The G7 recently declared in favour of a target on global warming - of limiting warming to a 2 degrees centigrade average increase from the pre-industrial period, by 2050. This has already been adopted as a target by the EU and is the best scenario for the UN scientific panel on climate change. Energy is critical in all this and it is worth looking at the energy security situation of the G7, in assessing this in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.
There are some key facts in an era of Peak Oil. The world’s oil and gas reserve base is moving eastwards, as US and UK North Sea reserves deplete and Mexican oil fields mature. The majority of these reserves are now located in the centre of the Eurasian triangle, in Russia and the central Asian Republics, and due south in the Gulf.
Among the G7 countries, only Canada has access to secure, long-term indigenous fossil fuel reserves - oil, gas and coal. The US is a major energy importer although it has access to long-term coal reserves and by 2020 the UK, from its recent self-sufficiency, it will have very few long-term fossil fuel reserves now it has closed all but a handful of its coal mines. Japan, Germany and Italy are highly dependent on imported energy, while France which has nuclear and hydro generated electricity is nevertheless highly dependent on imported energy for transport and other sectors.
Looking globally, the energy economy has entered a period of growing instability. This instability has led recently to higher oil and gas prices and then to a sharp drop as the financial and economic crisis hit home and demand fell. At the same time the large, rapidly developing countries (China, India, Brazil) have increased their energy consumption and especially their fossil energy use. For China and India, a rapid move away from fossils is not possible in the medium term, although plans for improved energy efficiency could contribute to less rapidly increasing demand in China.
China is now the second largest energy consumer, after the US, using 17.7% of the world’s primary energy, compared with 20.4% in the US in 2008 (BP, 2009). In million tonnes of oil equivalent this corresponds to 2002.5 and 2299 respectively. While there is still some debate about the calculations, China has now overtaken the US in the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from energy consumption and flaring of fossil fuels - 6017.69 versus 5902 million tonnes ((EIA, 2008).
As the world economy comes out of recession, however slowly, rising demand will once again drive up prices at the pump. President Obama has ordered the US car industry to build more fuel efficient cars. He is quite right. Now is the time to dump the gas guzzler.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Good on you, Judge Chin
Many small investors and no doubt some large ones will welcome the 150 year prison sentence handed down to Bernard Madoff by Judge Denny Chin. Madoff ran the largest of the recently exposed 'Ponzi' scams. In a Ponzi scam, money from new investors, rather than actual profits, is used to pay returns to older investors. Regulators are now catching up with these scams after what 'profits' they were apparently making completely crashed with the global economy last year.
What is amazing is that the regulatory authorities have been so slow about catching out these bank-rolling criminals. Madoff was at it for decades. But he was an esteemed former Chairman of the NASDAQ, the special stock exchange for hitech companies - the core of the future global economy. As a privileged member of the financial elite, he was simply left alone to carry out his crimes. Millions of ordinary people have suffered from financial mis-selling and even theft. Many are, rightly, calling for tough new regulations of financial markets. We have not yet seen much of this - yet billions of dollars of taxpayers' money are being pumped into banks and other ailing financial institutions to bail them out - in case of the very real danger that they will collapse the 'real' economy in which we all live and work.
Madoff and other self-proclaimed 'masters of the financial universe' have a lot to answer for but we, ourselves, are responsible for ensuring that our political leaders take the necessary actions. This means that we need to act at every level. Our own city is caught in the grip of these economic forces. The Wanganui District Council should be spending time sorting out its own mountain of debt to make us less vulnerable. It should act together with other district and regional councils to build financially sustainable local government. They, like we, as individuals, are vulnerable if we remain alone and isolated, but together we can exert real pressure.
Good on you Judge Chin, the son of poor Chinese immigrants to the US. You have struck a blow for us all.
What is amazing is that the regulatory authorities have been so slow about catching out these bank-rolling criminals. Madoff was at it for decades. But he was an esteemed former Chairman of the NASDAQ, the special stock exchange for hitech companies - the core of the future global economy. As a privileged member of the financial elite, he was simply left alone to carry out his crimes. Millions of ordinary people have suffered from financial mis-selling and even theft. Many are, rightly, calling for tough new regulations of financial markets. We have not yet seen much of this - yet billions of dollars of taxpayers' money are being pumped into banks and other ailing financial institutions to bail them out - in case of the very real danger that they will collapse the 'real' economy in which we all live and work.
Madoff and other self-proclaimed 'masters of the financial universe' have a lot to answer for but we, ourselves, are responsible for ensuring that our political leaders take the necessary actions. This means that we need to act at every level. Our own city is caught in the grip of these economic forces. The Wanganui District Council should be spending time sorting out its own mountain of debt to make us less vulnerable. It should act together with other district and regional councils to build financially sustainable local government. They, like we, as individuals, are vulnerable if we remain alone and isolated, but together we can exert real pressure.
Good on you Judge Chin, the son of poor Chinese immigrants to the US. You have struck a blow for us all.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
A Letter to Max
The problem is that the Fascists are relentless once they gain a foothold and they build on the developing euroscepticism which is running throughout established parties and in the UK has been running deep in the equivocal support the mainstream British parties have given to the European (Peace) project. One would have thought they would have learned their lesson by now. I can tell you that there is no appetite among the rising generation of NZers or Aussies to come come back to fight in Europe yet again if it all falls apart and that we, their parents and grandparents will not send them. NZers refused to send young men and women to Iraq to fight in that Imperialist war and will not do it again, lightly.
The political classes in Europe have made two critical errors - they have stopped explaining to the rising generations why they created the European Union (for peace in Europe) and have left the impression it was all just about free markets, which are now failing badly. Instead they created a complex system to keep the economic and social peace; so complex it is difficult to explain in translation from the official languages. Second, those national politicians, seeking to gain advantage over their national fellows, have attacked and denigrated European institutions as both too feeble and too powerful. When Europe has produced some stunning achievements they have often claimed credit for them, themselves. For example, Eurpean trade unions and employers organisations negotiated equal treatment in pay etc for both part-time workers and workers on fixed term contracts. these agreements have become the law of Europe and every member state, bringing equality and millions of euros in wage increases and benefits to millions of European citizens. Blair and Brown and many other national leaders claimed they had achieved this, when in the case of Blair and Brown, they did everything in their power to wreck our negotiations, as UK business did not want to pay equal wages.
So it does not surprise me that, with leaders who will not defend the peace treaties, that millions do not vote.
You should indeed Max, write a letter to the Independent and carry on doing all those things you have been doing before to campaign against this party, the BNP; for it is a party which supports what Hitler did in Germany and what the Japanese Imperial Army did in China and throughout Asia Pacific during the second world war. This is why it is so sad that it was able to secure two seats in the European Parliament created by a Peace Treaty after the end of that war in Europe, a treaty whose main purpose was to create an economic and social basis for a lasting peace in Europe.
As you know there are now quite a few parties like the BNP in other European countries and in the European Parliament, all seeking to pull the European Union apart and to establish militant, nationalist regimes in their own countries. If these, and other less militant parties with similar nationalist politics succeed in their efforts to wreck the European Treaties then we will not be just back to 1945 but probably to 1914 in Europe. The EU has many problems to solve, but not one of these parties has any intention of helping to do so.
My father 'did his duty' like millions of others (including many other colonials of German descent in Australian, Canadian and American armies), when he was asked to do it but he never once talked to us about this, so great was the effect of that episode of his life on him. But I thank God he did so, despite the tragedy that befell the German part of my family, some of whom went to their graves years before they should have done, during the wars of the 20th century. My father, an engineer on aship blown up off the D-Day beaches, grabbed the engine room clock as he finally left the bow section of the ship, which had remained afloat after being blown apart and he used to wind it up every week. It was a seven day clock and it ticked throughout our childhoods. We all knew that something terrible had happened, and this was the way he remembered his fallen comrades.
There are two films now showing in China about the 'rape of Nanjing'. One is the 'City of Life and Death' and it documents how the Japanese Army killed 300,000 citizens of the former Chinese capital city and raped thousands of women and girls in public and private. That Imperial Army, one million strong, went on to kill 4 million Chinese citizens citizens during the occupation of China, but was tied down by the Chinese people's resistance, instead of coming south to Australia and New Zealand, or east to the US, where they were trying to go. Japanese bombers and submarines did get as far as Sydney and Darwin in Australia in any event.
So, yes, Max, I do support everything you are doing to fight the ideas and influence of Mr Brons and his party. It is a very sad day for Britain indeed that you now have to do this.
in solidarity,
Dave
The political classes in Europe have made two critical errors - they have stopped explaining to the rising generations why they created the European Union (for peace in Europe) and have left the impression it was all just about free markets, which are now failing badly. Instead they created a complex system to keep the economic and social peace; so complex it is difficult to explain in translation from the official languages. Second, those national politicians, seeking to gain advantage over their national fellows, have attacked and denigrated European institutions as both too feeble and too powerful. When Europe has produced some stunning achievements they have often claimed credit for them, themselves. For example, Eurpean trade unions and employers organisations negotiated equal treatment in pay etc for both part-time workers and workers on fixed term contracts. these agreements have become the law of Europe and every member state, bringing equality and millions of euros in wage increases and benefits to millions of European citizens. Blair and Brown and many other national leaders claimed they had achieved this, when in the case of Blair and Brown, they did everything in their power to wreck our negotiations, as UK business did not want to pay equal wages.
So it does not surprise me that, with leaders who will not defend the peace treaties, that millions do not vote.
You should indeed Max, write a letter to the Independent and carry on doing all those things you have been doing before to campaign against this party, the BNP; for it is a party which supports what Hitler did in Germany and what the Japanese Imperial Army did in China and throughout Asia Pacific during the second world war. This is why it is so sad that it was able to secure two seats in the European Parliament created by a Peace Treaty after the end of that war in Europe, a treaty whose main purpose was to create an economic and social basis for a lasting peace in Europe.
As you know there are now quite a few parties like the BNP in other European countries and in the European Parliament, all seeking to pull the European Union apart and to establish militant, nationalist regimes in their own countries. If these, and other less militant parties with similar nationalist politics succeed in their efforts to wreck the European Treaties then we will not be just back to 1945 but probably to 1914 in Europe. The EU has many problems to solve, but not one of these parties has any intention of helping to do so.
My father 'did his duty' like millions of others (including many other colonials of German descent in Australian, Canadian and American armies), when he was asked to do it but he never once talked to us about this, so great was the effect of that episode of his life on him. But I thank God he did so, despite the tragedy that befell the German part of my family, some of whom went to their graves years before they should have done, during the wars of the 20th century. My father, an engineer on aship blown up off the D-Day beaches, grabbed the engine room clock as he finally left the bow section of the ship, which had remained afloat after being blown apart and he used to wind it up every week. It was a seven day clock and it ticked throughout our childhoods. We all knew that something terrible had happened, and this was the way he remembered his fallen comrades.
There are two films now showing in China about the 'rape of Nanjing'. One is the 'City of Life and Death' and it documents how the Japanese Army killed 300,000 citizens of the former Chinese capital city and raped thousands of women and girls in public and private. That Imperial Army, one million strong, went on to kill 4 million Chinese citizens citizens during the occupation of China, but was tied down by the Chinese people's resistance, instead of coming south to Australia and New Zealand, or east to the US, where they were trying to go. Japanese bombers and submarines did get as far as Sydney and Darwin in Australia in any event.
So, yes, Max, I do support everything you are doing to fight the ideas and influence of Mr Brons and his party. It is a very sad day for Britain indeed that you now have to do this.
in solidarity,
Dave
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Where there's muck there's brass
This old Yorkshire adage should be followed by the New Zealand and other country dairy industries to save on costs, provide energy and clean up the environment. As the global recession bites, New Zealand and other country dairy farmers will come under tougher cost pressures from increased electricity charges and environmental compliance. One solution is to use dairy waste to raise heat and power. Instead of taking fright at New Zealand greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rules, farmers can turn the situation to their advantage. New Zealand has a particular problem with methane, as 49 % of its GHG comes from grazing animals – mostly from their gut and out of their mouths and a the rest from the back end.
The technology involved comes off the shelf. It is in widespread use in the United States, being taken up in Europe and is now taking off in Asia. Any company which ‘cracks’ the packaging of a flexible system for dairy farms, will make a good living. Whanganui, where I live, and situated between large dairy regions, Taranaki and Manawatu, and having dairy farms of its own, could become a regional centre.
The technology works like this: dairy shed waste is flushed into a set of sumps; the grit is left to settle and then the waste is pumped into a digester. This produces methane gas from the waste, which is then burned to raise heat. It can also be burned in a small methane engine to generate electricity. Remote farms, using expensive diesel generators, can replace them. If a feed pad system is used, then more waste is collected while the cows are eating.
Here are the three wins:
• First, it allows farmers to manage their effluent better, including nitrous oxides. The process does not eliminate nitrogen, but manages it better.
• Second - it converts methane –20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – into useful energy.
• Third, in future, farmers will earn carbon credits for doing this. All political parties should be thinking about how to bring farmers into such a system early, to encourage the take up of biogas generation, now.
The Christchurch, NZ company, BioGenCool and Landcorp have a working prototype. Other trials have been conducted on middle sized dairy farms and several New Zealand companies are in talks with farmers to set up projects. Warwick Cutfield, technical director of Maunsell Engineering laid out the issues in a presentation to our Whanganui River Institute annual seminar back in February. Environutra, a start-up company is in discussions with dairy farmers in the region. The brass is in sight.
The technology involved comes off the shelf. It is in widespread use in the United States, being taken up in Europe and is now taking off in Asia. Any company which ‘cracks’ the packaging of a flexible system for dairy farms, will make a good living. Whanganui, where I live, and situated between large dairy regions, Taranaki and Manawatu, and having dairy farms of its own, could become a regional centre.
The technology works like this: dairy shed waste is flushed into a set of sumps; the grit is left to settle and then the waste is pumped into a digester. This produces methane gas from the waste, which is then burned to raise heat. It can also be burned in a small methane engine to generate electricity. Remote farms, using expensive diesel generators, can replace them. If a feed pad system is used, then more waste is collected while the cows are eating.
Here are the three wins:
• First, it allows farmers to manage their effluent better, including nitrous oxides. The process does not eliminate nitrogen, but manages it better.
• Second - it converts methane –20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – into useful energy.
• Third, in future, farmers will earn carbon credits for doing this. All political parties should be thinking about how to bring farmers into such a system early, to encourage the take up of biogas generation, now.
The Christchurch, NZ company, BioGenCool and Landcorp have a working prototype. Other trials have been conducted on middle sized dairy farms and several New Zealand companies are in talks with farmers to set up projects. Warwick Cutfield, technical director of Maunsell Engineering laid out the issues in a presentation to our Whanganui River Institute annual seminar back in February. Environutra, a start-up company is in discussions with dairy farmers in the region. The brass is in sight.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
May 1st reminds us - working hours are too long
May 1st is a Workers’ Holiday in many countries. It began as a harvest holiday. It became formal after tough strikes in 1886 in Chicago, for the 8 hour day. May Day should give us pause for thought about how long our working hours are. Between them, Kiwi men and women spend an average 62 hours a week at work. There is no legal limit on weekly working hours in New Zealand. Only four other developed countries have no limits.
The deep recession should also give us pause. There is much less work around. To preserve existing jobs, the National Government has extended the nine day fortnight scheme to firms with 50 or more employees, taking it down from the 100 minimum before. Well done. Shorter working hours would also share work around.
Long hours have a huge impact on family life, separating men, especially, from their children. Kiwi men work the second longest average weekly hours in the developed world, after the UK. Many women are working to boost family income because they have no choice, when their kids are young. These days we have many kids who are often ‘home alone’. Throw temporary, agency and migrant work into the mix and we can see social problems being created daily. Families are under pressure and the loss of income in the recession hits hard as well. Decent pay is essential, too.
Long working hours are damaging to health as well as to family life. May 1st makes us reflect and so, too, does our own Labour Day. It also commemorates the struggle for an eight-hour working day. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim this right when, in 1840, the carpenter Samuel Parnell led the fight for the eight-hour day in Wellington. Labour Day was first celebrated in New Zealand on 28 October 1890.
Another milestone in the fight for shorter hours came with the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908. Blackball was the birthplace of the New Zealand Labour Party. Its foundation followed the 1908 miners’ strike to reduce hours of work. If we are to have a healthy society and families which spend time together, then working hours must be reduced. There needs to be much better social support provided for working families with young children. Otherwise we will reap an even worse whirlwind of social problems.
The deep recession should also give us pause. There is much less work around. To preserve existing jobs, the National Government has extended the nine day fortnight scheme to firms with 50 or more employees, taking it down from the 100 minimum before. Well done. Shorter working hours would also share work around.
Long hours have a huge impact on family life, separating men, especially, from their children. Kiwi men work the second longest average weekly hours in the developed world, after the UK. Many women are working to boost family income because they have no choice, when their kids are young. These days we have many kids who are often ‘home alone’. Throw temporary, agency and migrant work into the mix and we can see social problems being created daily. Families are under pressure and the loss of income in the recession hits hard as well. Decent pay is essential, too.
Long working hours are damaging to health as well as to family life. May 1st makes us reflect and so, too, does our own Labour Day. It also commemorates the struggle for an eight-hour working day. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim this right when, in 1840, the carpenter Samuel Parnell led the fight for the eight-hour day in Wellington. Labour Day was first celebrated in New Zealand on 28 October 1890.
Another milestone in the fight for shorter hours came with the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908. Blackball was the birthplace of the New Zealand Labour Party. Its foundation followed the 1908 miners’ strike to reduce hours of work. If we are to have a healthy society and families which spend time together, then working hours must be reduced. There needs to be much better social support provided for working families with young children. Otherwise we will reap an even worse whirlwind of social problems.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Dateline: Beijing
Last week I promised to look at equality in China.
First, there is the stunning fact that over 200 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in recent decades. China is now the world’s third largest economy, yet its citizens have a per capita income of US$3,100. This is one tenth of ours - US$31,000. They are 104 in the league table; we are 28. But the Chinese have been getting wealthier year on year, as their economic growth rate has been stratospheric.
This year China is aiming for a ‘recessionary’ growth rate of 8%! In the months since the global recession hit, 20 million jobs of rural migrant workers have gone in the export factories as orders to the US, European and other shops and factories have dived. But China has not been as hard hit as Japan or the other Asian ‘tiger’ economies.
As recently as 1990, three quarters of the Chinese population lived in the countryside. Now it is down to around half. In the US the rural population is only 7%. The government is pursuing a broad strategy of moving people to urban areas as a means of increasing incomes. However, special measures have now to be put in place to help migrant workers returning to their villages to set up small businesses.
The National People’s Congress, which meets annually in March has just ratified the government’s proposal to spend 4 trillion RMB or US$ 586 billion on the economic stimulus package. More money is available if need be, says Premier Wen Jiabao. Expenditures are already flowing through via construction and infrastructure projects into the industrial economy. Some imports from Western countries are on the rise again, which is important for New Zealand, as exports to China are now substantial.
The government is making efforts, too, to persuade the Chinese, who are great savers, to spend more of their cash. A large chunk of the $586 bn is going into the health and social security systems, which are underfunded. Perhaps the most worrying aspect for China is their huge holding of US government debt. If the US struggles economically, China cannot escape. So while China is in a better position than most large economies, there remains a vast gulf between rural and urban living standards.
First, there is the stunning fact that over 200 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in recent decades. China is now the world’s third largest economy, yet its citizens have a per capita income of US$3,100. This is one tenth of ours - US$31,000. They are 104 in the league table; we are 28. But the Chinese have been getting wealthier year on year, as their economic growth rate has been stratospheric.
This year China is aiming for a ‘recessionary’ growth rate of 8%! In the months since the global recession hit, 20 million jobs of rural migrant workers have gone in the export factories as orders to the US, European and other shops and factories have dived. But China has not been as hard hit as Japan or the other Asian ‘tiger’ economies.
As recently as 1990, three quarters of the Chinese population lived in the countryside. Now it is down to around half. In the US the rural population is only 7%. The government is pursuing a broad strategy of moving people to urban areas as a means of increasing incomes. However, special measures have now to be put in place to help migrant workers returning to their villages to set up small businesses.
The National People’s Congress, which meets annually in March has just ratified the government’s proposal to spend 4 trillion RMB or US$ 586 billion on the economic stimulus package. More money is available if need be, says Premier Wen Jiabao. Expenditures are already flowing through via construction and infrastructure projects into the industrial economy. Some imports from Western countries are on the rise again, which is important for New Zealand, as exports to China are now substantial.
The government is making efforts, too, to persuade the Chinese, who are great savers, to spend more of their cash. A large chunk of the $586 bn is going into the health and social security systems, which are underfunded. Perhaps the most worrying aspect for China is their huge holding of US government debt. If the US struggles economically, China cannot escape. So while China is in a better position than most large economies, there remains a vast gulf between rural and urban living standards.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
I am proud of my Chinese colleagues
I am very proud of my Chinese colleagues and the other foreign advisers working to reduce coal mine accidents among China’s five million miners. The number of fatal accidents in coal mines has fallen from a peak of 6,995 in 2002 to a provisional figure for 2008 of around 3,200. This means that thousands more families have their men folk alive, earning a wage which often supports all three generations of a family.
China’s coal output has increased hugely - from 998 million tonnes in 2000 to 2,720 million tonnes in 2008; so, expressed as a rate per million tonnes of coal produced, fatal accidents have fallen much more than 50%, from 5.8 fatalities per million tonnes in 2000 to 1.18 per million tonnes in 2008. But this figure remains very much higher than the rates for developed countries, especially when compared with Australia and New Zealand, whose large mines are the safest in the world.
But the story does not end here, of course. China is producing over 40% of the world’s coal. It is the fossil fuel with the highest carbon content. Oil has 80% of the carbon of coal on a energy equivalent basis and natural gas has 60% that of coal. Consequently, China’s carbon footprint is rising fast. In total, it has just overtaken the United States, which emits just over 6,000 million tonnes per year. China’s energy demand is rising in line with its 8% annual economic growth rate. Other countries are asking China to maintain this so that they can sell China their goods. China’s CO2 emissions are likely to double to 12,000 million tonnes by 2030.
The earth quite simply cannot sustain this. Consequently, the other part of our work in China is to help China to move towards a lower carbon economy – to first stabilize, then to reduce its emissions. This is no easy task. President Obama is one person who wants to help. He knows very well the US itself has a very great problem in meeting its Kyoto CO2 reduction targets. During the G20 summit in the UK early in April, the US and China discussed these issues. New Zealand and others must help them succeed. Otherwise, the frequency of extreme climate events, like one in one hundred year floods in the Whanganui region, will increase. We have a direct stake in the outcome.
China’s coal output has increased hugely - from 998 million tonnes in 2000 to 2,720 million tonnes in 2008; so, expressed as a rate per million tonnes of coal produced, fatal accidents have fallen much more than 50%, from 5.8 fatalities per million tonnes in 2000 to 1.18 per million tonnes in 2008. But this figure remains very much higher than the rates for developed countries, especially when compared with Australia and New Zealand, whose large mines are the safest in the world.
But the story does not end here, of course. China is producing over 40% of the world’s coal. It is the fossil fuel with the highest carbon content. Oil has 80% of the carbon of coal on a energy equivalent basis and natural gas has 60% that of coal. Consequently, China’s carbon footprint is rising fast. In total, it has just overtaken the United States, which emits just over 6,000 million tonnes per year. China’s energy demand is rising in line with its 8% annual economic growth rate. Other countries are asking China to maintain this so that they can sell China their goods. China’s CO2 emissions are likely to double to 12,000 million tonnes by 2030.
The earth quite simply cannot sustain this. Consequently, the other part of our work in China is to help China to move towards a lower carbon economy – to first stabilize, then to reduce its emissions. This is no easy task. President Obama is one person who wants to help. He knows very well the US itself has a very great problem in meeting its Kyoto CO2 reduction targets. During the G20 summit in the UK early in April, the US and China discussed these issues. New Zealand and others must help them succeed. Otherwise, the frequency of extreme climate events, like one in one hundred year floods in the Whanganui region, will increase. We have a direct stake in the outcome.
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