In a followup to my previous post on peculiar infrastructure projects, I’d like to also bring your attention to these grand schemese for infrastructure development on a truly global scale. The projects can be seen in greater detail at the Schiller Institute, which is apparently associated with Lyndon LaRouche’s gang. The site proposes breathtakingly ambitious development plans for irrigation canals, high speed rail and infrastructure corridors.

From tunnels and superhighways to canals and transcontinental rail, the plans are pretty ambitious. I’ve never taken anything from the LaRouche crowd seriously, but it’s at least worth look at this group’s alternative blueprint for action in shrinking the gap.

Moraine Lake, shot by YH in summer 2005

As developed economies and global population expand, the demand for safe and secure water will only rise. Canada retains more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, 7 percent of it’s renewable water supply, and only 0.5 percent of the world’s population. This has sparked a debate on whether Canada should start selling its “blue gold.”

The fear of shrinking glaciers due to global warming and toxic contamination of the Great Lakes have Canadians worried about selling away their future. Yet Canadians consume vast amounts of the stuff: according to Macleans twice as much as France and four times the average Swede. Water conservation in Canada is largely reactive, only in effect if immediate conditions require it.

Canadians, particularly from the West, are proud of their natural resources. One worry is that the elephant next door will increase pressure to aquire these natural resources.

Canada already has a deep resource relationship with the US. About a fifth of America’s oil imports come from Canada. As oil prices rise and technology gets better the oil sands of Alberta will increasingly be a source for US foreign oil.

Canada’s lumber exports account for 30% of the US market. This has been capped per an agreement in 2003. If the cap is exceeded, Canada has to pay a penalty. So far the US has collected $5.2 billion in tariffs deemed unfair by NAFTA.

America’s softwood lumber (steel, agriculture, etc etc) protectionism is derided north of the border. But even if Canada wanted to try the same thing, they will probably not be able to hold out against American demands for water. Better to figure out a way to sell it to them now, than wait 10 or 20 years for them to take it.

Read more at:

Pressure to export water to U.S. could grow, CTV.ca (2 Jan 2006)

Steve Maich, America is thirsty, Macleans (24 Nov 2005)

From the UK’s independent:

Your wedding is one of the most important days of your life, but scratch beneath the glossy surface and it’s immediately apparent that it also causes substantial environmental damage.

According to Climate Care, an organisation that offsets harmful carbon dioxide emissions, the average wedding emits around 14.5 tons of CO2, markedly more than the 12 tons emitted by the average person during a whole year.

The entire article then turns into a product-placement advertisement that would make Hollywood cringe. They’ve got people selling everything from biodegradable confetti to bleeding-heart honeymoons.

A single long-haul flight could undo all your good work. But if you do want to go further afield, meaningful trips, such as panda conservation in China and orphanage projects in Sri Lanka are becoming more popular with newlyweds, according to the travel company www.Opodo.co.uk.

If you insist on tropical blooms or out-of-season flowers, you’ll rack up thousands of air miles. Plus, most flowers come from countries where pesticide usage isn’t as regulated as it is here. In Latin America and Africa, the labourers on flower farms are mostly women of reproductive age, and exposure to pesticides can be very harmful… (veiled advertisement for www.scentednarcissi.co.uk )

Excuse me, but all of this is utterly meaningless—of all the alleged environmental damage, of all the energy consumed, there is no way that a wedding has any meaningful impact in the grand scheme of things. It’s just another way the far-left demands we spoil a good event with doomsday environmental predictions. When I have a wedding, I’m going to have a bloody great blow-out—and have a good time doing it. My bride will not wear a second-hand dress, we will not ride a rickshaw as our wedding carriage, and it’s still going to result in less carbon dioxide than what’s required to fly even one of the hundreds of thousands of fat Europeans who vacation in Thailand every year for their winter vacations.

I can’t help but think of P.J. O’Rourke’s memorable line from his 1991 classic, Parliament of Whores:

When Republicans ruin the environment, destroy the supply of affordable housing and wreck the industrial infrastructure, at least they make a buck of it. The Democrats just do these things for fun.

One of our favorite historian-scientists here at ComingAnarchy has some unorthodox thinking on environmental issues. Below, an abridged excerpt from a last week’s Financial Times.

The Green Lobby: Scientist and author Jared Diamond believes businesses can help to solve the world’s environmental problems

By FIONA HARVEY 1088 words 10 February 2006 Financial Times London Ed1 Page 12

Jared Diamond says he is booed by environmentalists when he talks about business: “They call me a sell-out, say I’m corrupt and that I’ve taken the money and leapt into bed with big business.” But, he shrugs: “It doesn’t bother me.”

The biologist, thinker and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer has aroused the ire of some sections of the green movement by co-operating with large companies—and insisting that business has a role to play in remedying environmental problems.

Pollution, desertification and stress on water supplies, he believes, could potentially cause the collapse of modern life, in much the same way that the overuse of resources and external environmental changes have caused the demise of earlier civilisations.

But Prof Diamond sticks to his arguments: businesses play such a large role in modern life that it could be difficult to imagine progress on key environmental issues without the co-operation of the corporations.

Moreover, he says, an awareness of environmental issues in business thinking is a good discipline for managers, and can even save companies money. This is because taking into account environmental considerations—such as how to clean up pollution or minimise use of resources—requires managers to consider vital business issues such as waste and inefficiencies, and relationships with employees and consumers.

He says: “If you want to cut down on the amount of resources you need to bring into an area, that saves money. If you reduce the amount of waste you produce, that saves money. Using less energy saves money too. And if you make the water dirty, that could be a health problem for your employees. If you alienate the local community, and you are operating in a democracy, you may get thrown out, or you may get people trying to disrupt your business.”

Reputational risk also plays a role, although a lesser one. Bad environmental and social practices can attract negative publicity, even boycotts, that can lose sales. Employees can feel demoralised if they think they are working for an organisation that is harming people.

For these reasons, building an environmental awareness into management thinking from the start, rather than seeing such an awareness as a burden or an afterthought, makes for better management throughout a project.

Prof Diamond recounts an experience that convinced him of how valuable a role large businesses could play in preserving the earth’s natural resources, as well as exploiting them. A few years ago he went to Papua New Guinea with WWF, the conservation group, to look at some oil works. “I went expecting to see the usual oil company mess,” he says.

“It shocked me when I arrived there to find that the oilfield had been managed more scrupulously than most national parks. If you want to see tree kangaroos by daylight in Papua New Guinea, go to the Chevron oilfield. You’ll find the shyest and most beautiful animals there.”

Chevron’s part in preserving the local flora and fauna was born not of altruism, but of business sense, Prof Diamond says. “They want to make money. And they discovered that they could make more money by being clean than by making messes.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I wonder that my BBC bashing may be inappropriate, utter silliness such as this comes along: “Will Kyoto die at Canadian hands?” asks the BBC.

Is Canada’s newly elected Conservative Party now preparing to don the mantle of Darth Vader and emasculate the protocol to the point of impotence?

Of course, don’t you see? The new Conservative government will be a lord of the Dark Side—looking to castrate it’s enemies!

Kyoto is of course a complete nonsense, although I can appreciate that it’s existence guarantees that I have a job. And Michael Crichton says it best. The article’s take on practical alternatives—the environmental plans that actually might work to clean up the environment—is dismissive:

On the surface such agreements can co-exist with Kyoto. Below the surface, they present a radically different political proposition; that climate change can be curbed by developing clean technology and rolling it out to industrialising countries, without the need for binding targets and timetables on reducing emissions.

“Radically different” as in “somewhat effective,” as opposed to the “Kyoto Protocol,” which can best be described by people who understand energy and the environment as “nonsense.”

Tipped off by a photo essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy, I set off searching for more information on Bangladesh and their disassembly of old tankers. Over half of all ocean going vessles are taken to Chittagong, one of the world’s largest beaches. The captains wait until high tide and run the tankers full speed into the shore. When the tide goes back out, crews of Bangladeshis begin dismantling it and reusing and reselling every piece from scrap metal down to doorknobs. Bangladesh gets almost all of its steel from the ships it takes apart.

Although ship breaking used to take place in the first world, it has naturally migrated to developing countries, mainly India, China and Bangladesh. I gathered a few pictures found online to show readers. The best two sites for them are Palin’s Travels and The Luminous Landscape. The pictures below come from those two sites.

There has been a lot of discussion of the impact that the environment has on security. We have seen the destruction of typhoons, hurricanes, tidal waves and earthquakes completely destroy economic and physical security in numerous countries just over the past 2 years. Then there is warfighting over resources whether it be land (Lebensraum), oil reserves, or control over fresh water sources. All familiar topics, but recently the Economist covered a new angle: disruption of an ecological system (see article here). The gigantic echizen jellyfish, which can be up to 2 meters across and weigh 200 kilos, has experienced a boom in population and for unknown environmental reasons has been pushed closer to Japan’s shores than normal. These big-ass jellies cause fishermen problems by “breaking nets and gear, crushing the fish catch or spoiling it with poisonous tentacles.” The Economist notes that this jellyfish issue has become one more problem in Sino-Japanese relations.

Granted, I don’t think Japan will start bombing China anytime soon over these monster jellyfish, but I found it interesting that changes in ecology could result in political confrontation. I would be interesting in hearing other historical examples out there, if any of our readers know any. Obviously herd migrations in pre-modern nomadic societies would cause clashes, but I am wondering if there ever was any ecological situation causing ire between two modern states? Any takers?

CNN just had a special segment that promoted sauerkraut as a way to deter bird flu. The source? Korean scientists conducted a study that showed 11 of 13 chickens with bird flu recovered after injesting Kim Chi, the pickled Korean cabbage that is a staple of the diet. Apparently the magic ingredient is lactic acid, and the report was followed with a 850% spike in kraut sales.

Of course, the science and statistics behind this study is nonsense. Fortunately, the always illuminating Korea-based Party Pooper was crashing this party before the CNN story came out, noting that the study is nonsense.

The ‘virtue’ of kimchi in treating bird flu is based on ONE research study that the researchers themselves admitted was not conclusive. That was back in March and things have been fairly quiet since then, which seems more than a little odd… But even if no further research comes out to prove the theory, or even if research comes out that disproves the theory (though I doubt the Korean media would be bothered to report on it), the myth that kimchi cures yet another deadly disease will be etched onto the collective consciousness of the Korean people…

As for me, I’ll stick with my own proven diet of Burger King Whoppers, galbi, ‘Mexican’ fried chicken and the occasional Krispykreme doughnut that has kept me free for 30+ years from AIDS, SARS, bird flu, and every other disease save the common cold and flu. Say what you will, but I’ve got just as much ‘proof’ that my diet fights every serious disease known to man as kimchi does for it.

Of course, Party Pooper could have told you that “kim chi cures all” was nonsense a year ago.

The last deadly flu epidemic broke out almost 90 years ago in 1918. How quickly did the flu spread? From PBS.org comes this map that shows how the virus spread across the United States in just two weeks.

The United States had an excellent rail system, but it was nothing compared to the speed and efficiency of interstate highways and air travel. Transcontinental travel was limited to boats, and it took weeks to cross the Atlantic. In an age when you can fly from London to Lagos or New York to New Dehli within a day, the Avian flu will spread like nothing seen before in human history if it connects from human to human.

The BBC has a great map of the spread of the avian flu in birds and humans that is regularly updated. This week we’ve seen new cases in Russia, Kuwait, Britain, and Thailand; as of yet it’s not clear how the virus jumps from birds to humans, whether it’s consumption of the birds, air, fecal matter, or other. As of yet it does not spread from human to human. But dare I say it, the question is not “if” it transmits from human to human—it’s a question of “when.”

Hat tip Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace: yet another factor that could drive up prices at the pump (beyond, of course, the Bush-Cheney-Texas- Halliburton-Exxon-Saudi-military industrial complex-alien tentacle conspiracy) is a new court case just filed in the Federal District Court of Mississippi.

Big oil companies such as Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon Mobil are being sued on the grounds that their refining and production activities in the Gulf cause global warming, which in turn caused Katrina. Lawyers are trying to turn that lawsuit into a Mississippi-wide class action.

It claims that oil companies are the “greatest single source”Â? of global warming and that their activities “produced the conditions whereby a storm of the strength and size of Hurricane Katrina would inevitably form and strike the Mississippi Gulf coast”Â?.

Oil companies are also being sued for causing ecological damage to coastal marshes that had protected New Orleans.

If you like, you can tell yourself this case is based on a correct claim. Regardless, it will not succeed in court, it will cost the sued companies many million just to get it dismissed or fight it in court. Even if companies are making record profits, that all the major oil companies are being targeted means that all of them can raise their opperating costs, which could mean higher prices.