Climate change.?

# It was Tony Blair who decided that Western Europe had the moral duty to restore order in Serbia. It was Tony Blair who felt that the situation with Saddam Hussein in Iraq was untenable. It was Tony Blair who felt that climate change is a real issue. We don't give Blair enough credit for what the... USA did. At the G8 meeting of june 2007, suddenly Bush expressed his concern with climate change and agreed on a united policy to reduce the emission of dangerous gases.
The Kyoto protocol was a failed protocol, that rewarded Russia and punished the developed countries (the countries that drive the world economy's biggest economic boom in history) and that absolved mainland China of its polluting acts (China will soon overtake the USA as the main polluter in the world). The Kyoto Protocol was also based on really bad science, which is never a good way to plan the future (See The US reneges Kyoto: idiot or savant?).
If the G8 comes up with a better plan to control pollution (and not only "global warming", but the many instances of pollution that account for thousands of deaths every year in countries like mainland China), that would be welcome by almost everybody (except, possibly, the government of mainland China). But one has to be suspicious of these Western leaders who suddenly feel compelled to fight pollution, after having been elected by special-interest lobbies that represent the very polluters.
There might be two reasons for Bush's change of heart and for much of the passion with which Blair and Merkel support it. The first one is nuclear power. The West (except France) has lived in the fear of nuclear power for too long. The West is becoming a vassal of the Middle East because its dependence on oil kept increasing for three decades, instead of decreasing after the first oil crisis. This amounts to collective suicide. The only way out of this economic slavery is to install hundreds of nuclear powers all over the Western world. This cannot be done because the suicides are not the political leaders but the masses. The Western masses would rather send trillions of dollars/euros to the Middle Eastern tyrants than risk a nuclear accident on their own soil. It's a very expensive form of life insurance. And, ironically, it has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Western citizens by Islamic fundamentalists who were funded with the money that the West used to buy oil from the Middle East. Nuclear power would solve the problem forever, making each country largely independent of the energy resources of other countries. The good news is that uranium is mostly in the hands of democratic and responsible countries such as Australia and Canada. The political leaders of the West may have come to see the debate on "global warming" as an excellent opportunity to promote nuclear power to the masses. Basically, the question is becoming: do you want life to become extinct on Earth or the minor risk of a nuclear accident near your home?
The second reason for rediscovering the danger of climate change is that it hurts mainly mainland China, not the USA. The Western leaders are beginning to realize that the countries that would be punished the most by a fair world policy to control dangerous emissions are the emerging competitors. Basically, any policy to effectively control gas emissions would be a tax on emerging powers such as mainland China. As the USA well knows, taxing the colonies is a good way to keep them from becoming too competitive (that's how the USA's independence war against Britain started). Mainland China is right to be suspicious of any talk about "gas emission reduction". It almost certainly means that the more technologically developed West will come up with a new line of business while developing countries like mainland China (and most of the poor countries of the world) will be left behind yet again.
A fair deal in the name of protecting the poor peoples of the world would result in the poor peoples of the world becoming even poorer, missing the chance they have today of catching up with the rich countries. The British and French empires specialized in this kind of deals with their colonies, and always found a way to do it in the name of a moral duty.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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# (march 2007) The danger with national oil companies. We live in the age of nationalization of the oil companies. While most of the world is moving away from government-owned businesses, the governments of oil-rich countries have been moving towards nationalizing their oil industries. Mostly, this is due to the desire to maximize profits from the oil business and use them for the domestic economy.
Thus today the "seven sisters" are not Western multinations but national oil companies: Saudi Arabia's Aramco, Russia's Gazprom, Iran's NIOC, Venezuela's PDVSA, Malaysia's Petronas, etc.
Socialist-leaning ideologues might be happy to see that profits from a country's oil wells go directly to the people of that country (minus, of course, the money lost because of inefficiency and corruption). But there is a reason if capitalism has won its war against communism: over the long distance, capitalism works better. If i give one dollar to the 100,000 poorest people in the world, all of them will be one dollar richer for one day, but the following day we will all be penniless (not only them, but also myself). On the other hand, if i take from them the few pennies they have and put together enough money to invest wisely, tomorrow we will all be rich. Communism may sound more humanitarian, and capitalism more cruel, but capitalism tends to feed people while communism tends to starve people.
That is precisely the fear. The national oil companies do not invest in the future as much as the multinationals do. It sounds great that Chavez is spending oil money for the poor people of Venezuela, but this means that he is not investing much on the future of his oil industry, which means that tomorrow Venezuela may not be able to sell as much oil as it does today.
On top of the uncertainty about the growing demand for oil in the developing world, the world is now facing another uncertainty: the one about the decreasing will of oil producers to invest in producing oil.