Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Here’s something about North Dakota worth imitating
Steven Lesh, Arizona Daily Star
In January 2009, the group Democracy for America — Tucson brought Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of “Web of Debt,” to Tucson to discuss the economic crisis and to offer suggestions.
One that she offered was for state governments to form their own banks and, using fractional reserve banking practices and a government-owned bank, to create the money they need and lend it to themselves — just the way privately owned banks do.
Local and state governments have become dependent on borrowing to finance day-to-day operations and have been severely impacted by the frozen credit markets.
However, in addition to providing short-term financing, state-owned banks could supply financing for long-term investments in state resource development such as solar energy…
(4 Jan 2010)
The Other Plot to Wreck America
Frank Rich, New York Times THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.
What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.
The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.
It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation…
(9 January 2010)
America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.
Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.
The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.
Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive”. We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas…
(10 Jan 2010)
Can Farming Save Detroit?
David Whitford, cnn.com
John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management.
Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by early-American landscapes on the walls, an autograph collection that veers from Detroit icons such as Ty Cobb and Henry Ford to Baron von Richthofen and Mussolini, and a set of Ayn Rand first editions.
With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit — one of the very few in his demographic who stayed put when others were fleeing to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city.
Every weekday Hantz pulls his Volvo SUV out of the gated driveway of his compound and drives half an hour to his office in Southfield, a northern suburb on the far side of Eight Mile Road. His route takes him through a desolate, postindustrial cityscape — the kind of scene that is shockingly common in Detroit.
Along the way he passes vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and a whole lot of empty land. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “Every year I tell myself it’s going to get better,” says Hantz, bright-eyed, with smooth cheeks and a little boy’s carefully combed haircut, “and every year it doesn’t.”
Then one day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a revelation. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, “is how I got onto this idea of the farm.”
Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and — most important of all — stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.”…
(29 Dec 2009)
related: Jan Lundberg and Peter Goodchild have some commentary around this article on the Culture Change. -KS
The Visual Du Jour – What If…?
The Global Sociology Blog
How long would certain resources last if current patterns of consumption persist (outer number) or if the world consumed at half the US pace (inner number). Click on the image for a much larger view:…
(9 Jan 2010)
Economists start to consider that money can’t buy happiness
Ashley Seager and Heather Stewart, the Guardian
Britain has got the shopping habit back: we may only now be clambering out of the worst recession in living memory, but John Lewis has scored its best Christmas ever, Next clocked up a healthy festive season, and Boxing Day kicked off with jostling queues of bargain-hunters outside shopping centres determined not to miss a moment of the sales.
For long-suffering retailers, and the gleeful shoppers themselves, that feels like good news, but should we welcome the return of the spendthrift habits that plunged us into crisis in the first place, or is it time to ask if traditional metrics of economic success – retail sales, house prices, even GDP growth – really point us in the right direction?
As far as the politicians are concerned, the obsession with economic growth continues unabated. Gordon Brown used to take great glee in reminding parliament at each budget how many quarters of consistent expansion had been achieved under his chancellorship.
Now, with that record cruelly shattered, Labour hopes that 26 January and 23 April (assuming the election is held in May) will be key in producing a feelgood – or at least, feel-less-bad – factor, as voters prepare to go to the polls. These are the dates when GDP figures will be reported for the fourth quarter of 2009 and first quarter of 2010 respectively, and which are both likely to show positive growth after six consecutive quarters of contraction.
But with unemployment still rising, taxes going up and personal debt still high, the public may decide they do not feel any better just because of a couple of abstract numbers that don’t correspond to their own experiences. And Britain is far from the only country to have discovered in the past two years that a record of rapid GDP growth does not guarantee long-term prosperity, let alone fairness or environmental sustainability…
(10 Jan 2010)
related: The end of consumerism: Our way of life is ‘not viable’. My favorite quote from this article is “But the report’s findings were attacked last night by Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “Let’s face it, by 2050, the combined population of China and India alone will have grown to three billion. By then, most Chinese and Indians will have adopted an urban lifestyle. This… makes demands for radical curbs in consumerism and CO2 emissions utterly unrealistic.” Hmmmhhh…-KS
Peak oil demand funds
Kate Mackenzie, Financial Times
There are plenty of peak oil investment funds, but this is the first peak demand – or post-oil, as they call it – fund that we’ve heard of. The idea behind London-based Beetle Capital is not only everything peaks, but that the world is already in a peak oil phase and will soon enter a phase that is not just post-oil, but post-growth. From a short paper they published today:
“The world is now headed towards economic conditions that will entail not only cyclical but structural change: a damaged financial sector, an overstretched consumer base, rising energy prices, and shortages of food, water and other natural resources so severe that they could heighten global and regional tensions. These factors, combined with new external ones like carbon pricing, all point to one thing: a crisis of confidence in growth.”
The paper goes on to say that we don’t really know what lies over the horizon, etc, etc, but although resource scarcity will have severe effects, it will also herald a period of “creative destruction in which new policies and new entrepreneurs will radically transform the vast complex of energy-related industries”.
So yes, it might sound like Beetle drank the Kool-Aid on every bold new energy idea floating around, from electric vehicles to climate change adaptation, but the fund’s new hire Alex Veys apparently completed an MSc in sustainable energy future, and is also a former fixed income manager at Fidelity International, so he can at least claim to be well-rounded…
(11 Jan 2010)
