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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 18th, 2008 This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics. President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary. On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people. Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 - so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology. Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now. Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there - all as part of his UN Ambassadorship. Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians - and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria. So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War? He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated - something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on. ——— ***
Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals. By BILL KELLER Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us. Related Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism www.ft.com August 12, 2008) So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us. If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989. The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess. Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee. The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback. It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning. It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe. Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military. In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face. The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent. The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way. President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment. Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air. But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor. This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum. The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises. History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper. ***
The New Age of Authoritarianism. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism. It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.” Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes. That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first. Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s. For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment - China - is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.” But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view - and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do. In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”. The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all. But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength - and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society - an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”. Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad - as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000. Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 16th, 2008 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20… Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008 Cabinet trio visit Yasukuni. By KAZUAKI NAGATA, Staff writer, Japan Times online. Cabinet ministers and at least 53 Diet members visited Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on surrender day Friday while Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and two key ministers opted to keep their distance from the contentious landmark, which served as Japan’s spiritual pillar during the war.
The 63rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Former nationalistic Prime Ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe also paid their respects Friday. Koizumi was notorious for making annual visits to the shrine while prime minister from 2001 to 2006, including on surrender day in his final year. Each visit provoked harsh outcries from China and South Korea. Joining them Friday were farm minister Seiichi Ota, Justice Minister Okiharu Yasuoka, consumer affairs minister Seiko Noda and nationalist Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who went for a ninth year in a row. Noda, often regarded as having the best chance of becoming Japan’s first female prime minister, previously visited the shrine when she was posts minister. When asked if she felt awkward about coming to the shrine while Fukuda did not, Noda said his decision was based on his opinion and the Cabinet was not told to refrain. “People have different religious views, so (going to a shrine) should be freely allowed,” said Lower House member Yoshinobu Shimamura, who heads a nonpartisan group that visits the shrine together. Shimamura led 52 other Diet conservatives on the annual visit. Despite the scorching weather, the shrine attracted a myriad of visitors, many there to witness the lawmakers’ visit. The shrine served as the backbone for the Shinto fervor that drove Japan’s war. Dead soldiers were enshrined there as gods who protected the country, and many relatives of the war dead still go to Yasukuni to remember loved ones even 63 years after the end of the war. A 56-year-old man from Ishikawa Prefecture who requested anonymity said Yasukuni’s supporters and detractors both have their points, and it is difficult to say what’s right regarding the politicians’ visits. The prime minister and other ministers may need to be careful about expressing their views too much because “it is a fact that visiting Yasukuni has caused problems,” he said. On the other hand, while asserting an understanding of other countries’ viewpoints, he said they should not be so critical of a “domestic” issue. ————– Fukuda sticks to neutral venues: Prime minister honors nation’s war dead at nonreligious Budokan, Chidorigafuchi ceremonies. Friday marked the 63rd anniversary of the public radio address made by Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Showa, announcing Japan’s surrender, ending World War II. Fukuda, echoing several of his predecessors, expressed “deep remorse” to all of the war dead, adding that Japan caused “tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” Fukuda, widely known for his relatively dovish stance toward Asia, did not visit the contentious war-linked Yasukuni Shrine, which many parts of Asia in particular regard as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Instead, he attended the war dead commemoration ceremony and visited the religiously unaffiliated Chidorigafuchi war memorial, near Yasukuni, dedicated to unknown Japanese service members.
“The government should seriously consider establishing a memorial facility that is not based on a particular religion and one where everyone can unite and pay tribute,” Kono said. “Our nation and our neighboring countries still have unresolved issues related to history that have become a thorn and are causing friction.” Meanwhile, at a news conference Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said the government “does not need to take action” immediately to push for the alternative memorial facility.
Every year, the spotlight shines on the shrine and whether the prime minister and any of his Cabinet ministers will pay a visit. —————- War widow - now 94-year old - goes to first ceremony. Her husband was killed in the Philippines. Kyodo News, Over the past 63 years, Yotsu Iimura had not joined the annual national memorial ceremony on Aug. 15 to commemorate the war dead. But this year, the 94-year-old decided to come although she is in a wheelchair, becoming one of the oldest relatives of the war dead attending the ceremony, which is seeing fewer and fewer participants as the survivors pass away with the years. “My heart is too full to talk. I’m really happy,” she said, entering Tokyo Budokan Hall. This year, 4,579 surviving kin of deceased Japanese soldiers attended the Budokan ceremony. A decade ago, the number was 5,662. Iimura had hesitated to attend because “many bereaved families had been attending the ceremony,” she said. “But not much time is left for me, either. I feel lonely since fewer families are attending,” she said. Iimura’s husband, Shoji, was killed in action on Luzon Island in the Philippines at age 31. He had been a refrigerator maker before being drafted in 1944. Iimura learned in 1947 that her husband was dead. ———————– Bunce served as chief of the Religious and Cultural Resources Division at the general headquarters of the Allied Forces, working to separate militarism and nationalism from Shinto to promote the demilitarization of Japan under orders from the Allied commander in chief, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the paper said. But Bunce allowed Shinto, stripped of its nationalism, to continue and believers to worship privately, it said. A native of Ohio, Bunce earned a master’s degree in history from Ohio State University in 1933 and taught English at a Japanese junior college during the 1930s, according to the Washington Post. After the Occupation, he became a diplomat and served at embassies in India and South Korea before retiring in 1971. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 7th, 2008 From: munekata at iges.or.jp Call for Abstracts: Climate-Friendly Transportation Strategies in Asia: Overcoming Obstacles to Co-benefits. Selected authors will be invited to contribute full-length papers for a multi-chapter book project. Selected authors will also be sponsored to attend the Better Air Quality (BAQ) 2008 Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand and present their findings at a pre-event panel scheduled for 11 November 2008. Due Date: 1 September 2008 Rising rates of motorization in developing Asia have become a source of concern outside and inside the region. Outside the region this concern stems from projections that carbon emissions from Asia’s transport sector could triple by 2025. Inside the region it stems from projections that urban air pollution levels, fuel costs, and commuting times could increase just as sharply over the same period. The key to altering these projections may lie in integrated transportation policies. Integrated transportation policies are so named because, rather than focusing on either developmental or climate goals, they pursue both objectives simultaneously. Integrated policies therefore have the potential to be more cost-effective than isolated climate or developmental policies. A number of studies have demonstrated this potential by estimating the developmental benefits of integrated policies. These benefits are commonly referred to as co-benefits. The values of co-benefits are often found to be significant in developing Asia, which would presumably draw interest from regional policymakers. But while the influence of this research seems likely to expand, thus far its impacts on policies have been limited. This book project seeks to determine why these potentially sizable impacts have yet to materialize in developing Asia’s transport sector. More concretely, the project’s main goal is to understand the opportunities for and obstacles to maximizing the co-benefits of transportation policies in developing Asia. A second goal is to propose countermeasures based on that assessment. Abstracts should focus on one of the following three themes. Analytical Framework: Papers should identify categories of transportation policies with significant co-benefits and barriers to realizing those benefits. Papers may focus on technical, financial, political, and social barriers. Analytical frameworks offering explanations for why some categories of policies are more likely to succeed than others are encouraged. Case Studies: Papers should examine specific projects/programmes/ policies where the co-benefits have or have not materialized in developing Asia. Submissions should highlight the actors, interests and institutions that contributed to the case’s performance. Comparative case studies are encouraged. Co-benefits in the Post-2012 Climate Regime: Papers should explore opportunities for recognizing and rewarding transportation co-benefits in the post-2012 climate regime. Insights into how the post-2012 climate regime could strengthen the design and implementation of integrated transportation policies are encouraged. The IGES Climate Policy Project will acknowledge receipt of all submissions by email. Notification of selected abstracts will be made by 15 September 2008. The authors of selected abstracts will be asked to submit the draft version of full paper by 5 November 2008. This call for abstracts is open to policy practitioners, scholars, and students from both developed and developing countries. The focus of study should be Asia; cases outside the region can be used for comparative purposes. About the Climate Policy Project at IGES The mission of the project is to recommend effective climate policies for sustainable development in Asia in this era of evolving global climate regime. In Phase 4 of its research (April 2007-March 2010), the project is conducting research on four sub-themes: market mechanisms, adaptation, climate regime beyond 2012, and co-benefits. This call for papers is specifically designed to assist the work of the sub-themes of climate regime beyond 2012 and co-benefits. For additional details of the project, please refer to http://www.iges.or.jp/en/cp. For additional details regarding this call for abstracts, please contact: Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 3rd, 2008 Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization. by: Larry Rohter, The New York Times, August 3, 2008. When Tesla Motors, a pioneer in electric-powered cars, set out to make a luxury roadster for the American market, it had the global supply chain in mind. Tesla planned to manufacture 1,000-pound battery packs in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, then bring the mostly assembled cars back to the United States. { we wonder what Tesla was thinking - you make an electric car to save the world the CO2 emissions, and making that car you do unneeded emissions in having the parts circle the world because it saves some union headache when producing components in the US? } The world economy has become so integrated that shoppers find relatively few T-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart and Target carrying a “Made in the U.S.A.” label. But globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology.
“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.” Many economists argue that globalization will not shift into reverse even if oil prices continue their rising trend. But many see evidence that companies looking to keep prices low will have to move some production closer to consumers. Globe-spanning supply chains - Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago - make less sense today than they did a few years ago. To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers. Decisions like those suggest that what some economists call a neighborhood effect - putting factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers, to reduce transportation costs - could grow in importance if oil remains expensive. A barrel sold for $125 on Friday, compared with lows of $10 a decade ago. “If prices stay at these levels, that could lead to some significant rearrangement of production, among sectors and countries,” said C. Fred Bergsten, author of “The United States and the World Economy” and director of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. “You could have a very significant shock to traditional consumption patterns and also some important growth effects.” The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times. The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.” But if the international community fulfills its pledge to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change, even China and India would have to reduce the growth of their emissions, and the relative costs of production in countries that use energy inefficiently could grow. The political landscape may also be changing. A somewhat similar reaction can be seen in the United States, where Last week, efforts to complete what is known as the Doha round of trade talks collapsed in acrimony, dealing a serious blow to tariff reduction. The negotiations, begun in 2001, failed after China and India battled the United States over agricultural tariffs, with the two developing countries insisting on broad rights to protect themselves against surges of food imports that could hurt their farmers. Some critics of globalization are encouraged by those developments, which they see as a welcome check on the process. On environmentalist blogs, some are even gleefully promoting a “globalization death watch.” Many leading economists say such predictions are probably overblown. “It would be a mistake, a misinterpretation, to think that a huge rollback or reversal of fundamental trends is under way,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Distance and trade costs do matter, but we are still in a globalized era.” As economists and business executives well know, shipping costs are only one factor in determining the flow of international trade. When companies decide where to invest in a new factory or from whom to buy a product, they also take into account exchange rates, consumer confidence, labor costs, government regulations and the availability of skilled managers. ‘People Were Profligate’ What may be coming to an end are price-driven oddities like chicken and fish crossing the ocean from the Western Hemisphere to be filleted and packaged in Asia not to be consumed there, but to be shipped back across the Pacific again. “Because of low costs, people were profligate,” said Nayan Chanda, author of “Bound Together,” a history of globalization. The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected. Plants in industries that require relatively less investment in infrastructure, like furniture, footwear and toys, are already showing signs of mobility as shipping costs rise. Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States. But with transport costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States. Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month. “There’s just a handful of us left, but it has become easier for us domestic folks to compete,” said Steven Kincaid of Kincaid Furniture in Hudson, N.C., a division of La-Z-Boy. Avocado Salad in January. Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities.
“Being green is in their best interests not so much in making money as saving money,” said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University. “Green companies are likely to be a permanent trend, as these vulnerabilities continue, but it’s going to take a long time for all this to settle down.” Jeffrey E. Garten, the author of “World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy” and a former dean of the Yale School of Management, said that companies “cannot take a risk that the just-in-time system won’t function, because the whole global trading system is based on that notion.” As a result, he said, “they are going to have to have redundancies in the supply chain, like more warehousing and multiple sources of supply and even production.” One likely outcome if transportation rates stay high, economists said, would be a strengthening of the neighborhood effect. Instead of seeking supplies wherever they can be bought most cheaply, regardless of location, and outsourcing the assembly of products all over the world, manufacturers would instead concentrate on performing those activities as close to home as possible. In a more regionalized trading world, economists say, China would probably end up buying more of the iron ore it needs from Australia and less from Brazil, and farming out an even greater proportion of its manufacturing work to places like Vietnam and Thailand. Similarly, Mexico’s maquiladora sector, the assembly plants concentrated near its border with the United States, would become more attractive to manufacturers with an eye on the American market. But a trend toward regionalization would not necessarily benefit the United States, economists caution. Not only has it lost some of its manufacturing base and skills over the past quarter-century, and experienced a decline in consumer confidence as part of the current slowdown, but it is also far from the economies that have become the most dynamic in the world, those of Asia. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 3rd, 2008 OFFSHORE MAGAZINE, PennWell Corporation, Tulsa, OK - Offshore magazine, first published in 1954, is a monthly publication recognized as the worldwide leader for covering the key issues and trends relative to offshore technology, oil and gas E&P (Exploration and Production) operations. It is the world’s most highly respected magazine dedicated entirely to the offshore industry, and enjoys the highest and most widely read circulation in its class. Since 1910, The PennWell Petroleum Group has been the industry leader for coverage of and service to the worldwide petroleum industry. Its foundation magazines are Oil & Gas Journal, Offshore, Oil, Gas & Petrochem Equipment, Oil & Gas Financial Journal, LNG Observer and The Petroleum Buyers Guide. The group also produces targeted e-Newsletters, hosts global conferences and exhibitions, seminars and forums, directories and technical books, print and electronic databases, surveys and maps. We were introduced to http://www.offshore-mag.com because of our interest in the oil finds in Brazil. Brazil is now at the top of OFFSHORE interest and they plan an upcoming webcast lecture: (AkerSolutions Technip) The Petrobras FPSO Experience: Technology Evolution and Application In the US Gulf of Mexico ***
*** Brazil in OPEC? If confirmed, the Carioca-Sugar Loaf find would vault Brazil into the Top 10 countries for oil reserves, ahead of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) such as Nigeria and Libya. It also would surpass the US, point out oil analysts. Director Estrella, who is known for conservative forecasts, told Offshore that: “Considering the geologically provable dimensions of the whole pre-salt reservoirs, including Santos, Campos, and Espírito Santo basins, plus other prospects, such as geologically estimated recoverable oil and natural gas in the Tupi accumulation, we may be dealing with recoverable volumes very much larger than the current Brazilian proven reserves.” I am not in favor of Brazil joining OPEC. New oil producing countries started exporting but did not join OPEC, which in a way is weakening OPEC’s economic and political power. OPEC is going down the path of political obsolescence.” *** The OFFSHORE Magazine July 2008 issue (July 7, 2008) includes three articles about Brazil. We give here the references and small parts from these articles: July 7, 2008 Title: “Pre-salt discoveries continue in Brazil. ” (Above is a 6 page article) by Peter Howard Wertheim, Contributing Editor Potential for super-giant fields remains to be confirmed in ultra deepwater.
Brazil Energy Minister Edison Lobão was quoted as saying on São Paulo’s Estado newswire that he would neither confirm nor deny Lima’s statements. However, he cautioned that any announcement on the extension of oil fields should only be made once the government is certain about the data. For context, current Brazilian crude oil proven reserves are at 14.4 Bbbl. For Brazilian analysts, it also casts new doubts on peak oil theory, which postulates that world oil demand will soon outpace supply. Riedel says uncertainty remains regarding the size of the Carioca discovery on BM-S-9 block, which lays under 2 km (6,562 ft) of water, plus many more kilometers of sand, hard rock, and another 2 km of salt. The exploration area, also called Carioca-Sugar Loaf, is 275 km (171 mi) off the coast of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. “Petrobras is very good at deepwater drilling but this is going to be very complicated stuff to get out of the ground,” he adds. —————– July 7, 2008 http://www.offshore-mag.com/display_arti… Title: “Jubarte field production enhanced with wellbore ESP”. (Above is a 4 page article) by Marcos Pellegrini, Giovanni Colodette - Petrobras 1,200-hp subsea system installed.
Jubarte field: The Jubarte field, in the northern part of the Campos basin, about 80 km (49.7 mi) offshore from the state of Espírito Santo, was discovered in January 2001. An extended well test was performed to evaluate drilling, completion, artificial lift technology, and to verify reserves. Then, Petrobras started Phase 1 production with FPSO P-34. Four wells were planned to produce around 60,000 b/d of oil. Two of the wells are produced using gas lift, the third one is an ESP installation on the seabed, and the fourth is a subsea ESP wellbore installation. ———————- July 7, 2008 http://www.offshore-mag.com/display_arti… Drilling zero discharge offshore Brazil in an environmentally sensitive area. (Above is a 3 page article) These drillings are in shallow waters near terrific white sand beaches. by Perry Morris - El Paso Oil & Gas Equipment outlay: ————— The deepwater oil-finds locations towards the the souther part of Brazil’s coast - the Santos Basin and the Caramba, Sugar Loaf, Carioca, Parati, Tupi and Jupiter discoveries.
Location map of the exploration blocks in Santos basin showing the recent giant and super-giant pre-salt oil and gas discoveries. The shallow water oil-basins that are close to environmentally sensitive coasts. North of Rio de Janeiro - the Espirito Santo and Camamu basins and the Potiguar basin in the northeast.
The Acai and Cacau exploration wells in the Camamu basin are in a shallow 23 m (75.5 ft) water depth near shore. Permalink | |
