 In 1997 the world’s first water forum was held in Marrakech by the World Water Council, where it was agreed that a mandate was needed to develop a long-term ‘Vision for Water, Life and the Environment in the 21st Century.’
The challenge they set themselves almost ten years ago, has only increased in scale as meeting humanity’s needs for water in the face of increasing demand and depleting supply is now a huge issue facing many countries.
In 2000 the World Water Forum met for the second time in The Hague to thrash out what this Vision was and how it could materialise. It was noted that the world’s water resources needed to be managed to provide for future needs, and that responsibility and commitment was needed from the governments and stakeholders who had control over the policies which affect global water supplies. Central to this Vision are the principles of collaboration, partnership and innovation and the sharing of experience and knowledge of different organisations involved in global water politics.
|
|
|
2nd March 2006 - FAO, International rural development conference in Porto Alegre At the dawn of the third millennium, three-quarters of the world's 852 million men and women suffering from hunger are found in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their survival. Most of them are landless farmers or have such tiny or unproductive plots of land that they cannot feed their families. |
|
 Across the world, they are coming: the water wars. From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.
Yesterday, Britain's Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming.
In a grim first intervention in the climate-change debate, the Defence Secretary issued a bleak forecast that violence and political conflict would become more likely in the next 20 to 30 years as climate change turned land into desert, melted ice fields and poisoned water supplies.
Climate campaigners echoed Mr Reid's warning, and demanded that ministers redouble their efforts to curb carbon emissions.
|
|
 No one knows how much is left, but humankind can't wait any longer before coming up with alternatives
Are global oil supplies about to peak? Are they, in other words, about to reach their maximum and then go into decline? There is a simple answer to this question: no one has the faintest idea.
Consider these two statements: 1. "Last year Saudi Aramco made credible claims that as much as 500bn-700bn barrels remain to be discovered in the kingdom." 2. "Saudi Arabia clearly seems to be nearing or at its peak output and cannot materially grow its oil production."
The first comes from a report by Energy Intelligence, a consultancy used by the major oil companies. The second comes from a book by Matthew Simmons, an energy investor who advises the Bush administration. Whom should we believe? I have now read 4,000 pages of reports on global oil supply, and I know less about it than I did before I started. The only firm conclusion I have reached is that the people sitting on the world's reserves are liars.
|
|
|
Water "wake-up call" given by UN By Imogen Foulkes
BBC correspondent in Geneva The UN says the world faces a silent emergency because of the continued lack of clean water and sanitation. A new report reveals that more than 40% of the world's population does not have even the most basic sanitation.
More than one billion people have no access to clean water sources, the document adds.
The report was prepared by the UN's children's fund, Unicef, and the World Health Organisation to assess progress towards reaching millennium goals.
A key development goal is to cut by half the number of people without clean water and sanitation by the year 2015. The report makes depressing reading.
If things continue as they are, half a billion people will still have no sanitation 11 years from now.
|
|
|
Dave Lindorff ~ STWR Member Oil Price-Fixing? Of Course There's Oil Price-Fixing! There is so much propaganda, faith-based economic theorizing and simple ignorance and naiveté surrounding the question of soaring gasoline and oil prices in this country!
For heaven’s sake, of course there is collusion, monopolistic behavior and price fixing in the oil industry.
Start with the OPEC, that gang of producers, largely in the thrall of the major oil companies, which sets production quotas for most of the major oil producing nations.
Then move to the large companies. There used to be seven. Now there are far fewer mega companies, thanks to mergers like Exxon/Mobil and BP/Amoco.
But even those few companies aren’t really functioning as independent, competitive enterprises. Because refineries, offshore drilling platforms and pipelines are gigantic multi-billion-dollar capital projects--a typical refinery can cost upwards of $5 billion to construct--most are joint projects involving several oil companies, while others lease the use of them. In such a situation, all those elements of a business which are normally closely-held trade secrets important to maintaining competitive advantage--inventories, crude reserves, pricing, production rates, relative mix of heating oil, low and high-octane gasoline, etc.--are common knowledge.
It’s not like a typical business--say automobiles or television sets--where companies keep those kinds of numbers secret or, if they collude, have to do it by meeting in secret and agreeing on higher prices. The executives of the oil industry never have to get together, whether over a game of golf or in a back office. They know all about each other's operations without ever talking. Collusion, not competition, is a way of life in this industry.
There is simply no way to use a competitive model to explain what happened to gasoline prices after the Katrina storm hit New Orleans. At best, 10 percent of production was shut down, according to reports. That’s 10 percent of 1/4 of U.S. demand--a tiny amount. Even if it were 10 percent of total demand because of reduced import ability at the Louisiana port, we're talking about 10 percent, while gas prices rose 25-35 percent and even more in some areas. Not often mentioned in the same articles on this phenomenon was the fact that the world price of oil actually fell by almost 10 percent over the same period.
When the world oil price rises, I notice, as I'm sure most readers also notice, that the price at the pump is up the next day--sometimes the same day that a report comes out. Yet oil from places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait takes month to go from the wellhead to retail gas stations in the U.S. Even oil from Venezuela takes weeks to become gas at the station in the U.S. What other product do you know of where the retail price in stores jumps immediately when the price of raw materials that goes into it goes up? Does bread go up at the store the day that wheat prices kick up on the Chicago Merc? Does candy in the story go up when the price of sugar rises on the Comex? Of course not! Just gasoline and home heating oil. So if more expensive crude oil doesn't actually physically get to the pump for months, and the price at the pump goes up immediately, who’s pocketing that money in the meantime? Hint: It's not your local gas station owner. Just check out the stock prices of the oil companies, and you’ll have the correct answer.
In a competitive model, the kind Milton Friedman likes to celebrate, companies like Sunoco and Exxon would keep their retail prices as low as possible until costs forced them to raise prices--something that simply doesn’t happen. Indeed, it's a one-way arrangement. When the per barrel price of crude falls, the price at the pump hangs at its high level, sometimes for weeks, but if crude goes up, so does the pump price. Consumers can't shop for bargains because all gas stations behave the same way. For the most part, though, it's not the stations that are doing this--many of them aren't even independent businesses, but are owned by the major companies--but rather the oil companies themselves. The money that results from this collusive, monopolistic behavior, in other words, is accruing to the oil companies and their stockholders.
The beauty of this arrangement, from the oil industry’s perspective, is that nobody can be fined or jailed for it. Under U.S. anti-trust law, it's not illegal to have collusive results. The government would have to prove collusive behavior, and as long as the oil executives don't actually sit in a room or a teleconference, and expressly conspire to collude on raising prices or cutting production, it simply cannot be done.
If Congress and the White House were serious about combating price rigging and coordinated production slowdowns, they would be changing the anti-trust laws so that the objective existence of anti-competitive pricing and production alone would be illegal, not just deliberate conspiring to fix prices. A simple step would be just to make all the competitive information regarding production and pricing of oil and oil products, all the way from wellhead to pump, public. After all, if the oil companies all know everything about each other's internal pricing and production, there’s no justification for keeping that information from the public. Instead we have the opposite situation of course: secret meetings by our oil-industry-subsidized vice president and executives of the oil industry, where real collusive decisions were made.
Oil and energy are too crucial to the economy and to people's daily lives to allow them to remain the private domain of oil company executives and the oilmen--Bush and Cheney to name two--who run this blood-and-oil administration.
Dave Lindorff can be reached at:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
R. James Woolsey
R. James Woolsey, a former Director of Central Intelligence (CIA), was a member of the National Commission on Energy Policy and serves on the Advisory Council of the Energy Future Coalition
Reshaping the Energy and Security Debate
The world’s oil market and its transportation infrastructure should be at the centre of the debate about energy and security.
Electricity generation, for now, is a separable issue. Of course we need to choose wisely the methods we use to generate electricity to limit pollution and the emission of global-warming gases. And we must make our electricity grids more resilient in order to make them less likely to fail catastrophically – whether from accidents or terrorist attacks. But until the advent of a ‘plug-in’ feature for hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles (discussed below), electricity choices will, for most countries, have only a modest effect on oil use and hence on security.
The United States produces only about 2 per cent of its electricity from oil. It could move decisively to increase, say, wind power for electricity generation or deploy a clean form of using coal (such as the integrated gasification combined cycle) but, however wise, such improvements would have only the most limited effect on oil dependence now. And whether today or in the future, it does not substantially improve security to shift purchases of oil from one region of the world to another. We are all essentially in a worldwide oil market together, so for the United States to buy less from the Middle East and then for Europe, for example, to buy more there – only reshuffles trade patterns.
Transportation fuel
Oil is, of course, also used for chemical feedstocks and heat, but it is predominantly a source of transportation fuel. And it is this use that drives the world's oil dependence.
This dependence is a serious problem, for several reasons. As the world's demand for oil increases especially in light of the economic growth we are seeing in India and China its price is most likely to increase substantially. Deposits of unconventional oil such as heavy oil and tar sands in Canada and Venezuela – are huge, but currently extraction is not only expensive but causes serious environmental problems. At least two thirds of the world’s reserves of conventional oil are concentrated in the volatile Middle East and nearby areas (Iran, the Caspian Basin). Thus oil's production and refining infrastructure is not only subject to terrorist attack, but the reliability of various states as a source of supply could be in question in the event of chaos or radical changes in government.
Oil use contributes, of course, to pollution and to the release of global-warming gases. And as Senator Richard Lugar and the author set out in Foreign Affairs six years ago, oil imports into developing countries – denominated in hard currency drive the build-up of such countries debt, which is often a major source of their inability to climb out of poverty.
Other aspects of international economic stability are also heavily influenced by oil. The current weakness of the dollar has produced widespread concern about a possible flight from it, and a sharp reduction in US imports, to the detriment of many countries economic stability. The dollar's weakness is intimately related to the US current account deficit, which builds at the rate of around $10 billion per week. About $2 billion per week of that borrowing is for oil imports.
Changing focus
In this context two reports published in late 2004 make major contributions toward changing the focus of the somewhat sterile debate about oil and security. Their recommendations for action overlap on most key issues, and some highlights follow.
"Ending the Energy Stalemate" published in December by the National Commission on Energy Policy (funded chiefly by the Hewlett Foundation) proposes some deadlock-breaking paths. First, it recommends that the United States significantly raise its fuel economy requirements, while allowing manufacturers to trade fuel economy credits among vehicle categories and among one another. The proposal also introduces the concept of a safety valve for industry, permitting manufacturers to purchase credits from the government at a predetermined price. It thus seeks to have the US government mandate improvement but within a highly flexible framework.
Within this system, the Commission suggests that the most successful near-term technologies that should be promoted to improve fuel economy are hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles and advanced diesels – the latter limited to those that meet the more stringent Tier 2 air quality standards being phased in between 2004 and 2008. The Commission tersely states that, on the other hand, hydrogen offers little to no potential to improve oil security and reduce climate change risks in the next twenty years. It focuses instead on vehicle and fuel changes that can radically reduce oil dependence in the next few years and that, unlike hydrogen fuel cells, do not require major changes in transportation infrastructure, such as installing equipment to produce hydrogen at all filling stations.
Attractive characteristics
The Commission particularly notes two attractive characteristics of current gasoline-electric hybrids. First – for the four hybrids that have conventional vehicle counterparts (two Honda, one Ford, one Toyota) the hybrid version increases both fuel economy and horsepower over the conventional version: consumers need not choose between economy and performance. Second, hybrids lend themselves easily to adding a somewhat larger battery pack, making possible a most useful plug-in feature: this means the hybrid could have its battery topped up by being plugged in to an electric power source when not in use. Thus electricity could be used entirely as a substitute for gasoline or diesel for many short trips without the vehicle having the disadvantages and inflexibility of an all-electric car. Plug-ins could thus substantially further reduce our reliance on oil.
In the second fascinating report, Winning the Oil Endgame, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) proposes substantially increasing the already growing use of carbon composites for automobile construction. These combine strength and light weight, but at less demanding levels than for aircraft e.g. 80 per cent of the strength of aircraft composites at 20 per cent of the cost. Thus they can radically reduce weight and increase mileage while also enhancing safety. Again, technology can make it possible to avoid the need to choose between positive features.
Both reports also praise the potential of two types of alternative fuels: cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel produced from organic wastes. Both are now beginning to be produced commercially
Cellulosic ethanol produced from agricultural waste, such as rice straw, or from perennial grasses, has many advantages over starch-based ethanol (for example from corn). Not only are feedstocks available in very large volume worldwide (and to many small and subsistence farmers around the world), but the small amount of energy needed to produce such ethanol – and the use of some portion of the waste for co-generation of electricity – can, according to the Commission, make its production and use a carbon˜sink. This creates greater than 100 per cent greenhouse gas reductions compared to petroleum use.
Economic significance
Biodiesel, currently being produced from offal at a turkey-processing plant in the United States, can now be derived from a wide range of organic waste feedstocks, including manure, household waste and used tyres. This has the potential to lower production costs substantially, by taking advantage of fees paid for waste disposal. The National Commission and RMI both note the potential economic significance of such waste use.
Using already developed technologies for vehicles and alternative fuels, where both are compatible with the existing transportation system, gives promise of early, even striking, results. For example, a hybrid fuelled by (cellulosic) E-85, i.e. 85 per cent ethanol, would travel more than four times as far on a given volume of petroleum as a conventional vehicle. If it is given a plug-in capability and thus uses only electricity for short trips, it could easily get around eight times the mileage. Build it with RMI's proposed composites, and the light weight increases its mileage by a factor of 12. And a diesel vehicle that uses biodiesel made from organic waste is using no petroleum at all.
As RMI puts it, we should recognize that whatever exists is possible. That spirit can fundamentally change for the better not just the debate but the very nature of our oil dependence and our security.
This article appears courtesy of Our Planet
|
|
|
