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Bangladesh rations natural gas
AFP via Yahoo!News
DHAKA (AFP) – Gas-rich Bangladesh has decided to ration natural gas to industry from this week after demand rose sharply to outstrip supply, a junior minister said.
“The daily gap between demand and supply now stands at about 110 million cubic feet. As a result, we don’t have any choice but to ration gas to industries,” Deputy Energy Minister Mahmudur Rahman told AFP on Thursday.
…The country is one of the world’s poorest with nearly half its 140 million population living on less than a dollar a day.
(13 October 2005)
The supermarket goes south
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
The United States has made two great contributions to world cuisine over the last century: the fast-food franchise and the supermarket.
Temples of the cheap-food revolution, both institutions flourished in the 20th century, offering consumers convenience and the cachet of fast life. At the height of the post-war prosperity boom, before the yuppie-led backlash, fast-food and the supermarket occupied the cutting edge of food fashion in a rapidly suburbanizing nation.
Stagnation is causing all manner of disruption in the grocery industry. …
The resulting strategy has been to head south — to globalize. The post-industrial world’s grocery market may have matured, but there are still plenty of people in the southern hemisphere who nourish themselves within traditional, localized food networks. As southern-hemisphere governments have opened their markets to foreign investment over the past 20 years, prodded by the IMF and other transnational institutions, an enormous opportunity has arisen for multinational food processors and grocery giants.
(13 October 2005)
More concentrated food production and longer supply chains are not good news.-LJ
Has the Green dream wilted?
Sam Wilson, BBC
Only half a decade ago the future of Europe looked greener than ever before.
Green parties were part of the governments of five European countries, pushing the environment closer to the forefront of policy-making.
“Some had the impression that a luminous sunflower was hanging in the grey sky,” wrote Juan Behrend, the former secretary general of the Green federation in the European parliament.
But that era is now over.
With the cementing of a grand coalition in Germany this week, Greens have lost their last toehold in western European government, and their most recognisable figure, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, is out of office.
And this at a time, says Mr Behrend, when “the current climate is asking for Green politics”.
(13 October 2005)
Round up of Green Party prospects in Europe.
Inflation surge: Here to stay?
Ron Scherer, Christian Science Monitor
A sharp rise is expected in September’s consumer price index, to be released Friday.
————
NEW YORK – If it feels like money is flowing out of your pocket, it isn’t your imagination.
In the wake of the hurricanes, the cost of living across the nation is skyrocketing.
• In Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Jerry’s Café is telling customers it will raise breakfast prices by 10 percent.
• It used to cost Jacques Stambouli of Via Trading $650 to move a truckload of goods from Reno to Los Angeles. Today? $750. He’s passing the hike on to consumers.
• And in Bethlehem, Pa., Linda Cameron complains that a paperback book is now $15. “It’s crept up from $11,” she says.
Such changes are expected to show up Friday when the government reports the September consumer price index (CPI). Economists expect this inflation indicator to show a rise of between 1 and 1.5 percentage points.
This would be the sharpest spike since January 1990, when the CPI rose by 1.1 percent after a cold snap in December shot energy prices higher.
It is a number that will be scrutinized carefully by the Federal Reserve as it weighs whether to continue raising interest rates. And the financial markets will also be parsing the inflation number to determine if the September event is a one-time price shock, or something more worrisome.
(13 October 2005)
Many of the price increases mentioned in the article are due to higher energy prices.-BA
Natural Gas Users to Take Hit This Winter
H. Josef Hebert, AP via Yahoo!News
WASHINGTON – Winter heating bills will be a third to a half higher for most families across the country, with the sharpest increases expected for those who heat with natural gas, the Energy Department forecast Wednesday.
The department said natural gas users can expect to pay an average of $350 more during the upcoming winter compared to last year, an increase of 48 percent. Those who heat their homes with fuel oil will pay $378 more, or 32 percent higher than last winter.
(12 October 2005)
Refiner Madness
Senate’s stab at energy legislation may be more moderate than House bill
Amanda Griscom Little, Grist Magazine
“Shame, shame, shame, shame!”
That’s the furious chant that erupted from the Democratic section of the House of Representatives last Friday after Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) managed to eke out a victory for his Gasoline for America’s Security (GAS) Act, which would loosen environmental laws and boost industry incentives to accelerate the expansion of oil-refinery capacity in the U.S.
Now the onus is on Senate leaders who must decide whether they will help parlay Barton’s much-contested victory into law.
Strongly backed by President Bush, the GAS Act has been framed by Barton as a response to the escalating gas prices provoked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but critics say it is simply a repackaging of industry-friendly provisions that were cut out of the pre-Katrina energy bill on the grounds that they were too extreme.
(13 October 2005)
Also see Sierra Club’s Carl Pope on the GAS Act, recommended by David Roberts at Gristmill.
Greenspan Says Economy Handling Energy Costs `Reasonably Well’
Bloomberg
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. economy has “weathered reasonably well the steep rise” in energy prices thanks to market-driven incentives and “flexibility.”
“The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have surely produced marked economic contraction, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility,” Greenspan said in the text of his remarks to the National Italian American Foundation’s Frank J. Guarini Public Policy Forum in Washington.
Greenspan’s remarks today were nearly identical to comments made to the National Association for Business Economics on Sept. 27. The 79-year-old Fed chairman didn’t comment in his text on the state of the U.S. economy or on U.S. interest rate policy.
Crude oil prices are up 22 percent over the past 12 months, raising an inflation alert at the Federal Reserve. In minutes from their Sept. 20 meeting released yesterday, the Fed suggested that the risk of higher prices appears to outweigh that of an economic slowdown and said interest rates will probably go higher.
(12 October 2005)
What Greenspan calls “flexibility” usually translates into lower real wsges for working people. See ianqui’s post (Inflation and oil-price shocks) at The Oil Drum. The combination of outsourcing/globalization and economic disruption due to higher energy prices will hit working people hard. See the following article for more analysis.
The vanishing middle
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
We’re leveling down.
With the bankruptcy filing Saturday of Delphi Corp., the largest American auto parts manufacturer, the downward ratcheting of living standards that has afflicted the steel and airline industries hit the auto industry big-time. As Delphi executives tell the tale, they need to reduce the hourly pay of their 34,000 unionized employees from the current $26 to $30 range to a somewhat more modest $10 to $12.
No one denies that Delphi is losing money — about $5.5 billion over the past year and a half. Its labor costs are roughly 10 times those in Mexico and China, where an increasing number of parts that go into cars assembled in the United States are made.
The crisis for autoworkers, their families and communities isn’t likely to be limited to parts suppliers. Delphi, which General Motors spun off in 1999, still sells about half its products to GM. Under the terms of the spinoff, GM is liable for the wages and pension payments of a number of Delphi workers, a fact that has not worked wonders for the value of GM shares since Saturday’s bankruptcy filing. The specter of sharply reduced wages and benefits looms over the entire industry.
…So we level downward, and the normal workings of the economy seem powerless to stop it. We are in the third year of a recovery, but poverty rates and the number of medically uninsured continue to rise, while median household income continues to fall. Many millions of Americans are doing very well, of course, but, the inflation of home values aside, their ranks don’t include their countrymen whose jobs can be offshored or digitized.
(12 October 2005)
