LastSuperpower blog
Strange times are becoming interesting.
I don’t think I’ll make any wild predictions about the current financial crisis being the precursor of an economic meltdown. I wouldn’t have a clue. Nor can I provide a rigorous and convincing case for the claim that crises are inevitable under capitalism.
What I can say is that people like the US Treasury Secretary sure look frazzled and there is no consensus among pundits on whether the $700 billion bail out will do the trick.
It is good to see that the Australian Environment Foundation is alive and kicking and is holding its next conference in Canberra on October 11 to 12. The AEF was set up in 2005 by people who wanted to see environment policy evidence based and solution focused rather than driven by green ideology which not only harms humans but quite often also the environment.
Their first battle was with the Australian Conservation Foundation, the peak green body in Australia, that unsuccesfully took them to court to prevent them using a name they claimed might be confused with their own.
Their chairperson until recently was former TV gardener Don Burke who had to resign because of work commitments. A replacement will be announced shortly. It will be interesting to see who it is.
Resisting climate alarmism has become one of their big areas of interest. In fact the AEF has been closely involved in the establishment of the Australian Climate Science Coalition which will be officially launched at the conference. Continue reading ‘Environment Group with a Difference’
The motor vehicle is one of the key features of modern affluence along with such things as plumbing, electricity, universal education and modern health care. It gave us mobility and independence, and allowed us to move from the slums to the suburbs.
It has various shortcomings as we all know. Driving is stressful and dangerous, with millions killed and disabled every year. And when there is insufficient investment in freeways and public transit, it can eat up a lot of our time.
However, as with other challenges thrown up by our material existence, we can expect human ingenuity to come to the rescue. In this case the solution is the driverless vehicle which require the traveler to do no more than specify their destination. Much of the technology has already been developed and prototype vehicles are well advanced. Continue reading ‘Get rid of the driver and the car stays king’
“We need capitalism before socialism” says Prachanda, the head of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), according to a report in the The Independent .
This is one of those old Marxist ideas that must take off again if a genuine left is to re-emerge from the ether. It has to become a new meme.
What Prachanda is referring to is the fact that a system based on social ownership can only be built on the conditions created by capitalism. This means eliminating the conditions that are the basis of class society – routine labor, low levels of education, a general lack of sophistication and economic backwardness.
Look at it this way. A society based on sharing is only viable when we are generally sharing good things, in particular interesting jobs and affluence. Sharing poverty and jobs that should be done by machines is a no show. Furthermore, we need average people who can do most of the thinking and deciding, and when they cannot, are at least able to monitor and hold accountable those with special knowledge and ability.
In poor countries a major obstacle to progress is statism in its various (including “socialist”) guises which has allowed those in power to plunder the economy and to hold back the development of an entrepreneurial capitalist class. This has usually been assisted by agencies such as the World Bank [1]
Another obstacle is the pseudo left in the rich countries who do not want poor countries to become rich. That would require lots of power plants, roads, railway lines, modern housing and factories. Instead, they just want to make subsistence agriculture more viable by things like donating goats, digging wells and “fair trade”. [2] Continue reading ‘New Meme from Nepalese Maoists?’
I just thought I would pass on some climate change tit bits that I have come across in recent weeks. They show that controversy is alive and kicking despite claims that the debate is over.
Non-warming continues
The flat temperature trend for the last decade has become a cooling over the last year. Check out these graphs.
Over 31,000 US scientists have now signed anti-alarmist petition
The petition web site provides the names of signatories and classifies them by level and areas of training.
Bio-fuels responsible for food price hike According to the World Bank and Oxfam.
Stormy weather
Tropical cyclones have not increased in number or severity in the southern hemisphere of the last 25 years. and
Greenland ice sheet not going anywhere soon
The theory that water is lubricating the base of the ice sheet is challenged by a new study.
We rarely hear a good word for urban sprawl. Apparently it is “unsustainable” because it robs land from farming and nature conservation and has a big carbon “footprint”.
However if all 9 billion of us mid century were living at the density of a leafy suburb, say 3000 per square kilometre, that would require 3 million square kilometres. This would constitute an area considerably less than half that of the contiguous US – or a bit more than the eastern states of Australia. I must say I don’t find that especially scary.
We certainly would not want to encroach too much on farm land, at least not unless we had made the big shift to vertical farming where food is produced using hydroponics in high rise buildings. Nature conservation would also make us want to rule out habitation in some areas. In others, it may be that we would decide to keep down density by having various special arrangements in place. This would include retaining a lot of the original vegetation and controlling threats from exotic flora and fauna. Keeping the cat in at night would be essential.
And, there are lots of deserts to sprawl into. This is popular in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix and The Arab Gulf. You can’t grow anything there and nature would not mind too much.
A detached house with some land is more important for some people than others. Young families want it and so do older people with a garden. (And if your daughter has a horse you will need a nearby paddock…) Other people would be happy to sprawl upwards. This often happens where a location has a special attraction such as a view, lots of night life or requires less travelling. I am not talking “public housing” here. I have in mind a balcony, three bedrooms, study, large kitchen, lounge and dining room. I also envisage all the extras eg parking, gym and pool on the premises.
Floating cities are another possibility. These would allow us to sprawl out into the world’s oceans and experience constantly changing locations.
There is some dispute over whether living in the suburbs is more energy intensive, and hence more carbon intensive, than living in higher density inner areas. Either way I don’t think I can get too worried about carbon footprints. I’m not a climate alarmist, and besides we will undoubtedly move away from carbon based energy sometime later this century.
My hunch is that the urge to sprawl will increase as advances in transport technologies make travel cheaper and less painful. Personal Rapid Transit is one option. Driverless cars is another. These would involve far less death and injury, give us greater ability to avoid congestion and leave us free to read, teleconference, watch a movie, sleep or whatever.
Mass transit is definitely not the answer to current problems. Our transport needs are dispersed in both time and space, and so we need a system that moves individuals not masses.
Returning to the present, some cities have legal walls around them to prevent sprawl (“smart growth” it’s called). Often this is combined with a total failure to allow sufficient housing development within existing areas. House prices then go through the roof. The ratio of average house prices to average income is two to four times higher in “smart growth” cities than in places such as Germany, and the more freewheeling parts of the USA.
Melbourne (Australia), where I live, is surrounded by “green wedges” where building is not permitted. Given that there are no breaks between adjoining wedges, it is more like a noose strangling the city. A city under siege you might say.
In the long term however there will be no end to our sprawl as we spread out into the rest of the solar system and beyond.
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Some extra links:
Demographia a pro-sprawl web site.
The Institute of Public Affairs’ page on Australian housing
Here is a Green link on Personal Rapid Transport
‘Anti-capitalist’ sentiment is almost in the air we breath these days. At every turn we are reminded that capitalism and the life styles it makes possible threatens to destroy everything dear to our hearts and in particular that it is trashing the environment beyond repair. Strangely enough, the rich and powerful who are accused of wreaking this havoc, don’t seem particularly concerned about this message.
Despite claims to the contrary, “Big Oil”, “Big Mining” and “Big Retailing” just aren’t throwing big buckets of money into the battle to refute Big Green and Big “Left”. On the contrary, they have done very little to try to stem this tide. In some cases they actually fund it through various philanthropic foundations and by media advertising which feeds into it. Indeed there are many individual capitalists who have actively embraced it. Others seem to be just going along with it because such a tidal wave is difficult to resist. Why isn’t the capitalist class fighting back?
A small rearguard of classical liberals in “right wing think tanks” along with the Murdoch press are putting up some resistance. (Here‘s my favorite.) Associated with them are conservative stragglers who prefer the old time religion to the new green one. However, this is a beleaguered fringe effort which has little impact on the media mainstream.
The last time those in charge supported a fake “anti-capitalist” movement was in the 1930s. That one was called fascism. Of course the present movement is not remotely as toxic and we should be very grateful for that. However let’s hope their tolerance of the new weltanschauung backfires as badly as it did the last time.
Many people are beginning to feel that it has all gone too far. There is increasing opposition to oppressive demands that we restrict our “luxurious” lifestyle. Petty things like having plastic bags taken away to more serious matters like the government refusing to build sufficient power stations or to open up new land for housing are generating some resistance. And the fashionable nonsense which dominates increasing parts of the school and university curriculum has become more of a hot topic.
If a genuine revolutionary left were to emerge phoenix like and soar above this miasmic fog it would have the advantage of dominating the high ground because it would be the only serious and uncompromised defender of science and human progress against reactionary neo-romantic nonsense. At the same time it would be capable of demonstrating that the progress still being engendered by capitalism is providing the very conditions which will enable us to advance beyond it. Now that would give Big Capitalism something it would have to worry about.
Meanwhile those in charge are happy to let us all talk about the weather.
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