by Alex Evans | Mar 6, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, is quoted in the FT this morning as saying that “it would be in the interests of producers and consumers if oil stayed at its present level of about $45”.
This strikes me as a bit odd. A whole range of senior oil industry figures has been warning that with prices having fallen off a cliff since last summer’s peak of $147, investment in new production capacity has fallen sharply as well – setting the stage for a potential supply crunch as soon as the world begins to emerge from the downturn and demand starts to pick up.
Nick Butler, for example, suggested in December that a price band of $50-$75 a barrel is needed to ensure that sufficient new investment comes on stream to meet demand (which the IEA projects will rise from 85m barrels a day in 2007 to 106m mb/d by 2030). Total CEO Christophe de Margerie, meanwhile, said in October last year that if the oil price fell to $60 a barrel and stayed there, “a lot of [new] projects would be delayed”.
Strangest of all, it’s less than a month since Nobuo Tanaka himself was briefing heavily about the risks of a future supply crunch resulting from under-investment, and stressing that he expected demand to rise by about 1 mb/d from next year onwards.
So what’s going on?
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by David Steven | Mar 5, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Yesterday, I put some words into Barack Obama’s mouth – re-jigging JFK’s famous ‘man on the moon’ speech as a call for an immediate peak to global emissions.
Setting a goal that emissions should never rise again, is something I have argued we should do now, rather than hoping we’ll simply be braver or more desperate in five or ten years’ time.
Originally, I suggested this should be a major plank for civil society campaigning – and I still think it should be. But governments can play too. Let’s look at the policy from vantage point of the Obama administration. (more…)
by David Steven | Mar 4, 2009 | Conflict and security, South Asia
I’ve been visiting Pakistan on and off for a couple of years now – and each time things have got much, much worse (see this bleak assessment from 12 months ago).
Now the country has been plunged into further crisis. The Mumbai attacks put new pressure on its fractious relationship with India. The shootings in Lahore have severed its sporting links with the rest of the world.
These are calculated attempts to isolate and destabilize the country – attacks that have been planned by people who understand how to probe a culture’s weak points, and are skilled in the art of systems disruption.
They have consistently achieving outcomes disproportionate to the resources invested. But have we – the West I mean – done the same?
Here’s six questions I’d like to have the answer to. They all relate to the the country’s army, which is a dominant force in Pakistan’s politics and economics – and is an institution that has iconic status, even though it is losing legitimacy and respect.
Today, the Pakistan army finds itself in a strikingly similar position to that of the US military in Iraq before the surge. It is fighting a series of interlinked insurgencies. And it is losing badly – mostly because it’s fighting the wrong war.
So:
- How much money are the UK and US channeling to the Pakistan military?
- What proportion strengthens Pakistan’s ability to fight 20th century wars?
- And what proportion is directed at counter-insurgency and 4th generation warfare?
- Has a systematic and concerted attempt been made to pass the lessons learned in Iraq onto Pakistani senior and mid-level officers?
- If so, is there evidence that strategy is switching from targeting militants to protecting Pakistan’s people (perhaps the fundamental COIN tenet).
- And given that all modern armies boast about their commitment to outcomes (or effects based operations), what outcome has the UK and US’s vast post-911 investment in the Pakistan military delivered?
by Alex Evans | Mar 4, 2009 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard
The Economist has a piece on its website today bemoaning the effect of the credit crunch on aid flows:
It is unclear how aid flows are responding to the slowdown but the most recent data (which predate the crisis) hardly encourages hopes of a substantial expansion. Aid from OECD countries fell between 2006 and 2007, partly because of an exceptionally high level of debt relief in 2006. Disregarding this one-off effect, aid only crept up by 2% in 2007. And as a new report from the OECD points out, a 1970 United Nations target for aid of 0.7% of rich-country GDP remains a distant dream. Only Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have reached this target. The average contribution is 0.45% of GDP.
And this sum was calculated before donor countries were hit by an economic crisis that has shifted priorities dramatically. Moreover, the size of the overall pot in rich countries will shrink as economies contract. Maintaining current levels of aid implies the unlikely earmarking of an even greater share of GDP.
Ah, the target of giving 0.7% of GNI to development assistance: bow your heads in reverence. But hang on a minute. Why are we all paying so much attention to a target that’s (a) not based on any assessment of how much money is needed to achieve any defined set of objectives, and (b) nearly forty years old?
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by Richard Gowan | Mar 4, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security, Off topic
Now that President Bashir of Sudan has been indicted by the ICC, we can safely assume that a whole lot of speculative punditry is coming our way. But few will have the sheer logical power of the analysis emerging from the camp of libertarian crazy man economist Lyndon LaRouche, whose staff have drawn a compelling set of links between the indictment, a potential collapse of U.S. foreign policy, the ensuing collapse of civilization… and the need to dismantle the British Empire. A policy goal that I must admit I thought was pretty much in the bag, but what would I know?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmgbESOw8To[/youtube]
