by Richard Gowan | Jun 20, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, Off topic
Yesterday, I offered up Texan senator John Cornyn’s macho cowboy re-election video as “Texan political advertising at its best”. But the enjoyably off-beat William Butler Yeast blog (which has a commendable “What I’ve Been Drinking” sidebar which I hope we’ll be imitating soon*) points out that the creator of the single most powerful (and nastiest) advert for any Texan politician ever died last weekend.
The ad man was Tony Schwartz. The Texan was Lyndon Baines Johnson. The target was Barry Goldwater, LBJ’s opponent in the 1964 presidential election and feared by some as too likely to, er, go nuclear. The result was the “Daisy Ad”.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63h_v6uf0Ao&feature=related]
* As you ask, it’s a gin and tonic for me right now. Though I’m right out of lime.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 20, 2008 | Influence and networks, Off topic
Crime in Jamaica has always been pretty bad. The island of 2.7m people has one of the highest murder rates in the world and the last decade has seen a 10% increase in homicide. The reasons include deteriorating economic conditions and small town gangs evolving into powerful organised criminal networks. But researchers looking more closely into just why crime has got so bad have stumbled on something fascinating.
Ten years ago, researchers would comb the streets for information, talking with local residents and listening to their stories. These conversations would invariably take place on either the steps leading up to the front door or on the verandas overlooking the street. But when researchers moved from street to street in the city heat this time around, they noticed that the streets were empty. Were people hiding because of crime? Researchers began knocking on the doors of houses to find out. Once they had explained who they were through the shutters, the researchers were allowed in – and were immediately hit by a wave of cold air.
The reason behind the disappearing citizens hit the researchers – literally. As Jamaicans had begun purchasing cheap air conditioning units so the tradition of sitting out on the stairs and verandas started to die. And as the residents left, the criminals moved in – taking over streets in a bid to expand their turf. Researchers found that the mere presence of people sitting outside their houses had acted as a deterrent to crime by building social capital among local residents and in doing so bringing the community closer together. Buying aircon units, it seems, set off a unique chain reaction.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 20, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system, North America
At the start of the month, I tried to write a wry and whimsical post about signs of scarcity in Putnam County, a beautiful bit of hill country north of New York City. Well, sometimes you’re trying to do whimsy and you come over as a bit of a dick. Although it wasn’t possible to comment on the post (any blog that involves internet hate figure Daniel Korski has to take such measures) one Putnam resident ferreted out my e-mail address to point out that I’d got my facts and analysis wrong.
I won’t reprint the entire correspondence, but the central issue has been Putnam County’s 1970s Indian Point nuclear power station, which I mocked as “Olde Worlde” and a menace to the community. That’s not a unique point of view – heck, even folk legends Pete Seeger and Ani DiFranco claim that “Indian Point is leaking radioactive waste into the Hudson River, is one of the most vulnerable terrorist targets, and has 20 million people without a workable evacuation plan living in its shadows.” And for those who aren’t convinced that folk genius and knowledge of energy security are one and the same thing (I have visions of Steeleye Span commenting on pipeline issues) an organization called Riverkeeper bashes away at Indian Point and other polluters along the Hudson River.
All ostensibly convincing. But my correspondent says it’s all deeply misleading: “Putnamers in general do not subscribe to the PR-based notion of Indian Point as a problem. That notion flies higher the further away from the animal itself one gets.” He counters that Putnamers appreciate the employment Indian Point brings; fear that the alternative would be coal-fired power stations that would ruin the area’s excellent air quality; mistrust Riverkeeper and are generally weary of “negative snark” from ” the gentrification corps up from SoHo”. Now, I live in Brooklyn, but I plead guilty of snarking without fact-checking.
Of course, it’s possible that my correspondent doesn’t speak for a majority in Putnam County either – for once, I’m going to allow comments on this post to see if anyone else from that part of the world wants to contribute (but if you wish to weigh in on the merits of Steeleye Span as political commentators go here instead). Still, I’m convinced for now – as David has pointed out, energy and emissions issues are going to loom large in U.S. politics before and after the elections, so it’s good to look at the issues from the ground up. My correspondent and I ended up 100% agreeing that everyone should spend some time in Putnam County – go to Cold Spring from Grand Central via Metro North. It’s great.
by Alex Evans | Jun 20, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific
So says Kevin Kelly on what is now my favourite blog. Here’s why:
China shares borders with more countries (14 in total) than any other country on earth. Very few of those borders have ever been very permeable to migration of culture, commerce and ideas because of mountains, deserts, swamps, and high altitudes. In many ways China has acted as an island for millennia. The very large zone of an impermeable buffer, and mountainous and unfarmable land is shown in this image as water.
What’s left is the island of China. This is the traditional center of China, of fertile river valley farming, and home to the Han people. It is also the zone of manufacturing today. It is where all of its giant, throbbing cities lie. The island alone is huge, still among the largest countries in the world.
Prosperity in China is found only on the island. Off the island, in the waters deep, China remains remarkably undeveloped. In fact the level of development in the “Chinese waters” is about equal to the low levels of the neighboring countries. I was surprised to find in my own travels that many towns in the Chinese waterland were as remote, poor, and disadvantaged as any places I had seen in Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan — all neighbors of China. Not coincidentally, this waterland is also inhabited by non-Han peoples, what the Chinese call their minorities. It is not just Tibet where the nan-Han are outnumbered. In most of the counties covered by this buffer zone (shown as water), minorities dominate. There are lots of them, speaking their own language, often their own dress. What is most remarkable is how remote the rich island seems from the outer waterlands.
The China everyone talks about is the island. China’s worry is the outer zone will leave. Will they go the way of the Soviet Union and break off one by one? Will there be two futures? Much of the control-freak nature of the central political party has been trying — at almost all costs — to keep the whole waterland under control of the island — to keep the country intact. And when you look at this map, it is clear that a break up, or at least a break down, is a very real possibility. In fact the more you look at it, the more amazing it is that China has not devolved before now.
by Alex Evans | Jun 20, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, North America
If there’s a silver lining to the disastrous flooding in the US mid-west, then this might be it. As prices for corn go through the roof, the impacts of diverting so much of it to ethanol production – expectations before the flooding were of fully a third of this year’s crop – are leading to an increasingly determined push-back from the US food industry.
Of course, the effects of corn-based ethanol on food prices aren’t exactly a newsflash: Mexico City saw riots on this very subject back in February 2007, well before food prices had reached the top of the global agenda. But the extreme weather event that the US midwest is now experiencing shifts the intensity of debates up by at least two gears.
At present, the FT reports, US biofuel rules require 9 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended into transport fuels this year – mostly with corn-based ethanol. But the US Environmental Protection Agency can – if it chooses – waive the requirement. Texas has asked it to do just that – and food producers, as they watch their costs rocket – are asking it to do the same nationally. As one food company chief puts it, “it is not fair to expect us to compete with a government-subsidised market”. It’s a fair point.
As readers will already be aware, the importance of corn to the US food economy goes far, far beyond cornflakes and tins of Green Giant sweetcorn. If you haven’t already done so, read Tim Flannery’s excellent NYRB article from last summer entitled “We’re living on corn!” – he’s not kidding:
[Michael] Pollan gives us the example of the chicken nugget, which he says “piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn” (because the chickens are corn-fed), as does “the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget ‘fresh’ can all be derived from corn.
So dominant has this giant grass become that of the 45,000-odd items in American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn. Disposable diapers, trash bags, toothpaste, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and even the shine on the covers of magazines all contain corn. In America, all meat is also ultimately corn: chickens, turkeys, pigs, and even cows (which would be far healthier and happier eating grass) are forced into eating corn, as are, increasingly, carnivores such as salmon.
If you doubt the ubiquity of corn you can take a chemical test. It turns out that corn has a peculiar carbon structure which can be traced in everything that consumes it. Compare a hair sample from an American and a tortilla-eating Mexican and you’ll discover that the American contains a far larger proportion of corn-type carbon. “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs,” says one of the researchers who conducts such tests.
And of course, turning food into fuel is only half the story: for America’s love affair with corn is also the tale of turning fuel into food – on a truly epic scale. In the US, according to academics David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, even back in 1994 the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil was expended each year to feed each US citizen. Meanwhile, another study – this time of Canadian farms – gives an idea of how this energy use breaks down:
– 31%: manufacture of inorganic fertiliser
– 19%: operating field machinery
– 16%: transportation
– 13%: irrigation
– 8%: raising livestock (not including feed)
– 5%: crop drying
– 5%: pesticide production
Now, you may be wondering: if it takes this much energy to produce corn, how can it make sense then to use that corn as an energy source? Wouldn’t that seem, not to put too fine a point on it, wantonly defiant of the laws of thermodynamics? Alas, it would. Indeed, studies show that the energy-returned-on-energy-invested (EROEI) of corn is actually negative: corn ethanol requires 29 per cent more energy to grow than what you can get out of it.
Rewind! One more time: corn ethanol requires 29 per cent more energy to grow than what you can get out of it. You may have seen some pretty mad subsidies in your time, but I’ll wager that none tops this; watching America tie itself in knots thus, one can’t help but feel an awestruck respect for the thunderous public affairs capacity of the US farm lobby.
Still, as we watch the US farm lobby and the US food lobby start to join battle, one might reflect that neither is clearly doing many favours for the public interest. Corn-based ethanol may be an obviously stupid policy. But it’s hard to see a diet as rich in red meat, saturated fat and processed food (all derived from corn) as is America’s, as being much more sensible – especially given that the globalisation of that diet is the number one driver of rising global food prices.
