Michael Moore gives us a thoughtful article about Joschka Fischer (and some priceless Fischer anecdotes) in Slate today. Before going any farther I should make clear that I refer not to the notoriously fat filmmaker but to Michael Scott Moore, an American novelist living in Berlin. Of his fatness or otherwise I am entirely ignorant.
Tag Archives: Europe and the world
Oil Demand Expected To Stay High
The International Energy Agency have just published their forecast for oil demand next year, and its more of the same, with the emphasis on more.
Global oil consumption is expected to increase by 1.75m barrels a day next year to total 85.2m b/d, suggesting that a recent fall-off in demand is temporary… For 2006, the IEA revised its forecast of non-Opec supply down 335,000 b/d to an average of 50.3m b/d.
Delays and declining production in Canada, the UK, Asia and Sudan are expected to damp production growth next year. The massive damage to platforms and rigs caused by Katrina and Rita will be felt outside the US as well, increasing costs and causing rig shortages in places such as the Middle East, where two of the rigs damaged by Rita had been scheduled to move this year.
At the same time, the world’s thirst for oil shows few signs of abating, despite high prices. The IEA said that weakening of demand this month was likely to be a short-lived side effect of bottlenecks in distribution caused by the US hurricanes.
R&D: China To Overtake The EU?
Is China about to drive smartly past the EU and establish itself as a global R&D powerhouse? Somehow I doubt this, but nonetheless it seems to be the view of Janez Potocnik, EU commissioner for research, who is quoted by the FT as saying: The Chinese trend is extremely clear. If the trend continues, they [China] will catch us up in 2009 or 2010. The conditions for R&D in some emerging markets like China are improving and it is obvious that they [European companies] are transferring some of their investments there.
Really I don’t think that even Potocnik believes what he is saying. He is simply drawing attention to the fact that the EU needs to wake up and get it’s R&D act together:
“At present growth rates, the EU’s public and private spending on R&D is set to rise from 1.93 per cent of GDP in 2003 to 2.2 per cent in 2010, well short of the 3 per cent target agreed by EU heads of government as part of the 2002 Lisbon strategy.
R&D investment in China was 1.31 per cent of GDP in 2003 but is rising at a double-digit rate.”
The Atlanta Newspaper
Reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the occasional benefit beyond keeping me informed of the ups and downs of my favorite baseball team (they’re tied 1-1 with Houston in the first round of the playoffs). Atlanta is the home of the US Centers for Disease Control. And folks there have recreated the 1918 influenza virus in an effort to understand precisely why it was so deadly.
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H5N1
Like catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, an influenza pandemic is not a matter of if, but a matter of when and how bad. Fortunately, John M. Barry has written books about both. Until the definitive story of Katrina is told, Rising Tide
The inevitability of floods in New Orleans is a matter of geography; the inevitability of a flu pandemic is a matter of genetics. The natural reservoir for influenza viruses is in birds.
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The Share Project
Today is Sunday and I still seem to be having technical difficulties posting on AFOE, so I’m doing this as a test to see whether I can mange to do something on AFEM.
Firstly a link from the Economist Great Thrift Supplement (of which I’ll have more to say as and when I can post again) lead me to discover this conference on the economics of ageing which is being held in Venice from the 6th to 8th of October 2005.
Looking through the agenda and participants, I discovered that Axel Börsch-Supan is presenting a session based on data from the SHARE survey. SHARE is a Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe and you can find a complete book-length summary of the most recent findings at the top of the publications list.
Another Slice of Turkey
Actually, it’s more like a slab. But from the New York Times. It’s tasty and full of all sorts of facts and anecdotes that are probably very good for you.
The E.U.’s rationale for welcoming Turkey into its councils and its economic sphere used to be a matter of “strategic rent,” compensation for its position at a crossroads of continents and military blocs. Today, says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Bilgi University, what Europe sees in Turkey is “an example that a modern, secular democratic state and capitalist society is compatible with a Muslim population.” Europe has come to value Turkey not just for where it is but for what it is.
And of course the occasional provocative opinion.
Two-Way Ticket
It hasn’t only been the July 7th London bombers who have been attracting press attention for having bought return tickets: for some time now European-based Islamic radicals going to fight in Iraq have been causing concern amongst anti-terrorism experts due to the possibility they might one day return. This issue was first covered on Afoe back in July when Spanish police arrested 16 suspected Islamist militants accused of recruiting activists for the al-qaeda campaign in Iraq.
Subsequently there was a controversial CIA assessment which suggested that “Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days”.
Today, Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten interviews leading French counterterrorism investigating judge Jean-Francois Ricard on the topic, who informed to Keaton: “They’re taking round trips… I have confirmation … of this return with action targeting our countries”.
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More Bigtime Divergence
As people may have noted, last weekend Tobias and I were in Stockholm. One of the topics I wanted to post on but couldn’t was the latest Human Development report from the UN. There was plenty of press coverage: here, here, and here
There was even coverage in the blogs, but the tone seemed to be set by Slugger O’Toole who seemed mainly to take issue with Ireland’s rating in the HDI.
Personally I think the issues involved are much bigger than this.
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A modest proposal for CAP reform
I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.
In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.
Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.
Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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