AgroFuels: Pushing Prices of Vital Commodities Ever Higher

Priced out of the UK wood market by subsidies given to electricity generators

It seems there is a new casualty of the drive, or should that be forced march, toward biofuel; timber-based industries, and users of wood products (which is all of us). The Countryman has been hearing from the Wood Panel Industries Federation.

Alistair Kerr of WPIF says, “The government has failed to disclose to the public that generators like Drax, E.ON, RWE NPower and Scottish and Southern Energy will use the subsidy paid by taxpayers to source as much wood as they can from the UK before venturing further afield. If allowed to continue unchecked, not only are the UK’s wood processing industries at serious risk of being wiped out thereby putting at risk tens of thousands of jobs, but the forests that the British public care deeply about will be decimated – and it is the public that will have paid for it to happen.”

More here.

How high do corn prices have to be to get end-users to reduce consumption?

Scarcely credible - scarcely human - but this is the sort of question that economists, those nice men who never rape or commit foul crimes, are now amusing themselves with. Try replacing the phrase "end-users" with the word "people" and you get some idea of the (im)moral universe economists inhabit.

Southeast Farm Press reports that "This year's corn crop is not big enough to meet the entire consumption base that has been built ... [and] ... The largest competitor for corn in the coming year will be the ethanol industry where USDA analysts currently estimate 5.1 billion bushels of corn use."

After six months of peak already in 2011, the World Food Price Index looks set to continue inexorably upward from peak to peak ...

Dr Mountebank's Perpetual Motion Machine

Rob Dietz at think-tank CASSE highlights the work of a top economist whose "work has been highly influential among elite political and corporate leaders. Ronald Reagan is a prominent example. President Reagan once famously said, “There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.” That’s a close paraphrasing of Dr. Mountebank’s conclusion to his magnum opus, Infinity and Beyond: The Magical Triumph of Economics over Physics ..."

Read the full hagiography here.

Of Schemes and Schemers

Con + Insult = Consult

"There's funding available ..." Words to make any hungry consultant salivate, and as Private Eye reports in its latest issue in "REDD faces all round" the feeding frenzy is just beginning:

"There’s funding available from the World Bank to help countries draw up REDD plans, as well as assistance from some enthusiastic European nations. Most of this REDD-readiness money is ending up in the pockets of international consulting firms …"

Clever and complex schemes.

Kerching!

The new 'market', as many hipsters like to call it, in carbon credits is already creating fantastic global opportunities for business. Australian bureaucrats in charge of implementing climate change avoidance and mitigation have been warned of the "possibility of GST fraud on carbon credit trades under so-called "carousel fraud". The scam, which has operated overseas, involves the skimming of GST on the sale of carbon credits bought tax-free overseas." 

Sky Money

"The Netherlands' emissions trading authority has  [also] been the target of 'large-scale criminal activity, including fraud, money laundering and the financing of terrorism'. The Papua New Guinea "sky money" scam, involving the sale of worthless carbon credits, is also detailed in a spate of 2009 briefings."

And so it goes.

Price of Gold

Why is the price of everything going up and up? Could it be that the modern economic fantasy of perpetual motion growth is climaxing in its inevitable failure?

So, while the end-game lasts, why not stave off that nagging sense of futility by piling your gold ever higher and higher and paying off security guards to chase away any poor people who might get hungry and try to get a few crumbs off you, the filthy scrounging bastards!

Check out your investment ...

Yes, this is how the 'libertarians' 'real world' operates. Their sickness can only be cured by gold.

Bottom Massage

“… 200 years of abundant energy have allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live - at least not in the style to which we have become accustomed … Those who believe that ten years from now we will be able to get along with much reduced government have little appreciation of how modern civilization works or how bad things are going to get as fossil fuel energy fades from our lives …”

Read more at “peak oil crisis: the future of government” by Tom Whipple.

And more on 'bottom bouncing' at Shadowstats, where Walter J. "John" Williams notes that "despite minor changes to the system, government [economic] reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last decade or so." Can this be purely accidental? Surely not. After all, covering the hideous truth in a cheering blanket of confusion always helps, leaving only a few suspicious buggers to write dry headlines like  "November Jobs Increase Was Statistically Indistinguishable from Decline."

Scientists Agree: We Need to Act Now to Halt Biodiversity Loss

It's not exactly a snappy title, but after a 5 year gestation, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IpBES for short, is at last officially up and running.

In true dry-as-dust scientific form also, the new body states its brief thus: 

"Scientific knowledge on the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being has increased significantly since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MAs) was completed. There is however a need for a stronger international science-policy platform to enable emerging scientific knowledge to be translated into specific policy action at the appropriate levels."

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment "found universal agreement across the studies that fundamental changes are needed in society to avoid high risk of extinctions, declining populations in many species, and large scale shifts in species distributions in the future." Genengnews.com.

"There is no question that business-as-usual development pathways will lead to catastrophic biodiversity loss. Even optimistic scenarios for this century consistently predict extinctions and shrinking populations of many species."

It is worth stressing here, that those who ignore these facts are flying in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. The destruction and degradation of biodiversity is the single most important issue of the 21st century, an issue that, if not addressed forthwith, without any more shilly shallying around, will continue eroding our prosperity and our future, ultimately destroying our whole way of life.

So How Much is Nature Worth to Us?

Global biodiversity is worth much, much more to humanity than casual observers might think. Far in excess of the entire business output of any mere human artefacts such as countries, multinationals or banks.

"In one of the first efforts to calculate a global number, a team of researchers from the United States, Argentina, and the Netherlands has put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services, which are largely taken for granted because they are free. That is nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US$18 trillion ..."

 HT: British Ecological Society Blog 

All-American Jihad

For students of the impending impact of religious insanity on the real world.

Reading recently at the Wild Hunt about the exorcism craze in the Land of the Fee drew my attention to the Talk2Action website where they have a vast compendium of links relating to "spiritual warfare" including the following demented-cum-terrifying details here:

"... as noted in a recent New York Times story ... "spiritual warfare", an aggressive approach to evangelizing developed by the leaders of a worldwide religious movement which promotes a religiously based wealth transfer scheme as a means to implement theocracy."

"God has declared through His prophets that the wealth of the wicked will be released to the Kingdom of God."

"I declare that this wealth will be distributed for the extension of the Kingdom of God by the apostles that God has set in the church." .... human agency would be a part of his wealth transfer scheme. ... specifically from the "godless":

Resistance is useless!!! "I decree that vast amounts of wealth will be released supernaturally, even from godless and pagan sources... The enemy's camp will be plundered... Resistance will be impossible. Jesus will put all things under His feet."

This charismatic group, which over the last decade has rapidly expanded as an international movement within Neocharismatic "renewal" groups within Christianity is estimated to have 295 million members worldwide.

It is a movement organizing on a massive scale for religious, social and ideological takeovers in entire nations, such as in Brazil. such as in Pittsburgh and Topeka (not in report) and over the entire U.S., such as in Georgia. According to the documents, they are even mapping out, block by block, opposition and demonic "strongholds" in cities around the United States. [Hello-o, Buffy]
 
A helpful commenter transcribed a portion of one of their sermons which they felt was particularly interesting...

"Radical Muslims ... the jihâd oriented Muslims. 5 or 6 percent of the Mulim population, not the majority, but they'll control the other 90 percent because they control the high places. We have 35 percent of the United States that's evangelical. Here's the problem. 35 percent are regenerated in their spirit. They say Jesus is Lord but they're not necessarily converted... because if they were converted, the 35 percent would have as much influence as the 5 or 6 percent that are changing America...[but]... they're not taking territory ... So, meanwhile, your jihâdists are wiser than us because they go right to the top of the high places to make disciples out of their nations. They will make every nation a Muslim nation if they have their way. ... That's the closest thing on Earth to what we're supposed to be doing. ... You see, it's the counterfeit for the way the church ought to operate. We should be penetrating every field until we have 10 percent or so penetration of disciples ... And when you get disciples, you can then create a Christian culture within the culture .... This is how we do it. That's how the Muslims do it."

Couldn't we just transfer them all to a nice asteroid somewhere where they could indulge their "spiritual warfare to their hearts' content. The Clangers meets Alien Intercessors for Christ sort of thing. It'd make great theatre!  

Much, much more here. 

The Ever-Elongating Minsky Moment

There’s just no second-guessing the cold hard uncertainty of life is there?

From Wikipedia: “The financial crisis of 2007 to the present was triggered by a liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system … The collapse of the housing bubble, which peaked in the U.S. in 2006, caused the values of securitities tied to real estate pricing to plummet thereafter, damaging financial institutions globally."

I seem to remember that last year it was only “the financial crisis of 2007 - 2009.”

These economists! Just grasping through the mist for any substantial thing, can somebody, anybody, explain to me intelligibly whether Paul McCulley was advocating, mocking or merely predicting when he said “"There is room for the Fed to create a bubble in housing prices, if necessary, to sustain American hedonism”?

And Paul Krugman, NYT in 2002?

One economist who truly did have the wit to see what to many of us non “masters-of-the-universe” was horrifyingly obvious, namely that what goes up must come down, and that perpetual growth is as impossible as perpetual motion, was Ann Pettifor:

“There were some unkind comments on my column of August 29 2006. In it, I argued that last summer's fall in house sales in Florida and California were canaries in the deep vast coal mine of US credit; that the impact of a credit/debt crisis in the US would have a much greater impact on us all, than the crisis in Lebanon ..."

"The scale of the crisis is beginning to be grasped. However, deniers are still at work, spreading disinformation, delusions and, in some cases, downright lies about the real state of the international financial system. "

But if I may venture to disagree with Pettifor, it seems to me that the full scale of the crisis has NOT been grasped.

There is no going back to business as usual. You can try, but it won't work.

Revolutionary Fire

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When Blake rhymed his metaphorical Tyger, it was early days of plutonomic revolution. Now the "choice is between who will be destroyed the banks, or labor" says Michael Hudson a trifle apocalyptically, perhaps.

“From Brussels to Latvia ... The aim is to roll back wage levels by 30 percent or more, to depression levels, on the pretense that this will “leave more surplus” available to pay in debt service. It will do no such thing, of course. It is a purely vicious attempt to reverse Europe’s Progressive Era social democratic reforms achieved over the past century. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE).”

“'Join the fight against labor, or we will destroy you,' the EC is telling governments. This requires dictatorship, and the European Central Bank (ECB) has taken over this power from elected government. Its “independence” from political control is celebrated as the “hallmark of democracy” by today’s new financial oligarchy. This deceptive newspeak evokes Plato’s view that oligarchy is simply the political stage following democracy. The new power elite’s next step in this eternal political triangle is to make itself hereditary – by abolishing estate taxes, for starters – so as to turn itself into an aristocracy.”

“... Europe is ushering in an era of totalitarian neoliberal rule.”

Read full post here.

The FIRE economy pretty much works on thin air, thaumaturgically creating what we now call money, out of nothing more tangible than pixels, paper and debt. Here in the West we've almost entirely given up making anything real, and have tied our future, such as it is, to Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Nice clean office jobs with no nasty iron-pumping testosterone or sweat or anything horrid like that. Just what Mother would approve.

Unfortunately for us though,  a "collapsing FIRE Economy is accompanied by debt deflation, falling demand, debt defaults, business failures, and rising unemployment. The Great Depression in the US in the 1930s is a famous example of a debt deflation that followed the collapse of a FIRE Economy. That debt deflation ended with WWII …" according to fireeconomy.com.

Irrational Actors: What Moves Us?

Mind is the key to change. Good piece from the Moonbat - and what better in the Dark than to see bats catching moths under the Moon - on the psychology of destruction versus the psychology of wholeness:

"Our social identity is shaped by values that psychologists classify as extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic values concern status and self-advancement. People with a strong set of extrinsic values fixate on how others see them. They cherish financial success, image and fame. Intrinsic values concern relationships with friends, family and community, and self-acceptance. Those who have a strong set of intrinsic values are not dependent on praise or rewards from other people. They have beliefs that transcend their self-interest …"

“Advertisers, who employ plenty of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for JWT: marketers "should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions". The more they foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell products. Rightwing politicians have also, instinctively, understood the importance of values in changing the political map. Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that 'economics is the method, the objective is to change the heart and soul' ..."

Full article here.