Month: April 2008

Brazil Gusher Bombshell

In Brazil, Another Gusher
If confirmed, a 33-billion-barrels find would trail just two larger oil reservoirs, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Those fields were each discovered more than 60 years ago, but together still account for nearly 8% of global oil output. With a single field, Brazil could potentially top all the proved reserves in the United States, estimated at 29.9 billion barrels, according to BP’s 2007 Statistical Review of World Energy. Mexico’s 35-billion-barrel Cantarell field, discovered in 1976, was largely responsible for that country becoming the world’s fifth-largest oil producer.

“Carioca would be the third-largest oil field in the world,” said Haroldo Lima, director of ANP, at an energy seminar Monday.

Food The silent tsunami

Food | The silent tsunami | Economist.com
A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even China is worried (see article).

Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today’s crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.

Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.

Polar Bear Plays With Potential Dinner

This amazing slide show were taken from a Speaking of Faith audio and slide show by Dr. Stuart Brown, an expert on animal and human play and founder of the National Institute for Play. The photographs, along with more detailed information, are also published on the Institute’s website with the title Why Didn’t the Wild Polar Bear eat the Husky? Thanks to John Brittain

Insight Into Obama’s Dad Surfaces

Long-lost article by Obama’s dad surfaces – Ben Smith and Jeffrey Ressner – Politico.com

Now, a long-forgotten essay written 43 years ago by Obama’s father has surfaced, and its contents reveal much not only about the senior Obama’s grasp of economic theory but also the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native Kenya.

Parts of the article, titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” have been making the rounds on several small blogs over the past week, but Politico is now reproducing the entire piece in its original form online for the first time.

Don’t Blame Trade

A Speech About Nothing – New York Times
Barack Obama delivered a speech in Pittsburgh on Monday on the economic stresses facing American workers. In the speech, he devoted one clause in one sentence to the single biggest factor affecting the workplace: technological change. He then devoted 45 sentences to one of the least important: trade deals.

Economists differ over how much outsourcing will change the American job market in the future, but there is little evidence that trade has been a major cause of job loss or even wage stagnation so far. As Robert Z. Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in a recent study: “The recent increase in U.S. inequality … has little to do with global forces that might especially affect unskilled workers — namely, immigration and expanded trade with developing countries.”

And yet all Democratic domestic policy discussions have to start with trade and, in 99.9 percent of the cases, end with trade. Continue reading “Don’t Blame Trade”

Obama Bashed For Telling It Like It Is

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog
As soon as I think Obama’s pandering too much on economics, he says something this blunt and wise. Of course people get nasty and scared and cling to old shibboleths when they’re feeling vulnerable on economics! That’s the entire history of our country. Read Benjamin Friedman’s brilliant Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

How either McCain or Clinton try to pass this off as “elitism” is just goofy. Obama’s problem is that he’s a lot more honest than either of them. He sees the world more accurately, and when he speaks truth in that direction, he gets chastised by the Boomers with their quintessential ideological view of things.

Yes, we need to connect to middle class ideology again, just like around 1880-1910. But this time it’s a global middle class ideology, so trade protectionism isn’t the answer, unless you’re looking to resurrect fascism again, which I’m sure would seem familiar enough to McCain, given his age, but for the Millennials, that stuff is ancient history. We’ve got to connect to this rising global middle class. That’s where the ideological struggle of the future lies.

Potatoes To Feed The World

As other staples soar, potatoes break new ground | Reuters
Even though the potato emerged in Peru 8,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca, Peruvians eat fewer potatoes than people in Europe: Belarus leads the world in potato consumption, with each inhabitant of the eastern European state devouring an average of 376 pounds (171 kg) a year.

India has told food experts it wants to double potato production in the next five to 10 years. China, a huge rice consumer that historically has suffered devastating famines, has become the world’s top potato grower. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the potato is expanding more than any other crop right now.

Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes Mountains to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice.

No Warming Yet This Century

The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change | the Daily Mail
The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.

The world’s temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – part of Britain’s Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy – has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.

The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014.

Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world’s temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from “settled”.

“5th Beatle” Dies

Neil Aspinall | Economist.com
Yet there seemed to be not one jealous bone in Neil Aspinall’s body; which was why, for almost half a century, he was factotum, doorkeeper and man-of-all-work for four friends who became, in the words of Philip Norman, their biographer, “the greatest engine for human happiness the modern world has known”. From driving the battered old Commer, with hard benches back and front and his charges sleeping among the amps, he progressed to a tour bus and then to a chauffeured limousine with blacked-out windows, forcing its way through crowds of weeping teenage girls. From fetching everyone’s fish and chips, slathered with vinegar not ketchup, he moved up to more particular orders: a one-egg omelette for Ringo, cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches for George, and for John caviar and chocolate cake. In time, as chief executive of the Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, he acquired a chef and a dining room at his office in Savile Row. Continue reading ““5th Beatle” Dies”