Peter Nolan

Sunday Miscellany

I tried to buy an air conditioning unit yesterday - apparently London is all sold out.  For the first time, I'm finding it physically painful to move around in the open air between 10am and 4pm and the tube is sheer hell. 

I took a trip out of town yesterday to Mortlake - which sounds like a geographical feature from a Harry Potter novel - to see the Jesuit church of Saint Mary Magdelene.  Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel are at rest in the graveyard, in a cement replica of a bedouin tent.  There's even a little window up a ladder that you can climb so as to peer inside the tomb, with the coffins, some devotional pictures and various Catholic objects on display. 

Meanwhile, the night of the politically-dead continues in London, with Jack Straw among a number of Labour figures dissenting from his support of the US position

Mr Straw, demoted to Commons Leader by Mr Blair, sent out by far the strongest condemnation of Israel. In a statement to Muslim leaders in his Blackburn constituency this weekend, he said: "Disproportionate action only escalates an already dangerous situation.

All very depressing.  Well, at least Superman is back...

The more the merrier....

First the Da Vinci Code and now this.....

Only children tend not to be very good at sharing and the folks over at the Optimum Population Trust don't want all those nasty brown people coming here. 

Professor Philip Booth and I had an article about their ideas of "population control" in the Catholic Times.  Read it on the IEA website. 

Groups proposing policies of population control are once again making the headlines. They suggest that the world needs a smaller population to control its “environmental footprint”, to preserve natural resources and to ensure that we can live in peace and relative comfort. These ideas were once popular in the 1960s and 1970s. They are clearly incompatible with Catholic teaching on sex and the family. However, arguments in favour of an “optimum population” are also vacuous from an economic perspective. It is important that the economic arguments are understood. Particularly in Catholic schools, young people should not simply be taught the received wisdom on environmental issues: young Catholics should be encouraged to challenge the establishment view.

One of the more interesting things I found while researching this was an early book by Columbia University's Mahmood Mamdani from 1972 called "The Myth of Population Control". He writes:

Westerners have strong feelings about the value of personas and of human life not necessarily shared by Punjabi villagers.  Some crusaders may feel that the pressures arising from growing numbers of people were self-evident. The villagers did not always hold that view.

“These Americans are the enemies of the smile on this child’s face", one said, "All they are interested in is war or family planning.”

His account would warm the heart of any libertarian, telling of how of the Punjabi people making their own decisions about family sizes.  Contrary to the view of the higher-caste Indians and foreign experts, these were rational and fully sustainable in a rural economy with regular migration to the cities.  The villagers simply let the government intervention, free contraceptives and lectures simply wash over them , often being kindly by lying to the government contraception advocates that they were using the devices provided. 

Rory in the Indo

Rory writes in today's Sunday Independent on the crisis in Lebanon.  He points out they play three roles - fighting Israel, pushing for an Islamic Republic on the Iranian model in Lebanon - albeit now relying more on demographic changes, and as an asset of the Iranian state, which gives it some $100m a year, its missiles and even the military personnel to operate them.

The neutralisation of Hizbollah as the foremost instrument of Iran's imperialist ambitions in the region can hardly be a bad thing. In particular, a weakened Hizbollah would be less able to achieve its goal (first set out in 1985) of creating an Islamic republic in Lebanon as a stepping stone to the establishment of the worldwide caliphate.

[...]

Perhaps most importantly for the West, a weakened Hizbollah would mean a weakened global Islamist terror network. By the mid-Nineties, when al-Qaeda was only commencing its global terror operations, Hizbollah, at times in partnership with its Iranian patron, had already claimed responsibility for attacks in Ankara, Turkey, against the Saudi military attache in the city and in Brussels, where it assassinated the Saudi-born Imam of a local mosque for his perceived refusal to condemn Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1989), as well as in Tehran against the French Embassy and Air France offices (1993).

 

It was also responsible for the two car bomb attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that destroyed the Israeli embassy, killing 29 (1992), and the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association, or AMIA, that killed 100 and wounded more than 200 (1994).

Also, in the meantime, I'm hoping that Michael Young, who has been contributing some unmissable copy, such as this piece in Slate, will be safe. 

I lived through Israel's appalling siege of West Beirut in the summer of 1982, and this latest round is more bearable but also much more alarming. Bearable, because in most parts of the country the lights are still on, there is water, and one can still find fresh food, gasoline, and can even sleep. During the West Beirut siege, the inhabitants had virtually none of this, even as the Israelis bombed the city at will.

But this time, the attacks are also more alarming, because they are not limited, as they were then, to a sector of the capital. All of Lebanon is a target; all access roads, airports, and ports have been blocked or are in constant danger of being attacked, and a much larger swath of civilians are in danger. According to eyewitnesses in southern Lebanon, including journalist friends of mine, the destruction of villages is the worst they've ever seen—both intense and systematic—and it's not Hezbollah that is usually on the receiving end of the ordnance, it is civilians. Much the same is taking place away from the cameras in the northern Beqaa Valley, another majority-Shiite area. As for the Hezbollah stronghold in the Haret Hreik quarter of Beirut's southern suburbs, it has been reduced to dust. While this may have made it a legitimate objective, the suburbs have probably the highest concentration of inhabitants in Beirut, and virtually everybody has fled.

Michael's view from the ground is that international intervention would struggle to do any better than the current UNIFIL force to disarm Hezbollah. 

But this plan will go nowhere if Hezbollah retains its weapons and can fire its rockets against Israel while hiding behind the international peacekeepers. Prime Minister Siniora, and probably much of the international community, is said to want a much more solid arrangement that involves Hezbollah's demilitarization.

Nothing yet compels the party to accept. Its fighting capacity seems largely intact, despite Israeli claims to the contrary. Many Lebanese are fed up with Hezbollah but know it holds the guns. Between Hezbollah and the Israelis, people say, one thing is certain: Lebanon is in for prolonged instability. Then they mention the rock in their stomach.

Power failure

In May, Stockholm Network published Power Failure: The Politics of European Energy, which I edited with Sacha Kumaria.  The full publication is available for download on Stockholm's website. 

I summarised it in an article for The Business, Sparking a revolution in European energy

Fossil fools

The Business published my dismissal of a recent BBC docu-drama on world oil running short: The BBC scrapes the bottom of the barrel

The main characters in this miniature drama-documentary are Americans. The unspoken message, unsubtly applied, appears to be that it’s the Yanks who are to blame. An overweight and badly-dressed couple, housewife Janie and her truck-driver husband, John, are shown trying to adapt as prices escalate from $85 to $160 dollars a barrel, and a society based on cheap oil comes under stress. First there are queues at petrol stations and then outright shortages. Food prices rise. John loses his job. With the SUV unaffordable, the couple eventually have to resort to wheeling their groceries home in a shopping trolley.

John is prone to all sorts of anti-social individualism. Besides driving a big, fuel-hungry 4x4, he is shown stealing from his employers, hoarding diesel, unwilling to offer lifts to neighbours and driving like a maniac. Eventually, he gets his comeuppance, being left bloodied and bruised after getting into a fist fight on a garage forecourt – an allegory for the Iraq war?

Their daughter, the pushy Jess, works as an oil company executive and lives in London, with her English husband Nick, who, presumably like Prime Minister Tony Blair, is bulldozed into submission by his American partner. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, she despoils the Alaskan wilderness on behalf of her multinational employer. However, her search for “the world’s last giant oilfield” ultimately proves to be fruitless. The program also shows Venezuela’s governing left-wing and rabidly anti-US strongman Hugo Chavez still in power in 2016 – the one prediction in the program with which I feel comfortable.

 

Peak oil and Ireland

In April, I took issue with a report issued by Forfas, the Irish state industry and science body forecasting a global peak in oil production and making some policy recommendations for Ireland Opinion: Energy wasted on Forfas report

‘‘The best way to secure energy security is to have a free market . . . that’s exactly the opposite of what is happening in Russia,’’ Andrei Illarionov, president Vladimir Putin’s long-time economic adviser, told the BBC recently.

Instead of addressing these problems and the internal market reforms and multilateral solutions being undertaken by our European partners, Forfas has instead opted to peddle the ‘‘peak oil’’ theory promoted by a fringe group of environmentalists, based on an report carried out by American engineering consultant Robert Hirsch.

Hirsch is an activist in an organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) (found on the web at http://peakoil.net), and he bases most of his work for Forfas on that of other ASPO activists, rather than mainstream analysts.

The leading figure in this movement is Dr Colin Campbell, a retired oil geologist, now living in Cork. He has spent much of the last decade spreading the apocalyptic forecast of an imminent shortfall in the supply of oil as we exhaust the Earth’s available fields.

Dr Campbell’s scientific analysis is contested by other experts and none of the authoritative studies of the world energy - by the US Geological Survey, the IEA or the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - gives it credence.

Unluckily for Forfas, the report appeared out of date even before it was released. Last Monday, Venezuela announced that it would be asking Opec to recognise it as the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, bypassing Saudi Arabia, with enough oil to maintain its current production for another two centuries.

This comes as the country’s huge stocks of ultra-heavy crude oil - which is more expensive and difficult to refine, but which is economically viable at prices above $30-$40 per barrel - is being commercially produced for the first time.

...
EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs hopes that reforms favouring free markets and liberal institutions will provide the right multilateral framework for investment and trade between consuming and producing countries through treaties such as the Energy Charter and international institutions such as the IEA.

Instead, Forfas suggests that, even as a minnow in world politics, we somehow have the clout to cut our own bilateral deals on favourable terms with producing countries. However, a majority of the public in the EU - according to a recent Eurobarometer survey - would prefer Brussels to take the lead with a common European energy strategy.

Clooney Tunes

Back in March, just before he won the Oscar for it, I published this article on George Clooney's take on the global oil business, Syriana, in the Sunday Times.  The film is now out on DVD.  It's very entertaining, but not at all securely founded in the facts, as Sacha Kumaria and I argued. 

In a sense Gaghan and Clooney are correct — everything is connected. The international energy markets, the war on terror, the spread of democracy and liberalism in the Middle East are all complex, interwoven issues, and no film can fully represent their interplay. But the film’s creators misconceive the true nature of corruption.

In the Middle East it is borne of dictatorship and it is political. With free markets in oil shut down in favour of grasping state monopolies, corruption is inevitable, facilitated by the secretive middlemen operating outside the regulations that govern American and European companies.

Neither, as the example of Osama Bin Laden and the well- educated middle-class pilots who led the 9/11 hijackings should show, does poverty directly drive terrorism. On the contrary, judging from Clooney’s example, if you want to drive a man to become a radical opponent of his government, just give him millions of dollars and a house in the Hollywood hills. 

The term Syriana is most commonly used to describe the "Pax Syriana", the domination of Lebanon by Syria after the end of the country's civil war.   I'm proud that, as far as we know, Sacha and I were the only people to publish a review of Syriana in Syriana. 

Monopoly Money

In May, Constantin Gurdgiev and I wrote a series of articles on the Irish energy sector and the malign role played by the ESB, the monopoly state electricity generator.  Those in Sunday Tribune are not on line, but this version appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

DUBLIN -- Last month, the European Commission launched a bid to open up energy markets across the EU, with the aim to improve competitiveness and energy security. Yet when it comes to high prices, alleged abuses of monopoly power and dangerously overstretched electricity networks, perhaps no country faces bigger problems than Ireland. Without reform, the "Celtic tiger," as Ireland has been known during its continuing economic boom, could become a Celtic slug.

Businesses in Ireland are becoming increasingly concerned about rising business costs. According to 2005 figures from Eurostat, Ireland's electricity prices for industrial users are the highest in the EU: 34.1% above the EU-15 average and 57.2% above the U.K. rate. Electricity is 6.9% more expensive in Ireland than in Italy, the country with the second highest prices of the EU-15. "There are worries about whether we can keep the lights on," says David Manning, environment chief for the Irish Business and Employers Confederation. "That is a nonsensical situation."

For households, electricity prices jumped 41% from 2000 to mid-2005, according to Sustainable Energy Ireland, a state agency. That was the highest increase in the EU-15. Failures are increasingly likely: 57 warnings of power cuts were issued last year, more than double the 2004 figure of 27.

Lack of competition is the obvious culprit. The state-owned and regulated Electricity Supply Board (ESB) controls about 85% of Irish power generation. Once known for a strong ethos of public service, today's ESB is a cash cow for the unionized work force. The latest audited accounts for the ESB, from 2004, show the average pay package for employees totaled €71,700 a year. In 2005, the average industrial wage in Ireland was less than half that -- around €33,500. At one ESB power station in Dublin, workers took home a whopping €140,000 per year on average! And then there is the prospect of massive restructuring payouts, pensions and other benefits the government might hand out as it attempts to reform the industry.

"The End of History" Man

In March, it was my great pleasure to speak with Francis Fukuyama - who is probably the most acute and serious scholar of politics around today.  I wrote up our discussion and reviewed his latest book on neo-conservatism and the future of American foreign policy for the Sunday Business Post and Beirut's Daily Star.

Imperial Hubris

Just last week, the CIA disbanded its special "virtual station" based at their headquarters and dedicated to analysis and operations against Osama bin Laden, subsuming it into their other uits.  Last year, I interviewed, Dr Michael Scheuer, its founding head, the author of of the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror"  for the Jerusalem Post and Magill.  I thought that his analysis, while thorough, overemphasised the support for AQ among Muslims generally.  Also, Dr Scheuer seems to have an overpowering dislike of Israel and its American partisans.