“Corporatist System
But BP’s defenders and statist critics both have it wrong. This is not the story of a well-meaning or negligent firm operating in the free market. Negligent or not, BP is a player in a corporatist system that for generations has featured a close relationship between government and major business firms. (It wouldn’t have surprised Adam Smith.) Prominent companies have always been influential at all levels of government — and no industry more so than oil, which has long been a top concern of the national policy elite, most particularly the foreign-policy establishment. Continue reading
Tag Archives: environment
Gulf Economy Takes Multibillion Dollar Hit From Oil Spill
CNN reports on how the oil spill will damage the Gulf economy:
“As efforts to plug the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico continue to fall short, the stakes for the region’s economy grow ever higher. The numbers being batted around when it comes to how much the oil spill will ultimately cost BP and the local Gulf of Mexico economies are huge. $3 billion. $14 billion. One politician put it at over $100 billion. Continue reading
Why Not Build Barrier Reefs To Protect Coast From Oil Spill?
AP reported on May 17 that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and others want to build barrier reefs to protect the coast from the BP oil spill. Sounds like a good idea at this point, now that pumping the well with mud hasn’t worked:
“Gov. Bobby Jindal and leaders from several coastal parishes are pushing a $350 million barrier island repair plan as a way to protect Louisiana’s coast from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and reduce the ultimate cleanup and its costs.
Sand dredged from the gulf’s floor would be built up in 86 miles of the gaps between islands, returning land eaten away by decades of storms and slower erosion.
Jindal said Monday that the project could start within days after the Army Corps of Engineers approves it. He is asking for quick approval, and says he has been told that a decision could come in days.
Jindal says the price tag is much less than it would cost to try to remove oil from marshlands.
BP Oil Spill: Ten Horrifying Facts
Gulf Oil Spill: 10 Horrifying Facts You Never Wanted To Know
1. New estimates show the undersea well has spilled between 17 and 39 million gallons. These estimates dwarf those of BP, who claimed the spill had only released 11 million gallons to date, and mean that the Gulf leak is far bigger than Exxon Valdez, making it the worst spill in American history.
2. The National Wildlife Federation reports that already more than 150 threatened or endangered sea turtles are dead. And 316 sea birds, mostly brown pelicans and northern gannets, have been found dead along the Gulf Coast as a result of the spreading oil.
3. The Minerals Management Service, directly under the supervision of the Interior Department failed to impose a full review of potential environmental impacts of the BP drilling operation because preliminary reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was “unlikely.”
Barrick Gold Threatens Vancouver Publisher
CBC News in Canada reports that bankster-associated gold miner Barrick Gold is shutting down critical writing on the Canadian mining industry. (Thanks to Chris Cook).
An excerpt:
“The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.
Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of “libel chill” by one of Canada’s largest mining companies.
The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers. Continue reading
Vatican Moves Away from Frankenfoods
The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:
“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”
Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.
Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.
Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.
While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.
1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.
2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement. PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.
Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.
That makes it libertarian.
US Military to Coordinate Haiti Earthquake Relief
Update: Thanks to reader Jeff for this video of an outfit helping with Haiti’s water needs. It might be a better place for donations than any government relief effort.
Original Post:
I haven’t commented on the Haiti earthquake, mainly because I haven’t been on top of the details. Besides, there’s so much coverage in the MSM about it. My beat here remains the untold story.
But one angle does trouble me. The intervention of the military. I can’t bring myself to say they shouldn’t be involved, which would be the principled thing to say, but it bothers me a lot:
“Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to demonstrate just how much more the U.S. military is able to do than simply kill the enemy. Only the U.S. can initially control flights into and out of the Port-au-Prince airport from aboard a nearby Coast Guard cutter, while waiting for an Air Force special-ops team to set up shop at the airport and step up operations to 24/7. Only U.S. warships have the capability to generate up to 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Only the U.S. military can send a spy drone from California to fly lazy orbits over Port-au-Prince snapping close to 1,000 pictures a day, which when compared with similar ones shot last summer, create a map of the hardest hit areas that can be instantly relayed to those working on the ground.
Only the U.S. military has enough aluminum matting to boost the runway capacity of Port-au-Prince airport. Only the U.S. military has the surveillance capability to quickly assess additional Haitian airfields and seaports for use in rescue relief operations. Only the U.S. military has the wide variety of vessels and aircraft to utilize those fields and ports, including air-cushioned vehicles capable of ferrying 60 tons of supplies from ship to shore at 40 knots. (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the aftermath of the earthquake.)
But the limits of U.S. capability can also be seen: The Pentagon diverted an unmanned Global Hawk drone bound for Afghanistan to Haiti instead, to photograph the damage there. “We were about to send that Global Hawk over to the war” until the earthquake, explained Air Force Col. Bradley Butz. “It will stay here until the President says it’s time to send it forward.”
While the drone had no comment about its sudden change of mission, some of those bound for Haiti welcomed the new assignment after more than eight years of war. “Marines are definitely warriors first,” Captain Clark Carpenter said Friday as his unit prepared to ship out to Haiti from North Carolina. “But we are equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we like to show – a compassionate warrior that can reach out that helping hand to those who need it.”
Read more at Time for the corporate media’s view of the intervention.
And read Michel Chossudovsky, for the deep structure of the intervention, recent US interventions in Haiti, and the extent and implications of a US military presence there (he argues that it’s to monitor and intervene in Cuba and Venezuela).
I recall the tsunami relief effort in 2004 and the intrusion of military vessels and spy satellites into Indonesia and other regions in Asia. Humanitarian interventions are a prime locus for state meddling, because most people will feel reluctant to second-guess what’s happening. They don’t want come off as hard-hearted carping critics, with nothing positive to offer.
A life saved in Haiti is good PR for a life or two killed elsewhere. If such calculations are mathematical (and with the state they always have to be), then we are indeed better off with the US military, many would say.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan, I see, is donating a million to the relief effort.
And Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America are giving a million apiece too. That will be millions taken from the tax-payer and rival banks long defunct. But from wherever it comes, lives will be saved, right?
Thus do they wash their hands clean of guilt.
Who knows.
Maybe Lloyd Blankfein IS doing god’s work.
Or, at least, he’s Dean of the Jeffrey Levitt School of Philanthropy.
[For those with short memories, Levitt stole some $15 million in the 1980s, in the biggest white-collar crime in Maryland history, and almost single-handedly brought down the savings and loan business in the state. One reason he was able to get away with his thieving for so long was that he was careful to make judicious and well-publicized charitable donations].
Open Letter To The Secretary-General Of UN
Wednesday, December 9th 2009, 2:07 AM EST
Co2sceptic (Site Admin)
Dear Secretary-General,
Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.
Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.
We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate…”
For the rest of the post and the complete list of signatories, see Climate realists.
Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated
Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:
“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”
— Telegraph, December 6
Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.
No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.
The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.
“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”
In short, act first, think later.
Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..
At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.
Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me — whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12, were sent on October 12 to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then, realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.
“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”
The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.
But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.
So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.
The hackers have the last word on this:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”
Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.
World Bank’s IFC Suspends Investment in Agrofuels in Indonesia
From The Third World Institute’s Choike program, here’s a recent report that World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC) head Robert Zoellick has agreed to suspend World Bank/IFC financing of the agrofuel sector (oil palm, in this case) in Indonesia, in response to activists’ concerns about environmental degradation and social troubles:
“In response to an appeal by a global coalition of NGOs, IFC / World Bank President Robert Zoellick has agreed to suspend IFC funding of the oil palm sector pending the development of a revised strategy for dealing with the troubled sector.
The response follows a highly critical audit by the IFC’s independent ‘complaints advisory ombudsman’ which had shown that, as claimed by the NGOs, IFC funding of the Wilmar Group had violated the IFC’s own procedures, and commercial concerns had been allowed to override the IFC’s environmental and social standards.”
My Comment:
The IFC is an arm of the World Bank group and is based in Washington, DC. It differs from the World Bank in being entirely private and for-profit and in not being backed by sovereign (i.e. government) guarantees. It’s focus is on investment in the private sector in emerging markets.
This will be a big blow to top agro-fuels producer Singapore-based Wilmar International, whose business activities in Sumatra and Kalimantan have provoked complaints from some 19 environmental groups, plantation small holders, and indigenous people’s organizations:
“IFC’s ombudsman had conducted an audit following the NGO complaints and found that IFC funding of Wilmar International, listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, had violated IFC’s procedures and commercial concerns had been allowed to override IFC environmental and social standards.
The ombudsman’s report was released earlier this month and focused on four financing arrangements made by the IFC between 2003 and 2008 in favor of Wilmar International, which runs more than 200,000 hectares of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia.
IFC had earlier agreed to provide the company with US$33.3 million in investment guarantees and $17.5 million in loans over five year.” (Jakarta Post, Sept 14, 09)
Wilmar is also the supplier of cheap palm kernel that’s used to feed cows by New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra. Fonterra uses 1/4 of the world’s palm kernel – a trade that has drawn fire from NZ environmental groups, which call it a national scandal that a company in a country known for its environmental quality should be doing business with a corporation they describe as destroying Malaysian and Indonesia rain-forest at unsustainable rates.