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The Key to Fixing Health Care and Energy: Use Less
Michael Grunwald, TIME
Our health-care crisis and our energy crisis are complex dilemmas made of many complex problems. But our biggest problem in both health care and energy is essentially the same simple problem: we use too much. And in both cases, there’s a simple explanation for much of the problem: our providers get paid more when we use more.
Undoing these waste-promoting incentives — the “fee-for-service” payment system that awards more fees to doctors and hospitals for providing more services, and the regulated electricity rates that reward utilities for selling more power and building more plants — would not solve all our health-care and energy problems. But it would be a major step in the right direction.
… Everyone knows we use too much energy. Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets. Meanwhile, studies by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don’t even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars.
… Ultimately, the survival of our planet and the solvency of our country will depend on cultural changes that persuade enough of us to use less energy and less health care. The spread of eco-consciousness has helped with energy, but utilities have helped more, and only doctors can lead the way toward a similar less-is-more mentality in medicine. If Washington can change the incentives, the culture will follow the money.
(29 June 2009)
Market dogma is exposed as myth. Where is the new vision to unite us?
Madeleine Bunting, Guardian
With religion outmoded and society fragmented, it will require a different kind of moral narrative to inspire change
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“It’s the end of the era of market triumphalism,” declared the American political philosopher Michael Sandel in his recent Reith Lectures. The certainties that have dominated the last quarter of a century – that the market knew best, achieved efficiency and produced wealth – have collapsed. Few would disagree with him, but the clarity of that conclusion is matched by the confusion about what comes next. In his last Reith lecture, on Tuesday, Sandel will call for a remoralisation of politics – that we must correct a generation of abdication to the market of all measures of value. Most political questions are at their core moral or spiritual, Sandel declares, they are about our vision of the common good; bring religion and other value systems back into the public sphere for a civic renewal. His audience will probably wince with horror.
Sandel’s prescriptions will deeply divide – he even suggested on Radio 4’s Start the Week that perhaps the non-religious could learn from religious absolutism back in the public sphere – but few would dispute his call for civic renewal
… There is one school of thought which claims that it’s best to forget Westminster, given its miserable failures to regulate itself or the City. Political parties are charades operating antediluvian parliamentary systems; the best chance of renewal is in the myriad of community organising across the country. It’s become almost de rigueur to genuflect at the potential of the grassroots. The argument runs that this will gather strength and organisational capacity, and eventually feed back a reformed politics to the centre.
It sounds authentic and impeccably democratic, but the communitarianism cited, while admirable and transformational to those involved, offers frail green shoots. Compass, London Citizens or Transition are all inspirational initiatives, but they are tiny. Their growth is hard won and vulnerable to setbacks. Though I would be happy to be proved wrong, they seem to be more a measure of our desperation with mainstream politics than a credible politics of renewal.
The documentary film-maker Adam Curtis takes another perspective and is using a radical form of experimental theatre to enable people to grasp the argument intellectually, and to feel it emotionally. He argues that we need to interrogate much more closely what he describes as the current “moment of stagnation”, our incapacity to bring about political change. What is paralysing the collective will?
… Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.
(28 June 2009)
Vandana Shivas views on society & nature
Mike Epitropoulos, ZNet
The following is the presentation made by Dr. Mike Epitropoulos at B-Fest on Friday, May 29th, 2009. Mike Epitropoulos is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former member of the International Committee of the US Green Party. Dr. Epitropoulos has long used the writings of Vandana Shiva in his courses on Political Ecology, Environment and Society, and Development.
Good evening.
Tonight, I will present my interpretation of Vandana Shiva on Society and Nature.
I will summarize Shiva’s latest and classic arguments on the links between these two concepts and their real-world consequences in the context of ‘globalization’ and then proceed to present Shiva’s alternative view of “Earth Democracy,” which includes what she calls Living Democracy and Living Culture, that are based on anthropocentric principles.
… Hunger has direct links to: terrorism, environmental degradation, failed states, failed businesses, and even piracy! Thus, Shiva discusses the Four-Fold Crisis brought about Agribusiness.
Crisis 1) Non-Sustainability. The crisis of non-sustainability has three components: a) the overexploitation of the soil and water, b) the destruction of biodiversity, and c) the spread of toxic pollution.
Crisis 2) the Crisis of Small Farmers & Producers.
Crisis 3) The Crisis of Hunger (estimated at 1 billion people worldwide).
Crisis 4) (Flip side) The Crisis of Obesity (1 billion people, w/400,000 deaths/yr). (On this last crisis, we should note that it’s not only the US, but Greece is increasingly showing up at the top of lists of obesity, childhood obesity, diabetes, meat consumption, smoking, alcohol consumption, etc.)
(29 June 2009)
A new (under) class of travellers
The Economist
Victims of a warming world may be caught in a bureaucratic limbo unless things are done to ease—and better still, pre-empt—their travails
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THE airstrip at Lokichoggio, in the scorched wastes of north Kenya, was once ground zero for food aid. During Sudan’s civil war, flights from here kept millions of people alive. The warehouses are quieter now, but NGOs keep a toehold, in case war restarts—and to deal with what pundits call the “permanent emergency” of “environmentally induced” migration.
Take the local Turkana people. Their numbers have surged in recent decades, and will double again before 2040. But as the area gets hotter and drier, it has less water, grazing and firewood. The drought cycle in northern Kenya has gone from once every eight years to every three years and may contract further. That means no recovery time for the Turkana and their livestock; the result is an increasingly frantic drift from one dry place to another.
A local crisis with local causes? Only partly. Scientists think it is part of a global phenomenon: people across the world on the move as a result of environmental degradation. Just how many are moving, or about to move, is maddeningly unclear.
… These startling numbers may conjure up a picture of huge, desperate masses, trekking long distances and if necessary overrunning border defences because their homelands have dried up or been submerged. But at least initially, the situation in Kenya and other parts of east Africa is likely to be more typical: an already poor population whose perpetual search for adequate pasture and shelter grows harder and harder. In such conditions, local disputes—even relatively petty ones between clans and extended families—can easily worsen, and become embroiled in broader religious or political fights. And that in turn makes it harder for everybody in the area to survive, and more desperate to find new places to live, even if they are not far away.
(25 June 2009)
Cloning Winnie
Tom Peifer, Pueblo Verde
… We-the world that is-need a “take-charge” kind of guy. We need leadership like never before, somebody who can wrap his mind around the task at hand, explain the situation, motivate the masses, and simultaneously smile for the cameras, shake hands, schmooze and kick butt. Unfortunately, my own favorite candidate for the job is currently deceased. Before addressing the ‘slight technical difficulties,’ let me explain why I think Winston Churchill is the man of the hour.
Best known for personifying British steadfastness in the face of the Nazi onslaught during World War II, Churchill had an earlier career as Lord of the Admiralty-head of the Royal Navy. Prior to World War I., he had the vision to push for, and accomplish, the transformation of the Navy from coal to oil-powered, just in time to deploy a vastly superior armada-faster and more easily refueled. He pulled this off in the face of huge opposition and cultural inertia. Britain was built on coal. They dug, transported, burned, breathed and thought coal. Oil was a newfangled thing for them. ‘The sun never set’ on a seafaring empire which had coaling stations for ships around the world. Churchill’s decision proved to be one of the decisive factors in the epic naval warfare of WWI.
We need a guy like Winnie, able to grasp the energy/climate situation, envision the way and take the helm. With all due respect and with tongue slightly in cheek, I can’t think of a better idea than break out the shovels, dig him up, dust him off, get the DNA like in Jurassic Park, clone him quick and get him up and running on the double. Have Armani figure out an appropriate wardrobe for the 21st century. We are in desperate need of a leader who has the glandular fortitude to turn things around in a hurry. To pry millions of fingers off the ‘self-destruct’ button here on spaceship earth.
Tom Peifer is an ecological land use consultant with 12 years experience in Guanacaste.
(25 June 2009, but originally published in 2007)
James Lovelock just wrote a plea, We need a climate change ‘Churchill’. But EB reader Tom Peifer beat him to the punch with this essay he wrote for written for the Howler Magazine in 2007. -BA
