Humanity will keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere, but good policy can help sink it back into the earth.
By Peter W. Huber
Like medieval priests, today's carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness -- about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.
But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too -- because they're not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you'd best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can't possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.
If making carbon this personal seems rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race, Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal industry. No one can doubt Washington's power to bankrupt almost anything -- in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That's another whole United States' worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.
Cut to the chase. We rich people can't stop the world's 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can't even make any durable dent in global emissions -- because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we're foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.
We don't control the global supply of carbon.
Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet's oil reserves -- about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they've got.
Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon -- almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet's third great carbon reservoir -- the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that's all they've got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won't -- not any time in the foreseeable future.
We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor -- the other 80 percent -- are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United States, is now the planet's largest emitter. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these countries have all made it clear that they aren't interested in spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved -- decades hence -- at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty percent of the global population hasn't signed on to pay more than 0 percent.
Accepting this last, self-evident fact, the Kyoto Protocol divides the world into two groups. The roughly 1.2 billion citizens of industrialized countries are expected to reduce their emissions. The other 5 billion -- including both China and India, each of which is about as populous as the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -- aren't. These numbers alone guarantee that humanity isn't going to reduce global emissions at any point in the foreseeable future -- unless it does it the old-fashioned way, by getting poorer. But the current recession won't last forever, and the long-term trend is clear. Their populations and per-capita emissions are rising far faster than ours could fall under any remotely plausible carbon-reduction scheme.
Might we simply buy their cooperation? Various plans have circulated for having the rich pay the poor to stop burning down rain forests and to lower greenhouse-gas emissions from primitive agricultural practices. But taking control of what belongs to someone else ultimately means buying it. Over the long term, we would in effect have to buy up a large fraction of all the world's forests, soil, coal, and oil -- and then post guards to make sure that poor people didn't sneak in and grab all the carbon anyway. Buying off people just doesn't fly when they outnumber you four to one.
Might we instead manage to give the world something cheaper than carbon? The moon-shot law of economics says yes, of course we can. If we just put our minds to it, it will happen. Atom bomb, moon landing, ultracheap energy -- all it takes is a triumph of political will.
Really? For the very poorest, this would mean beating the price of the free rain forest that they burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
And with one important exception, which we will return to shortly, no carbon-free fuel or technology comes remotely close to being able to do that. Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal, and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars.
Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City's total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.
It's often suggested that technology improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller -- and bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.
This is why the (few) greens ready to accept engineering and economic reality have suddenly emerged as avid proponents of nuclear power. In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident -- which didn't harm anyone, and wouldn't even have damaged the reactor core if the operators had simply kept their hands off the switches and let the automatic safety systems do their job -- ostensibly green antinuclear activists unwittingly boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. The United States would be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol today if we could simply undo their handiwork and conjure back into existence the nuclear plants that were in the pipeline in nuclear power's heyday. Nuclear power is fantastically compact, and -- as America's nuclear navy, several commercial U.S. operators, France, Japan, and a handful of other countries have convincingly established -- it's both safe and cheap wherever engineers are allowed to get on with it.
But getting on with it briskly is essential, because costs hinge on the huge, up-front capital investment in the power plant. Years of delay between the capital investment and when it starts earning a return are ruinous. Most of the developed world has made nuclear power unaffordable by surrounding it with a regulatory process so sluggish and unpredictable that no one will pour a couple of billion dollars into a new plant, for the good reason that no one knows when (or even if) the investment will be allowed to start making money.
And countries that don't trust nuclear power on their own soil must hesitate to share the technology with countries where you never know who will be in charge next year, or what he might decide to do with his nuclear toys. So much for the possibility that cheap nuclear power might replace carbon-spewing sources of energy in the developing world. Moreover, even India and China, which have mastered nuclear technologies, are deploying far more new coal capacity.
Remember, finally, that most of the cost of carbon-based energy resides not in the fuels but in the gigantic infrastructure of furnaces, turbines, and engines. Those costs are sunk, which means that carbon-free alternatives -- with their own huge, attendant, front-end capital costs -- must be cheap enough to beat carbon fuels that already have their infrastructure in place. That won't happen in our lifetimes.
Another argument commonly advanced is that getting over carbon will, nevertheless, be comparatively cheap, because it will get us over oil, too -- which will impoverish our enemies and save us a bundle at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. But uranium aside, the most economical substitute for oil is, in fact, electricity generated with coal. Cheap coal-fired electricity has been, is, and will continue to be a substitute for oil, or a substitute for natural gas, which can in turn substitute for oil. By sharply boosting the cost of coal electricity, the war on carbon will make us more dependent on oil, not less.
The first place where coal displaces oil is in the electric power plant itself. When oil prices spiked in the early 1980s, U.S. utilities quickly switched to other fuels, with coal leading the pack; the coal-fired plants now being built in China, India, and other developing countries are displacing diesel generators. More power plants burning coal to produce cheap electricity can also mean less natural gas used to generate electricity. And less used for industrial, commercial, and residential heating, welding, and chemical processing, as these users switch to electrically powered alternatives. The gas that's freed up this way can then substitute for diesel fuel in heavy trucks, delivery vehicles, and buses. And coal-fired electricity will eventually begin displacing gasoline, too, as soon as plug-in hybrid cars start recharging their batteries directly from the grid.
To top it all, using electricity generated in large part by coal to power our passenger cars would lower carbon emissions -- even in Indiana, which generates 75 percent of its electricity with coal. Big power plants are so much more efficient than the gasoline engines in our cars that a plug-in hybrid car running on electricity supplied by Indiana's current grid still ends up more carbon-frugal than comparable cars burning gasoline in a conventional engine under the hood. Old-guard energy types have been saying this for decades. In a major report released last March, the World Wildlife Fund finally concluded that they were right all along.
But true carbon zealots won't settle for modest reductions in carbon emissions when fat targets beckon. They see coal-fired electricity as the dragon to slay first. Huge, stationary sources can't run or hide, and the cost of doing without them doesn't get rung up in plain view at the gas pump. California, Pennsylvania, and other greener-than-thou states have made flatlining electricity consumption the linchpin of their war on carbon. That is the one certain way to halt the displacement of foreign oil by cheap, domestic electricity.
The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil -- but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.
The other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and India won't trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.
By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth. Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while paying substantially more for an essential input. The carbon police acknowledge the problem and talk vaguely of using tariffs and such to address it. But carbon is far too deeply embedded in the global economy, and materials, goods, and services move and intermingle far too freely, for the customs agents to track.
Consider your next Google search. As noted in a recent article in Harper's, "Google . . . and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power." Google itself (the "don't be evil" company) is looking to set up one of its electrically voracious server farms at a site in Lithuania, "disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam." But Lithuania's grid is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear. Perhaps the company's next huge farm will be "near" the Three Gorges Dam in China, built to generate over three times as much power as our own Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. China will be happy to play along, while it quietly plugs another coal plant into its grid a few pylons down the line. All the while, of course, Google will maintain its low-energy headquarters in California, a state that often boasts of the wise regulatory policies -- centered, one is told, on efficiency and conservation -- that have made it such a frugal energy user. But in fact, sky-high prices have played the key role, curbing internal demand and propelling the flight from California of power plants, heavy industries, chip fabs, server farms, and much else (see "California's Potemkin Environmentalism," Spring 2008).
So the suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. "Green jobs" means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon, industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not lower them.
The grand theory for how the developed world can unilaterally save the planet seems to run like this. We buy time for the planet by rapidly slashing our own emissions. We do so by developing carbon-free alternatives even cheaper than carbon. The rest of the world will then quickly adopt these alternatives, leaving most of its trillion barrels of oil and trillion tons of coal safely buried, most of the rain forests standing, and most of the planet's carbon-rich soil undisturbed. From end to end, however, this vision strains credulity.
Perhaps it's the recognition of that inconvenient truth that has made the anti-carbon rhetoric increasingly apocalyptic. Coal trains have been analogized to boxcars headed for Auschwitz. There is talk of the extinction of all humanity. But then, we have heard such things before. It is indeed quite routine, in environmental discourse, to frame choices as involving potentially infinite costs on the green side of the ledger. If they really are infinite, no reasonable person can quibble about spending mere billions, or even trillions, on the dollar side, to dodge the apocalyptic bullet.
Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the "Zero-Infinity Dilemma." The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable -- but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn't be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn't melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that's a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.
To judge by actions rather than words, however, few people and almost no national governments actually believe in the infinite rewards of exorcising carbon from economic life. Kyoto has hurt the anti-carbon mission far more than carbon zealots seem to grasp. It has proved only that with carbon, governments will say and sign anything -- and then do less than nothing. The United States should steer well clear of such treaties because they are unenforceable, routinely ignored, and therefore worthless.
If we're truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don't try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet's carbon sinks -- the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it -- that's the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.
Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that neither man nor nature will disturb. It's keeping nature's black gold sequestered from humanity that's impossible.
If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it's burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it's the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren't enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.
Peter Huber is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and the co-author, most recently, of The Bottomless Well. His article develops arguments that he made in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate in January. He is president of Stratfor and was with the CIA (as was his wife Meredith) before they founded Stratfor, a private intelligence agency.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
EARTH HOUR – A WASTE OF HUMAN ENERGY
In his 2004 book entitled “Conspicuous Compassion”, Patrick West claimed that affluent societies had become shallow and insincere in their attitudes towards other people and the serious problems facing the world. He argued that people were reducing themselves to acts of conspicuous compassion: acts that generated a high public profile while showing participants’ emotional commitment to actions that ultimately were of little material benefit in solving the problems or issues about which people claimed to be compassionate over.
In the environmental field, recent years have seen similar acts of conspicuous compassion. Examples include bans on disposable supermarket plastic bags; public campaigns to stop the cane toad from reaching the Kimberley region of Western Australia; and now Earth Hour where we turn off our lights for an hour in March to show our communal support for action to reduce global energy consumption. Sadly, each of these conspicuous acts has failed and will continue to fail.
The reasons for these failures are similar: the goal of each action was not to make an actual difference to the issue of concern but to make people feel good while they very publicly proclaimed their awareness of the issue.
Disposable plastic bags were replaced by bright green or blue plastic bags which shouted the message that I’m more environmentally friendly than you. At the same time, the sale of plastic bag products from supermarket shelves reportedly increased as people were forced to find replacement bags for their kitchen rubbish bins and other uses for which the free bags were no longer available.
Cane toads continued to hop towards the WA/NT border, as herpetological researchers hoping to find biological or other controls that would reduce cane toad populations throughout Australia were starved of funds because of government misdirection of money to Toadbusters and other high profile but totally ineffective feel-good campaigns.
And now we have Earth Hour, where parties are held around the world to celebrate in a very public way the commitment of party goers to symbolic recognition of their understanding of the serious problem of anthropogenic climate change, while actually making no difference to energy consumption in either the short or long terms.
For each of these examples, conspicuous but effective actions could have been devised to make a real impact on the underlying problems. Supermarkets and other outlets should have been required to sell disposable plastic bags at a price reflecting the actual costs of their production, litter collection and landfill disposal or recycling. The public could still have bought the green or blue reusable bags to use on their weekly shopping outings, but people would have been forced to make rational economic decisions about whether to pay, say, 10 cents for the previously free bags or to pay a little more for bags able to be reused 100 times.
Cane toad researchers should have been fully funded to investigate biological and other science-based options for toad control, provided that their research programs included public awareness activities and information dissemination to communities such as Kunnunnurra which were next in line to be invaded by the toads.
And can Earth Hour be improved? Of course. Rather than having throwaway symbolic gestures lasting just one hour a year, groups involved in Earth Hour should decide upon just one important energy saving action (such as installing solar hot water systems or low flow shower heads or buying fuel efficient motor vehicles or using public transport) and then spend a full year informing governments and communities of the real difference that people could make by adopting that year’s action.
Does the wearing of pink clothing or ribbons make a real difference to community support for breast cancer research? Probably not. Does Glenn McGrath’s personal appeal to governments and the community to fund cancer research make a difference? Absolutely yes, so it’s a great pity that his personal tragedy was somewhat trivialised by campaigns encouraging people to wear pink ribbons.
Did the cane toad campaigns in the east Kimberley region of WA enthuse large numbers of local people? Without doubt, but what a shame that their preparedness to do some hard work was not directed into actions that could have produced significant improvements to the Kimberley environment such as revegetation of wetlands, feral cat control or improved fire regimes of natural areas.
Earth Hour is a con, a fraudulent excuse to show we care while doing nothing useful to make a difference. As members of Alcoholics Anonymous are required to do, we must admit we have a problem with Earth Hour and commit to turning it into a campaign that will achieve real environmental outcomes.
Let’s leave symbolism to the politicians. Surely the community can operate at a higher level than people who are self-seekingly attempting to get re-elected every 3 or 4 years. Clean-Up Australia is removing thousands of tonnes of rubbish from our public lands every year at the same time as it changes public attitudes about littering.
Earth Hour has similar potential to achieve the two important goals of making a real on-ground difference while also changing public attitudes, but it needs to leave its symbolic gestures behind. Instead, it should agree to focus on one effective action to be highlighted each year, with that action capable of being adopted by the broader community.
In the environmental field, recent years have seen similar acts of conspicuous compassion. Examples include bans on disposable supermarket plastic bags; public campaigns to stop the cane toad from reaching the Kimberley region of Western Australia; and now Earth Hour where we turn off our lights for an hour in March to show our communal support for action to reduce global energy consumption. Sadly, each of these conspicuous acts has failed and will continue to fail.
The reasons for these failures are similar: the goal of each action was not to make an actual difference to the issue of concern but to make people feel good while they very publicly proclaimed their awareness of the issue.
Disposable plastic bags were replaced by bright green or blue plastic bags which shouted the message that I’m more environmentally friendly than you. At the same time, the sale of plastic bag products from supermarket shelves reportedly increased as people were forced to find replacement bags for their kitchen rubbish bins and other uses for which the free bags were no longer available.
Cane toads continued to hop towards the WA/NT border, as herpetological researchers hoping to find biological or other controls that would reduce cane toad populations throughout Australia were starved of funds because of government misdirection of money to Toadbusters and other high profile but totally ineffective feel-good campaigns.
And now we have Earth Hour, where parties are held around the world to celebrate in a very public way the commitment of party goers to symbolic recognition of their understanding of the serious problem of anthropogenic climate change, while actually making no difference to energy consumption in either the short or long terms.
For each of these examples, conspicuous but effective actions could have been devised to make a real impact on the underlying problems. Supermarkets and other outlets should have been required to sell disposable plastic bags at a price reflecting the actual costs of their production, litter collection and landfill disposal or recycling. The public could still have bought the green or blue reusable bags to use on their weekly shopping outings, but people would have been forced to make rational economic decisions about whether to pay, say, 10 cents for the previously free bags or to pay a little more for bags able to be reused 100 times.
Cane toad researchers should have been fully funded to investigate biological and other science-based options for toad control, provided that their research programs included public awareness activities and information dissemination to communities such as Kunnunnurra which were next in line to be invaded by the toads.
And can Earth Hour be improved? Of course. Rather than having throwaway symbolic gestures lasting just one hour a year, groups involved in Earth Hour should decide upon just one important energy saving action (such as installing solar hot water systems or low flow shower heads or buying fuel efficient motor vehicles or using public transport) and then spend a full year informing governments and communities of the real difference that people could make by adopting that year’s action.
Does the wearing of pink clothing or ribbons make a real difference to community support for breast cancer research? Probably not. Does Glenn McGrath’s personal appeal to governments and the community to fund cancer research make a difference? Absolutely yes, so it’s a great pity that his personal tragedy was somewhat trivialised by campaigns encouraging people to wear pink ribbons.
Did the cane toad campaigns in the east Kimberley region of WA enthuse large numbers of local people? Without doubt, but what a shame that their preparedness to do some hard work was not directed into actions that could have produced significant improvements to the Kimberley environment such as revegetation of wetlands, feral cat control or improved fire regimes of natural areas.
Earth Hour is a con, a fraudulent excuse to show we care while doing nothing useful to make a difference. As members of Alcoholics Anonymous are required to do, we must admit we have a problem with Earth Hour and commit to turning it into a campaign that will achieve real environmental outcomes.
Let’s leave symbolism to the politicians. Surely the community can operate at a higher level than people who are self-seekingly attempting to get re-elected every 3 or 4 years. Clean-Up Australia is removing thousands of tonnes of rubbish from our public lands every year at the same time as it changes public attitudes about littering.
Earth Hour has similar potential to achieve the two important goals of making a real on-ground difference while also changing public attitudes, but it needs to leave its symbolic gestures behind. Instead, it should agree to focus on one effective action to be highlighted each year, with that action capable of being adopted by the broader community.
Friday, January 30, 2009
DEEP-FRIED KITTENS
PETA's dangerous new campaign
Jan 26th 2009
From Economist.com
PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS (PETA) claims 2m “members and supporters”, making it the world’s largest animal-rights organisation.
Much of its popularity likely derives from some important work it has done improving the welfare of farm and research animals around the world. But there is another side to animal-rights organisations. Many of them, PETA included, advocate that animals should not be regarded as property (no pets), and should not be used for food (even milk, honey and fish are out), clothing or research. Those who take such a hardline view are a distinct minority.
Even by PETA’s standards, its latest campaign against fish is particularly troubling. In the past PETA has drawn much mirth for its “fish empathy” campaigns, and at one point tried to have fish sticks banned. But its latest campaign, dubbed “Save the Sea Kittens”, is beyond satire. The sea kitten site aims to rebrand fish in the eyes of younger consumers. “It’s time for a serious image makeover,” an ad says. “And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?”
The site clearly is pitched towards younger web surfers. You can create your own cartoon sea kitten, customising your cute cartoon fish with sunglasses, a tiara, a pink skirt and, naturally, kitten ears. Sea Kitten accessory items include, rather bizarrely, a bowl of water (someone may need to remind PETA that fish live in the sea and therefore have the benefit of large quantities of the stuff).
The site also urges that e-mails be sent to H. Dale Hall, the director of America’s Fishing and Wildlife Service, asking him to stop “promoting the hunting of sea kittens (otherwise known as ‘fishing’).” When Mr Hall has stopped laughing long enough to pick himself off the floor and raise a still quivering forefinger, he will relegate such emails swiftly to the electronic dustbin. But while such complaints to the authorities are likely to fall on deaf ears, marketing aimed at children is not. Neither are attempts to manipulate the genuine worries of their parents.
One part of the site contains sea-kitten bedtime stories. These seem to be largely intended to scare children away from eating fish. But one story is aimed at both parents and children. “Tony the Trout is the smartest Sea Kitten in his school,” it begins. “Already litter-trained at two months old, Tony went on to double-major in neuroscience and environmental studies at Clamford University, eventually graduating with honours. When Tony is caught and fed to a precocious young child who, having eaten one mercury-filled sea kitten too many, falls to the bottom of the class, the irony is not lost on him”.
The big problem with this story and all this direct marketing is that the scientific evidence that eating fish is vital to children’s health and intelligence could not be clearer. And this finding takes into account the detrimental effects of mercury, which are far outweighed by the benefits accrued by the benefits of eating fish.
Last year, a British parliamentary report concluded that the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish formed an important part of human brain structure. It also found that a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids has been “associated with certain mental and behavioural disorders, such as ADHD, depression, dementia, dyspraxia, greater impulsivity and aggressive behaviour”. It added that food-health campaigns should make explicit the role of omega-3s, “which appear to be crucial to children’s life chances, particularly in utero and in early childhood”. Another study showed that pregnant women who eat more fish have smarter children, despite the higher levels of mercury that they ingest—indeed, their mercury exposure can predict the intelligence of their children.
In America, the FDA has spent five years exploring this topic, and having the benefit of access to similar data, the final conclusions are unlikely to be radically different from the British report. At the very least, on the basis of what we know already, campaigning to frighten children away from eating fish runs a real risk of reducing the nutritional quality of children’s diets.
The case for promoting fish to children is clear; this campaign is wrong. Even by PETA’s own standards it is wrong. Humans are animals too. We should no more insist that a tiger be fed tofu than we should tell a child not to eat fish
Jan 26th 2009
From Economist.com
PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS (PETA) claims 2m “members and supporters”, making it the world’s largest animal-rights organisation.
Much of its popularity likely derives from some important work it has done improving the welfare of farm and research animals around the world. But there is another side to animal-rights organisations. Many of them, PETA included, advocate that animals should not be regarded as property (no pets), and should not be used for food (even milk, honey and fish are out), clothing or research. Those who take such a hardline view are a distinct minority.
Even by PETA’s standards, its latest campaign against fish is particularly troubling. In the past PETA has drawn much mirth for its “fish empathy” campaigns, and at one point tried to have fish sticks banned. But its latest campaign, dubbed “Save the Sea Kittens”, is beyond satire. The sea kitten site aims to rebrand fish in the eyes of younger consumers. “It’s time for a serious image makeover,” an ad says. “And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?”
The site clearly is pitched towards younger web surfers. You can create your own cartoon sea kitten, customising your cute cartoon fish with sunglasses, a tiara, a pink skirt and, naturally, kitten ears. Sea Kitten accessory items include, rather bizarrely, a bowl of water (someone may need to remind PETA that fish live in the sea and therefore have the benefit of large quantities of the stuff).
The site also urges that e-mails be sent to H. Dale Hall, the director of America’s Fishing and Wildlife Service, asking him to stop “promoting the hunting of sea kittens (otherwise known as ‘fishing’).” When Mr Hall has stopped laughing long enough to pick himself off the floor and raise a still quivering forefinger, he will relegate such emails swiftly to the electronic dustbin. But while such complaints to the authorities are likely to fall on deaf ears, marketing aimed at children is not. Neither are attempts to manipulate the genuine worries of their parents.
One part of the site contains sea-kitten bedtime stories. These seem to be largely intended to scare children away from eating fish. But one story is aimed at both parents and children. “Tony the Trout is the smartest Sea Kitten in his school,” it begins. “Already litter-trained at two months old, Tony went on to double-major in neuroscience and environmental studies at Clamford University, eventually graduating with honours. When Tony is caught and fed to a precocious young child who, having eaten one mercury-filled sea kitten too many, falls to the bottom of the class, the irony is not lost on him”.
The big problem with this story and all this direct marketing is that the scientific evidence that eating fish is vital to children’s health and intelligence could not be clearer. And this finding takes into account the detrimental effects of mercury, which are far outweighed by the benefits accrued by the benefits of eating fish.
Last year, a British parliamentary report concluded that the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish formed an important part of human brain structure. It also found that a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids has been “associated with certain mental and behavioural disorders, such as ADHD, depression, dementia, dyspraxia, greater impulsivity and aggressive behaviour”. It added that food-health campaigns should make explicit the role of omega-3s, “which appear to be crucial to children’s life chances, particularly in utero and in early childhood”. Another study showed that pregnant women who eat more fish have smarter children, despite the higher levels of mercury that they ingest—indeed, their mercury exposure can predict the intelligence of their children.
In America, the FDA has spent five years exploring this topic, and having the benefit of access to similar data, the final conclusions are unlikely to be radically different from the British report. At the very least, on the basis of what we know already, campaigning to frighten children away from eating fish runs a real risk of reducing the nutritional quality of children’s diets.
The case for promoting fish to children is clear; this campaign is wrong. Even by PETA’s own standards it is wrong. Humans are animals too. We should no more insist that a tiger be fed tofu than we should tell a child not to eat fish
Saturday, November 08, 2008
THE NATIONALS CAN BLAME THEMSELVES FOR THE PLIGHT OF RURAL W.A.
Let's not get too carried away with the deal that the WA Nationals have brokered with the Colin Barnett-led Liberals to form government in what is in effect a loose coalition. The Royalties for Regions scheme has merit, to be sure, but how did the need for such a scheme arise?
At least in part, the Nationals can blame themselves for many of the problems currently being suffered by rural people. Certainly, services and infrastructure are inadequate in many parts of the state but it would be unfair to only blame the last eight years of Labor government.
From 1993 to 2001, the Richard Court government was a coalition between Liberal and the then National Party. For all of this time, deputy premier and Nationals leader Hendy Cowan was in an extremely powerful position to focus the government's attention on country problems. Sadly, based upon my experience as the MP for the country seat of Vasse, Cowan was more interested in playing party politics than in having the needs of his constituents attended to.
The best (or worst) example is the way that Cowan and the Nationals used (or abused) the regionally-based Development Commissions, of which nine exist around WA. Originally set up as government Authorities by the Brian Burke Labor government of the 1980s, in theory these Commissions were designed to assist and encourage economic development within each of their regions. The Burke government quickly realised that the Commissions were very effective as propaganda instruments that could be used for party political purposes by whoever was the Minister for Regional Development at the time. It's possible that Burke may have set them up with this intention in mind from the beginning but the official line states otherwise.
In 1997, as a newly elected MP for Vasse, I naively assumed that local government in WA was largely free of party political shenanigans. Little did I realise that the South West Development Commission was working to assist the National Party's Beryle Morgan who was at that time president of the Busselton Shire. I can only guess at whether the Commission was following a dictate of regional development minister Hendy Cowan or was responding to a request from Ms Morgan but almost certainly Cowan would have been aware of what was happening within his development commission.
To summarise what happened in 1997, the South West Development Commission commissioned a report investigating the lack of services and infrastructure within the seat of Vasse. The report was provided to the Busselton Shire Council and listed for discussion at a full council meeting. I found out about the report's existence only when I scanned that meeting's agenda pages. Upset that such a report should be written without the state MP being asked for input, I was further upset when I had just three days to submit a response to Busselton councillors so that they could have an alternative view to the bland and non-specific concerns raised in the report. For the next few years, as Mrs Morgan stood against me at two subsequent elections as the National Party candidate, this report was trotted out to try and criticise me and the Court government.
As an aside, at a parliamentary Estimates Committee hearing after the election of the Gallop government in 2001, South West Development Commission CEO Don Punch admitted that he was not aware of any other south west electorate for which a similar report had been prepared by the Commission.
A further criticism of the Nationals relates to the very effective election campaign they'd run for almost three years prior to the September 6 election in 2008. Is it any wonder that the Labor government and the Parliament as a whole wasn't aware of the shortfall in services and infrastructure in the bush when the five (now four) lower house Nationals MPs were out electioneering for most of the last term of government? Rather than representing their constituents and calling on government to allocate more money to the bush, the Nationals spent most of the last three years trying to win votes. That they succeeded in this goal is commendable but they can't deny the accusation that they must accept some of the blame for the Carpenter government's focus on Perth.
A final parting shot at Hendy Cowan. After eight years as the deputy premier, he gave his valedictory speech in 2001 prior to resigning and unsuccessfully standing as a candidate at the federal election. The final four years of his deputy premiership were in spite of the Liberals having won enough seats in the Legislative Assembly to govern without the support of the Nationals, yet Richard Court honoured the coalition agreement and retained Cowan and two other Nationals MPs as ministers.
Not once in his final speech did Cowan recognise nor thank Court for his eight years as the premier's deputy. Not once did he acknowledge the coalition agreement which had allowed the Nationals to be part of the government. Quite a few MPs noted the lack of gratitude and acknowledgement in Cowan's speech.
Ironically, one of the best rural policy initiatives to come out of the Court government era was the country water supply scheme, whereby subsidies were provided to allow scheme water to be piped to individual farms. What a pity for the Nationals that the idea came from Liberal MP Bill McNee. In contrast, it was former Nationals minister for transport Murray Criddle who pushed through the sell-off of Westrail Freight which owned the thousands of kilometres of rural railway line. The sell-off was opposed in the Coalition party room by a number of Liberal MPs who believed that it would only lead to a reduction in rail services in the country, an outcome that's now a reality.
Brendon Grylls deserves the accolades he and his party are currently basking in. Just remember, however, he and his predecessors are in part responsible for many of the problems being experienced in rural and regional WA.
Are there any lessons here for incoming premier Colin Barnett? He should either close down the development commissions and fund the appointment of economic development officers within local government bodies, or he should place all development commissions under one Liberal minister and make it difficult for the commissions to be used for party political purposes.
At least in part, the Nationals can blame themselves for many of the problems currently being suffered by rural people. Certainly, services and infrastructure are inadequate in many parts of the state but it would be unfair to only blame the last eight years of Labor government.
From 1993 to 2001, the Richard Court government was a coalition between Liberal and the then National Party. For all of this time, deputy premier and Nationals leader Hendy Cowan was in an extremely powerful position to focus the government's attention on country problems. Sadly, based upon my experience as the MP for the country seat of Vasse, Cowan was more interested in playing party politics than in having the needs of his constituents attended to.
The best (or worst) example is the way that Cowan and the Nationals used (or abused) the regionally-based Development Commissions, of which nine exist around WA. Originally set up as government Authorities by the Brian Burke Labor government of the 1980s, in theory these Commissions were designed to assist and encourage economic development within each of their regions. The Burke government quickly realised that the Commissions were very effective as propaganda instruments that could be used for party political purposes by whoever was the Minister for Regional Development at the time. It's possible that Burke may have set them up with this intention in mind from the beginning but the official line states otherwise.
In 1997, as a newly elected MP for Vasse, I naively assumed that local government in WA was largely free of party political shenanigans. Little did I realise that the South West Development Commission was working to assist the National Party's Beryle Morgan who was at that time president of the Busselton Shire. I can only guess at whether the Commission was following a dictate of regional development minister Hendy Cowan or was responding to a request from Ms Morgan but almost certainly Cowan would have been aware of what was happening within his development commission.
To summarise what happened in 1997, the South West Development Commission commissioned a report investigating the lack of services and infrastructure within the seat of Vasse. The report was provided to the Busselton Shire Council and listed for discussion at a full council meeting. I found out about the report's existence only when I scanned that meeting's agenda pages. Upset that such a report should be written without the state MP being asked for input, I was further upset when I had just three days to submit a response to Busselton councillors so that they could have an alternative view to the bland and non-specific concerns raised in the report. For the next few years, as Mrs Morgan stood against me at two subsequent elections as the National Party candidate, this report was trotted out to try and criticise me and the Court government.
As an aside, at a parliamentary Estimates Committee hearing after the election of the Gallop government in 2001, South West Development Commission CEO Don Punch admitted that he was not aware of any other south west electorate for which a similar report had been prepared by the Commission.
A further criticism of the Nationals relates to the very effective election campaign they'd run for almost three years prior to the September 6 election in 2008. Is it any wonder that the Labor government and the Parliament as a whole wasn't aware of the shortfall in services and infrastructure in the bush when the five (now four) lower house Nationals MPs were out electioneering for most of the last term of government? Rather than representing their constituents and calling on government to allocate more money to the bush, the Nationals spent most of the last three years trying to win votes. That they succeeded in this goal is commendable but they can't deny the accusation that they must accept some of the blame for the Carpenter government's focus on Perth.
A final parting shot at Hendy Cowan. After eight years as the deputy premier, he gave his valedictory speech in 2001 prior to resigning and unsuccessfully standing as a candidate at the federal election. The final four years of his deputy premiership were in spite of the Liberals having won enough seats in the Legislative Assembly to govern without the support of the Nationals, yet Richard Court honoured the coalition agreement and retained Cowan and two other Nationals MPs as ministers.
Not once in his final speech did Cowan recognise nor thank Court for his eight years as the premier's deputy. Not once did he acknowledge the coalition agreement which had allowed the Nationals to be part of the government. Quite a few MPs noted the lack of gratitude and acknowledgement in Cowan's speech.
Ironically, one of the best rural policy initiatives to come out of the Court government era was the country water supply scheme, whereby subsidies were provided to allow scheme water to be piped to individual farms. What a pity for the Nationals that the idea came from Liberal MP Bill McNee. In contrast, it was former Nationals minister for transport Murray Criddle who pushed through the sell-off of Westrail Freight which owned the thousands of kilometres of rural railway line. The sell-off was opposed in the Coalition party room by a number of Liberal MPs who believed that it would only lead to a reduction in rail services in the country, an outcome that's now a reality.
Brendon Grylls deserves the accolades he and his party are currently basking in. Just remember, however, he and his predecessors are in part responsible for many of the problems being experienced in rural and regional WA.
Are there any lessons here for incoming premier Colin Barnett? He should either close down the development commissions and fund the appointment of economic development officers within local government bodies, or he should place all development commissions under one Liberal minister and make it difficult for the commissions to be used for party political purposes.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
We won't lose our beaches as sea level rises!
Various media outlets and some otherwise scientifically sound climate change spokespersons claim that Perth's beaches will be lost forever if and when sea level rises and engulf them. The following letter to the editor of The West Australian wasn't published but it outlines what will actually happen.
"A major sea level rise of the Indian Ocean will not 'destroy' most of Perth's beaches (West, October 23, 2008, page 56). A rise in sea level along a sandy shoreline will move the shoreline inland in a ratio of about 1:100. For Scarborough and most other sandy beaches, a one metre rise will create a new beach some 100 metres inland. For some of the smaller 'pocket' beaches trapped within rocky coastlines such as around Trigg, these beaches will disappear completely unless large volumes of sand are washed northwards or artificial replenishment from inland occurs.
In the face of rising sea levels, we really only have two options: withdraw or defend. We can remove buildings and other structures so that a new beach is allowed to form inland of the old one. Alternatively, we can protect existing structures with massive engineered walls if the assets under threat are worth a lot more than the cost of their protection. Gold Coast sea defences cost up to $15,000 a linear metre or $15 million per kilometre. One consequence of seawalls is that they deflect wave energy seaward, causing the beach to be washed away. The resulting concrete structure with deep water immediately offshore is far less attractive than a natural sandy beach."
On a similar theme, The Sunday Times printed the following letter in reply to the statement that some Pacific island countries are threatened by sea level rise:
"Not all low lying countries like Tuvalu are threatened by sea level rise (Sunday Times, October 5). As a geologist, I know that many parts of the world are sinking as a result of tectonic movements deep in the earth. Many remote atolls are built on ancient volcanoes which are sinking, so it is inaccurate to state that sea level rise is the only or even the main threat to these countries.
Even so, the end result is the same and developed countries like Australia will have to address the question of what to do with the thousands and millions of people who will need to find a new home over coming decades."
"A major sea level rise of the Indian Ocean will not 'destroy' most of Perth's beaches (West, October 23, 2008, page 56). A rise in sea level along a sandy shoreline will move the shoreline inland in a ratio of about 1:100. For Scarborough and most other sandy beaches, a one metre rise will create a new beach some 100 metres inland. For some of the smaller 'pocket' beaches trapped within rocky coastlines such as around Trigg, these beaches will disappear completely unless large volumes of sand are washed northwards or artificial replenishment from inland occurs.
In the face of rising sea levels, we really only have two options: withdraw or defend. We can remove buildings and other structures so that a new beach is allowed to form inland of the old one. Alternatively, we can protect existing structures with massive engineered walls if the assets under threat are worth a lot more than the cost of their protection. Gold Coast sea defences cost up to $15,000 a linear metre or $15 million per kilometre. One consequence of seawalls is that they deflect wave energy seaward, causing the beach to be washed away. The resulting concrete structure with deep water immediately offshore is far less attractive than a natural sandy beach."
On a similar theme, The Sunday Times printed the following letter in reply to the statement that some Pacific island countries are threatened by sea level rise:
"Not all low lying countries like Tuvalu are threatened by sea level rise (Sunday Times, October 5). As a geologist, I know that many parts of the world are sinking as a result of tectonic movements deep in the earth. Many remote atolls are built on ancient volcanoes which are sinking, so it is inaccurate to state that sea level rise is the only or even the main threat to these countries.
Even so, the end result is the same and developed countries like Australia will have to address the question of what to do with the thousands and millions of people who will need to find a new home over coming decades."
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
GM crops deserve more reasoned debate
From: Science and Development Network. Published October 20, 2008
Debates around the potential benefits of GM crops for developing countries must be reasoned and evidence-based, says Albert Weale.
The World Bank recently estimated that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty. And the future does not look brighter. Food prices, although likely to fall from their current peaks, are predicted to remain high over the next decade.
As the world considers how to respond, the debate about genetically modified (GM) crops has inevitably reared its ugly head. 'Ugly' because the public exchange about this technology has usually seen extreme viewpoints gaining the most airtime. For example, in the United Kingdom, Prince Charles' spirited but ill-informed attack on GM crops this summer led to a flurry of opinionated responses. We could have been back in the polarised debates of the earlier part of this decade.
Since 1999, my organisation, the UK-based Nuffield Council on Bioethics, has twice examined the ethical issues raised by GM crops. In a 2003 report, the Council specifically focused on developing countries. Two of the conclusions are still particularly relevant today.
Ethical Obligation
First, the council concluded that there is an ethical obligation to explore whether GM crops could reduce poverty, and improve food security and profitable agriculture in developing countries. In coming to this conclusion, the council considered differing perceptions of risk. When people have enough food, as in developed countries, consumers and producers will feel free to avoid risk — even if that risk is theoretical rather than real. But developing nations, struggling with widespread poverty, poor health, limited pest control and poor agricultural sustainability, have a different risk-benefit calculation. This is perhaps why the acreage of GM crops has tripled in developing countries over the past five years, compared to just doubling worldwide.
Consumers in prosperous countries are being asked to suppress their doubts about GM crops so that research relevant to the developing world continues. In effect, they are being asked to concede that any potential losses to them are outweighed by potential gains to poor countries, where yields are declining and conventional agriculture is increasingly unsustainable.
This does not belittle other factors needed for poverty reduction and food security — such as stable political environments, appropriate infrastructures, fair international and national agricultural policies, and access to land and water. GM crops are just one part of a large and complex picture. But we will not know how important a part until we explore their potential.
Case by case consideration
The Nuffield Council's second key conclusion was that the wide range of GM crops and situations must be considered individually. Those who oppose or support GM crops per se make an unhelpful generalisation.
Each time, the gene or combination of genes being inserted, and the nature of the target crop, must be assessed. It is also important to compare a GM crop with local alternatives.
For example, Golden Rice — enhanced for b-carotene to help fight vitamin A deficiency — is not needed where people have sufficient vitamin A from leafy greens, or ready access to vitamin supplements. But where this is not the case, the crop may significantly improve nutrition.
Similarly, herbicide-resistant soybeans can reduce demands for local labour. This may be devastating if a community relies on wages from manual weeding. But it may help communities struggling with a labour shortage due to high prevalence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
The role of research
Scientific and other evidence must be central in the debate, and over the past few years evidence about GM crops has grown.
For example, according to a recent news report in Science, soon-to-be-published research will clarify the amount of Golden Rice a child would need to eat each day to prevent vitamin A deficiency. This kind of research is vital if governments and farmers are to make informed decisions about GM crops. Indeed, before new research is funded, national and regional bodies in developing countries should be consulted about their priorities for crops and desirable GM traits.
In the United Kingdom, the government has committed £150 million (US$263 million) over the next five years to research aimed at making agriculture more resilient to the pests and diseases affecting poor farmers, and increasing smallholders' agricultural productivity.
Research efforts are also growing in the developing world, with South African scientists developing and working to commercialise virus-resistant maize, and countries like Kenya and Nigeria hosting projects to develop virus-resistant varieties of key African crops.
Striking a balance
Many people worry about possible environmental risks from GM crops, such as gene flow to other plants, and this is something that scientific research must clarify. But alarm-raising without evidence is as helpful as calling 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Similarly, demanding evidence of zero risk before allowing a new technology is fundamentally at odds with any practical strategy for investigating new technologies. Mobile phones or aeroplanes might never have seen the light of day if such stringent demands had been placed on them.
In the case of GM technology it is clearly crucial to ask what the risks of adopting GM crops are. But it is also important to ask what the risks of not doing so are. Realistic cost-benefit analyses that consider local social and environmental conditions and development goals are needed on a country-by-country basis.
Heated debate about the food crisis must not detract from an evidence-based assessment of biotechnology's potential for improving agricultural productivity in developing countries. The benefits of GM crops must not be overstated. But neither can poor arguments be allowed to obscure strong arguments for a good cause.
Professor Albert Weale is chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and professor of government at the University of Essex, United Kingdom.
Debates around the potential benefits of GM crops for developing countries must be reasoned and evidence-based, says Albert Weale.
The World Bank recently estimated that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty. And the future does not look brighter. Food prices, although likely to fall from their current peaks, are predicted to remain high over the next decade.
As the world considers how to respond, the debate about genetically modified (GM) crops has inevitably reared its ugly head. 'Ugly' because the public exchange about this technology has usually seen extreme viewpoints gaining the most airtime. For example, in the United Kingdom, Prince Charles' spirited but ill-informed attack on GM crops this summer led to a flurry of opinionated responses. We could have been back in the polarised debates of the earlier part of this decade.
Since 1999, my organisation, the UK-based Nuffield Council on Bioethics, has twice examined the ethical issues raised by GM crops. In a 2003 report, the Council specifically focused on developing countries. Two of the conclusions are still particularly relevant today.
Ethical Obligation
First, the council concluded that there is an ethical obligation to explore whether GM crops could reduce poverty, and improve food security and profitable agriculture in developing countries. In coming to this conclusion, the council considered differing perceptions of risk. When people have enough food, as in developed countries, consumers and producers will feel free to avoid risk — even if that risk is theoretical rather than real. But developing nations, struggling with widespread poverty, poor health, limited pest control and poor agricultural sustainability, have a different risk-benefit calculation. This is perhaps why the acreage of GM crops has tripled in developing countries over the past five years, compared to just doubling worldwide.
Consumers in prosperous countries are being asked to suppress their doubts about GM crops so that research relevant to the developing world continues. In effect, they are being asked to concede that any potential losses to them are outweighed by potential gains to poor countries, where yields are declining and conventional agriculture is increasingly unsustainable.
This does not belittle other factors needed for poverty reduction and food security — such as stable political environments, appropriate infrastructures, fair international and national agricultural policies, and access to land and water. GM crops are just one part of a large and complex picture. But we will not know how important a part until we explore their potential.
Case by case consideration
The Nuffield Council's second key conclusion was that the wide range of GM crops and situations must be considered individually. Those who oppose or support GM crops per se make an unhelpful generalisation.
Each time, the gene or combination of genes being inserted, and the nature of the target crop, must be assessed. It is also important to compare a GM crop with local alternatives.
For example, Golden Rice — enhanced for b-carotene to help fight vitamin A deficiency — is not needed where people have sufficient vitamin A from leafy greens, or ready access to vitamin supplements. But where this is not the case, the crop may significantly improve nutrition.
Similarly, herbicide-resistant soybeans can reduce demands for local labour. This may be devastating if a community relies on wages from manual weeding. But it may help communities struggling with a labour shortage due to high prevalence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
The role of research
Scientific and other evidence must be central in the debate, and over the past few years evidence about GM crops has grown.
For example, according to a recent news report in Science, soon-to-be-published research will clarify the amount of Golden Rice a child would need to eat each day to prevent vitamin A deficiency. This kind of research is vital if governments and farmers are to make informed decisions about GM crops. Indeed, before new research is funded, national and regional bodies in developing countries should be consulted about their priorities for crops and desirable GM traits.
In the United Kingdom, the government has committed £150 million (US$263 million) over the next five years to research aimed at making agriculture more resilient to the pests and diseases affecting poor farmers, and increasing smallholders' agricultural productivity.
Research efforts are also growing in the developing world, with South African scientists developing and working to commercialise virus-resistant maize, and countries like Kenya and Nigeria hosting projects to develop virus-resistant varieties of key African crops.
Striking a balance
Many people worry about possible environmental risks from GM crops, such as gene flow to other plants, and this is something that scientific research must clarify. But alarm-raising without evidence is as helpful as calling 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Similarly, demanding evidence of zero risk before allowing a new technology is fundamentally at odds with any practical strategy for investigating new technologies. Mobile phones or aeroplanes might never have seen the light of day if such stringent demands had been placed on them.
In the case of GM technology it is clearly crucial to ask what the risks of adopting GM crops are. But it is also important to ask what the risks of not doing so are. Realistic cost-benefit analyses that consider local social and environmental conditions and development goals are needed on a country-by-country basis.
Heated debate about the food crisis must not detract from an evidence-based assessment of biotechnology's potential for improving agricultural productivity in developing countries. The benefits of GM crops must not be overstated. But neither can poor arguments be allowed to obscure strong arguments for a good cause.
Professor Albert Weale is chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and professor of government at the University of Essex, United Kingdom.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
IS FUELWATCH THE BEST THAT WE CAN DO?
Why are our politicians restricting the debate on fuel prices to side issues such as FuelWatch and reduced fuel taxes? Surely the huge resources of government can be better directed to finding other ways of reducing the pain felt by motorists? Effective solutions exist but they require strong governments willing to make difficult decisions.
At the global level, Australia can do nothing about the price of crude oil. The international market and the laws of supply and demand mean we're price takers, not price setters. Our hands are tied at this level.
Nationally, we've adopted a price structure based on the price of fuel coming out of Singapore's refineries. We could change our policy and allow local refineries to sell below these benchmark prices, but then the incentive to explore for oil and gas in Australia would be reduced. As well, the nation's existing oil refiners wouldn't invest money in new or upgraded facilities when they can make greater profits in other countries? No, our hands are tied at this level as well.
But market forces and competition in Australia are restricted. With WA having just one oil refinery, there's no internal competition. Transport costs make it unviable to ship large volumes of refined petroleum products into the state to try and compete with our existing refinery.
To encourage competition, the state could provide incentives to build another refinery. But this is unrealistic: the cost would be billions of dollars and we'd still have to ship crude oil in at world parity prices, so the gains would be minimal.
A more realistic action is to investigate the profitability of the existing refinery at Kwinana and see if BP is ripping off fuel users in WA. As owner of the state's only refinery, BP doesn't disclose the profits it makes at individual refineries. Globally, the company made US$20.8 billion profit after tax in 2007 and its annual report barely mentions Australia, let alone the money made from its individual operations. Maybe it's time for the state government to undertake a confidential analysis of BP's operations in WA. If company profits are found to be unreasonably high, tax and other mechanisms exist to reduce the load on fuel users in this state.
Remember: BP's Kwinana refinery is the largest in Australia. It's mostly an old plant, having been built in the 1950s, so depreciation and similar charges against operating costs would be small in comparison with the total cost of the asset. WA should be enjoying lower fuel prices than the rest of Australia simply because the Kwinana refinery should be delivering economies of scale - the bigger the plant, the smaller the overheads per unit of production. It'd be nice to have BP explain why their terminal gate price for fuel isn't the cheapest in the country.
Can FuelWatch be made to work better? There's no doubt that it provides a useful service to those consumers prepared to visit the website and find out where the cheapest fuel is each day. But the law requiring prices to remain fixed for a 24 hour period is anti-competitive. Competition's ability to bring prices down is lost when you can't lower your price once you've seen what your competitor is charging.
The state government should make a simple change to FuelWatch so that the posted prices are the maximum. An individual service station operator should be able to lower the stated price to gain a competitive advantage. Kevin Rudd should insist upon this change if the scheme is to go national.
Making the posted price a maximum, capable of being lowered within the 24 hour period, will make life tough for smaller, independent operators who probably won't be able to compete with the big fuel providers. But they stopped buying fuel from Singapore years ago, instead buying from BP's Kwinana refinery. So the public need to decide whether they really want lower fuel prices and a system that is truly competitive, even if some small operators get hurt in the process. Sadly, in our modern cut-throat business culture, you often can't have both.
Finally, the Rudd government can take a simple step to address the issue of why country fuel prices are often so much higher than in the city: amend the Trade Practices Act to outlaw discriminatory pricing. Shortly after the Howard government was elected in 1996, a review of this Act received submissions from big business that the existing laws against discriminatory pricing - where a supplier can sell the same product at different prices to different customers - were pointless as no one had ever been prosecuted under the existing provisions. In 1998, the relevant clauses were removed and very quickly we saw different prices being charged to different customers, even if the size of orders were the same.
Today, a large fuel retailer in country WA is usually forced to pay much more per litre for their wholesale fuel than a similar sized retailer in Perth. How often do you hear a small or rural business complaining that it's forced to pay a wholesale price that's higher than the retail price for the same item in Perth or at a national supermarket chain such as Coles or Woolworths?
Mr Rudd, if you want to make some serious changes to fuel prices, stop tinkering around the edges and amend the Trade Practices Act. And Mr Carpenter, you can bring genuine competition into fuel prices in this state by allowing the daily fuel price advised to FuelWatch to be a maximum price.
At the global level, Australia can do nothing about the price of crude oil. The international market and the laws of supply and demand mean we're price takers, not price setters. Our hands are tied at this level.
Nationally, we've adopted a price structure based on the price of fuel coming out of Singapore's refineries. We could change our policy and allow local refineries to sell below these benchmark prices, but then the incentive to explore for oil and gas in Australia would be reduced. As well, the nation's existing oil refiners wouldn't invest money in new or upgraded facilities when they can make greater profits in other countries? No, our hands are tied at this level as well.
But market forces and competition in Australia are restricted. With WA having just one oil refinery, there's no internal competition. Transport costs make it unviable to ship large volumes of refined petroleum products into the state to try and compete with our existing refinery.
To encourage competition, the state could provide incentives to build another refinery. But this is unrealistic: the cost would be billions of dollars and we'd still have to ship crude oil in at world parity prices, so the gains would be minimal.
A more realistic action is to investigate the profitability of the existing refinery at Kwinana and see if BP is ripping off fuel users in WA. As owner of the state's only refinery, BP doesn't disclose the profits it makes at individual refineries. Globally, the company made US$20.8 billion profit after tax in 2007 and its annual report barely mentions Australia, let alone the money made from its individual operations. Maybe it's time for the state government to undertake a confidential analysis of BP's operations in WA. If company profits are found to be unreasonably high, tax and other mechanisms exist to reduce the load on fuel users in this state.
Remember: BP's Kwinana refinery is the largest in Australia. It's mostly an old plant, having been built in the 1950s, so depreciation and similar charges against operating costs would be small in comparison with the total cost of the asset. WA should be enjoying lower fuel prices than the rest of Australia simply because the Kwinana refinery should be delivering economies of scale - the bigger the plant, the smaller the overheads per unit of production. It'd be nice to have BP explain why their terminal gate price for fuel isn't the cheapest in the country.
Can FuelWatch be made to work better? There's no doubt that it provides a useful service to those consumers prepared to visit the website and find out where the cheapest fuel is each day. But the law requiring prices to remain fixed for a 24 hour period is anti-competitive. Competition's ability to bring prices down is lost when you can't lower your price once you've seen what your competitor is charging.
The state government should make a simple change to FuelWatch so that the posted prices are the maximum. An individual service station operator should be able to lower the stated price to gain a competitive advantage. Kevin Rudd should insist upon this change if the scheme is to go national.
Making the posted price a maximum, capable of being lowered within the 24 hour period, will make life tough for smaller, independent operators who probably won't be able to compete with the big fuel providers. But they stopped buying fuel from Singapore years ago, instead buying from BP's Kwinana refinery. So the public need to decide whether they really want lower fuel prices and a system that is truly competitive, even if some small operators get hurt in the process. Sadly, in our modern cut-throat business culture, you often can't have both.
Finally, the Rudd government can take a simple step to address the issue of why country fuel prices are often so much higher than in the city: amend the Trade Practices Act to outlaw discriminatory pricing. Shortly after the Howard government was elected in 1996, a review of this Act received submissions from big business that the existing laws against discriminatory pricing - where a supplier can sell the same product at different prices to different customers - were pointless as no one had ever been prosecuted under the existing provisions. In 1998, the relevant clauses were removed and very quickly we saw different prices being charged to different customers, even if the size of orders were the same.
Today, a large fuel retailer in country WA is usually forced to pay much more per litre for their wholesale fuel than a similar sized retailer in Perth. How often do you hear a small or rural business complaining that it's forced to pay a wholesale price that's higher than the retail price for the same item in Perth or at a national supermarket chain such as Coles or Woolworths?
Mr Rudd, if you want to make some serious changes to fuel prices, stop tinkering around the edges and amend the Trade Practices Act. And Mr Carpenter, you can bring genuine competition into fuel prices in this state by allowing the daily fuel price advised to FuelWatch to be a maximum price.
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