Jerome a Paris, Author at Progress Pond

Some information on the French health care system

As a follow up on my recent post over at dKos with personal news about the health of my son, it might be interesting to provide some information on how the French health care system works.
The health care system is part of the larger “Sécurité Sociale”, which in France also includes pensions, invalidity support, and unemployment benefits and several other smaller benefits. But we use the term “Secu” to talk about the healthcare system, and that’s what I will use below. I’ll also describe the main cover provided to people who are salaried with an employer. There are semi-separate systems for the self-employed, farmers, and other categories, with the main difference being on the level of taxes to pay for these and the way they are levied. I won’t go in that level of detail here.

Health care is provided by a combination of public sector (hospitals) and private sector actors (clinics, doctors, pharmacists). You are free to choose where you will be cared for and by whom, and you pay for it yourself in full, unless you have specific cover (see below). The main rule is that the public system reimburses you up to an agreed amount for each medical act. If you go to a doctor that uses the State tariffs, then you will end up paying nothing; if you go to a more expensive doctor, you have to pay the difference.

We’ve had our share of financial crises with the system, as expenses are growing faster than the economy, and there have been regular “patches” to the system, the main ones being an increase in the taxes allocated to it (in the main fund, employers today pay 13.8% and employees 0.75% of the gross salary into the pot) and a reduction of the portion of the agreed tariff which is actually reimbursed to you (currently, it is 65% for most basic expenses, like doctor visits and medecine).

A second layer then kicks in, which we call “mutuelles”; in essence these are additional (and optional) medical insurance, provided by the private sector. In most companies, such coverage is provided by the employer as part of the employment package, but even if you don’t, such coverage can be found for something like 100-200 euros per month, depending on the quality of the coverage.

Such coverage usually pays for all or most of the difference between the agreed tariff and the “Secu” reimbursement (which makes you ending up paying nothing, or a small amount, typically 5% of the real cost); it also can provide for higher limits to the reimbursement of a doctor consultation – which allows you to go see more expensive doctors if you wish. For instance, the tariff for a visit to the pediatrician is set at 28 euros – my current mutuelle will reimburse me in full up to 40 euros per visit, so I choose to go to a 50 euro pediatrician that we appreciate and we end up paying 10 euros ourselves. These mutuelles are important as they provide coverage for dental and ophtalmologic (glasses) care, which are very poorly covered by Secu.

All heavy duty or long term care is FULLY covered by Secu, including transportation allowances and, as I wrote, stipends for parents if full time care is required. If you have a mutuelle, Secu will get that mutuelle to pay for a portion of the cost of the treatment/care.

So with both la Sécu and your mutuelle, which cost little, you get a pretty good coverage. Of course, the downside is that there are few limits to demand for health care, and people do not moderate their number of visits to the doctor and their consumption of medication and treatments, and the system is chronically in financial dire straits, which are patched every couple of years by a combination of lower repayments and increased taxes (of course, increase mutuelle payments do not count as taxes, but they come from the same pocket in the end). Various fixes have been tried to limit medical overconsumption, the most recent being the obligation to see a GP before going to a specialist, having a “preferred” MD to treat you, and building an electronic record of your medical files, so that duplicate exams and tests are avoided.

It’s a big topic here, chronically in the news, but there is always a consensus to find solutions; the government usually wants to shift a part of the costs on the population, while the unions try to make the companies pay for it.

The part to be paid by the population has grown so much in the past 20 years (from essentially zero to 35% now) that it had become an issue for the really poor to get access to health care, in view of the cost for them. So a new layer was put in place 5 years ago, the “Couverture Medicale Universelle”, which provides for 100% coverage if you fall below certain revenue levels or if you receive the RMI (Revenu Minimum d’Insertion – a monthly stipend that you receive if you have nothing else, no work, no unemployment benefits, worth about 400 euros per month. Just above 1 million people receive it in France today). The CMU is a sort of equivalent of your Medicaid, but thanks to it pretty much nobody is uncovered, as if you do not qualify for CMU, it means that you already have coverage.

There are regular lobbying efforts by various parties to get a better deal:

doctors wanting their agreed tariff to be increased in order to increase their revenues (a large majority of doctors actually use that tariff – 20 euros for a basic visit, 23 euros for a specialist -except pediatricians as stated above);
drug companies wanting (i) a better tariff for their drugs and (ii) a better proportion of the cost reimbursed by Secu (that proportion is lower for “comfort drugs”, the definition of which is done on a case by case basis)
Emergency room doctors are running chronic protests (they are on strike this week) to get better support, as they are often the only available place for care when doctors are closed at night, during the week-end or during holidays, and they don’t require you to pay upfront; they are often short on staff and see the worst cases like the homeless (they also had to deal on their own with the early days of heat wave two years ago, before emergency plans were kickstarted);
companies complain about the high level of taxes they have to pay and lobby to switch funding to the population or the insurance companies;
the insurance companies find the market profitable and are keen to take a bigger role.

The general impression in France is that, while we have a good system, it is in a crisis and new solutions need to be found to preserve it and fund it over the long run. As in any large bureaucracy, there are a number of things that don’t work very well, are wasteful or badly organised, and we love to complain about it. In any case, it is clearly seen by most people as a vital part of what makes the country stick together, an essential element of solidarity and fairness to all in the country.

I am not a specialist of the topic and see it more as a “consumer” than a real expert, and I have certainly over-simplified things. I hope the other few French posters around can correct any blatant errors, and that other European posters can provide some insights in their own systems.

I’ll try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge.

Sustainable animal husbandry

My previous post providing the writing of co-barfly (i.e. esteemed member of the Moon of Alabama community) DeAnander on Sustainable living was successful enough, so I’d thought I’d provide another recent tidbit herebelow.

Again, some cheers for DeAnander’s writing:

Most captive animal husbandry today is done in the minimum footprint possible (to be “efficient” in the use of land and human labour); this means animals are crowded/packed as closely as feasible, which in turn places various stresses on their health and vastly increases the odds on infection, infestation, and epidemic.

We generally compensate for these stresses using technologies like disinfectants, antibiotics, pressure washers, plumbing, filtration, etc. — basically keeping the livestock as close to terminal morbidity as we can w/out actually killing them and losing the investment. (The parallel with slave labour conditions is too obvious, I think, to require any elucidation: the same economic reasoning applies.)

But no one compensates for these insults to the adjacent wild flora and fauna. Without the “heroic measures” we take to enable domesticated livestock to survive the appalling conditions of their captivity, the feral commons are terribly vulnerable to our “farmed pathologies.”

For example, when we flush the waste from our hog farms into lagoons just far enough from the hogs to prevent massive morbidity and mortality among these (valuable) livestock — the stench, hypernutrient and toxic contamination, etc. are merely displaced onto the commons (“non-owned” space like the air, “non-owned” organisms like soil or creek/river biota).

Louse-infested coastal or river fish farms are imho just another example of agribiz-as-usual. The factory model of farming is inherently pathogenic — we deal with it essentially by substituting fossil energy and fossil-based chemicals for human labour and open space.

The only non-pathogenic way to raise livestock (that I know of) is at lower density with a closer approximation of natural conditions — ducks and freshwater fish as symbionts in rice paddy cultivation, for example; free-range grass-fed beeves; pond fish in low enough densities to avoid toxic buildup and maintain a nutrient cycle modeled on naturally-occuring wetlands. No “externalising” should be permitted; any waste product must be a useful input to a downstream process. For example, hog wastes can be consumed happily by Hermetia larvae, whose own wastes are harmless and a good fertiliser; the larvae breed like crazy and will very conveniently crawl out of their feeding bins when near pupation, at which point they can be collected, washed, and fed to chickens… you get the picture.

Closed-cycle (i.e. sane, non-fantastical) non-factory farming implies a lower per-annum per-capita output of animal protein, but of a higher quality, without the “added extra” of devastating the commons. It also implies diversified agriculture, a wider knowledge base (especially about the “lower orders” of insects and other invertebrates and bacteria, fungi, etc.) and less narrow specialisation on the part of the agronomist/farmer — and of course various other challenges to the Taylorist model of monocrop, technocratic management, and dumbed-down labour… topics on which I know I am a bit of a bore, so will stop here 🙂

Pakistan approaches boiling point

From the always interesting Asia Times, yet another worrying article about Pakistan:

KARACHI – On the face of it, the post-September 11 era sees Pakistan re-established in the world community, nurturing friendly relations with India, and enjoying political stability in the shape of President General Pervez Musharraf’s grip on power, with the economy steady.

Appearances can be deceptive, though

I can’t pretend that I know Pakistan very well, but all we hear coming from that country is really scary me each time, whether it is about nuclear proliferation, “honor” killings, or the madrasas.

And now this:

very powerful “Million March” in Karachi recently, organized by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a coalition of six religious-political parties that heads the opposition in the country, was the first punch, and yielded instant results. Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz abruptly caved in to a key MMA demand that a person’s religion be included in his or her passport.

(…)

This has sent shivers down the spines of those in the corridors of power: Qazi Hussain Ahmed has played this card with devastating results twice before. On the first occasion he mobilized thousands of Jamaat-i-Islami workers against the Nawaz Sharif government in 1993. It fell within a few weeks. He repeated this move in 1996, this time bringing down the administration of Benazir Bhutto.

The authorities now fear that the MMA’s renewed political activism will mobilize religious forces in the country.

Over the past few years, since Musharraf signed on to the “war on terror”, jihadi activists have had a hard time of it. They feel betrayed by the religious leadership, which has not supported them, notably in the tribal areas of Waziristan, where the jihadis tried to oppose military efforts to root out Taliban and foreign militants.

According to most estimates, more than 50,000 persons are committed to jihadi movements in Pakistan. However, deprived of a political platform and a common strategy, they are ineffective. Now, if they can align with the robust new religious-political movement of the MMA, they will get a new life.

The MMA’s agitation, with the huge crowds it can mobilize against Musharraf, is bolstered by every rise in prices, the deteriorating law-and-order situation across the country, and widespread opposition to military operations, especially in Balochistan against tribespeople there.

(…)

An economic bomb

In addition to the problems outlined above, Musharraf faces a potential killer blow in the economy. Despite the government’s presentation of rosy figures, many feel this is a game of smoke and mirrors.

According to a report of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) – the central bank – the country had liquid reserves of US$12.860 billion ($10.055 billion with the SBP and $2.805 billion with other banks) on March 19. At the end of February, the trade deficit was $2.45 billion and the deferred bill for imported oil was $2.75 billion.

(…)

The country thus does not have the foreign-exchange reserves that would be needed should sanctions be imposed on the country – always a possibility should Pakistan suddenly fall out of favor with the US, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. (How Pakistan will meet the multibillion-dollar bill for promised F-16s from the United States is another matter.)

Political and economic realities are pushing Musharraf further and further into a corner.

So, if I get this right, in addition to having tons of jihadists, a military unhappy to be shamed by the US State Department but still dreaming of “doing it” with India, out-of-control nuclear scientists, a religious/populist opposition ready and able to take the streets against the (military) government, the country is feeling the pinch of high oil prices…

Nice and not the stuff of nightmares!

Anybody have less black news to share about that country? Please?!

European Constitution – France votes soon. Diary II.

Trailer diary posted on Daily Kos. Please recommend as this is part of a larger plan…

Following in the footsteps of Welshman, and his great efforts on the coming UK elections, I’ll try to bring to you some additional information on the French referendum campaign on whether to approve or not the European Constitutional Treaty, with the vote on 29 May.

You can find some background on the Constitution itself and the main topics of the campaign in my first diary on the topic, which can be found here (it was also posted on dKos).

En avant!

First of all, I would actually like to have your feedback on what actually would be of interest to you guys:

a description of the political campaign? It includes a lot of intra-party fighting this time, which makes it interesting to political junkies in France but may not have that many attractions for outsiders
a presentation of the main issues of the day? (again, if I go into details, if will be a lot of domestic stuff which may or may not interest you)
a more abstract discussion of the big issues? (I was going to include a bit on Turkey below, but the post is already long enough)

Thanks for your feedback ; here we go!

The campaign is now in full swing

The past week has seen the real start of the campaign. It started with a number of polls confirming that the “no” vote held a slight edge in voting intentions, and saw the start of the “real”, organised, campaign by the proponents of the Yes.

Like the campaign for the Maastricht Treaty in 1991 (which saw the yes vote win by a very small 51% majority), the debate is not between left and right, but mostly between the centrists/mainstream blocs on each side and the more radical or extreme groups of the same side. The big parties (UMP and UDF on the right, and the PS and the Greens on the left) are all in favor of the yes, and the fringe parties (the National Front and the Sovereignist MPF on the right, the communists and trotskysts LO/LCR on the left) but there are also significant minorities/mavericks within the big parties that are in favor of the “no”.

Like the Maastricht vote, the campaign is also “polluted” by domestic issues, in particular strong dissatisfaction with Chirac and his increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. There is a deep social malaise caused by the persistently high levels of unemployment, stagnant incomes, a perceived decline of France and a general sense that reforms are necessary but not done (of course, they are not done because the French – or a least a noisy subset thereof – complain about them whenever any attempt is made…).

The Lefty “No”

On the left, in particular, a number of issues which have little to do with Europe are helping the “no” vote gain legitimacy:

a strong desire not to hand Chirac another electoral victory, after having been forced to vote for him in 2002 against Le Pen (and also after he chose to ignore the result of local elections last year, which the left won decisively, and which should have triggered a change of Prime Minister to at least cknowledge the result);
the tactical decision by Laurent Fabius, a former Prime Minister in the 80s and one of the heavyweights of the party, to support the “no”. Everybody knows that he did this to distinguish himself from the other potential candidates for the 2007 presidential election (he was seen as a member of the rightist wing of the party, but was in the shadow of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former economics minister), but it has given legitimacy to the “no” position.
the Socialists held a internal vote to decide on their position, and registered members voted 60-40 in favor of the “yes”, but this has not silenced the “no” camp, which has been even more strident since that vote, in blatant disregard of its result (after having called for it, as an exercise in “internal democracy”), whereas the “yes” camp, which thought it had done the hardest part, was caught flat-footed by the persistence of the “no” campaigners, and has been unwilling or unable to use party discipline to silence them.
this is all happening is a context of stagnant wages (INSEE, the statistical institute, recently came out with a study showing that purchasing power had actually declined in 2004, for the first time since 1996) and chronic demonstrations by workers to fight for salary increases and other social causes;
it has also been results season for companies, and the largest companies have come out with record profit levels, inevitably deemed “undecent” by unions. (and it would be even worse if we still had Francs instead of euros. Total made a 9 billion euro profit (close to 60 billion francs. I still remember the time when a 10 billion franc profit in the early 90s was a national scandal). The issue of fairness is coming up a lot as well with respect to the highest pay packages of the bosses which are increasing a lot faster than average wages.

There is finally a deep-seated belief on the left that the European Constitution is too much in favor of an “Europe libérale”, which in French means, of course, laisser-faire, free-market, pro-business… (Strangely enough, the British Euroskeptics are persuaded of the exact opposite, i.e. that European Constitution is too social-minded).

The righty “No”

On the right, it is only slightly simpler:

all the hard right groups are against the Treaty. They are “sovereignists” and resent any transfers of power to Brussels. They have been consistently opposed to further European integration or enlargement, and this is typically the kind of vote where the can get the most visibility for their parties, and they make very active campaigns
the mainstream right is mostly behind the Constitution. There are a number of doubters, but they are mostly kept in check by their loyalty to Chirac and to the government now in power.
the biggest source of tension on that side in between Nicolas Sarkozy, the -very- ambitious head of the UMP party and expected rival to Chirac for the Presidential election in 2007. Like the left, he is not keen to hand a victory to Chirac, but as the head of the majority party, he cannot not support it either, so he is likely to do a tepid campaign. Chirac loyalists within the party will be more active, but it is likely that there will be a lot of bickering there as well.

The “No” has dominated the campaign so far

So, until the middle of this week, the campaign has been dominated by the antics of the “no”partisans, which have avoided no histrionics (does my own bias shine through this sentence…?):

Emmanuelli, a leftist socialist, equalled voting “yes” to the vote by the French Parliament in 1940 that gave full powers to Petain (and gave birth to the Vichy regime). He apologised for this particular remark, but it was only because this was obviously unacceptable, not because it was the most aggressive comment;
the fact that the leader of the Socialist Party, François Hollande, was photographed together with Nicolas Sarkozy, the head of the UMP, on the cover of Paris Match, a French political/people weekly, in a show of unity in favor of the Constitution, has been held as an argument that he is “sold” to “Grand Capital”
all the current social discontent and unhappiness with Chirac and Raffarin is happily mixed and used as an argument against the Constitution, however tenuous the link between the two; the fact that the government panicks and is now trying to buy off discontents by showering them with budgetary largesse (salary increases for civil servants, new help for farmers, etc…) only reinforces the link between domestic social issues and “Europe” and shows that demonstrations pay off.

The righty “No” has been much less visible, but as always, feeds on the general restlessness.

The launch of the official “Yes” campaign

But this week also saw the launch of the official campaign by the big political machines, with official campaign meetings by the Socialists and the pro-governmental UMP, and both Raffarin and Chirac have stepped up to the plate (although some have suggested that Raffarin is such ” damaged goods” that it is counterproductive) to defend the Constitution.

It remains to be seen if the more rational arguments will have any effect, but at least they are finally been made:

the European Constitution has nothing to do with current European directives, which are decided under the existing treaties;
the European Constitution actually formalises some new social rights; it protects “public services”, a very important notion in France;
the European Constitution will not determine what kind of directives are voted when it is in force – it sets out how they are decided upon. Their actual content will depend on political forces at that time. Currently, the right dominates in Europe, and you cannot expect them to bring about leftist policies. The Constitution is not the place to enshrine specific policies, it just sets the rules on how the political game is played;
the European Constitution was a hard-to-reach compromise between 25 countries and many opinions within each country; it is not perfect, and if it does not come in force, the much-worse Nice Treaty will remain in force. If the French vote “No”, no one will come forward with new concessions to “improve” the Constitution from the French’s perspective (especially as the lefty “no” and the rightist “no” are for pretty much the very opposite reasons).

In any case, barring the odd dying pope, this referendum debate is clearly the central item in the news every day (together with the various social movements that, as we have seen, are enmeshed in the debate)

Voilà!

The Schiavo fracas was good news for the world

This came to me as a comment from a less newsjunky friend of mine, who basically said – “hey, Bush has not done anything crazy lately”.

I then went on to explain that this was not really true, as the Schiavo story clearly reached pretty high levels of craziness, despite the high standards we’ve grown accustomed to from the Bush administration. But, for once, the craziness was directed internally and not towards the hapless outside world.

Maybe it’s a good thing…

If you read what little has been written in the European press about the Schiavo case, it is described as a “normal” heart-wrenching right-to-die story, i.e. it is about a difficult medical/ethical decision and a torn family, some hotly debated legal decisions, and some attempts at political posturing around it.

A good example is this BBC story: Anger growing over Schiavo death

A French story can be found here: L’Américaine Terri Schiavo est morte

So, it has been mentioned, and obviously the interventions by Congress and Bush have been noted, and the strong mobilisation of the religious conservatives.

But a lot of that is fairly reminiscent of the debates that take place once in a while in our countries when a tragic case comes to light, with superficially similar roles: someone in the family wanting to pull the plug, the legal battles that go with it, debate about what the doctors may or may not do, religious authorities weighing in, conservative groups opposing any “right to die” and so forth (The most recent debate in France was around the case of Vincent Humbert, a young man terribly injured in an accident and who requested himself the right to die. It’s not exactly the same situation as for Schiavo, but it broaches similar themes). However, these debates never triggered 24/7 coverage, death threats or middle-of-the-night bills.

The coverage of the Schiavo case by European media, similarly, does not reflect the difference in intensity in the debate. De Lay is simply presented as a Majority Leader, with little background on his other current travails; there is little mention made of the blanket coverage of the story in the US. Superficially, it appears as a “normal” debate on a tough issue, and it gets some coverage but that’s it.

What we do notice is that, in the meantime, there is less belligerant talk about Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or elsewhere.

So, maybe, as a suggestion to you guys: keep the wingnuts busy with domestic social issues, it will help keep the world a little bit safer…

‘Emergency oil plan’ required in view of coming shortages

Financial Times

The report circulated to governments (…) suggests dramatic measures, such as reducing motorway speed limits by 25 per cent, shortening the working week, imposing driving bans on certain days, providing free public transport and promoting car pooling schemes.

And who’s saying this? Lefties? Envirofreaks? Eurowhiners?

Nope, it’s…

The International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for industrialised countries created after the oil crisis of the 1970s.

IEA to call for an emergency oil plan

Oil importing countries should implement emergency oil saving policies if supplies fall by as little as 1m-2m barrels a day, the International Energy Agency will warn next month.

The figure is much lower than the official trigger of 7 per cent of global oil supply equivalent to 6m b/d agreed in the treaty that founded the energy watchdog for industrialised countries after the oil crisis of the 1970s. A fall in supply of just 1m-2m b/d would be equivalent to the disruptions during the 2003 Iraq war or the 2002 oil industry strike in Venezuela.

A warning to set up “demand restraint policies” in the transport sector, such as driving bans or shorter working weeks, is contained in a study to be published next month during the annual IEA meeting of energy ministers.

It comes as oil is trading at more than $55 a barrel and highlights the agency’s concern about the possibility of a supply shock, the economic impact of high oil prices, and the need to focus on conserving energy rather than simply encouraging higher production.

The report marks a departure in IEA policy, as it says demand restraint measures, until now confined to times of crisis, “may be attractive during extended periods of high oil prices to relieve demand pressure”.

THEY ARE OFFICIALLY PANICKING.

What this means is the following:

a temporary drop of only 1-2% in oil production at any time, for any cause can have dramtic consequences for the oil market, because it is so stretched.
supply side policies (à la drilling in Alaska) are not sufficient. Production is still increasing, but this is barely enough to cope with rapidly increasing demand, and there now is no spare capacity.
above 50$/bbl prices have not reduced demand; they have not even slowed growth of the demand.
the official cheerleader of the oil markets, the EIA, which has always been saying that production capacities were sufficient, is finally admitting the obvious: they are not, and arguing for pretty radical steps.

Price increases are not enough to balance the market when demand is so unelastic – unless they are truly of earth shattering proportions (see this previous diary which suggested that prices needed to be multiplied by 10 or 15 to have an effect on demand of another unelastic commodity), so administrative measures are going to be required.

Rationing. Get ready for it. Really soon.

And no, I am not being needlessly dramatic. Everybody has been surprised by the surge in oil demand in the past 2 years, and there simply isn’t the requisite production capacity. As I have written previously, but it bears repeating, the oil majors are not investing because they have no access to the reserves in the most attractive places (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico), and the national oil companies are not investing because their governments are busily spending the windfall. Production capacity simply cannot cope.

This is not directly peak oil, but it is a kind of “political peak oil”, which is the first sign of the actual physical peak oil.

Sustainable living

This post is not really mine. I copied it directly from the amazing writing of DeAnander, one of the (many) brilliant commenters over at Moon of Alabama, the site where many of Billmon’s Whiskey Bar “barflies” have found a new home (and where we open a thread for each of his new posts – as you may have seen, he’s on a roll again).

This was written in reaction to a post on the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, where I contrasted the pessimism of the report with Meteor Blades‘s relative optimism on the topic, and I thought you might all find it quite fascinating.

So, everything below the fold as written by DeAnander, introducing “carburbs” and “corporadoes”…

O I could be such an optimist (of the David Suzuki variety) if only I could discount the massive weights of inertia, corruption, and ignorance tilting the scales so far against us. it is maddening. it is not that there is “no hope” or “no way out.” there are perfectly good avenues of hope and blinking EXIT signs all around us and we studiously ignore them.

Mc Kibben’s recent essay kind of covers the ground.

there is so much cause for optimism in our rapidly-increasing understanding of soil biology, of the functional use of fungi and invertebrates in waste processing, of permaculture (all too often rediscovering things that other cultures knew and practised millennia ago)… we can get more yield per acre from sustainable ag practise than from fossil farming; and we keep destroying family and peasant farmers, around the world, in favour of the less productive method.

as a species we are capable of inventing the bicycle (a truly innovative device and huge energy-saver), the hot-air dirigible, the focusing lens, the aerofoil sail, all the mechanisms we moderns dismiss as “clockwork”. we’re bloody clever! we moderns have been artificially made stupid, sub-competent and passive by our total-convenience lifestyle, but we have the capacity to be enormously inventive, creative, ingenious, handy. cause for optimism!

to mention just a few small examples: we already know of simple, practical, biotically-based ways to build or retrofit houses that are 5 or 6 times more efficient to heat. most of these methods are “illegal” under current building code. try to implement them in the average us town or burb and you will be punished with months of permit wrangling and tens of thousands of dollars in special fees.

we know how to install and use composting (“dry”) toilets, saving potentially 100s of mio gal of potable [aaaaargh] water per year. and most of our “planning” departments consider them illegal or sub-code. admit that you have installed one in the average town or burb in the us and you are in for the same trial-by-bureaucrat mentioned above. we are actively discouraging and preventing citizens from innovating and discovering less wasteful technologies.

we know how to transport heavy goods (and passengers) by rail and water, saving enormous amounts of energy. so — we deplete our rivers to the point where they become unnavigable, and tear up our railroads, and do our best to bankrupt our already-risible passenger rail network. we are running short of good farm land, so we pave more of it over for dead-end carburbs. we are politically and economically captive to foreign oil reserves; so we go out of our way to promote, build, market the most inefficient private vehicles we can envision, actively worshipping at the altar of profligate waste.

we know how to do all kinds of things right — “right” meaning “in an adaptive, survival-oriented, frugal, sensible way” — and yet we prefer to do everything as stupidly and wastefully as possible… I guess because it tickles our egos and makes us feel important and “wealthy”.

thus I remain a pessimist — a pessimist perpetually maddened by the proximity of optimism, like a starving castaway with a tin of food and no can opener, on an isolated atoll with no sharp rocks handy. optimism is so damn close — “another world is possible” — we can see it through the window, almost touch it, almost get our hands on it, but there is a phalanx of heavily armed plutocrats and their hypnotised disciples and rentathugs in between, telling us that we can’t go there. and history suggests that they will win. faced with the classic choice, “Adapt or Die,” they will make like the Greenland Norse, refuse “manfully” to adapt, and take us all down with them. when we were within arm’s reach of a saner way of living — no miracles or space aliens or perpetual motion engines required.

——-

I’m reminded of M John Harrison’s surreal, poetic, elegiac, elliptical sci-fi novel The Pastel City in which a grim unstable feudalism survives in the post-industrial, post-space-age ruins of a far-future England.

hard-bitten miners brave the toxicity and desolation of the Rust Deserts and the Metal-Salt Marshes to recover scraps and relics of the fallen civilisation; travellers ponder an artificial constellation left in their night skies by ancestors whose technological prowess is long forgotten, unable even to read the alphabet in whose letters which the Name Stars are configured. [maybe it will be the infamous “orbital Coca-Cola billboard”?]

our greatgrandchildren, I fancy, will excavate and mine our old “city dumps” and other industrial middens for metal, plastic, glass. I wonder if they will loathe and hate us when they reflect on all that we giddily threw away — like a drunken, gambling-addicted father in a Victorian morality tale — leaving them in relative resource poverty. or will they perhaps, having lost historical continuity, regard us as mythical ancestors with magical powers beyond their understanding?

if so, what will they make of the magisterial wastelands we have left behind us — the cracked obsidian craters of our nuclear tests, the poisonous blazing-aquamarine waters running off our old copper mines, the great tilted slabs of our silent airports, the gaunt enduring armatures of our skyscrapers, the vast barriers of our embanked roadways? what legends will they tell each other about the mysterious, sickly lands around our abandoned hot ponds, the probable deltas of desolation downstream of Hanford and similar sites?

will they hammer the shells of our old automobiles into armour for their agrarian wars, I wonder, starting the old story all over again?

or will they look back on us, from their immensely clever bamboo-and-paper houses, surrounded by their perpetual permaculture gardens, reading by the light of genetically-enhanced fireflies 🙂 and feel sorry for us… because we made our world so clunky, so unnecessarily ugly, sordid, wasteful, conformist, uncreative and graceless? I wonder in my happier moments if they will look back at the SUV, the passenger jet, the office cubicle, and ask themselves as we now ask of the corset, the bustle, the long woolies of the Victorian Brits — how the hell did living, breathing human beings resign themselves to such imprisonment, such stifling, such bondage?

——————

yes, less-impactful ways of living — and ideas about same — are heavily deprecated and obfuscated in the culture… derided and feared actually… not surprising as they all involve, ahem, buying less stuff. which is heresy, and must be extirpated.

Stossel (the limblowhard of ag and food) and his repeated attempts to demonise and “dangerise” organic produce is a good example. people in cars who yell “Hippie!” and “Get off the f**king road!” at cyclists on US streets. teenagers who learn to call the city bus the “loser cruiser” and believe it is a social stigma to ride it. people who believe that not eating meat every single day is an unthinkable degradation of their lifestyle — even if the meat they do eat is so stuffed with hormones and antibiotics and injected with adulterants that it almost qualifies as lab waste. it all adds up to a phobia, a cultural rejection, of the very idea of low-impact living. The American Way of Life is not negotiable. we can either be ourselves — heroic, imperial, wealthy — or we can suffer enormous loss of face and “live like peasants/heathen.”

the corporadoes did a really, really, really good job of burying the brief sustainable-counterculture movement of the 70’s. with ridicule and caricature [aided to some extent by the natural loopiness of humankind which expressed itself in communes and collectives just as vividly as it does today in the prayerful gaggle outside Terri’s hospice], with erasure and historical revisionism, with the help of police harassment and accelerating enclosure of “public” space and corporate media control, they pretty much “disappeared” the whole live-lightly cultural thread that flourished oh-so-briefly, along with its (ironically) very traditional values of materials re-use, ingenuity, home-building, low energy use, historicity, frugality, sharing, etc. those ideas are still out there, but you have to know where to look. they will only appear in the corporate media as part of a “humorous” freakshow story.

specifically on the composting loo topic, google for “Sun-Mar” or “composting toilet” or “sawdust toilet” or “Biolet” or “Joseph Jenkins”… I believe this technology is far better accepted in Euroland than the US. backward again, alas.

for an interesting review of the “owner-built home” movement and the sustainable architecture subculture, and their survival into the present, the recent book Home Work is a treasure trove. the original — classic — book Shelter is long oop I think.

the “smaller/lighter is more beautiful” movement is still around, just invisible to the media (except for occasional public pillorying and pelting with tomatoes). only the highest-tech edge of it (folks like the Lovinses) get any air time — imho because they support the grandiose technocratic mythos, whereas the humility and third-world ingenuity of the low-impact crowd really hurts the Amurkan ego. buckyballs are Way Cool, but mass transit is for losers and composting toilets are ‘eeeew gross!’

googling for “intentional community” may turn up examples of persistent low-impact advocates banding together to build or convert apartment buildings or condoplexes (in the city) or create eco-villages (in less urban areas) with a view to reduced resource consumption and more human/shared/green space. [it will also turn up the usual percentage of lifetime SCA members who want to form communities with others who wear wolfskin vests, carry broadswords, and try to speak extinct Scandinavian dialects. to the corporate media, they’re all the same — misfits, freaks, fantasists.]

also google for “urban gardening”, “green roofs,” “bioneers,” “hermetia larvae”, “eisenia fetida,” “straw bale building,” “papercrete construction,” “water harvesting,” and discover a lot of very ingenious people trying to be smart without being destructive… this list of googleable topics could easily get to be pages long, but you get the idea… little grains of determined crunchy hopefulness in the stodgy pudding of despair.

Libya and Mexico opening up for US Big Oil

Another Bush “transformational diplomacy” “success”? The simultaneity of the announcements is striking:

Mexican attitudes ease on private oil investment

Libya mulls oil exploration concessions

So how should this be interpreted?
Let’s have a look at the details:

Mexican attitudes ease on private oil investment

Politicians from Mexico’s three main parties are bracing themselves to allow more private sector investment and greater financial autonomy for the heavily indebted national oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex).

Pemex, which provides the Mexican government with 36 per cent of its revenues, needs to invest in fresh exploration and production to reverse a recent fall in reserves and rising imports. Recent oil spills have also drawn attention to the dangers posed by the company’s ageing infrastructure.

(…)

Mexico’s constitution asserts that energy resources are the exclusive patrimony of the nation, barring foreign companies. Pemex was such a sacred cow that Vicente Fox, elected president in 2000 on promises of a “government of change”, asserted that privatisation of the company was off the agenda.

Privatisation is still not being discussed, but many are appealing for options to allow some private investment, to sell some shares in the company to Mexican investors, or to reform its corporate governance.

(…)

With taxes based on revenues rather than profits, Pemex last year contributed about 75 per cent of its sales – 110 per cent of pre-tax profits – to the national Treasury.

So the story here is purely domestic: Pemex has been a cash cow for much too long, and although it is a competent company technically, it is not able to invest enough because its resources are captured by the central government (which depends unhealthily on them – 36% of income!), and because there are too many hands in the “pot of gold”…

This fits in my narrative in previous diaries about national oil companies being unable to invest, and the host countries being unwilling to let foreigners do it. Mexico, a democracy, is at least asking the right questions: how to invest, how to make the company more efficient, how to use the natural wealth of the country for the benefit of the population.

Pemex’s example shows that keeping investors out is not necessarily the best way for the country: the wealth is less than it could be because of lack of investment, and it only goes partly to the right uses as there is a lot of “seepage” in a monopoly with no competition and entrenched “stakeholders” of the wrong kind.

In any case, Bush has very little to do with it, so don’t let him claim that as a victory in any way.

Now Libya.

Libya dangles prospect of oil exploration concessions

(a slightly longer article than that linked to above, I am not sure it is accessible without a subscription)

Libya is considering offering lucrative long-term oil exploration concessions in a bid to attract international oil companies and boost crude output after years of economic sanctions.

Such a move, if agreed by the Tripoli government, would mark a rare return by an Opec producer to a concession system that collapsed in the mid-1970s.

Libya, which holds the largest oil reserves in Africa but trails Nigeria and Angola as a producer, is dangling the prospect of oil development and exploration rights at a time when oil companies around the world are battling to replenish dwindling oil reserves.

Analysts believe Libya hopes the concession arrangement will appeal to big foreign oil companies such as ExxonMobil and BP.

(…)

Libya, which has estimated reserves of 36bn barrels, has started to open up its potentially rich oil and gas sector to greater foreign investment following the lifting of 18 years of US trade sanctions in 2004.

In January it raised about $200m (€155m, £107m) through the award of 15 exploration licences, mainly issued to US companies led by Occidental Petroleum and Amerada Hess. But foreign companies only account for about 20 per cent of the country’s oil output.

Mr Shatwan said Libya planned to issue another 100 exploration licences over the next 18 months in an effort to double oil output to 3m barrels a day by the end of the decade. It currently produces about 1.6m b/d of crude, less than half the peak of 3.3m b/d in 1970.

Libyan officials estimate the country needs $30bn in investments to expand and modernise the oil industry.

Under the licence terms, Occidental and Amerada would have to share production with Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corporation (NOC).

Oil companies which already operate in Libya, such as Total of France, Italy’s ENI, Repsol of Spain and Austria’s OMV, operate under production-sharing agreements with the NOC.

Fellow Opec member Algeria may also introduce long-term oil concessions following last week’s approval of new energy liberalisation laws by the country’s national assembly.

This is fairly technical stuff, but what you need to note is the following:

Western oil companies (well, European) are already producing oil in Lybia, under the PSA (production sharing agreements) regime, which is not necessarily better than the concession regime (it all depends on the taxation mechanisms in each case).
like Mexico, Lybia needs new investment in its oil sector. Unlike Mexico, it has not been totally closed to foreign investment, but was not very welcoming until recently.
the elimination of the US sanctions allows US companies to join their European counterparts in the fun, and the improvement in bilateral relations makes it easier for all oil companies to come and invest.
as has been discussed elsewhere, Libya has been keen for relationship normalisation for a while and that process is only marginally linked to Bush’s diplomacy and the Iraq war.

In either case, do note that the investments wil ltake a few years to come to fruition, so this potential oil will not be in the market for a while and will not do much to ease the expected tensions on the market in the near future.

Smile of the Day: Dick Cheney as a (Role) Model

Brought to you by the irreplaceable Weekly World News, this story might even be true…

Veep Barely Worked His Way Through College …

CHENEY WAS A NUDE MODEL … FOR ART STUDENTS

Most Americans are very familiar with Vice President Dick Cheney’s distinguished career as a businessman and public servant — but much less familiar with his work as a nude artist’s model!

Before entering politics, Cheney put himself through college at the University of Wyoming by dropping his drawers for several local artists and sculptors.

“Oh sure, I remember him. He modeled for me for nearly two years,” recalls retired sculptor Lorraine Feinbaum. “Of course, back then he went by the name ‘Big Dick Cheney,’ as he was rather, um, well-endowed — which put him in great demand.”

(…)

Cheney is the latest among a string of Washington politicians with unusual backgrounds. According to reliable inside sources, California Senator Barbara Boxer earned extra cash jumping out of cakes at bachelor parties. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy worked one summer as a male escort, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the cover girl three times for Black Booty magazine, and First Lady Laura Bush worked briefly as a “fluffer,” — a woman whose job it is to keep male adult film stars in a continual state of arousal.

“fluffer” – hey, you learn new words every day.

Hat tip to Fran.

Care About What You Eat!

Hi everybody

You’re probably familiar with my name if you read the diaries. BooMan has kindly proposed that I post on the Front Page as well and I am honored to be able to do so.

Being in Europe, I expect to initially use the privilege during the “graveyard shift”, in the morning for me (thus the second part of the night for you, after even the hard core nightpeople have gone to bed), but I thought I’d give you a light tidbit from Paris to start off this new career for me…

And what could be more quintessentially French than good food?

Actually, we are beginning to face, with a few years’ lag, the same obesity epidemic crisis as in the US. As can be expected, it is especially worrying for the young generations, a growing proportion of which are overweight, for much the same reasons as everywhere else: industrial food, TV-meals, snacking, unbalanced diets….

But we’re fighting back! As this story in the Guardian shows, it is all a question of education:

“We don’t impose, we don’t ban, we don’t stigmatise,” said Agnes Lommez, coordinator of Fleurbaix-Laventie Ville Santé (FLVS), a food and nutrition project that has been running in what are two small neighbouring towns (combined population: 7,500) since 1992.

“What we do is inform and explain, as concretely as we can, what foodstuffs are, what they’re made of, what effect they have, how best to prepare them, how best to combine them, and what constitutes a healthy diet. We never talk weight or size; we talk health.”

Manifestly, it works. And before anyone asks what it costs, the budget for FLVS’s entire educational and public information campaign – excluding the accompa nying scientific research, a useful but optional and expensive extra – is €2.5 (£1.75) per person per year.

(…)

Because if you get kids at that age, you have them for life, said Ms Lommez: “We have young men, university students, calling us up these days and saying, ‘Hi, you probably don’t remember me, but I was one of the first kids in the project, 10 years ago. Well I’ve got this girlfriend and, um, her diet’s a catastrophe. She hasn’t got a clue. There isn’t a little course you could give her?'”

Do read the rest, it’s really instructive – and is probably easily replicable elsewhere. The short version: care about what you eat!

Comments and meta-comments on this first story welcome!