Sunday 5th April 2009 A cosy picture, two important leaders, one piggy in the middle.
Barack Obama, Silvio Berlusconi and Dmitry Medvedev
A happy trio at the end of the G20 meeting in London. You wouldn't think that the global economy was in mortal peril. The thumbs-up sign in particular seems to be particularly inappropriate. It has been my thesis for a while that our leaders are clueless - they were clueless getting into this mess, they are clueless dealing with it, and they are clueless about what is going to happen. And Barack Obama new on the scene, can perhaps be excused somewhat, but so far his statements and actions nowhere near reflect the seriousness of our times, or the reality of their causation.
In the various postings below there is a constant theme that our economic crisis is fundamentally an environmental one. The proof of this was the soaring price of oil and many other raw materials, up to the time of the crash, mid-2008. The collapse of our economy has seen these prices collapse too. But that doesn't disprove the thesis. This is a temporary state of affairs, and will last for a few years at the most, depending on the level of reduction of global economic activity. My blog contains my predictions dating back three years about the inevitibility of our present economic mayhem, on the basis of the reality of peak oil.
Our crash has given us a few short years respite to change our economy and our thinking. But this is the rub. If those happy leaders pictured above actually succeed in "stimulating the economy" with their US$1,000,000,000,000 dollar stimulus ( which is additional to all the other "stimuli" previously administered to the moribund corpse of the global economy) then demand for oil will soar and, as we saw in 2007, and the price will rocket, perhaps to the $200 /bbl predicted by some oil experts. Then we'll be back to where we were in mid-2008. The economic abyss will open even wider and deeper.
The global, free market, neo-liberal economy as we have known it growing in its malignant way in the last twenty years, is moribund. We might be able to "stimulate" it for a short while but it will never be the same, it is severely disabled and can never function as it did to 2008. The attempt to make it whole again is economic quackery on a global scale, which will merely create some sort of economic equivalent of Dr Frankenstein's monster, which will destroy us all.
New You can now search my site, or the web, with this search window. Good luck!
This site started out as an experiment and wish to learn something of html, and my first posting was a "letter" from Lord Kelvin. It has grown at an irregular pace, but the basic premise is that I have strong concerns about the environment, global warming and the problems associated with globalisation, in addition to matters concerned with my own profession. Over the years I have written to ministers and newspapers about my various concerns, and some of that material is written up in this internet site. I am particularly proud of the fact that I protested against the present Iraq war, and I am saddened, and angered, to see the problems that now afflict the Iraqis, as well as everyone else involved. Most of this site pertains to New Zealand, my adopted home, but I am also still very much at heart a "Pom" and some items will reflect this immigrant outlook.
When I gave a submission about three years ago on the Meridian proposal for a windfarm near Wellington, I added an addendum, which you can read in my Makara submission, but as a summary of my feelings about these vital issues and what it means to be a New Zealander I think it is worth placing here, on my homepage.
My Country
I cannot think of another country in the whole world which stands as blessed as this one. Godzone it used to be called. New Zealand possesses a clement and temperate climate, with adequate, indeed plentiful rainfall most years, some of which we capture and power our agriculture, homes and industry with. The sun shines from a transparent sky, indeed, so transparent it will cause skin cancer to the unprepared or careless. There is boundless energy from the sun and we could use this so much more productively than we do. The winds that caress our shores, and often bluster their way across our land, are cleansing and cooling, and have sufficient energy, if we choose to use them, to power much of our national endeavours. The oceans that surround us are over-exploited but still capable of regeneration, they moderate our climate, and are a source of much of our heritage and the pride we feel in being New Zealanders.
But there are problems. The soil on which we grown our crops or feed our livestock, and which is the ultimate foundation of this country's wealth, is fragile and highly prone to erosion, indeed much land was mistakenly denuded of its forest cover in the earlier days of settlement, and we have been paying a high price since then. Despite our being aware of this problem for many years, progress in protecting this soil is painfully slow, and we still have a very long way to go. On the dryer eastern parts of this country, increasing demands for water are straining our resources. Global warming and snow loss may well exacerbate this in the future. We enjoy an undeserved clean green image because of our lack of population rather than from a true concern for our environment. Our rapidly burgeoning population is greedy for resources, and we are having difficulty providing them. Our inordinate love of the motor car, and our profligate use of energy will have to cease if we wish to maintain any useful standard of living. Our ecological footprint is nearly the world's highest. The continuing introduction of exotic pests, most recently Didymo alga and sea-squirts, is proving very damaging. Our cities, but especially Auckland, are poorly planned, and surrounded by vast sprawling suburbs and so-called rural subdivisions, such that tendrils of cities reach out tens of kilometres and take over much previously productive farmland, and require high use of energy resources for transport. We continue to despoil many kilometres of our most beautiful coastline and much of our countryside with inappropriate and ugly subdivisions. Our public transport infrastructure has suffered from lack of investment for generations, and our rail network is poorer than in many third world countries. As a nation we are going to have great difficulty coping with oil-depletion and high oil prices, as a result of our internal energy inefficiencies and our external isolation from the rest of the world.
Yet despite all these concerns, and they are real, if any nation can see its way to a sustainable future, then New Zealand should be able to see this more clearly than any other. Or to put it another way round, if New Zealand, with its abundant natural endowments and its relatively small population, cannot organise for itself the sustainable future on which our descendants will depend, just where else on Earth can this be organised, and what will this say about our hopes for the future of mankind? Or to put it yet another way, it is precisely because New Zealand can organise a sustainable future, that it should become our duty that we organise a sustainable future. It should be this nation's good fortune to carry the beacon of sustainable progress for mankind; to refuse to take up this beacon will be a moral, ethical and spiritual failure for which our descendants will never forgive us.
Children playing, Days Bay, Port Nicholson, Wellington, New Zealand.
We owe our children rather more than we presently seem willing to give them.
