Month: April 2013

IMF calls for end to energy subsidies

(UpstreamOnline) – A new report from the International Monetary Fund calls for industrialised countries to rein in the subsidies given to for fossil fuel producers and exporters.

Energy subsidies totalled $1.9 trillion in 2011, the IMF said. While the goal of the subsidies is to keep energy prices low for consumers, they also accounted for 2.5% of global gross domestic product, or about 8% of all government revenue.

In the report titled Energy Subsidy Reform – Lessons and Implications, economists looked at a database of 176 countries and analysed ways to reform energy subsidies using case studies of 22 countries.

“The paper shows that for some countries the fiscal weight of energy subsidies is growing so large that budget deficits are becoming unmanageable and threaten the stability of the economy,” Reuters quoted IMF First Deputy Director David Lipton as saying.

Reliable way to improve revenues and lower CO2 emissions

The US was the biggest energy subsidiser, giving away about $501 billion in assistance to companies. China and Russia came in second and third at $279 billion and $116 billion, respectively.

And instead of helping poorer consumers, the IMF said, these subsidies end up taking away money that might otherwise be spent on civil infrastructure, education and health care. As such, the subsidies end up benefitting wealthier people more, since those people consume more energy.

Energy subsidies also encourage greater consumption of dirty fossil fuels and make cleaner technologies like renewable energy more expensive and less competitive.

“Removing these subsidies could lead to a 13% decline in CO2 emissions and generate positive spillover effects by reducing global energy demand,” the report said.

For economies such as the US, scrapping subsidies for fossil fuels could also add revenue into cash-strapped government coffers, the IMF said.

IMF ENERGY SUBSIDY REFORM – REPORT [pdf]

Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer

(ClimateProgress) – The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.  

• FP story by Steven D. – Great American Drought Continues
• My recent diary – Arctic Ice Vulnerable In Summer 2013 vs. Record Ice Growth

Try to imagine being 42 years old and knowing seventy people who have been killed. Imagine being able to write down their names. Or you can just start perusing the list of homicide victims in 2011 in a place like, say, Hampton Roads. It’ll take you a while. You’ll notice a trend. Lots of white men murdering their wives and then themselves. And a lot of people with names like: Khylief Thorpe, Dontae Jamar Howard, Reginald Lamont Davis, Darelle J. Williams, Raheim Hason Stokes, Chiquita Long, and Rahkim Goodwin. Take a look at a list of the homicide victims in Phladelphia from 2011. See how long it takes you to read out their names. And then maybe you will be in the correct state of mind to read Ann Coulter’s article about gun violence control.

This is a pretty serious idea. I started thinking about it while reading my paper New York Times, which ran a story this morning on page 1 below the fold, while it’s somewhat buried in the online edition, claiming that all newspapers are retreating behind paywalls and before you know it there’ll be nothing left but the Guardian.

So, I’m not merely willing for newspapers to make lots of money, I really want them to (though when I say that I mean writers and editors, not shareholders demanding a psychopathic 20% ROI), but: only under the condition that there’s a public library of some kind. That is, there needs to be an online public library, a virtual place where you might put yourself to some inconvenience to go and where reading your Washington Post or your Haaretz or your Welt am Sonntag is perhaps not as comfy as reading your subscription copy, but where this essential citizenship information can be found without too much difficulty and with no expenditure beyond that of getting online in the first place.

What I thought in the first place is that all of us–bloggers and commenters–could be contributing to the construction of a volunteer periodicals collection.
Everybody could belong to some bibliography-sharing program like Zotero; then, whenever you read an article from a subscribers-only source, you copy its metadata into the Zotero-like program: title, author, date, publication name, and permanent URL; along with a few index keywords, or maybe even a 20-word abstract of the article.

Then, all these accounts would be synced with a central account from which a newspaper-like front page can be published as with paper.li (or for that matter RawStory, but better if it’s laid out more or less automatically), but with archive and search boxes.

Stories ranked as with HuffPost, but on the basis of how many readers have submitted them.

And topical subject front pages (business, sports, international…) or self-generated front pages out of the keywords (France, Vietnam, tar sands, baking…).

Perhaps it could be done through Twitter, though 140 characters isn’t enough for bibliographically good entries, I wouldn’t think.

Or on the other end of elaborateness it could be a Wikimedia project: the idea has a lot of Wiki ethos to it, I think, the reverence for text edited by somebody else. Remember, it’s not a publication, just a catalogue of URLs. Or the door to a library that already exists, though in fantastical concealment like a virtual Easter egg hunt, in the cloud. Above all it’s a volunteer thing, an opportunity for everybody to participate in making our imaginary environment a better and friendlier place, which is what makes me so bold as to suggest naming it after everybody’s dear lost friend, the good, mourned, Aaron Swartz.

I wouldn’t have the time or the techitude or indeed the leadership quality (i.e. sociopathy) required to plan and implement such a thing, but I’d certainly give it some grunt time. I hope some smarter body will see this and think about making it happen–I’ve posted it at my place and Kos, and you Boomaniacs should feel free to copy and paste it wherever you see fit, or for that matter rewrite the whole thing if you like (be nice and link me though).

Climatologists and drought forecasters are now comparing the last few years of severe drought to the Dust Bowl era. And if their predictions are correct, that drought will be worse this year than last, which was about as bad as we’ve seen in the lower 48 in decades. The news that our drought situation is already off to a worse start than in either of the past two years is very discouraging news, and will have major impacts for most Americans, whether they live in the more drought stricken areas of the country or not.

The 2013 drought season is already off to a worse start than in 2012 or 2011 – a trend that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say is a good indicator, based on historical records, that the entire year will be drier than last year, even if spring and summer rainfall and temperatures remain the same. If rainfall decreases and temperatures rise, as climatologists are predicting will happen this year, the drought could be even more severe.

The federal researchers also say there is less than a 20 percent chance the drought will end in the next six months.

Over 54% of the country was affected by drought conditions in February this year, and increase of 15% from last year at this time. That is an alarming trend, considering the effect last year had on crop losses and increased food prices. As always, there remains the risk of wildfires (with ever fewer firefighters available to combat them) in the more severely drought stricken regions of the country.

Unfortunately, parts of the country may be looking at a rerun of last year’s wildfire season, the third-most active since 1960. As USA Today summed it up: “Persistent drought and an infestation of tree-killing insects have left broad swaths of the nation vulnerable to unusually fierce wildfires for the second straight year, just as the U.S. Forest Service is dealing with cuts in its firefighting budget.”

Last year, the Forest Service spent $1.4 billion fighting monster fires in the West that consumed 9.3 million acres. The conditions this year are, if anything, worse. […]

Because of the across-the-board spending cuts agreed on by the White House and Congress, the Forest Service will have 500 fewer firefighters than its usual 10,000 to 10,500. It can mitigate the cuts by trying to pre-position its firefighters, a tricky judgment when the agency manages 193 million acres in 43 states.

Your sequester at work people.

And with increased demand for water for industrial purposes, especially by the oil and gas industry which has led to toxic groundwater contamination, we can expect that such contamination, along with other harmful impacts of the drought, will make it harder to maintain sources of safe drinking water in many parts of the country the longer this drought continues.

As temperatures rise and precipitation decreases, water quality can be jeopardized. Shrinking amounts of water can concentrate contaminants such as heavy metals, industrial chemicals and pesticides, and sediments and salts. During drought, drinking water supplies are susceptible to harmful algal blooms and other microorganisms.

Unfortunately, Congress seems unable to deal with this crisis, and by Congress I mean primarily the Republicans in the House of Representatives. Democrats such as Henry Waxman and others have taken the lead in attempting to move the Republican colleagues to take the environmental crises we face seriously. Sadly, the response for the other side of the aisle has been a blend of of ignorance and outright disingenuousness

On March 15, Waxman and Ranking Member Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-IL) sent a letter to Chairmen Fred Upton (R-MI) and Ed Whitfield (R-KY), requesting a specific hearing with scientists and top experts on the need for action to address climate change. They believed that the scope of previous testimony had been limited. Waxman and Rush wrote, “While the Committee has provided a venue for regulated entities to complain about regulations to curb greenhouse gases, we have not held any hearings on recent scientific reports and technical analyses that explain why it is so important that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”

It’s a difficult path, especially when top Republicans continue to deny climate change. Some comments have included the following:

• From Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), “The science is not settled and the science is actually going the other way.”
• From Rep. Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) on the cause of climate change, “It could just be a shift on the axis.”
• From Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, “The Earth will end only when God declares it is time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

Unfortunately, this has become par for the course in Republican circles. Re-branding the GOP apparently doesn’t mean that Republican lawmakers have any desire to actually address our nation’s problems, especially when it comes to climate issues. Far from it, in fact.

[E]arlier this month, a deeply noncontroversial Senate resolution commemorating International Women’s Day had to be taken back and edited because someone objected to a paragraph — which had been in an almost identical version passed in the last Congress — stating that women in developing countries “are disproportionately affected by changes in climate because of their need to secure water, food and fuel for their livelihood.”

You may be wondering who the objecting senator was. Normally, these things are supposed to be kind of confidential, but in this case the lawmaker in question is proud to let you know that he is — yes! —Ted Cruz of Texas.

“A provision expressing the Senate’s views on such a controversial topic as `climate change’ has no place in a supposedly noncontroversial resolution requiring consent of all 100 U.S. senators,” a Cruz spokesman said. […]

There was a time, children, when the Republican Party was a hotbed of environmental worrywarts. The last big Clean Air Act of the Bush I administration passed the House 401-21. But no more, no more. You’re not going to get any sympathy for controlling climate change from a group that doesn’t believe the climate is actually changing. […]

It’s sort of ironic. These are the same folks who constantly seed their anti-deficit speeches with references to our poor, betrayed descendants. (“This is a burden our children and grandchildren will have to bear.”) Don’t you think the children and grandchildren would appreciate being allowed to hang onto the Arctic ice cap?

Expect a long and dry year, both in terms of drought and in terms of Republican denial regarding the causes and impacts of that drought. God help those who are going to suffer because Republicans surely will not.

We continue to hear arguments from the Republican establishment that the party is too socially conservative, particularly on gay marriage and immigration reform. But the social conservatives have a pretty decent rebuttal. Take this, from Gary Bauer:

Social conservatives are particularly — and understandably — bothered that the elites rarely want to discuss the elephant in the room: that the party’s economic policies don’t necessarily appeal to the the rank and file, who vote Republican because it is the party of traditional values.

“If we gave our voters an accurate portrayal of our ideas, that we want to cut the rate of growth on Social Security, give tax cuts to billionaires and then the values issues, the values issues would be more popular than the economic agenda of the current Republican Party,” said Bauer, citing particularly those Mass-attending Roman Catholics who have fled the Democrats.

Bauer added, “I would caution the donor wing of the Republican Party that is driving a lot of this: If they think social conservatives are the only thing preventing Republicans from winning, they’ll learn that their economic agenda will go down the tubes along with the Republican Party’s prospects.”

That’s a pretty astonishing admission on Gary Bauer’s part, if you stop and consider the implications of what he’s saying. If you just read between the lines there a little bit, he’s saying that the Republican Party’s leaders (including Mr. Bauer himself) are not giving an accurate portrayal of their economic policies to the rank-and-file. He’s saying that he basically gives the party a pass on economic policies that don’t serve his value-voters’ interests. He’s saying that he and other socially conservative leaders are basically in on the hoax, and that they’ll tell the truth about the GOP’s economic plans if their social interests are no longer represented in the party.

The basic idea is simple. There aren’t enough rich people to create a majority, so plutocrats have to bind voters to their interests some other way than merely droning on about their aversion to taxes and regulation. Social conservatism is the glue that has made majorities possible for the Republican Party.

The problem over the last two presidential cycles has been that the old coalition isn’t big enough anymore. Rich folks are looking for a new coalition, and gay and Latino-bashing isn’t part of their calculus. Some Republicans are more conservative on racial matters than sexual ones, and vice-versa, but there is also considerable overlap. I think Ken Mehlman is overly hopeful that this problem can be overcome.

To Mehlman, who came out as gay in 2010, expanding a conservative practice like marriage and welcoming immigrants is hardly incongruous with traditional values and is emphatically good politics.

“No smart political party, no successful company says lets be satisfied with yesterday’s customers,” he said. “They say how do we anticipate the needs of tomorrow’s customers consistent with who we are.”

“The key to a principled party succeeding in a changing electorate is to identify core principles that will appeal to rising and new voting groups,” Mehlman continued. “And the reason that more than 60 percent of evangelical millennial voters support marriage for same-sex couples and the reason many conservative politicians from Jeb Bush to George W. Bush have been able to win substantial support in the Hispanic community is because there’s a strong conservative case, indeed a family values case, for more people who want to join the institution of marriage and who want to come here to work, support their families and live the American Dream.”

It’s obviously true that it is easier to convince gay people to vote for you if your party isn’t openly hostile to gay rights. And it’s easier to get Latinos to vote for you if your party isn’t making anti-Latino pronouncements on a daily basis. But it’s much harder to get social conservatives to vote for tax cuts for millionaires, if they aren’t being primed with alarmist rhetoric about the destruction of traditional white culture. And the economic policies of the Republicans aren’t necessarily any more attractive to the average Latino or gay or lesbian person than they are to the average evangelical Christian.

The problem remains the same. The middle class and the poor vastly outnumber the rich. It’s not enough to moderate the Republican Party’s positions on social issues. They need to moderate their economic positions as well.

“Some regard unwieldy nominalizations as alarming evidence of the depraved zeitgeist” and some regard the use of “zeitgeist” as a pretentious display of intellectualized hauteur. If your first instinct is to slap the mouth that utters “jejune,” then you know what I am talking about. We don’t want to be dazzled by your extensive vocabulary; we want to understand what you are saying. When I tell you that something was an “epic fail” rather than an “epic failure,” I am not bastardizing ordinary usage for the giggles. I am emphasizing the degree, nay the completeness, of the failure in question. I am saying that this was no ordinary mistake. Anyone can lose, but not everyone is a loser. Shall I treat all losers the same? What shall I say about losses that are epic? Al Gore and Mitt Romney both thought the polls were predicting a win for them. Only one of them was an Epic Fail. The other got the refuse from the Supreme Court.

I’ll write what I want to write, and you will read it and like it.