Archive for the ‘The Perfect Storm’ Category

A mean streak in the US mainstream

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

– What to say?   This is one aspect of the U.S. that I will not be sorry to leave behind when I shift to New Zealand.

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The Independent (UK)
Tue, 25 Aug 2009

The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here

HealthCareFailureWhen we Europeans – the British included – contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?

The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.

If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle – even though it was central to his election platform – is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend – although this is a big part of it.

It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama’s chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.

The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party’s mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even – yes – frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum.

As some of Obama’s enemies warned through the campaign – and I mean warned, not promised – this is the philosophical terrain where, his voting record suggests, this President is most at home. But many more are not. The absence from the Senate of Edward Kennedy, through illness, and Hillary Clinton, elevated to the State Department, has left his pro-reform advocacy in the legislature sorely depleted.

But there is something else at work here, too, beyond defective advocacy, and it lays bare a profound misunderstanding. Europe hailed Obama’s landslide election victory as evidence that America had reclaimed its better self, turned to the left and bade farewell to ingrained racial divisions as well. That was a benevolent, but ultimately idealistic, gloss.

Obama’s victory can indeed be seen as a reaction to eight years of conservative Republicanism under George Bush and a turn by US voters to the left. But that left is still quite a bit further right than in most of Europe. Nor was it just a leftward turn that cost John McCain the White House; it was also a rejection of the weaker candidate. Obama’s great asset was that he came across as more competent on the economy, at a time of global financial meltdown. From this side of the Atlantic, we convinced ourselves that Americans had voted with their hearts, but there was a considerable element of the wallet as well.

That wallet element helps explain the deep-seated misgivings that have surfaced about Obama’s plans for health reform. A majority of Americans believe they have adequate health cover. Their choice of job may be limited by their insurance requirements (and labour mobility reduced). And their calculations may be upset – sometimes disastrously – by accident or illness.

But with most pensioners protected by the state system known as Medicare, an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude prevails. It coexists with the fear that extending the pool of the insured, to the poorer and more illness-prone, will raise premiums for the healthy and bring queuing, or rationing, of care – which is why stories about the NHS inspire such dread. The principle that no one should be penalised financially by illness is trumped by the self-interest of the majority, then rationalised by the argument that health is a matter of personal responsibility.

The point is that, when on “normal”, the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.

This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber – or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.

Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West. Still others see it as the price the US pays for its material success. What it means, though, is that if and when Obama gets some form of health reform through, it will reflect America’s fears quite as much as its promise. And it is unlikely to be a national service that looks anything like ours.

To the original…

– Research thanks to John P. and Charles S.

Climate change impacts in our backyards: the Southwest

Friday, August 28th, 2009

The Southwestern United States

A convergence of the highest population growth rates in the nation and the most rapid warming compared with other regions makes the American Southwest especially vulnerable to climate impacts.

“The fingerprints of climate change can already be seen in both natural and managed ecosystems of the Southwest.  Future impacts on the landscape are expected to be substantial, threatening biodiversity, protected areas, and ranching and agricultural lands.”  [quotes are from the June 2009 USGCRP report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States].

The Southwest already experiences very high summer temperatures and corresponding water and energy needs, intensified by a rapidly growing population.  Projected temperature increases for the Southwest represent augmented stresses to health, electricity, and water supply in a region that is already at risk.  As the climate warms, the current “tug-of-war among preserving natural ecosystems, supplying the needs of rapidly expanding urban areas, and protecting the lucrative agricultural sector, will be exacerbated.”

More…

Tiny particles pose threat: scientists

Friday, August 28th, 2009

– I’ve been beating this little drum for sometime now.   I think when we look back in the future on today’s science, this will be one of the big ‘gotchas’ we missed.

– I’ve written on this before here: , , , , and .

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Tiny particles in consumer products sold in New Zealand and around the world pose health and environmental risks and need to be tracked, scientists say.

Amid growing worldwide concern about the potential effects of nanoparticles, Kiwi scientists, academics and officials want the Government to introduce a labelling system identifying nanomaterials used in products on supermarket shelves and to maintain a public database of nanoproducts.

Nanoparticles are about 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and are used in more than 800 consumer products, including cosmetics, sunblock, clothing, food, washing machines and refrigerators.

A report on the opportunities and drawbacks of nanotechnology has just been published by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology. It lists more than 70 actions the Government should take.

Report editor and University of Canterbury physicist Simon Brown told The Press that apart from nanotechnology’s obvious advantages in the computer and electronics world, there were known and unknown hazards.

There was a strong sense the Government had yet to face up to nanotechnology.

More…

Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world

Friday, August 28th, 2009

HAINES JUNCTION, Yukon Territory (AP) — A veil of smoke settled over the forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains, in a wilderness whose spruce trees stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in the greenest heart of a Yukon summer.

“As far as the eye can see, it’s all infested,” forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley.

Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier, trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger.

Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming.

It’s here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth’s climate is changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming at twice that rate or greater.

In Russia’s frigid east, some average temperatures have risen more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with midwinter mercury spiking even higher. And “eight of the last 10 summers have been extreme wildfire seasons in Siberia,” American researcher Amber J. Soja pointed out by telephone from central Siberia.

Along with shrinking the polar ice cap and thawing permafrost, scientists say, the warming of the Arctic threatens to turn boreal forest — the vast cover of spruce, pine and other conifers blanketing these high latitudes — into less of a crucial “sink” absorbing carbon dioxide and more of a source, as megatons of that greenhouse gas rise from dead, burning and decaying wood.

American forest ecologist Scott Green worries about a “domino effect.”

“These things may occur simultaneously,” said the researcher from the University of Northern British Columbia. “If the bark beetles kill the trees, you’ll have lots of dead, dry wood that will create a really, really hot fire, and then sometimes you don’t get trees regenerating on the site.”

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The China Bubble’s Coming — But Not the One You Think

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Forget about a Shanghai stock bubble. The whole Chinese economy’s getting ready to burst.

Financial commentators are obsessively debating whether the recent rise in the Chinese stock market means there’s a bubble — and if so, when it’s going to burst.

My take? Who cares! What happens to the broader Chinese economy is what we should really be watching. It will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world — much more far-reaching than a decline in stocks.

Despite everything, the Chinese economy has shown incredible resilience recently. Although its biggest customers — the United States and Europe — are struggling (to say the least) and its exports are down more than 20 percent, China is still spitting out economic growth numbers as if there weren’t a worry in the world. The most recent estimate put annual growth at nearly 8 percent.

Is the Chinese economy operating in a different economic reality?  Will it continue to grow, no matter what the global economy is doing?

The answer to both questions is no. China’s fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups — and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent’s equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn’t factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.

Funds to buy Lucent’s equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance the purchase of its own equipment. This worked well enough, until it came time to pay back the loans.

The United States, of course, isn’t a dot-com. But a great portion of its growth came from borrowing Chinese money to buy Chinese goods, which means that Chinese growth was dependent on that very same borrowing.

Now the United States and the rest of the world is retrenching, corporations are slashing their spending, and consumers are closing their pocket books. This means that the consumption of Chinese goods is on the decline. And this is where the dot-com analogy breaks down. Unlike Lucent, China has nuclear weapons. It can print money at will and can simply order its banks to lend. It is a communist command economy, after all. Lucent is now a $2 stock. China won’t go down that easily.

The Chinese central bank has a significant advantage over the U.S. Federal Reserve. Chairman Ben Bernanke and his cohort may print a lot of money (and they did), but there’s almost nothing they can do to speed the velocity of money. They simply cannot force banks to lend without nationalizing them (and only the government-sponsored enterprises have been nationalized). They also cannot force corporations and consumers to spend. Since China isn’t a democracy, it doesn’t suffer these problems.

China’s communist government owns a large part of the money-creation and money-spending apparatus. Money supply therefore shot up 28.5 percent in June. Since it controls the banks, it can force them to lend, which it has also done.

Finally, China can force government-owned corporate entities to borrow and spend, and spend quickly itself. This isn’t some slow-moving, touchy-feely democracy. If the Chinese government decides to build a highway, it simply draws a straight line on the map. Any obstacle — like a hospital, a school, or a Politburo member’s house — can become a casualty of the greater good. (Okay — maybe not the Politburo member’s house).

Although China can’t control consumer spending, the consumer is a comparatively small part of its economy. Plus, currency control diminishes the consumer’s buying power. All of this makes the United States’ TARP plans look like child’s play. If China wants to stimulate the economy, it does so — and fast. That’s why the country is producing such robust economic numbers.

Why is China doing this? It doesn’t have the kind of social safety net one sees in the developed world, so it needs to keep its economy going at any cost. Millions of people have migrated to its cities, and now they’re hungry and unemployed. People without food or work tend to riot. To keep that from happening, the government is more than willing to artificially stimulate the economy, in the hopes of buying time until the global system stabilizes. It’s literally forcing banks to lend — which will create a huge pile of horrible loans on top of the ones they’ve originated over the last decade.

But don’t confuse fast growth with sustainable growth. Much of China’s growth over the past decade has come from lending to the United States. The country suffers from real overcapacity. And now growth comes from borrowing — and hundreds of billion-dollar decisions made on the fly don’t inspire a lot of confidence. For example, a nearly completed, 13-story building in Shanghai collapsed in June due to the poor quality of its construction.

This growth will result in a huge pile of bad debt — as forced lending is bad lending. The list of negative consequences is very long, but the bottom line is simple: There is no miracle in the Chinese miracle growth, and China will pay a price. The only question is when and how much.

More…

Australians sweat out warmest winter

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

SYDNEY – Australia is in the throes of probably its warmest winter ever, with records smashed up and down the country.

Lying awake at night in pools of sweat, Australians have been wondering which hemisphere they live in.

Now the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that this is set to be the hottest August on record, by a big margin – and, if forecasts for the next few days are correct, the hottest winter.

The bureau, which spends much of its time dampening speculation that weather patterns have changed, issued a “special climate statement” describing the heatwave as “highly abnormal”.

It blamed hot air accumulating over central Australia during the past two or three weeks, without southerly fronts arriving to blow it away, as would usually be expected.

Nearly a dozen towns have broken winter records by more than four or five degrees, while some coastal areas of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland experienced their warmest day of 2009 in August, surpassing the midsummer temperatures of January and February.

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Hungry in the dark of drought

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

NAIROBI – Crops have shrivelled, hundreds of cattle are dead and the World Food Programme says 3.8 million Kenyans need emergency food aid because of a prolonged drought, which is even causing electrical blackouts in the capital because there’s not enough water for hydroelectric plants.

With rivers thinning to a trickle and mountain glaciers shrinking, authorities this month began rationing power in the capital, darkening homes and businesses at least three days a week.

More…

So many amplifying methane feedbacks, so little time to stop them all

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

The UK’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton reports:

The warming of an Arctic current over the last 30 years has triggered the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane hydrate stored in the sediment beneath the seabed.

German and British scientists “have found that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres”

Methane released from gas hydrate in submarine sediments has been identified in the past as an agent of climate change. The likelihood of methane being released in this way has been widely predicted.

A lead researcher said, “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”

This is the first time that such behaviour in response to climate change has been observed in the modern period.

While most of the methane currently released from the seabed is dissolved in the seawater before it reaches the atmosphere, methane seeps are episodic and unpredictable and periods of more vigorous outflow of methane into the atmosphere are possible. Furthermore, methane dissolved in the seawater contributes to ocean acididfication.

Geophysics Professor Graham Westbrook warns: “If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of megatonnes of methane per year – equivalent to 5-10% of the total amount released globally by natural sources, could be released into the ocean.”

More…

– Research thanks to Kael

China: The new Big Oil

Friday, August 21st, 2009

The country is snapping up oil fields from Africa to South America to the Middle East. Soon it may be able to rival the Western giants.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — China is on an oil buying binge.

Over the past few months, the Chinese government — or its big government-controlled oil firms — have closed or floated a slew of deals in countries all over the world. These deals have expanded the nation’s oil reach and may one day position the nation to match the skills of western oil firms.

The deals include a $10 billion loan the Chinese government extended to Russia’s Rosneft in exchange for a guaranteed cut of that company’s production. The Chinese have also gotten in tight with Brazil’s Petrobras, arranging a similar deal with the firm that is developing a huge new offshore field – one of the biggest new discoveries in decades.

But it doesn’t end with loans. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that China National Petroleum Corporation is interested in buying all or a part of Argentina’s YPF for $14.5 billion, although a deal is far from certain.

In Africa, CNOOC and Sinopec are buying a $1.3 billion stake in offshore Angolan development rights from American oil firm Marathon. Angola has recently overtaken Nigeria as Africa’s biggest oil producer, and is one of Exxon Mobil’s (XOM, Fortune 500) favorite countries to invest in.

And rumors are swirling that the China National Petroleum Corporation will take the majority stake in Iraq’s Rumaila oilfield from BP (BP). Rumaila produces over 1 million barrels a day, and is Iraq’s biggest oil field.

It’s clear what the Chinese are doing.

“They are stilting on a huge pile of cash and they’re using this as a buying opportunity,” said Greg Priddy, a global energy analyst at the Eurasia group, a political risk consultancy.

More…

The Swiss Menace

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

Let’s talk about health care around the advanced world.

Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That’s how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It’s also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.

Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.

More…

– research thanks to:  Michael M.

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.