As energy and food prices soar, jobs and services disappear and incomes are cut it amounts to the worst assault on living standards in living memory.
For the 2.4 million households affected, the price of gas supplied by Scottish Power will increase by 19% - almost one-fifth – on August 1, and electricity will go up by 10%. Other energy supply companies are expected to follow Scottish Power with similar increases in the wake of a 30% increase in wholesale prices since November 2010,
Annual household energy bills are expected to rise by up to £200 to £1400 this year, hitting those on low incomes hard, and British Gas is warning that wholesale prices are expected to rise a further 25% this coming winter. With food prices rises also accelerating – a typical basket has risen close to 5% in the last year - many pensioners already have to choose between eating and staying warm, and some will have to forgo both this winter.
Whilst across the world inflation is cutting into incomes and enraging millions, opinion leaders for rich investors are building the case for much worse to avoid the catastrophic consequences of having to admit bankruptcy by Greece or allowing debt default by the USA which is threatened for August 2nd.
As the inflationary US money-creation quantitative easing programme runs into the sand, having failed to bring about a recovery, Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of investment company Silver Lake, and vice-chairman of the Brookings Institution says ‘The time is long past for “rosy scenarios” which the markets won’t believe. Hard choices will have to be made.’ And these include dramatic cuts in government spending programs combined with savage tax increases.
Meanwhile, the oil-producing countries that belong to OPEC and control 40% of world supplies are meeting to consider increasing production or maintaining high prices whilst every NATO bomb that hits Tripoli keeps high-grade Libyan oil under the ground and drives world oil prices higher.
The Arab Spring uprisings has terrified autocrats in oil-producing countries – Saudi Arabia in particular. The Saudi monarchy, for example, hope they can cling remain in power by appeasing their populations with public spending programmes – and claw back the money by raising the price of their oil. Forecasters say that oil prices will not drop below $80-$100 a barrel for years to come. They could even rise to $130-$140 – with huge effects on the world economy which relies on oil for 30% of its energy needs.
And with oil the most critical commodity for capitalism after labour, the higher the price of oil goes, the lower wages and benefits - the price of labour - must fall, if profits are to be maintained.
Some are calling for energy companies to open their books to explain the need for price increases when Scottish Power, owned by Spanish company Iberdrola, made £1.3bn profit in 2009/10. Southern Energy made £2.1bn.
Norman Kerr, of the Fuel poverty charity Energy Action Scotland, says rightly that "It is time to recognise that being able to heat and power the home to an adequate level at a price that is affordable is an essential part of everyday living and we cannot continue to pile more on to fuel bills and push more people into fuel poverty."
For the majority of the world’s population there’s only one choice: to take the energy companies into social ownership and end the for-profit system once and for all.
The rising price of basic necessities – fuel in particular - is a common factor that can potentially unite ordinary people’s struggles around the world. Protecting the vast oil and oil resources in countries from the corporate raptors and their war-mongering representatives in government is vital. Bringing energy sources under the control of popular assemblies to be used in a not-for-profit way offers a way forward. Then, collectively, people’s assemblies can begin to plan safe use of oil and natural resources to meet needs and restore the planet’s ecosystem.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label oil prices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil prices. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Peak oil is passed as renewable targets plummet
Peak oil has passed us by – it happened in 2006 according to Faith Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency. He made this astonishing statement in a number of interviews on television stations in the US and Australia.
Governments, said Birol, should have started thinking about all this ten years ago: “The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there’s a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.”
By 2035, three-quarters of the world’s oil production from existing fields will need to be replaced, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook report 2010. By then, crude oil output from fields that were in production in 2009 will have fallen from 68 million barrels per day in 2009 to 16 million per day, leaving a gap of 50 million barrels per day to be filled.
As production falls, prices increase – crude oil is currently over $100 a barrel compared to about $40 in 2009. The gap is being filled by a surge in new fossil fuels - shale gasification, extraction of oil from tar sands, and increased reliance on natural gas and coal.
The IEA’s first Clean Energy Report published in April states that surging demand for fossil fuels is “outstripping deployment of clean energy technologies”, adding:
“Coal has met 47% of the global new electricity demand over the past decade, eclipsing clean energy efforts made over the same period of time, which include improved implementation of energy efficiency measures and rapid growth in the use of renewable energy sources.”
In a hard hitting introduction to the report, the IEA states: “Less than three years after fossil fuel prices hit an all time high and the world plunged into its deepest recession since the Great Depression, geopolitical events are driving prices steadily higher.
“The short-term risks to political stability and economic activity posed by the world’s dependence on fossil fuels are again as manifest as its long-term threat to environmental sustainability. To break this dependency, the world needs a clean energy revolution.”
But no such revolution is in sight. In fact the opposite is happening. Renewable energy is being abandoned by governments, in the wake of the economic crisis.
EU Energy Chief Connie Hedegaard has spoken about ferocious lobbying by the European gas industry, representing themselves as a clean energy source. She expressed concern that when current European targets for renewable energy run out in 2020, the industry will simply stop growing.
And in any case states never could have invested, or subsidised, at levels to provide real competition to big fossil fuel interests. Only ecologically dubious bio-fuel can stand up to them to some extent, with processes that are only marginally more sustainable than fossil fuels themselves.
One estimate is that by 2030 renewables will have risen from their present 5% of the total to just 18%, and gas will be the biggest growth area. Oil and coal will fall slightly as a proportion of the whole but fossil fuels will remain the heart of the energy mix for the foreseeable future.
In 2009, the IEA set out the energy shift required to prevent dangerous climate change. By 2030, 60% of energy would need to be produced by low-carbon energy technologies – made up of renewable technologies (37%); nuclear (18%) and energy plants fitted with carbon capture and storage technology (5%).
That mix is not achievable if the current power structures – state power, corporate power and electric power – remain in place.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Governments, said Birol, should have started thinking about all this ten years ago: “The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there’s a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.”
By 2035, three-quarters of the world’s oil production from existing fields will need to be replaced, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook report 2010. By then, crude oil output from fields that were in production in 2009 will have fallen from 68 million barrels per day in 2009 to 16 million per day, leaving a gap of 50 million barrels per day to be filled.
As production falls, prices increase – crude oil is currently over $100 a barrel compared to about $40 in 2009. The gap is being filled by a surge in new fossil fuels - shale gasification, extraction of oil from tar sands, and increased reliance on natural gas and coal.
The IEA’s first Clean Energy Report published in April states that surging demand for fossil fuels is “outstripping deployment of clean energy technologies”, adding:
“Coal has met 47% of the global new electricity demand over the past decade, eclipsing clean energy efforts made over the same period of time, which include improved implementation of energy efficiency measures and rapid growth in the use of renewable energy sources.”
In a hard hitting introduction to the report, the IEA states: “Less than three years after fossil fuel prices hit an all time high and the world plunged into its deepest recession since the Great Depression, geopolitical events are driving prices steadily higher.
“The short-term risks to political stability and economic activity posed by the world’s dependence on fossil fuels are again as manifest as its long-term threat to environmental sustainability. To break this dependency, the world needs a clean energy revolution.”
But no such revolution is in sight. In fact the opposite is happening. Renewable energy is being abandoned by governments, in the wake of the economic crisis.
EU Energy Chief Connie Hedegaard has spoken about ferocious lobbying by the European gas industry, representing themselves as a clean energy source. She expressed concern that when current European targets for renewable energy run out in 2020, the industry will simply stop growing.
And in any case states never could have invested, or subsidised, at levels to provide real competition to big fossil fuel interests. Only ecologically dubious bio-fuel can stand up to them to some extent, with processes that are only marginally more sustainable than fossil fuels themselves.
One estimate is that by 2030 renewables will have risen from their present 5% of the total to just 18%, and gas will be the biggest growth area. Oil and coal will fall slightly as a proportion of the whole but fossil fuels will remain the heart of the energy mix for the foreseeable future.
In 2009, the IEA set out the energy shift required to prevent dangerous climate change. By 2030, 60% of energy would need to be produced by low-carbon energy technologies – made up of renewable technologies (37%); nuclear (18%) and energy plants fitted with carbon capture and storage technology (5%).
That mix is not achievable if the current power structures – state power, corporate power and electric power – remain in place.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
'Devil's excrement' has its revenge
The revolutionary upsurge in North Africa and the Middle East is having a direct impact on the global crisis of capitalism.
Oil prices have surged as much as 6% since Monday, rising to their highest since the collapse of demand in the global crash of 2008. If this rise is maintained, it is certain to trigger a renewed slowdown in global production.
Oil companies in Libya are in the process of shutting down the 2% of the world’s production that come from the country. Western oil companies have suspended oil production and BP has started evacuating workers from Libya.
The Libyan mission to the UN is in disarray, the country’s generals are resigning along with many ministers. As in Egypt, the army is going over to the side of the revolution
Every part of the transnational capitalist class – global corporations, capitalist governments, unaccountable global agencies - is watching events with a mounting horror. They were horrified by the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power in 1969, now they are horrified by the revolution that will end his rule.
Mostly they are desperate to find a way of halting the contagion of revolt against autocratic governments which have provided safe haven for the global oil corporations and built their family fortunes from the proceeds. Nervously they assess the risk of the infection spreading to Saudi Arabia, which is the source of close to 10% of current oil supplies.
Interviewed on Al Jazeera, a former UN official spoke for the capitalists. Now they don’t mind people having rights, they’re even in favour of them having the same “democratic”, “human” rights enjoyed by people in the West. But above all they want stability, they want to see investment, they want people to keep their jobs, they want to see economic growth. They fear a revolution that could end the for-profit system. They are wondering what they can do to stop it.
Any disruption in oil supplies increases the power of the Organisation of Petrol Exporting Countries (OPEC) consisting of Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. As of November 2010, OPEC members collectively hold 79% of world crude oil reserves and 44% of the world’s crude oil production, giving them major influence over the global market.
Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso was a prominent Venezuelan diplomat, politician and lawyer primarily responsible for the inception and creation of OPEC. In 1975 he warned that “oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil's excrement” – “the devil’s. He wasn’t far off.
In the 1970s, the inflationary printing of dollars to buy its way out of a historic economic crisis forced the US to abandon the relationship between the paper currency and gold established in 1944. The value of the dollar crashed from $42 for an ounce of gold in 1971 to $800 in 1979. OPEC acted to defend the value of its commodity which was emerging as the essential, cheap and plentiful foundation of the post-war economy. The price of oil quadrupled by 1973.
Four decades later, the situation is very different.
Exponential growth – the global success story of credit-funded huge corporations pouring previously unimaginable torrents of products into the hands of debt-burdened consumers has ensured that the world’s oil is half gone.
Much of it has been used to transform agriculture from a system of food production by millions of small farmers to a global business controlled by small number of corporations whose hunger for profit puts food prices beyond the reach of billions.
Industrialised agribusiness like the rest of capitalist manufacturing is addicted to oil. The burning of oil to fuel the capitalist growth mania has brought the planet to the limits of its ability to sustain life. The revolutionary upheaval now under way brings the possibility of a different future. We have to grasp it.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Uprisings deepen capitalism's crisis
Attempts to solve the global debt crisis have sent food prices soaring, driving impoverished masses onto the streets throughout the Middle East. Now a wave of political revolutions dashes remaining but false hopes of economic “recovery”.
Oil prices are rising sharply as the upheaval that began in Tunisia and now grips Egypt threatens to spread to major producers Algeria, Libya and even Saudi Arabia. Stock markets are jittery as they take in the consequences, including any threat to oil tankers which use the Suez Canal.
In Egypt, workers, the unemployed, young and old, artists and athletes, Christians and Muslims have united in their determination to bring the 30-year old autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak to an end. His determination to hang on until September pleases neither the Egyptian people nor the White House, which fears the consequences of an unstoppable revolutionary process the longer Mubarak’s regime clings to power.
This fact is recognised by the International Monetary Fund too, which helped impose harsh market “reforms” on Egypt in the 1990s, which have only deepened inequality. IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned governments to tackle economic strains or risk instability and even war.
“This protest won’t end in North Africa; it will spread in many countries because of high unemployment and increasing food prices,” Hamza Alkholi, chairman and chief executive of Saudi Alkholi Group, a holding company investing in industrials and real estate, said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland.
As Nouriel Roubini, the leading economics analyst who forecast the global financial crash, notes: "What has happened in Tunisia, is happening right now in Egypt, but also riots in Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan, are related not only to high unemployment rates and to income and wealth inequality, but also to this very sharp rise in food and commodity prices."
In Egypt, 40% of the 80 million people live on less than $2 a day. Prices of basic foodstuffs have soared by over 17%, putting basic necessities beyond the reach of many. The average Egyptian now spends 40% of his or her income on food while economists put the unofficial jobless rate at about 25%.
The worldwide surge in commodity prices is being driven by stock markets and investment banks desperate to find new areas for profit-taking. With the 2008 financial meltdown still unravelling, speculators have turned to basic commodities. They have used funds pumped into the system by the US Treasury and the Bank of England, also known as QE or “quantitative easing”.
QE was designed to boost economic growth. Instead, it has helped to create a 32% increase in the average cost of food in the second half of 2010, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Wheat prices alone jumped 70% between June and December.
Despite Mubarak’s televised claim that the protests had been manipulated by political forces this is a completely Egyptian, largely secular, wholly grass roots movement. With its roots in a strike by textile workers in April, 2008, a popular revolution is under way. The country is at a standstill as events unfold. The economy is paralysed. People’s committees have taken charge of the security of their streets and neighbourhood.
Even when Mubarak shut down the internet and mobile phone networks last week the 70,000 strong April 6th Facebook group of mostly young people continued to organise the protest, calling for the “million man march” that brought more than two million Egyptians onto the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Sinai and Upper Egypt demanding that the president should leave.
People on the street demand change to “every element of the system” but lack a developed leadership that can transform the Egyptian capitalist state. As soaring prices and unemployment make clear, revolutionary social and economic change is required along with the end of the Mubarak dictatorship.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Oil prices are rising sharply as the upheaval that began in Tunisia and now grips Egypt threatens to spread to major producers Algeria, Libya and even Saudi Arabia. Stock markets are jittery as they take in the consequences, including any threat to oil tankers which use the Suez Canal.
In Egypt, workers, the unemployed, young and old, artists and athletes, Christians and Muslims have united in their determination to bring the 30-year old autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak to an end. His determination to hang on until September pleases neither the Egyptian people nor the White House, which fears the consequences of an unstoppable revolutionary process the longer Mubarak’s regime clings to power.
This fact is recognised by the International Monetary Fund too, which helped impose harsh market “reforms” on Egypt in the 1990s, which have only deepened inequality. IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned governments to tackle economic strains or risk instability and even war.
“This protest won’t end in North Africa; it will spread in many countries because of high unemployment and increasing food prices,” Hamza Alkholi, chairman and chief executive of Saudi Alkholi Group, a holding company investing in industrials and real estate, said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland.
As Nouriel Roubini, the leading economics analyst who forecast the global financial crash, notes: "What has happened in Tunisia, is happening right now in Egypt, but also riots in Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan, are related not only to high unemployment rates and to income and wealth inequality, but also to this very sharp rise in food and commodity prices."
In Egypt, 40% of the 80 million people live on less than $2 a day. Prices of basic foodstuffs have soared by over 17%, putting basic necessities beyond the reach of many. The average Egyptian now spends 40% of his or her income on food while economists put the unofficial jobless rate at about 25%.
The worldwide surge in commodity prices is being driven by stock markets and investment banks desperate to find new areas for profit-taking. With the 2008 financial meltdown still unravelling, speculators have turned to basic commodities. They have used funds pumped into the system by the US Treasury and the Bank of England, also known as QE or “quantitative easing”.
QE was designed to boost economic growth. Instead, it has helped to create a 32% increase in the average cost of food in the second half of 2010, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Wheat prices alone jumped 70% between June and December.
Despite Mubarak’s televised claim that the protests had been manipulated by political forces this is a completely Egyptian, largely secular, wholly grass roots movement. With its roots in a strike by textile workers in April, 2008, a popular revolution is under way. The country is at a standstill as events unfold. The economy is paralysed. People’s committees have taken charge of the security of their streets and neighbourhood.
Even when Mubarak shut down the internet and mobile phone networks last week the 70,000 strong April 6th Facebook group of mostly young people continued to organise the protest, calling for the “million man march” that brought more than two million Egyptians onto the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Sinai and Upper Egypt demanding that the president should leave.
People on the street demand change to “every element of the system” but lack a developed leadership that can transform the Egyptian capitalist state. As soaring prices and unemployment make clear, revolutionary social and economic change is required along with the end of the Mubarak dictatorship.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Friday, June 13, 2008
Pouring oil on troubled waters
The start of a four-day strike by hundreds of oil tanker drivers brings a new angle to the energy crisis which is convulsing countries around the world. The drivers are employed by contractors Hoyer and Suckling, two haulage companies delivering Shell fuel products to one tenth of UK garages.
The drivers’ union Unite says that Shell tanker drivers today earn a basic wage of just under £32,000 per year for a 48-hour working week. In 1992, a typical tanker driver directly employed by Shell earned approximately the same £32,000 per year for a 37-hour week. This is a truly catastrophic 16-year decline in the value of weekly income combined with an almost 30% increase in hours.
It is stark evidence of the typical, brutal increase in the rate of exploitation by global corporations and the less-than-worthless state of trade union leadership. Desperate to avoid a confrontation, Unite assistant general secretary Len McCluskey has been begging Shell to intervene – to no avail.
Now rocketing worldwide inflation – ironically driven by the commodity the drivers deliver - has triggered a social movement that is spreading like last summer’s wildfires. In Asia this week there have been strikes and demonstrations in South Korea, Hong Kong, India and Malaysia, where the government has raised prices by 41% for petrol and 63% for diesel.
In Europe, action by truck drivers in Spain led to 40% of petrol stations in Catalonia running dry, and stocks of fresh food running low in the markets and shops. Drivers in Portugal joined in the strikes and there have been protests in France. Spanish fishermen, driven to desperation by fuel costs, have been on strike since May 30.
One trucker died this week in Spain and another in Portugal. In both cases they were run over while manning picket lines.
The chief executive of Russia's Gazprom this week warned that crude oil might go as high as $250 a barrel next year, far in excess of the record $139 a barrel reached last week. Meanwhile BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy attributes the spiralling price to a continuing increase in the demand for oil whilst global production has been falling. In Russia, BP is in conflict with the four billionaire shareholders in TNK-BP, the largest foreign venture in Russia by a single company. TNK-BP made $5.3 billion net profit in 2007 and produces a quarter of BP's global oil output.
The oil price and supply crisis is fuelling tensions globally. In the Middle East, tensions are rising as Israel and the US are colluding to increase the threat to bomb Iran, with Barack Obama promising to use whatever means are necessary to destroy the country’s nuclear fuel capacity.
Dealing with this festering stew of inter-related crises means taking the energy industries into social ownership and eliminating for-profit production. Only democratic stewardship of limited resources can protect the world’s population from the twin threats of depletion and climate change. Transition Initiatives must take these questions on board if action on energy reduction is to have any but a symbolic significance.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
The drivers’ union Unite says that Shell tanker drivers today earn a basic wage of just under £32,000 per year for a 48-hour working week. In 1992, a typical tanker driver directly employed by Shell earned approximately the same £32,000 per year for a 37-hour week. This is a truly catastrophic 16-year decline in the value of weekly income combined with an almost 30% increase in hours.
It is stark evidence of the typical, brutal increase in the rate of exploitation by global corporations and the less-than-worthless state of trade union leadership. Desperate to avoid a confrontation, Unite assistant general secretary Len McCluskey has been begging Shell to intervene – to no avail.
Now rocketing worldwide inflation – ironically driven by the commodity the drivers deliver - has triggered a social movement that is spreading like last summer’s wildfires. In Asia this week there have been strikes and demonstrations in South Korea, Hong Kong, India and Malaysia, where the government has raised prices by 41% for petrol and 63% for diesel.
In Europe, action by truck drivers in Spain led to 40% of petrol stations in Catalonia running dry, and stocks of fresh food running low in the markets and shops. Drivers in Portugal joined in the strikes and there have been protests in France. Spanish fishermen, driven to desperation by fuel costs, have been on strike since May 30.
One trucker died this week in Spain and another in Portugal. In both cases they were run over while manning picket lines.
The chief executive of Russia's Gazprom this week warned that crude oil might go as high as $250 a barrel next year, far in excess of the record $139 a barrel reached last week. Meanwhile BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy attributes the spiralling price to a continuing increase in the demand for oil whilst global production has been falling. In Russia, BP is in conflict with the four billionaire shareholders in TNK-BP, the largest foreign venture in Russia by a single company. TNK-BP made $5.3 billion net profit in 2007 and produces a quarter of BP's global oil output.
The oil price and supply crisis is fuelling tensions globally. In the Middle East, tensions are rising as Israel and the US are colluding to increase the threat to bomb Iran, with Barack Obama promising to use whatever means are necessary to destroy the country’s nuclear fuel capacity.
Dealing with this festering stew of inter-related crises means taking the energy industries into social ownership and eliminating for-profit production. Only democratic stewardship of limited resources can protect the world’s population from the twin threats of depletion and climate change. Transition Initiatives must take these questions on board if action on energy reduction is to have any but a symbolic significance.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Brown's 'greenwash' failure
The government’s alleged environmental credentials are in ruins, with Gordon Brown’s announcement of support for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and the exposure of the “green tax” fraud. Brown has gone further than before by declaring that new nuclear power sites will be needed. And this is in addition to the even more immediate threat of a new generation of heavily polluting coal-fired power stations.
Last year the government was claiming its road tax policies were aimed at reducing car use – now the chancellor is planning to scrap them, as Labour MPs wake up to the fact that they will only drive the poorest people off the roads. The taxes also have precious little to do with changing behaviour, as they apply to cars bought as long ago as 2001!
Meanwhile, as speculators and hedge funds tighten their grip on the oil market, helping to send fuel prices soaring, the government is like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights. In the autumn the big utility companies are planning further increases in domestic fuel prices. Mark Todd, the director of energy-helpline.com, says: "This winter we have had the credit crunch. Next winter it will be the energy crunch.” He warned British consumers could face a 66% rise in gas prices by January, and similar increases in electricity.
Consumers got a taste of things to come on Tuesday, when several power stations shut down at the same time leaving half a million homes and businesses without power. After that, the price of gas for next winter reached a record 99.5p a therm, double the level a year ago. That increase will be passed on to the consumer, not only in higher fuel bills but in higher costs for food and other essentials.
The government was also forced this week to defend its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, in the face of new reports exposing it as an expensive fraud. Two academics at Stanford University, California, studied more than 3,000 CDM projects earning up to $10bn worth of carbon credits, and concluded that none of them should have qualified as they would have been built anyway. Almost every chemical, wind power or hydro electric scheme planned for China in the next four years has applied to register.
When it finally expires in 2012, it seems Kyoto will have saved a pitiful total of about 175 million tons of carbon, according to Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research. Pielke totalled the cumulative emissions saved by CDM schemes already registered, or in the pipeline and found that the level emissions that would have been reached on January 1, 2012 will now happen just before noon on January 7, 2012. So at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, the CDM has given the planet about another 6.5 days. I suppose we should be grateful.
All the government’s hopes of meeting carbon emission reduction targets are pinned on the CDM, not on any real reductions. A note of desperation crept into their defence. A spokeswoman said: "We completely reject any assertions that it is fundamentally flawed. We've worked consistently for and seen improvement in CDM processes over the past few years of its operation. We believe the CDM is essentially transparent and robust, though we will continue to press for the environmental integrity of projects."
The facts are clear enough – the government is leaving it all to the global energy companies and to the market in carbon. It has no solutions to the fuel crisis or to climate change. The "green tax” approach has failed. Government policies are essentially a greenwash. There is an urgent need for a crash programme of energy saving and efficiency measures, along the lines of A World to Win’s Action Plan to Halt Climate Chaos. Join us today to help develop the strategy for implementing this urgent alternative.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Last year the government was claiming its road tax policies were aimed at reducing car use – now the chancellor is planning to scrap them, as Labour MPs wake up to the fact that they will only drive the poorest people off the roads. The taxes also have precious little to do with changing behaviour, as they apply to cars bought as long ago as 2001!
Meanwhile, as speculators and hedge funds tighten their grip on the oil market, helping to send fuel prices soaring, the government is like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights. In the autumn the big utility companies are planning further increases in domestic fuel prices. Mark Todd, the director of energy-helpline.com, says: "This winter we have had the credit crunch. Next winter it will be the energy crunch.” He warned British consumers could face a 66% rise in gas prices by January, and similar increases in electricity.
Consumers got a taste of things to come on Tuesday, when several power stations shut down at the same time leaving half a million homes and businesses without power. After that, the price of gas for next winter reached a record 99.5p a therm, double the level a year ago. That increase will be passed on to the consumer, not only in higher fuel bills but in higher costs for food and other essentials.
The government was also forced this week to defend its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, in the face of new reports exposing it as an expensive fraud. Two academics at Stanford University, California, studied more than 3,000 CDM projects earning up to $10bn worth of carbon credits, and concluded that none of them should have qualified as they would have been built anyway. Almost every chemical, wind power or hydro electric scheme planned for China in the next four years has applied to register.
When it finally expires in 2012, it seems Kyoto will have saved a pitiful total of about 175 million tons of carbon, according to Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research. Pielke totalled the cumulative emissions saved by CDM schemes already registered, or in the pipeline and found that the level emissions that would have been reached on January 1, 2012 will now happen just before noon on January 7, 2012. So at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, the CDM has given the planet about another 6.5 days. I suppose we should be grateful.
All the government’s hopes of meeting carbon emission reduction targets are pinned on the CDM, not on any real reductions. A note of desperation crept into their defence. A spokeswoman said: "We completely reject any assertions that it is fundamentally flawed. We've worked consistently for and seen improvement in CDM processes over the past few years of its operation. We believe the CDM is essentially transparent and robust, though we will continue to press for the environmental integrity of projects."
The facts are clear enough – the government is leaving it all to the global energy companies and to the market in carbon. It has no solutions to the fuel crisis or to climate change. The "green tax” approach has failed. Government policies are essentially a greenwash. There is an urgent need for a crash programme of energy saving and efficiency measures, along the lines of A World to Win’s Action Plan to Halt Climate Chaos. Join us today to help develop the strategy for implementing this urgent alternative.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Friday, May 23, 2008
'Well-placed'? Pull the other one
New Labour was always fond of telling anyone who would listen that globalisation dominated by powerful corporations and open markets, worked to everyone’s benefit. We were in a new period of economic history, where old-style capitalism was no more. What then to make of the following: "We are facing a testing period in the economy. We are facing the first real international economic crisis of globalisation."
This admission came yesterday from Lady Vadera, a business minister and former adviser to Gordon Brown (the ex-investment banker was responsible for devising the disaster that is the part-privatisation of London Underground). She was speaking in the House of Lords, as the price of oil experienced its biggest one-day increase in almost 20 years and New Labour headed for its first defeat by the Tories in a by-election in nearly 30 years. The two events are not unrelated – soaring prices and tax increases have hit poorer votes hard and their massive rejection of New Labour in Crewe spells political oblivion for the ruling party.
More on that later. Keeping to the Brown script, in a breathtaking display of national and nationalist self-interest, the Baroness insisted that Britain was “well-placed” to withstand the global turbulence. Never mind the reports from yesterday’s United Nations Human Rights Council which estimates that more than 850 million people worldwide are going hungry, and another two billion are suffering from malnutrition. According to the UN the high prices and shortages of food which jeopardise the well-being and rights of countless people add up to a massive violation of human rights.
In a few short months, a superabundance of apparently ever-cheaper commodities has been replaced by soaring inflation and food shortages on a scale unprecedented in human history. Argentina, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Russia, South Africa and Morocco are among the countries that have seen demonstrations and strikes in response to soaring prices.
These are the consequences of the policies and actions of New Labour’s support for the interests of transnational corporations and the global financial institutions.This year, agribusiness profits, like those of the oil giants are soaring, increasing by anything from 21% to 1200%, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal were taking to the streets to protest against rising food prices.
Just a few companies are the near-monopoly buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world. Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade. ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world’s corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year’s crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food.
A senior editor of Time magazine warned recently: "The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War... And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world … when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose."
Back to New Labour’s prospects, or lack of them, and Vadera’s view that Britain is “well-placed”. Well, she might be “well-placed” but the rest of us aren’t. Unemployment is rising steadily, the house building industry is in a state of collapse and people who are obliged to drive to work cannot afford to do so as the price of petrol has risen by 20% in a year. Millions are in serious debt and large numbers of people face repossession. Her government is on its way out. This is the content of tomorrow’s timely conference, Beyond the Market Economy.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
This admission came yesterday from Lady Vadera, a business minister and former adviser to Gordon Brown (the ex-investment banker was responsible for devising the disaster that is the part-privatisation of London Underground). She was speaking in the House of Lords, as the price of oil experienced its biggest one-day increase in almost 20 years and New Labour headed for its first defeat by the Tories in a by-election in nearly 30 years. The two events are not unrelated – soaring prices and tax increases have hit poorer votes hard and their massive rejection of New Labour in Crewe spells political oblivion for the ruling party.
More on that later. Keeping to the Brown script, in a breathtaking display of national and nationalist self-interest, the Baroness insisted that Britain was “well-placed” to withstand the global turbulence. Never mind the reports from yesterday’s United Nations Human Rights Council which estimates that more than 850 million people worldwide are going hungry, and another two billion are suffering from malnutrition. According to the UN the high prices and shortages of food which jeopardise the well-being and rights of countless people add up to a massive violation of human rights.
In a few short months, a superabundance of apparently ever-cheaper commodities has been replaced by soaring inflation and food shortages on a scale unprecedented in human history. Argentina, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Russia, South Africa and Morocco are among the countries that have seen demonstrations and strikes in response to soaring prices.
These are the consequences of the policies and actions of New Labour’s support for the interests of transnational corporations and the global financial institutions.This year, agribusiness profits, like those of the oil giants are soaring, increasing by anything from 21% to 1200%, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal were taking to the streets to protest against rising food prices.
Just a few companies are the near-monopoly buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world. Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade. ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world’s corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year’s crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food.
A senior editor of Time magazine warned recently: "The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War... And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world … when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose."
Back to New Labour’s prospects, or lack of them, and Vadera’s view that Britain is “well-placed”. Well, she might be “well-placed” but the rest of us aren’t. Unemployment is rising steadily, the house building industry is in a state of collapse and people who are obliged to drive to work cannot afford to do so as the price of petrol has risen by 20% in a year. Millions are in serious debt and large numbers of people face repossession. Her government is on its way out. This is the content of tomorrow’s timely conference, Beyond the Market Economy.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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