baghdad of a DVD showing the beheading of a foreigner or Iraqi "collaborator" : 50 cents

Price of the bottle of champagne a New York club requires patrons to buy in order to use a diamond-encrusted table : $5,000

Minutes of weightlessness that Virgin Galactic passengers will experience on suborbital space flights in 2007 : 5

"Degrees of freedom" accorded each eyebrow of an "Emotion Expression" robot under development : 4 (see page 28)


Figures cited are the latest available as of October 2004.


December Index Sources

1-3 US Department of Justice

4 Colum Lynch, Washington Post (New York City)

5 Halliburton (Houston, Texas)

6-7 Office of the Comptroller (New York City)

8 US Department of Homeland Security

9-10 Program Executive Office for Ammunition (Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey)

11 Harper's Research

12-13 US Department of Defense

14 PoliticalMoneyLine (Washington)

15-16 Ballot Access News (San Francisco)

17 Green Party (Washington)

18-19 Juliet Schor, Boston College (Boston)

20 Delta Air Lines (Atlanta)

21 American Sociological Association (Washington)

22-23 The Brookings Institution (Washington)

24-25 Harper's Research

26 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Silver Spring, Maryland)

27 Times-Picayune (Jefferson Parish, Louisiana)

28 Department of Health (London)

29 International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna)

30 Harper's Research

31 Embassy of the Republic of Sudan (London)

32 British High Commission (Wellington, New Zealand)

33 Harper's Research

34-35 State Police Headquarters (Pondenone, Italy)

36 Richard Beeston (Baghdad)

37 Select (New York City)

38 Virgin Group (London)

39 Waseda University (Tokyo)



"Harper's Index" is a registered trademark.

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The world's first multinational

Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern complaints were made against the British East India Company in the 18th century.

by Nick Robins

New Statesman Cover Story (December 13 2004)


In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part of his "prison trilogy", written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on the country he would shortly rule. "The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India", he wrote, "is something which passes comprehension". It was, he added, "significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is 'loot'".

For most of the succeeding sixty years, the East India Company sank from view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought to revive the reputation of the "Honourable East India Company". Its founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its glamorous executives profiled as multicultural "white moguls".

Yet the East India Company, romantic as it may seem, has more profound and disturbing lessons to teach us. Abuse of market power; corporate greed; judicial impunity; the "irrational exuberance" of the financial markets; and the destruction of traditional economies (in what could not, at one time, be called the poor or developing world): none of these is new. The most common complaints against late 20th- and early 21st-century capitalism were all foreshadowed in the story of the East India Company more than two centuries ago.

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith used the East India Company as a case study to show how monopoly capitalism undermines both liberty and justice, and how the management of shareholder-controlled corporations invariably ends in "negligence, profusion and malversation". Yet nothing of Smith's scepticism of corporations, his criticism of their pursuit of monopoly and of their faulty system of governance, enters the speeches of today's free-market advocates.

Smith's vision of free trade entailed firm controls on corporate power. And, as did his own times, subsequent history shows how right he was. If it is to contribute to economic progress, the corporation's market power has to be limited to allow real choice, and to prevent suppliers being squeezed and consumers gouged. Its political power also needs to be constrained, if it is not to rig the rules of regulation so that it enjoys unjustified public subsidy or protection. Internal and external checks and balances must curb the tendency of executives to become corporate emperors. And clear and enforceable systems of justice are necessary to hold the corporation to account for any damage to society and the environment. These are tough conditions, and have rarely been met, either in the age of the East India Company or in today's era of globalisation.

Today, we can see the East India Company as the first "imperial corporation", the very design of which drove it to market domination, speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so that it could force down its purchase prices.

By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but effective private army, the company engineered a series of "revolutions" that gave it territorial as well as economic control.

After Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the company literally looted Bengal's treasury. It loaded the country's gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool GBP 2.5 million (more than GBP 200 million today) for the company, and GBP 234,000 (GBP 20 million) for himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better understood as the company's most successful business deal.

It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal's weavers who felt the full force of the company's new-found market power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer - for example, to set maximum levels for wages - India's weavers were able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers' freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but important market autonomy. It imposed prices forty per cent below the market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the winders of raw silk, "instances have been known of their cutting off their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk".

As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, instead of seeking "moderate but permanent profit", the company had recklessly pursued "immediate and excessive returns". Corruption assumed epidemic proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider trading led by Clive and other executives.

In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a share-price slump that rocked the world. The company's share price doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal's entire tax system in 1765. In London, the company's management and shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of "bulls" and "bears" descended on the company's shares, with shareholders voting for a doubling of the annual dividend from six to twelve per cent in order to cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of "infectious greed" - to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later - came to an end in May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London markets. The share price fell sixteen per cent in a single month, and would continue a downward course for the next fifteen years, reaching the depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.

Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food beyond the reach of the poor. "As soon as the dryness of the season foretold the approaching dearness of rice", went one eyewitness account, "our Gentlemen in the Company's service were as early as possible in buying up all they could lay hold of". The situation was compounded by the company's decision to increase the rate of tax to ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm's negligence. As Horace Walpole wrote at the time: "We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped - nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by the servants of the East Indies".

The company's fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company, begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for corporate reform.

Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain's elite feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome's conquest of Asia (western Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the company's takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could "repeat the same cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged with native and innocent blood the plains of India". Prior to his conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and for its system of exploitation to be ended. "Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India", he concluded, a judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.

All the tools with which we are now familiar were deployed to tame the firm: codes of conduct for company executives, rules on shareholder abuse, government regulation, and ultimately, as with so many failed firms, nationalisation.



Government intervention over a hundred years transformed the company from a purely commercial institution to an agent of the British state. It was only in the wake of the great rebellion against company rule, which shook northern India in 1857-58, that its anachronistic position as a profit-making ruler was put to an end. Direct control of the company's territories passed to the crown, and the British Raj was born.

Yet in spite of all the parliamentary inquiries and waves of regulation, few of the company's executives were ever brought to book. Clive narrowly escaped parliamentary censure in 1773, only to die by his own hand. Parliament then turned its attention to Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, voting twice to recall him for mismanagement. Both times this was rebuffed by the company's shareholders and, as a last resort, and at Burke's instigation, the medieval practice of impeachment was revived and used against him. Among the charges was that Hastings had introduced a company monopoly over the production of opium and, in an attempt to smuggle the crop into China, had awarded the contract at a knock-down price to the son of the East India Company chairman, who promptly sold it on for a tidy profit. Hastings was also the first to seek deliberately to break China's ban on the importation of opium. His attempt failed, but would be pursued by his successors, with tragic consequences. Burke won Commons majorities in support of his case, and in February 1788, the trial of Hastings began in the Lords with Burke delivering a four-day opening speech against him.

What makes Burke's challenge to Hastings and the East India Company so compelling are the principles on which it was based. "The laws of morality", he declared, "are the same everywhere ... there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and the world over". Against the relativism that increasingly viewed India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice should apply, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values, protesting against "geographical morality". In the heat of his reactions to the French revolution, Burke would oppose Tom Paine's Rights of Man. But in the case against Hastings, Burke argued for companies to be judged by their respect for what we would understand as universal human rights. The trial was interrupted, first by George III's madness and then by the French revolution. After eight long years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, a result that surprised nobody, given the political complexion of the Lords.

Yet there is one instance where the company's impunity was broken. In 1774, a group of Armenian merchants launched a civil case for damages against Hastings's predecessor, Harry Verelst. Led by Gregore Cojamaul and Johannes Padre Rafael, the merchants alleged that Verelst had arbitrarily locked them up in Bengal six years earlier, confiscating their property and removing their freedom to trade. It is a testimony to the British legal system that in December 1774, the Lord Chief Justice decided in favour of the Armenians, judging that Verelst had been guilty of "oppression, false imprisonment and singular depredations". Verelst had to pay GBP 9,000 in damages, as well as full costs. Thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime, the principle of extra-territorial liability for corporate malpractice was established in 1770s London.

Many in business regard the current upsurge of global litigation against corporations such as Talisman, Unocal and Shell as somehow new and unjustified. Yet Verelst's case provides a powerful precedent, demonstrating that more than 200 years ago, a senior executive of the world's first multinational was tried and found guilty of what we would now consider human rights abuses.

It is not, however, Cojamaul's statue that stands outside the Foreign Office in Whitehall, but Robert Clive's. That such a rogue still has pride of place at the heart of government suggests that Britain has not yet confronted the connections between its corporate and imperial pasts. This is not mere forgetfulness, but the mark of a continued belief that the unrestrained pursuit of market power and personal reward is to be praised at the highest levels. In India, the East India Company's mismanagement remains part of the national consciousness; here, knowledge of the company's corruption and abuse is almost entirely lacking. We still do not recognise the "imperial gene" that remains at the heart of modern corporate design.

Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the consequences of England's long domination of India in terms of karma, the spiritual law of cause and effect. "Entangled in its meshes", he wrote, "we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past inheritance and start afresh on a different basis". Independence was a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too, needed to "start afresh". As we approach the 250th anniversary of Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India Company's contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its quest for market domination.

http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nscoverstory.htm

Nick Robins's Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East India Company will be published next year. He also takes part in The Great Debates: Hastings v Burke (Radio 4, 29 December, 8 pm)

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

R & D

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (December 2004)

A country without its czar is like a village without an idiot.
- Russian proverb


The documentary play "Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" serves as a dispatch from the Cuban internment camps in which the American government currently holds captive several hundred presumed terrorists of Arab nationality and descent, and very early in the performance I saw last October in New York it occurred to me that I had been extended the privilege of watching a Pentagon experiment with laboratory animals. On the strength of the play's intelligence and from what I knew of its provenance (the script based on evidence gathered by British journalists and London civil-rights lawyers), I could assume that the association of ideas was deliberate and the irony intended. The principal actors appear as "detainees" dressed in orange prison uniforms and placed on a desolate stage furnished with a few tables and chairs, four narrow bunks, and four steel cages; for the most part silent and inert, they wait to be moved, like so many numbered mice, into another maze, tent, interrogation booth, or isolation cell. When permitted to speak about the circumstances of their arrest or the terms of their confinement, they use the words given in legal pleadings, press reports, and private letters from three British citizens, law-abiding but inopportunely Muslim, who found themselves among the herd of suspects rounded up by American military authorities searching the world for allies of Osama bin Laden during the months subsequent to the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The play doesn't quarrel with a civilized society's right to defend itself - if necessary, by whatever means come most expediently to hand - against enemies both real and imagined; neither does it doubt the possibility that at least some of the suspects brought to Guantanamo Bay provided information forestalling the destruction of a bridge in Maryland or the poisoning of a reservoir in Oklahoma. The play doesn't address the realpolitik of the war on terror; it considers the moral consequences - not the grand strategy of what President Bush defines as the "monumental struggle of good versus evil" but the brutalization of the participants on both sides of the interrogation, both ends of the rope. The actors speak as detainees who happen to be innocent - not surprisingly, because, as was made clear with the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report, our American intelligence agencies find it hard to distinguish one Muslim from another, to tell the difference between a jihadist mullah, an Iraqi politician, an Afghan warlord, and a Syrian bicycle thief. Among the inmates held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly three years, only four have been formally charged with a crime, apparently no more than twelve or maybe twenty guilty of some sort of a connection to Al Qaeda. The Supreme Court last June granted the detainees the right to inquire about the reasons for their imprisonment, but the questions of procedure have yet to be resolved. In what legal jurisdiction do the hearings take place, with or without advice of counsel, under whose rules of engagement? The shuffling and reshuffling of paper could continue for another three years; in the meantime the voices on the stage try to account for their presence in a void.

Their joint and corroborating testimony gathers its force from the gradual accumulation of small and wretched fact. No grandiloquent statements about man's inhumanity to man, no artful turns of phrase or plot, little else except plain narrative and the bearing of collective witness - one man arrested for no discernible cause while making, a religious pilgrimage to Pakistan, another man shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in a freight container with the cargo of his dead and dying companions. Slowly and against its will, the audience comes to learn what sort of prison it is that America, "honor bound to defend freedom", has created in the image of its own fear on a distant Caribbean shore: a system of justice operating outside the bounds of national or international law, similar in its charter to one of the Enron Corporation's special-purpose entities, accountable to no authority other than the word of the American president and the whim of the American military command, which acts as warden, prosecutor, defense counsel, jury, judge, and, if deemed appropriate, executioner.

Classified as enemy combatants and therefore ineligible for the rights accorded prisoners of war, denied access to a lawyer or a writ of habeas corpus, the detainees fall into the category of a subhuman species available to experiment - kept in cages; exposed to deafening noise, unmuzzled dogs, extreme temperatures of heat and cold; stripped naked and searched for contraband in their teeth and anal cavities; deprived of food, medicine, water, and sleep; seldom allowed to stand or move unless shackled with the weight of chains.

First staged in London at about the same time that the photographs from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison were making the rounds of the print and broadcast media, the play attracted a good deal of notice in the periodical press, and before seeing the off-Broadway production I was well enough acquainted with the Bush Administration's approach to suspected terrorists - in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Camps X-Ray, Romeo, and Delta, praised by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as safe, healthy, and humane environments in "beautiful, sunny" Cuba - to know that the dramatization was faithful to the facts. What I didn't expect was the shift in perspective introduced by the notion of a Pentagon research project, and on leaving the theater I found myself wondering about the purpose of the experiments. What was it that our inspectors general were trying to find out, and why so many of them? Who was learning what from whom?

The large number of intelligence operatives (regular Army as well as CIA) sent to Cuba since the winter of 2002 to interrogate the same few hundred inmates suggests the need for a training facility where Christian officers and gentlemen might practice the art of extracting information from hardened infidels, improve their technique, overcome their feelings of revulsion and disgust. I can understand why it might be important to learn how to translate a scream in Arabic into a word in English, or useful to note the precise degrees of humiliation and degradation that a human being can be made to suffer without inducing insanity or attempted suicide, but how often must the experiments be repeated? Surely at some point the answers cease to be of interest. The research staff presumably looks for something other than fantastic guesses as to the whereabouts of Mullah Omar, and so I'm obliged to think that our apprentice Grand Inquisitors have more far-reaching questions in mind - not questions about the phobias of captive Muslims (how do they react to sexual insults, Big Mac cheeseburgers, and giant spiders?) but questions about the character and quality of free Americans.

If it is our intention to rule the world from the throne of military empire, how willing are the American people to tolerate or ignore, perhaps even to admire and applaud, the cruelties necessary to the maintenance of so great a glory? Is it possible to construct the moral equivalent of a toxic-waste dump in which to dispose of our sentimental squeamishness? If the government chooses to hang its prisoners by their testicles or thumbs, must the authorities in Washington anticipate objections from CBS News? From the Catholic and evangelical churches? From the Supreme Court? If so, how strong an objection, and can it be silenced with the antidote of fear? If a Marine colonel makes a mistake with an experiment involving two Syrian terrorists, a fishing boat, and a shark, will a feature editor at the Washington Post award the story seven paragraphs or one?

Different answers to the questions imply different versions of the American future, and as I considered the various possibilities in the light of the next day's newspaper reports arriving from Israel, Afghanistan, Russia, and Iraq, I noticed that it was hard to find much deviation between the reasons given by American generals for the bombing of Iraqi civilians in Fallujah and those given by Israeli generals for bombing Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip; or to make a clear distinction between Vladimir Putin's belief that too much freedom threatens the stability of the Russian state and the Bush Administration's aversion to any and all forms of constitutional law. Given the money and effort that the United States has assigned over the last half-century to the shaping of Russian and Israeli politics, it shouldn't come as a surprise that both countries now serve us as laboratories in which we might study various strains of anti-democratic government and cultivate socioeconomic organisms adaptable to the totalitarian climate of the new American imperium.

At present the most advanced research is being done in Iraq, much of it apparently directed toward a further and more complete understanding of the necessity for a state of perpetual　war. George Orwell identified the importance of the topic in the novel 1984; Adolf Hitler conducted extensive field studies in both Eastern and Western Europe; America and the Soviet Union cooperated for forty years in a joint experiment with the waging of synthetic war, words substituted for deeds, prolonged artillery bombardment replaced with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The prior research need not be discounted or ignored, but in Baghdad at the moment we have access to a near limitless supply of laboratory specimens and a rare chance, literally God-given to President George W Bush, to add to our store of knowledge.

The senior managers of the Bush Administration can be counted upon to acknowledge the truth of Orwell's dictum that "ignorance is strength", but will the Iraqi people verify the corollary finding that "freedom is slavery"? For how many weeks or months, and with what degree of religious zeal, will a true believer in the promise of Islam persist in his or her refusal to pledge allegiance to the American flag? To accept the word of Christ? Can our own soldiers be relied upon to decimate the ranks of our enemies with the same reptilian calm that the historians ascribe to the legions of imperial Rome? How quickly, and with what modifications to its assembly lines, can a nominally free press be converted to the production of weapons-grade propaganda?

The scale of the federal program in Iraq should yield results well worth the cost of the undertaking, but it cannot answer all the questions, and in some areas of related interest we will continue to depend on the experiments being performed in Israel, Afghanistan, and Russia. The Afghans test the hypothesis that an economy sustained by drug trafficking and a social order governed by a savage interpretation of the Koran can be presented to the world in the costume of democracy. Ever since its 1967 conquest of the Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank, more desperately since the rising of the second intifada in September 2000, the Israeli government has been searching for new and improved techniques guaranteed to control the pestilence of a subject population. In the process it has developed lines of anesthetic reasoning, among them the theory of preemptive strike and precautionary assassination, to protect its own citizens against the pains induced by an overly active conscience. Many of the same arguments we have adopted as palliatives for our own states of anxiety, but we have yet to learn the secret of removing from the American body politic large numbers of people deemed undesirable, dangerous, or impious. The Israelis are fortunate to find every antisocial trait of character in the same enemy, and so their experiment with a wall neatly separating the just from the unjust might not prove immediately applicable to the American circumstance. Our society is too multifaceted, infiltrated by too many people of different races, colors, creeds, and sexual orientations. The work in Israel, however, deserves serious consideration and careful study. An alarming number of our most eminent political theorists and financial advisers foresee a soon arriving end not only to American democracy but also to the country's long-abiding economic　prosperity. If their premonitions of heavy debt and chronic unemployment prove as well founded as their own offshore bank accounts, how then do our ruling and possessing classes redistribute the presence of the no longer working poor?

Some of the more impregnable gated communities in the country's upscale suburbs already incorporate elements of medieval-fortress architecture, but they don't come fully equipped　with floodlights, razor wire, and readily available armored vehicles; fences along the Mexican border from California to Texas are, in places, adequate to their purpose but not suitable to the terrain along the Canadian border in Minnesota and Montana. It's conceivable that we might wish to build model communities within the United States that combine the theory of the refugee camp at Khan Younis with the design of Camps X-Ray, Romeo, and Delta.

The lessons to be learned in the Russian laboratories have to do with the problems presented by a national economy fallen into the hands of thieves. During the long siege of the Cold War, Russia bankrupted itself in the attempt to compete with America's weapons industry and thus to earn promotion to the rank of superpower and the name of hegemon. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 put an end to Communism, and within a matter of months a new class of arriviste oligarchs, schooled by American bankers in the science of high-end swindle, privatized what remained of the national wealth. Now comes the question as to whether they can keep the rewards of their entrepreneurial enterprise. The Putin government, increasingly authoritarian in character and method, seeks to repatriate the assets lost to the private sector. The fledgling system of representative government has been canceled by a return to czarism, the news media have been brought obediently to heel, and among the richest captains of Russian industry and finance quite a few have been forced to depart for London and the French Riviera. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, proprietor of the Yukos oil monopoly and a man believed to be worth $15 billion, currently occupies a jail cell in Moscow not much bigger than the ones reserved for the guests of the United States Navy in Cuba.

His situation is not without interest to our own fellowship of corporate oligarchs. How much is it possible to steal, and to what degrees of economic degradation and humiliation can the general population be exposed, before a virulent outbreak of a revolutionary virus obliges even the most venal and accommodating of governments to suppress the disease with the vaccine of despotism? Judging by the strong bipartisan support for the bill passed last October by both the Senate (69-17) and the House of Representatives (280-141) granting American business interests $137 billion in tax breaks, the day of reckoning is not yet come. Even so, prudence is a virtue, and it's always wise to know when the morning plane leaves for Zurich or Dubai.
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Social Security

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

It's now or never for Washington

America's real aim in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics is to seize control of vital resources before China and India can challenge US dominance.

by Mark Almond

New Statesman (December 06 2004)

Are we on the brink of a new cold war? On both sides of the Atlantic, media commentators see the crisis in Ukraine as comparable to the Berlin crises, involving the US and the Soviet Union, which kept the world on tenterhooks for decades. In this supposed drama, a resurgent Kremlin under an ex-KGB colonel is suppressing freedom at home and encroaching on ex-Soviet republics around his country's vast rim.

This terror of shadows has a track record of success. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the ailing world of Leonid Brezhnev was portrayed as a sinister superpower with its tentacles almost around Uncle Sam's throat. The US and the majority of western European nations combined behind a programme of arms build-up and covert sponsorship of anti-communist dissidents.

The coincidence of dates is not often noted, but the Pentagon was inaugurated on 11 September 1941, exactly sixty years before it took its first direct hit. In my view, its role was positive for many years: few would regret the fall of Hitler or the deterrence of Stalin. But America's bloodless victory in the cold war did not lead her to rest on her laurels. As early as 1992, Pentagon insiders led by Paul Wolfowitz and sponsored by the then defence secretary, Dick Cheney (under President Bush I), had drawn up a doctrine designed to prevent any power getting the "capacity" to challenge the US in the future. Not only potential foes but friends were to be kept subordinate.

There was no peace dividend. Instead, US defence spending rose. Now the Pentagon spends more than the European Union, Russia, China and India combined. As one Pentagon friend said to me recently: "The new arms race is between the US army today and the US army which might fight it tomorrow!"

Yet, according to Washington's friends, Russia is on the prowl, even though its military technology is ageing and Nato expansion (and with it, US bases) reaches deep inside the old Soviet Union. In reality, the Kremlin's writ is fraying at the edges of the smaller, post-1991 Russia. Already Chechnya is in chaos and much of the north Caucasus is simmering. If Russia poses no military threat even to its neighbours, the divide of the first cold war era is dead.

And yet the culture of the new cold war is very different from that of the old. For forty years, the west's intellectuals and media were bitterly divided over policy towards Moscow. Each side - particularly the west - had its allies on the other side. The west's victory in 1989 was good for the market economy but bad for intellectual pluralism. Sky News came online in 1989 but the explosion of 24-hour news has been matched by an implosion of alternative views.

With the collapse of one-party states, any justification for western covert intervention in elections died. Yet the methods of the old cold war have continued and even grown in scale. Washington's power elite see the whole world as former president Reagan saw Latin America - indeed, many Reagan administration figures are involved in current events. Cold war methods are still in use - even more so - but now against opponents who do not merit the description "totalitarian", whatever their faults.

In the run-up to the velvet revolutions of 1989, I was a bagman carrying tens of thousands of dollars to eastern European dissidents. I have a good idea of how much money and foreign input are required to get a spontaneous "people power" revolution going. Then, however, it was the Communist Party that blocked dissent. Today, western intelligence agencies, the media and "the people" crush any dissent from the Washington consensus.

At the time of the Falklands war, Henry Kissinger said: "No great power retreats for ever". Maybe Russia is about to disprove his thesis, because so far Russia has retreated steadily under Vladimir Putin's rule. If Ukraine falls into the Nato orbit, Russia will lose her access to Black Sea naval bases and Russian oil and gas export routes will have to pass an American stranglehold.

Yet Russia is a bit player in this new global competition. The Pentagon is really aiming at Beijing in its grab for the old Soviet strategic space around Russia. China is booming, but energy is her Achilles heel. Economically and technologically, China's 1.3 billion people seem poised to assume superpower status, but China cannot risk falling out with America. Only access to Russian and central Asian oil can liberate China from dependence on vulnerable sea-borne oil supplies, so the real "Great Game" is between Beijing and Washington. America's real strategic fear is the rise of China and India. Unlike Russia, they are not beset by demographic decline.

Worse still for US planners, the Chinese and Indians may want the benefits of western consumerism but they do not share the cultural cringe of peoples of the former Soviet bloc: like Gandhi, they believe that western civilisation would be a very good idea.

In Latin America, too, Washington does not have everything its own way. It is not just that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez saw off a Ukrainian-style "people power" push, having already trounced an old-style putsch in 2002; Brazil and Argentina are also failing to toe the Washington line. The region's big players show signs of looking to China and south Asia for markets and investment.

If South America, south Asia and China begin to coalesce, then Washington could find itself confronted by an alternative axis not seen since before the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. But, whereas Mao and Brezhnev represented economic dead ends, the new China and her potential partners have dynamism on their side. Maybe India and China are business rivals, but their old frontier disputes in the Himalayas are frozen. Latin America has nothing to fear from either superpower of the future, nor do Latin Americans nurse visceral resentments of Beijing or Delhi that are in any way comparable to their deep-dyed anti-Yankee feelings.

America's drive to dominate the old Soviet Union represents a gamble by today's only superpower to seize the highest-value chips on the table before China and India join the game. If China can add access to post-Soviet energy to the Chinese hand, it will be game on for a real new cold war. Many of the predictions among Washington neoconservatives about China's growing power recall the fear among German militarists that the window of opportunity for a global role was closing by 1914. Washington's drive to seize maximum advantage before the inevitable waning of US power recalls the Kaiser's cry eighty years ago: "Now or never!"

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200412060023

Mark Almond is a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004

See also "The Political Crisis in The Ukraine: Key articles and essays", Global Research E-Monograph and Reports Series, No 2, 2004 (December 23 2004)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CRG412A.html

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The politics of the Christmas story

by James Carroll

The Boston Globe (December 21 2004)

THE SINGLE most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome's day is over.

The Gospel of Matthew builds its nativity narrative around Herod's determination to kill the baby, whom he recognizes as a threat to his own political sway. The Romans were an occupation force in Palestine, and Herod was their puppet-king. To the people of Israel, the Roman occupation, which preceded the birth of Jesus by at least fifty years, was a defilement, and Jewish resistance was steady. (The historian Josephus says that after an uprising in Jerusalem around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Romans crucified 2,000 Jewish rebels.)

Herod was right to feel insecure on his throne. In order to preempt any challenge from the rumored newborn "king of the Jews", Herod murdered "all the male children who were two years old or younger". Joseph, warned in a dream, slipped out of Herod's reach with Mary and Jesus. Thus, right from his birth, the child was marked as a political fugitive.

The Gospel of Luke puts an even more political cast on the story. The narrative begins with the decree of Caesar Augustus calling for a world census - a creation of tax rolls that will tighten the empire's grip on its subject peoples. It was Caesar Augustus who turned the Roman republic into a dictatorship, a power-grab he reinforced by proclaiming himself divine.

His census decree is what requires the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, but it also defines the context of their child's nativity as one of political resistance. When the angel announces to shepherds that a "savior has been born", as scholars like Richard Horsley point out, those hearing the story would immediately understand that the blasphemous claim by Caesar Augustus to be "savior of the world" was being repudiated.

When Jesus was murdered by Rome as a political criminal - crucifixion was the way such rebels were executed - the story's beginning was fulfilled in its end. But for contingent historical reasons (the savage Roman war against the Jews in the late first century, the gradual domination of the Jesus movement by Gentiles, the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century) the Christian memory deemphasized the anti-Roman character of the Jesus story. Eventually, Roman imperialism would be sanctified by the church, with Jews replacing Romans as the main antagonists of Jesus, as if he were not Jewish himself. (Thus, Herod is remembered more for being part-Jewish than for being a Roman puppet.)

In modern times, religion and politics began to be understood as occupying separate spheres, and the nativity story became spiritualized and sentimentalized, losing its political edge altogether. "Peace" replaced resistance as the main motif. The baby Jesus was universalized, removed from his decidedly Jewish context, and the narrative's explicit critiques of imperial dominance and of wealth were blunted.

This is how it came to be that Christmas in America has turned the nativity of Jesus on its head. No surprise there, for if the story were told today with Roman imperialism at its center, questions might arise about America's new self-understanding as an imperial power. A story of Jesus born into a land oppressed by a hated military occupation might prompt an examination of the American occupation of Iraq. A story of Jesus come decidedly to the poor might cast a pall over the festival of consumption. A story of the Jewishness of Jesus might undercut the Christian theology of replacement.

Today the Roman empire is recalled mainly as a force for good - those roads, language, laws, civic magnificence, "order" everywhere. The United States of America also understands itself as acting in the world with good intentions, aiming at order. "New world order", as George H W Bush put it.

That we have this in common with Rome is caught by the Latin motto that appears just below the engraved pyramid on each American dollar bill, "Novus Ordo Seculorum". But, as Iraq reminds us, such "order" comes at a cost, far more than a dollar. The price is always paid in blood and suffering by unseen "nobodies" at the bottom of the imperial pyramid. It is their story, for once, that is being told this week.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/12/21/the_politics_of_the_christmas_story/
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Cost of Christmas

￡30 billion: The amount Britons will spend celebrating Christmas this year

Compiled by Cahal Milmo

The Inedpendent (December 24 2004)


SPENDING

￡4.2 billion: The amount Britons spent on cosmetics this Christmas

￡4.1 billion: Britain's aid budget for the developing world in 2004

￡813: Average spending per adult on celebrating Christmas (￡55 less than last year)

￡50: The per capita annual income in Ethiopia

￡20 million: Amount made by Mark Tilden, British robot expert who invented Robosapien, this year's hit toy

￡20 million: Amount nations of sub-Saharan Africa are paying in debt to developed world every sixteen hours


EATING

7,000: Average calories consumed by Britons on Christmas Day

780: Minutes running needed to burn off 7,000 calories

7: Number of days a child refugee in Darfur could survive on 7,000 calories

￡12: Average cost per head in UK of Christmas lunch

￡12: Cost of a month's supply of grain for a family in drought-hit Malawi

30,525: Number of miles your Christmas dinner will have travelled to reach your table - vegetables alone are likely to have come 15,800 miles

4: Miles walked daily by families in developing world in search of water


HEALTH

5 million: Britons will suffer a stomach upset over festive season

2 million: People in developing world killed this year by diarrhoeal disease


CRIME

244,000: Homes in Britain likely to be burgled over festive season

75,058: Britons spending Christmas in prison

4.2%: Rise in murder rate over Christmas


ENVIRONMENT

83 square kilometers: Amount of wrapping paper used (enough to cover 33 Hyde Parks)

3,000,000: Tons of extra rubbish generated - enough to fill 120 million wheelie bins

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=595883

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Festivals of Austerity

Christmas - Muslims fast and Hindus walk. Only Christians gorge themselves

by Ziauddin Sardar

New Statesman (December 13 2004)

I blame the three wise men. These guys from the east came bearing gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh, stuff fit for a king. They established a tradition of giving presents at Christmas. As a result, children have been turned into surrogate princes and princesses to be overindulged with the best that adults can afford. And because all adults are merely overgrown children at heart, they decided to get in on the act and demand presents of their own, and a feast of abandoned indulgence to boot.

So the celebration of the birth of a prophet famed for throwing the money changers out of the temple of worship has become the occasion for a global outpouring of homage to unmitigated consumerism. How did the money changers take over the temple and become the altar of our adoration? What has gone wrong with Christmas?

It's about time we rescinded the learned credentials of those guys who followed the star. Our wise men should have known that in the east, gifts given during religious festivals are symbolic rather than real.

Take Chinese New Year. The whole concept is built around wishing people good fortune for the coming year. Gifts given and received consist of mandarin oranges, paper or tin formed into representations of bars of gold, or mass-produced ceramic statues of the guardians of the new year. True, Chinese children collect lots of little red packets with gifts of money in them, but it would be the height of impoliteness to open these packets in public, in case the smallness of the amount should prove to be a disappointment. However, the greatest difference is the basic premise that one should settle all one's debts before the arrival of the new year, rather than rack up as much debt as possible - which seems to be the prime directive where Christmas is concerned.

Though everyone likes a festival and having another excuse to hold a celebration, religious festivals in the east are primarily religious festivals. That means you have to earn the right to celebrate by serious spiritual effort. In Muslim countries, Eid ul-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, is the great celebration of the year. But participation requires a whole month of fasting; and you cannot celebrate unless you go for that special, congregational Eid prayer. And then the celebration actually consists of feeding the poor and handing out dollops of cash to the needy.

The Hindu festival of Thaipusam, the feast for the son of Shiva, Lord Subramaniam, requires even more rigorous spiritual exercises. Subramaniam is the universal granter of wishes. But all those who ask him for a favour, or seek to repent of their past sins, must fulfil a vow in return. So they fast, walk for miles, carry heavy burdens, and some, in a state of spiritual trance, pierce their bodies. Then, they celebrate by giving to charity.

The business end of eastern festivals appears at the event itself. People don't stay at home on Eid or Chinese New Year or Deepavali - the Hindu festival of light. They go out shopping. And the shopping is contained in time and is limited to the specific day(s) of celebration.

I have watched and participated in Eid, Chinese New Year, Thaipusam, Deepavali and Wesak Day (the Buddha's birthday), all while living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Each festival is publicly recognised and the shops are decorated for each occasion, but each holiday is different.

During Eid, for example, the emphasis is on meeting people. Families will ensure that everyone has a new set of clothes, colour co-ordinated. The most common gift is home-made biscuits. Everyone takes an elegant box of sweets to everyone they visit, and it is considered proper to try to visit everyone you know during Eid and the days following. Yet it is not just about people you know. The practice is to hold an "open house" so people you don't know can come, too. During one Eid in Kuala Lumpur, I remember well, I kept opening the door to people I had never met and never invited. They walked in, made themselves at home, ate whatever they could and left, never to be seen again.

For Wesak Day the emphasis shifts to austerity. The city is enveloped in candle-lit lanterns, made of bamboo and covered with transparent, coloured paper. Most shops sell lanterns, candles and papers of all imaginable variety and colour. The devout, clad in pure white and without make-up or jewellery, make their way to the temples, where they spend 24 hours in quiet contemplation. No solid food is taken after the midday meal, and all the energies are directed towards emptying the body of impure habits and the mind of impure thoughts.

Chinese New Year brings the invasion of crates of mandarin oranges and plastic buckets piled with food and the inevitable bottle of brandy, all gorgeously wrapped in cellophane - these being the staples of gift-giving. Huge Chinese dragons appear throughout town. Most goods in the shops are fake gifts, intended to indicate goodwill without breaking the bank.

The festivals of the east are about individual and social spirituality, community and belonging. In contrast, apart from the odd Mass, which few people attend, Christmas is drained of any notion of the sacred. No wonder it has been reduced to naked consumerism and selfish individualism.

Perhaps it is not the fault of the three wise men after all. Maybe their gold, frankincense and myrrh were fakes - or at least symbolic - and the whole idea was taken far too literally. Symbolism is something that the poor of the world, the majority, understand intrinsically. Poverty is the great inspirer of symbolism. What you cannot afford can nevertheless be indicated, intimated and shared around by non-literal and non-material means.

A pity that those celebrating Christmas have forgotten this basic fact.

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200412130033

Please also see "The Politics of the Christmas Story" by James Carroll, The Boston Globe (December 21 2004)
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/12/21/the_politics_of_the_christmas_story/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Wind

by Murray Duffin

[Although the technical level in the section on "intermittency" of the following article might seem daunting, I am posting the article anyway because wind energy is important in the overall discussion of the Energy Challenge. Bill Totten]

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Wind

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (October 13 2004)


In addressing the declining availability of fossil fuels, and with nuclear energy less than popular, the remaining choices are energy efficiency and renewables. Fortunately, they are complementary choices and have the added virtue of being carbon free. Renewables include hydro, wind, solar, bio-fuels, geo-thermal, wave, and tidal energy. Of these, wind, solar, geo-thermal, and wave/tidal are abundant, but only wind is currently economical and easy to harness.

Whatever you think you know about wind, especially the negatives, if it was based on data and analysis prior to 2000 you can be pretty sure it's wrong. Wind has made enormous strides in the last fifteen years. In 1992 the average size of installed wind turbine was 200 kilowatts. In 2002 it was 1.4 megawatts. Now almost all units being installed are over 2 megawatts. Total world installed wind energy in 1992 was 2.5 gigawatts. By 2003 it had reached 40 gigawatts, a compound annual growth rate of 30% per year.


How Much Energy

Probably the best early data on the total USA wind resource is the 1993 report found at www.nrel.gov/wind/potential.html. This report estimated total potential for 25% efficient turbines, with 25% losses, and average 50 meter hub heights, and made exclusions for environmental, urban, and agricultural purposes. The result was that about 15 quads of equivalent fossil fuel energy could be replaced by class 5 to 7 winds. Adding class 4 winds, which were marginal at that time, raised the potential to greater than 60 quads. Most recent Texas wind farms are in class 4 areas.

This report was based on 1991/92 technology, when the largest envisioned turbines were 300 kilowatt and blade rotation speeds were such that considerable areas were excluded for environmental reasons, such as bird kill. Best wind speeds were 15-25 miles per hour and it was also assumed that only 20% of the actual wind energy per square kilometer could be converted to electricity.

Now for 1.5 megawatt turbines with hub heights near 80 meters, Archer and Jacobson <1> find class 3 winds are economic, and are available for about 20% of the lower 48 land area. ["Lower 48" means the United States excluding Alaska and Hawaii.] They also have found that near shore coastal areas with suitable winds cover more than twice the shoreline of the 1993 paper. Today turbines being installed are up to 3 megawatts, and up to 5 megawatts are in development. Blade rotation is much slower. Efficiencies are now above 30% and losses below 15%. Productive wind speeds are now in the class 3 range. Conservatively, total lower 48 available wind energy with 2004 technology is in the order of 150 quads, fossil fuel equivalent, or 50% more than total USA current primary energy demand. We are unlikely to want to harness more than 1/4th of that between now and 2050.


Intermittency

The primary problem usually raised by wind opponents is intermittent availability with significant daily, monthly, and seasonal variations. Probably the first person to address this issue systematically was Gregor Czisch for Western Europe. He analyzed 3 hour interval recorded wind speed (at ten meter average height above ground) for all areas that could provide 1500 or more full load hours per year, that is, minimum 17% full load factor. His analysis shows that:

5 minute correlation is near zero at 20 kilometers
12 hour correlation is near zero at less than 1000 kilometers
24 hour correlation is near zero at 1800 kilometers
monthly correlation is near zero at 2500 kilometers.

Of course at the eighty meter hub height of a 1.5 megawatt turbine the full load hours and correlation distances would improve significantly. Archer and Jacobson (A&J) <1,2> found that for a small area only 500 by 700 kilometers centered in Kansas, averaged over eight wind-farm locations, the incidence of zero power wind was zero.

One turbine might be expected to produce 30% of rated kilowatt hour during a year. Using the 8 wind farm curve of average windspeed vs percent of time available, and assuming the ratings of the NEG/Micon NM82/150 turbine (nominal windspeed of 12 meters per second, cut in windspeed of 3 meters per second and cut out windspeed of 18 meters per second) the eight wind-farms produce 85.5% of nominal annual output and operate at or above nominal 38% of the time.

However this estimate understates probable performance for three reasons:

1. A&J used measured wind speed increase from ten meters to eighty meters on a few sites, generated a formula to be applied to all other sites where measurements at eighty meters were not available, and generated their curve using the estimated eighty meter windspeed. Because wind speed increase is not linear with height, and because power is proportional to the cube of windspeed, the upper half of the swept circle has more weight than the lower half. The "virtual" windspeed at the hub is higher than the estimated.

2. Turbine manufacturers specify performance parameters conservatively.

3. Measured upper level wind speeds tend to be slightly higher then estimated.

Therefore, as a conservative adjustment, to better reflect expected performance, the A&J <8> wind-farm curve was shifted right by one meter per second and performance recalculated. With this adjustment, for the selected turbines, the eight wind-farms can be expected to produce 111% of nominal energy in a year, and would be at more than 100% of nominal output 48% of the time. With wind turbine costs now at about $0.90 per watt installed, and amortization over thirty years at 6% the direct cost of electricity at nominal output would be 1.91 cents per kilowatt hour. If we increased the number of turbines by 33% the cost of electricity at nominal output would go to 2.54 cents per kilowatt hour, we would be at more than nominal output 58% of the time and we would generate 147% of nominal output energy per year.

If we added hydrogen fueled gas turbine backup at 40% of nominal power at a capital cost of $.60 per watt financed at 6% for thirty years we would be at more than nominal output 75% of the time and nominal electricity would go up to 3.14 cents per kilowatt hour. Total output would go to 157% of nominal. If the surplus energy is used to generate and store hydrogen at 75% efficiency (feasible with existing electrolysis and compression equipment), and the backup burns hydrogen to generate electricity at only 40% efficiency (greater than 50% should be possible with a CCGT), there would be at least 70% more hydrogen than needed to run the backup generator. The cost of the hydrolysis, compression and storage might push the direct cost for total nominal electricity to 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This cost is better than coal or natural gas at 2004 prices.

Now extend this approach to even more efficient 3 megawatt turbines and perhaps three times as many wind-farms spread over say 500 by 2000 kilometers and nominal power will be available close to 100% of the time, so the problem of intermittence can readily be overcome. However, to get there utility management would have to think in whole system terms and would have to cooperate over a large interstate geographic area, a couple of things they are not accustomed to doing.


A Possible Surprise

If it will scale up an even more exciting potential has been illustrated by a ninth grade Canadian girl. <6> A dual rotor turbine has the potential to harness lighter winds, lowering cut-in and cut-out speeds, and greatly increasing the harnessable wind resource. Alternatively the two-rotor approach could enable significantly smaller rotors for the same wind regime. The two-rotor approach might also lower turbine cost by enabling a more balanced design. There is some possibility that three rotors would provide additional improvements, but perhaps not enough to be cost effective.

Certainly this possibility calls for immediate analysis by the wind industry, even if the source might prove to be a bit embarrassing.


Operation

To make such a system work effectively we need three additional elements, good hourly to daily wind forecasting, computerized dispatching and load matching, and a well-integrated transmission network. The keys to smooth operation that have been listed by various experts are:

<> variable speed and power factor turbines
<> modern control systems with remote sensing and control
<> regional wind forecasting up to two days ahead
<> local wind forecasting up to two hours ahead
<> minimum start and stop transients
<> good smoothing of individual turbine outputs in wind-farm outputs
<> wind-farm policy integrated into regional utility policy.

All of these are common sense, manageable requirements.

Wind antagonists raise cost issues of connections to the grid, and the costs of ancillary services due to wind variability. In many cases the output from wind-farms can serve local communities, thus reducing load on regional grids. However large scale development of wind power will require upgrades of regional and national grids. Any energy policy must strongly address upgrading and development of the transmission infrastructure. Wind should be central to such planning and execution. This is simply not a wind specific issue. Several studies <3> have been done to cost the ancillary services with resulting estimates from 0.2 to 0.6 cents per kilowatt hour with wind from 5% to 20% of the local total energy supply. The worst case includes day ahead forecast errors of 50%. With a well integrated network of wind-farms as described in 3) above, these already very small costs would decline


Cost

In a 1995 disinformation effort, the coal industry sponsored a report developed by Resource Data International and published by the Center for Energy and Economic Development, projecting wind energy costs of 6.8 cents per kilowatt hour in 1995, remaining unchanged until 2010. <1> In a rebuttal, NREL estimated 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour in 1995, going to 3.5 cents in 2010. <1> The Lake Benton Wind Farm in Minnesota, now in production, produces electricity at 4 cents per kilowatt hour unsubsidized, using one megawatt turbines. With larger turbines the cost would be lower. Of course the cost will vary with wind class and siting issues, but for developments we are likely to see by 2010, the NREL estimate is looking good. We can expect average costs in the future to be cheaper than coal fired plants, with none of coal's environmental issues.


Objections <5>

The usual objections presented by wind skeptics are:

<> Bird kill
<> Unsightliness
<> Land area
<> Noise
<> Low energy returned on energy invested
<> Future like the past

In response to these objections one can state:

Bird kill - The only place that has posed a real problem was the Altamont pass in the 1980s, with small fast rotating turbines. There is no evidence that new large turbines, with slowly rotating blades, kill even as many birds as power lines do. <4>

Unsightliness - Surveys in Palm Springs (US) and Wales (UK) show that neighbors grow to like wind farms and find them attractive. Most wind farms in the USA will be sighted in areas that vary from rural to empty, where the issue is unlikely to arise.

Land area - Class 4 and higher wind areas available for wind development are 6% of total lower 48 land area. Of this area, less than 5% would be occupied by turbines, equipment, and access roads. Cultivation can be carried out almost to the base of the turbines, and livestock like the wind shadow.

Noise - Modern turbines have noise levels below 50 dbm (like a summer breeze in the trees) at distances of about 250 yards.

Low EROEI - A recent study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds that wind farms generate between 17 and 39 times as much energy as is required for their construction and operation. The Danish wind energy association comes up with an energy payback time of less than six months, or a return of over 60 for a thirty year life.

Future like past - Saying that wind will never happen, because it never has is like saying a one-year-old will never walk because he never has.


Benefits

Perhaps the major benefits are environmental. There is one well documented and quantified example to support this advantage: In 2001, Ontario Canada's five coal fired power plants were responsible for 20% of all greenhouse gases released in the province, 23% of all sulphur dioxide emissions, 14% of nitrogen emissions and 23% of mercury emissions. These plants are scheduled for closure by 2007.

More specifically, one can say for wind that:

<> It's not a source of nuclear waste.
<> It's does not despoil the land like strip mining for coal.
<> It does not damage fragile habitats, like drilling for coal bed methane.
<> It does not threaten the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
<> It's not a source global warming greenhouse gases.
<> It's not a source of fish-contaminating mercury.
<> It's not a source of acid rain.

Apart from clean, inexpensive power, the surprise benefits to the economy can be a drop in farm subsidies. Minnesota farmers earn less than $30 per acre with livestock, and $250 per acre with crops, but can earn $1,000 per acre from land rental for wind farms, and still have the livestock or crop.

The big benefit to operators is freedom from fuel price risk, and that benefit will only grow from an already very attractive level in 2004.


The Challenge

Several states have goal of getting 10% of their electricity from wind by 2015 or 20% by 2020. With declining availability of natural gas and oil, we will have to do much better than that on a national basis. The real goal should be to get perhaps 20% of our total energy (albeit a declining total) by 2030 or 2040.

A two megawatt wind turbine with a 30% duty cycle and 95% availability will generate 5.8 million kilowatts hour per year. Fifteen quads of wind power by 2030 would require 750,000 turbines, or 30,000 per year starting now. That is five times present world production capacity, but is probably a worst-case estimate. At three megawatts, 35% duty cycle and 15 quads we would need only 450,000. Building 15,000 to 30,000 turbines per year is no big deal for an economy that can build seventeen million cars, trucks, and busses per year, but still, we had better get cranking. It can't wait until after 2020.

Could the two-rotor design mentioned above reduce dramatically the number of installations needed? The wind industry needs to address this question urgently.

References:
1. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/winds_jgr.pdf

2. http://fluid.stanford.edu/~lozej/winds/winds.html

3. http://www.nrel.gov/wind/pdfs/grid_integration_studies_draft.pdf

4. http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html

5. http://www.eere.energy.gov/windpoweringamerica/

6. http://www.alumni.ca/~walk4d0/sf11.html

Copyright 2004 CyberTech, Inc.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=843

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

China and the US: Competing Geopolitical Strategies

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Commentary Number 151 (December 15 2004)

Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University


Ever since Richard Nixon went to China on February 21 1972 to visit Mao Zedong, the world's geopolitical alignments have never been the same. The meeting represented a spectacular shift in geopolitical hostilities of the post-1945 period. The major consequence was that China and the United States ceased to act as though each were the other's primary enemy, and acted as though each were a potential collaborator of the other on the world scene - collaborator, which is less than an ally. Each has been careful to do nothing that would allow for a return to the pre-1972 period which had seen open warfare in Korea and unlimited rhetorical harangue across the world. This cautious, even wary, relationship has continued unabated up to today and has survived intact even during the era of US neo-conservative aggressive foreign policy under George W Bush.

Initially what brought the two countries together was the desire of each to constrain, even diminish, the power of the Soviet Union. But they soon discovered that each could have important economic benefits out of a less antagonistic relationship. And each had long-term visions which they thought might be served by this curious bilateral arrangement. The US sought to tame China, to bring it out of its Maoist cocoon and into the market whirl of the capitalist world-economy. China sought to buy technology, trade, and above all time in which to strengthen its economy and its military, and enable it to become a superpower. To some extent, each has been served well thus far in terms of what it sought to achieve.

But as we move forward into the twenty-first century, it is becoming clear that each is pursuing a quite different geopolitical strategy in its semi-friendly but intense competition with the other. Any major power in the interstate system has four different cards to play in its search for power and preeminence: the economic, the political, the military, and the cultural-ideological cards. But of course the cards each has to play are not equally strong, and the choice in foreign policy is always which one or ones to emphasize.

The United States is a declining hegemonic power. Its economic card has been on the decline for almost forty years. Bush's incredible expansion of national debt has made the US economic situation far worse than it was even five years ago. US manufacturing is for the most part a doomed export and now we learn that Brazil may displace the US as an agricultural exporter - one of the last advantages in production of the US on the world economic scene. The declining economic strength of the US has diminished its political strength, particularly but not only in Europe, and Bush's Iraq fiasco has intensified the negative feelings considerably. As for the cultural-ideological strength of the US, the collapse of the Soviet Union undid the major argument which it had been using to rally support around the world. And the efforts of the US to use the "war against terrorism" as an ideological substitute has fallen very flat.

So, the US has had to fall back on the only strong card it has left - the military card. However, even here the US is doing less well than one might have expected. It has shown in Iraq, once again, that it is basically incapable of dealing with a nationalist insurgency. Still, the US retains an incredible edge in military hardware, and it is pouring an immense proportion of its national wealth into maintaining and expanding this edge.

The key to US military superiority remains nuclear weapons, which explains why the US continues an almost hysterical concern with nuclear proliferation. It is however becoming clear, even to the Bush administration, that the US is isn't going to be able to stop a series of countries from obtaining nuclear weapons. North Korea and Iran may head the list, but there is a long list quietly (or not so quietly) starting to jump on the bandwagon. When the US can't get even Great Britain to align itself on its struggle to keep Iran in line, it is in bad shape politically.

This doesn't mean that the US is abandoning the effort to maintain an unquestioned military lead. It is moving full speed ahead in developing itself the so-called mini-nukes. These mini-nukes are actually reasonably powerful. They have about the power of the bombs that were used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have, however, two features that are different: they can burrow deep into the ground (and therefore of enemy shelters), and they cause less collateral damage, which supposedly will make them less politically objectionable. The US is proceeding with their production at Los Alamos, and will probably be testing them soon. These mini-nukes are not meant as a deterrent but for actual pre-emptive use. If the US does succeed in making viable mini-nukes, we may expect a new worldwide arms race to try to counter this US advantage.

Meanwhile, China is on a different tack. It is to be sure intent on strengthening its military apparatus. But it will be a while before China can in any sense be a peer to the US on this front. China also maintains a low political profile on the world scene. It consists mainly of cultivating better relations with just about everyone. But China is certainly not yet ready today to be a major political player. Furthermore, China's ideological stance is, to say the least, confusing. It is a "market socialist state" - the meaning of which no one is totally sure. It sometimes remembers its position of the old days of the Bandung conference, as a leader of the Third World, but most of the time, it is relatively quiet on North-South issues.

China's main card today is the economic card. It is a rising economic power. How powerful it might come to be is as yet unsure. But it is patiently expanding its role. A Chinese firm has just bought out IBM's personal computer division and is now the third largest computer firm in the world. China is a mainstay of the US dollar by investing in US treasury bonds. This gives China more economic control over the US than vice versa, since a withdrawal of these investments or even a rapid lessening of their extent could wreak economic havoc on the US. China has cultivated excellent relationships with Iran, which enhances its needed access to petroleum.

And most interesting of all, on November 29 2004, China signed a deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that is being hailed as "historic" and which moves towards establishing a trade bloc that rivals those of the US and the European Union. This agreement creates a market zone of two billion people, and it will be accompanied by new road and rail links between China and Southeast Asia. What China needs to do to complete this solid base is to come to an economic arrangement with Japan. This is an objective that is complicated by long-standing political and military concerns on both sides. But it seems economically so advantageous to both China and Japan in the long run that it is hard to see that it will not come to pass.

The US emphasis on the military card has the flavor of desperation. China's emphasis on building slowly its economic base seems by contrast an act of patience. Perhaps this is the story of the tortoise and the hare.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.

These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.

http://fbc.binghamton.edu/151en.htm

Please also see:-

"Limits to American Power" by Eric Hobsbawm as interviewed by The Hindu, ZNet (December 19 2004) http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=6892
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

America's War with Itself

Bush's attempt to wreck the climate talks follows an established pattern of self-destruction

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 21 2004)

I have a persistant mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.

Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were no links between the Baathists and Al Qaeda: now Bush's government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army developed high-grade weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who posted envelopes of anthrax in 2001 took it from one of the army's laboratories. <1> Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences. <2> The Pentagon's space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which doesn't yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States. It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D Roosevelt's widow. The US is now the only member of the UN Security Council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the world's most effective instruments for the projection of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It ensured that Saddam Hussein could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its allies in Jordan and Turkey. <3> Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The United States finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government in Buenos Aires last week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its own interests. US economic growth depends on the rest of the world's prosperity. The greatest long-term threat to global prosperity is climate change, which threatens to wreck many of America's key markets in the developing world. Coastal cities in the United States - including New York - are threatened by rising sea levels. Florida could be hit by stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities are likely to be affected by droughts.

In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees global warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism. <4> As a result of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to define human life ... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies". The nuclear powers, it suggested, are likely to invade each other's territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.

So how does Bush respond to this? "Bring it on". The meeting in Buenos Aires was supposed to work out what the world should do about climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. Most of the world's governments want the protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher agreement. But the Bush administration has been seeking to ensure both that the original agreement is scrapped, and that nothing is developed to replace it.

"No one can say with any certainty", George Bush asserts, "what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided". <5> As we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute "terrorism" for "warming". When anticipating possible terrorist attacks, the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best. The "precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters of national security that it now threatens American civil liberties. But it is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.

The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But instead of helping to design a treaty which would eventually bring them in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by carbon cuts. <6>

The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, thirty-six hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new commitments" is forbidden. <7> According to the head of the US delegation, the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". <8> It's like saying that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is flying into the tower.

Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But this is now familiar practice. The US tried to sink the biosafety protocol in 1999, even though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it. It sought to trash the 2002 Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This isn't, as some people suggest, isolationism. It is a thorough and sustained engagement, whose purpose is to prevent the world's most pressing problems from being solved.

And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the Pentagon is now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of dollars in Buenos Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity. Of course we know that its delegation was representing the interests of the corporations, not the people, and that what's bad for America is good for Exxon. But this does not detract from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity of its position.

The United States has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that appealing to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but surely there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's making of America.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. George Monbiot, 21st May 2002. Riddle of the Spores. The Guardian. Also available at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/05/21/riddle-of-the-spores/

2. Leading article, 20th November 2004. Engineering the smallpox virus is dicing with death. New Scientist.

3. Leading article, 5th December 2004. The UN Oil Scandal. The New York Times; Susan Sachs and Judith Miller, 13th August 2004. Under Eye of UN, Billions for Hussein In Oil-for-Food Plan. The New York Times.

4. David Stipp, 9th February 2004. The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare. Fortune magazine; Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, 22nd February 2004. Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us. The Observer.

5. George W Bush, 11th June 2001. President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change. Transcript of speech. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House.

6. Geoffrey Lean, 19th December 2004 US Fails in Bid to Kill off Kyoto Process. The Independent.

7. No author, 19th December 2004. Deal opens small door to climate talks. USA Today.

8. Dr Harlan L Watson, Senior Climate Negotiator and Special Representative, US Department of State, 7th December 2004. Press Briefing, Buenos Aires. http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2004/Dec/08-68436.html


http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/12/21/americas-war-with-itself-/
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Sustainable Territories

In February this year, Richard Douthwaite conducted a week-long internet seminar on his book The Growth Illusion for over six hundred participants worldwide. Here is an edited version of some of his contributions towards the end of the debate.

by Richard Douthwaite

The Aisling Magazine (Issue 24, Lughnasa 1998)

I want to be quite clear. Sustainability is best achieved by international agreement and by working at a national level provided that's possible. The idea of becoming sustainable in a local area is very much a second best - it is a lifeboat solution and the lifeboats are going to be very uncomfortable and inadequate if the world ship goes down. But they may be all that we have.

Very few participants in this seminar have expressed any confidence that we can put international agreements into place - and effectively enforce them - before appalling damage is done. I think we were right to reject this possibility but perhaps we should have explored the reasons for our rejection more thoroughly than we did. My own view is that if a country's prosperity depends on its international competitiveness, governments are bound to collude with companies operating within their borders to get round treaties which impose restrictions on the way they operate which subject them to extra costs. International enforcement measures might be tried to counteract this, but they have not stopped Saddam Hussein doing things the whole world thinks undesirable.

So, without really discussing the prospects for international remedies for a global problem, we have jumped to the conclusion that national or local solutions are required.

At the national level first, I think we need to see if we can agree whether or not national governments still have the powers to take the radical measures necessary to force the economic system to transform itself. Can they restructure the whole basis of taxation, moving, perhaps, from taxes on labour to ones on resource use, without multinational corporations and investors revolting and bringing about a financial crisis?

The Significance of local money is that it is issued by the people who use it and they pay no charge to anyone else. At the local level we need to explore ways in which we can create the circumstances in which a community can use more of its resources to meet its own needs directly and less of them on satisfying those needs by the conventional, indirect way of producing goods and services for an external market and then using the money this generates to buy the things it needs from wherever in the world they can be bought most cheaply. In my second book, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World (Green Books, Totnes, England, distributed in the US by Chelsea Green) I argue that communities which want to become more self-reliant should create a local "financial micro-climate" which enables them to do many more things than would be possible if external prices and interest rates ruled unchallenged. How? By issuing their own currencies and establishing their own banks.

If a community does not have its own currency, when one neighbour wishes to buy something from another but has nothing of equivalent value to give in exchange, he or she is forced to hand over money to complete the purchase which either they or someone else in their community originally obtained by selling their goods and services to the outside world. In other words, people in communities without their own currencies have to trade with the outside world just to be able to do business among themselves. Greater self-reliance requires that this link be broken. LETS systems are a step along the way. However, much more powerful local systems are also possible and one, the Wirtschaftsring, has been operating successfully in Switzerland for over sixty years. It now has 60,000 members, all small and medium-sized businesses. Five systems modelled on the Swiss example will start trading in Europe later this year, two of which plan to print their own currency notes.

When the British and the other colonial powers took over a new territory, their first action would frequently be to impose a tax on every hut, which had to be paid in the colonialists' money. This not only forced the native peoples to work for the new rulers in order to earn the money, but it broke down local self-sufficiency. Today, as contributors have pointed out, the majority of money is not issued by governments, but by banks, who charge for its use. The significance of local money is that it is issued by the people who use it and they pay no charge to anyone else. In other words, money creation has been democratised.

In Short Circuit I suggest that each community should try to produce its basic necessities for itself on a sustainable basis, from its own resources, so that it can trade with other communities and with the rest of the world generally out of choice rather than necessity. That way, it can never be exploited to the extent that its sustainability is destroyed.

Of course, urban communities are going to find it impossible to produce their basic necessities for themselves. How do we handle this? The development of most of the world's major conurbations is surprisingly recent, the result of the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. Isn't, as the title of one recent article asked, a sustainable city an oxymoron? My approach to this is that we should try to halt the flow of population from rural areas and work towards reversing it. Some contributors have already mentioned this flow. It is only by building greater rural self-reliance that we can stem it.

**********

Several contributors have commented that they do not see our being able to reconfigure the world economic system towards sustainability except in crisis conditions. Well, we may soon have our chance. I believe that a world crisis worse than that experienced in the 1930s is developing at present. Indeed, in some countries it has already struck and my worry is that we haven't done sufficient thinking about the economic systems required to achieve sustainability to seize the initiative when it arrives in our areas too.

The crisis has its roots in the changes in the labour market mentioned by Margaret Hampton. The past few years have seen a significant shift in the distribution of national income in favour of the better-off in most countries around the world. In general, wage-earners (and potential wage earners who are unemployed) have lost out from the increased international competition, while big companies and those investing in them have done very well.

The better-off save a greater proportion of their incomes than the poor, and so in almost every country a higher proportion of national income has been invested each year rather than being spent on consumption. This increased investment has to generate a return which can only come from selling goods and services: so who will buy the extra goods and services the investments produce? The government will take some. Business groups will press the government to spend on more roads and other forms of infrastructure to cope with the increased output levels. Subsequent investment projects will also provide a market, enabling the investment boom to feed on itself.

But sooner or later, the public is going to have to be able to take up most of the additional output and if they can't do so because almost all the extra income generated by growth has gone to the wealthiest 10% of population, the bubble will burst. Prosperity will vanish, just as it has done in Korea and elsewhere in South East Asia. The new factories, shopping centres and office blocks will lie empty and the system will begin to run in reverse, because those who have lost their jobs building new factories or producing machinery for them et cetera, will be unable to spend as much as before. The rich will be uneasy and cut their spending too. And so consumption demand as well as investment demand will drop, costing more people their jobs, and the economy will enter a downward spiral with one set of cuts leading to further ones.

In the 1930s, Henry Ford realised that workers had to be able to buy their products and mounted a campaign to encourage his fellow employers to increase their employees' wages to help the US get out of the depression. Many of them followed his advice and a study of the period shows that they put themselves into debt to do so. Today, of course, no employer would suggest such a thing because the extra wages would leak out of the country concerned and help revive factories elsewhere. This, and the loss of local production capacity, is the reason why I think that the crisis which is developing week by week will be worse than in the 1930s. It will certainly be more intractable.

So when it is asked whether people really want LETS systems and local banks, my answer is that so long as the international economy works well, they won't, but as soon as it leaves them and their neighbours without wages, they will. However, I should stress that, as Mike Rowbotham suggests, LETS systems are not even a half-adequate replacement for the current money system. They are essentially small-group systems which rely on social sanctions to make people abide by the rules, and they would break down if they had more than perhaps a thousand active members. Systems which rely on the law to keep members in line are needed to cope with large numbers, and the best example of such a system, the Wirtschaftsring in Switzerland, shows that they are capable of being used and trusted by conventional, conservative business people.

It's true, as Rowbotham says, that the Wirtschaftsring has not led to the contraction of the mainstream Swiss banking system. Vested interests were too strong for that but at least the organisation, which was born in the crisis of the 1930s, has prospered in more normal times and may demonstrate its true value in times to come.

In a totally sustainable world, each country, each territory and each community has to be sustainable by itself. This is because two or more unsustainable sub-systems can never balance each other out and make a sustainable whole. There are therefore two basic ways in which a sustainable world might be achieved, although a combination of the two would generate synergy and thus be highly desirable. One is that international regulations are introduced which force everywhere to become sustainable at more or less the same time. The other is that each community or territory makes itself sustainable within its own boundaries without waiting for the international regulations to be put into effect. Indeed, by demonstrating that it is possible to have a satisfactory way of life and yet be sustainable, such places would make it much easier for international regulations to be introduced and enforced.

A bit by bit approach to sustainability presents difficulties because for a sustainable community to stay that way in a world in which other places are behaving unsustainably, it needs to be able to protect itself militarily and economically from places that have used up their own resources and want access to resources that have been managed well. The problem of providing military protection - which would include policing of borders against hordes of environmental refugees - is outside the scope of our seminar, although one participant quite rightly raised the question of defence. All we need note is that if an arms race developed between a sustainable part of the world and an unsustainable one, it could destroy the sustainability of the former.

The economic arsenal of a sustainable territory consists of an independent currency and banking system. These are necessary to protect itself against competition from corporations and places which have lower costs because they are producing unsustainably. It would also be useful for the territory to be able to impose import duties on unsustainably produced goods but such tariffs are not currently in the realm of practical politics for sub-national areas while local currencies and banks are.

A territory which establishes its own currency or currencies gains the tremendous advantage that its people no longer have to trade with the outside world to assemble the means of exchange to trade with each other. In other words, the volume of business they are able to do amongst themselves becomes independent of inflows and outflows of national or international currencies. These inflows and outflows are affected by external interest rates, the buoyancy of the external economy and the competitiveness of the local one and so can be very erratic. Relying on somewhere else's money for local trade is therefore destabilising and makes it very difficult to become sustainable.

Another major advantage of having a territorial currency is that local producers who can sell their goods for it because they buy a lot of their inputs from the local area gain an enormous competitive advantage over producers who have to insist on payment in an external currency because most of their inputs are external. The advantage arises because it is always much easier to earn the local currency as it is never in short supply. Having a local currency therefore provides some of the protection which a generation ago could have been afforded by imposing import duties.

With its own banking system a territory can ensure that interest rates are related to the rate of profit possible on projects within the territory rather than to the highest rate of return that can be found anywhere in the world. This means that there is very much less pressure for the territory's resources to be used unsustainably in order to generate the financial returns required for investment funds to be committed and projects to go ahead.

********

A mature sustainable economy is one which employs only sustainable production processes and has ceased to grow economically. This means that although its buildings are repaired and its capital equipment is replaced as they wear out, no new buildings are erected and no extra equipment installed because the benefits from doing so are so small it's not considered worth while. In other words, all the sustainable projects which give a reasonable rate of return have been carried through. However, from time to time, new technologies will come along which make additional projects or production possible without destroying sustainability by using more resources or releasing more waste. Such technologies will be rare.

The fact that there is no net investment in a mature economy means in turn there is no net saving. That is not to say that individuals will not save, but the money they put aside will go to older people who are selling their assets and spending the proceeds during their retirement.

The low rate of return from investing in a mature sustainable economy means that the owners of capital in the territory will always be tempted to remove their funds to unsustainable or immature sustainable economies to get the higher rates of return possible there. If these capital movements are permitted, the mature economy will run down because funds which would have been used to repair buildings or replace worn-out equipment will be invested outside the territory instead. This will mean that unemployment appears and less goods and services are produced. Wages will fall and prices will rise, enabling businesses to make additional profits from which higher interest rates can be paid. Only when these rates match those available elsewhere will the capital outflow stop.


Net capital movements out of sustainable economies should therefore be strongly discouraged as they reduce total output and shift a larger share of this smaller output to the owners of capital, who also benefit from the interest payments they receive from their investments outside. Ideally, a separate exchange rate should be established for capital movements, just as the Sterling Area had until the late 1970s, so that capital outflows are matched by people moving their capital in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, though, such an arrangement is unlikely to be possible unless the territory concerned is a nation state.

If net capital movements do take place, they increase the return per unit of capital and reduce it per citizen. They also mean that no territory can become sustainably mature until everywhere else in the world does too. In addition, the need to pay interest on external capital means that the territory has to trade externally, which can put its sustainability at risk. "Neither a borrower nor lender be" is a maxim any territory intent on sustainability should follow.

Once a territory has set up its own currency and banking system, it should move towards producing all its essential requirements from the resources of its own area, regardless of whether or not this seems "economic" by conventional criteria. This is because a territory which has to export goods and services to be able to buy basic foodstuffs and fuel has to accept whatever deal the world market offers. These terms could be so unfavourable as to jeopardise its sustainability. However, if it becomes self-reliant for its essentials, the territory is able to trade with the outside world out of choice rather than necessity. It is no longer open to exploitation.

In my view, the essential features of a sustainable territory are:

* It has a stable population;

* It provides the basic necessities of life for its population from renewable resources under its control and expects to be able to continue to do so without over-using or degrading those resources for at least the next thousand years. It is therefore able to trade with the outside world out of choice rather than necessity. This frees it from the need to do unpalatable or unsustainable things in order to compete, such as adopting potentially dangerous technologies or curtailing social welfare provisions;

* It is able to protect its renewable resources and its population both militarily and economically. Its collection of economic protection weapons includes an independent currency and banking system. It has no net flows of capital across its borders, thus allowing its interest rate to fall to close to zero as it moves towards maturity;

* It does not depend on economic growth to stave off collapse. Its economy is growing very slowly if at all.

I see a sustainable world as a mosaic of sustainable territories trading non-essentials with each other to gain a greater range of consumer choice. Rather than a global mono-culture in which almost the entire human population competes for the same limited range of resources because they live in the same way, I see a world of thousands of micro-cultures, each developed to allow people to live sustainably and well within the limits of their own place. However, these territories will not be entirely self-reliant. Besides trading luxuries with each other, they will trade with global companies producing metals and other goods that cannot readily be produced on a local scale.

Like Robert Gale, many people are frightened that such territories would become inward looking and restrictive in the way that Irish communities were in, say, the 1940s. I think, however, that there is very little risk that this would happen because even if the flow of capital and goods was curtailed, the flow of information would not be. Instead, I see them as places within which people, released from the pressures of competing for a share of the global market, could develop to their fullest extent.

http://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM24/Sustainable.html

Richard Douthwaite is author of The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has enriched the few, impoverished the many, and endangered the planet (Lilliput Press and Green Books, 1992) and Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World (Lilliput Press and Green Books 1996). He lives in Westport, Co Mayo, Ireland.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Nuclear

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (October 08 2004)


No aspect of the energy challenge is more polarized than that of nuclear energy. Both the pros and cons are very selective in presenting their arguments, and it is very difficult to get a balanced or objective view of the real trade-offs. While much of the opposition is emotional, deriving from fear of radiation, bombs, and Chernobyl, it is not unlikely that this polarization also arises from the fact that, at present, there may be as many real negatives as positives.

The Pros:

The main plusses presented in favor of nuclear are:

<> There is a limitless fuel supply.

<> It is non-polluting, particularly having no carbon dioxide emissions.

<> It has very high energy density, requiring the least fuel for the energy provided.

<> It is inexpensive, the produced electricity being cheaper than coal.

<> It contributes to our national security.

<> New technology will make it 100% fail safe.

<> It already provides 20% of our electricity.

<> Nuclear generated electricity costs only 2 cents per kilowatt hour.


When these claims are examined in detail we find that:

<> The fuel supply is only relatively limitless, and then only if we use fast reactors, and their development was suspended in the USA in 1994.

<> Mining the ore, refining it, and concentrating it to make it fissionable are very polluting processes. If the whole fuel cycle is considered, nuclear produces several times the carbon dioxide that wind energy does.

<> Concentrated ore is very rare, so huge volumes of waste are created in providing the fuel.

<> Curiously, because of the thin film technology (thousandths of an inch), solar photovoltaic has a higher energy density.

<> Costs quoted (1.8 cent to 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour) are operating (that is, marginal) cost only, that is, fuel, maintenance, and personnel, and omit R & D, plant amortization, end-of-life decommissioning, and ultimate spent fuel storage costs. <3> Fully costed, it is our most expensive electrical energy source, at 6-10 cents per kilowatt hour. New reactor designs are expected to come in under 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

<> 90% of the uranium is imported, which is not consistent with national security. (We do have large domestic reserves that are not in large-scale production.)

<> The new technology is still questioned under conditions like terrorist attack. Unlike other methods of generating electricity there is no totally fail-safe mode for radioactive material.

<> Nuclear-produced electricity is less than 3% of our total energy consumption.

<> Nuclear produced electricity cost of 2 cents per kilowatt hour ignores plant amortization cost.

A couple of the points are relatively true for us, because of the import share, that is, we get to export much of the pollution, and the main suppliers, Canada and Australia, are secure allies.


The Cons

The major negatives presented by its opponents are:

<> Spent fuel storage will always be a problem.

<> Radioactive uranium hexafluoride, left over from the concentrating process in large quantities, also has to be stored.

<> Uranium 235, which is fissionable without concentration, is not abundant.

<> Plutonium can be used to make bombs, and therefore vastly increases the security risk.

<> Plutonium is an extremely hazardous and deadly poison.

<> Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe, and if we have a lot of them, another Chernobyl will be inevitable.


A careful examination of these claims reveals that:

<> Technological advances have greatly reduced the amount of spent fuel relative to early days, and there is promise for accelerator transmutation to further mitigate the storage problem. "Integral fast reactors", now forbidden, produce much less waste with a half-life of about 500 years versus more than 10,000 years for conventional light water reactors (LWRs).

<> U238 is relatively abundant and the technology to concentrate it for reactor fuel is mature.

<> Using "fast" reactors we do not need U235.

<> There are three isotopes of plutonium, and the mix produced by breeder reactors, without complex and expensive further processing, is not "weapons grade".

<> The "advanced fast reactor" consumes rather than producing plutonium.

<> Barring direct inhalation of particles (which are heavy), plutonium is about as poisonous as lead.

<> Modern reactors are safer than most things we do in life - much safer than flying, or mining coal, for example.


The Real Issues

On balance, probably the most telling issues are:

<> At the end of the day we are dealing with radioactive materials, which pose both short- and long-term risks, and which have to be stored for millennia.

<> Exporting our pollution to the fuel source countries is not a very nice way to solve a problem.

<> If fully costed, nuclear energy is not now cost competitive. <2> (See section 4 below).

<> Greatly increasing the amount of plutonium around will inevitably raise security risks. Plutonium is already being smuggled. <1> (Note, this point is a negative for conventional reactors, but a positive for Integral Fast Reactors [IFRs] <4>.)

<> We have renewable alternatives that have none of these drawbacks.

<> Yucca Mountain will be full by 2020, and we will need to develop new storage, starting soon, or develop alternatives to long-term storage.

<> When full the storage facility becomes in effect a potential "plutonium mine", and we can't be sure it will be safeguarded for millennia.

<> Just to get to ten quads of nuclear power for the USA, assuming 1,000 megawatt plants, would require about 350 new plants, including replacement of the present 104, or an average of seven per state. The NIMBY prospect is considerable to say the least.

<> The proponents of new fail safe "pebble bed" reactors note that they are modular and could be built as 100 megawatt plants for local distribution. Does anyone want perhaps 2,000 or so sources of radioactive material to regulate and control? <1>


Resource Depletion

Some people point out that there is not enough Uranium reasonably available in the earth's crust to support much world growth in nuclear power, without facing another declining resource in a few decades. Again this is a false objection. There are 433 active reactors (excluding shipboard propulsion units) operating in the world today, with a combined capacity of about 350 gigawatts electric (GWe). They can generate about ten quads of electricity per year. Argonne Labs estimates available Uranium as 3000 quads. If we tripled world nuclear capacity between now and 2030, (unlikely), and then ran flat, that would carry us to 2110. In addition we have three times as much thorium, which can be upgraded to fissile uranium in nuclear reactors, so even with major growth of present technology reactors we would be good for two centuries or so.

However present conventional reactors only consume about 1% of the fuel, or perhaps 2% after upgrading. The "Integral Fast Reactor" (IFR) <4> would consume most of the fuel, and therefore stretch the available Uranium to 300,000 quads. Even with vastly expanded world consumption we have at least several centuries of fuel.

NB:- The HTML version has a graph here. See http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=839


NB:- The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is also inherently safer in every respect than conventional reactors but IFR design was suspended in 1994 as a result of rather hysterical efforts by ill-informed anti-nuke activists who considered it to be a type of fast breeder reactor and open-ended source of near weapons grade plutonium. An even less informed House suspended development over the objections of a better-informed Senate.


Electricity Cost

Fully costed, nuclear generated electricity today costs from 6 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, not competitive with coal or natural gas. However the main component of that cost is plant amortization at 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour. Most of our fleet of nuclear plants was built in the 1970s and is now approaching the end of the 30-year initial amortization period. About seven plants have already been re-licensed for a longer useful life (now fifty years), and several more have applied for re-licensing. After amortization, the cost of electricity for these plants will drop to about 2 cents per kilowatt hour, a cost that makes electricity almost free, and that no other source of electricity can compete with. Experts feel that with sound maintenance, the lifetime of a nuclear plant can be near "forever". Of course, this means that nuclear energy consumers, over the last thirty years have paid for very cheap energy for their progeny, an unusual and certainly unintentional act of altruism.

This point raises the question of cost for electricity from new nuclear plants. There are several ways of keeping such costs competitive. The first and most obvious is that operators of present plants will simply average their cost from new and fully amortized plants. Next, the high cost from numerous existing plants derived from huge cost overruns during construction, often due to regulatory delays. The initial cost of new plants can be expected to be lower, and indeed fully costed electricity from new plants is projected as under 5 cents per kilowatt hour. If global warming is finally taken seriously in the USA (which now seems likely), and a carbon trading scheme is introduced, nuclear plants should be allowed to trade carbon credits, thus providing an income stream to offset amortization. Finally, if plant life is taken to be very long, as now seems certain, amortization can be spread over 50 or maybe even 100 years. With all of these possibilities, new nuclear power will certainly be competitive with fossil fuels even at today's prices, and fossil fuel prices will only rise.

All of the above ignores the fact that nuclear R&D has been paid for by the taxpayer. R&D for, eg, gas turbines is paid for by the manufacturer and that cost is passed along in price to the customer. Historically, most of the nuclear R&D led to atom bombs and reactors for nuclear submarines so having the taxpayer pay was appropriate. That is no longer the case, but given the strength of the precedent nothing is likely to change. We can't know the real cost of nuclear energy unless the industry pays its own R&D costs. We should consider such already "sunk" R&D cost as a gift to future generations, another little piece of altruism, that may offset some of the other problems we are leaving them.


No Nukes!

The anti-nuclear folk correctly point out that we can choose to phase out nuclear energy without any significant negative impact on our economy. We do not have a major American processing industry. The rest of the world will still provide a market for Australia and Canada. We will still be a small market for fuel for naval reactors and for medical and industrial isotopes. Since nuclear provides less than 3% of the energy we consume, since it does have some real drawbacks, and since there are better, lower cost alternatives, why bother with it? For sure it does not make sense to expand subsidization <3> of a controversial energy source. With nuclear's subsidies, wind/solar/hydrogen would be competitive, and is much more desirable.


Reality Check

That said, let's consider reality. As natural gas and petroleum availability go into decline, and as the hydrogen economy develops, increasing electricity demand, nuclear will start to look more and more attractive. Resistance on the part of lawmakers is already dropping. The National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), in their May 2001 report made this recommendation: "In the context of developing advanced nuclear fuel cycles and next-generation technologies for nuclear energy, the United States should reexamine its policies, to allow for research, development and deployment of fuel conditioning methods (such as pyroprocessing) that reduce waste streams and enhance proliferation resistance". They were referring to the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). In fact there is now a consortium of ten countries, led by Argonne Labs of the USA, to define and develop the "fourth generation" nuclear reactor, dubbed the "Advanced Fast Reactor", (AFR) <6> a rebirth, with improvements of the IFR for which development was abandoned in 1994. It is expected that the first AFRs will go into service by 2030, and when petroleum does go into decline, that schedule is likely to be advanced. Argonne is also leading the Congressional Advanced Reactor Hydrogen Project, designing the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, and developing technology to prolong the working life of present reactors.

An alternative new reactor design, the helium cooled "pebble bed" reactor (PBR) <7> is also in development, with units expected to be in service in China <8> and South Africa in the time frame of 2008 to 2012. Actually PBRs are not new. The first such reactor was operated in Germany for several years starting in the early 1980s. The PBR is claimed to be inherently fail-safe, in that overheating of the core forces passive shutdown, but there was a failure in the fuel feed to the German unit that resulted in the release of a plume of radioactive material, and led the German government to permanently shut the unit down. This specific failure mode could be prevented by design change. South Africa has plans to build at least ten PBRs for domestic use, and to build up to twenty per year small modular "plug and play" units for export. China is targeting 300 gigawatts electric of PBR capacity by 2050. South Korea is also in the planning stages of adding PBR capacity. Even Serbia has now announced plans to build a new reactor. Nuclear is at the beginning of a major comeback, especially in less developed countries (undoubtedly with USA involvement), but before long in the USA also, like it or not.


Sell the Benefits.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the new designs?

PBR: The major benefits claimed are:

<> They are operationally fail-safe by design.

<> Burn rate can be readily adjusted enabling accommodation of peak loads.

<> They are continuously fueled obviating periodic prolonged shutdown for refueling.

<> They are modular and can be built and operated in sizes as small as 10 megawatts.

<> They can be delivered as operational "plug and play" modules and put together like legos, making them practical even for LDCs.

<> They are low initial cost.

<> When prefab'd modules become available, time to commissioning may be as short as two years.


PBR: The drawbacks are:

<> They burn fuel inefficiently like conventional light water reactors (LWRs), meaning large amounts of long half-life radioactive waste production.

<> They are modular, and can be delivered in plug and play modules.

<> They don't strictly require a containment housing.

<> Given the last two points, and inevitable delivery to countries with low levels of technology, controls and maintenance abilities, they will be disasters waiting to happen in some cases.

Only the inefficiency drawback is a problem in the USA.


AFRs: The major benefits claimed are: <4>

<> no production and build-up of plutonium - they are closed loop with an integrated fuel reprocessing (pyroprocessing ) stage, so the plutonium produced is ultimately consumed.

<> short-term management of plutonium - the in-process plutonium produced is not accessible as it never leaves a highly radioactive environment.

<> disposition and long-term management of plutonium - they can burn existing plutonium stockpiles, especially that reclaimed from weapons.

<> other proliferation concerns - they ultimately eliminate the "plutonium mine".

<> long-term waste management - they produce much less radioactive waste, burning the long half-life actinides and leaving short (less than 500 year) half-life residue.

<> environmental effects - much less uranium ore processing per year.

<> resource conservation and long-term energy supply - more than seventy times the energy recovery of conventional reactors.

<> safety - automatic shutdown with thermal sink reserve to ensure core cooling in case of failure in the heat exchanger cycle.

<> refueling shutdown - they are expected to run for up to forty years on a single fuel charge.

<> constant output - base-load supply that wants to operate 24 hours per day and that provides a balance for variable renewables electricity generation. In the hydrogen economy this is a further advantage, because low priced night-time production can be used for hydrogen generation.


AFRs: The drawbacks are:

<> high initial cost and therefore high electricity cost. This drawback can be offset for the first several reactors built by charging for disposal of existing plutonium stockpiles. They should be given credit for elimination of such hazardous waste. See also section 4 above.

<> The first IFR was designed with a liquid sodium cooling bath, and a sodium/water heat exchanger. Everyone knows about the danger of sodium-water contact, and a staged film of such large-scale contact would be a major selling point for anti-nuke activists. New designs are evaluating sodium/helium and lead-bismuth/water heat exchangers. Russia already has a lot of experience with the latter.


Conclusions

Declining availability of natural gas and petroleum are going to shift a major portion of our energy burden to electricity. In response we will certainly turn to coal, renewables and nuclear. If the decline is sharp, which is very likely for natural gas, we will not be able to respond quickly enough on the supply side, especially given the very long permitting, building and commissioning times for nuclear (up to ten years today). Pebble Bed Reactors (PBRs) hold out promise to reduce this time to perhaps 2-3 years before 2010. When nuclear becomes again acceptable, we are likely to build PBRs for some years, while we accelerate development of Advanced Fast Reactors (AFRs). Before 2030 AFRs will almost undoubtedly be the reactor of choice. While nukes will always have inherent danger, AFRs have the promise of eliminating plutonium stockpiles, and can thus, on balance, make the world a safer place. There is still a need to overcome poorly informed and emotional resistance.

References:

1 http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999782

2 http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ for a lot of info the nuclear industry does not want to tell you.

3 Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, notes: "Were it nor for government subsidies, there wouldn't be one nuclear power plant in this country".
4 http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr.html
5 http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html
6 http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2002/april/a1ap02.cfm
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
8 http://www.grist.org/news/daily/2004/09/03/china/index.html


Copyright 2002-2004, CyberTech, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=839


---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

How the US Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the US cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies. [includes rush transcript]

by Amy Goodman

Democracy Now! (November 9th 2004)

John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

Twenty years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Men".

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldos, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldos and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the US invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studios.


John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man". He is the author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more ...

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It's great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Okay, explain this term, "economic hit man", "ehm", as you call it.

JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring - to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we've been very successful. We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last fifty years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh's government who was Time's magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed - well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn't have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a CIA agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the CIA and the NSA to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas T Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan - let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador - and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a US company, or US companies, to build the infrastructure - a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn't possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can't do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, "Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forests, which are filled with oil". And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they've accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It's a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. You say because of bribes and other reasons you didn't write this book for a long time. What do you mean? Who tried to bribe you, or who - what are the bribes you accepted?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I accepted a half a million dollar bribe in the nineties not to write the book.

AMY GOODMAN: From?

JOHN PERKINS: From a major construction engineering company.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

JOHN PERKINS: Legally speaking, it wasn't - Stone-Webster. Legally speaking it wasn't a bribe, it was - I was being paid as a consultant. This is all very legal. But I essentially did nothing. It was a very understood, as I explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that it was - I was - it was understood when I accepted this money as a consultant to them I wouldn't have to do much work, but I mustn't write any books about the subject, which they were aware that I was in the process of writing this book, which at the time I called "Conscience of an Economic Hit Man". And I have to tell you, Amy, that, you know, it's an extraordinary story from the standpoint of - It's almost James Bondish, truly, and I mean -

AMY GOODMAN: Well that's certainly how the book reads.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, and it was, you know? And when the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. I come from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly strong moral values. I think I, you know, I'm a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced. And if I hadn't lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I'd have a hard time believing that anybody does these things. And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. In your book, you talk about how you helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of dollars of Saudi Arabian petrol dollars back into the US economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the House of Saud and successive US administrations. Explain.

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, it was a fascinating time. I remember well, you're probably too young to remember, but I remember well in the early seventies how OPEC exercised this power it had, and cut back on oil supplies. We had cars lined up at gas stations. The country was afraid that it was facing another 1929-type of crash - depression; and this was unacceptable. So, they - the Treasury Department hired me and a few other economic hit men. We went to Saudi Arabia. We -

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men - "ehm"s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves "ehm"s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in US government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire US companies to build Saudi Arabia - new cities, new infrastructure - which we've done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they've done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we've done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are CIA-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had - his bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn't get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we've obviously done in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?

JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos had signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much - and, you know, it passed our congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that's an interesting story - how that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos - tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which - I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There's no question in my mind that it was CIA sanctioned, and most - many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where - when did your change your heart happen?

JOHN PERKINS: I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me. And, of course, I was doing things I was being patted on the back for. I was chief economist. I was doing things that Robert McNamara liked and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?

JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank provides most of the money that's used by economic hit men, it and the IMF. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we've put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help - genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, I want to thank you very much for being with us. John Perkins' book is called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004).

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251&mode=thread&tid=25#transcript

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Coal

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (September 30 2004)


Coal may be the most interesting of the fossil fuels, and it is certainly the most abundant and the most controversial. The environmentalists hate coal because of its ecological footprint in mining, its emissions (particularly mercury and carbon dioxide), and its gross inefficiency as a source of energy. The coal producers fight any kind of progress in safety, efficiency, pollution or alternatives, afraid their costs or sales growth will be impacted. Progress in improving efficiency and reducing emissions comes mainly from government research, in cooperation with electric utility companies. The environmentalists are wearing blinkers, and the producers are irresponsible.

In the meantime, coal production in the USA climbed about 2.4% per year over a long-term average (doubling in thirty years), through 1996, flattened through 2003 and then jumped to growth rate above 3% in 2004; and is likely to continue growing for another forty to fifty years. Consumption could increase by a factor of more than two before it peaks, and while we should be thankful it can do so, unless we see management changes we should strive to prevent it.


Coal Resources

The USA estimated recoverable reserves are about 275 billion short tons, but the EIA notes that "much of this may not be mined because of sulfur content, unfavorable quality, mining costs and/or transportation infrastructure". Actual production in 1998 was about 1.1 billion short tons, and this is where the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) gets their figure of a 250-year supply, (275/1.1).

In fact, the Coal Demonstrated Reserve Base (CDRB) <1>, which is a relatively high- confidence factor estimate, is 508 billion short tons (25% of world reserves). However, the EIA estimates that 17% of this is off limits or otherwise not accessible, and 34% is lost in production, leaving 55% recoverable, that is, 275 billion short tons.

We now have to consider two sets of factors that pull in opposite directions:

<> The not mineable, due to sulfur, quality, cost, etc.

<> The potential available from reducing "off limits", reducing "lost in production" and reducing sulfur problems, all with better technology.

In the moderately pessimistic case, we probably have 150 years, and in the optimistic case 300 years at 1998 production rates, that is, 165 and 330 billion short tons respectively. However with petroleum and natural gas supplies in decline, the use of coal will grow. If it grows at 2.5% per year (with no change in efficiency of use) we will double coal useage before 2035, and triple it by 2050. At that rate of sustained growth we would use 100 billion short tons by 2050, and would have between fifteen and fifty years supply left at the then use rate. We will certainly increase the efficiency of coal use, thus stretching this schedule, but it is almost certain that the rate of coal production will also peak and go into decline before 2050, as the available seams become deeper and/or thinner. Coal may be the form of fossil fuel that provides the energy bridge we need to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, but by itself it is not a solution to the problem of oil and natural gas shortages.

The problem with coal in the short term is not shortage; it is inefficiency and pollution.


Coal Challenges

There are some major problems with increasing coal use.

<> Diminishing returns. As we use more coal, we will, over time, be mining both deeper and thinner seams, driving up cost and driving down energetic yield. The modest growth of 2004 has already seen eastern anthracite prices double.

<> We use petroleum to mine coal. As we experience diminishing petroleum availability, we will have to use coal to mine coal, with much lower efficiency and much higher carbon dioxide output (unless we develop carbon dioxide sequestration technology).

<> Because of the difficulty of mining and transporting coal, its lower energy density, and the inefficient way we burn it to generate electricity (throwing away the heat), it has been estimated that coal has only 40% of the energetic productivity in the economy of oil, and less than 1/7th that of primary electricity. (See Note 0). New IGCC plants (Integrated [coal] Gasification Combined Cycle) using best available technology can burn coal about 30% more efficiently, but if 100% of old plants were replaced, it would only move coal productivity to 1/5th of primary electricity at best.

While our first energy problem will be to replace natural gas we will also shortly need substitutes for oil. Oil companies, with a liquid fuel mindset, have done a lot of work on using coal to develop fuel liquids, in order to use the existing refining and distribution infrastructure. The problem with this approach is that using the present USA average coal quality as feed stock, we would have to more than double coal production to replace 1/3rd of our petroleum, (about 27 quads of coal to replace 13 quads of oil). We would have to build 100 large liquefaction plants and greatly increase the mining infrastructure. Not a very feasible solution.

It would be better to use the investment for renewably generated electricity and a hydrogen infrastructure. About 90% of coal used in the USA is used to generate electricity. Three or four quads of primary electricity from wind or solar would replace about 21 quads of coal, as noted above.

An alternative to using coal for liquid fuel is using coal in IGCC4 (Integrated [coal] Gasification Combined Cycle) <5> plants to generate electricity and hydrogen, and use the hydrogen for automotive fuel. With today's best available technology, this alternative is probably about 30% more efficient than the liquid fuel choice. Of course, in the short run, using otherwise wasted night time electricity to generate hydrogen is very efficient. We still have the problem of the hydrogen infrastructure.

It seems likely that as we make the transition to a hydrogen economy we will continue to increase coal use for some decades, simply for lack of an early alternative. However, to minimize the problems inherent in such a course, and recognizing that petroleum shortage is a proximate issue, a thoughtful energy policy must prioritize transportation efficiency first, and then focus on other efficiencies, renewables, and the electricity/hydrogen infrastructure.


A Clean Coal Future

As coal will not go away soon, we must also develop clean efficient coal technologies (see ZECA - the Zero Emissions Coal Alliance) <2,3> and more efficient coal fired generating plants. The ZECA fuel cell approach holds promise of doubling the efficiency of generating electricity from coal, while approaching zero pollution. It is interesting to note that electricity generation was less efficient in 1998 than it was in 1959. During forty years, regulated monopoly electric utilities have made no progress, even though technology has evolved, because they didn't have to. It is this kind of management incompetence and lack of progress by both coal producers and users that is driving our present problems. Over the next thirty years we can probably reach 70% more electricity output from coal with no greater number of generating plants and burning no more coal than today. However history tells us it won't happen voluntarily and will be impeded by the coal industry.

The ZECA approach involves fluidized bed coal gasification to generate syngas from which hydrogen is derived to fuel a high temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC). It results in very high efficiency (near 70% projected) through high heat utilization, and very low emissions, better than natural gas combustion. It also has the promise of economic carbon dioxide capture in the form of mineral carbonate. The theory appears sound, but much technological development is still required, especially for the fuel cell.

An interim step is the IGCC (Integrated [coal] Gasification Combined Cycle) generating plant which uses the front end technology envisaged for ZECA for syngas generation from coal (or other fuels like petroleum coke, orimulsion, or heavy oils), and uses the syngas in a combined cycle turbine generator. Hydrogen can be a byproduct. All of the technology for the various elements of an IGCC is well developed, and a few fully integrated plants have been operating for enough years to assure expected operation in new plants. The pilot plant technology-debugging phase has now been completed. Existing plants have achieved over 40% HHV efficiency, compared to less than 35% typically for a conventional coal fired steam boiler (PC) plant. New plants are expected to achieve 45 to 50% efficiencies.

The main advantage of IGCC plants is reduced emissions. Sulfur and Nitrogen Oxide are much lower than for a PC plant, and more than 98% of the mercury can be eliminated at very low cost (a few mils per kWh). The capital investment <5> required to build the next generation of IGCC plants is generally estimated to be approximately twenty percent higher than investment required to build the next generation of PC plants. However the cost of carbon dioxide capture from an IGCC plant is estimated at 1.0 to 1.7 cents per kWh versus 2.2 to 3.3 cents per kWh for a PC plant. With mandated limits and a cap and trade scheme for mercury and carbon dioxide, IGCC would be the more economic choice. With coal prices rising, they may be more cost effective only due to efficiency.


Management Barriers

Even with all of these benefits, new plants now being approved are mostly traditional rather than IGCC. Note the following from the Chicago Tribune (August 24 2004):-

"Everyone speaks well of a technology that could turn Illinois coal into energy, but hardly anyone wants to spend money to use it. A once-vibrant industry, coal mining in Illinois has lost thousands of jobs in recent years, brought down by clean-air legislation of the early 1990s. The state's coal is loaded with sulfur, forcing the coal-fired generating plants that supply nearly half the state's electricity to buy cleaner fuel from western states. But a technology known as coal gasification (IGCC) radically reduces the pollutants expelled from the exhaust stacks of power plants. It is those substances - mercury and compounds of sulfur and nitrogen - that are among the nation's principal sources of air pollution and acid rain. But there is no reason to expect it to be used in the state anytime soon. Several power plant developers are toying with the idea, which is being used at plants in Indiana and Florida. But the two big electric-generating plants expected to open in Illinois in coming years - one Downstate and one on the former Joliet Arsenal site in Will County - have rejected it, saying conventional technology is cheaper."

And there we have an example typical of industry mindset. Don't worry about jobs, or pollution, or efficiency, just go with cheaper first cost, and don't even consider that legislation might soon make the cheaper decision more expensive. (See The New York Times, August 26 2004 "US Report, in Shift, Focuses on Greenhouse Gases" by Andrew C Revkin). If a carbon dioxide cap and trade scheme is enacted, and that is probable in the next few years, the IGCC will prove to have been the cheaper choice as well as the best.

Aggravating the problem of power industry conservatism we have an even worse situation in the coal mining industry. Almost every independent article one reads about coal deals with opposition to environmental constraints, or pollution controls, or renewables, or efficiency, or miner safety, or any other socially responsible proposal. For a typical example see "Friends in the White House Come to Coal's Aid" by Christopher Drew and Richard A Oppel Jr, New York Times (August 09 2004):-

"Coal producers are among the biggest political spenders, dispensing millions of dollars per year on campaign contributions, lobbying, and disinformation campaigns. Heaven forbid they should divert such spending to say R&D in the national interest. (Note the lack of American coal companies in the ZECA)."


Government Action

In fairness some developers claim that they cannot get financing for IGCC plants because they are new and untried. (Excess conservatism is certainly one of the problems of the electric power industry). Clearly this situation has to change, urgently. "Third Party Covenant" <5> financing would solve this problem and more than offset the cost differential with lower cost of capital by allowing for eighty percent federally guaranteed debt, a significantly higher percentage of debt at a lower interest rate than available under traditional utility financing. Note that such a scheme would cost the government only about 1/10th the cost of a thirty year production tax credit. However we need new federal legislation to enable such financing.

To jump-start IGCC we need legislation limiting emissions, especially of carbon dioxide and mercury, or an enabling scheme like the "third party covenant" or both. Unfortunately the power industry, in their usual "head in the sand" fashion, is likely to oppose, rather than support such legislation.

Conclusion

Coal is one of the keys to a safe transition from a world of fossil fuel energy to a world deprived of fossil fuels. Natural gas and petroleum will become the first depletion problems. By definition coal will be a growth industry for at least some decades, so coal company management can stop worrying about sales and stop opposing renewable energy sources and efficiency initiatives. Their future is secure.

However for coal to do its job without contributing more problems than it solves, we need progress in clean and efficient coal fired electricity generation. Both the coal and power industries need to step up and accelerate the transition to cleaner, more efficient technologies, starting immediately. IGCC looks like the first step and ZECA represents the ultimate goal.

With the changes hurtling towards us, driven by declining availability of natural gas and oil, and the near certainty of more needed environmental legislation, the country cannot afford the type of management typical of the coal mining and coal-fired power industries. These industries are too important to the nation's energetic future to be managed hitherto as they have been heretofore. We need forward looking, progressive, socially responsible management that promotes rather than opposes innovation, and technical and social progress. Until such management becomes the norm, we will have to depend on legislation and the need for appropriate legislation is urgent.

Notes

Note 0: Regarding relative productivity in the economy of different fuels. As primary source see the paper by Cleveland found at http://dieoff.com/cleveland.pdf , page 5 of 17, (or page 305 of the referenced journal). Cleveland, in referring to Adams and Miovic speaks of, "petroleum 1.6 to 2.7 times and electricity as 2.7 to 14.3 times more productive than coal in producing industrial output". He than provides a table with minimum and maximum average product ratio calculations done at different times. Simply averaging the ratios given, and the cross ratios implied, (for example, from oil:coal and gas:coal one can infer oil:gas), we end up with productivity ratios as: electricity to oil 1.7 to 5.8 times, electricity to gas 2.3 to 6.3 times and electricity to coal 3.8 to 16.7 times.

Weighting more recent data more heavily on the theory that the wide range of estimates reflects different kinds of work done (eg more of the energy in coal is used productively for heat than it is for electricity), and more recent estimates would better reflect the current mix in the economy, and adjusting the averages slightly so that, for example, coal to oil and oil to electricity would come out much like coal to electricity, and rather than use a range calculated to one decimal place averaging the range and rounding to the nearest whole number in the direction that favors fossil fuels, (to be conservative), on average in the economy, one quad of primary electricity does the work of 7 quads of primary energy in coal, 3 quads of primary energy in natural gas and 3 quads of primary energy in oil. This result may be somewhat unfair to natural gas relative to oil, but to get closer we have to use 2 significant digits, which is surely not justified.

The biggest room for error is that for different kinds of work we have a range from 4 to 17 for the electricity:coal ratio, and the mix that produces that range is not known. If it is heavily weighted to either end the above number could be quite wrong. Collapsing a range to a single number may be questionable, but it seems like a useful simplification.

Note 1: the primary energy quoted by the EIA for nuclear is simply three times the electricity produced because on average USA reactors dissipate two watts as heat for every watt of electricity produced. Thus we have a three times productivity factor for primary electricity vs nuclear.

Note 2: As gas gets used more for efficiently producing electricity rather than hydrogen, heat and cooking (including BBQ grills) its productivity will rise sharply, so maybe we should think of it as better than oil now.


References:
1 www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/reserves
2 www.ch2bc.org/ZECA_files/frame.htm
3 http://www.zeca.org/
4 http://www.bechtel.com/PDF/BIP/22008.pdf
5 http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication.cfm?ctype=book&item_id=394


Copyright 2002-2004, CyberTech, Inc. - All rights reserved.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=832

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Tragedy of the Commons

by Garrett Hardin (1968)

"The Tragedy of the Commons", Garrett Hardin, Science, 162(1968):1243-1248.

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, J B Wiesner and H F York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are ... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation." [1]

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment ..". Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems", and more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.

It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win". I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game - refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

The class of "no technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem", as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem - technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

What Shall We Maximize?

Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically", or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per-capita share of the world's goods must decrease. Is ours a finite world?

A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape. [2]

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?

No - for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern, [3] but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert (1717-1783).

The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.

In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J H Fremlin has so wittily shown. [4] The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is unobtainable.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely require more than one generation of hard analytical work - and much persuasion.

We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables.

Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.

Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcise the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand", the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain", is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote ... the public interest". [5] Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.

Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known Pamphlet in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). [6] We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons", using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it [7]: "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly + 1.

2. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of - 1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another ... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. [8] The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space, the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.)

In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the Western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas". Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans", they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction. [9]

The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent - there is only one Yosemite Valley - whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.

What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all objectionable. But we must choose - or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.

Pollution

In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in - sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest", so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers.

The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream - whose property extends to the middle of the stream - often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.

The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every ten miles", my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

How to Legislate Temperance?

Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. [10] Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.

In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words", said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally - in words.

That morality is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the past. "Thou shalt not ..." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason - Quis custodies ipsos custodes? - Who shall watch the watchers themselves? John Adams said that we must have a "government of laws and not men". Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption, producing a government by men, not laws.

Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities unnecessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.

Freedom to Breed Is Intolerable

The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of "dog eat dog" - if indeed there ever was such a world - how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds. [11] But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line - then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, [12] and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? [13] To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some thirty nations agreed to the following: "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else." [14]

It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, who denied the reality of witches in the seventeenth century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope", that we shouldn't find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives. However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy". If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis [15] in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.

Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.

People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

In C G Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus. [16]

The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary - but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A J Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good - by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.

Pathogenic Effects of Conscience

The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but it has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience", what are we saying to him? What does he hear? - not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: 1. (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2. (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons".

Every man then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind". Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia. [17] The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience", said Nietzsche, "is a kind of illness".

To conjure up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level succumb to this temptation. Has any president during the past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in noncooperators.

For centuries it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt it.

Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says: "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties". [18]

One does not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating mechanisms of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers; [19] it is not a pretty one.

Since proof is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's (or the world's) breeders. But what is the meaning of the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for nothing.

If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it. [20] "Responsibility", says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements". Notice that Frankel calls for social arrangements - not propaganda.

Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.

The morality of bank robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks", without providing for exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.

Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance - that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust - but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out, [21] worshipers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (1) that the status quo is perfect; or (2) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.

Recognition of Necessity

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.

Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.

In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government has paid out billions of dollars to create a supersonic transport which would disturb 50,000 people for every one person whisked from coast to coast three hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?

Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and "freedom" fill the air. But what does "freedom" mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity".

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity" - and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

Notes

1. J B Wiesner and H F York, Scientific American 211 (No. 4), 27 (1964).

2. G Hardin, Journal of Heredity 50, 68 (1959), S von Hoernor, Science 137, 18, (1962).

3. J von Neumann and O Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1947), page 11.

4. J H Fremlin, New Scientist, No. 415 (1964), page 285.

5. A Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, New York, 1937), page 423.

6. W F Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1833).

7. A N Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Mentor, New York, 1948), page 17.

8. G Hardin, Editor, Population, Evolution, and Birth Control (Freeman, San Francisco, 1964), page 56.

9. S McVay, Scientific American 216 (No 8), 13 (1966).

10. J Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster, Philadelphia, 1966).

11. D Lack, The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers (Clarendon Press, Oxford, England, 1954).

12. H Girvetz, From Wealth to Welfare (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1950).

13. G Hardin, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 6, 366 (1963).

14. U Thant, International Planned Parenthood News, No 168 (February 1968), page 3.

15. K Davis, Science 158, 730 (1967).

16. S Tax, Editor, Evolution After Darwin (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1960), vol 2, page 469.

17. G Bateson, D D. Jackson, J Haley, J Weakland, Behavioral Science 1, 251 (1956).

18. P Goodman, New York Review of Books 10 (8), 22 (23 May 1968).

19. A Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (Nelson, London, 1967).

20. C Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (Harper & Row, New York, 1955), page 203.

21. J D Roslansky, Genetics and the Future of Man (Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1966), page 177.

http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

See also "The Tragedy of the Common Revisited" by Beryl Crowe (1969), reprinted in Managing the Commons by Garrett Hardin and John Baden (W H Freeman, 1977) at the same URL,
http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Natural Gas

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (September 23 2004)


Overview

Natural gas is a more difficult subject to address than petroleum, because the data is much less complete and reliable, and because the USA situation appears much more precarious than the world situation. BP/Amoco statistics imply that at 1998 consumption rates, the world has about sixty years of resources remaining. However, known reserves are much lower, resource estimates are highly speculative, and the major resources (approximately 70%) are in the Middle East and former Soviet Union.

Natural gas can be readily transported by pipeline, but cannot be transported either in large quantities or economically by ship. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have long-term contracts that lock up nearly all existing LNG shipping capacity. Europe may be able to depend on the Middle East and the former Soviet Union for several decades of natural gas supply. The USA does not have that luxury.

Because of transportation limitations, the USA has historically depended on North American natural gas. Mexico has long since reduced exports to zero and is now a small importer. Canada supplied about 16% of USA consumption in 2002, but has had very disappointing exploration results in recent years, and exports to the USA declined 8% averaged across 2003, reaching nearly a 14% year on year decline in the 4th quarter. Known USA reserves represent about eight years' supply at recent consumption rates, while demand has been projected to grow by more than 50% during the next twenty years. In 2003 the EIA revised their USA production projections from steady growth to essentially flat through 2020, and even that seems very doubtful in the light of recent trends. In spite of major increases in drilling, production in North America declined at least 3% in 2003 versus 2002, and is down another 3% YTD 2004.

Included in natural gas resource estimates are:

<> Associated resources - discovered along with oil fields, through drilling for oil.

<> Non-associated resources - free flowing natural gas discovered without petroleum.

<> Tight gases - natural gas in dense shale or sandstone deposits that requires extensive drilling and fracturing to recover.

<> Coal bed methane - gas released from coal deposits that again requires extensive drilling and fracturing to recover.

Estimates for total USA resources vary widely from about 300 to 1,400 trillion cubic feet (tcf), and methods of estimating are very imprecise and speculative. Background data is not freely available to the individual, but databases can be accessed at the cost of a few thousand dollars. It seems likely that the higher resource numbers result from arithmetic addition of low probability estimates, and may therefore be meaningless. A number near 1,100 trillion cubic feet or fifty years is widely used, but is a very risky multiple of proven reserves. The hard data we do have is not encouraging. What we do know is:

<> Drilling for natural gas in the five years from 1980 through 1984 was about double the average during the decade of the 1990s, but annual average discoveries were slightly less.

<> Because of the bad experience with wildcat drilling in the early 1980s, drilling in the 1990s tended to be concentrated near known large basins, extending their boundaries but not making major new finds.

<> 9,000 new gas fields were discovered from 1977-87, but only 2,500 from 1987-97.

<> With the application of new technology, especially hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, initial production of new fields has been kept nearly constant for two decades, but depletion time has been shrinking rapidly. New wells average 56% depletion in the first year of production. Congressional testimony in 2004 stated that some tight sands wells deplete 50% in less than six months.

<> Wells drilled in 2000 were 60% above 1999, and early 2001 were about 50% above 2000. Production grew less than 2% in 2000, and less than 1.5% in 2001. After falling off in late 2001 and early 2002, drilling has increased steadily for the last two years while production continues to decline.

<> New finds are becoming progressively smaller.

<> Proved reserves of natural gas in the USA declined from a peak of 290 trillion cubic feet in 1967-70 to 167 trillion cubic feet in 1989, and, with some fluctuation, have been flat since, in spite of a major drilling peak in the early 1980s as noted above.

<> For twelve years through 2001, discovery just kept pace with production, and consumption growth was served by increasing imports.

<> Of 1999 EIA estimated resources of 1,280 trillion cubic feet, 890 trillion cubic feet were classified as "undiscovered", and 220 trillion cubic feet as expected reserve growth. (Most of the discovery in the 1990s was reserve growth. How much can be left?)

<> Natural gas production in the USA peaked in 1973.

<> Natural gas supply from the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) shelf is in decline.

<> Natural gas discovery in the deep Gulf of Mexico is much lower than expected, and NRG Associates in 2001 projected peak supply as 3 trillion cubic feet in 2007 versus the National Petroleum Council forecast of 4.5 trillion cubic feet in 2010.

<> Simmons has noted that rig count in the Gulf of Mexico grew 40% from April 1996 to April 2000, and 60% in Texas from January 1996 to October 2000, with production remaining flat.


There is nothing in the known facts to support an optimistic resource estimate. Clearly the natural gas industry has to rapidly accelerate drilling, just to keep production flat. A large increase in wildcat drilling in the early 1980s didn't help and seems to be not helping much again.

Is Alaska going to help? Resources are projected by the EIA as 237 trillion cubic feet, but proven reserves are only 10 trillion cubic feet. (Does that make you wonder?) A three-foot -diameter pipeline, moving gas at 2,200 feet per second <1> would deliver only 0.5 trillion cubic feet per year, less than 2% of 2020 needs. The energy to move the gas increases with the square of the velocity, and, at this velocity, would require more than 2% of the gas moved just to drive the compressors. It may not be economical to build a 2,000-mile pipeline. (Maybe the natural gas can be converted to liquid syn fuel in situ and shipped via the existing oil pipeline?)

The National Petroleum Council has forecast natural gas demand as 29 trillion cubic feet in 2010, and the EIA as well as the NEPDG projected demand of 40 trillion cubic feet by 2020. Rising prices have already severely dampened such demand growth, with at least 25% of 2001 industrial demand already having been destroyed through closures or moves offshore. Unfortunately, because of low prices and high availability in the late 1990s, and to meet emission restrictions, almost all new electricity generation capacity built in the last decade has been gas fired, with the bulk of it coming on stream in 2002/3. Only unusually benign weather during the last fifteen or so months has saved us from severe natural gas shortages up to now.

To make matters worse, if a curve of USA discovery is superimposed on production with a shift of 28 years, the two curves match very well up to now. However, discovery went into a sharp decline about 28 years ago, so we can expect a similar decline in production soon. (We can't produce what hasn't been discovered). Production is likely to "fall off a cliff" and be down by half before 2015. See http://www.peakoil.net/JL/BerlinMay20.pdf, Figures 78 and 89.


The Current Situation

While natural gas supply tends to be quite flat year round, demand is distinctly seasonal, with highest demand for winter heating load. Demand varies widely even week-to-week dependent on "temperature degree days" (TDDS), either "heating degree days" (HDDs) in winter or "cooling degree days" (CDDs) in summer. Winter demand is higher than production, requiring a build up of storage during spring, summer and fall to supply peak demand in winter. This splits the year into two main seasons, about thirty weeks from near 1 April to near 30 October, the "injection" (to storage) season, and about 22 weeks, 1 November to 31 March, the "withdrawal" (from storage) season. To get a good comparison from year to year one needs the "gas weighted" HDDs and CDDs.

Historically injection has varied from a low of 1600 billion cubic feet to a high of about 2450 billion cubic feet, mainly depending on how low storage got during the previous withdrawal season. The critical minimum storage level is from 700 to 900 billion cubic feet. Above 900 billion cubic feet the system operates fairly smoothly. Below 700 billion cubic feet there is a high probability of severe price spikes, and inability to deliver sufficient gas to users, due to low system pressure. Withdrawal also varies from a low of about 1800 billion cubic feet to a high of 2400 billion cubic feet, with the last ten-year average about 2000 billion cubic feet. Target end of injection season storage is above 3000 billion cubic feet.

In spring of 2003 storage got down to 720 billion cubic feet, and in February, when severe shortages were forecast, prices spiked to $18.00 per million Btu interday and $28.00 per million Btu intraday, versus a base level near $5.00 per million Btu. Because of this extremely low storage, Alan Greenspan began warning of an natural gas crisis in spring 2003. Then several factors worked together to provide record 2003 injections so that the 2003/2004 withdrawal season started with ample storage (3200 billion cubic feet). These factors were:

<> a substantial degree of industrial demand destruction in 2002 and 2003 due to high natural gas prices

<> a sharp increase in liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, from about 200 billion cubic feet per year to 540 billion cubic feet per year

<> the decision by suppliers to leave natural gas liquids (NGL) in the supply, supplying wet gas instead of dry gas

<> an unusually mild summer with low CDDs until late August, that sharply reduced demand for peak electricity generation.


These factors were enough to offset declining production and rebuild adequate inventory for the withdrawal season.

During 2002 the USA used about 23.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with about 16% imported from Canada by pipeline and a little under 1% supplied as imported LNG. During 2003 domestic production dropped sequentially by quarter by about 1%, 2%, 3% and 4%, for an average just below 3%. Imports from Canada dropped about 3%, 6%, 9% and 12%, for an average of near 8%. With supplies holding flat in 2004 at 4th Quarter 2003 levels, we can expect domestic production to be down 3%, 2%, 1% and 0% for an average of 1 to 1.5%, and imports from Canada to be down 9%, 6%, 3% and 0% for an average of 4%. Offsetting these declines, LNG imports should be up about 200 billion cubic feet, limited by regassification terminal capacity. Net, total supply was down about 1.5% in 2003 versus 2002, and 2004 will probably be down another 1.5% versus 2003. Demand has grown in both years due to high housing additions (80% of new houses are heated by natural gas), increased electricity generation fired by natural gas, and increased economic activity. These increases were fairly modest in 2003, mainly due to weather, but are quite sharp in 2004. During the last three weeks in May 2004 total electricity generation was up 5% year on year after adjustment for TDDs and holidays, and manufacturing activity is up sharply since late 2003.


Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)

Most optimists and many analysts believe that LNG imports will save our bacon. That is not the case. Several countries with stranded natural gas are building liquefaction facilities so there will be plenty of LNG supply. The USA has expanded regasification facilities rapidly during 2002, 2003, and 2004 and has enough capacity for near term needs. New projects are approved or under construction to provide enough capacity to meet EIA import projections of 2.2 trillion cubic feet for 2010. The first problem is that at a decline rate for North American availability of 2% per year (remember 2003/4 declines have been much worse than this) we would need 2.6 incremental trillion cubic feet of LNG in 2010 to reach 2004 total natural gas supply level, and 3.7 trillion cubic feet to meet the 2002 level of consumption, not the 2.2 projected by the EIA. It is not clear that there will be enough regasification capacity to meet these numbers (there are a lot of NIMBY problems), and these numbers do not provide for any growth.

A much larger limitation is shipping capacity. The world LNG tanker fleet in Q1 2004 was 156 vessels, with 62 more on order for delivery through 2008. World shipbuilding capacity for LNG tankers is 20 ships per year. If this capacity is booked full another 50 or so vessels can be delivered by end 2008. All of the existing fleet is already under long-term contract, and not more than 18 of the vessels under order are available for shipments to the USA. Up to now about 40% of the USA LNG supply has come from Trinidad, 40% from North Africa, and the rest from the Middle East and Indonesia. Trinidad supply is now maxed out, but they will have some more capacity coming on stream in 2006. North Sea production is now in decline so Europe must become a much larger importer from North Africa. This means that most of the incremental USA supply will have to come from the Middle East, which means only about ten deliveries per ship per year. One modern ship has a capacity of about 2.6 to 2.8 billion cubic feet of regasified natural gas, but because of losses during transport, could only deliver about 2.3 billion cubic feet per trip from Qatar to the USA. At ten trips per year we would need an incremental 100 ships by the end of 2009 to meet 2010 demand equal to 2004 consumption, or 160 to meet 2002 consumption. Even if shipbuilding capacity is doubled by the end of 2006, (and the order book right now is not large enough to get that process started), and all of the incremental capacity went to serve USA demand, we would still be fifty ships short of minimum 2010 needs.

NB None of the above even considers North American production "falling off a cliff"! We can be confident that total USA NG supply in 2010 will be at least 1 trillion cubic feet less than the peak year of 2002, and there is a high probability that it will be less than half.


Other Sources

Users of natural gas have been urging the government to open up restricted areas for drilling. That will not solve the problem either. At least 40% of government lands in the Rockies are already open, but there is no great rush to drill them. Most of the land in question, where it contains gas, contains tight sands gas. It doesn't matter how much is available, it simply can't be produced fast enough to offset decline in the present major fields. The eastern Gulf of Mexico holds some promise, but deepwater Gulf of Mexico has been largely disappointing relative to early expectations so far. Coal bed methane has the producibility problem of tight sands plus a major environmental problem of water pollution.

If there were major attractive prospects in any of the areas in question the natural gas producers would be beating down the doors in Washington. That isn't happening, even with as energy corporation friendly government as we have now.


Conclusion

Natural gas is somewhere between a limit to growth and a disaster waiting to happen right now, and no one is doing anything about it. Only a few months of inclement weather will cause severe shortages and rocketing price spikes. There is a high risk of major availability declines with unimaginable economic impact, and there is no supply side solution. We urgently need a government driven, demand side oriented "Apollo Program" for energy. The wake-up call is already sounding, at least for natural gas, but the powers that be just aren't paying attention, and the energy industry, both users and suppliers of fossil fuel, are asleep at the switch or in denial. The bad news is that it looks like we will have to experience a prolonged crisis before there is any reaction to the danger. The good news is that the crisis is likely to happen real soon.

Note

<1> The Fort St John, British Columbia to Chicago pipeline, completed in 1999, meets this specification. See Petroleum Review, November 2000, London, page 13.

Copyright 2004 CyberTech, Inc.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=828
---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

A Deadly Reversal

Why does no one care that the world's worst conflict has broken out again?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 14 2004)

I hope that the newspapers do not represent public opinion. If they do, it means that we consider the Home Secretary's love affair several hundred times more important than the resumption of the most deadly conflict since the Second World War. On Sunday the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), already responsible for 3.8 million deaths, started again. <1> If you missed it, you're in good company.

The Rwandan army appears to have crossed back into north-eastern DRC. Rival factions of the Congolese army - some of them loyal to Rwanda - have started fighting each other. As usual, it's the civilians who are being killed - and raped and tortured and forced to flee into the forest. Last week, before the fighting resumed, the International Rescue Committee reported that over 1000 people a day are still dying from disease and malnutrition caused by the last conflict. Nearly half of them are children under five. <2>

Rwanda has already invaded the DRC (or Zaire, as it used to be called), twice. In both cases it appeared to have justification. The Interahamwe militias who had killed 800,000 Rwandans fled there after the genocide in 1994. They were sheltered first by President Mobutu, then by President Kabila. They wanted to reinvade Rwanda and resume the genocide.

But after moving into the eastern DRC for the second time, in 1998, Rwanda more or less forgot about the genocidaires. It had found something more interesting: minerals. Better armed than the other forces in the region, the Rwandan army concentrated on seeking to monopolise the trade in diamonds and coltan. By 1999, according a report for the UN Security Council, 80% of the Rwandan military budget - around $320 million a year - was coming from minerals stolen from the DRC. <3>

The six African armies which had been drawn into the conflict, their proxy militias and the government of the DRC started fighting a monumental turf war over the mines. Millions of people fled their homes. Thousands were captured and forced to mine or to work as prostitutes. Rwanda's operation was by far the most efficient. According to Amnesty International, it was controlled directly from the capital, Kigali. <4> Even after 2002, when the armies officially withdrew, the Rwandan government left its men in the eastern DRC to continue running the mines. <5> The latest invasion appears to be a thinly-disguised attempt to deal with the militias which threaten its lucrative business.

Though we are rightly exercised about the atrocities in Darfur, it is hard to find anyone who gives a damn about the Congo. This is partly because we are used to seeing the Rwandan government forces as the good guys - the people who first suffered at the hands of the genocidaires, and then drove them out of their country. It's hard to adjust to the fact that good guys can become bad ones, harder still to recognise that they can become some of the world's bloodiest war criminals.

Those who believe that Paul Kagame's government can do no wrong concentrate their attacks on a report published in 2002 by the United Nations. <6> They allege that it has been subject to power-play between the members of the Security Council. But they fail to explain why Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, Global Witness, the British all-party parliamentary group and the US State Department have all, independently, come to the same conclusions. <7>

The reports produced by these bodies run to hundreds of pages, full of eye-witness accounts and the direct testimony of both survivors and perpetrators. They make dreadful, horrifying reading. They show how troops have repeatedly raped children as young as three; have sliced off the genitals of women who resist being raped; have forced women and children to work in terrifying conditions in the mines: scores have been buried alive. They have torched villages, looted homes, killed those who resist or those who appear to have helped the other side, and forced millions to flee into the jungle. Most of the 3.8 million have died of malnutrition and disease; but had the marauding armies filled them with lead, they could scarcely have had greater responsibility for their deaths.

The reports give the names of both agents and victims, the dates of the crimes, the precise locations, the value of the stolen resources and the names of the people and companies who bought them. It is very hard to see how they could all be disputed.

Some people, such as the former Guardian journalist Victoria Brittain, have claimed that Rwanda's critics have confused "the disciplined Rwandan army and the chaotic rebel groups". <8> While all the armed forces who have fought in the DRC since 1998 have committed atrocities, the Rwandan army is named in the documents again and again. The State Department, for example, summarises "numerous credible reports" of regular Rwandan troops "killing, torturing, or raping" people in North and South Kivu and northern Maniema Province. <9>

It is not easy to see, anyway, where the moral difference lies between killing people and commissioning others to do so on your behalf. Rwanda's proxy, the RCD-Goma militia, has committed innumerable atrocities all over the east. The Rwandan government is directly responsible for both its formation and its survival. In June this year, Global Witness reported that "the RCD was put together in Kigali [the Rwandan capital] rather than in the Congo" and "still remained highly dependent on its Rwandan backers to finance its military deployment in the region". <10> Amnesty International reports that the Rwandan army supplied this force with "rocket launchers, armoured cars, machine guns, light artillery, mortars and landmines". <11>

None of the reports disputes that the DRC's government in Kinshasa has also been responsible for crimes against humanity in the east of the country. But in much of this region, its writ hardly runs. As a UN report leaked to the BBC last week confirms, Rwanda and its proxy militias are the most powerful forces in the eastern DRC. <12> They control most of the minerals trade and have been involved in almost all the fighting.

Rwanda could have wiped out the Interahamwe - which is now a much smaller and weaker force than it used to be - years ago. As the International Crisis Group points out, "Rwanda had exclusive and total military control over the eastern half of the Congo between 1996 and 2002 and failed to neutralise and repatriate all its nationals". <13> Instead, it has repeatedly used its presence as an excuse to occupy the mineral-rich regions. As the British parliamentary group reports, the Rwandan army was often "located in areas where the Interahamwe did not exist, or were at least fifty kilometers away". <14> In some places, the army has even formed alliances with the Interahamwe to control the mines. Now, using the old excuse, the Rwandan government is dragging the eastern Congo back into war.

It would not be hard for the international community, and the British government in particular, to defuse the world's most deadly conflict. Rwanda is a tiny, frail state, which would collapse without foreign aid, over one third of which comes from Britain. <15> But nothing will happen until we wake up to this dreadful war, and stop pretending that the victims of atrocious crimes cannot also be perpetrators.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. No author, 12 December, 2004. New fighting erupts in DR Congo. BBC News online.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4090717.stm

2. International Rescue Committee, December 2004. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Results from a Nationwide Survey, Conducted April-July 2004.
http://www.theirc.org/pdf/DRC_MortalitySurvey2004_RB_8Dec04.pdf

3. United Nations Security Council, October 2002. Final report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. UN, New York.

4. Amnesty International, 1st April 2003. Democratic Republic of the Congo: "Our brothers who help kill us" - economic exploitation and human rights abuses in the east.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR620102003

5. United Nations Security Council, ibid.

6. United Nations Security Council, ibid.

7. Amnesty International, 1st April 2003. Democratic Republic of the Congo: "Our brothers who help kill us" - economic exploitation and human rights abuses in the east. http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR620102003

Human Rights Watch, June 2004. D R Congo: War Crimes in Bukavu. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/11/congo8803.htm

Human Rights Watch, 19th November 2004. D R Congo: End Arms Flows as Ethnic Tensions Rise.http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/19/congo9697.htm

Human Rights Watch, 4th December 2004. Democratic Republic of Congo - Rwanda Conflict.
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/12/04/congo9767.htm

The International Crisis Group, 7th July 2004. Pulling Back From The Brink In The Congo. http://www.icg.org/home/index.cfm?id=2854&l=1

Global Witness, June 2004. Same Old Story - Natural Resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo. www.globalwitness.org/reports/download.php/00141.pdf

The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention, November 2002. Cursed by Riches: Who Benefits from Resource Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? http://www.appggreatlakes.org/content/pdf/riches.pdf

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, US State Department. 31st March 2003. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2002. Rwanda. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/18221.htm

8. Victoria Brittain, 15th April 2004. Rwanda Confounds Its Critics. The Guardian.

9. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, US State Department. 31st March 2003. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2002. Rwanda. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/18221.htm

10. Global Witness, June 2004. Same Old Story - Natural Resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo. www.globalwitness.org/reports/download.php/00141.pdf

11. Amnesty International, 1st April 2003. Democratic Republic of the Congo: "Our brothers who help kill us" - economic exploitation and human rights abuses in the east.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR620102003

12. Mark Doyle, 10th December 2004. Rwanda Controls DR Congo, UN Says. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4085463.stm

13. The International Crisis Group, 7th July 2004. Pulling Back From The Brink In The Congo. http://www.icg.org/home/index.cfm?id=2854&l=1

14. The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention, November 2002. Cursed by Riches: Who Benefits from Resource Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? http://www.appggreatlakes.org/content/pdf/riches.pdf

15. Jonathan Clayton, 26th June 2004. British Mission Heads off War in Central Africa. The Times.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/12/14/a-deadly-reversal-/

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Beyond the Peak

Closing Address to the First US Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, Yellow Springs Ohio (November 14 2004)

by Richard Heinberg

First let me take this opportunity to express my great thanks to Pat Murphy, Faith Morgan, and Megan Quinn of Community Service, who have organized this conference so thoughtfully and successfully.

We have already heard a lot of talk this weekend, and I don't want to tax us further with yet more information. I see in the program that I am supposed to speak on "Hope and Vision: Solutions for Planet Earth". It seems to me that several other presenters have already given us plenty of hope and vision; I am not sure I have much to add in that regard. But perhaps I could take these few minutes to share with you some philosophical thoughts on the big picture - on our plight and opportunity from a historical perspective.

We are, it seems to me, seeing the beginning of the end of industrial civilization.

That word civilization is a tricky one. We are trained to think of it as connoting everything refined, cultured, and secure. The alternative is barbarism, is it not?

Well, not necessarily - not, at least, from a historical or anthropological perspective.

For several years in the 1990s I was a member of an academic organization called the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, which, like most such outfits, holds yearly meetings at which professors entertain one another with their latest iterations of sometimes indecipherably subtle theories. The members of ISCSC, or "issy" as it is affectionately called, could never quite settle on a definition of the word civilization, but there was general agreement that civilizations are good and very worthy of comparative study. Thus the paper I read one year, "A Primitivist Critique of Civilization", didn't go over particularly well.

But while the word civilization may be hard even for experts to define, its derivation is clear enough; it comes from the Latin civis, meaning "city". Civilized people are city builders. But this is hardly a complete or even useful explanation; there are surely other factors involved, including writing, numeracy, trade, and a system of social classes. According even to these few criteria, there have been about 24 distinct civilizations so far.

Now, I think we all have a clear sense that our particular civilization is qualitatively different from any other in history - from the Chacoan, for example, or the Mayan, or the Mesopotamian, or the classical Roman or Greek. Ours is the first, and will be the only, fossil-fueled civilization. It is civilization on steroids, civilization on multiple carafes of espresso, civilization on rocket fuel. We supersize it; we want it done yesterday. Consequently we have chewed up and spit out more of the Earth's resources more quickly than any other group of humans has ever managed to do.

Of course, civilizations produce wonderful cultural artifacts: pyramids, temples, literature, music, and so on. Perhaps because the American oil empire has grown up so quickly and rootlessly, its cultural products - though admittedly impressive in some ways (consider the modern Hollywood blockbuster movie with its multi-million-dollar special effects) - often have an ephemeral quality, a superficiality, and an emotionally manipulative commercial utilitarianism, that makes many of us less than proud.

Our buildings, clothes, utensils, containers, and tools - all aspects of our designed environment - have come to be shaped by fuel-fed machines rather than by human hands. If we can make them faster, or if we can make more of them more cheaply with machines, economics requires that we do so. As a result, we have become starved for beauty - the beauty of nature, and the beauty of careful, skilled, individual hand production rooted in slowly and painstakingly evolved culture that is itself rooted in a particular landscape. Perhaps we suffer unknowingly from an unrecognized mass disease: chronic, pernicious beauty deficiency.

One interesting thing to note about civilizations is that they have a nasty habit of collapsing. Many of them have come to their ends for similar reasons, and often the process of collapse has begun within only years of their reaching their maxima of geographical extent, military power, and accumulated wealth. Clive Ponting, in his marvelous book A Green History of the World, offers a familiar explanation: ancient societies typically drew down their resource base and destroyed their habitat. They cut too many trees, exhausted their topsoil, emptied their wells.

Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies, provides a more subtle account. He attributes collapse to declining returns on investments in complexity. And he defines collapse itself as a reduction in social complexity. A flattening of the pyramidal class structure, a withdrawal of imperial overreach, a rupturing of trade relations - all are symptoms of the involuntary simplification of a society.

Parenthetically, I should note that Tainter, who certainly respects indigenous cultures, is not saying that non-civilized societies aren't complex in terms of their rituals and myths, or their ecological understandings. He defines complexity in terms of quantifiable social elements like the number of distinctive tools and tool systems, or the number of social classes and occupations present.

Societies become complex in order to solve their problems. We adopted agriculture to make up for the caloric deficit consequent upon our overhunting of megafauna during the late Pleistocene. We irrigated so that we could practice agriculture in seasonally arid places. We built social hierarchies to allocate irrigation allowances from a single river to hundreds or thousands of individual farmers, or to store and distribute grain from seasonally abundant harvests.

At first, such investments in social and technological complexity may yield dizzying returns, and societies that make them often grow quickly and tend to overpower their neighbors. An empire may develop, and may persist for centuries.

But the strategy of social complexification imposes hidden costs that gradually build up. The support population eventually tires under the burden.

Once the point of declining returns is reached, almost anything can push a society into decline. Climate change and other environmental disasters sometimes play a role. Typically, civilizations that are near their point of collapse become involved in wars over resources, and they are often plagued by poor leadership that is unable to understand the nature of the challenge or to propose effective responses.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Surely a civilization whose entire basis rests upon the extraction and use - and thus the depletion - of a few nonrenewable resources is the most vulnerable sort of civilization that has ever existed.

Most scientists I know who study these things have come to the conclusion that we are living near the end of the current empire, the first truly global empire in the history of our species. By "end" I don't mean that the whole thing will come crashing down tomorrow or next year. Historically, collapses have usually occurred over a period of decades or centuries. In our case the signs of diminishing returns, and of overextension, are already unmistakable. And, perverse as the comment may seem, I don't think collapse, in this instance, would necessarily be such a bad thing.

As Tainter points out, collapse really just means a return to the normal pattern of human life-life, that is, in tribes or villages: small communities, if you will. Collapse is an economizing process in which a society reverts to a level of complexity that is capable of being sustained.

This is all so easy to understand from an academically detached perspective. But of course we are not Martian anthropologists observing the events through a telescope; we are talking about the circumstances of our lives.

So what do you do if you are living at the end of an empire? I suppose one rational response would be to eat, drink, and be merry. Why not? It sure beats worrying oneself to death over events one can't control, and thus squandering whatever moments of normalcy and chances for happiness may remain before the end comes.

Somehow, I think that you here have other ideas about what to do. I suspect that if you had been passengers on the Titanic, you would not have been drinking yourselves into a stupor at the bar; you'd have been strapping deck chairs together, finding a way to increase the signal strength of the ship's radio, or inventing waterproof buoyant suits that could be remanufactured from hemp ropes using equipment commandeered from the ship's machine shop.

I probably can't tell you anything you should be doing that you are not already doing about as well as you can under the circumstances. We all know the drill - grow more of your own food, conserve energy, become active in your local community, learn useful arts and skills, stock up on hand tools. In essence: we must plant the seeds for what can and will survive, for a way of life as different from industrialism as the latter is from the medieval period, a way of life whose full flowering we ourselves may never see in our brief lifetimes.

Many of you have been teaching this stuff for decades; you don't need a "how-to" lecture from me.

However it can be helpful to know that there are others thinking the same thoughts, grappling with the same challenges, and finding different but complementary strategies; and it seems to me that this conference has helped immeasurably in this regard. We know each other now, and we know that we are in this together. We know also that we have passed a few recent signal events and are approaching another very important one. It's helpful to compare notes.

Somewhere this weekend I heard the inevitable comment that we are preaching to the choir. That's not the way I look at it. To bend that metaphor, I feel as though in this moment I am addressing a council of preachers.

We have only a dwindling amount of time to build lifeboats - that is, the needed alternative infrastructure. It has been clear for at least thirty years what characteristics this should have - organic, small-scale, local, convivial, cooperative, slower paced, human-oriented rather than machine-oriented, agrarian, diverse, democratic, culturally rich, and ecologically sustainable. We have known for a long time that the status quo - a society that is machine-oriented, competitive, inequitable, fast-paced, globalized, monocultural, and corporate-dominated - is deadening to the human spirit and ecologically unsustainable.

Sustainable. Unsustainable. What do these words really mean?

Perhaps peak oil at last provides the word sustainability with teeth. People now speak of "sustainable development", "sustainable growth", and "sustainable returns on investment". That, my friends, is sustainability lite. The word has been diluted and denatured almost beyond recognition.

An understanding of peak oil provides us with a minimum definition of the word: can we do this, whatever it is we're talking about, without fossil fuels? If we can, then it just might be a sustainable activity or process. There's no guarantee: there are a lot of human activities that don't involve fossil fuels and that are not sustainable - like large-scale whaling with sailing ships, or intensive irrigation agriculture in soil that isn't properly drained.

But if you can't do it without fossil fuels, by definition, it ain't sustainable.

And that includes most of what we do in North America these days.

What we here are saying is that a transition to a lower level of social-technological complexity need not be violent, need not be chaotic, and need not entail the loss of the values and cultural achievements of which we are most proud as a society. And the end result could be far more humane, enjoyable, and satisfying than life currently is for citizens of this grandest of empires.

Even though this conference is spectacularly well attended from the standpoint of the expectations of the organizers, we are comparatively few. And the message we are communicating is not being heard by the great majority of our fellow citizens. It is probably optimistic to think that it will be understood by more than one or two percent of the population. However, if that seed nucleus of the total citizenry really gets it, we may have a chance. We all know what seeds are capable of.

I'm reminded of the Populist rural movement of the late 19th century, which altered America's political landscape and very nearly diverted the US away from its imperial, corporatist destiny back toward the agrarian ideal of Jefferson. The Populists spread their word, starting in rural Texas, to nearly every county in the South, East, West, and Midwest. Their method? They trained 40,000 public speakers. Then, at grange halls, county fairs, and Chautauquas, they painstakingly educated their fellow citizens about the banking cartels, the trusts, and the currency system, and about how local communities could take charge of their own economies once again.

The 1898 presidential election proved to be the undoing of the movement: the Populists had decided to bet the farm on electoral politics and ran William Jennings Bryan, who was beaten by the arch-imperialist William McKinley, himself soon to die at the hand of an anarchist assassin.

We've just had an election too. And, unless it is contested, it may well mark the unequivocal end of the Republic, and of national electoral democracy in this country.

But just as it is becoming altogether clear that we are living in an empire, we are seeing clear signs that the empire is itself nearing its fate.

My friends, it is a time to be hopeful. It is a good time to cherish one another and embrace the young and fortify them with our experiences and vision, and to trust in their ability to find their own appropriate response to the events ahead.

There will be sustainable human cultures on this planet a century from now. In fact, that's the only kind of cultures there will be. And I think we can reasonably hope that at least some of those cultures will be able to trace their lineage to the seemingly marginalized hippies, activists, energy geeks, permaculturists, communitarians, organic farmers, eco-city planners, and plain citizens who started educating their neighbors about peak oil early in the century.

We have done some good work already, but we have a lot more to accomplish. Perhaps we now have a better grasp of the context in which our work must continue, and of its crucial importance for the survival of our species.

May we apply ourselves with renewed confidence, commitment, and good humor. We can create beauty and live in beauty. We can live in joy, knowing that our efforts will sprout roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. We can dwell in community, as we share each other's lives and visions, talents and resources, concerns and needs, and learn to support one another and work together.

It is a scary time to be alive, but it is a wonderful time to be alive. It is good to know that there is so much accumulated intelligence and compassion among us. This has been a fabulous conference with extraordinary presenters and presentations, and even more amazing participants. We leave here with gifts of knowledge, encouragement, perspective, and passion. Thank you.

[For more information about the conference, and to find out about Community Service, go to www.communitysolution.org.]



Observations on the Whimpering Extinction of American Electoral Democracy

November the second 2004 was a dark day for the future of our world. Just how dark we are likely to find out soon enough.

Like many other people whom I've since compared notes with, I wandered around in a depressed daze Tuesday evening and much of the next day. The two questions I asked myself are ones that millions were no doubt pondering: What can we learn from these events, and where do we go from here?

It seems to me that the answers to these questions are going to take a while to emerge. One thing is clear, though: We have to start with a realistic understanding of what happened.

In the days before the election I anticipated a Bush win, primarily because of the numbers of electronic voting machines in place in strategic states and counties. At least a third of voters used these new "black box" paperless touch-screen machines; the problems with them - their vulnerability to tampering and their inability to provide the basis for a verifiable recount, as well as the political partisanship of their manufacturers - have been discussed extensively for the past two years. I predicted to friends that only a landslide vote for Kerry could give him the White House.

On the day of the election, as I learned of the high voter turnout, I became guardedly optimistic about a Kerry victory. People rarely vote in record numbers merely to endorse the status quo; usually a high turnout means that the electorate wants a change. Informal early exit polls showed strong numbers for Kerry. Was this the landslide that might overwhelm Bush's secret weapon?

Then the official vote counting began, and the news was grim. By Wednesday morning everyone was agreed: Bush had won, Kerry had lost. The people had spoken.

Within hours, leftist spokespeople were offering radio and newspaper commentaries that offered one or both of two rather predictable responses. First, the Democrats blew it: they misread the electorate; they didn't get out the vote; they didn't put forward a sufficiently (fill in the blank) program. Second, people on the left need to regroup, organize, and hone their message so that it appeals to more voters next time around.

It seems to me that both responses are pointless. Why? They miss the single most important aspect of the situation.

This election, like the presidential election of 2000 and several of the mid-term elections of 2002, was stolen.

The evidence of massive voting fraud in this instance is convincing but - due to the nature of the voting machines themselves - probably impossible to prove legally. That, of course, is the genius of the fraud strategy.

In most states where there was a paper trail, exit polls matched the official tally closely. In states where there was no paper trail, exit polls diverged widely from official tallies, in Bush's favor in every instance. The odds against this occurring, absent fraud, are staggering (one statistics professor calculated them as 250,000,000 to one).

In Florida, exit polls favored Kerry by 0.7 percent, while Bush officially won by 5.1 percent. If the election results had been based on exit polls rather than official tallies from computer voting machines, Kerry would easily have won a minimum of six more states and the presidency.

In Ohio, the strategy (implemented in this case by Republican secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell) included placing fewer voting machines than needed in Democratic areas, leading to hours-long waiting lines that discouraged thousands of voters.

Bizarre as it may seem, the counting of eighty percent of the total votes nationally - whether from computer touch-screen machines or optically-scanned paper ballots - was delegated to two private companies with strong family ties to one another. Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company of which his brother Todd is currently vice president. Both brothers are millenarian Christians, and both are avowed and dedicated Bush supporters.

The details of the fraud may emerge gradually as the result of painstaking research. They will be reported only haphazardly and dismissively in the mainstream press. A recount of the vote in Ohio, and perhaps in a few other states, which is being mounted by the Greens and Libertarians, may succeed in highlighting some of the voting irregularities.

The outcome of the election is unlikely to be altered in any case.

The lessons we draw from the events need to reflect the reality, not the illusion. If it is true that Bush won only as a result of massive voting fraud, then telling people that "we need to work harder to get out the vote next time" or "we screwed up by not sending a message that resonated with the electorate" is an insulting misdirection and waste of everyone's time and attention.

Meanwhile, one party now controls all three branches of government and the machinery that decides who wins elections. There is every reason to assume that the engineers of this power grab will use the next months and years to consolidate their gains by attempting to destroy the entire infrastructure of environmental, consumer, and human rights nonprofit organizations in this country, perhaps using "tax reform" as the means. Who is to stop them?

We have finally reached the point where we must sadly declare that national electoral democracy in the US is dead. What we have instead is a single-party fascist state. Yet most people seem still to be muddling along under illusions drilled into them as children in civics class. They are living in a holographic projection of democracy, a Matrix of normalcy, while the reality is something very different.

One indication as to just how we have already traveled along the road to stealth dictatorship is the fact that there are growing numbers of binding federal regulations that are unpublished and entirely inaccessible to citizens. According to Secrecy News,www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2004/11/111404.html, such regulations include the one that authorizes airport security screeners to randomly pat-search passengers. When an ultra-conservative former Republican Congresswoman asked to see a copy of the statute that authorized the procedure, she was told that the regulation was categorized as "sensitive security information" that could not be viewed by citizens. The Homeland Security Act creates an entire system of such secret laws.

Does anyone suppose that a second Bush term will lead anywhere but further along the path to secrecy, the curtailment of constitutional rights, detentions without charges or trials, universal surveillance, the torture of prisoners, the abandonment of international law, more bombings of populations in resource-rich regions, and the deployment of more imperial forces in other nations?

What follows are some of my recent, admittedly rather dark, ruminations on how political events in the US may play out in the years ahead.

The genius of the framers of the US Constitution lay in their creation of a system whereby tepid periodic reforms could be implemented by means of the ballot box, thus forestalling violent revolutions. That system, which actually had as its main purpose the protection of wealth and privilege, has become gradually more corrupted with each passing decade. Evidently, the elites became greedier over time and decided that they wanted it all.

Historically, the political pendulum in the US has had a tendency to swing from left to right, or right to left, about every 35 years. That metaphorical pendulum should be due for a swing to the left. Due to changing demographics-growing Hispanic and African-American populations, and expanding numbers in Democratic-majority regions - it would seem that (under ordinary conditions) Democrats should be expected to control the nation's politics for the next few decades.

By colonizing the media, by packing the courts, and now especially by taking charge of the very machinery of democracy, the Bush-led Right has succeeded in nailing the pendulum in place at its furthest extreme.

This can work for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later, the momentum will build until it is unstoppable. But because it has been held back, the pendulum will swing with a violence and vengeance not seen in recent US history. Whether this happens in six months or twenty years, it will happen as surely as day follows night.

Meanwhile, the current administration is gloating insufferably, its hubris unbounded. Bush and his extreme right-wing advisors are purging the CIA and the State Department, removing competent careerists and inserting ideology-driven loyalists. But there are not enough competent loyalists to go around, and so the government itself is destined to become increasingly dysfunctional. Valuable intelligence information will be suppressed; yes-men will continue to be promoted. A society cannot function forever on the basis of convenient illusions.

As the economy founders and resource wars require military service from unwilling young people, the nation will begin to come apart at the seams. The lower classes will deliberately be further impoverished to provide an incentive for enlistment in the quickly expanding armed forces and domestic police forces that will be required to maintain order throughout the American Empire. Eventually, however, attempting to maintain order with force alone will be about as successful in New York or Miami or Seattle as it is in Fallujah.

The revolution may initially be spearheaded by idealistic leftists. But the heavy lifting, when it finally occurs, will be accomplished by others: at some point, disaffected elements of the military, the CIA, and the international financial elite will weigh in; and when they do, the seemingly impregnable fortress of the Bushites may be shaken to its foundations. If by this time the Bush crew has managed to precipitate a global resource war, other nations will become involved. The US may end up being "liberated" from Bush in a manner vaguely analogous to the way the German people were relieved of Hitler, or the Italians of Mussolini.

Since it is the heavy lifters who will have turned the tide, they will also seek to take credit for, and determine the outcome of, the events. The result will likely not be a leftist utopia, but some reformist state that is (as usual) friendly to the interests of the elites.

All of this is what should be expected if we simply imagine the twenty-first century to be a continuation of the twentieth. However, from the standpoint of population and resources the new century represents an entirely different era in the human journey. The ground is shifting under us. Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.

In the days ahead we will each have to think about where we are going to put our energy and effort during this time. The overthrow of tyrannies is certainly a worthy occupation, and those who devote themselves to the task in this instance will have many opportunities for conspicuous heroism.

However, at this point in history, as industrial civilization crumbles, lifeboats are needed - survivable local communities capable of weathering the storms of war, ecological collapse, and economic calamity. At least some of us must devote our efforts to these practical infrastructural needs, which center on the building of local networks for food, water, energy, and monetary security.

Perhaps the choice need not be an exclusive one. Up to this point I have attempted to pursue both lines of effort in my writings. However I am unsure whether it will remain possible to be effective at lifeboat building while being politically active within the developing context of state repression. We shall see.

For more information on the election fraud:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Energy Challenge 2004 - Petroleum

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (November 17 2004)


THE CURRENT SITUATION

Recent high prices of oil have raised the visibility of the petroleum challenge considerably, but there is still more heat than light being generated on the subject. For the first weeks of the recent price surge, most writers were trying to lay blame on OPEC for acting like robbers. In fact, as analysts are now beginning to realize, prices have gone up in two stages. The first in 2003 was simply due to the weak dollar. During that stage, the price in Euros barely budged. The second (2004) is due to worldwide demand outstripping supply, aggravated by security concerns. The weak dollar and the security concerns are direct results of Bush programs, that is, the tax reduction budget deficits, and the war in Iraq.

The gasoline price increases we have seen recently result from four primary causes.

<> Worldwide oil demand is at or above installed production capacity. There may be 2% of slack left, all of it in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. World economic recovery and booming energy demand in China and India are outstripping production increases.

<> Second, the supply of low sulfur crude is even more critical, and most USA refineries are designed for low sulfur crude.

<> Third, no new refinery capacity has been added in the USA in nearly three decades, and with numerous different gasoline mixes mandated by our fifty states to minimize summer air pollution, refinery capacity is max'd out. USA gasoline demand is up about 3% year on year, mainly due to growing use of fuel inefficient SUVs.

<> Fourth is fears about middle-east instability causing governments to increase strategic reserves, and investors to go long.

You will hear that oil company profits are up 90% and that is true. What you will not hear is that oil company profits have been dismal for several years, which is one of the reasons that no refinery capacity has been added. Even after this nice rise, profits are not excessive. No, I am not a spokesman for the oil industry.

What most people don't know is that USA oil production has been in decline since 1970, with the rate of decline slowly increasing. It's at about 4% per year now. We now produce only about 40% of the oil we consume, and oil imports are the single largest item in our very negative balance of payments. If you had to pay at the pump to maintain the military we keep in the middle-east to keep the supply lanes open (not counting the cost of the war in Iraq), instead of having it buried in the defense budget, gasoline would be over $7 per gallon today.

To make things more interesting, worldwide oil production will probably be in irreversible decline before the end of this decade. The present high oil and gasoline prices are just the first tremors of the earthquake that is coming.

Some months ago Lee Raymond, the chairman of Exxon-Mobil made a presentation that included a curve showing historic oil production (in million barrels per day) and projecting future supply and demand. The supply curve, based on production from present known reserves sloped downwards. The demand curve sloped upwards. The growing gap between supply and demand represented new sources that we must discover to support world economic growth. Mr Raymond made the point that by 2020 we must find enough new oil sources to supply fifty million barrels per day. Today Russia and Saudi Arabia are each supplying a little more than nine million barrels per day, and struggling to get to ten. Their combined claimed reserves are about 400 billion barrels. One can extrapolate that we need to find and develop 1100 billion barrels of new reserves during the next fifteen years, or an average of about 75 billion barrels per year. During the last fifteen years, with plenty of incentive to find new oil sources, we have not averaged ten billion barrels per year.

Let's forget about economic growth, how about just offsetting declines. If Mr Raymond's curve reflects reality we would still have to find about thirty billion barrels per year. How are we doing? From http://www.ems.org/rls/2004/01/28/oil_supply_short.html we find the following:

The rate of major new oil field discoveries has fallen dramatically in recent years. There were thirteen discoveries of over 500 million barrels in 2000, six in 2001 and just two in 2002, according to the industry analysts IHS Energy. For 2003, not a single new discovery over 500 million barrels has been reported. Key findings of a recent Petroleum Review report are:

<> Between 2003 and early 2007 some eight million barrels per day of new capacity is expected to come on stream.

<> In 2005, eighteen projects with a potential peak capacity of three million barrels a day are due to come on stream, slowing in 2006 with eleven new projects followed by three in 2007, and three in 2008 adding a cumulative four million barrels/day of potential new capacity at their peak.

<> It appears likely that from 2007, the volumes of new production will fall short of the need to replace lost capacity from depleting older fields.


Further confirming this trend, recent E&D results strongly support the expectation of a near term peak in oil production. The net present value of all discoveries for the five oil majors during 2001, 2002, and 2003 was less than their exploration costs.

Six months later, in World Energy, Mr Raymond admitted that we have to find enough new oil to provide eight times Saudi Arabia's current output, that is, at least five new Saudi Arabias, or seven Russias. How likely is that too happen? Oil in the earth's crust is distributed fractally along a curve of declining field size versus increasing field occurrence. There are very few super giants, a few more giants, more majors, et cetera down to many, many insignificant fields. Because they are the easiest to detect, the big ones are found first, and they have been found. There are about 41,000 known oil fields worldwide, of which about 21,000 are termed very small to insignificant. The probability that we have found so many small fields, and overlooked any more big ones, let alone a Saudi Arabia or Russia, is near zero.


RECENT EVENTS AND NEAR FUTURE

In the two months since the rest of this paper was written the price of oil has bounced off of $56 per barrel. In the past, when supply and demand were in close balance (due to artificially constrained supply), price has been very volatile. A 1% change in the balance can cause a 30-50% swing in price. When supply has been constrained below demand, price has doubled or tripled in a very short time. Excluding a very small slack capacity for sour crude there is a large possibility that we are now at another tipping point. In current dollar terms, during the prior "oil shocks" prices went to $70-80 per barrel; oil is a much smaller portion of USA GDP than in 1973; gasoline is a much smaller portion of household budgets than in 1973; and China's labor costs are so low that energy cost increases can easily be passed on to customers. Given these facts, we can expect prices to continue to increase, possibly with brief declines. Do not be surprised if oil prices spike to $80 per barrel in the next weeks, as cold weather raises heating oil demand. On the other hand there is some evidence that China and India have been building strategic reserves, and if their capacity fills, a temporary drop in demand could send prices back to the low 40s for some months. Simmons expects another large demand increase in 2005, so lower prices are not likely to last long.


THE "D" WORDS

Analysts, economists and industry spokespersons seem very reluctant to talk about depletion or production decline. Chris Skrebowski of ODAC has analyzed the 2004 BP Statistical review of World Energy and has noted that there were 32 countries that were able to increase production in 2003 versus 18 countries which have been in decline for three years or more. In 2003 the growers had to increase production by 7.5% to offset declines of 4.9% for the decliners to give net world growth of 3.7%. Production from the 18 countries now in sustained decline peaked in 1997, and had fallen 10.7% by 2003. More countries are joining the decliners list, their rate of decline is increasing, and the growers list is not growing, so the burden on those still growing is increasing rapidly.

In 2003 several of the growers increased production by near 10%, mainly by reopening wells that had been shut in during the price declines at the end of the last century. Now every one is operating close to or at installed capacity, so a similar increase cannot be repeated. To increase capacity significantly will require large investment and some years. Declines however continue to accelerate. It is only a matter of time, and not much time, before growth is no longer able to offset declines.


PETROLEUM BACKGROUND

There is a phenomenon, well known in the oil industry, but little publicized, that when an oil field has been about 50% depleted, production begins an irreversible decline. In 1956 a petroleum geologist named M King Hubbert applied this concept to an analysis of the lower 48 states, and predicted a decline of production starting about 1970. He was derided at the time, but lower 48 USA oil production has been in decline since 1970. The phenomenon has been named the Hubbert Peak, and the production growth and decline curve is often referred to as a Hubbert Curve.

In 1998, using the best petroleum industry database available, two petroleum engineers (Campbell and Laherrere) applied a Hubbert analysis to the entire world, and predicted a peak between 2000 and 2010. Refined analyses since then focus on 2005 to 2010. In fact, due to economic and political factors, there is more likely to be an irregular plateau, with possibly several small peaks before the decline, but an irreversible decline by 2010 seems inevitable. There is a great deal of real data to support such a view and little but untenable optimism to support alternative views. "In God we trust, others please bring data!"

We know that Middle East reported reserves grew by about 280 billion barrels between 1987 and 1990, with little additional exploration, and remained constant during the 1990s in spite of continuous production. It is certainly more likely that reserves are overstated than understated. Middle East reported reserves seem to have been influenced by OPEC quotas.

The USA consumes about 25% of world oil production and imports more than 60% of the oil it consumes. With growing demand from developing countries and exploding populations in OPEC countries, we will not be able to maintain our present share of world oil, short of occupying the entire Middle East. When world availability begins to decline, our availability will decline faster. Imagine a world where natural gas availability has suddenly dropped by half, and oil availability has gone into irreversible decline, and we have done nothing in advance to compensate. That is the world we face with the present Congressional energy bills, and it will lead to an economy that will make the Great Depression look like a picnic. We can alleviate that probability by addressing energy conservation and efficiency, and developing renewable electricity alternatives vigorously, starting now, but that is the polar opposite of the emphasis of present pending legislation!

So far, in their speeches Vice President Cheney and Secretary Abraham have looked out ten to twenty years, but not beyond twenty years. By 2030, oil availability will be less than 50% of our peak year (which should occur before 2010), and before 2040 there will be no availability for general energy needs. The pittance remaining will be allocated to chemicals and agriculture. What kind of world will we leave our children if we have not succeeded in developing a new electricity based energy economy long before 2030? What chance do we have to succeed if we not make good strides by 2010? What can we gain by the present policy of focusing on accelerated depletion of severely limited supply side resources?

For detailed petroleum information visit http://www.peakoil.net/, and look particularly at the newsletters archived there. For a presentation on Saudi Arabia oil prospects go to: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/TRANSCRIPTS/index.php?name=MATT.SIMMONS&origin=/&transcript=2004/07/Simmons.2004-07-09 or try the tiny URL at: http://tinyurl.com/5bx3t.


PETROLEUM MYTHS

Poor information and silence

Understanding the Petroleum challenge is hampered by a lot of non-information, misinformation, disinformation and confusing information. There are numerous myths floating around, a few of which need to be addressed. Fortunately the most insidious myth of all, the implied myth of silence on the subject, is now dying. High oil and gasoline prices have recently led to a growing spate of articles in the printed media, and frequent mention on television. Most recently the topic has been featured in business-oriented magazines like Business Week and Fortune, both in August 2004. The ability of government and industry to keep the issue under wraps is rapidly eroding.

USGS Disinformation

In their year 2000 report, the USGS (United States Geologic Survey) project estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) of 3,000 billion barrels, with "potential" discovery plus reserve growth adding 1300 billion barrels to reserves from 1996 through 2025. The word "potential" is not defined. They seem to have taken USA reserve growth history and applied it to recently reported world reserves, a statistically invalid approach. With eight years of the period in question now elapsed, actual reported discoveries are less than 30% of the needed run-rate. Reserve growth is not reported, but the highest number that could be inferred is less than 80% of the needed run rate, and the likely number less than 30%. Both are in decline. A cumulative number by 2025 above 300 billion barrels (versus 1300) seems very unlikely.

To increase available oil (discovery plus reserve growth) by 1300 billion barrels in thirty years, as the USGS projects, means an average increase of 43 billion barrels per year. This is more than four times the experience of the 1990s, and would mean sustaining the highest level ever achieved during a single decade, over three decades. Such a projection simply does not stand the test of reason. The USGS underwent a Congressional investigation and was found guilty of misleading Congress after the 1973 oil shock. It is clearly time they were subjected to a new investigation.

Non-conventional oil

Many economists pin their hopes on "non-conventional oil", generally shale oils, tar sands, Orinoco bitumen and very heavy or very deep oils, not recoverable or refineable by conventional technology. To do so they forget recovery rate. For sure, such resources are vastly larger than known conventional oil. However, after decades and billions of dollars of effort, shale oil recovery has been abandoned. Tar sand and bitumen recovery are now about 1% of total oil consumption, and even with economy-breaking investment, are unlikely to exceed 10% of present world demand by 2020. Tar sand recovery is also an environmental nightmare. Further, it has been estimated that no more than one-sixth of unconventional resources will ever be energetically recoverable. Unconventional oil will never be a solution. At best it will slightly reduce the rate of decline.

Enhanced recovery

Others believe that enhanced recovery technology such as pressurization, water or steam injection, and horizontal drilling will greatly increase recoverable oil. For fields that have been in decline for long enough to project the estimated ultimate recovery (EUR), and for which enhanced recovery has been employed, recovery has briefly improved, and then decline has resumed on a steeper curve, leading to the same EUR. Enhanced recovery usually accelerates depletion, but does not increase available oil.

Reserves to production (R/P) ratio

Another frequently quoted statistic is reserves to production (R/P) ratio. Recent BP/Amoco statistics provide an R/P of about 38 years, based on 2002 production rates and known reserves. Optimists note that this ratio has been near forty years for at least two decades. There are several problems with this argument:

<> We are not discussing the end of oil (total exhaustion of reserves); we are talking about the end of cheap oil, the post-peak decline, when half the original endowment is still available.

<> The implicit premise of the R/P is that production can be held constant until oil is exhausted and then drop abruptly to zero. Petroleum doesn't work that way.

<> The USA R/P ratio has been near constant for three decades, while both R & P have declined in lock step.

<> When low on gasoline, you can continue to accelerate your car until the tank hits empty. Increasing production does not imply that we are far from peak availability.

Misstated reserves

The scariest probable myth of all is stated reserves. It is likely that at least some of the reserve increases claimed by OPEC in the late 1980s were political, not geologic. The virtually unchanged reserves during the last fifteen years, while about 120 billion barrels have been produced by OPEC, is simply not credible. Real world reserves might well be 200 to 300 billion barrels less than claimed, and the world production peak might well be in 2004.


CONCLUSIONS

<> As T Boone Pickens has recently noted, sub $30 per barrel oil is a thing of the past. Sub $40 per barrel will not be experienced often or for long.

<> We are much more likely to see $80 per barrel oil than $30 per barrel oil in the near future.

<> There are no fossil fuel supply side answers to the challenge of high oil prices.

<> We had better start developing demand side and renewable solutions while we still have abundant fossil fuel to develop them with. There is no second chance.

<> Present industry and government awareness and responses are contrary to our needs, and must be changed, urgently.

<> Up to now the Power and Gas segment has not perceived petroleum as their concern. Declining petroleum completely changes their future also, and they need to wake up to the fact.


PS: This just in,

Some of the industry's most informed participants believe there is little that can be done to increase worldwide oil production. Earlier this year, British Petroleum announced that it will be returning to shareholders all cash flow it receives in excess of US$25 per barrel. For every dollar the company receives in excess of US$25 per barrel, BP will adjust its dividend or increase its share buyback program to return the cash flow to shareholders. BP has essentially given up its effort so increase production or even keep production flat. Instead, the company has chosen to give shareholders back their capital with interest.


REFERENCES

Other key Internet sources include:

http://www.odac-info.org/
http://www.asponews.org/
http://members.home.nl/peakoil/
http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk/
http://www.peakoil.com/
http://hubbert.mines.edu/
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches
http://www.oilscenarios.info/


Copyright 2004 CyberTech, Inc.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=868


Murray Duffin is a seventy year old "concerned and informed citizen", retired from the position of Corporate Vice President for Total Quality and Environmental Management of a $5 billion+, 35,000 person, leading European based multi-national corporation in the field of microelectronics. Born in Canada and naturalized in 1964, he has lived and worked abroad, in Europe and Asia, for 27 of his 44 working years. He has a BScEE 1956 from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and has done post-graduate study, first in electronics at UCLA and then in Business Administration at Arizona State University. He has authored numerous published papers and lectured extensively on Total Quality Management, primarily in Europe.

Under his leadership, his employer became the only corporation in the world to win all of the European Quality Award, the Singapore Quality Award, and the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, each at the level of the local total corporate entity. They also won the Malaysian, Maltese and Moroccan Quality Awards at the local plant level. They were the first non-American-owned corporation to win the Malcolm Baldridge.

In addition they were the first corporation in the world to have all plants (17) worldwide EMAS validated and ISO 14001 certified. In 1999 they were identified in the "Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index" as the world's leading electronic sector company for sustainability, and were the only semiconductor company awarded the highest (AAA) rating by Innovest Environmental Research.

The combination of TQM and environmental responsibility in industry led directly to considerations of energy efficiency. During his last five years in corporate management he led a worldwide effort involving seventeen factories that effected a 30% reduction in energy in per unit of good production out, with the needed capital investments having an average economic payback under two years. This work provided evidence that a properly designed greenfield plant could operate on about one-fourth of the energy traditionally needed by a microelectronics factory.

Since retirement he has also designed and built one house and retrofitted another to provide comfortable living on one-third of the energy of similarly sized conventional neighborhood homes.

For the last five years his number one preoccupation has been the energy future of the world, but more particularly, out of concern for children and grandchildren, of the USA.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Energy Challenge 2004

by Murray Duffin

http://www.energypulse.net (September 10 2004)


The new administration's priority attention to energy is a much needed step in the right direction. The report of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) might be considered a reasonable first pass (a grade of B-?), given that it was produced in a relatively short time, and driven from a petroleum industry point of view. However from a perspective of the challenge we face and the nation's real needs it must be given a failing grade.

The NEPDG report has seven key weaknesses that must be addressed and have so far, during the last 3 years, been ignored. In priority order these are:

1. Time Horizon: The energy challenge to 2020 can to some degree be addressed as outlined in the report, but doing so will put the future beyond 2020 in more jeopardy than it is in now. No policy and no projections that stop short of 2050 should be allowed. The present approach will address the problem for those of us over fifty at the expense of our grandchildren.

2. Supply Limits: Limits to the supply of oil and natural gas are ignored. Worldwide oil availability will be in decline long before 2020, and natural gas by 2030. (Natural gas production in North America is already in decline, since a peak in 2002). Neither will be significant in the energy picture by 2050, but replacements must be developed.

3. Hydrogen: The inevitable - and probably at least thirty-year - effort of shifting from a hydrocarbon to a hydrogen economy is largely ignored. The Bush administration has put some priority on the development of a hydrogen economy since the NEPDG report was issued, but this is seen by many as a way to postpone the real needed actions.

4. Efficiency and Conservation: The potential on the demand side is severely underestimated, and the priority for the demand side is far too low.

5. Renewables: Far too little attention is given to either the potential of renewables, or the challenges of realizing their potential, and the shift to renewables is not optional. Only the timing and rate of speed are optional.

6. Relative Costs: Saving energy costs much less than developing additional supply, and can have an impact much more quickly. The report fails to touch on this subject.

7. Regulations, Incentives, and Perverse Incentives: This subject is touched on lightly, relative to distributed power, but is largely ignored. It is a key topic to be dealt with in any effective energy policy.

Energy will be the most important issue facing the country in this decade, even more than, but inseparable from, terrorism. We need a policy and strategy that set aside partisan differences, ignore special interest pressures, and give the Energy Challenge the priority it deserves.

The worst aspect of this problem is that present legislation (passed in the House and pending in the Senate) is largely based on the NEPDG report, remains unchanged since late 2001, and is largely contrary to the country's real needs. There is major emphasis on development of new domestic supplies with large subsidies for oil, gas, coal and nuclear, and little attention to the demand side or to renewables. In spite of the fact that, since the legislation was written, oil prices have doubled, coal prices have nearly doubled, natural gas prices have more than tripled, and energy company profits have soared, the proposed subsidies haven't changed. Also E&D activity hasn't exactly soared. Clearly domestic prospects are not attractive enough for development on the shareholders money, but legislators don't get it.


ASSERTIONS

The energy challenge we face is the most important issue of this decade in terms of its impact on future generations. If we get the answers right, we have a good chance to take the challenge in stride, with no more than minor economic impact. If we get them wrong, this decade will prove (in retrospect) to have been the most important decade in the country's history. The decisions we make can either set us on a path of smooth transition to a new energy economy, or on a slide toward a future of deprivation for our children and grandchildren and generations to come. Unfortunately, most of our elected leaders are living in a world of no information, misinformation, or disinformation. Unless this situation changes, they are unlikely to make the best decisions.

No information results mainly from the fact that energy has not been an issue, so the homework has not been done. Misinformation derives mainly from dealing with assumptions and opinions rather than facts, well-meaning but one-sided viewpoints, too short time horizons (twenty years or less), and expecting that the future will be like the past. Disinformation comes mainly from two sources, one of which has some claim to innocence:

<> Economic models that are based on invalid and usually unstated fundamental assumptions

<> Selfish special interests that are, at best, economical with the truth.

Following is a set of declarations or assertions that introduce the key issues, and that can be made with a high degree of confidence:

1. Supply side

<> World conventional oil availability will be in decline by the end of this decade, and no amount of additional drilling will change that.

<> USGS (United States Geologic Survey) year 2000 projections of oil "potential" availability from 1996 through 2025 are demonstrably invalid.

<> American oil production has been in decline for years - the lower 48 since 1970 and Alaska since 1988 - and the decline is irreversible.

<> A key European oil supply source, the North Sea, is now in decline also.

<> America consumes about 25% of world oil, and imports over 60% of her oil supply. As major LCD's (like China) develop and OPEC populations explode, America will not be able to maintain her present share of world oil at any price.

<> Unconventional oil is not a solution to the coming shortage, because it cannot be produced fast enough, regardless of how abundant it may prove to be.

<> Developing presently restricted North American oil and gas sources will likely be both necessary and economically desirable, but this is a short-term palliative, not a solution, and will only hasten the ultimate depletion of a resource with better uses than powering SUVs. A policy of "drain America first" is strategically very shortsighted.

<> Natural gas growth projections from now to 2020, made as recently as 2000 will not (and can not) be met, and before 2030 worldwide natural gas availability will also be in decline.
Oil has declined 2% to 4% per year for many years in the lower 48, is declining at 6% per year or worse in the North Sea, and has declined at more than 10% per year in Prudhoe Bay in spite of major secondary recovery activities. There is a real risk that natural gas supply in North America will "fall off a cliff" sometime in the next one to five years.

<> Before 2050, neither oil nor natural gas will be significant as energy sources in the US. Whether by exhaustion or replacement with alternatives is our choice.


2. Alternatives to oil and gas

<> Nuclear power will be an important part of the solution, but it is not politically palatable right now, and will need to be based on Integral Fast Reactors when restarted to avoid fuel shortages in only a few decades. Work on IFRs is presently forbidden in the USA.

<> Coal will be a major source for decades yet, and can probably become economically clean, with considerable R & D. However, if we maintain the growth trend of coal of the last thirty years, it too will peak (at 2-3 times the present consumption) and will be in decline before the end of the century.

<> Wind power is an economical alternative, and there is enough harnessable wind to meet America's total energy needs, but there are problems of variability to be overcome.

<> Solar power will also be part of the solution, but it needs a lot of R & D to become economical for all but a few special applications. It can be economical for peaking power now, but the utility industry seems to be ignorant of the potential.

<> Bio-mass, mainly in the form of agricultural waste, will also be a significant contributor, especially for replacement of a good fraction of petroleum shortages.

<> Other alternatives (geo-thermal, tidal, wave) must also receive attention.

<> All alternatives require major investment to be realized and demand a long-term commitment and plan.


3. Demand side

<> Even with the present fuel mix, America could maintain its present economy on less than half the energy presently consumed, without individual sacrifice.

<> Changing to renewable sources of primary energy also reduces the primary energy needed. A complete switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy would reduce non-nuclear primary energy needed by at least 50%.

<> Both the industrial and consumer segments of the economy have vast opportunities to reduce energy waste, by both conservation and efficiency.

<> Retrofitting the economy to reduce waste will create jobs and economic benefits for at least a few decades.

<> Reducing energy demand can be achieved for less than half the cost per kilowattt-hour of increasing supply.

<> New, high-tech, and sophisticated developments will contribute, but the greatest early gains will come from simple, low-tech, well understood, and easily applicable improvements.

<> While market advocates deride the need for government intervention, we must face the fact that we do not have, and probably cannot have, a free market. Demand side initiatives are presently impeded by both lack of appropriate incentives and presence of perverse incentives and subsidies.

<> Prior to 1996 and so-called "deregulation", California was the nation's leader in addressing demand side incentives and disincentives, and California is the most energy efficient state in the union.

<> California has only scratched the surface.

<> Demand side initiatives are vigorously opposed by major selfish special interests - foolishly, myopically, amorally, and unpatriotically. Government has always had to bridle big business, and this issue is no different.


SEVERAL CONCLUSIONS CAN BE INFERRED FROM THE ABOVE ASSERTIONS:

<> Our time horizon must go well beyond twenty years. What we decide now and launch in this decade must look to 2030, 2060, maybe even 2090.

<> We must develop alternatives to fossil fuels.

<> We must develop the alternatives while we still have the fossil fuels, or we will not have the energy with which to develop them.

<> Demand side initiatives are both quicker and more economical than supply side.

<> In the very short term (ten years) we face rising energy costs (with possible brief respites) that will act like a tax, slowing economic growth. Energy-wise this is a good thing! Frantic supply side initiatives to prevent this result will not succeed, and will be counterproductive in the medium and long run.

Clearly we need a balanced and measured approach; focused on the long-term national interest, unswayed by short-term special interests, and dealing with all of supply side, demand side, alternatives, regulations, and incentives.


BACKGROUND

In dealing with the question of energy, we need to start by trying to understand and/or suppress some of the sources of confusion. We also need to start with a basis of facts before getting to projections, assumptions and opinions. Finally, we need to quantify issues as much as possible, always within a comparable framework. The following will address a few key aspects of these topics.

1. Metrics <1>

We need to understand a few key metrics in order to quantify our discussion, within a consistent framework. The key metrics are:

Quads <2> - A quad is a quadrillion Btu's of energy, or 293 billion kilowatt-hours of energy. In 2000 the USA consumed about 98 quads, of which 35 quads or 36% were consumed in supplying 11 quads of electricity, and 26 quads or 27% powered transportation. Primary sources were:

Coal 22 quads
Oil 38 quads
Gas 23 quads
Nuclear 8 quads
Renewables 7 quads


KWh/MWh - Kilowatt hours and megawatt hours. Power is measured in watts. Energy is measured in watt hours. A watt hour is 1 watt of power applied for 1 hour. A KWh is one thousand watt hours. A MWh is one million watt hours. Scientists use joules to express energy, but KWh are more familiar and more useful here. (1 KWh = 3.6 million joules or 3.6 MJ)

Gb - Gigabarrels or billion barrels. Oil production, consumption and reserves are usually expressed in Gb. The world consumed nearly 28 Gb of oil in 2000, or about 76 million barrels of oil per day. We are now at 83 Mb per day or near 31 Gb per year in 2004. The USA consumes about one-fourth of that or 7+ Gb per year = 19+ million barrels per day.

- For calibration, ANWR reserves are estimated to be 10.4 Gb as the most likely number with only about 6 Gb considered recoverable. The 30 Gb quoted by Senator Murkowski in 2001 is a 5% probability figure.

- World oil production capacity in late 2004 is estimated as under 85 million barrels per day, with the only slack capacity now available being for heavy/sour crude.

Tcf - Tera cubic feet or trillion cubic feet. The Europeans use Tcm or trillion cubic meters. One cubic meter is about 35 cubic feet. Annual natural gas production, consumption and resources are expressed in Tcf. Daily or weekly consumption is expressed in Bcf or billion cubic feet.

- One Tcf of natural gas provides about 299 billion KWh or 1.02 quads of primary energy when burned efficiently (one cubic foot = .299 KWh)

- USA proven reserves are a little more than 160 Tcf, and consumption has averaged very near 20 Tcf per year for the last decade. Discovery approximately equaled consumption during the 1990s, but is now falling well short.

Bst - Billion short tons. Coal production is expressed in short tons. One short ton of top grade USA anthracite has the embedded energy of 4.4 barrels of oil. However, USA coal averages nearer 3.4 barrels. The 1998 USA production of 1.1 Bst of coal provided the primary energy equivalent of 3.75 Gb of oil.

Boe - Barrels of oil equivalent. In order to be able to grasp the relative amounts of primary energy from different sources, coal and natural gas are sometimes expressed in Boe. For the USA on average, 1 short ton of coal is equivalent to 3.4 barrels of oil. 5,600 cubic feet of NG = 1 barrel oil, or 1 Tcf = 180 Mb of oil.


2. Economists

Economists tend to base all their beliefs and assumptions on two underlying and usually unstated principles, both of which are demonstrably invalid. These are:

<> Resources, or at least natural resource availability, will increase with price. For this to be true, the potential supply would have to be unlimited, at least over the time horizon considered. The corollary, that resource scarcity will drive up price, is true in the absence of substitution.

<> If it could be done, it would already be being done. This assumption ignores the ignorance of what is possible, adoption time lags, priorities, conservative engineering practices and technology developments.

This first principle leads economists to ignore or assume away physical limits to supply and thus overestimate resource availability, in our case fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas. It also assumes away practical limits on recovery rates, even if the plentiful resource exists.

The second principle leads to the conclusion that no energy economies or efficiencies are possible, because everything possible is in practice, and therefore the only way to reduce energy is to downsize the economy. When this assumption underpins an economic model, the model inevitably produces false conclusions.

Beware of any "expert" input from economists on the subject of energy, and check who sponsors their work.


3. Economics

When Vice President Cheney or Secretary Abraham downplay the demand side potential in the economy, they are acting out of ignorance of what is possible, and reacting uncritically to the inputs of economists (as described above).

In fact, retrofitting the national infrastructure, industrial, commercial and consumer, would create millions of jobs. Reducing dependence on imported oil would both improve the balance of payments and reduce the national security costs of ensuring the supply lines. Energy efficiencies can be realized at much lower costs per KWh than adding to supply, and usually more quickly also. The USA has been the victim of unlimited cheap energy and has therefore lacked incentive to address the demand side. Switzerland, lacking our blessing, has an energy intensity per unit of GDP less than 1/2 of ours and can not be considered economically deprived.

As it is we now face, during the next thirty years, irreversibly declining supplies and increasing costs of oil and gas. The resulting increase in energy costs will act like a tax, slowing economic growth. We can mitigate this problem by vigorously addressing development of alternatives (renewables), and - more effectively in the very short run - by emphasizing, not downplaying, demand side improvements.


4. Philosophy

Regrettably, we can not address the energy challenge without accepting the fact that some tradeoffs have to be made. For example, producing truly efficient cars (see www.hypercar.org) will negatively impact the steel and machine tool industries, while benefiting the chemical, plastics and electrical equipment industries.

Another issue that we do not have to address urgently now, but that is implicit in the whole discussion, is the limits to growth. For a very short period in human history (about 200 years) we have been able to develop a philosophy of unending economic growth, powered by limitless cheap energy. Even with a successful conversion to renewables, we will reach insurmountable limits to energy in less than 200 years, at present world growth rates. Other limitations will kick in before energy, for example, food.

We probably have less than 100 years to shift to a philosophy of sustainability and progress without growth. Energy is a good starting point.

While addressing a present US challenge, we must not ignore the far future or the world.


References:

<1> For easy conversions, go to: www.processassociates.com/process/convert/cf_eue.htm

<2> Figures extrapolated from 1999 EIA Annual Energy Review.

Copyright 2004 CyberTech, Inc.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=819


---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

No Escape from Dependency

Looming Energy Crisis Overshadows Bush's Second Term

by Michael Klare

TomDispatch.com (December 08 2004)


When George W Bush entered the White House in early 2001, the nation was suffering from a severe "energy crisis" brought on by high gasoline prices, regional shortages of natural gas, and rolling blackouts in California. Most notable was the artificial scarcity of natural gas orchestrated by the Enron Corporation in its rapacious drive for mammoth profits. In response, the President promised to make energy modernization one of his top concerns. However, aside from proposing the initiation of oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he did little to ameliorate the country's energy woes during his first four years in office. Luckily for him, the energy situation improved slightly as a national economic slowdown depressed demand, leading to a temporary decline in gasoline prices. But now, as Bush approaches his second term in office, another energy crisis looms on the horizon - one not likely to dissipate of its own accord.

The onset of this new energy crisis was first signaled in January 2004, when Royal Dutch/Shell - one of the world's leading energy firms - revealed that it had overstated its oil and natural gas reserves by about 20%, the net equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil or the total annual consumption of China and Japan combined. Another indication of crisis came only one month later, when the New York Times revealed that prominent American energy analysts now believe Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, had exaggerated its future oil production capacity and could soon be facing the wholesale exhaustion of some of its most prolific older fields.

Although officials at the US Department of Energy (DoE) insisted that these developments did not foreshadow a near-term contraction in the global supply of energy, warnings increased from energy experts of the imminent arrival of "peak" oil - the point at which the world's known petroleum fields will attain their highest sustainable yield and commence a long, irreversible decline.

How imminent that peak-oil moment may in fact be has generated considerable debate and disagreement within the specialist community, and the topic has begun to seep into public consciousness. A number of books on peak oil - Out of Gas by David Goodstein, The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, and The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg, among others - have appeared in recent months, and a related documentary film, The End of Suburbia, has gained a broad underground audience. As if to acknowledge the seriousness of this debate, the Wall Street Journal reported in September that evidence of a global slowdown in petroleum output can no longer be ignored. While no one can say with certainty that recent developments portend the imminent arrival of peak oil output, there can be no question that global supply shortages will prove increasingly common in the future.

Nor is the evidence of a slowdown in oil output the only sign of an unfolding energy crisis. Of no less significance is the dramatic increase in energy demand from newly-industrialized nations - especially China. As recently as 1990, the older industrialized countries (including the former Soviet Union) accounted for approximately three-quarters of total worldwide oil consumption. But the consumption of petroleum in developing nations is growing so rapidly - at three times the rate for developed countries - that it is soon expected to draw even.

To meet the needs of their older customers and satisfy the rising demand from the developing world, the major oil producers will have to boost production at breakneck speed. According to the DoE, total world petroleum output will have to grow by approximately 44 million barrels per day between now and 2025 - an increase of 57% - to satisfy anticipated world demand. This increase represents a prodigious amount of oil, the equivalent to total world consumption in 1970, and it is very difficult to imagine where it will all come from (especially given indications of a global slowdown in daily output). If, as appears likely, the world's energy firms prove incapable of satisfying higher levels of international demand, the competition among major consumers for access to the remaining supplies will grow increasingly more severe and stressful.

To further complicate matters, many of the countries the Bush administration considers potential suppliers of additional petroleum, including Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, are torn by ethnic and religious conflict or are buffeted by powerful anti-American currents.

Even if these countries possess sufficient untapped reserves to sustain an increase in output, as long as they remain chronically unstable, the desired increases are unlikely to appear. After all, any significant increase in day-to-day energy output requires substantial investment in new infrastructure - investment that is not likely to materialize in countries suffering from perpetual disorder. At best, production in such countries will remain flat or rise sluggishly; at worst, as in Iraq today, it may even threaten to fall. Indeed, the persistence of political turmoil in countries like Angola, Colombia, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela has largely been responsible for the higher gasoline prices still evident, despite recent modest decreases, at the neighborhood pump.

If anything, the potential for conflict in such countries is likely to grow as demand for their petroleum rises. The reason is simple. Increased petroleum output in otherwise impoverished nations tends to widen the gap between haves and have-nots - a divide that often falls along ethnic and religious lines - and to sharpen internal political struggles over the distribution of oil revenues. Because the wealth generated by oil production is so vast, and because few incumbent leaders are willing to abandon their positions of privilege, internal struggles of this sort are prone to trigger violent clashes between competing claimants to national power.

In many cases, these clashes may take the form of attacks on the oil infrastructure itself, further jeopardizing the global availability of energy. As shown in Colombia and Iraq, where raids on oil pipelines and pumping stations have become a near-daily occurrence, such infrastructure - stretched out over miles and miles of jungle or desert - represents an unusually vulnerable and inviting target for terrorism. Not only do such attacks deprive the prevailing regime of vital revenues, but they also constitute an assault on the United States and the large multinational corporations that are deemed responsible for so many of the developing world's afflictions.

With oil demand regularly outpacing supply and disorder spreading in major producing areas, global shortages and resulting high prices are likely to become the norm, not the exception. Ideally, the United States could compensate for any shortfalls in the global availability of petroleum by increasing its reliance on other sources of energy. When producing electricity, for example, it is often possible to switch from coal to natural gas and back again. But most of our petroleum supplies are used in transportation - mainly to power cars, trucks, buses, and planes - and, for this purpose, oil has no readily available substitutes. Indeed, we have so organized our economy and society around the availability of cheap and abundant petroleum that we are severely ill-equipped to deal with the sort of shortages and supply disruptions that are likely to become the norm in the years ahead.

It is here that the performance of the Bush administration should come in for close scrutiny. In response to the earlier energy crisis of 2001, the President appointed a National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to analyze America's energy predicament and devise appropriate solutions. The NEPDG issued its final report, the National Energy Policy (also known as the Cheney Report), in May 2001. How the group arrived at its final assessment is a matter of some speculation, as the administration has refused to make its deliberations public, but its conclusions are incontrovertible: rather than stress conservation and the rapid development of renewable energy sources, the report called for increased US reliance on petroleum. And because domestic oil production is in an irreversible decline, any rise in American oil usage necessarily entails an increased reliance on imported petroleum.

In a crude attempt to mislead the public about the nature of our oil dependency, the Cheney Report called for increasing US energy "independence" by exploiting the untapped oil reserves of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other protected wilderness areas. But ANWR only possesses sufficient petroleum to provide this country with (at most) one million barrels per day for an estimated fifteen to twenty years, a tiny fraction of the twenty million barrels of additional oil that will be needed to supplement domestic output in 2025. What this suggests is that the overwhelming bulk of this additional energy will have to be acquired from foreign sources. To obtain all this imported energy, the Cheney Report calls on the President and his chief associates to place a high priority on acquiring additional petroleum from producers in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, Africa, and Latin America - that is, from regions especially susceptible to instability and anti-Americanism.

As a result, we are more dependent on foreign oil in 2004 than we were in 2001, and all the indicators suggest that this dependency will only become more pronounced during Bush's second term. Yes, the administration has proposed modest investment in the development of hydrogen-powered fuel cells and other new energy systems; but, at current rates of development, these new technologies will not prove capable of substituting for oil on a significant scale during the next few decades. This means that we will face our looming energy crisis with no viable fallback measures in sight. We remain trapped in our dependence on imported oil. In the long run, the only conceivable result of this will be sustained crisis and deprivation.

When, and in just what form, the United States enters the coming energy crisis cannot be foreseen. Perhaps it will be provoked by a coup d'etat in Nigeria, a civil war in Venezuela, or a feud among senior princes in the Saudi royal family (possibly brought on by the impending death of King Fahd). Or it could be thanks to a major act of terrorism or a catastrophic climate event. Whatever the case, our existing energy system, already stretched to its limits, will not be able to absorb a major blow like this without considerable readjustment and pain - or worse. While President Bush is likely to respond to a new energy crisis, as he has in the past, with renewed calls for drilling in ANWR and the further relaxation of US environmental standards, nothing he has proposed to date even suggests a viable exit strategy from perpetual crisis.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1208-22.htm

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

Copyright 2004 Michael Klare

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

How silent are the 'humanitarian' invaders of Kosovo?

Kosovo - the site of a genocide that never was - is now a violent "free market" in drugs and prostitution. What does this tell us about the likely outcome of the Iraq war?

by John Pilger

ZNet Commentary (December 09 2004)

Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account for its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's "onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.

Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing ... they may have been murdered". David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide", said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust", chorused the Sun and the Mirror.

By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave".

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active". The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't".

One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by journalists were inventions - along with Serb "rape camps" and Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed civilians.

Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common knowledge that Nato went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks]", said James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the attack. "Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places".

Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist organisation in league with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign Secretary Robin Cook allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The Kosovo-Albanians played us like a Stradivarius", wrote the UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, last April. "We have subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary".

The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord had a secret Annexe B, which Madeline Albright's delegation had inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to a Commons' defence select committee, Annexe B was planted deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which included some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out, "the rump of Yugoslavia ... was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per cent of industry was state or socially owned."

At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato's destruction of only fourteen Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed", wrote Clark.

Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent, criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and prostitution. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats and Jews have been ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces standing by. KLA hit squads have burned, looted or demolished 85 Orthodox churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."

Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an integral part of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN administration to sell off anything, multinational companies are being offered ten- and fifteen-year leases of the province's local industries and resources, including the vast Trepca mines, some of the richest mineral deposits in the world. After Hitler captured them in 1940, the mines supplied German munition factories with forty per cent of their lead. Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure "future democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp Bondsteel, a 775-acre permanent base.

Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an earlier show trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the west's man who was prepared to implement "economic reforms" in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community demands; to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty. The empire expects nothing less.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-12/09pilger.cfm

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

by Kenneth S Deffeyes

Chapter 1 of his book by the same name (Princeton University Press, 2001)


Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world's production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again. The world will not run out of energy, but developing alternative energy sources on a large scale will take at least ten years. The slowdown in oil production may already be beginning; the current price fluctuations for crude oil and natural gas may be the preamble to a major crisis.

In 1956, the geologist M King Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s. <1> Almost everyone, inside and outside the oil industry, rejected Hubbert's analysis. The controversy raged until 1970, when the US production of crude oil started
to fall. Hubbert was right.

[M King Hubbert, 1903-1989, was an American geophysicist who made important contributions to understanding fluid flow and the strength and behavior of rock bodies. Hubbert was at the Shell research lab in Houston when he made his original estimates of future oil production; he continued the work at the US Geological Survey.]

Around 1995, several analysts began applying Hubbert's method to world oil production, and most of them estimate that the peak year for world oil will be between 2004 and 2008. These analyses were reported in some of the most widely circulated sources: Nature, Science, and Scientific American. <2> None of our political leaders seem to be paying attention. If the predictions are correct there will be enormous effects on the world economy. Even the poorest nations need fuel to run irrigation pumps. The industrialized nations will be bidding against one another for the dwindling oil supply. The good news is that we will put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bad news is that my pickup truck has a 25-gallon tank.

The experts are making their 2004-8 predictions by building on Hubbert's pioneering work. Hubbert made his 1956 prediction at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, where he predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s. He said later that the Shell Oil head office was on the phone right down to the last five minutes before the talk, asking Hubbert to withdraw his prediction. Hubbert had an exceedingly combative personality, and he went through with his announcement.

I went to work in 1958 at the Shell research lab in Houston, where Hubbert was the star of the show. He had extensive scientific accomplishments in addition to his oil prediction. His belligerence during technical arguments gave rise to a saying around the lab, "That Hubbert is a bastard, but at least he's our bastard". Luckily, I got off to a good start with Hubbert; he remained a good friend for the rest of his life.

Critics had many different reasons for rejecting Hubbert's oil prediction. Some were simply emotional; the oil business was highly profitable, and many people did not want to hear that the party would soon be over. A deeper reason was that many false prophets had appeared before. From 1900 onward, several of these people had divided the then known US oil reserves by the annual rate of production. (Barrels of reserves divided by barrels per year gives an answer in years.) The typical answer was ten years. Each of these forecasters started screaming that the US petroleum industry would die in ten years. They cried "wolf" During each ensuing ten years, more oil reserves were added, and the industry actually grew instead of drying up. In 1956, many critics thought that Hubbert was yet another false prophet. Up through 1970, those who were following the story divided into pro-Hubbert and anti-Hubbert factions. One pro-Hubbert publication had the wonderful title "This Time the Wol!
f Really Is at the Door". <3>

Hubbert's 1956 analysis tried out two different educated guesses for the amount of US oil that would eventually be discovered and produced by conventional means: 150 billion and 200 billion barrels. He then made plausible estimates of future oil production rates for each of the two guesses. Even the more optimistic estimate, 200 billion barrels, led to a predicted peak of US oil production in the early 1970s. The actual peak year turned out to be 1970.

Today, we can do something similar for world oil production. One educated guess of ultimate world recovery, 1.8 trillion barrels, comes from a 1997 country-by-country evaluation by Colin J Campbell, an independent oil-industry consultant. <4> In 1982, Hubbert's last
published paper contained a world estimate of 2.1 trillion barrels. <5> Hubbert's 1956 method leads to a peak year of 2001 for the 1.8-trillion-barrel estimate and a peak year of 2003 or 2004 for 2.1 trillion barrels. The prediction based on 1.8 trillion barrels makes a better match to the most recent ten years of world production.

In 1962, I became concerned that the US oil business might not be healthy by the time I was scheduled to retire. I was in no mood to move to Libya. My reaction was to get a photocopy of Hubbert's raw numbers; I made my own analysis using different mathematics. In my analysis, and in Hubbert's, the domestic oil industry would be down to half its peak size by 1998. Fortunately, universities were expanding rapidly in the post-Sputnik era, and I had no trouble moving into academe.

Hubbert's prediction was fully confirmed in the spring of 1971. The announcement was made publicly, but it was almost an encoded message. The San Francisco Chronicle contained this one-sentence item: "The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100 percent allowable for next month". I went home and said, "Old Hubbert was right". It still strikes me as odd that understanding the newspaper item required knowing that the Texas Railroad Commission, many years earlier, had been assigned the task of matching oil production to demand. In essence, it was a government-sanctioned cartel. Texas oil production so dominated the industry that regulating each Texas oil well to a percentage of its capacity was enough to maintain oil prices. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was modeled after the Texas Railroad Commission. <6> Just substitute Saudi Arabia for Texas.

With Texas, and every other state, producing at full capacity from 1971 onward, the United States had no way to increase production in an emergency. During the first Middle East oil crisis in 1967, it was possible to open up the valves in Ward and Winkler Counties in west
Texas and partially make up for lost imports. Since 1971, we have been dependent on OPEC.

After his prediction was confirmed, Hubbert became something of a folk hero for conservationists. In contrast to the hundreds of millions of years it took for the world's oil endowment to accumulate, most of the oil is being produced in 100 years. The short bump of oil exploitation on the geologic time line became known as "Hubbert's peak".

In Chapter 7, I explain how Hubbert used oil production and oil reserves to predict the future. We scientists don't like to admit it, but we often guess at the answer and then gather up some numbers to support the guess. A certain level of honesty is required; if the numbers do not justify my guess, I don't fake the numbers. I generate another guess. Hubbert's oil prediction was just barely within the envelope of acceptable scientific methods. It was as much an inspired guess as it was hard-core science.

This cautionary note is needed here: in the late 1980s there were huge and abrupt increases in the announced oil reserves for several OPEC nations. <7> Oil reserves are a vital ingredient in Hubbert's analysis. Earlier, each OPEC nation was assigned a share of the oil market based on the country's annual production capacity. OPEC changed the rule in the 1980s to consider also the oil reserves of each country. Most OPEC countries promptly increased their reserve estimates. These increases are not necessarily wrong; they are not necessarily fraudulent. "Reserves" exist in the eye of the beholder.

Oil reserves are defined as future production, using existing technolology, from wells that have already been drilled (not to be confused with the US "strategic petroleum reserve", which is a storage facility for oil that has already been produced). Typically, young petroleum engineers unconsciously tend to underestimate reserves. It's a lot more fun to go into the boss's office next year and announce that there is actually a little more oil than last year's estimate. Engineers who have to downsize their previous reserve estimates are the first to leave in the next corporate downsizing.

The abrupt increase in announced OPEC reserves in the late 1980s was probably a mixture of updating old underestimates and some wishful thinking. A Hubbert prediction requires inserting some hard, cold reserve numbers into the calculation. The warm fuzzy numbers from OPEC probably give an overly optimistic veiw of future oil production. So who is supposed to know?

A firm in Geneva, Switzerland, called Petroconsultants, maintained a huge private database. One long-standing rumor said that the US Central Intelligence Agency was Petroconsultants' largest client. I would hope that between them, the CIA and Petroconsultants had inside information on the real OPEC reserves. This much is known: the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants. <8> My guess is that they were using data not available to the rest of us.

A permanent and irreversible decline in world oil production would have both economic and psychological effects. So who is paying attention? The news media tell us that the recent increases in energy prices are caused by an assortment of regulations, taxes, and distribution problems. During the election campaign of 2000, none of the presidential candidates told us that the sky was about to fall. The public attention to the predicted oil shortfall is essentially zero.

In private, the OPEC oil ministers probably know about the articles in Science, Nature, and Scientific American. Detailed articles, with contrasting opinions, have been published frequently in the Oil and Gas Journal <9> Crude oil prices have doubled in the past year. I suspect that OPEC knows that a global oil shortage may be only a few years away. The OPEC countries can trickle out just enough oil to keep the world economies functioning until that glorious day when they can market their remaining oil at mind-boggling prices.

It is not clear whether the major oil companies are facing up to the problem. Most of them display a business-as-usual facade. My limited attempts at spying turned up nothing useful. A company taking the 2004-8 hypothesis seriously would be willing to pay top dollar for
existing oil fields. There does not seem to be an orgy of reserve acquisitions in progress.

Internally, the oil industry has an unusual psychology. Exploring for oil is an inherently discouraging activity. Nine out of ten exploration wells are dry holes. Only one in a hundred exploration wells discovers an important oil field. Darwinian selection is involved: only the incurable optimists stay. They tell each other stories bout a Texas county that started with thirty dry holes yet the next well was a major discovery. "Never is heard a discouraging word". A permanent drop in world oil production beginning in this decade is definitely a discouraging word.

Is there any way out? Is there some way the crisis could be averted?

NEW TECHNOLOGY. One of the responses in the 1980s was to ask for a double helping of new technology. Here is the problem: before 1995 (when the dot.com era began), the oil industry earned a higher rate of return on invested capital than any other industry. When oil companies tried to use some of their earnings to diversify, they discovered that everything else was less profitable than oil. Their only investment option was doing research to make their own exploration and production operations even more profitable. Billions of dollars went into petroleum technology development, and much of the work was successful. That makes it difficult to ask today for new technology. Most of those wheels have already been invented.

DRILL DEEPER. The next chapter of this book explains that there is an "oil window" that depends on subsurface temperatures. The rule of thumb says that temperatures 7,500 feet down are hot enough to "crack" organic-rich sediments into oil molecules. However, beyond 15,000
feet the rocks are so hot that the oil molecules are further cracked into natural gas. The range from 7,000 to 15,000 feet is called the "oil window". If you drill deeper than 15,000 feet, you can find natural gas but little oil. Drilling rigs capable of penetrating to 15,000 feet became available in 1938.

DRILL SOMEPLACE ELSE. Geologists have gone to the ends of the Earth in their search for oil. The only rock outcrops in the jungle are in the banks of rivers and streams; geologists waded up the streams picking leeches off their legs. A typical field geologist's comment about jungle, desert, or tundra was: "She's medium-tough country". As an example, at the very northernmost tip of Alaska, at Point Barrow, the United States set up Naval Petroleum Reserve #4 in 1923. <10> As early as 1923, somebody knew that the Arctic Slope of Alaska would be a major oil producer.

Today, about the only promising petroleum province that remains unexplored is part of the South China Sea, where exploration has been delayed by a political problem. International law divides oil ownership at sea along lines halfway between the adjacent coastlines. A valid claim to an island in the ocean pushes the boundary out to halfway between the island and the farther coast. It apparently does not matter whether the island is just a protruding rock with every third wave washing over the rock. Ownership of that rock can confer title
to billions of barrels of oil. You guessed it: several islands stick up in the middle of the South China Sea, and the drilling rights are claimed by six different countries. Although the South China Sea is an attractive prospect, there is little likelihood that it is another Middle East.

SPEED UP EXPLORATION. It takes a minimum of ten years to go from a cold start on a new province to delivery of the first oil. One of the legendary oil finders, Hollis Hedberg, explained it in terms of "the story". When you start out in a new area, you want to know whether the oil is trapped in folds, in reefs, in sand lenses, or along faults. You want to
know which are the good reservoir rocks and which are the good cap rocks. The answers to those questions are "the story". After you spend a few years in exploration work and drilling holes, you figure out "the story". For instance, the oil is in fossil patch reefs. Then pow, pow, pow - you bring in discovery after discovery in patch reefs. Even then,
there are development wells to drill and pipelines to install. It works, but it takes ten years. Nothing we initiate now will produce significant oil before the 2004-8 shortage begins.


To summarize: it looks as if an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon. There will be chaos in the oil industry, in governments, and in national economies. Even if governments and industries were to recognize the problems, it is too late to reverse the trend. Oil production is going to shrink. In an earlier, politically incorrect era the scene would be described as a "Chinese fire drill".

What will happen to the rest of us? In a sense, the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s were a laboratory test. We were the lab rats in that experiment. Gasoline was rationed both by price and by the inconvenience of long lines at the gas stations. The increased price of gasoline and diesel fuel raised the cost of transporting food to the grocery store. We were told that ninety percent of an Iowa corn farmer's costs were, directly and indirectly, fossil fuel costs. As price rises rippled through the economy, there were many unpleasant disruptions.

Everyone was affected. One might guess that professors at Ivy League universities would be highly insulated from the rough-and-tumble world. I taught at Princeton from 1967 to 1997; faculty morale was at its lowest in the years around 1980. Inflation was raising the cost of living far faster than salaries increased. Many of us lived in university-owned apartments, and the university was raising our apartment rents in step with an imaginary outside "market" price. Our real standard of living went progressively lower for several years in a
row. That was life (with tenure) inside the sheltered ivory tower; outside it was much tougher.

What should we do? Doing nothing is essentially betting against Hubbert. Ignoring the problem is equivalent to wagering that world oil production will continue to increase forever. My recommendation is for us to bet that the prediction is roughly correct. Planning for increased energy conservation and designing alternative energy sources should begin now to make good use of the few years before the crisis actually happens.

One possible stance, which I am not taking, says that we are despoiling the Earth, raping the resources, fouling the air, and that we should eat only organic food and ride bicycles. Guilt feelings will not prevent the chaos that threatens us. I ride a bicycle and walk a lot, but I confess that part of my motivation is the miserable parking situation in Princeton. Organic farming can feed only a small part of the world population; the global supply of cow dung is limited. A better civilization is not likely to arise spontaneously out of a pile of guilty consciences. We need to face the problem cheerfully and try to cope with it in a way that minimizes problems in the future.

The substance of this book is an explanation of the origin, exploration, production, and marketing of oil. This background about the industry is important because it sets geologic constraints on our future options. I describe the strengths and weaknesses of Hubbert's
prediction methods and end with some suggestions about preparing for the inevitable. My intention is to give the reader some expertise in evaluating the problems. The experts' scenario for 2004-8 reads like the opening passage of a horror movie. You have to make up your own mind about whether to accept their scary account.

My own opinion is that the peak in world oil production may even occur before 2004. What happens if I am wrong? I would be delighted to be proved wrong. It would mean that we have a few additional years to reduce our consumption of crude oil. However, it would take a lot of unexpectedly good news to postpone the peak to 2010. My message would remain much the same: crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel.

Stephen Jay Gould is fond of pointing out that we all have difficulty rising above our cultural biases. ("All" in that sentence includes Gould.) It helps if I identify the roots of my biases. Here is my confession:

I was born in the middle of the Oklahoma City oil field. I grew up in the oil patch. My father, J A "Dee" Deffeyes, was a pioneering petroleum engineer. In those days, companies moved employees around wherever they were needed. I went to nine different grade schools getting through the first eight grades. During high school and college, each summer I had a different job in the oil industry: laboratory assistant, pipeyard worker, roustabout, seismic crew.

After I graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, I worked for the exploration department of Shell Oil. Right at the end of the Korean War, everybody my age got drafted. There weren't many of us. I was one of the few born right in the pit bottom of the Great Depression. I wanted to have my revenge on the army by using up my GI Bill at the most expensive school I could find. The geology department at Princeton turned out to be fabulous.

After graduate school, I was delighted to be asked to rejoin Shell at its research lab in Houston. Scientific progress happened very rapidly at the Shell lab. Jerry Wasserburg of Cal Tech, not known for passing out compliments freely, said that the Shell research lab in that era was the best Earth science research organization in the world. As I mentioned, it was Hubbert's prediction that caused me to get out of the oil business.

I taught briefly at Minnesota and Oregon State, and in 1967 I joined the Princeton faculty. In addition to teaching, I had the pleasure of cooperating with John McPhee as he wrote his books on geology. <11> The "oil boom" of the 1970s and early 1980s gave me a chance to participate in the industry again. As a consultant, I advised programs that drilled for natural gas across western New York and northern Pennsylvania. My programs drilled 100 successful gas wells without a dry hole; one of them was the largest gas well in the history of New York State. <12> I also served as an expert witness in oil litigation.

You don't outgrow your roots. As I drive by those smelty refineries on the New Jersey Turnpike, I want to roll the windows down and inhale deeply. But in all the years that I worked in the petroleum industry, I never came to identify with the management. I'm a worker
bee, not a drone.

A couple of years ago, I was testing a new treatment on an oil well in northern Pennsylvania. I picked up a pipe wrench with a 36-inch handle and helped revise the plumbing around the wellhead. I was home again; I loved it.

NOTES

1. Hubbert, M K (1956), "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels", American Petroleum Institute Drilling and Production Practice, Proceedings of Spring Meeting, San Antonio, 1956, pages 7-25; also Shell Development Company Publication 95, June 1956.

2. Hatfield, C B (1997), "Oil Back on the Global Agenda", Nature 387:121; Kerr, R A (1998), "The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large-And Perhaps Close", Science 281:1128-31; Campbell, C A, and Laherrere J H (1998), "The End of Cheap Oil", Scientific American, March: 78-83.

3. Akins, J E (1973), "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here", Foreign Affairs, April 1973.

4. Campbell, C J (1997), The Coming Oil Crisis, Multi-Science Publishing Company and Petroconsultants. His world scenario is on page 201.

5. Hubbert, M K (1981), "The World's Evolving Energy System", American Journal of Physics 49:1007-29.

6. Yergin, Daniel (1991), The Prize, New York: Simon & Schuster. The founding of OPEC is described beginning on page 522.

7. In this book, the reserves and production data are those reported by the Oil and Gas Journal in its last issue of each year. Campbell's evaluation of OPEC reserve increases is on page 73 in his Coming Oil Crisis.

8. Colin Campbell and Sam Carmalt have worked for, or with, Petroconsultants. In 1998, Petroconsultants was merged into the IHS Energy Group, www.ihsenergy.com.

9. One of the best critical rejections of Hubbert's approach is Adelman, M A, and Lynch M C (1997), "Fixed View of Resource Limits Creates Undue Pessimism", Oil and Gas Journal, April 7:56-60. Other comments are in Oil and Gas Journal, February 23 1998:77, and November 2 1998:94.

10. As explained in the next chapter, David White of the US Geological Survey was a pioneer in interpreting the origins of oil. In 1929, White published "Description of Fossil Plants Found in Some 'Mother Rocks' of Petroleum from Northern Alaska", American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin 13:841-48.

11. McPhee, John (1998), Annals of the Former World, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. This is a revised printing of four earlier books.

12. McCaslin, J C (1984), "Well Completions Boost Impact in New York Area", Oil and Gas Journal, March 5:121-22.


Please also see "Charts of the Coming Global Oil Crisis" at Hubberpeak.com (September 06 2004) http://www.hubbertpeak.com/curves.htm

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Bring Them Back

We should welcome the return of the big wild mammals

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 07 2004)

It hardly compares in importance to the invasion of Iraq, or the fall of the dollar, or the outcome of the next election. But in some ways the decision we are being asked to make will say more about us and the world we choose to inhabit than any of the grand political themes.

Last week a man called Paul Lister held a conference in Scotland. He explained that, if his plans are accepted by the public, within five years he will be able to reintroduce the wolf, the bear, the Eurasian lynx, the wild boar and the European bison to the Highlands. Similar claims have been made before, but Lister is the first enthusiast who can make it happen. He has millions of pounds and a 23,000-acre estate. He wants his land to become the core of a much larger conservation area. Another landowner, Paul van Vlissingen, has volunteered to add his 81,000 acres to the scheme. As animals like wolves and lynxes are smart and agile enough to escape from almost any large enclosure, this is, in effect, a proposal to repopulate Britain with its extinct native wildlife.

Two days later, we discovered that the mammals had pre-empted them. A herd of wild boar - the fourth to have established itself in this country - has emerged from the Forest of Dean, having escaped, it seems, from a farm. The government must decide whether or not to let it survive. The big wild animals are returning. It is an attractive idea, with unattractive implications.

Though the advocates of reintroduction sometimes seek to deny it, four out of five of the species they hope to bring back are dangerous to humans. A couple of years ago Mr van Vlissingen told the Times that there are no known cases of a wolf killing a person in Europe over the last 100 years. <1> If this were true, then the objections to reintroduction would be harder to sustain. But it is not. Twenty-one people were attacked by healthy wolves in Europe between 1950 and 2000, and four of them were killed. <2> Five others (though this should not be an issue in Britain) were killed by wolves with rabies. <3> Lynx won't hurt anyone, but European brown bears, though less aggressive than North American grizzlies, killed 36 people in the 20th Century. <4> Though only a few hundred boar are living in the British countryside, several people have already been chased by them. <5> The boar aren't half as scary as the bison, as the photos in this month's BBC Wildlife magazine testify: a herd in Poland appears to be playing volleyball with a wild boar it has gored to death.

An admiration for large wild animals often appears to be linked with a contempt for human life. "And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion", D H Lawrence wrote. "And I think in the world beyond how easily we might spare a million or two of humans / And never miss them". <6> John Aspinall and Joy Adamson would have nodded vehemently. There is a certain kind of ill-adjusted person who seems to project himself into the mind of a predator, roaming across a world without people.

The risk of being attacked by one of these beasts is tiny by comparison to almost any of the other hazards we confront. In Canada, where bears occasionally prey on people, you are 67 times more likely to be killed by a domestic dog, and 374 times as likely to be killed by lightning. <7> But it's a risk which those who would introduce these animals impose on other people, with or without their consent. It is hard to argue with the verse, with which anyone who picks up a shotgun is instructed: "All the pheasants ever bred / Won't repay for one man dead". If we believe that human lives are more important than animal lives, and if even one person is killed by a wild animal deliberately re-introduced into this country, is that not too great a price to pay for the purely aesthetic benefit of restoring our native wildlife?

I am not convinced that it is. If every tree which grows close to a road or a house were felled, dozens of human lives could be saved; but you would be hard put to find anyone who thinks this is a good idea. The French government ran into massive opposition when it tried to clear the famous avenues which line its country roads. A few extra deaths are considered, by most French people, to be a fair exchange for the preservation of some flickering shade. When a city council in Britain proposed to cut down a row of horse chestnut trees because children might be hurt when collecting conkers - or might hurt someone else when throwing sticks and stones into the branches - it caused a national outcry. Similarly, we use public money which could have been spent of the National Health Service to support galleries, museums and parks. Aesthetic concerns in all these cases are weighed against human life, and permitted by society to win.

There is, of course, a moral difference between failing to eliminate existing risks and introducing new ones. But, in permitting public bodies to plant new trees or dig new ponds, we commission them actively to trade human survival against a diffuse social pleasure. Unlike the businessmen who want to be allowed to expose their workers to dangerous industrial practices in order to boost their profits, the tree planters give us something in return for the risk they impose on us.

This might make sense even in terms of moral arithmetic: people who live in unstimulating places are more likely to become depressed, and people who become depressed are more likely to kill themselves. Dramatic but mildly dangerous lifeforms - or just the excitement of knowing that they are out there somewhere - might even save lives.

And the vision of those who would deny room in this empty world for large wild animals is surely as misanthropic as D H Lawrence's. When Norwegian hunters set out to eliminate the wolves which kill a few dozen sheep in that country each year, or when, as they did last month, French hunters shoot the last female Pyrenean brown bear, we are rightly outraged. We see in them an intolerance of diversity, of contingency, of unruliness. They would reduce the world to a money-making monoculture, a bland, controlled, mechanical place that is as hostile to the needs of humans as it is to the needs of animals.

I want to live in a land in which wolves might prowl. In which, as I have done in eastern Poland, I can follow a bend in a forest path and come face to face with a bison. In which, as I have done in the Pyrenees, I can stumble across a pair of wild boar sleeping under a bush. I am prepared to exchange a small risk to my life for the thrill of encountering that which lies beyond it. This is a romantic proposition, I admit. But is it not also a rational one?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Gillian Harris, 26th June 2002. Wolves would boost tourism says landowner. The Times.

2. JDC Linnell et al, January 2002. The Fear of Wolves: a review of wolf attacks on humans. Norsk Institutt for Naturforskning, Trondheim.

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. M J Goulding, March 1998. Current Status and Potential Impact of Wild Boar (Sus scrofa) in the English Countryside: a Risk Assessment. Report to Conservation Management Division C, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-countryside/vertebrates/reports/Wild%20Boar%20Risk%20Assessment%201998.pdf

6. D H Lawrence, 1925?. Mountain Lion. From DH Lawrence, Selected Poems, 1972. Penguin, London.

7. These figures are explained at www.bearsmart.com

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Alternative Media

Undercurrents and Schnews are both ten years old, and still blooming.

by George Monbiot.

Published on www.monbiot.com (December 03 2004

When most of the media is controlled by people (the rich and powerful) who have an active interest in ensuring that the misdeeds of the rich and powerful are not exposed, the alternative media become critical to the survival of democracy. Rational political choices - who to vote for, which policies to support, which to oppose - are impossible if you don't understand the implications, and the very information you need most is the information you are least likely to obtain. Unless, that is, you are lucky enough to have discovered Undercurrents and Schnews. There are plenty of alternative media in Europe, but I've yet to come across any which are as informative and entertaining as these. If ever I forget why I'm an activist, Undercurrents and Schnews are there to remind me. Both of them are ten years old this year.

Undercurrents is a video and DVD newsreel, and an antidote to everything that's wrong with mainstream television news. It treats the rich and powerful as objects of ridicule rather than objects of reverence. Its mission is to hold them to account, to expose the injustices they cause and to encourage people to knock them off their perches. This is where it really excels: inspiring hope in situations which at first sight look hopeless. The latest tape contains a remarkable film about a students' strike at Harvard: the most powerful university on earth. The students locked themselves into the university offices in protest at the pay and conditions Harvard was imposing on its janitors. They stayed there until the university caved in. There's extraordinary footage of the escape from the Woomera detention camp in Australia, and coverage of the successful campaign against an oil company investing in Burma. There's also some brilliant animation and a genuinely funny spoof of Bush and Blair's foreign policy. Fahrenheit 911 and Supersize Me look pretty tame when you've seen this stuff. Whenever I've seen a copy of Undercurrents, I feel my head's going to explode with inspiration and new ideas.

Schnews is a weekly newspaper, published in both print and electronic forms. It is funny and wise and well-written. I love its corny headlines, and its ability to convey complex issues with clarity and concision. I receive 300 emails a day, but when Schnews comes out on a Friday, it is always the first one I open. It tackles the issues which should be the stuff of daily conversation, but which the mainstream media generally ignores, such as the government's refusal to hold corporate killers to account, the scandalous private finance initiative, the new laws restricting protest and civil liberties and the persecution of gypsies and travellers. If our mainstream media had the same commitment to exposing injustice as Schnews does, Bush and Blair would have been be out on their arses by now. And it always has news about successful protests, in Britain and the rest of the world. The latest edition contains the best reporting of Ukraine's orange revolution I've read so far. I think, at last, I understand what's happening there.

Both of them are run on a shoestring - Undercurrents for example, can't release another tape unless enough people buy the current one. And yet they have more to say about the real state of the world than any of our lavishly-funded papers and broadcasters.

You can buy the latest Undercurrents, plus the back issues, at www.undercurrents.org/unn.

You can subscribe to Schnews at http://www.schnews.org.uk/index.html. If you want to see what you've missed over the past ten years, it has just published a collection called Schnews at Ten.

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Would you buy a car that looked like this?

SUVs are as dangerous to health as tobacco and should be made to carry similar warnings.

by Andrew Simms

New Statesman Cover story (November 29 2004)

They clog the streets and litter the pages of weekend colour supplements. Sport utility vehicles or SUVs, otherwise known as 4x4s, four-wheel drives and all-terrain wagons, have become badges of middle-class aspiration. They are also dangerous, fabulously polluting and, as part of a general transport problem, set to become, according to the World Health Organisation, one of the world's most common causes of death and disability - ahead of TB, HIV and war. But as the advert for the original British urban crossover car, the Range Rover, puts it, the SUV stands "above it all". It's a place to go, say the advertisers, to "preserve your inner calm".

With the Kyoto Protocol about to kick in and a major conference on global warming starting in Buenos Aires in two weeks, it is time for some fresh thinking on SUVs. In London, Mayor Ken Livingstone has proposed a surcharge on vehicle excise duty for SUVs and a higher congestion charge. But drivers will probably just complain and pay. It's a problem that needs a more creative solution.

The gap between image and reality with SUVs is reminiscent of that in tobacco industry advertising. After all, the scientific consensus over the causes and consequences of climate change closely mirrors that about smoking and cancer. And in the same way as the tobacco advertisers, car advertisers have tried to associate their product with masculinity, health and the outdoor life. So shouldn't SUVs now be labelled in the same way as cigarette packets, with messages such as those in our illustration or "Climate change can seriously damage your health"? This might not entirely stop people driving SUVs, but it would force them to accept the consequences. The case for regulation of this sort is growing like a giant cloud of vehicle exhaust.

According to a 2004 World Health Organisation report, 1.2 million people across the world are killed in road crashes each year and 50 million injured. If nothing changes, the numbers are projected to rise by 65 per cent in 20 years. In Britain alone, there were 290,607 reported road casualties in 2003, including 3,508 deaths.

The WHO compares the global burden of diseases by look ing at the years of potential life lost as a result of premature death and the years of productive life lost due to disability. In 1990, road traffic accidents ranked ninth on these criteria. By 2020, they will be third. And this does not include the contribution of vehicle emissions to respiratory disease and deaths or to the injuries caused by climate change.

SUVs, by almost any measurements, are more dangerous than other passenger cars. The Ford Explorer, America's biggest-selling SUV, is sixteen times more likely than the typical family car to kill the occupants of another car in a crash. Pedestrians, too, are more at risk. You're twice as likely to be killed if you get hit by a 4x4. Even the widespread belief that, come the crunch, so to speak, the SUV owner is better off is a myth. New US federal traffic data reported in the New York Times shows that "people driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly eleven per cent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars". One of the SUV's key selling points, its height, which is meant to make you feel safer, makes these cars twice as likely to be caught in fatal "rollover" accidents as ordinary cars. The US Consumers Union also reports that SUVs suffer from greater rear-view blind spots - which may account for the rise of more than fifty per cent (to 91) last year in the number of US parents who killed their children by reversing over them.

Then there are vehicle emissions. Road transport now accounts for half of most pollutant emissions and a fifth of all carbon dioxide emissions in Europe. In 2002, greenhouse gas emissions from transport in the UK were 47 per cent higher than in 1990.

There are both direct and indirect health consequences. Living in Glasgow, Britain's third most polluted city, has the same effect on the lungs as smoking 44 cigarettes a day, reports the Scotsman. One ingredient of vehicle emissions, particulates, is linked to increased risks of asthma, heart attacks and reduced lung function. The National Asthma Campaign has estimated that asthma, aggravated by air pollution, costs the UK more than ￡1 billion a year. The Department of Health estimated that the deaths of between 12,000 and 24,000 vulnerable people were accelerated by air pollution. Still more casualties can be attributed to climate change. Though the effects are only just beginning, the WHO estimated that it caused 150,000 deaths in 2002.

SUVs are bound to be more dangerous in these respects. They give only around twenty miles a gallon, while the most efficient passenger cars can give three or four times as much.

As the Health Secretary, John Reid, put it the other day: "In a free society, men and women ultimately have the right within the law to choose their own lifestyle, even when it may damage their own health". But, he added, "people do not have the right to damage the health of others, or to impose an intolerable degree of nuisance on others". And when it comes to choosing cars, it seems that neither industry nor the self-absorbed consumer can be trusted to do the right thing.

In the US, by the end of the 20th century, overall vehicle economy had dropped to its lowest level in twenty years. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "two decades of fuel-saving technologies, that could have helped curb carbon dioxide emissions, have instead gone into increasing vehicle weight and performance". The figures bear them out. In 1985, SUVs accounted for only one in fifty vehicles sold in the US. Now they make up one in four. In Britain, sales of 4x4s rose thirteen per cent in 2003 to 111,846; in London, they now account for one in seven new cars sold.

In the US, people don't drive them just because they like them. Amazingly, the US government waves them on with tax breaks. Even the most costly SUVs - owned by lawyers, real estate agents, plastic surgeons, film stars and so on - get breaks that can be worth up to $35,000. This is because SUVs are modelled on the frames of commercial vehicles. In other words, as far as the US taxman is concerned, they're really trucks. A sales tax credit designed for light trucks of more than 6,000 lbs ended up being applied to the full range of big cars. This encourages manufacturers to build larger, weightier and more polluting vehicles. Adding transport insult to climate injury, such vehicles are also exempted from emissions limits imposed on US manufacturers.

None of this is a problem if you listen to the industry. "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Repeat, not a pollutant", says the SUV Owners of America, an industry front group run by a PR firm that has worked for General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Ford. "It is a naturally occurring part of the air we breathe". Carbon dioxide is "not" a pollutant only in the way that arsenic is "not" a poison. It's all a question of dosage. And that's the problem with SUVs.

So would fuel taxes change behaviour? Yes, in part. But fuel duties have been politically out of favour since the country was held to ransom during the fuel blockades. And to change behaviour significantly, the taxes have to be very high.

That is why we should look at labelling. If you peer at the small print on car adverts, you can find out how many grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre a car will produce. But that's meaningless without comparative figures. The government plans to pilot a new labelling scheme based on the green-to-red, A-to-G European labels that are found on electrical appliances.

Research and experience suggest, however, that more is needed. The Society of Motor Manufacturers says that "environmental factors are very low on people's list of priorities when it comes to buying a car". So the New Economics Foundation is looking at the model of tobacco labelling as a way to help people kick the SUV habit. Canadian government research, backed by World Bank findings, shows that there is a direct relationship between the size of warnings and the effect on personal behaviour. "The larger the health warning message", reports Health Canada, "the more effective it is at encouraging smokers to stop smoking".

Where cigarette smoke contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, as the warnings tell us, car exhaust has benzene, particulates, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. Smoking kills, but so do SUVs, their exhaust and the global warming to which they disproportionately contribute.

Opinion is already turning against the vehicles. It is not only London's Ken Livingstone who wants to restrict them. Paris city council has declared that SUVs are "totally unacceptable". In Rome, the city government has proposed to treble the permit rate for SUV owners to enter the city centre. So labelling is the logical next step. The only issue would be classifying the guilty parties. The urban off-roader, crossover SUV, Chelsea tractor, four-wheel drive or 4x4 is instantly recognisable with or without the bullbars. The group encompasses vehicles with similar size and style that are marketed as sport utility vehicles but which may not incorporate substantial off-road features. Styling aside, a threshold could be set to trigger the labelling, such as having a certain number of typical features, on the basis that "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck ... "

Fuel efficiency, already used as a basis for assessing vehicle excise duty, could also be key, with the labelling kicking in when efficiency drops below a certain threshold. Like those for cigarettes, the warnings could cover thirty to fifty per cent of the vehicles' surface area. People could still drive them, but when they did, they would publicly accept the consequences of their actions, and help the education drive on traffic safety and global warming.

At the least, cigarette-style car labelling would help the industry move out of denial. A recent advert for the Chrysler Crossfire invited the reader to "kiss the sky" with the car. But in an age of global warming, a more honest slogan for a 23 miles-per-gallon vehicle would have been "rip it apart". Label up, and let's go.

Andrew Simms is policy director of the New Economics Foundation (nef), http://www.neweconomics.org

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200411290004

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004

---------------------------------------------------------------
To post a comment, or to read comments posted by others,
please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of
the version of this essay posted at:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Oil Trap

Environmental Ethics and Public Policy

by Ernest Partridge

The Online Gadfly, www.igc.org/gadfly

Published in The Online Journal (August 08 2002)
and Smirking Chimp (August 09 2002)

Nobody - not even George Bush and Dick Cheney - believes that the Earth is producing more petroleum, at least not within an interval of time or at a scale to be of any use to us or to our successors.

Everybody knows that sooner or later we will run out of oil, although only a few informed geologists even suspect how ominously soon this may be. And when it happens, the consequences may well be unimaginably catastrophic. It will be so if we do nothing at all to forestall these consequences.

The Bush administration has chosen to do nothing at all. Instead, it has chosen to increase oil consumption, thus hastening the day of reckoning.

The coming end of the petroleum age involves much more than the question of whether or not we continue to drive SUVs. Petroleum is the source of plastics, medicines, and other industrial and consumer products too numerous to mention. But most significantly, petroleum is the foundation of industrial agriculture. Thus the threatened depletion of this vital resource entails nothing less than the issue of how we or our children and grandchildren will eat - how we will survive.

Though few of us appreciate it, in a real sense all of us "eat petroleum". Petroleum-based agriculture has reduced the proportion of the US population engaged in agriculture from about half nearly a century ago to less than two percent today. In other words, the average American farmer feeds fifty of his compatriots, in addition to still many more abroad through our agricultural exports. He accomplishes this through the gasoline that drives his tractors and combines, and the petroleum based fertilizers and petroleum derived pesticides that he puts on his fields. Accordingly, Michael Pollan, in his revealing "Power Steer" (New York Times Magazine, March 31 2002), estimates that a corn-fed steer "consumes" 284 gallons of petroleum in its lifetime.

Petroleum also moves food from the fields and feed-lots to the cities and to suburban homes occupying once-productive farm land. Thus Floridians feast on salmon from Alaska, while Alaskans enjoy orange juice from Florida.

In short, our very existence depends upon what ecologist Kenneth Watt calls "the fossil fuel subsidy" - the massive import of energy into industrial agriculture from petroleum, natural gas and coal. In a speech at the first Earth Day (1970), Watt warned that:
"Between 1950 and [1970] a final eleven million horses have been taken out of American agriculture and replaced by tractors powered by crude oil. Since it takes very roughly four times the acreage to support one horse as a person, this means the we have been able to add 44 million people to the American population [in those twenty years] for that one cause alone, because of a fossil fuel subsidy ...

"Mankind is embarked on an absolutely immense gamble. We are letting the population build up and up and up, by increasing the carrying capacity of the Earth for people, using a crude-oil energy subsidy, on the assumption that there's no inherent danger in this because when the need arises we'll be able to get ultimate sources of energy ...

"The world can probably support between one and four billion people at the absolute outside without a fossil-fuel energy subsidy ... By the time we run out of this fossil fuel energy subsidy, there will be ten to twenty billion people in the world ..."

And how soon will "the oil crunch" appear? Several scientific sources indicate that it may happen during the current decade.

In 1956, geologist M King Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s and thereafter decline. His projection, which was widely criticized at the time by both academics and industry, turned out to be right on target, as US production declined after 1970. Now geologist Kenneth Deffeyes (a former colleague of Hubbert), in his new book Hubbert's Peak (Princeton University, 2001), foresees a decline in world oil production as early as 2004. Numerous analysts, publishing in such prestigious peer-reviewed journals as Science, Nature and Scientific American, concur, setting the peak at some time within this decade. (World-Watch, March/April, 2002, pages 33-34, see also Hubbert's Peak <1> and Hubbert Peak of Oil Production <2>).

Of course, the end of the petroleum age will not happen all at once. But as production declines, prices will rise - particularly the prices of that most oil-dependent and essential of commodities, food. Since virtually all commodities use petroleum fuel to move from production to consumption, as fuel prices rise, all commodity prices must also rise. And as the price of food and other essential commodities rise, luxuries and dispensable goods and services will drop out of the family budgets and the standard of living will decline. Economic collapse will follow.
If oil production falls precipitously and no alternative energy supply and infrastructure is available to replace petroleum, widespread starvation is a likely outcome.

Strange to say, if there are to be any winners in the coming catastrophe, it will be third-world subsistence farmers - Juan, or Nguyen, or Hamid - who till the land that has been sustainably productive for generations, through the "primitive" method of raising food through the toil of their own labor and that of their draft animals.

Industrial civilization will not go gentle into the dark night of decline and collapse. It is one thing for the oligarchs to deprive the rest of us of our fair share of the national product, to rob us of our pensions and our Social Security, and to deprive the poor of their education and job opportunities - all this can be layered over with spin and propaganda. It is quite another matter for the masses to be deprived of their food. They will not stand for that. The coming collapse of the petroleum economy endangers us all - even the heads of the oligarchs are on the block.

Apparently, the Bushistas fail to foresee the dangers to us all, not excluding themselves. Not even "enlightened self-interest" can motivate them to take appropriate action. Instead, sharing the ill-founded faith of such cornucopian economists as Julian Simon, they presume that the sacrosanct "free market" - that is, human ingenuity combined with economic incentives, totally "free" of government direction or "interference" - will suffice to solve all problems, including this ultimate "energy crisis". (See "Perilous Optimism" <3>.) Assuming, of course, that they think at all about such things.

For George Bush, you see, is in effect "The Lobbyist in Chief", not the President of all the American People. His task is not to serve us, but to serve those who by violating our right to vote and our Constitution, put him into his office. Such individuals do not believe in community, or society, or a "common good". ("There is no such thing as 'society'", said Margaret Thatcher.) Moreover, the corporate vision is inherently myopic. Investors are only interested in next year's returns on their investments, and CEOs only in the remaining five years of their tenure, or at most the fifteen years of their longevity post retirement. And always there is that inevitable cop-out "we'll think of something". "Posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?" Apres nous, le deluge! (See our "In Search of Sustainable Values" <4>).

The future looks dismal - but it is not inevitably so. Unfortunately, almost nothing is being done by the Bush administration to avoid this dreadful fate. Instead, Bush and his allies have successfully defeated increased fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards and have cut funds for research and development of alternative energy sources.

And it is through these alternative sources that we might escape the coming "oil trap".
The most promising sources of new energy are the sun, hydrogen, and biomass. Some thirty years ago, Barry Commoner calculated that an area less than the size of Arizona could, through solar energy, produce more than the current US energy needs. I once calculated that if I covered the roof of my southern California home with solar cells, I could, with adequate storage facilities, supply all my household electrical needs, with surplus watts to send to the power company. Solar panels produce electricity directly, and that electricity can, in turn, produce hydrogen through electrolysis - a process familiar to all high-school chemistry students.
Which brings us to hydrogen - the combustion product of which is water (that is, zero pollution, zero greenhouse effect). Hydrogen, however, like electricity, is a "secondary" energy source - it takes energy to produce the energy (usually from the inexhaustible source of water). As noted, electricity is the primary source, and it can be supplied from non-polluting, non-fossil fuel sources such as solar power and hydropower.

Finally, there is biomass, which, as it decomposes, produces such fuel products as methane and methanol. Methane, which is released from farm animals, swamps and garbage dumps, is a powerful greenhouse gas. Far better that it be used as a fuel, the combustion products of which are water and carbon dioxide. (This carbon dioxide, unlike that from fossil fuels, is a benign greenhouse gas, since it is obtained from carbon presently cycling in the ecosystem rather than geologically sequestered deposits). Technology over a century old, can, through "anaerobic digesters", convert raw sewage, animal wastes, and agricultural waste, into methane, methanol and organic fertilizer.

What is missing in all this is an infrastructure, which, in turn, can only result from a full commitment to and investment in the transition to a post-petroleum economy. Only when a hydrogen or fuel-cell car can count on a network of refueling stations within driving range of each other, will the public purchase post-petroleum cars. Only when farm machinery is fueled with cheap and abundant non-fossil fuels (hydrogen, or methanol, etc) and when organic fertilizer is widely employed, will the coming famine be safely averted.

To their credit, some major auto companies are engaged in significant research into fuel-cell technology, as are such energy companies as Shell and British Petroleum. (Keep that in mind, next time you fill up). But this is all too little, and unless significantly augmented, will prove to be too late.

In short, we can avert the catastrophic consequences of the inevitable end of the petroleum age through an international government sponsored "Manhattan Project". But this will require massive investments in research and infrastructures. None of this is being done, or even contemplated, by the "gas-house gang" that controls the White House and the Congress.
The escape from catastrophe will require collective and cooperative effort in behalf of the common good and the distant future - and the very word "collective" raises, in the American mind, the spectre of socialism or even communism. Such is the legacy of the successful attack on "government" by Reagan and his successors. Thus have we been effectively alienated from the potential source of our salvation.

Hopefully, the 2002 election will give us a Democratic Congress that will restore funding for the research, development and infrastructure of alternative energy sources. Beyond that, we may have to wait another two years, following the defeat of George Bush in 2004, to initiate appropriate measures to avert the coming collapse of industrial civilization. Surely we can wait no longer than that.

If, somehow, George Bush is re-elected in 2004 and persists in his policies, thus failing to use the remaining oil reserves to build a bridge to the post-petroleum age, devastation will ensue and the civilized condition and all its advantages may follow the dinosaurs into extinction.

http://gadfly.igc.org/eds/envt/oiltrap.htm

Copyright 2002 by Ernest Partridge

Notes:
<1> Hubbert's Peak
http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/hubbertspeak.html
<2> Hubbert Peak of Oil Production
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/
<3> Perilous Optimism
http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/cornuc.htm
<4> In Search of Sustainable Values
http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/sustain.htm

Please also see:-

The Vulnerable Giant by Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers (May 25 2004)http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/vulnerable.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The fewer the better

We dare not discuss population growth lest we be called racist. Yet wouldn't lower numbers give us a gentler, less materialistic Britain?

by David Nicholson-Lord

New Statesman (November 08 2004)

This is a story of two Britains and two futures. In the first Britain, the work culture dominates; the talk is of economic growth and dynamism and competing with the rest of the world. Labour is young, cheap and biddable, and driven by the urge to "succeed" - to make it in material and career terms, with the consumer goods and lifestyles to match. In the cities of this 24/7 society, population densities rise: so do crime, violence and antisocial behaviour. Outside the cities, urbanisation spreads, along with noise, congestion, the creep of human clutter and development. Unspoilt places are increasingly hard to find. Pollution gets steadily worse.

The second Britain is a quieter place. The age profile is older, the values less strident and materialistic. People work longer - they are not pensioned off in their fifties - but they save more and spend less, at least on ephemera and gadgets. They drink much less, too, and don't get involved in fights. Work is important but so are hobbies, family and community life. Cities are more spacious, roads emptier, the countryside more rural. The air and water are cleaner and there is hope of getting the weather back to normal because the planet is no longer warming so rapidly.

Which future would we prefer? The first - let us call it "UK plc" - with its economic engine revving at full speed? Or the second, where quality of life matters more: not so much a plc as a community enterprise, with the emphasis on community rather than enterprise? Most people would plump for the second. Yet we seem to be heading for the first.

What we do not admit is that the difference between the two futures is largely one of human numbers. Population is a subject we don't like to mention. In September Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, pointed out that, over the next thirty years, Britain's population would grow by 5.6 million - an increase of nearly ten per cent on the current 59 million. Immigration, running at an average net inflow of 158,000 a year in the past five years, accounts for 85 per cent of this increase. Because population is forecast to rise, the government plans an extra 3.8 million houses in England over the next twenty years. But that plan is based on net immigration of 65,000 a year. If it continues at 158,000 a year, we will need 4.85 million new homes.

Howard went on to quote, with approval, the conclusions of the government's Community Cohesion Panel, which said in July that people "need sufficient time to come to terms with and accommodate incoming groups, regardless of their ethnic origin. The 'pace of change' ... is simply too great ... at present."

Alarmist? Electioneering? Playing the race card? In so far as these parts of Howard's speech were reported at all, that was how the left-liberal media interpreted them. Yet his figures understate the contribution of immigration to housing forecasts, because they ignore the changes in fertility and household formation resulting from a younger population. According to the Optimum Population Trust, a continuation of the 2001-2003 growth rate of 0.4 per cent would result in a UK population of 71 million in 2050 and 100 million by the end of the century.

The implications of this bear examination. Given a population of "only" 65-66 million by mid-century, for example, we would need an extra nine or ten million houses by 2050 - more than twice the numbers Howard was talking about, and an increase of nearly fifty per cent on the current English housing stock. Should this worry us? Clearly many people think so; the government's housing plans have been a source of controversy ever since they were published. Examine this controversy in greater depth, and you will find a developing awareness of what ecologists call "carrying capacity": the balance (or lack of it) between a physical environment and the numbers it can support.

About all this, the environmental lobby is now silent. The last time such issues were deemed fit for public debate was in 1973, when a government population panel said Britain must accept "that its population cannot go on increasing indefinitely". The progressive-minded believe, on the one hand, in liberal multiculturalism and, on the other, in sustainability. They cannot resolve the conflict. The field has thus been abandoned to the political right.

The demographic facts are undeniable, however. Before the start of the current immigration surge in the 1990s, Britain's population, like that of many other developed countries, was heading for decline - as early as 2013, according to some forecasts. British women are having 1.7 children each, on average, above Germany (1.4) and Japan (1.3) but below the replacement level of 2.1. If this had been allowed to continue, with no immigration, we would be down to thirty million by 2120.

What would it be like to live in a country where population halved in the space of three or four generations? Environmentally, the case for population decline is unanswerable - less pollution, less strain on natural systems, greater national self-sufficiency, a reduction in fossil-fuel emissions, the freeing up of land for other species and higher-order human uses, such as wilderness. Psychologically, what the economist Fred Hirsch called "positional goods" - a view, an unspoilt beach, a piece of heritage - would be freer of the crowds and queues that now, for most people, mar them. Applied to social and economic life, this might reduce the awful sense of competitiveness that is a relatively recent feature of cultural life, for jobs, places at school or university, or entry to prized social institutions or niches.

Given the close association between crowding, densities, congestion and stress, and the greater distances available between people, we would also probably see less casual public aggression: less of the "rage" that emerged in the late 1980s. And, because young people are more likely to commit crimes, the ageing of society that would result from population decline would reinforce these trends. A Britain of thirty million people would almost certainly be a kindlier, more easygoing, more socially concerned place - exactly the sort of Britain that many readers of the New Statesman would like to see.

Most of the argument so far, however, has focused on the perils of decline: economic and social stagnation, the decrease in the support ratio (of workers to pensioners), emerging labour shortages and so on. Given that all of these "problems" are either illusory, fantastical or soluble (see below) it is instructive to ask why they obsess us. Why were the Tories, for example, thinking until recently about encouraging people to have babies and why does the government still envisage no upper limit on immigration? There are two answers. First, population growth is such a feature of the past two centuries - although not of preceding ages - that it has become synonymous in our minds with progress. Second, economic growth is how politicians and economists measure national success. And having more people is the quickest and easiest way to boost gross domestic product.

Much is made, therefore, of the impact of immigration on economic growth. Yet the growth comes almost entirely from additions to the national headcount. The increased wealth per person may be as little as 0.1 per cent a year, according to US research.

More important is what happens when "immigrants" become "natives". This is the central fallacy of the demographic "time-bomb" argument. Immigrants eventually become pensioners, and pensioners keep living longer. The only way to preserve a support ratio regarded as optimal is thus to have permanently high levels of immigration - and a population permanently, indeed infinitely, growing. David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, has calculated that to keep the support ratio between pensioners and those of working age at roughly current levels would require a UK population in 2100 of approximately 300 million and rising. He calls it "the incredible in pursuit of the implausible".

And what about the world as a whole? How are developing countries, presumably expected to provide the young immigrants to the UK and other western countries, supposed to support their own old people?

New figures from the US Population Reference Bureau suggest a world population of roughly 9.3 billion in 2050, against 6.4 billion now. Studies such as the WWF's Living Planet Report say that by that time, humanity's footprint will be up to 220 per cent of the earth's biological capacity. We would need, in other words, another couple of planets to survive. But if we manage to control global population (and it looks increasingly likely that we can) numbers will start to decline, possibly around 2070. What is the world supposed to do then? Import extra-planetary aliens to maintain the support ratio? Even within Britain, it is hard to make a case for labour shortages when unemployment is three times the number of vacancies and economic inactivity, notably among the over-fifties, is at an all-time high. It is also hard, morally at least, to argue that we should deliberately cream off the skilled and educated workers of poorer countries - little different from people-trafficking, according to a National Health Service overseas recruiter addressing this year's Royal College of Nursing conference - or that we should bring people in because there is nobody else to sweep our streets and clean our toilets.

The solutions to the "problems" of population decline, in fact, lie safely within the range of realistic policy options. They include: people saving more and consuming less; governments investing more in preventative health measures, to lengthen illness-free old age; better labour productivity; a higher retirement age; drawing the economically inactive back into economic activity (with penalties for ageism); and restructuring hard-to-fill jobs to make them more attractive. Population decline creates a (relative) shortage of workers and therefore shifts power from capital to labour and raises pay rates generally, as happened after the Black Death. Isn't the left supposed to be in favour of such an outcome and against the use of immigrants to create a US-style low-wage economy?

Yet the argument is not primarily about economics. Those who advocate increases in immigration and population do so largely on the grounds that they are good for GDP. They forget, as most economists do, that they are often bad for the environment and society. Economic growth, after all, is ethically undiscriminating: the wages earned from clearing up the effects of a car crash or a pollution mishap count towards GDP in the same way as those earned from making a loaf of bread. All over the world, Britain included, population growth is generating an extraordinary range of negative effects, from climate change and resource exhaustion to the destruction of species and habitats and the poisoning of the biosphere. Deliberately boosting Britain's population, either through large-scale net immigration or by telling people to have more babies, will ultimately make it a much worse place to live in.

How big should Britain's population be? That depends which sums you do - but some calculations from the Optimum Population Trust suggest twenty million or fewer.
Before you throw up your hands in disbelief at this idea, consider the view of a liberal from another generation, John Stuart Mill, who in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) acknowledged the economic potential for a "great increase in population" but confessed he could see little reason for desiring it. "The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain ... all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse", he wrote, "has, in all the most populous countries, been attained". In 1848, the world contained just over a billion people and the population of Britain was 21 million.

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200411080019

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Late, Great, American Republic

A Report from Mid-Century - 2050

by Nigel Doowrite as told to Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor

The Crisis Papers (July 12 2003)

A note from the "real" author: The following is an imaginary essay by an Oxford University historian at mid-21st century. It assumes a continuation of current political and economic trends set in motion by the Bush Administration. With a sudden and early awakening of sanity amongst the public, the media and the elites, which catalyzes effective dissent, protest and reform, a far different future might be realized. (Ernest Partridge)

Who could have imagined, at the turn of this century, how quickly and completely the American republic would collapse? Historically, the decline and fall of great empires normally takes place over decades, and in the case of Rome, over several centuries. The disintegration of the United States took place in just a few brief years.

At the close of the twentieth century, the United States was at peace and enjoying one of the most sustained and productive periods of prosperity in its history - a prosperity that favourably affected all segments of society. President Clinton, though mercilessly harassed by his political opponents, was highly esteemed by heads of state and ordinary citizens throughout the world. The United States, despite its manifest faults, was widely admired and envied by free peoples everywhere.

It was, to put it simply, a great time to be an American.

And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

The American economy collapsed and the American leadership, unlike the Roosevelt administration during the great depression of the 1930s, lacked the insight and will, and the federal treasury lacked the funds, to effect a rescue. The admirable American system of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, of a free and diverse press, of free enterprise and economic opportunity, and of popularly elected government was, by the close of the first decade, replaced by a despotic oligarchy in total control of the permanently ruling Republican party. Finally, the United States, through a unilateral abrogation of its treaty obligations and a series of aggressive wars, was transformed from "the leader of the free world" into a rogue state. As we all know, the community of nations responded to the new threat of American economic imperialism by forming the alliances that are today the dominant world powers: the Eurasian Union and Islamia.

Distrusted and isolated from the global community, the United States withdrew into itself to become the pitiful and impoverished third-world despotism that it is today.

The forces set in motion during the illegitimate Presidency of George W Bush that led to this decline and fall were plain for all to see, and amazingly, however outrageous and contrary to the most fundamental American political traditions, they were not effectively resisted. When the American public came face-to-face with the dreadful consequences of these regressive and despotic forces, it was too late to resist and turn back. The fate of the American republic was sealed.

The American Economy

Late in the twentieth century, twenty percent of the private wealth in the United States was owned by the top one percent of the population. At the turn of the century, that share had doubled. Then, with abolition of dividend, capital gains and estate taxes, the flow of national wealth to the very few accelerated, so that in 2012, midway through the Jeb Bush administration, eighty percent of the national wealth was in the hands of the top one percent.

Of course, by that time, the United States was in the depths of The Great Depression. A full year into George Bush's second administration, the unemployment rate was above ten percent and rising, eventually to reach one-third of the work force when his younger brother succeeded him in 2009. Compounding that disaster was the retirement of the "baby boom" generation, which found that the Social Security and Medicare funds which they had confidently expected, had been exhausted. Those retirees who could not be cared for by their children often ended up in the streets, for the only remaining social services - "faith-based" agencies supported by federal funds - were overwhelmed and willing only to accept devout members of their various (usually evangelical) denominations.

The primary cause of the depression was compellingly obvious: with the wealth of the nation withdrawn from the population at large, there was little disposable income remaining to feed the cash-flow of commerce. First the "expendable" industries - amusements, recreational vehicles, resorts, automobiles - were bankrupted and their employees discharged, causing the succeeding dominoes to fall and leading to the downward spiral of depression.

Prominent so-called "conservative" theoreticians in the first decade, such as Grover Norquist, with the full support of the George Bush administration, called for the virtual elimination of all government services and functions, federal, state, and municipal, with the exception of the military and "Homeland Security" which soon evolved into the Federal Police. Of course, the obvious fact that no civilized and industrialised nation has ever functioned without a central government, did not concern these theoreticians. Consumed by dogma, they had no inclination to be "confused by the facts". And so, their stated objective of "drowning the government in the bathtub" and "bankrupting" state governments was achieved, with disastrous results.

The public schools and universities closed and, unable to afford the tuition of the remaining private schools, most of the children were deprived of an education. Similarly, private college and university enrollments plummeted. Literacy rates fell and the pool of trained and resourceful workers evaporated. Attempts to privatise the infrastructure - roads, bridges, electrical grids, pipelines, et cetera - failed dismally, and with the governments bankrupt, no funds were available to bail them out. And so, these facilities fell into useless ruin, which further crippled the national economy.

Due to widespread evictions, single-family homes and apartments became crowded communes when only the combined resources of three and four families could pay the utilities, rents and mortgages. And these were the lucky ones, as millions of Americans were forced to live on the streets or in tent cities.

The United States of America, once the powerhouse of the world economy, was headed hell-bent toward the third-world status that it has today.

The World Economy

When the United States was the predominant economic power in the world, economic policy-makers used to say that when the US sneezes the world gets a cold, and when the US gets a cold, the world gets pneumonia. So when the US economy collapsed in 2006, this had serious global repercussions. And yet, to the amazement of all, the world economy fared far better than expected. By employing the sort of cooperative and collective policy and planning despised by the American "conservatives", and free of interference by American corporations, the global economy soon recovered and went on to prosper.

The greatest shock to the world economy was the sudden announcement by President Jeb Bush that the United States would no longer honor its three trillion-dollar foreign debt. A resulting collapse of the world economy was averted when the leading governments of the industrial nations agreed together to absorb the debt - a policy that accelerated the emergence of the Eurasian Union.

With the American credit-rating thus reduced to zero, the United States was effectively isolated from the world economy. The Americans then discovered that they were in desperate need of raw materials that were unavailable within their borders. The world at large, on the other hand, enjoyed resource-independence from the Americans. The Americans suffered most acutely from the severe shortage of petroleum, upon which their once-thriving agricultural industry depended. And so the spectre of famine, unimaginable in the previous century, haunted the unfortunate Americans. (See "The Oil Trap")

In the 20th Century, America's primary contribution to the world economy was its advanced technology, as young students from around the world flocked to its excellent universities to acquire advanced degrees and to engage in cutting-edge research and development. With the closing of the public education system and the end of federal research funding (except, of course, for the military), superior centers of scientific and technological research appeared in Europe and Asia. First to depart was biomedical research, severely crippled by the United States ban on stem-cell research. But this was only part of the story. The manifest contempt for science by the Bushes and their corporate and fundamentalist supporters accelerated the demise of the scientific and technological pre-eminence of the United States.

Finally, with the United States government in the complete control of the petroleum industry, the Bushes had no inclination whatever to build a bridge to the post-petroleum age - with predictable and disastrous results. In stark contrast, the Eurasian Union clearly foresaw the coming emergency, and made massive preparations for it. Thus, in Eurasia today, the remaining petroleum reserves are being properly utilised for their petrochemicals, while the combination of biomass, solar, nuclear fusion and other sources, and the hydrogen fuels produced thereby, offer abundant energy to the peoples of Eurasia and Islamia. The United States, with no exportable commodities or technologies of any worth, and bankrupted by the tax policies of the George and Jeb Bush Administrations, is unable to enjoy the advantages of these innovations, except, of course, out of the largesse of humanitarian aid from Eurasia.

The New Despotism

The American democracy died with the invention and complete implementation of paperless computer voting. But this was a coup-de-grace, delivered to a body politic critically injured by the rigging of the 2000 Florida presidential election, engineered by Jeb Bush and his accomplices, and the subsequent vote of five Republican operatives on the Supreme Court in the notorious ruling, Bush v Gore. The winner of the 2000 election, Al Gore, meekly acceded to this judicial coup d'etat, and the public followed his lead.

The Republican control of the media and the election procedures was maintained and extended in the election of 2004, when the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, was ruthlessly slandered, and a nationwide conspiracy of voter suppression and computer hacking of election returns once again handed the White House over to manifestly incompetent George Bush. Once again, the Democratic Party meekly submitted to its victimhood, despite the outrage of the millions of supporters of the defeated candidate.

Encouraged, if astonished, by this passivity of the public and the "opposition" party, the victorious George Bush administration proceeded to snuff out the civil liberties of the American people, until the final lights went out halfway through the Jeb Bush administration. This twilight of the American democracy was accelerated by the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 upon New York City and Washington, DC, whereby a stunned public and Congress accepted without protest a draconian attack on the Bill of Rights, cynically named the USA PATRIOT Act.

Soon after the re-election of George Bush in 2004, and the "uncovering" by the CIA and FBI of an alleged plot by al Qaeda to set off a nuclear device in New York Harbor, "Patriot Act II" was enacted by the Republican Congress. With this, habeas corpus, and the constitutional rights of citizens to open trials by juries, access to counsel, were all suspended. On the assumption that "you are either for us or against us", as articulated by George Bush soon after the September 2001 attacks, critics of the government were regarded as "traitors". Mere hours before their intended arrests, dissenters Noam Chomsky and Paul Krugman escaped to Canada and thence to the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge. Democratic presidential aspirants Howard Dean, Dennis Kusinich and John Edwards, and the defeated candidate, John Kerry, were not so lucky, and have not been heard from since their disappearance in the summer of 2006.

Quite possibly these dissenters joined millions of others in the Alaskan Gulag, perchance to work in the oil fields of ANWR and Prudhoe Bay. Or perhaps they were impressed along with the millions of the unemployed to toil as farm laborers when, due to the acute petroleum shortages, the farm machinery was shut down and it became impossible to transport sufficient food for the starving masses in the inner cities. "You work or you starve", was the stark choice given to the unfortunate unemployed. Sadly, many who remained in the cities did, in fact, starve or, weakened by malnutrition, fell victim to the great plagues of the "twenty-teens".

Despite these catastrophes, the Republicans have been the sole ruling party in the United States throughout the 21st century to this date. Typical Congresses have contained about 80% Republican seats. The Democrats exist at the sufferance of the Republicans, as unpersuasive "window dressing" to preserve at least the appearance of democracy. Republicans congressmen who show any independent tendencies are generally marked by the Party bosses for defeat in primary elections, or in the general elections by designated and compliant Democrats.

Observers from abroad regard American elections with the same contempt as historians show toward "elections" in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Informal polls (conducted with great difficulty and at great risk) show a residual opposition to the Republicans, and often an overwhelming majority preference for the Democrats. But no matter. The official results issuing from the paperless voting machines are uniformly just what the Administration desires. As always, the voting machines are manufactured, and the secret software codes are written, by corporations completely controlled by the Republicans (as, indeed, are all corporations). Exit polling is banned. Advance polling by organisations such as Gallup accurately predict the final results. But, of course, the Gallup organisation was acquired in 2006 by the Murdoch corporation.

Ninety percent of the media are owned by the three interlocking corporations of "The First Amendment Consortium". The remaining ten percent are licensed by the federal government. Independent newspapers or magazines that dare to criticise the government are soon absorbed in "hostile takeovers" by the Consortium. Of course, independent broadcast media no longer exist in the United States.

In late 2005, Rupert Murdoch acquired full ownership of the Internet, whereupon dissenting ("unpatriotic") websites were banished from the Net.

A tragedy, to be sure, but not unforeseen. As early as 2003, the journey toward this dreadful destination was well-embarked. The stolen 2000 Presidential election, well known to those who cared to study it, was two years in the past. The PATRIOT Act had been enacted and several American citizens were being held incommunicado, in violation of the Constitutional rights. The use of paperless computer ballot machines was widespread and growing. The FCC successfully ruled in favour of media conglomeration, and dissenting liberal opinions were severely restricted on television, and virtually non-existent on the radio.

Finding no resistance, the triumphant Republicans proceeded, and by unopposed increments, destroyed the American democracy.

The New World Order

A fundamental rule of politics, well-known to Aristotle and political philosophers since, asserts that alliances are formed out of the shared perception of a common threat. Thus, in the mid-twentieth century, the United States, England and the Soviet Union joined forces against Nazi Germany. Following the defeat of Germany, that alliance fell apart, as the NATO alliance arose to meet the Soviet threat.

The unification of the Eurasian continent, long assumed to be a fantasy, was brought about by the shared perception of a threat by the "rogue" American imperialists. The American neoconservatives could not have been clearer in their intention that the United States would go it alone in the world. Following their statement of this intention in such documents as the "Project for the New American Century", the George Bush administration proceeded to follow this guideline to the letter, abrogating treaties at will, invading defenseless countries on patently false pretenses, and in general earning for itself the fear and contempt of the global community.
In the face of this, the once-inconceivable unification of the nations of Europe and Asia became an inevitability.

Similarly, following the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and thence of Iran in the spring of 2005, the Islamic nations united to form the Federation of Islamia, which now stretches from the Atlantic, across north Africa, all the way to Indonesia. The unity of Islamia was enhanced by the expulsion of the American forces from Iraq in 2005, followed by the establishment of a Shi'ite Islamic republic. As in neighboring Iran, Iraq suffered through a period of fundamentalist repression, until the fanaticism consumed itself and was replaced by a moderate semi-democratic government. So it has been throughout Islamia, as the member states, faced with a choice between religious fundamentalism and technical-economic development, have chosen the latter option.

The overwhelming American military, the budget for which, at the turn of the century, almost equaled the sum of all other military budgets combined, proved to be of little use to the United States. Nuclear blackmail would not work since, of course, the Eurasia was also a nuclear power. And as Viet Nam and Iraq proved, the strategically astute response to a technologically overwhelming force is to absorb the force and then to bleed it white with a thousand cuts. (The Russians used the strategy successfully against Napoleon and Hitler. The Americans, typically, learned nothing whatever from this history.)

Furthermore, the Eurasians and Islamics wisely understood that even if the an opposing nation's military is invincible, it does not follow that the nation itself is invincible. It might be vanquished non-militarily. And this, of course, is exactly what happened. The United States, starved of resources and credits, weakened internally by the fiscal insanity of the Bush brothers, blinded by dogma to the insights of science and scholarship, collapsed from within. (See "The Vulnerable Giant").

After their military had suffered several defeats in Islamia, the United States withdrew, whereupon the military was put to use by the Department of Homeland Security to put down insurrections, to protect the few oligarchs in their gated communities, and to keep the masses confined to their gated ghettos in the inner cities. In this capacity, aircraft carriers, submarines and ICBMs proved to be of little use.

And so, the world beyond the shores of the United States has gone on to an era of prosperity and enlightenment which the Americans cannot share - excepting, of course, those fortunate American who manage to escape from the despotic Republican regime and are welcomed immigrants to the Global community.

The growing community of American expatriates, who have contributed so generously to world science, scholarship, literature, art, industry, and culture, have also brought to our world the vivid memory of the magnificence of the first two centuries of the American Republic - and the undying aspiration for its restoration in that once-blessed land.

In the American Diaspora, the spirit of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and Roosevelt survives and flourishes.

May it soon return to its home.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/07/p/12_late.html

Copyright 2003, by Ernest Partridge

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

They Fight and Die, But Not For Their Country

Why Soldiers Make the Ultimate Sacrifice

by Ted Rall uexpress.com (December 01 2004)

On Veteran's Day, Kyle Burns of Laramie, Wyoming lost his life in Iraq. At his memorial service, the Associated Press reported, he was remembered "as a marine who died for his country". Another fallen American was honored in Topeka the same week. Clinton Wisdom, said a reporter for Channel 13 news, was "a soldier who had died for his country". There was another service in Belington, West Virginia, for Romulo Jiminez, killed at age 21 in Fallujah. "He not only died for his country, he died for each one of us individually to preserve freedom", said the funeral director. Wisconsin lost three men in Iraq that week, including Todd Cornel, 38. "What he did was what he wanted to do, and he died for his country, for our freedom", said his father.

Did he? Have any of the Iraq war dead really "died for their country"?

At a time when every other Arab oil-guzzling SUV bears a yellow "support our troops" sticker and probable antiwar liberal Dan Rather "salutes fallen heroes" of Iraq on the evening news, the red-blue divide hasn't altered traditional perceptions of military service. But with 1,500 US soldiers dead in Afghanistan and Iraq and influential Bushists calling for invading Iran, the question bears asking: What does it mean to fight (or die) for the United States?

When we hear that soldiers fight for our country, we immediately think of their role guarding our borders, protecting us from invaders. Yet the US has only been invaded twice, when Great Britain attempted to bring us back into the colonial fold during the War of 1812 and in 1846, when Mexico launched a brief incursion across the disputed Rio Grande. During the ensuing 158 years, no member of the US military has fought or died while repelling an invader. 9/11 demonstrated that the Pentagon doesn't consider a foreign incursion a major threat; that's why they assigned twelve "ground-based" Air National Guard jets to guard the entire country.

If you participate in a war of retribution, are you "fighting for your country"? There have only been four attacks on American soil by a foreign power. All were carried out by Japan during World War II: Pearl Harbor, the now-forgotten submarine strafing of a California oil refinery, balloon-borne bombs dropped without casualties on Oregon and Washington state, and an air raid on Dutch Harbor, a remote US outpost on Alaska's Aleutian Islands, in which 43 residents died. Japan and Germany's declarations of war intuitively appear to justify the sacrifice of 291,557 American soldiers in World War II, but were those deaths necessary to defend us? There is no evidence that the Axis intended to invade the US, nor did it possess the logistical capability to occupy it. The defeat of Nazism liberated millions from tyranny, but that was a happy byproduct of a war we fought to expand our military and economic influence. Right or wrong, World War II was a war of choice against Germany and one of retribution against Japan.

What about avenging an attack, not on US soil, but against an American facility overseas? In 1986 President Reagan ordered bombings in Libya in retaliation for the bombing of a German disco that killed off-duty American soldiers. Moammar Khaddafi's young daughter [and] others were killed. Subsequent intelligence proved that Libya had had nothing to do with the nightclub attack, but - even setting that aside - it's a stretch to argue that the pilots who bombed Libya were "fighting for their country". Moreover, even retaliatory strikes don't occur frequently. The most recent bona fide assault on a foreign asset by another country took place in 1979 when Iranians took over the American embassy in Tehran. US overseas assets are rarely attacked.

The truth is, US troops are hardly ever called upon to defend the territory of the US or its outposts - military bases, embassies and consulates. Of the approximately 250 deployments of US armed forces since 1798, the majority have been preemptive actions against possible future threats, or wars of aggression waged to advance American geopolitical interests.

81,243 American soldiers died in combat during the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf wars. True, had the US not gotten involved, a unified Korea might be suffering under the dictatorship of Kim Jung Il and Kuwait could be Iraq's 19th province. But those problems wouldn't have been ours. The snuffing out of over 80,000 young lives didn't do anything to make the US safer, but that wasn't the point. We lost Vietnam and made a friend; we won in Korea and created our most dangerous enemy today.

For one American president after another, winning or losing doesn't matter. For an empire, military action is its own reward. Our willingness to wage war intimidates adversaries and their neighbors into giving us what we want: cheaper oil, military bases, favorable trading terms. When American sailors invaded the Falkland Islands in 1832, it was "to defend American interests". Ditto for 1855, when US forces stormed Fiji. Ditto for the 1903 Dominican Republic action (where defending US interests meant suppressing a popular revolution), Honduras in 1911, the Soviet Union in 1918, Lebanon in 1953 ... you get the idea. The soldiers who fought in those invasions were told they were fighting for their country. Those who lost their lives were called heroes.

Repeating a lie doesn't make it true.

Now we're at it again, this time in Iraq, a nation that would never have invaded us. Everyone, even the Bushists who manufactured the war from whol