Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Time for a Carbon Tax?
Gas Taxes, Peak Oil and Long Range Energy Planning
Ed. note: This item originally ran in Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog.
I consider the level of dependence of the U.S. on imported petroleum to be a very large financial risk endangering the country's future. There are certainly other import-related risks as well, but here I want to talk about the financial risk.
I consider it similar to having a mortgage upon which you pay interest each month - but in which the interest rate can fluctuate wildly. If you typically pay 7% interest on your mortgage, but your rates quickly climb to 12%, a lot of people would find themselves in a deep financial hole. Come to think of it, a lot of people did when they found themselves in a similar situation. They gambled on the future and lost.
With respect to oil prices, we are also gambling on the future. We import a bit over 9 million barrels per day of crude oil (we also import gasoline, diesel, etc.) Each $10/bbl increase in the price of oil means that consumers pay $33 billion more each year for oil. We are now paying $100 billion more each year for oil than we were just a few short years ago, and that money comes out of all of our pockets. This acts as a tax upon the U.S. economy, albeit one that doesn't primarily benefit U.S. citizens.
The drain on the U.S. economy is one thing, but the risk is quite another. Why do we tolerate that sort of price risk? In my opinion, it is because tolerating the status quo is viewed by politicians as the cheapest, most politically safe option. And even if they are concerned about the risks, when economists say that oil might be going back down to $30, politicians are paralyzed from taking action. The uncertainty is a killer.
A story I read this morning highlights that uncertainty, and points to some of the consequences:
Low Gas Prices Threaten Green Car Revolution
The single biggest factor determining the success or failure of high-tech fuel-efficient cars is not battery technology, legislation, tax incentives, new model introductions, or infrastructure. It’s gas prices. The price at the pumps is the elephant in the room when it comes to green cars.
I would imagine that there is general agreement on that. When gas prices raced ahead, the Toyota Prius began to outsell the Ford Explorer. When gas prices fell back to $2/gal, SUV sales surged and Prius sales plunged.
The fundamental problem is that many people don't make long-range plans with energy prices in mind. When gasoline goes to $2/gal, some expect it to stay there and so that SUV purchase doesn't look bad - until gasoline is back to $4/gal. And the inability to plan is compounded by analysts who give mixed messages on which way oil prices are going:
Japanese broker Ryoma Furumi said oil prices will stay rangebound at $70-$75 a barrel; analysts at Mirae Asset Securities said prices are likely to consolidate between $65 and $75; and Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates, said crude could be pushed toward the $75 mark.
Verleger, the energy consulting firm, predicts a drop in oil this year—all the way down into the $30s. The firm bases this prediction on crude stockpiles in the US being 14 percent higher than a year ago, and gasoline supplies up by 2.2 percent. Also, OPEC is currently pumping 600,000 barrels a day more than the world needs.
Meanwhile, Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of French oil giant Total, this week said he sees a risk of oil rebounding to $100 a barrel unless there’s greater investment in exploration. He warned of a possible oil shortage between now and 2015 if immediate action is not taken to invest in exploration. "The reserves of oil are there but if you don't invest they don't come on the market," de Margeries said.
Would we plan differently if we knew that oil prices were going to be $100/bbl? Of course we would. We have already seen consumers respond as oil prices went over $100/bbl. But while consumers were responding, a lot of damage was done to the U.S. economy. The airline industry and the auto industry took a beating, as did many personal budgets that suddenly had to cope with much higher weekly fuel outlays.
Enough gambling on oil prices! Let's raise the price of petroleum via taxes so that people can make energy plans that incentivize them to become more fuel efficient. As I have argued before, you can direct that back at people in the form of a tax credit. The idea would be to trade energy taxes for income taxes.
The benefit would be that we would start moving toward a higher level of fuel efficiency without having to legislate CAFE mandates that end up being gamed. With increased fuel prices, people will demand more efficient vehicles. Automakers will know which cars they need to build. Renewable energy - particularly those varieties that aren't heavily reliant on fossil fuels - would also see a boost. Not only would they be competing against higher priced fossil fuels, but project developers could have more assurance that oil prices aren't going to fall to $30 and destroy their project economics.
The benefits would be substantial. Most importantly, our consumption would fall. I consider it very important to stretch our remaining fossil fuel endowment as far as we can, and we can do a better job of that if we manage it. We need to buy time, because renewables are not ready to fill the supply gap that will result if we burn through our remaining oil too quickly.
I don't think there is any question our oil imports would fall as people started to change their transportation arrangements. Following the high prices of mid-2008, total petroleum imports over the following 12 months fell by 700,000 barrels/day over the previous 12 months (although it is hard to say how much of that was recession-induced).
I have long complained that government energy policies that vacillate every time a different political party comes into power have long been an impediment for companies trying to do long-range project planning, both for fossil fuel and renewable energy projects. Volatile prices have much the same impact. I have had my disagreements with Vinod Khosla in the past, but his call to put a floor underneath oil prices has merit (see Point 14 here).
Having a price floor would would allow companies - especially energy companies and auto makers - to do a better job of long range planning. I don't fault automakers for getting caught with an oversupply of SUVs as oil prices skyrocketed. They were just making cars that people in a low-oil-price scenario had long demanded. With the certainty of higher prices, the auto companies needn't gamble that SUV sales are going to come back strong. They would know that they need to shift to the more efficient vehicles that consumers will demand.
I have no problem with taking calculated risks, but I do not gamble. Living on the Gulf Coast of Texas without hurricane insurance is gambling, because the hurricane probability is too high. I don't see that as much different than the risk we place on the economy by not taking more proactive steps to insulate the economy against price spikes. But we didn't learn that lesson in 1973, nor in the 1974-75 recession that followed. I don't expect we are much wiser today.
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
From Ted Talks = Inspiring Science
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Monday, 21 September 2009
Friday, 18 September 2009
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
War Crimes From the Independent - Anyone Listening
Report also censures Hamas but accuses Israelis of punishing entire population of the Palestinian Strip
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Israel targeted "the people of Gaza as a whole" in the three-week military operation which is estimated to have killed more than 1,300 Palestinians at the beginning of this year, according to a UN-commissioned report published yesterday.
A UN fact-finding mission led by the Jewish South African former Supreme Court Judge Richard Goldstone said Israel should face prosecution by the International Criminal Court, unless it opened fully independent investigations of what the report said were repeated violations of international law, "possible war crimes and crimes against humanity" during the operation.
Using by far the strongest language of any of the numerous reports criticising Operation Cast Lead, the UN mission, which interviewed victims, witnesses and others in Gaza and Geneva this summer, says that while Israel had portrayed the war as self-defence in response to Hamas rocket attacks, it "considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole".
"In this respect the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support," the report said. It added that some Israelis should carry "individual criminal responsibility."
The 575-page document presented to yesterday's session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva was swiftly denounced by Israel. The foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the UN mission had "dealt a huge blow to governments seeking to defend their citizens from terror", and that its conclusions were "so disconnected with realities on the ground that one cannot but wonder on which planet was the Gaza Strip they visited".
The Gaza war began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009.
The UN report found that the statements of military and political leaders in Israel before and during the operation indicated the use of "disproportionate force", aimed not only at the enemy but also at the "supporting infrastructure". The mission adds: "In practice this appears to have meant the civilian population."
The mission also had harsh conclusions about Hamas and other armed groups, acknowledging that rocket and mortar attacks have caused terror in southern Israel, and saying that where launched into civilians areas, they would "constitute war crimes" and "may amount to crimes against humanity".
It also condemned the extrajudicial killings, detention and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Hamas regime in Gaza - as well as by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank - and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal abducted by Gaza militants in June 2006.
While the Israeli government refused to co-operate with the inquiry - or allow the UN team into Israel - on the ground that the team would be "one-sided", Cpl Shalit's father, Noam, was among those Israeli citizens who flew to Geneva to give evidence.
That said, the much greater part of the report - and its strongest language - is reserved for Israel's conduct during the operation. Apart from the unprecedented death toll, the report says that "the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces". The purpose was "to make the daily process of living and dignified living more difficult for the civilian population".
The report also says that vandalism of houses by some soldiers and "the graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian population". Hospitals and ambulances were "targeted by Israeli attacks."
Amid a detailed examination of most of the major incidents of the war - albeit an examinations carried out five months after the incidents took place - it says that:
* The first bombing attack on Day One of the operation when children were going home from school "appears to have been calculated to cause the greatest disruption and widespread panic".
* The deaths of 22 members of the Samouni family sheltering in a warehouse were among ones "owing to Israeli fire intentionally directed at them", in clear breach of the Geneva Convention.
* The firing of white phosphorus shells at the UN Relief and Works Agency compound was "compounded by reckless regard of the consequences", and the use of high explosive artillery at the al-Quds hospitals were violations of Articles 18 and 19 of the Geneva Convention. It says that warnings issued by Israel to the civilian population "cannot be considered as sufficiently effective" under the Convention.
* On the attack in the vicinity of the al-Fakhoura school, where at least 35 Palestinians were killed, Israeli forces launched an attack where a "reasonable commander" would have considered military advantage was outweighed by the risk to civilian life. The civilians had their right to life violated as under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). And while some of the 99 policemen killed in incidents surveyed by the team may have been members of armed groups, others who were not also had their right to life violated.
* The inquiry team also says that a number of Palestinians were used as human shields - itself a violation of the ICCPR - including Majdi Abed Rabbo, whose complaints about being so used were first aired in The Independent. The report asserts that the use of human shields constitutes a "war crime under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court."
From the Guardian - Thought Crime
* News
* UK news
* Crime
'Columbine' plot prosecution accused of wasting public money
Police and CPS face criticism after court clears teenagers of planning to carry out massacre at Manchester school
* Buzz up!
* Digg it
* Helen Carter
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 17.56 BST
* Article history
McKnight and Swift cleared after Columbine copycat trial
McKnight and Swift leave Manchester crown court. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA
A jury took just 45 minutes today to clear two teenagers of plotting to carry out a Columbine-style massacre at their school, prompting claims that the prosecution was a waste of public money.
Matthew Swift, 18, and Ross McKnight, 16, were accused of orchestrating an attack on pupils and teachers at Audenshaw High School on 20 April this year, the 10th anniversary of the rampage in Colarado by the teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
But the jury at Manchester crown court accepted the Swift's and McKnight's defence that they had been guilty only of indulging in a "fantasy" to channel teenage angst.
Police and prosecutors were criticised for pursuing the case against the pair, who had not been in trouble with the police before. One of the defence barristers said it had been an "unnecessary, heavy-handed prosecution" that had wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) insisted, however, that it had been in the public interest for the teenagers to be put before a jury.
McKnight's father, Ray, a serving police officer, declined to comment on the CPS's decision but said both his son and Swift had gone through "purgatory" and "absolute agony" after spending six months remanded in custody, McKnight at a young offenders' institute and Swift in Strangeways prison.
Outside Manchester crown court, Ross McKnight said: "I would like to make it clear that at no time was any person put at risk. This was just a fantasy. This was never a reality. I would just like to say that during my time in custody, I have taken my GCSEs. I hope that my wish to join the army has not been harmed."
The prosecution had claimed the best friends, from Denton in Greater Manchester, were obsessed with the Columbine killers Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17, who murdered 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves in 1999.
It was alleged Swift and McKnight had planned a similar murder spree against their own school, which they named Project Rainbow. They would also have planted a diversionary bomb at the Crown Point North shopping centre in Denton, the prosecution said.
The trial heard the teenagers had spent months chatting about the subject online, though much of the case was based on diaries kept by the pair full of hate-filled rants against the school and society.
No explosives or firearms were discovered after their arrest in March, when police were tipped off that McKnight had made a drunken telephone call to a female friend in which he boasted about carrying out the plan. The trial heard a second girl had received a message from McKnight saying: "If I ever text you not to come into school don't question it, just don't go in."
When police searched Swift's bedroom, they found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, which details how to manufacture explosive devices, and an imitation machine gun that fires ball bearings.
Inside a safe were plans of the school and details of how to use acetone peroxide as a detonator. Also inside the safe was a notepad containing detailed entries about the so-called Project Rainbow. On page one was written: "Ground Zero ... Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold will rise again."
In one note, Swift wrote: "Audenshaw high will be no more. Unlike Columbine, my propane bomb will actually fucking explode and I will walk from classroom to classroom killing the fuck out of everybody, then maybe people will learn."
Swift is is an orphan and was brought up by his grandparents, having never known his father and lost his mother when he was aged 10. He told the jury his notes were "naive and pathetic ways to channel my teenage angst. I was 16 with a vivid imagination."
Giving evidence, Ray McKnight said his son was full of harebrained schemes, such as climbing Ben Nevis in winter or creating a dinghy service along local canals.
The jury cleared both teenagers of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property.
McKnight's defence counsel, Roderick Carus QC, said it had been a weak case and possibly the "quickest acquittal of this apparent gravity" that he had experienced.
He said: "There is a generation gap here, perhaps because we don't understand how young people live on their computers, that we fail to understand."
Stephen Turner, the headteacher of Audenshaw High School, said both were "perfectly ordinary boys" while at school, and they had done well in their examinations.
During the investigation, the police flew two detectives to Colorado to question the homicide department that investigated the Columbine killings. Later, that case's lead investigator, Kate Battan, was flown to Manchester.
Yesterday, Constable Terry Sweeney, responsible for criminal justice at Greater Manchester police, said: "We presented the evidence we had to the Crown Prosecution Service and, together as a prosecution team, it was felt it was in the public's interest to take this matter before the courts."Ultimately, as part of a fair judicial process, it is for a jury to decide whether there is sufficient evidence for a conviction. In this case, the jury took the decision not to convict, and we respect their decision."
John Lord, reviewing lawyer at the CPS, said: "The case brought against Matthew Swift and Ross McKnight was, we believe, one that was as equally strong as serious ... As such, we felt it was in the public interest to ensure that the charges against the defendants were given the full scrutiny of a jury."
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
GM Watch - an interesting Site
Keep up to date with the latest news on the issue of genetically modified (GM) food and crops and find out about the deceptive PR campaigns being used to promote GM worldwide.
News and Comment from GMWatch
Latest News
- Latest news from GMWatch on Twitter
- Farmers in Pakistan protest against Monsanto's GM trials
- The Agrichemical Revolutionary
- Re: Illegal GM contaminates flax
- Green Revolution wasn't green enough
- More on French research on organic food
- Illegal GM contaminates flax - UK fails to respond
- Big anti-GM protest in Germany
- "The Legend Passes On"
- New research points to organic benefits
from the Nation - Michael Pollan
Wendell Berry for That
By Michael Pollan
The Nation Posted on September
10, 2009, Printed on September 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142502/
This article is adapted from Michael Pollan's introduction to Bringing It
to the Table, a collection of Wendell Berry's writings out this fall from
Counterpoint.
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable
garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business
section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the
headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the
paper's agriculture reporter, said that "after being largely ignored for
years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have
found a receptive ear in the White House."
Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform
the way Americans grow food and feed themselves -- the "food movement,"
as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- local
and organic and pastured -- are thriving, farmers' markets are popping up
like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms
tallied in the Department of Agriculture's census has gone up rather than
down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to
"sustainability" and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and
activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the
USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors.
Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there
have been more words than deeds -- but some of those words are
astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a
reporter for Time that "our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil"; he went on
to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial
agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other,
the healthcare crisis.
Americans today are having a national conversation about food and
agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short
years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation,
with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links
between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well
and being in good health unless it also farms well.
But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and
farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell
Berry, Frances Moore Lapp, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of
these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive
science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology
but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection
between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life
in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from
that soil.
I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971,
when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue
introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British
agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry's own since he
first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry's thinking about
agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard's master
idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and
prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to
reconceive "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as
one great subject." No single quotation appears more often in Berry's
writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as
even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a
guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible.
That same year, 1971, Lapp published Diet for a Small Planet, which
linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to
cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the
decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis,
showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the
industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist
colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood
without reference to the problem of agriculture.
Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all
we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good
farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more
political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a
couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought;
and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have
averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now
find ourselves.
For what would we give today to have back the "environmental crisis" that
Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of
the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively
manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type
2 diabetes became "epidemic"? (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to
the early 1980s.)
But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin
thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter
was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat
and solar panels), we went back to business -- and agribusiness -- as
usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter's solar panels from
the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of
ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins
of national politics and culture.
When I began writing about agriculture in the late '80s and '90s, I
quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject
timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off
avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something
people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never
thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.
It was during this period that I began reading Berry's work closely --
avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I
was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own
food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of
New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when
it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child
of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems
of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild
and didn't fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don't
have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field
at Walden, but he couldn't square his love of nature with the need to
defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on
agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that "if it were proposed to me
to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human
art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for
the swamp." With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing
about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It's not
at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at
farming and gardening.
It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a
sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture.
Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I
had a legitimate quarrel with nature -- a lover's quarrel -- and showed
me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He
relocated wildness from the woods "out there" (beyond the fence) to a
handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a
necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He
marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators
but as full-fledged participants.
Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau
problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism,
which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone
than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we're finally
beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American
environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban
eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for
getting it started with sentences like these:
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in...farming? There are lots of
reasons - but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in
food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists
may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they
are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all
farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by
somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to
resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly
directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. - -
"Conservationist and Agrarian," 2002
That we are all implicated in farming -- that, in Berry's now- famous
formulation, "eating is an agricultural act" -- is perhaps his signal
contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All
those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at
the farmers' market, are deep in his debt.
2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142502/
Monday, 14 September 2009
NYT Michel Pollan
by The New York Times
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
by Michael Pollan
To listen to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night, or to just
about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the
biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself -
perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures,
lack of competition, and greed.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care
industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States
spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care
can be substantially explained, as a study [1] released last month says,
by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the
administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of
chronic disease linked to diet.
That's why our success in bringing health care costs under control
ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to
take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food
industry.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [2],
three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat "preventable
chronic diseases." Not all of these diseases are linked to diet - there's
smoking, for instance - but many, if not most, of them are.
We're spending $147 billion [3] to treat obesity, $116 billion [4] to
treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular
disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the
so-called Western diet. One recent study [5] estimated that 30 percent of
the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be
attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts
for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the
debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions
to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle
Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama
talked about putting a farmers' market in front of the White House, and
building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public
schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer
Tater Tots. He's even floated the idea of taxing soda.
But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national
conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to
go on encouraging America's fast-food diet with its farm policies even as
it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that
diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the
uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2
diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is
politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At
least in the health care battle, the administration can count some
powerful corporate interests on its side - like the large segment of the
Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.
That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap
food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs
of that food are charged to the future. There's lots of money to be made
selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes.
One of the leading products of the American food industry has become
patients for the American health care industry.
The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2
diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict
one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in
the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it
more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There's
more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them
on diet and exercise.
As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be
good business, but, at least under the current rules, it's much better
business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your
pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules
against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients
overboard when they become ill.
But these rules may well be about to change - and, when it comes to
reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a
game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on
offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same
rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their
rolls regardless of their health. Terms like "pre-existing conditions"
and "underwriting" would vanish from the health insurance rulebook - and,
when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and
the food industry will undergo a sea change.
The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will
promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of
obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2
diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year;
over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will
quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent
adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy
Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to
future profits.
When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the
collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food
system - everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches
- will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn't really
ever had before.
AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has
swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health
insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk
food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and
Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm
bill - which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those
agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with
the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.
In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight
behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and
perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City's
bold new ad campaign [6] against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal
campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a
political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of
Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption,
which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.
That's why it's easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a
soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time
the industry would come to see that the development of regional food
systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on
heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease
and reduce their costs.
Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the
foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative
systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their
conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they
determined that promoting the concept of a "foodshed" - a diversified,
regional food economy - could be the key to improving the American diet.
All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter
how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis.
To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on
improving our health - which means going to work on the American way of
eating.
But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require
insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that
course.
For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard
look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it
down. 2009 The New York Times Michael Pollan is the author, most
recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto [7]. His previous
book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals [8] (2006),
was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the
Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire: A
Plant's-Eye View of the World [9] (2001); A Place of My Own [10] (1997);
and Second Nature [11] (1991). A contributing writer to the New York
Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards,
including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the
Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan
served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now
the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC
Berkeley [12].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/10
Saturday, 5 September 2009
22 years escape from corporations
This reminds me of the great escape from pissing my life away branded by some faceless corporation, living a life under some idiot of a middle manager wishing my life away and waiting for dead shoes and depending on other twits.
and then making my own huge mistakes !
Friday, 4 September 2009
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Easyjets downed - 20% start - Lets hope the rest stop
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 3:57 PM on 03rd September 2009
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easyJet is cutting the number of flights out of Luton
easyJet is cutting the number of flights out of Luton
EasyJet is to cut 20 per cent of its flights out of Luton Airport and close its East Midlands base, it was revealed today.
The budget airline also wants to slash of the number of pilots and cabin crew at Belfast, Bristol, Newcastle and Stansted airports.
EasyJet blamed the cutbacks at Luton on 'the airport's failure to recognise the commercial realities of the recession', while saying that its East Midlands airport operation had 'remained stagnant for many years'.
The low-price carrier started at Luton and refers to it as its 'spiritual home' but had been refusing to pay higher landing charges proposed by the airport.
EasyJet said flights to and from East Midlands airport up to the end of the year are 'wholly unaffected'.
Passengers travelling to and from East Midlands beyond the end of this year would be informed well in advance if and how their travel might be affected.
The airline employs 120 staff and operates three aircraft at East Midlands, and carries around 700,000 passengers a year.
The consultation on crew numbers at Belfast, Bristol, Newcastle and Stansted affects about 40 pilot and cabin crew jobs.
EasyJet has 530 pilots and cabin crew at Luton where it operates 16 aircraft and carries 4.7 million passengers a year.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210901/easyJet-slashes-flights-Luton-closes-Midlands-airport.html#ixzz0Q4kSYcVB
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
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