The Jim Kunstler preparedness check-list

From yesterday’s Clusterfuck Nation (this is an abridged version).

1. Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.
2. End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid (this includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program).
3. Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors.
4. In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability.
5. Institute “locational taxation” based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories.
6. … begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or desirable to construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons to go forward with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we need to establish it quickly.
7. … prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a “consumer” activity.
8. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain “big box” operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business.
9. Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration.
10. Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious “wealth” — and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support.
11. Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and punish others.

I believe thought-provoking is the usual compliment. Debate-provoking would be a lot more useful, but that stronger criterion depends more heavily on the rest of us.

I, for one, am with him completely on rail, light rail and shipping commerce. Rail here is worse than a joke: it’s plain insulting to a country as wealthy and richly-resourced as this. His arguments concerning civic infrastructure (including hospitals and schools) make for a very interesting wool-gathering spending of time. The immigration issue is equally interesting (not sure I agree, but I believe he is being pragmatic and, ultimately, he is right: the way things will be is the way things will be. There will be little time or space for normative time-wasting, cometh the hour).

EU vs. biofuels

Class participation! In my first Eco 1 lecture, I raise the issue of biofuels as the best modern example of the Economic Problem (unlimited wants: in this case food and energy, vs. scarce resources: top-soil). The original paper I typically use is this piece in Foreign Affairs, an early and excellent contribution to the debate.

So to the EU (via the IHT, via the student who emailed me the story. I read the IHT anyway, but I’m impressed that one of my undergrads also does, let me tell you):

In a sign of shifting attitudes toward biofuels, European Union officials are proposing to ban imports of certain fuel crops whose production could do more harm than good in fighting climate change, according to a draft law seen Monday.

The proposals, to be unveiled next week, are aimed at enhancing the environmental credentials of biofuels like biodiesel or ethanol to counter concerns that European drivers are playing a role in destroying wetlands, forests and grasslands in areas like Southeast Asia or Latin America each time they fill up their tanks.

In its draft, the EU requires that biofuels from crops grown on some kinds of land covered in forest, wetlands and grasslands as of January 2008 should be banned for use in the 27-nation bloc. The commission also would require that biofuels used in Europe should deliver “a minimum level of greenhouse gas savings.”

The text, which could change before European commissioners meet Jan. 23 to adopt a final version, also emphasizes that areas like rainforests and lands with high levels of biodiversity should not be converted to growing biofuels.

At the same time, the EU does not want to abandon biofuels because of the contribution they could still make to increasing Europe’s energy independence.

Funnily enough, it was only yesterday that I was discussing the detrimental effect of European market choices on ecological diversity loss in our oceans, but baby steps, I supposed. Any move in the ‘right’ direction is a ‘good’ move.

An issue not – apparently – addressed specifically (or initially) by the EU, but a big factor in the use of bio-fuels (this is, to save unnecessary debate, as opposed to waste-based bio-mass), is mentioned in the article:

In the United States, ethanol produced from corn has boomed, as has sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil. In Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, vegetable oils have been converted into a type of diesel fuel by a simple chemical procedure.

In principle, these biofuels promise not only to displace imported oil but also to lower the amount of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. The crops absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow, and the fuels made from them re-emit that same gas when they are burned a few months later.

But it is turning out that fuel crops hold the potential for considerable environmental harm.

Not only is native vegetation, including tropical rain forest, being chopped down in some cases to plant the crops, but the crops also are often grown using fossil fuels like diesel for tractors – and they demand nitrogen fertilizer made largely with natural gas.

Moreover, turning the crops into fuels can demand huge amounts of water.

Many bio-fuels are a lot like shale oil, tar-sand oil, etc.: maybe cost-effective, but not energy-cost-effective to pursue. As before, though, any government over-sight is better than none. It’d be nice if the US would follow this sort of thinking – they have the greater capacity to affect conservation.

Be a nurse; get pregnant: make $10,000

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Nurses will be offered a $6000 cash bonus to rejoin the workforce and help fill more than 19,000 hospital vacancies across Australia – but the lure will not be enough to fix the health system, experts said.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced the scheme at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital yesterday, saying he hoped to attract about 7750 nurses back into the system in the next five years.

Nurses who have been out of the system for more than a year will be paid $3000 after six months’ work and another $3000 12 months later. Hospitals will receive $1000 for every nurse retrained.

The acting general secretary of the NSW Nurses Association, Judith Kiejda, said she hoped nurses “would come back in droves”. “If they do, it will ease the pressure on those already in the system and allow them to take a step back and catch their breath,” she said. “But it is not enough – we have 1300 vacancies in NSW and resources are very stretched. Our members are constantly covering these positions, so we want rewards for the nurses who have stuck it out.”

One wonders how this shortage of skilled labour could have arisen. I’ve written a couple of times about the policies of the former government, and their being structured (a) towards getting women out of the workplace, and (b) against them returning.

Hence a shortage of skilled labour, across the board (or, at the very least, a board made up of industries staffed predominantly by women).

The so-called “baby bonus” – originally AUD3,000, now AUD4,187, makes up the fee listed in the title.

This is all an excellent example of why the Austrians don’t like government intervention: offer a subsidy to (on paper) boost the birth-rate, but generate dis-incentives with respect to another very key component of our economic growth: labour force participation. What to do? Well, obviously, offer another set of targeted incentives for specific industries.

Now, the problem is not, necessarily, with recruitment: it is with retention:

“This is a good start, but it is a small part of what is needed. We need an overhaul of the health system and we need the Government to invest very heavily in primary and aged care to keep patient numbers down in public hospitals and take some of the pressure off nurses,” she said.

After 12 years out of the workforce, Karen O’Connor, a former clinical nurse specialist at Royal North Shore’s emergency department, will return to work soon – but refuses to re-enter the public system because staff “are not supported, the work is too stressful and the shifts are not conducive to family life”.

“There are few incentives to get back into nursing. I think the $6000 is a great start, but it’s not enough when you have no support and have to work shifts, including night shift,” Ms O’Connor said.

So what happens in a year or so when – specific to nursing, an under-appreciated and over-worked sector in the economy – nurses get/earn their $6,000, but realise they’re back to the position they were in originally (maybe they even want to have another child?). The government can reasonably be assumed to be containing costs by offering a signing bonus, rather than higher wages (which are dramatically more expensive, raising the costs of every nurse, even incumbent ones) – but short-term incentives usually produce short-term effects.