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Chávez Restyles Venezuela With ’21st-Century Socialism’
Juan Forero, NY Times
CARACAS, Venezuela – Firmly in power and his revolution now in overdrive, President Hugo Chávez is moving fast to transform Venezuela’s economy by bucking free-market planning with what he calls 21st-century socialism: founding state companies, seizing abandoned private factories and establishing thousands of cooperatives and worker-run businesses.
The populist government is reorganizing the country’s colossal oil industry, taking a bigger share from private multinationals. Planners are reorganizing the banking system, placing stringent restrictions on lending while creating state banks. Venezuela is also developing a state-to-state barter system to trade items as varied as cattle, oil and cement as far away as Argentina and as near as Cuba, its closest ally.
(30 October 2005)
Even with gas at 4¢ per litre, Venezuelans still complain
Mike Ceaser, Globe and Mail
CARACAS — Dennis Savicke pulls his white 1982 Ford truck into a Caracas gas station and tops up its two tanks to their 120-litre capacity. The price: 6,000 bolivars, or $3.29.
While the rest of the world complains about soaring gasoline prices, Venezuela has a different problem: gasoline is almost free and its price is dropping. “It seems cheap to you,” Mr. Savicke, a delivery man, told a reporter after filling up. “But it’s expensive for us. We have lots of petroleum here, so how could they raise the price? “
Here in the world’s fifth-largest petroleum exporter, the government keeps the retail price of gasoline fixed at 70 bolivars a litre for regular gasoline, and 97 for premium. With inflation dropping the bolivar’s value to about 1,800 to the Canadian dollar, pump prices have fallen to as low as four cents a litre.
But the subsidy worsens air pollution, while costing the government billions of dollars that it could earn by exporting gasoline at world prices. It feeds horrendous traffic jams that clog streets with gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles and decades-old wrecks, many of which stream trails of exhaust because Venezuela enforces no car-pollution laws. It is also fuelling a smuggling industry to Brazil, Colombia and the Caribbean islands.
The subsidy “is a crime,” said Jose Moya, president of the environmental organization Forja. It is popular, however, with both the rich, who accuse populist President Hugo Chavez of squandering money, and with the poor, who fear an increase in bus fares.
(31 October 2005)
Is China to blame for the rise in oil prices?
Niu Li, China Daily via Japan Focus?
[Japan Focus introduction: Many news accounts of surging oil prices have pointed at China, and to a lesser extent India, as culprits given the rising thirst for oil to fuel their high growth economies. This survey of oil demand and consumption by Niu Li challenges these assessments by showingthat China’s oil imports are only one-fourth those of the U.S. Equally important, China is far less dependent on oil for its energy than is the U.S., and in 2005 its oil imports increased only slightly in line with Chinese efforts to conserve energy and favor non-oil energy sources.
The problem of spiking, and long-term high oil and energy prices lie above all in two realms. One is the fact that we are fast approaching the tipping point at which world oil production begins to decline, or Hubbard’s Peak in the theory of peak oil explained in several Japan Focus articles. If this is correct, we face long term high and rising oil prices. The other is the failure, above all by U.S. policymakers, to make even token moves toward conservation through the use of tax and other policies to curb the rampant increases in oil consumption that distinguish the U.S. from virtually all other economies. The U.S. is not only by far the world’s largest oil and gas consumer; it is also the largest importer. And in contrast to many other nations, there is no sign of policy-driven efforts to control consumption. ]
(27 October 2005)
Also posted at Znet.
A Separate Peace
America is in trouble–and our elites are merely resigned.
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It’s harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can’t prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”
(27 October 2005)
Odd, perhaps significant, column about a national loss of confidence by a former speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.. The column doesn’t mention peak oil or climate change, but the mood matches the pessimism about US leadership felt by many of us. The column was mentioned by Prof. Goose at The Oil Drum, at Marxmal, and at Big Gav’s Peak Energy blog, among others. -BA
Friends of the Earth slam World Bank over money for clean energy
Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net via Common Dreams
WASHINGTON – International energy and climate talks opened Tuesday amid contention over whether the agency entrusted with leading the financial charge against global warming is doing enough to drum up investment in projects designed to harness the wind, sun, and other sources of renewable energy.
Pressure group Friends of the Earth, in a new report, accused the World Bank of doing too little to promote renewable energy, prized because it is considered to be in infinite supply–unlike oil, coal, and gas–and because it involves little or no pollution compared to those fossil fuels.
The World Bank building is shown in Washington, DC, in 2004. International environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth (FoE) slammed the World Bank for failing to play an effective leadership role on climate change and renewable energy.(AFP/File/Brendan Smialowski)
The Washington, D.C.-based bank, in a statement, countered that it had doubled its financing for renewable energy and for efforts to improve energy efficiency around the globe.
The controversy came as energy and environment ministers gathered in London for international talks on climate change and clean energy.
(2 November 2005)
“Friends of the Earth International is a federation of autonomous environmental organizations from all over the world. Our 1.5 million members and supporters in 70 countries campaign on the most urgent environmental and social issues of our day, while simultaneously catalyzing a shift toward sustainable societies.”
The World Bank and clean energy
David Roberts, Gristmill
In 2000, in response to worries that World Bank investments in extractive fossil-fuel projects were exacerbating poverty and degrading the environment, then-WB president James Wolfensohn conceived an independent review to investigate the legitimacy of the concerns. In 2001, he launched the review and appointed Emil Salim, former environment minister of Indonesia, to lead it. The Extractive Industries Review was completed in December 2003. The review confirmed the worst accusations of World Bank critics. Its recommendations were, at least in terms of the status quo, fairly radical, urging a substantial reduction in fossil-fuel investments and increase in renewable energy investments.
In September 2004, after several delays, World Bank management issued its formal response (press release; full PDF), rejecting most of the recommendations. In particular, it elected not to cease investing in fossil-fuel extraction.
(2 November 2005)
See original for links.
Stop oil company price gouging
Congressman Bernie Sanders, Common Dreams
…The time is long overdue for Congress to take real action that will lower prices at the pump and move us toward sustainable energy. The Republican leadership must rescind the tax breaks and subsidies recently given to Big Oil and bring the CEOs of the major oil companies before Congress to investigate their pricing practices. The leadership must also stop blocking attempts to enact real energy reform legislation that will control oil prices and stop Big Oil from picking the pockets of American consumers. If the Republican leadership refuses to take on Big Oil to stop their price gouging, they will have the American people to answer to.
Bernie Sanders represents Vermont as an at-large member of the House of Representatives, where he has served since 1991.
(29 October 2005)
Frist orders oil price probe
Reuters
WASHINGTON – Amid record-high earnings from oil companies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday ordered a Senate hearing with testimony from major oil company executives on why energy prices are high.
The unexpected announcement by the chamber’s top Republican showed the growing political pressure as American consumers brace for higher winter heating costs at the same time energy companies are reporting fat profits.
“If there are those who abuse the free enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed,” Frist said in a statement.
(27 October 2005)
A world becoming more peaceful?
Paul Rogers, OpenDemocracy
The first annual Human Security Report finds – despite evidence from Afghanistan to Iraq, Chechnya to Congo – that violent conflict around the world is declining. Can this be true?
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There appear good reasons for most people to think that the world is becoming a more dangerous place. In the four years since the 9/11 attacks, the George W Bush administration has pursued a vigorous counter-terrorism policy that has already terminated two regimes and has, at a conservative estimate, seen at least 40,000 people killed, most of them civilians. …
The Human Security Report (HSR) – co-financed by five governments, including Canada and Britain – is modelled on that indispensable guide to issues of development, the United Nations Human Development Report, though it is not itself a product of the UN system. It argues that there has in fact been a marked decrease in political violence since the end of the cold war. The number of armed conflicts has decreased by more than 40%, and the number of major conflicts (which it defines as resulting in 1,000 or more “battle-deaths”) has declined by 80%.
Among its other conclusions, it finds that interstate wars now comprise only 5% of all armed conflicts, far less than in previous eras; that the numbers of people killed in individual wars have declined dramatically in the past five decades; and that the number of international crises fell by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001. The report also says that the number of autocratic regimes, noted for their systematic attacks on human rights, is decreasing.
…[There are] two strong notes of caution… First, the very vigour of the American response to 9/11 may be creating the conditions for increased instability and conflict. These counter-currents are most evident in the middle east, whose rapidly growing energy resource significance coupled with the advent of China as a competitive agent reinforce existing political tensions.
Second, the assessment of whether or not the world has become more peaceful needs to accommodate the greatest human test of all – the response to climate change and all the many new insecurities that will come in its wake if it is not brought under control. The “drying out” of the tropics and the impact of global warming on the polar icecaps, which now look increasingly possible, will overshadow every other issue of international security in the coming decades. The huge pressure to migrate they are likely to bring is only one of their likely effects.
These two cautions refer to problems that will dominate the coming years and which can still – just – be addressed by making necessary policy changes
(17 October 2005)
In other words, the conditions that promise to be a source of future conflicts are: the struggle for energy and the effects of global warming. -BA
Former UK soldier wins landmark case over Gulf War Syndrome
Geneviève Roberts
A former guardsman suffering from Gulf War Syndrome has won a landmark legal case against the Ministry of Defence. Daniel Martin, 35, who has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, memory loss and impaired concentration since the 1991 conflict, will receive a disability award under the “umbrella term” of Gulf War Syndrome.
He is one of 1,500 soldiers who made a claim for a disablement pension because of the syndrome, which, for the past 14 years, the MoD has said does not exist. A war pensions tribunal in London yesterday ruled “the term Gulf War Syndrome is the appropriate medical label to be attached” to Mr Martin’s condition. The ruling will enable the other servicemen to claim their disablement pensions.
Charles Plumridge, Co-ordinator for the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said: “Hundreds of veterans have applied to have the diagnostic label of Gulf War Syndrome recognised. While the Ministry of Defence has said in the House of Commons that they do not recognise the syndrome, the Pensions Appeal Tribunal has ruled that there is enough evidence to warrant the term.” …
(1 November 2005)
