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How the Crisis Saved the German Railroads
Victor Grossman, MR-Zine
The rolling stock of the German railroads, due to be peddled off to the highest stock market bidders on October 27th, has been saved, at least temporarily, and is still nationally owned. That seems to be the one possible bit of good news in the present economic crisis. All the rest is bad.
The railroad system has been run in recent years by a kind of transportation czar, Helmut Mehdorn, 66, perhaps the least popular figure in German politics. On the one hand he has been constantly raising fares, twice this year alone. On the other hand, while modernizing the main lines for quick, comfortable transportation between Germany’s major cities, he has been mercilessly cutting secondary rail networks between smaller cities and towns, dooming endless kilometers of track to rust and weeds, selling off or abandoning numerous stations and cutting service to all but the diminishing number of “quality” customers.
… Mehdorn’s proclaimed aim for many years now, which he hoped would crown his own career, was to privatize the railroads, in the same way that the post office system, the telephone system and other public utilities have been turned over to private concerns.
A small but determined movement called “Railroads for Everyone” opposed privatization. They pointed out the catastrophic results of this step in Britain and other countries and how postal and telephone employees and the public had suffered from privatization.
… And then came the financial and economic crisis. Instead of 10 billion Euros — and possibly later an additional 8 billion, which the sale proponents had claimed, at least unofficially — the bids of the main potential purchasers began to diminish or vanish and sounded more like 4.5 billion. Morgan Stanley in the USA was having other worries, the same was true of Goldman Sachs and the Swiss financial concern UBS. Even the Russian railroad system, a prospective purchaser, was facing similar problems at home and backed out of the deal.
“Railroads for Everyone,” the group actively opposing the sale, with a moving documentary film and small but spectacular actions at main railroad stations, said the rolling stock was actually worth about 14 billion Euros. It would be a criminal act to sell it way under value, losing billions urgently needed in so many sectors of the economy.
(12 October 2008)
Why motoring will only get more expensive: The car of the future
Andrew English, Telegraph
The real trouble with oil arises from carbon and concentration, not scarcity argue Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheeswaran in their new book “”Zoom – The Global Race To Fuel The Car Of The Future”.
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The second book is “Zoom – The Global Race To Fuel The Car Of The Future” by Iain Carson and Vijay V Vaitheeswaran. These two journalists hail from The Economist and very good they are, too. As a primer into our progress towards “peak oil” (the half way point of all global oil production) and its likely effects, there is no finer contemporary read. The chapters on the search for alternative fuels and the decline of the indigenous US car industry are well told and instructive. As for currently unprecedented high price of oil and gas, it is instructive to read these two wise heads: …
(9 October 2008)
New charges on shipping could help climate
Juliette Jowit, The Guardian
Billions of dollars could be raised to help the poorest countries cope with and tackle climate change under proposals to be floated in London this week for new charges on international shipping.
Opponents fear the charges – in the form of a fuel tax or selling permits to pollute – will raise the cost of food imports, especially for small island states that depend on trade to feed their populations.
However, a report for the environmental campaign group WWF estimates that price increases would average less than 1% and that up to $45bn (£25bn) could be generated a year, most of which would be spent on developing countries…
(6 October 2008)
Trade and climate policies must be linked post-2012
SciDev.Net, The Guardian
China is now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, decades earlier than many predicted. Chinese emissions are often viewed as a Chinese production problem, but the role of spiraling consumption in rich nations should not be underestimated. One third of China’s territorial emissions come from producing exports.
A closer look at China’s emissions from 2002–2005 shows that half their growth was due to export production. A further third of the growth came from capital investments, with a significant share of this in export industries. Indeed, only 15 per cent of the emissions growth from 2002–2005 was due to household and government consumption.
By the same argument, emissions in some developed countries have not stabilised if imports are included. In the UK, for example, emissions associated with consumption have increased 18 per cent since 1992 — even though emissions reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have declined…
… ignoring the developed world’s share of responsibility for Chinese emissions could put post-2012 debates on a negative and protectionist footing, with serious consequences for world trade. In the words of Ma Kai, the chairman of China’s chief economic planning agency, “the ramifications of limiting the development of developing countries would be even more serious than those from climate change”…
(3 October 2008)
