by Alex Evans | May 3, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
A while back I linked to an analysis from Tullett Prebon, a leading brokerage firm, discussing peak oil and limits to growth – not the sort of issues you really expected capital market investors to be focusing on, as I noted at the time.
Now, here’s another example – this time, from Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist at GMO ($107 billion under management). Grantham’s latest letter to investors (full pdf here), which was also covered in Merryn Somerset Webb’s column in the weekend FT, has this to say:
Rapid growth is not ours by divine right; it is not even mathematically possible. Our goal should be to get everyone out of abject poverty, even if it necessitates some income redistribution.
He goes on to cover peak oil, the food spike, the effect of climate change and all the other core scarcity themes that are familiar to readers of GD. But significantly, he also emphasises the prospects of another short term collapse in commodity prices, just as they collapsed from their 2008 as the financial crisis kicked in. This time, he argues, the downside risk stems from the possibility that
“China’s structural imbalances will cause at least one wheel to come off their economy within the next 12 months. This is painful when traveling at warp speed – 10% a year in GDP growth …
… The significance here is that given China’s overwhelming influence on so many commodities, especially in terms of the percentage China represents of new growth in global demand, any general economic stutter in China can mean very big declines in some of their prices.
You can assess on your own the probabilities of a stumble in the next year or so. At the least, I would put it at 1 in 4, while some of my colleagues think the odds are much higher. If China stumbles or if the weather is better than expected [and crop yields are therefore higher in the immediate term], a probability I would put at, say, 80%, then commodity prices will decline a lot. But if both events occur together, it will very probably break the commodity markets en masse. Not unlike the financial collapse.
But, he continues, such a collapse would not in any way alter the long term underlying trend towards resource scarcity (and so, if you’re an investor, a commodities crash would represent a once in a lifetime buying opportunity). This argument makes total sense to me. Back in July 2008, just after oil prices had started to decline from their peak, but before their really big fall, I wrote a post arguing that while the long-term drivers on oil prices were strongly inflationary, it would be a volatile, stop-start, boom-crash sort of process (see also this). Whether the impetus for the next crash is China or some other global shock, the fundamentals will remain in place.
Grantham’s conclusion is exactly the same as mine: poor countries are most vulnerable to this new age of scarcity, and issues of fair shares become absolutely fundamental in a world of limits:
At the bottom of the list, poor countries with few resources and little efficiency, which already use up to 50% of their income on the commodity “necessities”, will suffer. The irony that they suffered the most having used up the least will probably not make their misery less. Limited resources create a win-lose proposition quite unlike the win-win we are accustomed to in global trade. Theoretically, we all gain through global trade as China grows. But with limited resources, the faster they grow and the richer they get (and, particularly, the more meat rather than grain that they eat), the more commodity prices rise and the greater the squeeze on the poorer countries and the relatively poor in every country. It’s a gloomy topic. Suffice it to say that if we mean to avoid increased starvation and international instability, we will need global ingenuity and generosity on a scale hitherto unheard of.
by David Steven | May 2, 2011 | Conflict and security
Today’s raid on Abottabad, where US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden, brings back memories of an aborted raid in 2005:
A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.
But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.
Rumsfeld called off that raid because he thought too many US lives were at risk. The plan started off life sounding very similar to the one that took out bin Laden – just a small team of Seals.
But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces.
”The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. ”We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.
The aborted raid became politically controversial after a young American senator denounced the decision in August 2007 in an early foreign policy speech:
Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.
Senator Obama was then on the campaign trail, and facing formidable odds, running 23 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. His commitment to “getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan” didn’t go down well with the other candidates for the Democratic nomination, with Clinton chiding Obama for destabilising President Musharraf’s regime.
In 2008, Senator McCain repeatedly bashed Obama over the issue, using the speech to claim that America would be taking an unnacceptanle risk putting itself under “confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”
Asked by Larry King whether he would go after bin Laden in Pakistan, McCain replied “I’m not going to go there and here’s why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.”
Obama is surely feeling vindicated on two counts today. First, the decision to pursue intelligence that bin Laden was indeed in Pakistan and, second, in not allowing the original plan to mushroom into something too unwieldy as it did in 2005.
Of course, if – say – one helicopter crash had turned into two and the mission had failed, we’d all be busy reaching exactly the opposite conclusion.
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, UK
I was in Brussels last week speaking at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (here’s my presentation on the oil-food price spike). As expected, it was a well-informed and instinctively progressive audience. But during a coffee break, I found myself doing a pronounced double-take – for there, in the flesh, was Nick Griffin.
Nick Griffin, for non-UK readers, is the head of the British National Party – the UK’s main far right political party – and a Member of the European Parliament. He started out with the National Front; after 1983 he broke away to co-found a more radical splinter called ‘Political Soldier’ which advocated a return to feudalism; he’s been convicted of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred; and he comes up with statements like this:
“I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat.”
A charming guy, then. But what on earth was he doing at a conference on peak oil and resource scarcity?
In fact, as a quick visit to Google reveals, this is a pretty long-standing interest of Griffin’s. He’s been attending peak oil conferences for at least six years, as proven by this 2005 Energy Bulletin post by someone similarly bemused to encounter him mingling with a sustainable development crowd. He’s written about it at length on his own website. And if you want a sense of where he’s coming from on the issue, try this rather rambling excerpt from an Independent on Sunday interview transcript:
This country is the most overcrowded in Europe. To some extent I would agree with the greens that its proper carrying capacity is about 30m. Particularly with the peak oil problem – which is the real problem that politicians should be addressing and not climate change which is either nothing to do with us or nothing we can do anything about or which won’t strike for another 100 years anyway – the real problem is peak oil and the implications of running out of oil for a civilisation which is built on easily available oil and the benefits it brings that this country should not have the population it has and what’s more we need the most stable, homogenous population possible because anything less than that once you subject a society to the stresses of the economic impact of the crisis which is very rapidly approaching people instead of pulling together tend to fall apart.
What Griffin’s interest in peak oil underscores is a larger point about the politics of resource scarcity: it can either be the tipping point for a decisive shift towards a recognition of interdependence and the need for international cooperation and positive sum games, or it can prompt a slide towards some very nasty zero sum political dynamics. The last few years have already provided us with plenty of examples of what the latter might look like: food export bans, landgrabs, countries pre-positioning themselves for a world of resource nationalism.
Now, we can add neofascist politics to the list. You can bet your bottom dollar that Nick Griffin will be at the very forefront of those trying to ensure that resource scarcity does indeed become the prompt for people to ‘fall apart instead of pulling together’, as he puts it. This is a man who understands very well the political strategy of being ready for shocks before they arrive. The question is whether progressives are ready to take on not just the man, but also the zero sum point of view he stands for.
We need to get engaged much more seriously in figuring out an internationalist policy agenda to deal with resource scarcity, and to start getting the solutions, strategies, messages and coalitions in place to push for it. Either we start facing up to the fair shares issues that are inherent to a world of limits – or we all find ourselves living in Nick Griffin’s dream scenario.
by David Steven | May 2, 2011 | Conflict and security, Global Dashboard
@reallyvirtual – “An IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” – found himself in the midst of things today:
And it was Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld former Chief of Staff who first broke the news that Bin Laden was dead.
