Japan Plans Massive Solar Power Station To Orbit Earth

There ’s greentech and then there’s Martian greentech. A group of Japanese companies unveiled plans to build a 1-gigawatt solar power collector in space, according to Earth2Tech. The system would beam the power back to Earth using radio waves. This sort of system has been discussed in the past, but deemed too pie-in-the-sky. I mean, power stations in space? That’s science fiction, right.

Apparently, not any longer. The consortium of dozens of Japanese companies will be led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, says Bloomberg. They plan to spend $21 billion on R&D over four years before hitting launch dates for the first stage of the project in 2015. The target completion date is 2030 or beyond. To put this in perspective, 1 gigawatt of power would be enough to power up to 750,000 U.S. homes for a year at current consumption rates.

Big solar panel makers Mitsubishi Electric and IHI would supply the necessary photovoltaic arrays. The initial launches of equipment could happen as soon as 2015 — if this project ever takes flight. Obstacles that remain are enormous. For starters, with current rocket technology, transporting the necessary solar panels into space would be prohibitively expensive.

The technology for capturing solar power as electricity remains beyond the bleeding edge. The process would work this way: First, a satellite equipped with photovoltaic cells would capture the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity. Then, the satellite would convert that electricity into radio waves to transport it to earth, where the radio waves would then be converted back into electricity.

Two years ago, a government-funded think tank, the National Space Society, laid out a plan to generate 10 megawatts of space-based power with an outlay of $10 billion. Several firms have filed patents in the area, but no working demonstrations have been performed to date. One of the companies, PowerSat, is planning to raise $100 million to launch a 10-kilowatt power generation satellite within the next three years.

Regardless of the obstacles, producing power in space has been a pipe dream for both power hounds and astrogeeks for decades. Outside the earth’s atmosphere, the sun’s energy is several times stronger. Satellites that capture power would never be in the dark, either, as opposed to solar power installations on terra firma. And carbon emissions is not an issue, nor are zoning, real estate prices, or environmental impact assessments.

At least one large public utility, California’s PG&E (PGC), is taking the idea very seriously. In April 2009, PG&E petitioned state regulators for a 200-megawatt power purchase agreement with SolarEn, one of the three startups that are seeking to build space-based power generation capabilities. The Japanese plan would be five times as large as the Solaren-PG&E deal and would likely pave the way for a new generation of space-based power plants. Should it happen, the completion of this massive orbiting power monster would be a giant step for man and mankind alike.

A Drug That Can Extend Life as Effectively As Dieting

A Drug That Can Extend Life as Effectively As Dieting Many studies have shown that rigorous caloric restriction, or strict dieting, can increase longevity dramatically in lifeforms from yeast to humans. But a study released today shows one way to mimic the life-extending effects of food deprivation – using drugs. A team of researchers in the UK explored the role of a protein known as S6K1, which turns out to play an extraordinary role in aging and age-related disease. When the researchers grew mice lacking the gene to produce S6K1, their mice lived significantly longer (see chart – the red lines are mice without S6K1). They also developed fewer age-related debilitating conditions. Female mice without S6K1 lived slightly longer than their male counterparts, and over 160 days longer than the control group. That means the female mouse lifespan increased by twenty percent. Mice without S6K1 also lost weight, even if they ate more than ordinary mice. In other words, a substance that could block the expression of S6K1 would trick the body into thinking that you’d gone on a very rigorous diet. And it would make you healthier into an older age. The best part? In their paper, the researchers conclude: It might be possible to develop drug treatments that manipulate S6K1 and AMPK to achieve improved overall health in later life. Indeed, short-term rapamycin treatment reduces adiposity in mice, and metformin treatment [often used against type 2 diabetes] extends lifespan in short-lived mice. This is good news, because often when researchers make discoveries related to longevity there is no immediate pathway to manufacturing a life-extending drug. For all of us who want to stay healthy in old age while still eating sugar and fat once in a while, let’s hope this research team starts testing a drug based on their S6K1 discovery – and soon.

Immortality Only 20 Years Away Says Scientist

The 61-year-old American, who has predicted new technologies arriving before, says our understanding of genes and computer technology is accelerating at an incredible rate.

He says theoretically, at the rate our understanding is increasing, nanotechnologies capable of replacing many of our vital organs could be available in 20 years time.

 

Mr Kurzweil adds that although his claims may seem far-fetched, artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available.

Mr Kurzweil calls his theory the Law of Accelerating Returns. Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: “I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.

“Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.

“Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen.

“Heart-attack victims – who haven’t taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts – will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive.

“Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.

“If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.

“So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs.”

Space Porch Is Open for Business

The International Space Station has a new “engawa”—and it’s open for business.

 

Engawa is Japanese for “porch,” and while that might seem like a strange thing for a space station to have, researchers have been looking forward to the addition for a long time. Space shuttle Endeavour delivered the Japanese-built platform to the ISS on July 22nd and astronauts attached it to Japan’s Kibo1 science lab a day later. Now, when a science experiment requires a dose of hard vacuum or radiation, it can be set “out on the porch” for exposure.

 

And that’s just for starters.

 

“On the new ‘Japanese Exposed Facility’ [JEF for short], researchers can stage experiments to look up at the cosmos, down at Earth, or around at the environment the ISS voyages through,” says Julie Robinson, ISS Program Scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Besides resembling a porch, this structure has unique features that differentiate it from the experiment exposure points2 located elsewhere on the station.”

 

For instance, the JEF offers temperature control. Like the space station’s other external experiment locations, it has a warming plate for thermal control, but unlike the others the JEF includes a cooling feature.3 Another advantage is that JEF experiments can be serviced by Kibo’s robotic arm4.

 

“The beauty of this is that payloads can be designed to be ‘plug and play,’” says Robinson, “so the robotic arm can install them — no space walk required.”

 

On July 24th, Kibo’s arm deftly delivered the first two JEF experiments from the Shuttle payload bay to the porch and positioned them5. These Japanese experiments are the SEDA-AP6, short for Space Environment Data Acquisition equipment-Attached Payload, and MAXI7, or the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image.

 

“SEDA-AP’s sensors will measure the space environment of low Earth orbit — neutrons, plasma, heavy ions, high-energy light particles, atomic oxygen, and cosmic dust,” explains Robinson.

 

With this experiment, researchers can test the mettle of materials and equipment exposed to the UV light, deep space radiation, and extreme temperatures of space . SEDA-AP will monitor material degradation to help researchers choose the hardiest materials for building future space instruments, equipment, and vehicles.

Hawaii Could Become Launch Site for Space Tourism

Friday , July 10, 2009

 

HONOLULU — 

Space pioneers envision launching high-end Hawaii tourists from the sand to the stars, taking island-hopping to new heights.

Hawaii could become the first place where travelers can use the planes for real transportation. Planners envision planes taking off in one place, traveling through space, then landing in another, going from the Big Island to Oahu. Within a decade, space travelers could island hop from Hawaii to Japan in 45 minutes.

And promoters promise a unique perspective during the flight.

“Flying down the Hawaii island chain, it’s a completely different view of the planet than you’ll see when you launch from landlocked states,” said Chuck Lauer, vice president of business development for Oklahoma City-based Rocketplane Global. “It’s the blue planet view of the world.”

Hawaii’s tourism leaders recognize the potential for attracting visitors with the promise of space travel, but it’s unclear whether Gov. Linda Lingle will release the licensing money at a time when the state is facing big budget problems and possible government employee layoffs. A new law authorizes the state to spend $500,000 to apply for a spaceport license from the federal government, which is the first step toward allowing commercial space travel from the islands.

Lingle has indicated she will either sign the legislation this month or let it become law without her signature. But she has the authority to withhold the money even after the bill becomes law.

If the plan goes forward, tourists would pay $200,000 for a weeklong package including spaceflight training, resort accommodations and short test flights to simulate weightlessness.

At the vacation’s finale, five voyagers would embark on a horizontal takeoff aboard a special rocket plane, climb to 40,000 feet before rockets fire, accelerate to 3,500 miles per hour, coast for a few minutes of weightlessness 62 miles above the Earth, flip over and then return to ground.

Jim Crisafulli, the state’s director of aerospace development, is confident many people would come to Hawaii to fly to space. “They wouldn’t bat an eye at spending that amount of money to fly to space,” he said. “It’s going to be a soul-energizing experience.”

Hawaii could become the eighth state granted a spaceport license. The process will take about three years, meaning space flights wouldn’t start earlier than 2012.

Hawaii would use existing runways on Oahu and the Big Island for its space program, which would use a rocket plane that looks like a mid-size business jet. The plane is still in the design phase, with actual construction expected to begin in a year and a half in Burns Flat, Okla.

The spaceport licensing process will involve studying the rocket plane’s potential effects on the environment, said state Tourism Liaison Marsha Wienert.

“I’m trying to stay as neutral and calm as possible on this,” she said. “As we plan for the future, I agree that we should consider all opportunities, and hopefully the environmental impact statement will show that it is an opportunity.”

Lauer said the space planes wouldn’t harm the environment because they’ll be powered by liquid oxygen and synthetic jet fuel.

Several space tourism companies, including Rocketplane, have shown interest in coming to Hawaii if they could, said John Strom, vice president of business development for Enterprise Honolulu, the Oahu economic development board. Those businesses’ studies show they can turn a tidy profit if the Hawaii market opens.

Space tourists will come away with a different understanding of how fragile the earth is, said Strom, a private pilot.

“The higher you go, the smaller it gets,” he said. “You definitely get a sense of the uniqueness of this fragile blue marble that we live on.”

Uncle Sam Enters the Great Nanny State Debate

(NOTE: TWITTER ENTRIES AT BOTTOM OF PAGE, UPDATED THROUGHOUT THE DAY. )

By Joseph B. White

From President Barack Obama’s first hour in office, he has been urging the American people to shape up.

“The time has come to set aside childish things,” the president said, quoting the Bible in his inaugural address. In his own words, he called for “a new era of responsibility.”

Andrew Zubko

Since then, Mr. Obama and his allies in the Democratic Congress have been working on a wide range of proposals designed to encourage citizens to change their behavior in the realms of health, finance and the environment.

Conservatives denounce the efforts as a “nanny state” that undermines personal responsibility by taking decisions out of citizens’ hands. And according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, nearly seven in 10 survey respondents said they had concerns about federal interventions into the economy.

President Obama and his circle of advisers think of it as a “nudge” state — a government that gives citizens the freedom to make choices, but arranges those choices in ways designed to leverage their lethargy for their own good, or the common good. It’s like a parent who puts a bowl of fruit within easy reach while stashing the cookies inconveniently on the pantry’s top shelf.

Mr. Obama isn’t the first president to see room for improvement in the way citizens conduct their lives. Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan told Americans to “Just Say No” to drugs. And Bill Clinton enacted a sweeping welfare overhaul that aimed, in part, to push recipients into the labor force.

But Mr. Obama’s efforts go beyond exhortations to a wide-ranging series of policies ready to warn you off bad behavior and favor good choices.

“What’s new here is the idea of ‘nudging’ and changing the choice architecture,” says Eric Patashnik, associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

Still smoking? The Food and Drug Administration will clamp down on marketing practices designed to encourage the habit — one that has had a hold on the president himself.

Mr. Obama says Americans should go for a run, or hit the gym. If that poke in the love handles from the presidential pulpit isn’t enough, members of Congress are working on proposals to levy taxes on sugary drinks and to require that restaurants put calorie information on menus.

Kenneth Baer, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, says the administration’s goal is to help people make better informed decisions, not to mandate choices. “Steering is preferred over rowing,” he says.

The government’s track record as an agent of behavior change is mixed. Jimmy Carter’s efforts to preach the virtues of energy conservation from the Oval Office during the 1970s earned him the scorn of political rivals. Pat Caddell, a former Carter adviser, says such efforts can work — but they take time. When he was younger, littering was widespread, but the culture changed to the point that it “became socially unacceptable,” he says.

Erwin C. Hargrove, an emeritus professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, says the Obama administration appears to be trying to couch its calls for self-improvement not so much in moral terms, as President Carter did, but in terms of national self-interest — at least, for now.

“A moralist who preaches to people doesn’t get anywhere,” Mr. Hargrove says.

Japan Creates Next-Generation Female “Cybernetic Human”

(Comment: Japan is forging ahead of most industrialized countries, including the U.S., in the development of robotic technologies and “humanoid” robots. The day is drawing near when such ‘droids will work in factories and homes, and even provide companionship to the elderly. Could these be the new “housepets” of the 21st century?—Michael Zey)

By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama, Ap Business Writer Mon Mar 16, 10:14 am ET

TSUKUBA, Japan – A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn’t cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models.

Three Faces of Eve?

 

Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, a government-backed organization, said their “cybernetic human,” shown Monday, wasn’t ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people — as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.

 

“Technologically, it hasn’t reached that level,” said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot’s developers. “Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure.”

 

For now, the 158 centimeter (62.2 inch) tall black-haired robot code-named HRP-4C — whose predecessor had weighed 58 kilograms (128 pounds) — will mainly serve to draw and entertain crowds.

 

Developers said the robot may be used in amusement parks or to perform simulations of human movement, as an exercise instructor, for instance.

 

HRP-4C was designed to look like an average Japanese woman, although its silver-and-black body recalls a space suit. It will appear in a Tokyo fashion show — without any clothes — in a special section just for the robot next week.

 

The robotic framework for the HRP-4C, without the face and other coverings, will go on sale for about 20 million yen ($200,000) each, and its programming technology will be made public so other people can come up with fun moves for the robot, the scientists said.

 

Japan boasts one of the leading robotics industries in the world, and the government is pushing to develop the industry as a road to growth. Automaker Honda Motor Co. has developed Asimo, which can walk and talk, although it doesn’t pretend to look human.

 

Other robots, like the ones from Hiroshi Kobayashi at the Tokyo University of Science and Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, have more human-like faces and have been tested as receptionists.

 

But demands are growing for socially useful robots, such as ones that can care for the elderly and sick, said Yoshihiro Kaga, a government official in the trade and industry ministry.

 

“We want this market to grow as an industry,” he said.

 

The robot shown Monday has 30 motors in its body that allows it to walk and move its arms as well as eight motors on its face to create expressions like anger and surprise.

 

In a demonstration for reporters, the robot waddled out, blinking, a bit like an animation figure come to life, and said, “Hello, everyone,” in a tiny feminine voice while its mouth moved.

 

The demonstration didn’t all go smoothly. The robot often looked surprised, opening its mouth and eyes in a stunned expression, when the demonstrator asked it to smile or look angry.

 

Its walk was also not quite ready for the Paris Collection, partly because its knees are permanently bent. It has sensors in its feet but lacks the sensitive balance of a real human.

 

The big challenge in creating HRP-4C was making the parts small enough so it looks female, especially its thinner legs, said Shuuji Kajita, who leads the institute’s humanoid research group.

 

“But this is just the first step,” he said

WSJ: Time To Return To The Gold Standard

 

Capitalism Needs a Sound-Money Foundation

Let’s give the Fed some competition. Abolish legal tender laws and see whose money people trust.

 

By JUDY SHELTON

Let’s go back to the gold standard.

 

If the very idea seems at odds with what is currently happening in our country — with Congress preparing to pass a massive economic stimulus bill that will push the fiscal deficit to triple the size of last year’s record budget gap — it’s because a gold standard stands in the way of runaway government spending.

 

 

Under a gold standard, if people think the paper money printed by government is losing value, they have the right to switch to gold. Fiat money — i.e., currency with no intrinsic worth that government has decreed legal tender — loses its value when government creates more than can be absorbed by the productive real economy. Too much fiat money results in inflation — which pools in certain sectors at first, such as housing or financial assets, but ultimately raises prices in general.

 

Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals, making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets without increasing their real consumption opportunities.

 

In short, inflation undermines capitalism by destroying the rationale for dedicating a portion of today’s earnings to savings. Accumulated savings provide the capital that finances projects that generate higher future returns; it’s how an economy grows, how a society reaches higher levels of prosperity. But inflation makes suckers out of savers.

 

If capitalism is to be preserved, it can’t be through the con game of diluting the value of money. People see through such tactics; they recognize the signs of impending inflation. When we see Congress getting ready to pay for 40% of 2009 federal budget expenditures with money created from thin air, there’s no getting around it. Our money will lose its capacity to serve as an honest measure, a meaningful unit of account. Our paper currency cannot provide a reliable store of value.

 

So we must first establish a sound foundation for capitalism by permitting people to use a form of money they trust. Gold and silver have traditionally served as currencies — and for good reason. A study by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber, concluded that gold and silver standards consistently outperform fiat standards. Analyzing data over many decades for a large sample of countries, they found that “every country in our sample experienced a higher rate of inflation in the period during which it was operating under a fiat standard than in the period during which it was operating under a commodity standard.”

 

Given that the driving force of free-market capitalism is competition, it stands to reason that the best way to improve money is through currency competition. Individuals should be able to choose whether they wish to carry out their personal economic transactions using the paper currency offered by the government, or to conduct their affairs using voluntary private contracts linked to payment in gold or silver.

 

Legal tender laws currently favor government-issued money, putting private contracts in gold or silver at a distinct disadvantage. Contracts denominated in Federal Reserve notes are enforced by the courts, whereas contracts denominated in gold are not. Gold purchases are subject to taxes, both sales and capital gains. And while the Constitution specifies that only commodity standards are lawful — “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts” (Art. I, Sec. 10) — it is fiat money that enjoys legal tender status and its protections.

 

Now is the time to challenge the exclusive monopoly of Federal Reserve notes as currency. Buyers and sellers, by mutual consent, should have access to an alternate means for settling accounts; they should be able to do business using a monetary unit of account defined in terms of gold. The existence of parallel currencies operating side-by-side on an equal legal footing would make it clear whether people had more confidence in fiat money or money redeemable in gold.

 

If the gold-based system is preferred, it means that people fully understand that the purpose of money is to facilitate commerce, not to camouflage fiscal mismanagement.

 

Private gold currencies have served as the medium of exchange throughout history — long before kings and governments took over the franchise. The initial justification for government involvement in money was to certify the weight and fineness of private gold coins. That rulers found it all too tempting to debase the money and defraud its users testifies more to the corruptive aspects of sovereign authority than to the viability of gold-based money.

 

Which is why government officials should not now have the last word in determining the monetary measure, especially when they have abused the privilege.

 

The same values that will help America regain its economic footing and get back on the path to productive growth — honesty, reliability, accountability — should be reflected in our money. Economists who promote the government-knows-best approach of Keynesian economics fail to comprehend the damaging consequences of spurring economic activity through a money illusion. Fiscal “stimulus” at the expense of monetary stability may accommodate the principles of the childless British economist who famously quipped, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” But it shortchanges future generations by saddling them with undeserved debt obligations.

 

There is also the argument that gold-linked money deprives the government of needed “flexibility” and could lead to falling prices. But contrary to fears of harmful deflation, the big problem is not that nominal prices might go down as production declines, but rather that dollar prices artificially pumped up by government deficit spending merely paper over the real economic situation.

 

When the output of goods grows faster than the stock of money, benign deflation can occur — it happened from 1880 to 1900 while the U.S. was on a gold standard. But the total price-level decline was 10% stretched over 20 years.

 

Meanwhile, the gross domestic product more than doubled.

At a moment when the world is questioning the virtues of democratic capitalism, our nation should provide global leadership by focusing on the need for monetary integrity. One of the most serious threats to global economic recovery — aside from inadequate savings — is protectionism. An important benefit of developing a parallel currency linked to gold is that other countries could likewise permit their own citizens to utilize it. To the extent they did so, a common currency area would be created not subject to the insidious protectionism of sliding exchange rates.

 

The fiasco of the G-20 meeting in Washington last November — it was supposed to usher in “the next Bretton Woods” — suggests that any move toward a new international monetary system based on gold will more likely take place through the grass-roots efforts of Americans. It may already be happening at the state level. Last month, Indiana state Sen. Greg Walker introduced a bill — “The Indiana Honest Money Act” — which would, if enacted, allow citizens the option of paying in or receiving back gold, silver or the equivalent electronic receipt as an alternative to Federal Reserve notes for all transactions conducted with the state of Indiana.

 

It may turn out to be a bellwether. Certainly, it’s a sign of a growing feeling in the heartland that we need to go back to sound money. We need money that works for the legitimate producers and consumers of the world — the savers and borrowers, the entrepreneurs. Not money that works for the chiselers.

 

Ms. Shelton, an economist, is author of “Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System” (Free Press, 1994).

ZEY: The Human Enhancement Revolution Is Here

December 08, 2008

“The Human Enhancement Revolution Has Arrived”

By Dr. Michael G. Zey

We are in the midst of a somewhat quiet revolution, one in which startling breakthroughs in science and medicine promise to make individuals stronger, smarter and more durable. Evidence of this revolution is everywhere. People routinely undergo LASIK surgery to achieve “super-vision” of 20-15 and receive cochlear implants to regain or dramatically improve their hearing. Although it is considered controversial for athletes to use  drugs and supplements such as steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) to  better their performance, various clinics in California and elsewhere legally administer HGH to older clients to literally rejuvenate them, helping these seniors  feel younger, stronger  and more vibrant.

Moreover, millions of Americans are utilizing a variety of pharmaceutical methods to increase their mental agility and intelligence. Students, soldiers and executives are discovering that the drug Provigil can boost intelligence, memory and concentration. A full 20 percent of the academics, scientists and researchers responding to a 2008 informal Nature magazine survey revealed that they used Ritalin and Provigil to improve their concentration, focus and memory. The  U.S. and Israeli military as well as the  French Foreign Legion have administered Provigil, Donepezil and other “smart drugs” to soldiers and pilots to enhance their alertness and performance.

And the best is yet to come! In as little as 10 years, people could temporarily boost  their intelligence through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which delivers microsecond pulses of energy a few centimeters into its wearer’s brain, inducing electrical activity in brain cells. Tests have found  that such pulses can increase the recipient’s reaction time on tests and enhance memory. By 2030, it is predicted that we will use nanotechnology and implanted nanobots to restructure the limited and flawed architecture of the brain’s neural region. As a result, humans who receive such implants will possess a more efficient memory and an increased capacity to think. University of Washington scientists are working on a contact lens that will give the wearer “ultra-human” power to see holographic driving control panels, visually surf the Web on the go, and electronically generate forgotten key information about old acquaintances they might meet simply by focusing the lens on the person.

Scientists are also looking to increase physical strength by restructuring the  human body. Physicist Yoseph Bar-Cohen at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hopes to someday replace muscles in the body with a little-known material called electroactive polymer. Proponents of nanotechnology foresee a time when we will be able reengineer our skin into a material that would be lightweight, more adaptable to environmental changes and veritably indestructible. It is likely that someday science will enable parents to genetically program their offspring for a host of enhanced characteristics, including advanced intelligence and more resilient bodies.

For decades government, civic leaders, teachers,  the media and the public have enthusiastically endorsed the concept of human enhancement, albeit by “natural” means. Over the last few decades millions have turned to aerobic exercising and dieting as the magic elixir to unlock and extend the body’s potential. We gulp down vitamin supplements by the bottle. “Human potential” even had a movement named after it. For years the U.S. Army’s motto and recruitment logo was,  “Be all that  you can be.”

Paradoxically, now that scientific and technological breakthroughs are promising to unleash human potential to an extent unimaginable for most of the 20th century, many people are greeting such innovations not with open arms but with a combination of fear, anxiety and often outright hostility. Some members of  the President’s Council on Bioethics, which strongly influences government science policy and funding, hold a decidedly negative attitude toward new human enhancement technologies. One-time council chairman Leon Kass has outspokenly opposed research into human enhancement and anti-aging technologies, fearing such technologies could undermine the moral fabric of society. Council member Francis Fukuyama has labeled the potential liberation of the human race from its biological constraints a “dangerous” trend that government must oppose.

One of the criticisms of human enhancement advanced by those opposed to such research is that the use of enhancement technologies is tantamount to cheating — the individual using  steroids, HGH and smart pills has an unfair competitive advantage over the non-enhanced person. The cheating argument has gained credibility in some circles mainly because many enhancement technologies have been introduced to the public in the context of sports. However, the ultimate purpose of most organizations and their  members is to provide useful goods and services, not win Olympic medals or the Super Bowl. Under what moral logic, for instance, would we prohibit  a scientific team  from using  “smart drugs” or “creativity pills” that could help them more quickly discover the cure for cancer or AIDS, simply because we perceive such use a form of “cheating?” Similarly, if you were drowning, would you rather that the lifeguard swimming your way be an enhanced individual that could reach you in 30 seconds or a non-enhanced lifeguard that would reach you in two minutes?

Ironically, countries will eventually endorse human enhancement technologies for the very reason that  such breakthroughs do, in fact, make them more globally competitive. Studies have revealed that the higher a country’s citizens’  IQ scores, the higher its GDP. This makes sense — creative and  intelligent people tend to work smarter and more efficiently, learn more quickly, and invent more products. Governments prohibit the use of smart drugs at the risk of falling behind in the global marketplace. In addition, confronted with  aging populations, the U.S., Europe and Japan will eventually embrace substances such as HGH  that promise a workforce that at age 50 or 65, instead of being ready to retire and collect Social Security, is  rejuvenated, physically vibrant and craving new career challenges and productive  work experiences. As we have seen, various countries already enthusiastically embrace a host of enhancement technologies to unlock the performance potential of their soldiers. The U.S. Air Force surgeon general’s office endorses the use of amphetamines by pilots.  According to one of its statements, in order to extend operations, “prescribed drugs are sometimes made available to counter the effects of fatigue during these operations.”

Some people refer to this enhancement process as “transhuman,” as though the resulting product of all these technological and scientific activities is somehow “not human” or lies outside the human sphere. I prefer the label “ultra-human,” a smarter and more physically adroit human whose new powers owe their very existence to the brain power and creativity unique to our species. The enhancement process is helping us discover what being human really means. In the process of enhancing ourselves, we should embrace, not deny, our humanity.

Most importantly, instead of looking for ways to limit the creation and implementation of these technologies, we should enthusiastically endorse them as  methods for improving the  human condition.

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About this Week’s Guest Blogger:

Dr. Michael G. Zey is the author of Ageless Nation (New Horizons/Kensington), The Future Factor: Forces Transforming Human Destiny (Transaction Publishers, paperback; McGraw-Hill,  hardcover), as well as Seizing the Future: The Dawn of the Macroindustrial Era (Simon and Schuster) and several other books.  His next book, The Expansionary Vision, is due out in 2009. He is a professor at Montclair State University, consults to major corporations, is director of the Expansionary Institute (zey.com), and regularly interviewed on radio, TV and in print publications.

PHOTO: iStockphoto (Top) | Courtesy of Michael Zey (Bio photo) |

Europe Steps Up Nuclear Fusion Project

Scientists will soon have access to a giant supercomputer network

Sylvie Barak, vnunet.com 27 Jan 2009

The European Commission is boosting its nuclear fusion research project by allowing scientists to access Europe’s consortium of supercomputing centres, and connecting them together to form a giant supercomputer network.

The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) will allow scientists working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) nuclear fusion project to harness huge amounts of processing power for their research.

This, in turn, will give researchers the ability to better model complex processes while simulating the operation of a fusion reactor.

Nuclear fusion, which occurs naturally in stars to release huge amounts of energy, has been achieved artificially in the past, but the process has yet to be properly controlled. If brought to heel, it could revolutionise the way governments think about their energy supply, and provide an alternative, clean and sustainable form of power generation.

Nuclear researchers from across Europe, as well as Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russia and the US, will work together on the $9.3bn (£6.6bn) ITER project with the goal of developing a fusion reactor to be set up at Cadarache, in the south of France, within the next decade.

Europe’s information, society and media commissioner, Viviane Reding, said in a statement that she expected the new partnership between DEISA and the European nuclear-fusion community to make an “enormous contribution to nuclear fusion’s potential as a viable energy source, and power Europe’s role in this quest”.

Reding added that the moves showed “how pooling its best scientists and infrastructures helps Europe’s scientific community remain at the forefront of global research”.

DEISA was granted €26m (£25m) by the European Commission in 2004, and proceeded to continue the development of its Géant computer network which distributes and shares Europe’s supercomputer processing power for research and academic projects.

 

 

Census: Younger Women Choosing Motherhood

For nearly 40 years, women have been delaying childbirth longer and longer, partly to launch careers. Now, this trend may be ending.

For the first time since government records have been kept, the average age at which women have their first babies posted a decline — according to newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Mothers’ mean age at their first childbirth fell to 25.0 years in 2006, the most recent figures available, from 25.2 in 2005. Women ages 20 to 24 led the shift, with a 5% increase in the rate of first births.

A one-year reversal doesn’t make a trend, of course. But the study lends weight to anecdotal evidence that young women are tuning in more closely to their biological clocks. “It’s the first time it’s ever gone down, and certainly that’s noteworthy,” says Brady Hamilton, co-author of the study.

Other factors are at work too, including rising numbers of Hispanics, who tend to start families sooner, says Steven Martin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. A 4% rise in the rate of first births to older teens, ages 15 to 19, is also playing a role. And the sheer size of the baby boomlet generation, now entering the child-bearing years, may be skewing new mothers’ mean age lower.

But some experts also see a shift in attitudes. More young women today just assume they’ll have both a career and a family, and on their own timetable, says Stephanie Coontz, director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families. Young women feel less compelled to spend a decade proving themselves on the job before kids, she says.

Sarah Distel, an at-home mother in Oxford, Ohio, and her husband, Christopher, a research technician, had their two children, now 1 and 3, in their mid-20s. Ms. Distel, a college graduate, sees her generation as unique. “We weren’t fighting for careers like the older generation. It was something we take for granted,” she says. After watching the struggles she has seen older moms face juggling established careers and child-care, Ms. Distel has decided to wait to launch her own planned career in library administration until her children are in school.

Candace Parker, the biggest star in women’s basketball, shocked league officials and fans last month by announcing she was pregnant — at the age of 22. If anyone had a career reason to defer child-bearing, Ms. Parker did; she was the 2008 league MVP and Rookie of the Year for the Los Angeles Sparks and had become the face of the sport in various marketing campaigns.

But after years spent striving to please others, says Ms. Parker, who is married to Sacramento Kings forward Shelden Williams, “this decision obviously was for myself and my husband and my family.” Ms. Parker’s parents were in their 30s when she was born, and “I kind of missed out” on shooting hoops with her dad and other shared play, she says. She wants her children to have the benefit of young parents.

Close bonds with their own grandparents are important to young women, too. Heather Allen of St. Cloud, Minn., an art teacher whose husband is still in college, had her first baby at 21. She wants her children, now 4 and 1, to know their great-grandmother, 76; she considers extended family “part of the village” it takes to raise a child.

It’s unclear whether the country’s current economic woes will affect the move toward younger child-bearing. Historically, recessions have reduced family size, but their impact on the age at which women start families is less clear. In any event, Dr. Martin says, “demographers will continue paying very close attention” to whether a cultural sea change is under way.

 

 

 

Trial Begins for HIV Gene Therapy

By Aaron Rowe February 03, 2009 | 7:00:00 AMCategories: Biotech, Medicine & Medical Procedures  

 

Gene therapy that could immunize people against the most common type of HIV is ready to be tested on humans.

 

Recruiting for the trial began Tuesday, and the first people to receive the experimental treatment will be HIV patients with drug-resistance problems.

 

“We do have good treatments for HIV. That has been one of the most successful stories of the last 20 years in medicine,” said Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

“However, over time, if the medications are not taken properly, individuals develop resistance to the HIV treatments, so they tend to have more limited therapeutic options.”

 

Since the discovery that a small portion of people who are exposed to HIV do not get infected, scientists have been working to discover the secret to those people’s resistance and how to make others resistant as well.

 

It turns out that most people have a gene called CCR5, which makes them vulnerable to HIV infections. The naturally resistant people have mutant CCR5 genes that inhibit HIV.

 

Previously, scientists found that by cutting the CCR5 gene out of white blood cells involved in the immune response known as T-cells, they could protect a tube full of human cells from the virus. The gene editing technique relies on proteins called zinc finger nucleases that can delete any gene from a living cell.

 

In theory, zinc finger nucleases could give that immunity to anyone.

 

The procedure is simple: Take some healthy T-cells out of an HIV patient, clip out their CCR5 genes, grow more of these clipped T-cells in a dish, and then put them back in the patient.

 

“In this first study we will re-infuse approximately 10 billion of these cells back into the participants, and we will see if it is safe and if those cells inhibit HIV replication in vivo,” said Tebas. “We know they do in the test tube.”

 

Scientist: Welcome To The New Ice Age!

Phil Chapman | Article from:  The Australian

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.

By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.

Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.

For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.

We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.

We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.

The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.

All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.

In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.

India Lands Probe on Moon to Mine Helium 3

 

One objective is to look for Helium 3, a rare isotope for nuclear fusion

By Rina Chandran

Reuters

updated 2:07 p.m. ET, Fri., Nov. 14, 2008

MUMBAI – A lunar probe from India’s first unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has landed on the moon and started sending its first images, officials at the Indian Space Research Organization said on Friday.

 

The Moon Impactor Probe detached itself from Chandrayaan-1 (moon vehicle) about 62 miles from the moon’s surface and crash-landed on the south pole of the moon at 10:01 a.m. EST, officials said in Bangalore.

“It was a flawless operation,” said SK Shivakumar, director of ISRO Telemetry’s tracking and command network.

The Probe, to be named “Aditya,” aimed to kick up some dust, which instruments in the craft would analyze. It has started sending images to the mother ship, Shivakumar said.

A principal objective is to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in the future.

It is thought to be more plentiful on the moon, but still rare and very difficult to extract.

India launched Chandrayaan-1 on Oct 22, joining the Asian space race in the footsteps of rival China and reinforcing its claim to be considered a global power.

Chandrayaan-1, a cuboid spacecraft built by ISRO, is also seen as a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

In April, India sent 10 satellites into orbit from a single rocket, and ISRO says it plans more launches before a proposed manned mission to space and then on to Mars in four years’ time.

 

Copyright 2008 Reuters. Click for restrictions.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27719701/

TMS: Can Magnetic Stimulation Reduce Depression, Even Increase Intelligence?

•  

By Melinda Beck

You sit in what looks like a dentist’s chair and a psychiatrist places a metal coil against your head. Rapid magnetic pulses penetrate your scalp and skull and produce a mild electrical current in the left prefrontal cortex of your brain. You feel a tickling sensation and hear a loud tapping sound. The treatment, known as TMS, for transcranial magnetic stimulation, lasts about 40 minutes and is done daily for four to six weeks. If you’re suffering from major depression, you could start feeling better within a few weeks.

“We’ve seen improvement in mood, sleep, appetite, energy level and a restoration of hopefulness and self-esteem,” says psychiatrist Sarah Lisanby, chief of the brain stimulation division at Columbia University.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first TMS system, called NeuroStar, made by Neuronetics Inc. of Malvern, Pa., to treat patients who haven’t responded to at least one antidepressant. Roughly 5% of U.S. adults suffer from major depression in a given year, and as many as 40% of them don’t get adequate relief from psychotherapy or drugs.

For those who have failed other therapy, TMS is still no panacea. In a clinical trial of 325 patients at 23 sites in the U.S., Canada and Australia, only 24% improved on TMS, but that was twice the response to the placebo. Side effects were mild — mostly scalp irritation and headaches — and there was no weight gain or sexual side effects as with some antidepressants. And unlike electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also used to treat severe depression, patients remain awake and don’t need anesthesia. There’s no confusion or memory loss as sometimes happens with ECT.

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Neuronetics

Magnetic pulses stimulate the left prefrontal cortex, which is linked to depression.

TMS is part of a new era in understanding and treating psychiatric disorders. Using high-tech imaging, scientists can now see depression in the brain, and some theorize that it involves an imbalance between the thinking areas in the cortex and the emotional areas of the limbic system.

Imagine coming upon a snake, says psychiatrist Mark George at the Medical University of South Carolina: Your limbic system registers it as a threat. Then your cortex recognizes it as harmless and quiets down the response. “That balance disappears in depression,” says Dr. George, who was an early pioneer of TMS. “With TMS we can tickle the cortex and over time restore the balance.” Talk therapy can sometimes do that too, he notes.

But neither talk therapy — nor medication — is sufficient in some patients. “Joe,” who didn’t want his real name used, was a successful writer until he fell into a severe depression in the 1980s. He was suicidal for years and hospitalized repeatedly. He tried a gamut of antidepressants. “But they made me sleep 18 hours a day,” he says. “The only thing I wanted to do was die.”

Joe’s psychiatrist encouraged him to enroll in a TMS trial. “It’s the only thing that worked,” Joe says. “Within six weeks, I was officially no longer depressed.” Now he is off medication but returns for weekly TMS treatments.

TMS is still in its infancy. Even proponents say patients who don’t respond to one antidepressant should try another drug before using TMS. For now, only a few U.S. centers plan to offer it (see Neuronetics.com for sites). It isn’t yet covered by insurance, and prices are still being determined — one estimate is about $6,000 for a full course.

TMS has yet to be tested for milder depression, and experts aren’t sure how long the effects last. Dr. George is recruiting patients for another clinical trial, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, that will study different doses and durations of treatment and which patients are most likely to benefit.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying whether TMS might be useful to combat schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder and migraine headaches, and to fight depression in adolescents, who face a higher risk of suicide on antidepressants. Says Dr. Lisanby, who has received research support from Neuronetics, “We’re standing at the threshold of a new family of therapeutic interventions.”

LONGEVITY VILLAGES: New Niche For Medical Tourism

China’s ‘longevity villages’ want tourists to come and breathe the air

By Stan Sesser

 

China Span

A village in Guangxi’s Bama county

Poyue, China

Just being here adds years to your life — or at least that’s what elderly natives, eager government officials and hopeful visitors in this remote place contend. Poyue and several other villages near the Vietnam border in China’s Guangxi Autonomous Region comprise a “longevity cluster.” They claim an inordinate number of centenarians, including one said to be 113 years old. The surrounding Bama county, with a population of 250,000, has 74 centenarians, or about one for every 3,400 people, according to Luo Ronghui, a local tourism official. That’s a far higher incidence than in the U.S. or even in Japan, which has one of the longest average life expectancies in the world.

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Stan Sesser/The Wall Street Journal

Experts on aging are skeptical about the existence of longevity clusters, but that hasn’t blunted Bama’s ambitions to become a center for health tourism. Visitors who aren’t interested in the supposedly life-prolonging air or soil will still find much to admire in the region’s scenic limestone karsts, mud and stone dwellings and breathtaking caverns that are a natural sculpture gallery.

Bama’s plans include building upscale accommodations for foreign tourists who want a spa vacation without the costly treatments, massages and exercise regimens. The pitch: Visitors need only hang out — breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food — and they’ll benefit. “The treasure of longevity in Bama belongs to people all over the world,” says Mr. Luo, whose office is in Bama City, a half-hour drive from the longevity villages. His expansive vision for the area’s future includes a visitors’ complex somewhere nearby, with separate facilities for different nationalities so that everyone will feel at home, he says. Tourism, currently no more than a trickle, could be a huge growth industry for the region. “We can accommodate 10,000 tourists a day,” Mr. Luo says.

Trip Planner

Getting there: Bama City, near the longevity villages, is an eight-hour bus ride from Guilin, the big tourist spot in Guangxi Autonomous Region, or a four-hour ride from Nanning, the region’s capital. Air-conditioned intercity buses are comfortable, and the roads are excellent. There is a daily flight from Guilin to Tianyang Airport, about a 90-minute taxi ride outside Bama City. Fly to Guilin or Nanning from major cities in China and some cities in Southeast Asia, including Bangkok.

Where to Stay: One option is to stay in Bama City, and hire a car and driver for the half-hour drive to the longevity villages. Stay at the Longevity (Shouxiang) Hotel, a comfortable four-star facility with an excellent restaurant (488 Zhonglu Shouxiang, Tel.: 86-778-622-1818; about $40 a night). The other option is to stay in the village called Poyue. The 25-room Life Extension Hotel is clean but basic; it offers private bathrooms and good food (Tel.: 86-778-614-0311, $10 a day for a room and three meals). Neither hotel had English-speaking staff when I visited, so book through a travel agent who speaks Chinese. If you decide to stay in Nanning on the way to Bama county, try the five-star Yongjiang Hotel (1 Linjiang Rd., Tel.: 86-771-218-0888, around $65 a night). Around the corner, the colorful Zhongshan Road food vendors are reason enough to spend a night.

Joe LeMonnier

Frank Lin, a 61-year-old garment maker from Taiwan, is currently spending three months at Poyue’s clean but spartan Life Extension Hotel, where a room and three meals costs the equivalent of $10 a day ($150 for a month). He came here last year with a group on a whirlwind tour of mainland China and liked it so well that he returned for another month. After 30 years of smoking, Mr. Lin says he gave up cigarettes during that month without a second thought and hasn’t had one since. “When people try to quit smoking in the city, they become irritable and think about cigarettes all the time,” he says. “Here, I had no reaction. Bama is really blessed by God.”

Several other regions around the world are renowned for the unusually long life expectancies of their residents. No group investigates and certifies longevity-cluster claims, however, and no two lists of them are the same. The Caucasus Mountains in Russia, the Japanese island of Okinawa and the mountain town of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, are often mentioned. Dan Buettner, author of a book published by National Geographic earlier this year about diet and lifestyle in longevity clusters, even identifies a group of Seventh-day Adventists living in Loma Linda, Calif. Possible explanations range from eating yogurt (the Caucasus) to eating very little meat (Okinawa) to drinking water from melting glaciers (Vilcabamba).

Genetics is by far the most important factor, says Thomas Perls, associate professor of medicine and geriatrics at Boston University’s School of Medicine and head of the New England Centenarian Study. The notion that something in the air, water or soil can prolong life is “nonsense,” he says.

And longevity claims are only as credible as the birth records they’re based on. Many places can’t document the ages of the people in their purported cluster. “A lot of the literature is filled with testimonials and anecdotes, but never any scientific evidence,” Prof. Perls says. Longevity clusters are “mostly a marketing ploy.”

Don’t tell anyone in Bama county, though. Water from the local river comes from springs and is considered so pure that it is drunk without treatment or filtration. I had three glasses of it during lunch at the Life Extension Hotel; it tasted fine and produced no gastric distress. Residents freely bat around terms that translate as “low alkalinity” and “magnetic fields” when describing the soil and water. Because local animals drink the local water and eat local plants, “their meat is different,” says Mr. Lin, the Taiwanese visitor. “People eat fatty meat here, but they’re all thin. You never hear of a cancer case.”

Stan Sesser / The Wall Street Journal

Huang Malun, at left, says she is 107 and traveled with Red Army soldiers.

Another believer is Huang Malun, who says she is 107. She and a dozen family members span five generations and all live in the same tiny house in Poyue. A wrinkled, sweet-tempered woman who walks with the aid of a cane, Ms. Huang recalls traveling with revolutionary Red Army soldiers decades ago; she helped their cause by making their clothes. “We lived on wild vegetables,” she says. “All the hardships were very tough.” How does she explain her long life? “Organic food and the good air,” she says. “I ate all naturally grown food. Now they use chemicals, and of course it’s going to hurt.”

In Bama City, the four-star Longevity Hotel sells everything from Long Life bottled water to snakes coiled in a jar of alcohol (a staple of Chinese medicine). The hotel travel agency found a car and driver to take me, my translator and a guide to the villages for $30 a day. But we could find no one in the county who spoke even a few words of English. In the tourist center of Guilin, a one-day drive or a one-hour flight from Bama City, travel agencies have guides for hire that will set you back about $100 a day or more, plus expenses.

Fountains of Youth?

Here are four more places reputed to have large centenarian populations:

	The Caucasus Mountains of Eurasia The inhabitants are often said to live to an old age because their diet is rich in yogurt.
	Okinawa The Japanese island of Okinawa, where the local diet includes little meat, claims an extraordinary number of centenarians.
	Vilcabamba, Ecuador This mountain town’s residents thrive, legend has it, because they drink water from melted glaciers.
	Loma Linda, California A recent book has identified a longevity cluster among a community of Seventh-day Adventists here.

Photo credits: EFE/Zuma Press (Ecuador); Matt Korner (CA); Getty Images (2)

The road from Bama City to Poyue looks out at dramatic tree-lined rock outcroppings, the sort that inspired China’s famous brushstroke paintings. Some locals say a supposedly high concentration of negative ions in the atmosphere — remember the fad for home ion generators? — inspires a feeling of exhilaration and explains residents’ longevity tendencies. That may be — but the scenery is so exhilarating that it’s hard to believe that negatively charged particles could make much difference.

The longevity villages, with their stone or mud-brick houses and tile roofs, make for some scenic walking. Lunch at the Life Extension Hotel was delicious, although it’s hard to tell if it was life-prolonging. The big bonus, though, was the Hundred Demon Cave, a network of caverns with immense rock hangings, like a vast sculpture gallery. The local government has built 2.5 miles of illuminated concrete walkways, with railings on steep portions, making for what is surely one of the world’s most tourist-friendly caves — despite the almost complete lack of tourists. Our guide said she sees a foreign visitor about once every two weeks.

The cave is popular among locals, however; they gather each morning to talk and play mah-jongg. They come because the cave’s negative ion reading is supposedly off the charts. It was there that I met 84-year-old Guan Rongcang, a retired teacher who moved to Poyue four years ago. He is a walking commercial for Poyue’s negative ions, bicycling twice a week into Bama City to shop — a 36-mile round-trip. “I’m famous in this area for my bike rides,” he says. “Everyone knows me.”

Write to Stan Sesser at stan.sesser@awsj.com

Forced-Sterilization Making A Comeback in U.S.

The Judge Says: Don’t Get Pregnant. A Lapsed Law Now Sees New Life

By DAN SLATER

 

Some old laws never quite fade away.

In a dark corner of U.S. history, a number of states ran forced-sterilization projects, in which women deemed unfit for motherhood were surgically prevented from having a child. The country’s most esteemed legal minds blessed the programs. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that authorized sterilization for a woman who, along with her mother and child, was “feeble-minded.” In upholding the statute, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By 1935, nearly 20,000 forced eugenic sterilizations had been performed in the U.S.

Austin Chronicle

Judge Charlie Baird

Then, in 1942, the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma’s Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, declaring that “marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.” Following the horrors of eugenics in Nazi Germany, the sterilization movement dwindled.

Yet in scattered cases, state regulation of reproductive rights remains a part of the legal culture — now amid very different circumstances. Just this month, for example, a judge in Texas ordered a woman, as a condition of her probation, to stop having children after her daughter was badly abused. The order, by Judge Charlie Baird, is difficult to enforce and possibly unconstitutional. It reflects the willingness of some judges to push the limits of punishment in ways that hark back to a time before a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions elevated individual rights.

In other areas, too, the impulse behind a law can linger, in society and in the courtroom, long after the law itself has fallen into disfavor or disuse. For a long time, the state asserted control over who could marry whom. It was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, giving constitutional protection to interracial marriage — and creating a broader social assumption that marriage in general was a private matter. Three decades later, many states still resist same-sex marriage.

Similarly, the rationale behind forced sterilization is making its way back into the courts in the form of no-pregnancy orders, in small numbers and often overturned on appeal. In 1999, after finding a mentally retarded woman guilty of neglecting a dependent, in connection with the death of her infant son, a state court in Indiana ordered her not to become pregnant as a condition of her eight-year probation. A state appeals court struck down the no-pregnancy condition, ruling that it violated the woman’s “privacy right of procreation” and that the goal of preventing injury to a child could be served by less-restrictive means.

Yet a similar condition was upheld in 2001, this time as it applied to a man. David Oakley, a father of nine children, pleaded no contest to charges that he intentionally failed to pay child support. As a condition of probation, a state judge in Wisconsin ordered Mr. Oakley not to father any more children until he could show the court he was capable of supporting the ones he had. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a split decision, upheld the constitutionality of the order. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case on appeal.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for some of the people involved in these cases. Felicia Salazar, the 20-year-old Texas woman who found herself before Judge Baird, admitted to failing to provide protection and medical care to her then-19-month-old daughter, who suffered broken bones and other injuries when she was beaten by her father. Judge Baird sentenced the father, 25-year-old Roberto Alvarado, to 10 years in prison. Mr. Alvarado and Ms. Salazar relinquished their parental rights, and the child was placed in foster care. Judge Baird sentenced Ms. Salazar, who had no criminal history, to 10 years of probation and ordered her not to have children during that time.

“Under Texas law, judges can impose any condition on probation so long as it’s reasonable,” Judge Baird says. Ms. Salazar “has a fundamental right to reproduce, so I couldn’t order her to be sterilized. But she can be forced to forfeit certain fundamental rights.” He adds: “I’m not even preventing her from having intimate sexual relations. I’m only preventing her from becoming pregnant.”

Is the distinction tenable? Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who represented Mr. Oakley in the Wisconsin case, says Judge Baird’s order is “tantamount to sterilization” and abridges Ms. Salazar’s reproductive freedom as guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision affirming abortion rights.

There is also a question of enforceability. If Ms. Salazar becomes pregnant, must she choose among concealing the pregnancy, abortion or incarceration?

Allison Wetzel, the Travis County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Ms. Salazar, had agreed with the defense on probation — but not on the no-pregnancy order. “I think when the average person hears a story of a mom who failed to protect a child, their instinct is that she doesn’t deserve to have a child,” Ms. Wetzel says. “But we don’t get to decide that for her.”

Should We Adopt The Gold Standard?

In Uncategorized on October 8, 2008 at 2:11 am

Loose Money And the Roots Of the Crisis

No one can believe in the omniscience of central bankers anymore.

By JUDY SHELTON

 

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

– T.S. Eliot
“The Hollow Men” (1925)

The world is not ending. Despite the wrenching turmoil in global financial markets and morbid allusions to the death throes of capitalism, it ain’t over. Not until people quit believing in themselves, not until people quit believing in a better future.

Corbis

But the whimpering is real, and justified, because it hurts to have your world come crashing down. And global financial markets are definitely crashing, even when the impact is momentarily softened through massive injections of artificial money — “artificial” because the fiat money does not represent a store of genuine value but rather an airy government claim to future wealth yet to be created.

In the aftermath of this financial catastrophe, as we sort out causes and assign blame, with experts offering various solutions — More regulation! Less complex financial instruments! — let’s not lose sight of the most fundamental component of finance. No credit-default swap, no exotic derivative, can be structured without stipulating the monetary unit of account in which its value is calculated. Money is the medium of exchange — the measure, the standard, the store of value — which defines the very substance of the economic contract between buyer and seller. It is the basic element, the atom of financial matter.

It is the money that is broken.

These days, we don’t often refer to the validity of the money itself but rather to “monetary policy” and how the Federal Reserve has managed to calibrate the money supply to economic activity over the last two decades. There are plenty of critiques; the most pointed ones blame former Fed chief Alan Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low, too long.

During his 19 years at the monetary helm — from 1987 to 2006 — Mr. Greenspan served under four different U.S. presidents. At least one of them, George H.W. Bush, blamed Mr. Greenspan for keeping interest rates too high. The stock market crash that occurred in October 1987, two months after Mr. Greenspan’s confirmation under Ronald Reagan, sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 508 points (23%). It required huge injections of liquidity, which subsequently needed to be mopped up with tighter monetary policy. “I reappointed him,” the elder President Bush said. “And he disappointed me.”

President Clinton likewise reappointed Mr. Greenspan — and soon learned the terms of the trade-off for reduced short-term interest rates: Bring down the fiscal budget deficit. Spurred on by a Republican Congress, it actually happened; the federal budget was balanced in 1998. All too briefly, the Fed’s biggest concern was how to carry out future monetary policy if we ran out of government debt securities for open-market operations. The fiscal deficit subsequently ballooned after 2001, due to spending in excess of revenue growth, while interest rates and unemployment — and inflation, counterintuitively — remained low. One thing for sure: We will have more than enough government debt securities.

There’s a reason for this short diversion into Mr. Greenspan’s long watch. While he is readily demonized today — Italy’s finance minister recently characterized him as the man who, after Osama bin Laden, “hurt America the most” — Mr. Greenspan is also the man who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and whose honorary titles include Knight Commander of the British Empire and Commander of the French Legion d’honneur.

So how does such an accomplished central banker turn out to be a monetary doofus?

Scapegoats are wonderfully convenient receptacles for our collective disappointment, but that’s all. When credit markets seize up, when financial instruments disintegrate, when the dollar fails — it’s not because Alan Greenspan was not sufficiently omniscient. He wasn’t, true. But no one ever was. No one ever could be.

If capitalism depends on designating a person of godlike abilities to manage demand and supply for all forms of money and credit — currency, demand deposits, money-market funds, repurchase agreements, equities, mortgages, corporate debt — we are as doomed as those wretched citizens who relied on central planning for their economic salvation.

Think of it: Nothing is more vital to capitalism than capital, the financial seed corn dedicated to next year’s crop. Yet we, believers in free markets, allow the price of capital, i.e., the interest rate on loanable funds, to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives. We might as well resurrect Gosplan, the old Soviet State Planning Committee, and ask them to draw up the next five-year plan.

“There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.” It would be easy to dismiss this statement as a quaint relic from Mr. Greenspan’s earlier days as an Ayn Rand acolyte; his article on “Gold and Economic Freedom” appears in her 1966 compendium “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” But Mr. Greenspan said it, rather emphatically, last October on the Fox Business Network. He was responding to the interviewer’s question: “Why do we need a central bank?”

Whatever well-intentioned reasons existed in 1913 for creating the Federal Reserve — to provide an elastic currency to soften the blow of economic contractions caused by “irrational exuberance” (and that will never be conquered, so long as humans have aspirations) — one would be hard-pressed to say that the financial fallout from this latest money meltdown will have less damaging consequences for the average person than would have been incurred under a gold standard.

Moreover, the mission of the central bank has been greatly compromised. Can anyone have faith that Fed policy decisions going into the future will deliver more reliable money? Don’t we already know in our bones that the cost of this latest financial nightmare will be born by all of us who store the value of our labor and measure our purchasing power in the form of dollars? As John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist, observed in his “Tract on Monetary Reform,” published in 1923:

“It is common to speak as though, when a Government pays its way by inflation, the people of the country avoid taxation. We have seen that this is not so. What is raised by printing notes is just as much taken from the public as is a beer-duty or an income-tax. What a Government spends the public pay for. There is no such thing as an uncovered deficit.”

The entire world has been affected by the breakdown of the U.S. financial system, thanks to the globalization of investment capital. But the free flow of capital — along with free trade — is a good thing, the best path to global prosperity. The problem is that the role of the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency has been called into serious question, both by allies and adversaries. Writing in the People’s Daily, Chinese economist Shi Jianxun laments: “The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States.”

Let’s do exactly that. It is time to take on the task of establishing a new foundation for international economic relations and financial relations — one dedicated to open markets and based on monetary integrity. Every country is responsible for anchoring its own currency to the universal reserve asset, and every citizen has the right to convert the national currency into the universal reserve asset.

That’s how a gold standard works. A bimetallic system, linked to silver and gold, works the same way. In either case the money is fixed to a common anchor — and thus automatically functions as a common currency to serve the needs of legitimate producers and consumers throughout the world.

How would such an approach cure financial market ills? Nothing can rescue humans from occasionally making bad choices or succumbing to herding instincts. But on the same principle as democracy and free elections, embedded in the aggregate judgment of individuals over time is a wisdom that outperforms the most ostensibly savvy administrator. Sound money would go a long way toward eliminating the distortions that pervert financial decisions and credit allocations. Price signals do matter; if they don’t, then free markets don’t matter, and capitalism doesn’t work. In which case, let government dictate demand and regulate supply.

No, we need to fix the money. Literally.

One of the candidates for president of the United States might issue the call for international monetary reform. Bad timing? The memo that resulted in the 1944 Bretton Woods international monetary agreement was written three weeks after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next global conference need not take place in Bretton Woods, N.H., but rather Paris or Shanghai. Countries should participate on a voluntary basis, no coercion, in full recognition that the goal is to hammer out a new financial order where the validity of the monetary unit of account is not determined by hollow men roaming the marble halls of government central banks.

This is where the new world of sound money begins. This is where the unknown ideal of capitalism takes form.

Ms. Shelton, is an economist

New Consensus: Home Ownership Only For The Creditworthy

Not Everyone Should Own a Home

Even without Fan and Fred, American mortgage rules are unusually lax.

By JANET ALBRECHTSEN

•  

Maybe only a friendly foreigner could say this. But America needs to realize that not everyone can own a home. The American Dream of home ownership for all is a fraud. Politicians who pimped this dream created an unsustainable mortgage industry whose collapse is only surprising because it didn’t happen earlier. America’s mortgage industry will not recover, nor deserve to recover, unless it is prepared to challenge this politically unpalatable reality.

Why listen to an Australian like me? For starters, as our central banker, Glenn Stevens, said a few weeks back, Australian banks are “light years away from what’s happening in other banking systems around the world.” Australia’s four major banks sit amongst the 20 AA rated banks around the globe. And as the Sept. 23 International Monetary Fund Country Report on Australia concluded, Australia’s banking sector “is sound with stable profit, high capitalization and few non-performing loans.”

The reasons go directly to regulatory differences that should interest Americans. Take nonrecourse mortgage loans. When Australians borrow money to buy a house, they know that if they default and the mortgaged property doesn’t cover the debt, they will be responsible for the shortfall. And the lender will chase them for it. It’s a neat way of reminding Australians to borrow responsibly.

In America, where populist post-Depression laws in many states have mandated loans be nonrecourse, the opposite is true. Americans can take out a mortgage more or less as a one-way bet. If you can’t afford the repayments and can’t refinance, you just send the keys back to the bank. Borrowers wipe their hands of liability. So, naturally, an American in financial strife will pay off debts that carry personal liability — such as credit cards — before they pay off their mortgage.

Quite apart from ugly economic effects of such laws, they are objectionable in a moral sense. America is meant to be the land of sturdy individuality and personal responsibility. Instead, nonrecourse lending laws mean that mortgages, as an asset class, are of dubious value.

This is made worse by the fact that traditionally many American mortgages were typically set at a fixed rate for the 25- or 30-year life of the loan and the borrower often has the nifty ability to refinance without penalty. Most Australian mortgages are usually subject to a variable rate of interest. Fixed-rate loans are limited to around five years. So when Australian lenders offer a fixed-rate loan for five years, they fund it by borrowing five-year money. If borrowers want to repay a fixed-rate loan early, sensible economics require that they pay the lender a “break” fee, which compensates the lender for the lost interest the loan would have brought in had it been carried to term.

Prepayment penalties are either prohibited or severely restricted in the U.S. Thus, an American lender who makes a 30-year fixed rate loan that the borrower can prepay at any time without penalty is simply making a bet about the average life of a loan. And while it’s true that there are good quality statistics about how long American loans usually last, these are necessarily averages. Averages don’t reflect actual experience and are especially misleading when real outcomes are at the extreme. If market interest rates fall below the fixed interest rates, borrowers will simply refinance at lower rates. Another fine deal for borrowers. If market rates rise above the fixed interest rates, borrowers will stand pat. So loans are terminated by borrowers when they are profitable for lenders and loans last longer when they are unprofitable for the banks. Who would want to be an American lender?

America has a long and undistinguished history of populist politicians stacking the cards against lenders and in favor of risky homeownership. Proving that good intentions are no guarantee of good policy, President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which required banks to make loans to low-income people, was just another legislative leg-up for high-risk borrowers. If socially laudable but economically reckless laws cause entirely predictable problems for lenders, don’t be surprised if taxpayers have to bail them out.

The final proof that American social policies have made mortgage lending an unviable industry rests with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If sensible business people don’t get into the mortgage industry because it is fundamentally a bad business, the American way has been to send in a couple of quasi-government agencies to fill the gap.

Fannie and Freddie dominated the mortgage industry because ultimately government was prepared to fund activities that prudent lenders would not. When their implicit government guarantee became explicit, America’s system of government-directed lending on socially desirable, but commercially imprudent, lending stood exposed.

Now, Australians — and others — place a high value on homeownership too. But they are aghast at the dumb things America has tolerated in pursuit of that goal. Even more dumbfounding is that nobody in Washington seems to be talking about fixing it.

Ms. Albrechtsen writes a weekly column for The Australian.

 

 

How America Lost Its Global Dominance

America and the New Financial World

Politicians can make the adjustment more or less painful.

By ZACHARY KARABELL

 

Soon enough, America’s financial crisis will wind down — maybe in a month, maybe in a year. Yet regardless of when, this crisis marks the beginning of a new era for the U.S. For more than six decades, from the end of World War II in 1945 until now, the U.S. was the hub of global capital and capitalism. In the years to come, it will remain a vital center, but not the center.

Corbis

In 1945, after an exhausting three decades of exertion against Germany, the United Kingdom emerged militarily victorious only to see itself economically exhausted. A year later, it was bankrupt, unable to find capital and on the verge of collapse. It had nowhere to turn but the U.S., which then dictated terms that amounted to a withdrawal of Great Britain from the world stage. The U.S. is not yet in the position of Great Britain, and our creditors in China are not yet as we were then. But absent a more humble and realistic attitude toward capital in Washington, that is the path we’re headed down.

What is happening to finance today is similar to what happened to manufacturing beginning in the 1970s. Until then, U.S. manufacturing accounted for as much as half of all global output. By the 1970s, Germany and Japan began to exert themselves as manufacturing titans. So did Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and others that had benefited from American aid. The globalization of manufacturing continued, and was accelerated by the information technology revolution of the 1990s. While the U.S. today continues to produce a decent share of global manufactured goods, it is one among many and employs only 13 million people (10% of the workforce) in a sector that in the middle of the 20th century accounted for a third of all jobs. The same thing is now happening with finance.

In the past five years, there has been a transfer of wealth from the U.S. and Europe to Asia, the Middle East and Russia of trillions of dollars for oil and raw materials as well as inexpensive manufactured goods. Whether or not that transfer has been positive or negative for the U.S. economy writ large — and there is considerable debate on that subject — the outflow of wealth is a fact.

You can argue that the transfer of dollars to goods-producing countries, China above all, has provided American consumers with products that might otherwise be unaffordable but has had a negative effect on the U.S. labor force. The transfer of wealth to oil-producing states and countries rich in base metals has been an economic drain, especially as the price has spiked and the cost has risen.

That wealth transfer occurred just as the U.S. financial system began to expand its exposure to the housing market. The movement of capital away from the U.S. was one reason hungry banks turned to more absurd forms of leverage. That disguised the erosion of real capital.

Even as that was happening, however, American financial institutions still wore the mantle of global leadership. As China, the Gulf region, India, Brazil and other parts of the world have increased in affluence, they relied on the expertise, acumen and advice of Wall Street. Go to any region of the world and you will find central banks and investment banks staffed by people educated at U.S. business schools and graced with resumes that include time at the formerly premier institutions of Wall Street. Few major deals were brokered without involvement from a U.S. bank or access to Wall Street financing. That is now at an end.

It is at an end for two reasons. One is structural. There are now vibrant economies that don’t depend on the U.S., are not heavily levered, and have a burgeoning, confident and ambitious middle class. But it is also at an end because those newly affluent regions of the world do not find the U.S. a welcoming home for capital.

There is no small irony in the fact that state-driven capitalism, which is the norm in the Persian Gulf and China, finds the U.S. too restrictive. Sovereign wealth funds, with enough cash on hand to bail out Wall Street and the U.S. housing market many times over, invested billions a year ago but are now saying no.

Uncertain growth for the United States is one reason. But the nature of the American regulatory regime is also to blame. Sarbanes-Oxley and the Patriot Act — whose anti-money-laundering provisions had the unintended consequence of repelling legitimate investors — combined with a tax code that places a heavy burden on corporations doing business in the U.S. has meant that, as the wealth transfer has happened, there is less and less inclination for global institutions to place that capital in the U.S.

This is a fact regardless of whether you believe that a high corporate tax rate is morally and fiscally correct. In truth, because of the differentials between high U.S. corporate taxes and the rates in Europe (lower) and Asia (in places nonexistent), even U.S.-listed companies that operate globally keep their profits outside the U.S., and thereby avoid those high taxes altogether.

In addition, the regulatory requirements of listing a company in the U.S. have led many companies to look to other markets and other exchanges for financing, hence the boom of financial centers such as Hong Kong, Dubai and even London.

This should not be a partisan argument. It is perfectly fair to argue that wealthy corporations should pay a greater share of the tax base than struggling middle-class Americans. Fair, but not realistic. The U.S. government can no longer dictate to global capital. Once, when the U.S. was the engine of global growth, when the world needed Wall Street for funding, capital could be taxed and controlled by the fiat of the U.S. government. No longer. The U.S. may have the will; it does not have the power.

The current debate in Washington gives no indication that this reality is understood. Both sides of the aisle are susceptible to a false sense of American economic sovereignty. Companies and countries flush with cash increasingly view U.S. laws, regulations and attitudes as undue burdens. As consumer activity accelerates outside the U.S. and Europe, and as financial centers spring up elsewhere, there is increasingly less inclination and less need for the world to go either to Wall Street or to Main Street.

For now, even with the breakdown of Wall Street, the U.S. remains vital to the global economy. It is the largest market, with a dynamic consumer culture, innovative companies, and is deeply enmeshed in the international system. But it is not the alpha and the omega; it is not the center; and the crisis hitting Wall Street is leading the rest of the world to form bonds that bypass the U.S.

Not all of this need be an absolute negative. In a truly interconnected world, more affluence and activity globally can be a universal benefit. U.S. companies operating outside the United States and Europe have already been reaping the rewards. But failure to accept the new reality will lead to the worst of all worlds.

As the U.S. government plunges into the markets, we must understand that this is the end of an era, and that attempts to unilaterally force capital to stay here will only lead to its continued flight. We are now one market among many, a huge and affluent one to be sure, but a wise nation recognizes both its strengths and its limitations. A more secure domestic capital base depends on the U.S. being seen as a desirable place for investment, and not as King Lear raging against the storm, alone, deluded and abandoned.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice Research. His latest book, “Chimerica: How the United States and China Became One,” will be published next year by Simon & Schuster.

 

Should We Adopt The Gold Standard?

Loose Money And the Roots Of the Crisis

No one can believe in the omniscience of central bankers anymore.

By JUDY SHELTON

 

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

– T.S. Eliot
“The Hollow Men” (1925)

The world is not ending. Despite the wrenching turmoil in global financial markets and morbid allusions to the death throes of capitalism, it ain’t over. Not until people quit believing in themselves, not until people quit believing in a better future.

Corbis

But the whimpering is real, and justified, because it hurts to have your world come crashing down. And global financial markets are definitely crashing, even when the impact is momentarily softened through massive injections of artificial money — “artificial” because the fiat money does not represent a store of genuine value but rather an airy government claim to future wealth yet to be created.

In the aftermath of this financial catastrophe, as we sort out causes and assign blame, with experts offering various solutions — More regulation! Less complex financial instruments! — let’s not lose sight of the most fundamental component of finance. No credit-default swap, no exotic derivative, can be structured without stipulating the monetary unit of account in which its value is calculated. Money is the medium of exchange — the measure, the standard, the store of value — which defines the very substance of the economic contract between buyer and seller. It is the basic element, the atom of financial matter.

It is the money that is broken.

These days, we don’t often refer to the validity of the money itself but rather to “monetary policy” and how the Federal Reserve has managed to calibrate the money supply to economic activity over the last two decades. There are plenty of critiques; the most pointed ones blame former Fed chief Alan Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low, too long.

During his 19 years at the monetary helm — from 1987 to 2006 — Mr. Greenspan served under four different U.S. presidents. At least one of them, George H.W. Bush, blamed Mr. Greenspan for keeping interest rates too high. The stock market crash that occurred in October 1987, two months after Mr. Greenspan’s confirmation under Ronald Reagan, sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 508 points (23%). It required huge injections of liquidity, which subsequently needed to be mopped up with tighter monetary policy. “I reappointed him,” the elder President Bush said. “And he disappointed me.”

President Clinton likewise reappointed Mr. Greenspan — and soon learned the terms of the trade-off for reduced short-term interest rates: Bring down the fiscal budget deficit. Spurred on by a Republican Congress, it actually happened; the federal budget was balanced in 1998. All too briefly, the Fed’s biggest concern was how to carry out future monetary policy if we ran out of government debt securities for open-market operations. The fiscal deficit subsequently ballooned after 2001, due to spending in excess of revenue growth, while interest rates and unemployment — and inflation, counterintuitively — remained low. One thing for sure: We will have more than enough government debt securities.

There’s a reason for this short diversion into Mr. Greenspan’s long watch. While he is readily demonized today — Italy’s finance minister recently characterized him as the man who, after Osama bin Laden, “hurt America the most” — Mr. Greenspan is also the man who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and whose honorary titles include Knight Commander of the British Empire and Commander of the French Legion d’honneur.

So how does such an accomplished central banker turn out to be a monetary doofus?

Scapegoats are wonderfully convenient receptacles for our collective disappointment, but that’s all. When credit markets seize up, when financial instruments disintegrate, when the dollar fails — it’s not because Alan Greenspan was not sufficiently omniscient. He wasn’t, true. But no one ever was. No one ever could be.

If capitalism depends on designating a person of godlike abilities to manage demand and supply for all forms of money and credit — currency, demand deposits, money-market funds, repurchase agreements, equities, mortgages, corporate debt — we are as doomed as those wretched citizens who relied on central planning for their economic salvation.

Think of it: Nothing is more vital to capitalism than capital, the financial seed corn dedicated to next year’s crop. Yet we, believers in free markets, allow the price of capital, i.e., the interest rate on loanable funds, to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives. We might as well resurrect Gosplan, the old Soviet State Planning Committee, and ask them to draw up the next five-year plan.

“There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.” It would be easy to dismiss this statement as a quaint relic from Mr. Greenspan’s earlier days as an Ayn Rand acolyte; his article on “Gold and Economic Freedom” appears in her 1966 compendium “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” But Mr. Greenspan said it, rather emphatically, last October on the Fox Business Network. He was responding to the interviewer’s question: “Why do we need a central bank?”

Whatever well-intentioned reasons existed in 1913 for creating the Federal Reserve — to provide an elastic currency to soften the blow of economic contractions caused by “irrational exuberance” (and that will never be conquered, so long as humans have aspirations) — one would be hard-pressed to say that the financial fallout from this latest money meltdown will have less damaging consequences for the average person than would have been incurred under a gold standard.

Moreover, the mission of the central bank has been greatly compromised. Can anyone have faith that Fed policy decisions going into the future will deliver more reliable money? Don’t we already know in our bones that the cost of this latest financial nightmare will be born by all of us who store the value of our labor and measure our purchasing power in the form of dollars? As John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist, observed in his “Tract on Monetary Reform,” published in 1923:

“It is common to speak as though, when a Government pays its way by inflation, the people of the country avoid taxation. We have seen that this is not so. What is raised by printing notes is just as much taken from the public as is a beer-duty or an income-tax. What a Government spends the public pay for. There is no such thing as an uncovered deficit.”

The entire world has been affected by the breakdown of the U.S. financial system, thanks to the globalization of investment capital. But the free flow of capital — along with free trade — is a good thing, the best path to global prosperity. The problem is that the role of the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency has been called into serious question, both by allies and adversaries. Writing in the People’s Daily, Chinese economist Shi Jianxun laments: “The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States.”

Let’s do exactly that. It is time to take on the task of establishing a new foundation for international economic relations and financial relations — one dedicated to open markets and based on monetary integrity. Every country is responsible for anchoring its own currency to the universal reserve asset, and every citizen has the right to convert the national currency into the universal reserve asset.

That’s how a gold standard works. A bimetallic system, linked to silver and gold, works the same way. In either case the money is fixed to a common anchor — and thus automatically functions as a common currency to serve the needs of legitimate producers and consumers throughout the world.

How would such an approach cure financial market ills? Nothing can rescue humans from occasionally making bad choices or succumbing to herding instincts. But on the same principle as democracy and free elections, embedded in the aggregate judgment of individuals over time is a wisdom that outperforms the most ostensibly savvy administrator. Sound money would go a long way toward eliminating the distortions that pervert financial decisions and credit allocations. Price signals do matter; if they don’t, then free markets don’t matter, and capitalism doesn’t work. In which case, let government dictate demand and regulate supply.

No, we need to fix the money. Literally.

One of the candidates for president of the United States might issue the call for international monetary reform. Bad timing? The memo that resulted in the 1944 Bretton Woods international monetary agreement was written three weeks after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next global conference need not take place in Bretton Woods, N.H., but rather Paris or Shanghai. Countries should participate on a voluntary basis, no coercion, in full recognition that the goal is to hammer out a new financial order where the validity of the monetary unit of account is not determined by hollow men roaming the marble halls of government central banks.

This is where the new world of sound money begins. This is where the unknown ideal of capitalism takes form.

Ms. Shelton, an economist, is author of “Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System” (Free Press, 1994).

 

New Book: Male “Guyland” Culture Encourages Career Aimlessness and Personal Anomie!

Dude! Why guys aren’t growing up

Career aimlessness and beer and porn culture define ‘Guyland’

TODAY Books

updated 10:41 a.m. ET, Wed., Aug. 27, 2008

After interviewing hundreds of 16- to 26-year-olds across the U.S., sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel found a trend of “guy” culture that is marked by the inability to have healthy relationships with women, murky career goals, and the desire not to grow up. In his new book “Guyland,” Kimmel writes about why many young men are trapped between adolescence and adulthood. An excerpt.

Jeff* is 24, tall and fit, with shaggy brown hair and an easy smile. After graduating from Brown three years ago, with an honors degree in history and anthropology, he moved back home to the Boston suburbs and started looking for a job. After several months, he found one, as a sales representative for a small Internet provider. He stays in touch with friends from college by text message and email, and still heads downtown on weekends to hang out at Boston’s “Brown bars.”

“It’s kinda like I never left college,” he says, with a mixture of resignation and pleasure. “Same friends, same aimlessness.”

Andy is 17, a high-school senior in the San Diego area. Affable, slightly chubby, and wearing glasses, his Chargers jersey signals his interest in sports. At the moment, he’s waiting to hear to which University of California campus he’ll be accepted. Or if he’ll be accepted. Once a reasonably good student, he says he now worries that he’s spent so much time playing video games and hanging out in online communities that he hasn’t studied hard enough and that his grades have suffered. “I just get kinda lost in there, you know?” he says. “My parents think I’m doing homework all the time, so I sorta keep it a secret.”

Read whole article

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26317942/?GT1=43001

 

THE DRUG WAR’S CORRUPTING INFLUENCE

Doctors hold banners during a demonstration against a recent wave of crimes and kidnappings in Tijuana, Mexico

Mexico Pays the Price of Prohibition

 

 

 

 

by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

August 18, 2008; Page A13

With the world fixated on Vladimir Putin’s expansionist exploits in Georgia, a different sort of assault against a democracy south of the U.S. border is getting scant attention.

But it is equally alarming.

 

Mexico is engaged in a life-or-death struggle against organized crime. Last week six more law enforcement officials were killed in the line of duty battling the country’s drug cartels. This brings the death toll in President Felipe Calderón’s blitz against

 

A number of the dead have been gangsters but they also include journalists, politicians, judges, police and military, and civilians. For perspective on how violent Mexico has become, consider that the total number of Americans killed in Iraq since March 2003 is 4,142.

 

Kidnapping and armed robbery numbers have also soared. In Tijuana, a kidnapping epidemic has provoked an exodus of upper-middle-class families across the U.S. border in search of safety.

 

As this column has pointed out many times, one reason that security has so deteriorated in the past decade is the demand in the U.S. for illegal narcotics, and the U.S. government’s crackdown on the Caribbean trafficking route. Mexican cartels have risen up to serve the U.S. market, and their earnings have made them rich and well-armed.

 

The victims of last week’s killing spree include the deputy police chief of the state of Michoacan and one of his men, a detective in the state of Chihuahua, and a deputy police chief in the state of Quintana Roo. As of July, 449 police and military officers have died in the Calderón offensive, further underscoring the price Mexico is paying

In a developed country like the U.S., prohibition takes a toll on the rule of law but does not overwhelm it. In Mexico, where a newly revived democracy is trying to reform institutions after 70 years of autocratic governance under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the corrupting influence of drug profits is far more pernicious.

 

According to Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, part of the explanation for the kidnapping surge can be traced to the success of the government’s squeeze on the drug runners. He told me in February that he expected the pressure to produce a fragmentation of the cartels, turf wars and an increase in other criminal activities to replace shrinking profits in drug trafficking.

 

If true, the kidnapping spree might be a sign that Mr. Medina Mora’s strategy is working. But when federal investigators recently fingered Mexico City police in the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Mr. Medina Mora’s theory lost some credibility. Rather than being the work of demoralized criminals, kidnapping, in the capital anyway, appears to be just one business run by a well-oiled machine with institutional links.

 

Ricardo Medina, a leading Mexican opinion writer and the editor of El Economista, the country’s top financial daily, told me on Thursday the case shows that “independent of the shooting war on drugs there is the problem of institutions being infiltrated by criminals and corrupted.”

 

Even captured criminals often go free, Mr. Medina says, and all branches of government share responsibility for this crisis of impunity. It is true that judges can be intimidated or bribed. But it is also true, for example, that under Mexican law kidnapping is not a federal crime, and therefore must be handled by local authorities. Often victims do not want to press charges because there is a perception that the local police and local governments are in on it.

 

That perception has been strengthened in the Martí case, but the problem of impunity is hardly new. As Mr. Medina wrote in El Economista on Friday, “impunity is in view of everyone, day after day. We all see it even to the point of smiling ironically or shrugging our shoulders.”

 

Why hasn’t this problem been tackled? One possible explanation in Mexico City is that the district police and the rest of the district’s bureaucracy represent an important constituency for the ruling Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). If the PRD’s base prefers the status quo, there is a high political cost to challenging it.

 

Drug profits going to organized crime only complicate the matter. Writing in the latest issue of the Milken Institute Review, former U.S. foreign service officer Laurence Kerr takes a page out of U.S. history. “America has been in Mexico’s shoes: flush with the bounty of illegal liquor sales, organized crime thoroughly penetrated the U.S. justice system during Prohibition. As long as Americans willingly bury Mexican drug traffickers in greenbacks, progress in constraining the trade is likely to be limited.” Regrettably, Mexico’s institutional reform will also be limited and the death toll will keep climbing.

 

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com

 

GANG GREEN: Is Environmentalism The New Totalitarianism?

By STEPHEN MOORE
August 15, 2008; Page W9

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

Read whole column:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121876314203443039.html?mod=taste_primary_hs

Why We Are Not In A Great Depression

Todd G. Buchholz. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Aug 15, 2008. pg. W.9

I slapped the side of my television in April when economist Joe Stiglitz called this the worst recession “since the Great Depression.” But now the economy is not only hurting homeowners; it’s apparently harming parakeets, too! An AP item reports that pet owners are abandoning their furry and feathery friends to animal shelters because they can no longer afford to feed them. Never mind that GDP is puttering along in positive terrain. Headlines still scream that we’re closing in on 1929, not 2009.

Are we a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm put it a little while ago, getting himself kicked off John McCain’s advisory team? No, the American public is not whining. One reason may be that consumers are swallowing $13 billion of pick-me-uppers like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil. (A doctor friend who volunteered at a sleepaway camp said that, every morning, 20% of the kids lined up for their psychomeds.) More likely, though, Americans are just leaving the whining to pundits and trend reporters. The fellow who filed the pet story did not bother to point out that, in this alleged new Great Depression, the Pet Products Manufacturers Association says that Americans have spent 5% more this year on their pooches and pussies than last year.

Where are the Hoovervilles camped out under the Washington Monument? Where are the soup lines? Willie Nelson is still on tour, beseeching us to save the family farm. But it must be tougher for him to gin up support when the typical American farm, thanks in part to ever expanding ethanol subsidies, has see its annual income surge 50% past its 10-year average. Apparently Willie is traveling on a biodiesel, soybean-fed bus. So now we know at least what Willie’s bus is smoking.

The fact is that most Americans get up in the morning to work hard, feed their families and pay for soccer uniforms and maybe a vacation, if they can stand the security lines at the airport. Most Americans don’t let whining get in the way of work. That separates us from the French, who would join a picket line to protest against picket lines. The problem with whining, as with socialism, is that it requires too many evenings. And forget about the organized whining that we know as social activism. That requires too many meetings and too many covered- dish dinners too. I’m still not sure what Barack Obama accomplished as a professional “community organizer.” I doubt he was another Martin Luther King, but I’m pretty certain he carried a lot of macaroni salad.

Sure, we gripe about higher food prices and shaky home prices, but we are still living “La Vida Latte,” lining up every morning before a barista and otherwise indulging in the imperatives of the good life. Yes, the share price of Starbucks has sunk of late, but Americans spent more, not less, at Starbucks last year than the year before. And if you add premium coffee sales at McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, the growth rate of this liquid luxury has soared. I should point out that the price of a Starbucks latte is about $1,200 a barrel. Makes that SUV fill-up a little easier to swallow, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Prius cars are flying off the Toyota lots, even though they cost $3,700 more than a similarly sized gasoline-fired Toyota and it takes 3.5 years to pay back the investment in fuel savings. The ageless Paul McCartney’s spanking new Lexus LS600h will take him 102 years. Rock on, Sir Paul.

Of course, these are high-end luxury items, the kinds you see at the Kennedy compound when you look at it from Martha’s Vineyard, hoping never to see a windmill blocking your view. But even the situation for middle-class Americans is not all that dire. In July the jobless rate among college graduates was just 2.4%, drifting up from 2.1% in March. That is miles away from the 1981 recession and, of course, you’d need scientific notation to compare it to the Great Depression, no matter what the Obama campaign says. The job market, while weak, has not collapsed.

Each Thursday morning I look at weekly jobless claims — how many people trudged up to state unemployment offices, pink slips in hand. That number has hovered under 500,000. To match up to the level of 1981-82 layoffs, it would have to explode to 1.2 million. It won’t. Moreover, a big proportion of the layoffs are coming among 16-24 year olds, who are not yet supporting a household.

So, no, we are not whining — in part because we do not have much to whine about, whatever the hysterical headlines might say. But don’t pop champagne corks yet. For some, it still feels lousy out there. But lousy is not a technical synonym for recession. On the lower end of the income spectrum, we have deep problems, both economic and sociological.

Back in the ’60s a high-school graduate could still make good money, especially if he learned a trade. That’s because almost every other adolescent in the world lacked a high-school degree. We were about the only country that educated teenagers. But now the rest of the world has caught up, and Americans are undereducated or ill-educated. High schools don’t teach what they used to, and so students who don’t go to college are left without the skills necessary to compete in a global economy. Forget the Beijing Olympics. In math-science competitions, the U.S. is the Jamaican bobsled team of education.

Most Americans who suffer layoffs do not deserve blame. It is more likely that their incompetent, often overpaid, bosses do. Still, no president, Democrat or Republican, can create prosperity for those who decide to forgo even a basic education. Our problem is not whining. It is persuading young people that, with baby boomers retiring, entitlement programs bulging and the world economy growing ever more competitive, now’s the time to roll up the sleeves for something other than tattoos.

As for hysterical journalists, I’m waiting for a reporter to tell us that pet owners can’t even afford the paper to line their animals’ cages. That would be a shame, because it’s about all those papers are good for.

Enviromania: Will Obama’s Energy Plan Sacrifice Growth For Climate Goals?

Enviromania
August 7, 2008; Page A11

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she’d levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan.

With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

 No one has been hit harder by this unexpected truth than Nancy Pelosi and her green brigades.

Fearful of an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil in, of all places, our own country, the Pelosi House and Harry Reid’s Senate shut down Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner calls drilling the greatest issue Republicans have had in his political lifetime. A party flat on its back is ready to run on oil pumps.

Why stop there?

 

Republicans shouldn’t settle for making the world safe for SUVs. What’s going on here is about more than $4 gasoline.

When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats spent a week holding the people’s chamber under house arrest, they made plain a political vulnerability beyond drilling. To achieve greenhouse gas goals in the out-years, they are willing to risk a slowdown now in the American economy. How else can you interpret what happened this week? These Democrats aren’t environmentalists. They’re enviromaniacs.

An environmentalist with two feet on the planet is someone who admits that fixing what economists call “externalities,” such as air pollution or climate effects, requires a balance between those goals and protecting the productive economy.

AP

An enviromaniac is the sort of person who would say: “Breaking our oil addiction . . . will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” The complete transformation of our economy?

So said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his major energy statement this Monday. Though the speech had hedged bows to oil, coal and nuclear, it was overwhelmingly a Goreian jeremiad about “building” a new economy on a promise called renewables.

“We can see shuttered factories open their doors to manufacturers that sell wind turbines and solar panels that will power our homes and our businesses,” he said. “We can watch as millions of new jobs with good pay and good benefits are created.” This will “meet our moral obligations to future generations.”

Whoa. “Millions” of new jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, and this is to “meet our moral obligations?”

Virtue aside, here’s the biggest problem with Sen. Obama and Democratic enviromania: It’s a risky roll of the dice with the U.S. economy.

The economy we’ve got works. We know that carbon makes the U.S. economy run like a Swiss watch (transportation, distribution, production, commuting). The bet between carbon inputs and growing American outputs is virtually 1:1.

Mr. Obama and his Democratic colleagues in Congress want a “complete transformation” of an already successful economy. Not partial. complete. Can any of them say what the odds are that all this economic activity, including the nation’s electrical grid, will work as well with their new fuels? Assuredly, growth’s odds aren’t as good as the ones we have now.

Sen. Obama: “I will not pretend we can achieve [my goals] without cost or without sacrifice.” Might this mean foregoing some GDP for five to 10 years? “Growth” appears in Mr. Obama’s speech only to describe the “clean energy sector.”

The problem with Democratic enviromania is that it’s uncoupled from the realities of a nation whose economy has to compete now with the Chinas and Indias of the world, whose high growth rates use proven energy sources.

Republicans this fall should push their argument beyond drilling. Drilling is mainly a proxy for one’s understanding of the U.S. economy. The Democrats and Mr. Obama showed this week they are so in thrall to Al Gore’s big climate bet that they’d risk having a slow-growth economy. The GOP should run on High Growth America as a better bet than Democratic Slow Growth.

Instead of enviro-messianism, they should propose a drill-to-transition for whatever energy source can prove it works at a nonsacrificial price — shale, coal gasification, nuclear, solar or some combination. (Windmill farms are a pox on the land.)

Don’t be oil-industry deniers. Mr. Obama and Rep. Pelosi want to hammer and punish the only players on the field who actually know how to put massive amounts of energy on the grid. Don’t we want them using their resources to drill here, rather than off in some godforsaken place producing gushers of cash for people who want to pound us into a hole? We need Smart Oil on our side for at least 10 years.

Democrats this week chose the prayer of alternative energy over proven prosperity. They’ve handed prosperity in the here-and-now to the Republicans. Run with it.

Is Obama “The Green Hornet”?–WSJ Says Obama Energy Policy Not Right For America

August 6, 2008; Page A14

Al Gore said the other day that “the future of human civilization” depends on giving up fossil fuels within a decade — and was acclaimed as a prophet by the political class. Obviously boring reality doesn’t count for much these days. Even so, when Barack Obama wheels out an energy agenda nearly as grandiose as Mr. Gore’s, shouldn’t it receive at least some media scrutiny?

On Monday, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. must “end the age of oil in our time,” with “real results by the end of my first term in office.” This, he said, will “take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” Mark that one down as the understatement of the year. Maybe Mr. Obama really is the Green Hornet, or some other superhero of his current political myth.

The Senator calls for $150 billion over 10 years to achieve “energy independence,” with elevated subsidies for renewable alternatives and efficiency programs. He also says he’ll “leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy,” euphemistically referring to his climate plan to tax and regulate greenhouse gases. Every President since Nixon has declared “energy independence,” as Mr. Obama noted. But this time, he says, things will change.

They won’t. And not because of “the old politics,” or whatever. Currently, alternative sources — wind, solar, biomass, hydroelectric and geothermal — provide less than 7% of yearly domestic consumption. Throw out hydro and geothermal, and it’s only 4%. For the foreseeable future, renewables simply cannot provide the scale and volume of energy needed to meet growing U.S. demand, which is expected to increase by 20% over the next two decades. Even with colossal taxpayer subsidies, renewables probably can’t even slow the rate of growth of carbon-based fuel consumption, much less replace it.

Take wind power, which has grown rapidly though still only provides about two-thirds of 1% of all U.S. electricity. The Energy Department optimistically calculates that ramping up merely to 20% by 2030 would require more than $2 trillion and turbines across the Midwest “wind corridor,” plus multiple offshore installations. And we’ll need a new “transmission superhighway system” of more than 12,000 miles of electric lines to connect the wind system to population centers. A mere $150 billion won’t cut it. Mr. Obama also didn’t mention that this wind power will be more expensive than traditional sources like coal.

Wind, too, is intermittent: It isn’t always blowing and can’t be accessed on demand when people need electricity. Since there’s no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, wind requires “spinning reserve,” or nonalternative baseload power to avoid blackouts. That baseload power is now provided largely by coal, nuclear and natural gas, and wind can’t displace much. The same problem afflicts solar energy — now one-hundredth of 1% of net U.S. electric generation. One of the top uses of solar panels is to heat residential swimming pools.

Mr. Obama also says he wants to mandate that all new cars and trucks are “flexible fuel” vehicles, meaning that they can run on higher concentrations of corn ethanol mixed with gasoline, or second-generation biofuels if those ever come onto the market. Like wind and solar, this would present major land use problems: According to credible estimates, land areas larger than the size of Texas would need to be planted with fuel feedstocks to displace just half the oil America imports every day. Meanwhile, the economic distortions caused by corn ethanol — such as higher food prices — have been bad enough.

And yet there’s more miracle work to do. Mr. Obama promises to put at least one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015. That’s fine if consumers want to buy them. But even if technical battery problems are overcome, this would only lead to “fuel switching” — if cars don’t use gasoline, the energy still has to come from somewhere. And the cap-and-trade program also favored by Mr. Obama would effectively bar new coal plants, while new nuclear plants are only now being planned after a 30-year hiatus thanks to punishing regulations and lawsuits.

Problems like these are the reality of “alternative” energy, and they explain why every “energy independence” plan has faltered since the 1970s. But just because Mr. Obama’s plan is wildly unrealistic doesn’t mean that a program of vast new taxes, subsidies and mandates wouldn’t be destructive. The U.S. has a great deal invested in fossil fuels not because of a political conspiracy or because anyone worships carbon but because other sources of energy are, right now, inferior.

Consumption isn’t rising because of wastefulness. The U.S. produces more than twice as much GDP today per unit of energy as it did in the 1950s, yet energy use has risen threefold. That’s because energy use is tethered to growth, and the economy continues to innovate and expand. Mr. Obama seems to have other ideas.

See all of today’s editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

Scientists Turn Skin Cells Into Motor Neurons in ALS Patients

Feat could one day lead to tailor-made cells to treat fatal disease, researchers say

Posted July 31, 2008

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) — Scientists have turned skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease into motor neurons that are genetically identical to the patients’ own neurons.

An unlimited number of these neurons can now be created and studied in the laboratory, a capability which should result in a better understanding of the disease and, one day, lead to new treatments or even the production of healthy cells that can replace the diseased ones.

“The hope of some scientists is that they might be able to harness stem cells and program them to generate pluripotent stem cell lines [capable of differentiating into many different types of cells] which have the genes of patients,” said Kevin Eggan, co-author of a paper appearing July 31 in the online version of Science. “This would open up the possibility of producing a large supply of immune-matched cells to that patient that could be used in transplantation methodologies.”

“The other hope, and one that’s much closer upon us . . . is if you could produce the cell types that become sick in that person, you might be able to use them in the laboratory to come to understand basic aspects of the disease and take the study of disease out of patients, where it’s very difficult, and put it into the Petri dish,” added Eggan, who is a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and spoke about the research at a teleconference Wednesday.

However, the actual therapeutic potential of this approach is still years away.

Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is caused by the degeneration and death of spinal motor neurons, which carry messages from the spinal cord to the body’s muscles. This leads to paralysis of muscles and, eventually, death. Some 30,000 people in the United States suffer from the disease, which has no cure.

“We don’t at all fully understand [ALS], and it is our lack of understanding of that disease process which we believe is preventing us from developing more effective [treatments],” said Christopher Henderson, a co-author on the paper and co-director of the Center for Motor Neuron Biology and Disease at Columbia University. “Because the disease process is happening in the spinal cord in the central nervous system of patients, we don’t at all have access to living examples of the neurons that are undergoing the disease process. . . . No way could we go to ALS patients and take samples of their motor neurons.”

The scientists had originally planned to use somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or “therapeutic cloning,” to try to accomplish this feat. That process involves removing the genetic material from a donated human oocyte and replacing it with genetic material from the skin cells of patients. The approach has been hindered by political, ethical and other obstacles.

Instead, researchers decided to take adult skin cells from two elderly sisters (aged 82 and 89) with a genetic form of ALS and reprogrammed them into cells resembling embryonic stem cells using a technique called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. iPS has already been successfully used to reprogram healthy adult cells.

This study was the first to apply the technique to cells from ill patients.

Those embryonic stem cells were then transformed into motor neurons, although it’s not yet clear if the cells will suffer from the same disease process.

Although only about 2 percent of people with ALS suffer from this particular form of the disease, Eggan and Henderson believe the approach has promise for studying other forms of the disease. In fact, the research team is already working on producing similar cell lines from patients with the “sporadic” form of the disease.

It was also encouraging that the feat was accomplished in the two of the oldest, if not the oldest, ALS patients in the United States. Researchers didn’t know if the ravages of the disease might have interfered with their ability to reprogram the cells.

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether iPS will eliminate the need for somatic cell nuclear transfer. Eggan said it won’t.

“There are still several important caveats for these cells that we’ve made that are important to be aware of,” Eggan said. For one thing, the cells were infected with genetically modified viruses, making them potentially dangerous to humans. Future research will no doubt focus on ways to replace those viruses with chemicals.

“[But], for the moment, we’re going to have to press forward with SCNT research just in case that doesn’t work out,” Eggan said. So far, though, no one knows if human SCNT is even possible.

More information

Visit the ALS Association for more on Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

AICAR: Scientists Have Put Exercise In a Pill

Researchers experiment with a chemical compound that they say can produce the benefits of aerobic activity without the work.

By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 1, 2008

Scientists have discovered what could be the ultimate workout for couch potatoes: exercise in a pill.

In experiments on mice that did no exercise, the chemical compound, known as AICAR, allowed them to run 44% farther on a treadmill than those that did not receive the drug.

The drug appeared to change the physical composition of muscle, essentially transforming the tissue from sugar-burning fast-twitch fibers to fat-burning slow-twitch ones, the same change that occurs in distance runners and cyclists through training, according to research released Thursday.

“You’re getting the benefits of exercise without having to do any work,” said David Mangelsdorf, a pharmacologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not connected with the research.

It is unknown if the drug has any benefit for athletes who actually work out — or for any human, for that matter, since the research has so far only involved mice.

Though the chemical pathways that transform muscle cells appear to be the same in mice and humans, Michael Rennie, a physiologist at the University of Nottingham in England, said that AICAR did not activate human pathways at the doses research subjects received in a study he conducted of the drug’s potential to treat diabetes.

“Mice are not men,” Rennie said. “Rats and mice are much more metabolically unstable than human beings.”

Nonetheless, lead researcher Ronald Evans, a molecular physiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, said he has already been contacted by dozens of athletes and overweight people who have heard about his research from lectures.

One request came from a horse trainer who was interested in trying AICAR out on a thoroughbred, he said. Evans declined.

“Anything that could provide half of a quarter of 1% is attractive,” said Dr. Don Catlin, a professor emeritus of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA and a top anti-doping expert. “The athlete who can find a way to get an edge is one up on his competitors.”

Evans said he had notified world anti-doping officials, who are now scrambling to implement a test for it before the Beijing Olympics start next week.

The compound, which is naturally produced in tiny amounts in human muscle cells and has been studied for decades, is readily available through scientific supply companies. One company was offering AICAR for $120 a gram. At that price, giving a person the drug in the same concentration the mice got would cost thousands of dollars a day.

Evans predicted that in the wake of his study, published in the journal Cell, the drug would “fly off the shelves.”

AICAR has been tested in humans for a variety of conditions. “It was found to be a quite safe drug, at least at the doses we were using,” said chemist Paul Laikind, who began testing it in the 1980s as a means of preserving blood flow to the heart during surgery.

Drug maker Schering-Plough Corp. is trying to develop it as an intravenous infusion for use during bypasses.

With more research, scientists said, the drug’s fat-burning properties could also help reduce weight, ward off diabetes, prevent heart disease and restore the fitness of bedridden patients.

The discovery of AICAR as a potential couch-potato exercise pill grew out of Evans’ continuing research on the physiology of muscle cells.

In 2004, he made headlines for engineering “marathon mice.” By injecting a single gene into the nucleus of a fertilized egg, he created mice born with more efficient muscles, faster metabolisms and stronger hearts.

Evans wanted to know if it was possible to achieve the same effect using a drug.

His team started not with AICAR but with another compound known as GW1516, which drug maker GlaxoSmithKline is trying to develop to raise levels of HDL, or good cholesterol. The drug is known to stimulate the production of a protein known as PPARd, which in turn activates the genes that boost endurance in muscle cells.

In sedentary mice, the drug had no effect on endurance. Only when the drug was combined with exercise did it give the mice an advantage. After five weeks of training, mice that got the drug were able to run for an average of three hours and 24 minutes, a 68% improvement over mice that received only training.

When the researchers dissected the test mice, they found that the number of high-efficiency muscle fibers had increased 29%. “That’s a huge increase,” Evans said. “That’s the kind of stuff that Lance Armstrong and endurance athletes aim for.”

The experiment might have ended there, but after Evans submitted the paper for publication last year, one academic reviewer wanted to know why the drug had transformed the fibers only with exercise.

The reviewer surmised that the answer could be found somewhere in the complex chain of chemical reactions that energize muscle cells during exercise.

Evans decided to try AICAR because it closely resembles a nucleotide that prompts the production of an enzyme that activates the high-endurance genes.

To Evans’ surprise, the experiment worked. When sedentary mice were fed the drug daily for four weeks, they were able to run an average of 1,795 feet on a treadmill, 44% farther than mice that had received a placebo.

The researchers now plan to test whether AICAR or GW1516 can increase endurance beyond the maximum that can be achieved by intensive training alone.

In the meantime, Evans said, his team has developed detection protocols for both compounds and their breakdown products and turned them over to the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal.

He said it was unclear whether the tests would be in place for the Olympics.

Frederic Donze, a spokesman for the association, said in an e-mail that the organization “does not indicate when it implements new detection means or methods.”

But, he added, it is not crucial for the tests to be in place now.

“A number of anti-doping organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, store doping control samples of their events for eight years for potential future retesting and detection as anti-doping science advances,” Donze said.

alan.zarembo@latimes.com

Michael G. Zey: U.S. Could Become an Energy Exporter

The Providence Journal

 

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, May 5, 2008

 

MICHAEL G. ZEY

 

MONTCLAIR, N.J.

ACCORDING TO McGraw-Hill’s energy-research arm, Platts, every recession since 1973 has been preceded by sharp spikes in the price of oil. Now, as the price of oil sets records, predictably the nation is feeling economic pain again.

After each economic contraction over the last 35 years, the U.S. has vowed to cut its dependence on foreign energy sources by developing its own oil, coal, nuclear and various “alternative” resources. And each time we have squandered energy-development opportunities, in the process becoming more dependent on foreign oil. In 1980, 37 percent of the oil the U.S. used came from foreign sources, rising to 55 percent in 2001 and headed for 65 percent in 2016.

As the Platts report plainly states, without a growing energy supply, countries face “declining growth rates, diminished standards of living, and growing transfer of wealth from importing to exporting countries.” In other words the U.S. either enlarges its energy pool or just waits for accelerating gasoline and electricity prices to erode its global economic competitiveness over the next several decades.

There are some signs we are finally getting serious about becoming energy self-sufficient. Last year saw the first applications for new nuclear-power plant construction in the United States since the 1970s, with 31 new plant-license applications soon to come. Four to eight new U.S. nuclear plants should be in operation by 2016 or so, helping us to compete with China, India, and Russia, which plan over 50 nuclear plants by 2020.

The outlook for developing other energy sources is not as rosy. Several U.S. governors, purportedly concerned about “greenhouse-gas emissions,” have vetoed construction of coal-burning power plants in their states — at least 45 coal plants were abandoned in 2007. Meanwhile China, Germany and the Netherlands are busily constructing “clean-coal” power plants that will use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that traps carbon-dioxide emissions and pipes them underground, not into the atmosphere. Are our anti-coal governors aware of this breakthrough?

The High Arctic region’s resources are also critical to U.S. energy independence. But if the government accedes to demands to classify that region’s polar bear as an endangered species, we cannot tap the estimated 10 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), equal to the next 10-15 years of oil imports from Saudi Arabia. A planned privately funded natural-gas pipeline to transport to the U.S. mainland some of the 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope would also be scrapped.

The list of such wasted opportunities is painfully long. We have cut funding for nuclear-fusion research. We refuse to drill for oil off the U.S. shore, or to build any new oil refineries that could process any additional oil. We are only slowly developing vehicles powered by hydrogen, electricity and compressed air. Many countries, but not the U.S., are seriously examining low energy nuclear reaction devices as a cheap energy source for homes, vehicles, and appliances.

Government and business leaders’ response to this emerging crisis is alarmingly sanguine. Influenced by concerns over global warming, presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are offering plans to cap carbon emissions by 2050 by switching to green energy technologies, such as solar, wind and biomass — sources that experts say lack the muscle to power a globally competitive 21st Century economy. They are lukewarm on nuclear-power development. Clearly, neither party has a vibrant pro-progress wing able to pressure the candidates to emphatically demand a strong energy-production program. Is a new party built upon pro-progress principles the solution?

Not to be “out-greened,” PSEG, a big New Jersey energy company, ran an ad encouraging its customers to go on an austerity-style “energy diet,” and seems almost giddy about all the “green-collar” jobs to be created by the windmill and biomass industries. While voicing perfunctory support for nuclear power, the PSEG ad informs us that “the power plant that doesn’t need to be built is the cleanest [plant] of all.” Some economists and government planners are now telling Americans that slower economic growth is actually an “energy solution”—less economic activity, less energy use — omitting the fact such contractions also lead to higher unemployment and lower living standards.

More often than not it is politicians, corporate moguls and environmental organizations sitting together at hearings and legislative councils who are determining this “green” energy future for Americans. One might ask why such conclaves do not seat organizations representing the pro-progress, pro-development, “expansionary” vision of the future shared by most working Americans?

Without such a presence, laws that drastically affect Americans’ lives, such as the 2007 bill requiring all Americans to replace their incandescent light bulbs with 10 times more expensive “environmentally friendly” bulbs by 2012, pass with little public scrutiny or opposition.

Once America achieves energy independence, our next goal should be to become a net energy exporter! The U.S. economy would boom as those petro-dollars pour into the U.S. from abroad, instead of traveling from our pockets to Saudi and Venezuelan treasuries! And the world economy would thrive as we expand the world energy pool with our energy resources and technologies yet to be discovered.

We have the technology, the resources and the skills. Now all we need is the will!

Michael G. Zey, a sociologist and futurist, is author of Seizing the Future (Simon and Schuster), and a professor at the Montclair State University School of Business.

 

Michael G. Zey (The Providence Journal): What Medical Tourism Teaches America

 The Providence Journal

 

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, September 13, 2007

 

 

 

MICHAEL G. ZEY

 

MONTCLAIR, N.J.

HEALTH CARE today provides one of the great paradoxes of our time. Breakthroughs in genetics, biotechnology, stem-cell research and transplant technology have enabled us to live longer than any generation in recorded human history. But the newest and greatest medical miracles — heart-bypass surgery, LASIK eye treatments, cochlear implants and hip replacements — don’t come cheap.

Presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Barack Obama all claim that their health-care plans can make medical help affordable and accessible to the broad mass of Americans. But even as they debate government solutions, Americans are taking a uniquely market-driven approach to their medical treatment. In 2006, over 150,000 of us boarded planes to India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to get hip transplants, heart surgery and dental work.

This number is sure to grow as more of our citizens discover the eye-popping medical-cost savings overseas recently described in Forbes magazine and elsewhere. A $55,000 valve replacement in the U.S. runs $13,000 in Cyprus’s American Heart Institute. In Malaysia, Americans can save $80,000 on a liver transplant and $40,000 on hip-replacement surgery. In Istanbul, the standard U.S. $69,000 price tag for surgical oncology performed by a staff affiliated with Harvard Medical International is reduced to $14,000. In the Philippines, Americans can save tens of thousands of dollars on kidney transplants and bypass surgery. South American dentists undercut U.S. dentists by 20 to 50 percent. Knee-replacement surgery that runs $30,000 in the U.S. costs $6,500 in India. (Cuba’s hospitals did not make any “10 Best” lists, in spite of the plug from Michael Moore’s movie Sicko.)

Practitioners in the U.S. claim that medical service at such low prices must be inferior. But the Joint Commission International, which rigorously inspects hospitals around the world as its parent organization does in the United States, has accredited over 125 hospitals in 23 countries, and expects that number to double soon. Noted Indian hip surgeon Dr. Vijay Bose says that Indian hospitals are simply charging the “appropriate” amount, while U.S. medical costs are “artificially boosted” by malpractice premiums and lawsuits, among other factors. (During the next candidates’ debate, someone should ask trial-lawyer extraordinaire John Edwards how his plan would limit damages from malpractice lawsuits.)

Surprisingly, medical treatment in some countries surpasses that offered in the United States. For instance, doctors in Europe and India have more extensive experience than U.S. doctors using “hip resurfacing,” a long-lasting hip-replacement procedure which preserves a greater portion of the thigh bone. And many foreign countries’ scientific research could very likely generate treatments that would be available in those countries first. An Israeli-Thai company, TheraVitae, is developing an adult-stem-cell therapy for severe heart-disease sufferers. The medical schools and institutes in Chennai, India, are engaged in intensive research in stem-cell research, nanotechnology, tissue engineering, gene therapy and research on curing diabetes.

Predictably, American companies are beginning to encourage their employees to travel to India and other countries for medical procedures, Business Insurance magazine reports. Bonnie Blackley, benefits director at Canton, N.C.-based Blue Ridge Paper Products, said she uses a company named IndUShealth to arrange travel for her employees to India for more cost-effective medical treatment.

As more Americans seek out foreign medical treatment experts, expect fees for major joint-replacement and heart procedures to drop. Daniel J. Snyder of Singapore’s Parkway Holdings hospital chain in Singapore has stated that “the cost of delivering health care in the U.S. will have to come down.” Already the Black Hills Surgery Center, based in Rapid City, S.D., plans to offer knee and hip replacements at half the cost of prices elsewhere in the United States.

The number of Americans taking advantage of global health care should rise yearly. Americans are inveterate bargain hunters, and global health care now enables them to comparison shop for medical procedures on the Internet. And Americans are no strangers to globe-trotting — over 40 million of us traveled or lived offshore in 2006. Some savvy countries are wisely packaging sightseeing vacations with medical-travel trips. Imagine visiting Thailand for a cataract operation and also spending a week on its beaches, or enjoying a safari after undergoing cosmetic surgery in South Africa.

No doubt some hospitals and doctors here might not welcome the inevitable price cutting that could result from the international competition for customers. Pharmaceutical companies have been decidedly negative about Americans’ buying cheaper prescription drugs in Mexico and Canada.

Perhaps we can invite our politicians to sign a pledge that their proposed medical-health systems will in no way prohibit Americans from seeking cheaper and better health care abroad. They should do so enthusiastically. After all, for years they have been lecturing us about how open international competition results in cheaper cars, plasma TVs and DVDs. We can only expect the globalization of health care to be equally beneficial.

More importantly, presidential aspirants must assure us that as they design the next great American health-care system, they will heed the advice the Hippocratic Oath imparts to all medical practitioners: “Do no harm.”

Michael G. Zey is a professor at Montclair State University School of Business, in Montclair, N.J., and the author of the books Ageless Nation, The Future Factor and Seizing the Future.

 

 

READ ARTICLES ON MEDICAL TOURISM BOOM

“Americans seeking stem-cell medical treatment turn to overseas clinics”

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/273921/36/

“Stem cell tourism stirs concern”

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/news/nation/story/2b1c27e61100ca368625748b00113471?OpenDocument

First Opportunity for U.S. Consumers to Explore Medical Travel: The Medical Travel RoadShow Debuts in Six U.S. Cities

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/first-opportunity-us-consumers-explore/story.aspx?guid=%7B70759B35-E3B7-4508-AB39-9CFE4822E07F%7D&dist=hppr

Koreans Live Longer Than Ever

By Bae Ji-sook
Staff ReporterKoreans live up to 79 years on average, the longest ever, and more than the OECD average.

The average life span of Koreans was 79.1 in 2006, higher than the average 78.9 for members of the organization, according to the OECD Health Data 2008 released through the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. It is now narrowing the gap with

 

 

 

 

Japan the “country of longevity,” which boasts 82.4 years.The future for Koreans in terms of life span is quite bright. It is constantly expanding, from 76.4 in 2001 to 77 in 2002 and 78.5 in 2005. “At the end of this year, the figure may exceed 80,” a ministry spokesman said.

 

The OECD said such longevity could be attributable to higher income’s changing people’s lifestyle as a whole; individual care and investment in health management; health insurance coverage expanding year after year; and relatively easy access to medical services.

In fact, the average number of Koreans’ visiting doctors was 11.8 a year in 2005, much higher than OECD average of 6.8. It reflects that health insurance covers nearly every disease and those sick have less of a financial burden, the ministry said.

However, in terms of medical infrastructure, the country still has a way to go. The number of medical staff ― doctors and nurses ― was less than half that of other nations, even though there were more sick beds available.

Also, the number of those dying from cancer and cerebrovascular disease is falling, but those dying from ischemic heart disease and suicide are increasing.

The smoking rate of those over 15 years of age dropped to 25.3 percent in 2005 from 30.4 percent four years ago. Annual alcohol consumption was 8.1 liters per person, lower than the 9.5-liter OECD average.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr

 

 

Carbon Trading Scam?—French Firm Rhodia Cashes In Under U.N. Warming Program

Source:  Copyright 2008, Wall Street Journal
Date:  July 23, 2008
Byline:  Charles Forelle
Original URL

Copyright 2008, Wall Street Journal

 

A French chemical maker is reaping a potential billion-dollar windfall under a United Nations program intended to spur climate-friendly investment in the developing world, highlighting the challenges of using market forces to tackle global warming.

The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn’t make.

The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It’s Rhodia’s single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution “credits.”

The laughing gas is big money thanks to the U.N.-administered program in which polluters in rich countries buy credits like Rhodia’s, effectively paying for the privilege of continuing to emit greenhouse gases. The money is meant to flow to poorer countries to develop clean-air technology — for instance, an African nation would get a financial incentive to build windmills instead of a cheaper, but dirtier, coal-fired power plant.

Rhodia’s experience shows that even a major Western industrial company can cash in on the pollution-trading program. The Rhodia factory in Onsan alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.

The U.N. system is designed to use market mechanisms — the trade in credits — to curb emissions in the developing world without stunting those countries’ economies. Critics say the system is flawed. The money from selling credits reduces the incentive for a relatively wealthy country like South Korea to adopt voluntary cuts of its own, they argue.

“Markets are incredibly powerful institutions,” says David Victor, a Stanford University professor who studies climate policy. But in some cases, he says, “you cannot create the right kind of market forces.”

Some also question the logic of paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Rhodia for installing pollution-control equipment that cost a bare fraction of that, about $15 million or so, to install. Simply paying for the installation of the equipment “could have done this an awful lot more cheaply,” says Patrick McCully of International Rivers, an environmental group.

RELATED DOCUMENT

• Take a look at Rhodia’s U.N. filing describing its project in Onsan.Rhodia points out its Onsan project was approved by both local authorities in South Korea and administrators of the U.N. program. Its projects prevent tens of thousands of tons of nitrous oxide — which is 310 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — from floating into the atmosphere, the company says.

Philippe Rosier, president of Rhodia’s Energy Services division, says the company is committed to environmental protection and has pledged to cut its own greenhouse-gas emissions in France voluntarily by 30% from their 1990 levels by 2010. The company says its efforts world-wide cut the equivalent of 37 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year; for more than half of those reductions, it says, it receives no compensation.

The U.N. defends its pollution-trading system, saying it helps industrialized countries meet their obligations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in a cost-effective way. Regarding windfalls for companies like Rhodia, Conor Barry, an official at the U.N.’s climate secretariat in Bonn, Germany, says the U.N.’s objective is mainly to determine that any emissions reductions are “additional” — that is, they wouldn’t have happened without the financial incentives provided by the U.N.’s pollution-trading program.

Mr. Barry declined to speak specifically about Rhodia. In granting approval to this or any project, the U.N. is in effect concluding it will be “additional.”

Rhodia can claim credits for pollution-cutting at the Onsan plant thanks to international climate negotiations, conducted in the 1990s, that categorize South Korea as a “developing” nation. Under the global agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol, developing nations don’t have to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions, but they get a nice bonus if they do: Each ton of emissions cut generates a credit that can be sold through the U.N. program. Rich countries (most of which are required to cut emissions under the Kyoto treaty) can buy the credits in lieu of cleaning up what comes out of their own smokestacks. Individual European companies can also buy credits to meet their caps under European Union rules.

The U.S. hasn’t signed on to Kyoto. But U.S. lawmakers are debating implementing a similar pollution-trading system.

Today, South Korea’s designation as a developing nation looks outmoded. The country is an industrial powerhouse and home to global brands like Samsung and Hyundai. Per capita gross domestic product is roughly $20,000, putting it on par with Portugal, which is considered a “developed” economy under Kyoto.

South Korea’s economic muscle, combined with developing-nation status, means it has plenty of pollution to profitably cut. That has transformed South Korea into a hotbed of pollution-credit sales. So far, South Korea has received about 18% of all the credits issued world-wide.

Koreans say the rules are the rules, and the world agreed to them. “I can’t say the critics are groundless,” says Jung Jaesoo, 48 years old, who runs a consulting firm that advises Korean companies on how to qualify for credits. “But the Kyoto Protocol is a multilateral agreement. It is impossible to make only South Korea an exception now.”

Mr. Jung’s company, Ecoeye Co., has shepherded about a dozen projects to U.N. approval, among them wind, tidal, solar and hydroelectric power plants.

In credits received so far, South Korea is behind only China and India, two much poorer countries that have per capita GDPs of about $2,500 and $1,000, respectively.

“I think South Korea has great potential,” Mr. Jung says. There are still a number of industries, including semiconductors and flat-panel displays, that can sell credits, Mr. Jung says. “These industries produce a lot of greenhouse gases.”

South Korea’s experience is spurring pollution-credit prospectors like Mr. Jung to scour other countries in Asia, including Thailand and Vietnam, for easy pollution reductions.

Michael Hennig, who works in South Korea for a German trading firm and helped set up a deal to sell credits from a fertilizer factory, says he, too, has been peppered with inquiries. “It’s a good business, because the Western world is basically desperate” to purchase these credits, says Mr. Hennig. “If I would have more [credits], I think I could sell them all.”

The U.N.’s pollution-trading system doesn’t directly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted to the atmosphere, since each ton of carbon dioxide cut in a developing country allows someone in an industrialized country to pollute that same amount. Rather, the idea is to transfer money to poor countries to encourage construction of environmentally sensitive factories and spur alternative-energy use. Otherwise, the argument goes, global greenhouse-gas emissions would grow more quickly as developing nations like China expand their economies.

Looming Deadline

One factor that’s spurred the rush into South Korea is a looming deadline: Many expect the country will be reclassified a “developed” country after 2012, when Kyoto’s current requirements end. That means extra urgency for companies to get credits now. Park Chun-kyoo, director of the South Korean environment ministry’s climate-change policy division, says it is “much too early” to say what will happen at international climate talks.

Critics say the system that funnels money to companies in places like South Korea is partly to blame. It sends signals that “are exactly the opposite of what we should be sending,” says Mr. Victor, the Stanford professor. For South Korea — a relatively wealthy nation — emissions cuts should be an obligation, not a windfall, he says. “It’s just part of being a responsible citizen.”

Western nations are likely to press for South Korea to be recategorized as developed. At this month’s meeting of the Group of 8 nations, officials from the U.S. pressed for Asian countries to promise to cut their own emissions as a part of a new climate accord to take effect after Kyoto.

Until then, the current pollution-credit program is likely to balloon. At the summit, G-8 nations committed to major emissions reductions, and the EU passed a measure bringing airlines into Europe’s pollution-trading system in 2012. Both moves will spur demand for more pollution credits.

No one has mined South Korea for credits as successfully as Rhodia. The Paris-based company was spun off in 1998 from Rhône-Poulenc, a French chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate.

The subsequent years were unkind. Rhodia creaked under heavy debt. The ballyhooed recall early this decade of the painkiller Vioxx, after reports of heart problems, crippled Rhodia’s contract-drug-manufacturing business.

But by 2003, Rhodia managers had figured out that two of its factories — the Onsan plant in South Korea and the Brazil facility — were jackpots. For reducing one ton of carbon dioxide, the U.N. issues one credit. One ton of the more potent nitrous oxide yields 310 credits.

These credits are currently changing hands at about €21 on European markets, although prices can vary wildly because the market is relatively new.

Many adipic-acid plants long ago slashed nitrous oxide emissions. Indeed, the technology to burn it off was developed in the 1970s. By the 1990s, most adipic-acid producers in the U.S. and Europe started to voluntarily cut their emissions under pressure from environmentalists. Rhodia itself did so in 1998 at its plant in Chalampé, France.

But it had left its then-smaller Brazil and Onsan plants unmodified. At the time, “there was no obligation to do it,” says Mr. Rosier of Rhodia, the executive in charge of the credit project.

A Good Investment

The advent of credit sales under the U.N. program in 2004 made nitrous-oxide abatement lucrative. In 2006, Rhodia turned on the furnace to destroy the gas at the Onsan plant. The furnace cost roughly $15 million to install. It was a good investment: The plant is projected to generate more than nine million credits a year, and Rhodia is initially authorized for seven years of credits.

The Onsan factory sits in an industrial park that runs for four miles up the Korean coast, wedged between evergreen hillocks and the open sea. The plant is a gurgling network of boilers and centrifuges. A metal pipe carries the waste gas outside, where it is stripped of other pollutants, fed with natural gas and then burned off. An outside auditor checks emissions data, and every few weeks the U.N. issues new credits.

In the case of some greenhouse gases, the U.N. imposes constraints to combat the “perverse incentives” to run a factory simply to generate pollution credits, says the U.N.’s Mr. Barry. A few years ago, the U.N. came under fire after some Chinese plants started reaping huge numbers of credits for relatively small changes to their manufacturing process.

There are no such U.N. constraints on adipic-acid production, Mr. Barry says, since there’s demand for the finished product, given its importance in manufacturing nylon. “With adipic-acid prices, it’s not considered economically viable to produce the product” simply to generate pollution credits for sale, he says. However, he adds, the U.N.’s panel examines the situation regularly as prices change.

Currently, if adipic-acid production is a profitable business, it’s only barely. The average cost of producing adipic acid was just over $1,750 a metric ton in June, while the sales prices in the benchmark Chinese market were barely higher, at around $1,800 a metric ton, according to industry consultant PCI Nylon GmbH. That works out to a slim profit of roughly $50 a metric ton. “The economics of adipic-acid production are currently pretty awful,” says PCI’s Robin MacDonald.

The figures suggest that Rhodia almost certainly makes more money from selling pollution credits than it does from producing adipic acid. If Rhodia’s adipic acid at Onsan generates a profit of $50 or so a metric ton, that’s worth $7.5 million a year. The company is making much larger sums from sales of pollution credits: According to U.N. figures, Rhodia was issued more than 11 million credits for cuts in 2007; at the €15 price Rhodia says it recently has been getting, they are worth some €173 million ($275.1 million).

Mr. Rosier declined to comment on the relative profitability of adipic acid and pollution credits. He played down the financial significance of credit sales, saying the price of credits is highly volatile and could fall.

As to whether it is sensible for his company to reap rewards for installing pollution-control technology in a highly industrial country like South Korea, Mr. Rosier says the rules of the U.N.’s system were set by the Kyoto negotiators.

“We were not part of these discussions, we didn’t make the rules of the game,” he says. “We know only to work with the rules as they were set down.”

Kyoto’s Long Goodbye

Wall Street Journal
July 11, 2008; Page A14

One of the mysteries of the universe is why President Bush bothers to charge the fixed bayonets of the global warming theocracy. On the other hand, his Administration’s supposed “cowboy diplomacy” is succeeding in changing the way the world addresses climate change. Which is to say, he has forced the world to pay at least some attention to reality.

That was the larger meaning of the Group of Eight summit in Japan this week, even if it didn’t make the papers. The headline was that the nations pledged to cut global greenhouse emissions by half by 2050. Yet for the first time, the G-8 also agreed that any meaningful climate program would have to involve industrializing nations like China and India. For the first time, too, the G-8 agreed that real progress will depend on technological advancements. And it agreed that the putative benefits had to justify any brakes on economic growth.

In other words, the G-8 signed on to what has been the White House approach since 2002. The U.S. has relied on the arc of domestic energy programs now in place, like fuel-economy standards and efficiency regulations, along with billions in subsidies for low-carbon technology. Europe threw in with the central planning of the Kyoto Protocol — and the contrast is instructive. Between 2000 and 2006, U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions fell 3%. Of the 17 largest world-wide emitters, only France reduced by more.

So despite environmentalist sanctimony about the urgent need for President Bush and the U.S. to “take the lead” on global warming, his program has done better than most everybody else’s. That won’t make the evening news. But the fact is that the new G-8 document is best understood as a second look at the “leadership” of . . . you know who.

The G-8 also tends to make grand promises that evaporate as soon as everyone goes home. This year, picking up the “accountability” theme pressed by the U.S., envoys grudgingly accepted a plan that will track — and publicize — how well countries are living up to their word. So when the G-8 endorsed greenhouse reduction “aspirations” that are “ambitious, realistic and achievable,” the emphasis fell on the last two attributes.

Put another way, global warming is an economic, not a theological, question. It is not at all clear that huge expenditures today on slowing emissions will yield long-run benefits or even slow emissions. Research and development into sources of low-carbon energy is almost certainly more useful, and the G-8 pledged more funding for “clean tech” programs. This is vastly preferable to whatever reorganization of the American economy that Barack Obama and John McCain currently favor in the name of solving this speculative problem.

The G-8 also conceded that global-warming masochism is futile and painfully expensive. If every rich country drastically cut CO2, those cuts would be wiped out by emissions from China and India. “Carbon leakage” is a major problem too, where cutbacks in some countries lead to increases in others with less strict policies, as manufacturing and the like are outsourced. This whack-a-mole won’t stop without including all 17 major economies, which together produce roughly 80% of global emissions.

Much to the ire of Kyotophiles, Mr. Bush started this rethinking last year when he created a parallel track for talks on a post-2012 U.N. program, luring China and India to the table with more practical options. But developing countries, led by that duo, still refused to sign on to the G-8’s 2050 goal. They aren’t eager to endanger their growth — and lifting people out of poverty — by acquiring the West’s climate neuroses.

The irony is that Kyoto has handed them every reason not to participate. Europe knew all along that it couldn’t meet its quotas, so it created an out in “offsets.” A British factory, say, buys a credit to pay for basic efficiency improvements in a Chinese coal plant, like installing smokestack scrubbers. This is a tax on the Brits to make Chinese industries more competitive. Sweet deal if you can get it.

It gets worse. The offsets are routed through a U.N. bureaucracy that makes them far more valuable in Europe than the cost of the actual efficiency improvements. So far, Kyoto-world has paid more than €4.7 billion to eliminate an obscure greenhouse gas called HFC-23; the necessary incinerators cost less than €100 million. Most of the difference in such schemes goes to the foreign government, such as China’s communist regime.

Given these perverse incentives, the magical realism of Kyoto has backfired in a big way. The global warming elite will never admit this, because that would mean giving up their political whip against George Bush. But Kyoto II is already collapsing under its own contradictions. By sticking to a more realistic alternative, this reviled President has handed his green opponents a way to save face.

Pickens: My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil

T.Boone Pickens

 

 

By T. BOONE PICKENS
July 9, 2008; Page A15

One of the benefits of being around a long time is that you get to know a lot about certain things. I’m 80 years old and I’ve been an oilman for almost 60 years. I’ve drilled more dry holes and also found more oil than just about anyone in the industry. With all my experience, I’ve never been as worried about our energy security as I am now. Like many of us, I ignored what was happening. Now our country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II.

 

 

Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens says his “Pickens Plan” to increase natural gas and wind power’s role as energy sources is not a play for personal gain. Steve Gelsi reports. (July 9)

The problem, of course, is our growing dependence on foreign oil – it’s extreme, it’s dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.

Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.

This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world’s oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world’s reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.

In fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Why do I believe that our dependence on foreign oil is such a danger to our country? Put simply, our economic engine is now 70% dependent on the energy resources of other countries, their good judgment, and most importantly, their good will toward us. Foreign oil is at the intersection of America’s three most important issues: the economy, the environment and our national security. We need an energy plan that maps out how we’re going to work our way out of this mess. I think I have such a plan.

Consider this: The world produces about 85 million barrels of oil a day, but global demand now tops 86 million barrels a day. And despite three years of record price increases, world oil production has declined every year since 2005. Meanwhile, the demand for oil will only increase as growing economies in countries like India and China gear up for enhanced oil consumption.

Add to this the fact that in many countries, including China, the government has a great deal of influence over its energy industry, allowing these countries to set strategic direction easily and pay whatever price is needed to secure oil. The U.S. has no similar policy, because we thankfully don’t have state-controlled energy companies. But that doesn’t mean we can’t set goals and develop an energy policy that will overcome our addiction to foreign oil. I have a clear goal in mind with my plan. I want to reduce America’s foreign oil imports by more than one-third in the next five to 10 years.

How will we do it? We’ll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the “Saudi Arabia of the Wind”? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.

Martin Kozlowski

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

I believe this plan will be the perfect bridge to the future, affording us the time to develop new technologies and a new perspective on our energy use. In addition to the plan I have proposed, I also want to see us explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation. Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well, as we need to look at all options, recognizing that there is no silver bullet.

I believe my plan can be accomplished within 10 years if this country takes decisive and bold steps immediately. This plan dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil and lowers the cost of transportation. It invests in the heartland, creating thousands of new jobs. It substantially reduces America’s carbon footprint and uses existing, proven technology. It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation. It will build a bridge to the future, giving us the time to develop new technologies.

The future begins as soon as Congress and the president act. The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant. I am also calling for a monthly progress report on the reduction in foreign oil imports, as well as a monthly progress report on the state of development of natural gas vehicles in this country.

We have a golden opportunity in this election year to form bipartisan support for this plan. We have the grit and fortitude to shoulder the responsibility of change when our country’s future is at stake, as Americans have proven repeatedly throughout this nation’s history.

We need action. Now.

Mr. Pickens is CEO of BP Capital.

Chesapeake, Plains Set to Tap Gas Field

Joint Investment Seeks 
To Make Obscure Area 
A Big Energy Producer

By BEN CASSELMAN
July 3, 2008; Page B3

A $3.3 billion joint-venture deal between Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Plains Exploration & Production Co. is the latest sign that a long-obscure swath of north Louisiana and east Texas is emerging as the country’s hottest area for natural-gas exploration.

Under the agreement, Plains will pay $1.65 billion in cash for a 20% interest in Chesapeake’s drilling leases in the field, known as the Haynesville Shale. Plains will also shoulder $1.65 billion of Chesapeake’s drilling costs over the next three years or so, and will have the right to buy into any future leases Chesapeake signs in the area.

Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Gas Power: A $3.3 billion joint venture between Chesapeake Energy and Plains Exploration & Production is bringing attention back to this swath of north Louisiana and east Texas.

Chesapeake was the first company to recognize the Haynesville field’s potential, and its 550,000 leased acres there make it by far the area’s largest player. The company has said its leases could produce as much as 44 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — nearly twice what the entire U.S. consumed last year.

Chesapeake shares rose 3% to $69.40 in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading on the news, and are up 56% since the company first announced its Haynesville discovery in March. Plains shares fell 5.3% to $69.35, also on the NYSE.

Experts said the deal shows how much Chesapeake stands to gain from its head-start. The agreement with Plains values Chesapeake’s Haynesville territory at $30,000 per acre, more than six times what the company paid. In a conference call with investors Wednesday, Chesapeake said it has spent $2.5 billion to acquire and develop its Haynesville holdings — meaning the company will earn back all its money and more via the Plains deal, while still retaining 80% of its acreage.

The deal also highlights just how fast development is moving in the Haynesville field. The town of Haynesville, 60 miles northeast of Shreveport, was the site of an oil boom in the 1920s, according to local history, though today it has only about 2,700 residents.

But the area’s natural-gas potential was almost completely unknown until March, when Petrohawk Energy Corp. discussed it at an analyst conference. Later that month, Chesapeake announced it had leased more than 200,000 acres in what is known in the industry as a play, and said Haynesville may “have a larger impact on the company than any other play in which it has participated to date.”

That announcement set in motion a frantic rush to lease land and drill wells. Major natural-gas producers such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Devon Energy Corp. and XTO Energy Inc. have leased land, and even global giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC has gotten involved, via a partnership with Canadian energy producer EnCana Corp.

On Monday, Petrohawk said its first horizontal well in the Haynesville field was producing nearly 17 million cubic feet of natural gas a day, and Chesapeake on Wednesday said it expects its wells to produce an average of 4.5 to 8.5 billion cubic feet each over their lifetimes.

The potential investment is huge. Chesapeake alone expects to drill 600 Haynesville wells in the next three years, which would cost $3.9 billion at current rates, although the company expects to reduce its per-well costs over time. Ultimately, Chesapeake plans to drill some 6,875 wells on its current leases.

Discovery of the Haynesville field is the latest in a series of developments that have remade the U.S. natural-gas industry in recent years. Higher prices and new technologies have allowed companies to extract gas from dense rocks called shales, a process considered too difficult and expensive until a few years ago.

The success of the Barnett Shale, a massive gas formation around Fort Worth, Texas, has driven companies to scour the continent for new shale resources — though none has yet rivaled the Barnett field.

Experts said early results suggest Haynesville could be different. But they warned that companies are buying access to acreage there in part to appeal to outside investors, who are seizing on the latest natural-gas discoveries — and often moving on as soon as the next one is announced.

“People want the exposure and Haynesville’s the latest and greatest,” said David Tameron, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets. “If you go back six months, it was Appalachia. A year before that it was the Barnett. Six months from now, they’ll be talking about a Utica shale or something else. It’s the nature of Wall Street.”

Write to Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com

Cold-Fusion Demonstration a Success

On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and — for around a month — the world was under the impression that the world’s energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair’s results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did “not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion.”

This hasn’t prevented a handful of scientists persevering with cold-fusion research. They stand on the sidelines, diligently getting on with their experiments and, every so often, they wave their arms frantically when they think have made some progress.

Nobody notices, though. Why? These days the mainstream science media wouldn’t touch cold-fusion experiments with a barge pole. They have learnt their lesson from 1989, and now treat “cold fusion” as a byword for bad science. Most scientists agree, and some even go so far as to brand cold fusion a “pathological science” — science that is plagued by falsehood but practiced nonetheless.

There is a reasonable chance that the naysayers are (to some extent) right and that cold fusion experiments in their current form will not amount to anything. But it’s too easy to be drawn in by the crowd and overlook a genuine breakthrough, which is why I’d like to let you know that one of the handful of diligent cold-fusion practitioners has started waving his arms again. His name is Yoshiaki Arata, a retired (now emeritus) physics professor at Osaka University, Japan. Yesterday, Arata performed a demonstration at Osaka of one his cold-fusion experiments.

Although I couldn’t attend the demonstration (it was in Japanese, anyway), I know that it was based on reports published here and here. Essentially Arata, together with his co-researcher Yue-Chang Zhang, uses pressure to force deuterium (D) gas into an evacuated cell containing a sample of palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide (ZrO₂–Pd). He claims the deuterium is absorbed by the sample in large amounts — producing what he calls dense or “pynco” deuterium — so that the deuterium nuclei become close enough together to fuse.

So, did this method work yesterday? Here’s an email I received from Akito Takahashi, a colleague of Arata’s, this morning:

“Arata’s demonstration…was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there…Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers…This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata’s lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active.”

I also received a detailed account from Jed Rothwell, who is editor of the US site LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and who has long thought that cold-fusion research shows promise. He said that, after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.

Rothwell also pointed out that Arata performed three other control experiments: hydrogen with the ZrO₂–Pd sample (no lasting heat); deuterium with no ZrO₂–Pd sample (no heating at all); and hydrogen with no ZrO₂–Pd sample (again, no heating). Nevertheless, Rothwell added that Arata neglected to mention certain details, such as the method of calibration. “His lecture was very difficult to follow, even for native speakers, so I may have overlooked something,” he wrote.

It will be interesting to see what other scientists think of Arata’s demonstration. Last week I got in touch with Augustin McEvoy, a retired condensed-matter physicist who has studied Arata’s previous cold-fusion experiments in detail. He said that he has found “no conclusive evidence of excess heat” before, though he would like to know how this demonstration turned out.

I will update you if and when I get any more information about the demonstration (apparently there might be some videos circulating soon). For now, though, you can form your own opinions about the reliability of cold fusion.

Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 23, 2008 3:05 PM | Permalink

RepRap – Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself

RepRap – Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself

Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled. 

By News Account

Created Jun 3 2008 – 11:29pm

 

Technology

Dr Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in engineering in the Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath, has created RepRap, an open source prototype machine that has succeeded in making a duplicate of itself – by printing its own parts and building a clone.

RepRap is short for replicating rapid-prototyper. RepRap employs a technique called ‘additive fabrication’. The machine works a bit like a printer, but rather than squirting ink onto paper, it puts down thin layers of molten plastic which solidify. These layers are built up to make useful three-dimensional (3D) objects.

RepRap has, so far, been capable of making every day plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. Now, the machine has also succeeded in copying all its own 3D-printed parts.

 

These parts have been printed and assembled by RepRap team member Vik Olliver in Auckland, New Zealand, into a new RepRap machine that can replicate the same set of parts for yet another RepRap machine and so on ad infinitum. While 3D printers have been available commercially for about 25 years, RepRap is the first that can essentially print itself.

The machine will be exhibited publicly at the Cheltenham Science Festival (4-8 June 2008).

Dr Bowyer said: “These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn’t they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too?

“The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too.”

Recently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manage at Google Inc, encouraged people to: “Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.”

Sir James Dyson, Chief Executive of the Dyson Group, said: “RepRap is a different, revolutionary way of approaching invention. It could allow people to change the ergonomics of a design to their own specific needs.”

Dr Bowyer hopes people will come to the Cheltenham Science Festival and see both the ‘parent’ and the ‘child’ RepRap machines in action for the first time together.
“RepRap is the most enjoyable research project I’ve ever run,” he said. “And without the many talented and selfless volunteers the RepRap project has all round the world, it would have never succeeded so quickly.”

Complete plans for the prototype RepRap 3D printer and detailed tutorials to aid motivated amateurs (and professionals) in assembling one are available to everyone free at the RepRap website (details below). The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about £300. All those non-printed parts can be bought at hardware shops or from online stores.

Adrian and several of the other Reprap team members will be available to answer questions and exhibit the parent and child Darwin printers in operation at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 4 – 8 June 2008.

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