Two headlines stood out in today’s mainstream news, taken together they seem almost obvious. The first was of course the price of oil, which is hardly news since it represents the capitalist system in all its glory hard at work. The other interesting story gracing the front pages was the tumbling stock price of the US automotive giants GM and Ford.
Even my nine year old would be able to understand the connection so it is no surprise that the smart money is getting out of traditional car makers whose product is totally dependent on cheap oil for fuel. What isn’t so obvious is where is the smart money going to. Imagine the prospects for this little gem! Instead of wasting our money with Toyota and GM the government should be talking to the Indians about the future of motorised transport.
Bernard Keane writing today in Crikey paints a pretty sad picture of Oz politics. Unfortunately he’s also pretty well summed up the failure of this new Labor government to actually come to grips with the problems it has inherited. The current challenges facing us down under are all the more difficult because there seems to be a rather depressing “head in the sand attitude” currently being expressed by the incumbent media, with the ABC leading the way.
We have huge problems facing the world right now! Food is running out all over the place. This is very very bad, it makes people angry and it undermines peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately in the fat capital of the world, we here in Oz don’t seem to understand how important having enough to eat is to the majority of the world. Like our grossly overindulgent friends in the US and elsewhere in the west we are far more obsessed with having enough cheap petrol to put in our nice new shiny cars. The current media frenzy about petrol and the hijacking of political debate on the subject seems to have completely obscured the 5000lb elephant in the room, the lack of food for an ever increasing world population and the impact of climate change on existing agriculture.
Anyone who expected Kevin Rudd to be the man to help lead us thru this difficult time really should have their head examined. However it must be said that John Howard was even less likely to be able to act in the way we need. The failure of the political system is simply to be expected given the short term thinking that predominates in a three year electoral cycle and the ownership of the media by powerful vested interests. Things won’t get better by themselves and history is littered with examples of what happens when people fail to act when they can. The sort of things we need right now if we are serious about the issues ahead are seemingly way beyond our mandarin speaking Kev. Things like major investments of public funds into carbon neutral and sustainable energy sources that will deliver results in the next 3 to 5 years, not piddling little feasibility studies but real tangible substantial reductions in the amount of coal we burn for electricity and oil we use for transport. Its not beyond doing but it involves a degree of honesty currently lacking in the whole sorry debate.
The Murray Darling river system is probably a goner so we also need to really start thinking about where to move our agriculture and it would be a real bonus if we didn’t fuck the country up any more than we have in the past. And we need to decouple ourselves from the western myth that unlimited consumption is in our best interests. Maybe we should ask the aborigines how they managed to live here for thousands of years without turning the place into a dustbowl.
These things don’t sound too bad, but as Bernie points out, implementing any sort of policy that brings any of this about is going to be very unpopular in the short term. Generally very unpopular political decisions have a habit of being made in situations where people really have no choice and more often than not are made with under the guise of a national emergency. The time for easy political decisions is long gone. Pity.
Chris Anderson’s article in Wired is quite thought provoking. Is he right? Does the rise of cloud computing mean we no longer need theories to describe the world around us, can we simply point to a computed result and say that is the way things are? No why is necessary.
Why am I thinking this way? It doesn’t matter why, you just are and you can be modeled in some computer system. Is there a danger here that accepting a description of something in whatever terms you pose means relegating inquiry to a mathematical application? Can Google provide an answer to that? While I’m at it, can Science answer why we seem hell bent on wiping ourselves off the face of the planet? Perhaps Chris is right about correlation superseding causation but there is an infinity of possibilities and we can only ever know for certain what we have proved through trial and error up to now. The wonders of cloud computing might offer us a fast track to proving what is knowable now, but there will be new questions tomorrow. Tying human inquiry to a single process, one that seems to speak with such authority has a rather disturbing overtone.
A little while ago the local beekeepers came to town and asked the government for some money to help protect the bees. In case you somehow missed this rather gloomy bit of news in a world brimming with otherwise great news, here is my take on the situation.
There is a little bug ( a mighty mite) who infests the home of bees, a beehive, and causes all the bees to fall about and croak, but they don’t turn into frogs since we don’t have any where near enough rain for frogs anyway. This rather savage little mite has apparently wiped out huge numbers of bees elsewhere which has two rather sad consequences. The first and obvious one is that honey gets a little hard to find and thus much more expensive to buy. However its the second consequence which is far more serious, and that’s the threat that a demise in bees poses to the pollination of plants. If you skipped birds and bees at skool then let’s just say that bees are pretty important in the way plants produce seeds and reproduce. Lots of plants! Think Bee Story in real life…
Ok, this isn’t new news but as I was lolling around, enjoying the sunshine today at a friend’s house I was reminded once again how busy the humble bee is, how much they are part of a ecosystem that is self sustaining and one that provides us with many of life’s essentials. If the gloom of impending catastrophic climate change wasn’t enough, then start factoring in some of the other potentially devastating biological disasters threatening our relatively benign world. And the best our mass media can talk about is this crud.
Last night the Murray Darling Commission hit the airwaves with its report on the state of the Murray. It is a tragedy of almost unsurpassed magnitude, all the more depressing because it has happened in less than my short lifetime.
Perhaps given the scale of this disaster it is understandable that Gary Jones on Lateline news actually gave breath to the real reason behind this sad state, “100 years of human impact” and climate change. As Karlene Maywald says “the river is over-allocated, that the river needs to have more water for the environment”. In some reports this over allocation is listed at some 300% more than is actually available in the river system.
If you want some graphic evidence of the decline have a look at the Age’s little multimedia package but be warned that such pictures might ruin your otherwise good day. Most likely the news won’t really affect political realities. A dead river and devastated world heritage wetland is hand wringing material, but the culprits will never be made to pay.
This is an example of Craig Emerson’s market failure staring us in the face. Australia has prospered on the back of the farm sector for a long time, the irrigators along the Murray Darling basin has contributed hugely to our abundant food supplies and generated significant export dollars. Also tapping into the water supply are the numerous inland towns and cities east of the Great Divide, Canberra is just one of the benefactors of years of relatively free water. This basic commodity fuels growth.
This growth has in resulted in what we have today. Global climate change that has seen a significant decline in rainfall over the south east of Australia, an area that has since the invasion by whites been subject to the most inappropriate land use imaginable. The wholesale destruction of the native vegetation coupled with the zealous damming of every major river flowing west to sustain what is clearly unsustainable agriculture is today’s legacy.
Well done Australia!
Craig spoke tonight at the Sydney Institute about his belief in a the role of a market economy in providing for a better society. His key point seems to rest on the role of education in overcoming social and economic disadvantage, which is a laudable objective however one which should be considered in light of prevailing political realities. That education is fundamental to a creative and successful society is difficult to argue yet Dr Emerson would have to be aware that such gains are only realised in the medium to long term. This government may well be long gone before the generation of children who might benefit from early childhood education intervention get to vote, and they are not likely to remember anyway. You need only look at how many of today’s right wing politicians benefited from the free university education that used to be on offer in Australia.
Dr Emerson referred to market failure and the need to protect, perhaps even enshrine competition in the market place as the best way to provide benefit to society at large. Does this herald a new wave of players in the world of business and commerce at a time when economic confidence is crashing as basic resource prices skyrocket? Craig suggested that government intervention in the marketplace is only appropriate when the market fails, but that begs the question of what the government might do if say the transport sector collapsed because of the price of fuel or if the grocery retail business suddenly became unable to put food on the table for everyone? Indeed what good is intervention in the case where a business causes massive environmental damage, after all the damage is done and often irreparable.
Removing bureaucratic regulation in the world of small business, particularly given some of the stupid discrepancies between states is long overdue and one that should have some benefit, but why stop with the small stuff? The waste and duplication inherit in our antiquated states based system of government could be easily resolved by simply getting rid of them. But that’s obviously an agenda item for some other time (perhaps when all of the current crop of labor state governments finally implode).
But it is his claims that reward for effort, individual freedom, better educational opportunities and workplace participation will equate to a richer and better Australia whilst remain true to traditional Labor values that remains contentious. In making this claim Dr Emerson seems to acknowledge that as far as the left is concerned, the only place these days for equality is in the area of opportunity, which is an domain notoriously difficult to measure. Distribution of wealth, something which can be measured far more accurately is no longer on the political agenda. Equally missing from Dr Emerson’s address is any consideration of just what we actually do with all of the so-called wealth if the market economy actually starts to deliver, besides stuff it into the bank. We would do well to remember the Sioux wisdom that money cannot be eaten.
Dr Emerson ministerial page is here.
Kev splashed out with some small change yesterday, by way of a $35 million gift to Toyota to prop up the local car making industry which industry minister Kim Carr (unfortunate coincidence of names) lauded with the extra and rather dubiuous comment that making cars also gives this country the capacity to make fighter planes!
Kev backed up his minister by mumbling something about leading a country that makes things, unfortunately both pollies need to understand that assembling a product out of mixture of imported and local components isn’t the same as manufacturing something from the ground up. Now in our sophisticated times there is plenty of scope for diversifying supply, but if Kim and Kev are serious about making stuff, rather than just making stuff up, they probably need to do some more homework by way of history. Australia used to have a reasonably large manufacturing industry but it sat behind a wall of tarrifs. It was good for jobs and it gave us a sense of self reliance but it was a hindrance to the new world economic order. Kev’s sentiments are noble, Kim’s claim is rather ambit and the pair of them look a little silly when you look at the substance of what’s going on.
Dennis Phillips blogs over at the ABC about America’s energy independence. It’s a political document that seems to suggest that energy independence is something evil in the scheme of things, that should the US suddenly stop consuming vast quantities of an ever diminishing resource, the world as we know it will collapse. As a couple of his responders have observed, the politics of the oil economy are very different to the science and technology of alternative transport and energy. Using Kev’s hybrid as an example, if petrol hits say $4 a litre by 2010 (2 years away when the hybrid camry rolls of the line) then filling it up with 50 litres of fuel is going to set you back $200. But by investing in the car and the petrol fuel you remain locked in to more of the same, so when petrol hits $8 litre you are paying $400 to swan around in the leather seats and listen to your CD’s whilst trundling along to work.
On the other hand Kev and his cronnies could be pushing the researchers into developing some of the alternatives to oil that we currently have, solar and wind for energy and maybe algae for hydrocarbon creation. If they really want to lead a country that makes stuff, we need to stop hankering for the days when we considered a defective US car design transplanted into this country as something to be proud of and start looking at what new ideas are coming up to help this country deal with the realities of a world running out of oil and in serious danger of cooking itself. Instead of building lego cars out of bits and pieces from everywhere else, where all the intellectual propery is overseas we should get of our arses and make the things we really need, alternatives to petrol and energy sources that are sustainable over the next few centuries.
Stilgherrian’s post got me started and I also confess to a hankering to fiddle with bits of gear every now and then. For instance today’s edict from Jobs regarding the new wank phone has me calculating budgets between now and July 11 to see if I can possibly justify such an indulgence. The rumor that Vodaphone are also thinking about offering the iPhone mk2 on prepaid might just make the difference. But back to the writing thingy…
The point of Stilgherrian’s post is that the creative process is seemingly mired in rather simple habits. Most writers I have read about seem to be chained to their desks during the process of writing a book, at least in some way or another. What about the impact of blogging on the potential to create the next Catcher in the Rye? Writing anything is easy, my 9 year old daughter can manage to string a few words together and make it look like a children’s book and judging by some of the blogging around, there are certainly those who seem to think a few sentences strung together with a handful of hyperlinks to other equally eridute web creations constitutes a work of art comparable with Wuthering Heights however I think there are a few who might disagree. I think it is fair to say that writing well is an art which is why we have traditionally rewarded authors who can do it well with rewards similar to other artists. Sadly for the blogging set, ten minutes on the laptop (or the new iPhone) while swanning around at the local barista is not really the same as slaving away for months and years to produce a manuscript that eventually makes it way onto the best sellers list.
Maybe that’s why writers lead such ordinary lives, anything else just gets in the way.
It would seem there are rumblings of discontent in the US over current economic policy and the behaviour of corporations.
At issue are two rather obvious fundamental problems. The first one is the ability of large rich multinational corporations to act above and beyond the rule of law as it applies to the rest of us. This obviously leads to a lawless chaotic environment for them to operate in, which seems rather counter intuitive. One would be inclined to the view that stability is prefered so perhaps this is just a phase in the lifecycle of the new economic world order.
The other problem that is referred to above is the threat posed by unfettered corporations to national interests. On this there would appear to be even stronger grounds for concern. We often hear of cries for more competition in markets as a means of providing benefits to consumers, however such claims are based on a consumption based society. Any business regards another competitor as a threat, to be vanquished as soon as possible Microsoft are proud exponents of this philosophy, one which is mostly portrayed uncritically by the mainstream media, as something in everyone’s best interests, without ever questioning the foundations of such claims. Importantly, the economic footprint of such a large corporation naturally results in special consideration by governments who rightly have concerns for the broader community. Such considerations often end up resulting in outcomes more beneficial to the vested interest and of less benefit to the nation as a whole, something we all ought to be concerned about if we don’t want to retreat to a feudal society ruled by a handful of mega rich overlords.
