The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) said on Sunday that there was no heavy water leak in the first unit of the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karnataka and that “all plant systems were found to be functioning normally.”

In a press release, Om Pal Singh, Secretary, AERB and Director, Information and Technical Services Division, said an incident of tritium intake by some workers of the Kaiga station was noticed on November 24 during routine sampling of their urine

A drinking water cooler was found to be the source of water contamination and this cooler was isolated immediately. The tritium contamination was limited to only this cooler. The water tank of this cooler, like other coolers, was kept locked. “However, it appears that some mischief-maker added a small quantity of tritiated heavy water to the cooler, possibly from a heavy water sampling vial, through its overflow tube. Further investigations are in progress in this regard.”

About 65 workers of Kaiga-1 receiving radiation doses higher than the prescribed limits “has nothing to do with the reactor’s functioning.”.

Kaiga-1 reactor uses natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as both coolant and moderator. Heavy water has two atoms of deuterium and one atom of oxygen. During the reactor’s operation, small quantities of heavy water got converted into tritium, which is in liquid form but highly radioactive.

Asked how “an insider could have played mischief,” Mr. Jain explained that there was heavy water in the reactor’s moderator system and primary heat transporter. Trained workers took out samples of tritiated heavy water from sampling points and carried them to chemical laboratories for analysis. This was done every day. When urine samples of 250 workers were tested on November 24, it came to light that 65 of them had received radiation doses higher than the prescribed limits.

- from thehindu

heavy water is a coolant and moderator in this plant. Its purpose is to cool plant core and control atomic reaction inside code. It is not a radio active material. All radiation and radio active materials are inside the core. But during the operation small quantity of heavy water will be converted into tritium, which is highly radio active.

They collects samples periodically and check the content of tritium in heavy water. They have safe mechanism to dispose the samples also. If a small sample of secondary nuclear material can cause this much damage, what will be the effect of the real nuclear materials inside the code?

They say that you cannot consider this as a nuclear accident. Yes, but all accidents happens like this. In Chernobyl misunderstanding of two teams resulted in the largest nuclear disaster in the world.

Do we still need this monster to get some power?

Nuclear energy is a failed technology of 20th century. It is about the most ridiculous, dangerous, costly and wasteful way to boil water* ever undertaken.

* There may be a confusion when we say nuclear power plant. “Keep Uranium on clay dish, then connect 2 electrodes, now electricity will flow through the electrodes”. Mainstream media in India is selling this kind of thoughts. Actually its not like that. Atomic reaction will release intense amount of energy in the form of gamma rays, ultraviolet, infrared, x rays etc. In these only infrared, which is heat, is used in power plant to boil water. Boiled water releases steam. That steam is used in turbine to convert its pressure energy to electricity as the same way as coal based thermal power plant. But in nuclear plant things are costly and dangerous.

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

On its website, the NCPA says: “NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth’s current warming trend is [sic] still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce CO2 emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause.”

The Heritage Foundation published a “web memo” in December that said: “Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007″. Scientists, including those at the UK Met Office say that the apparent cooling is down to natural changes and does not alter the long-term warming trend.

In its 2008 corporate citizenship report, published last year, ExxonMobil said it would cut funds to several groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy.

The NCPA and Heritage Foundation are included among groups funded by ExxonMobil, according to details of its “2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments” published recently.

Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.”

In 2006, Ward, then at the Royal Society, wrote to ExxonMobil to challenge the company’s funding of such lobby groups. The move, revealed in the Guardian, prompted accusations of censorship and debate about whether experts should “police” the distribution of scientific information.

In an article on the Guardian website, Ward writes: “I have now written again to ExxonMobil to point out that these organisations publish misleading information about climate change on their websites, and to seek guidance on how to reconcile this fact with the pledge made by the company. I believe that the company should keep its promise by ending its financial support for lobby groups that mislead the public about climate change.”

ExxonMobil said it annually reviews and adjusts its contributions to policy research groups. A spokesman said: “Only ExxonMobil speaks for ExxonMobil and our position on climate change is clear. We have the same concerns as people everywhere, and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We take the issue of climate change seriously and the risks warrant action.”

- from guardian

Every year, UK supermarkets throw out at least 100,000 tonnes of food which is still safe to eat. It’s a shocking figure when considered against a backdrop of global poverty and environmental degradation. Tony Lowe is the chief executive of FareShare, an organisation which aims to be part of the solution to this profligacy.

FareShare takes waste food from manufacturers and retailers, that is still within its sell by date, and feeds 26,000 people daily. It keeps to the same hygiene standards of any mainstream distributor and ensures that the food remains appropriately frozen, chilled or at ambient temperature. FareShare then redistributes the produce to organisations who look after people with no or low income: Homeless hostels, substance misuse projects, breakfast clubs for children, centres for refugees or the elderly. Eager not to create dependence on free food, FareShare’s wares are only available to people who are willing to accept other services to help them out of the poverty trap.

- from howtomakeadifference

First appreciate FareShare’s effort to save food.
But think about why the rich countries can waste 100,000 tonnes of food? The simple reason is that they are rich. That’s why they can do that.
What is final solution?
Don’t make these countries rich. How can we do that? Don’t buy anything manufactured by companies of the rich country. Buy locally manufactured goods and services. People from rich countries also invest money in their local economies. Dont buy from big company. Don’t by from supermarkets.

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says. Researchers say carbon dioxide levels are having a marked effect on the health of shellfish such as mussels.

They sampled coastal waters off the north-west Pacific coast of the US every half-hour for eight years.

The results, published in the journal PNAS, suggest that earlier climate change models may have underestimated the rate of ocean acidification.

Professor Timothy Wootton from the department of ecology and evolution, University of Chicago, in Illinois, says such dramatic results were unexpected as it was thought that the huge ocean systems had the ability to absorb large quantities of CO2.

The findings showed that CO2 had lowered the water pH over time, demonstrating a year-on-year increase in acidity.

The research involved taking daily measurements of water pH levels, salinity and temperature, off the coast of Tatoosh island, a small outcrop lying in the Pacific Ocean, just off the north-western tip of Washington state, US.

As well as measuring physical factors, the health of marine life present in the coastal ecosystem was also tracked.

Professor Wootton says biological factors were missing from previous models of ocean climate systems – and that life in the ocean, or in this case on the ocean edge, can also affect seawater pH.

Every summer, Professor Wootton returned to the same sites on Tatoosh island’s windswept coasts, to look at the abundance and distribution of life at the water’s edge. He was especially interested in barnacles, algae and the dominant species, the Californian mussel.

The mussel has a calcium carbonate -based shell, which can be weakened or even dissolved by exposure to acid. Professor Wootton says the increase in acidity may be responsible for the decline in mussels noted in the study.

Other species quickly move into the space previously occupied by the mussels – though one of these species, the barnacle, also has calcified shells.

To explain this apparent anomaly, Professor Wootton says the decline of the dominant species allows a window where another species may thrive – though he expects this to be temporary as the interloper too will eventually be affected by the increasing acidity.

The researchers say they were surprised that the plants and animals in their study are so sensitive to CO2 changes. These organisms live in the harsh inter-tidal zones, they may be submerged under water, exposed to the sun, then lashed by waves and storms.

Professor Wootton says the most troubling finding is the speed of acidification, with the pH level dropping at a much greater rate than was previously thought.

“It’s going down 10 to 20 times faster than the previous models predicted,” he says.

The research team are now working together with chemical oceanographers to see how their coastal observations can be matched with large scale observations, to try to explain why the decline in pH levels seems to be happening so quickly.

“We actually know surprisingly little about how ocean acidity is changing over time, we need a broader network of measurements,” said Professor Wootton.

- from bbc

Ken Saro-Wiwa

After legal battles lasting nearly fourteen years, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has been forced to pay a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement. Plaintiffs from the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta have successfully held Shell accountable for complicity in human rights atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in the 1990s, including the execution of writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The legal action is one of a very few brought under the U.S. Alien Tort Statute that have been successfully resolved in favor of the plaintiffs. The settlement includes establishment of a $5 million dollar trust to benefit local communities in Ogoni.

- from priceofoil

- more shell is guilty of much more than human rights abuses
- more remembersarowiwa.com

Giant jelly fish are taking over parts of the world’s oceans due to overfishing and other human activities, say researchers. Dr Anthony Richardson of CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research and colleagues, report their findings in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Richardson says jellyfish numbers are increasing, particularly in Southeast Asia, the Black Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. He says the Japanese have a real problem with giant jellyfish that burst through fishing nets.

Richardson and colleagues reviewed literature linking jellyfish blooms with overfishing and eutrophication – high levels of nutrients. Jellyfish are normally kept in check by fish, which eat small jellyfish and compete for jellyfish food such as zooplankton, he says. But, with overfishing, jellyfish numbers are increasing. Jellyfish feed on fish eggs and larvae, further impacting on fish numbers.

To add insult to injury, nitrogen and phosphorous in run-off cause red phytoplankton blooms, which create low-oxygen dead zones where jellyfish survive, but fish can’t.

Richardson and colleagues say climate change may also encourage more jellyfish.

They have postulated for the first time that these conditions can lead to what they call a “jellyfish stable state”, in which jellyfish rule the oceans.

Richardson and colleagues recommend a number of actions in their paper, to coincide with World Oceans Day. They say it’s important to reduce overfishing, especially of small pelagic fish, like sardines, and to reduce run-off. They also say it’s important to control the transport of jellyfish around the world in ballast water and aquariums. Richardson says researchers are experimenting with different ways of controlling jellyfish. Some methods involve sound waves to explode jellyfish, while others use special nets to try and cut them up.

Jellyfish are considered simple jelly-like sea animals, which are related to the microscopic animals that form coral. They generally start their life as a plant-like polyp on the sea bed before budding off into the well-known bell-shaped medusa. Jellyfish have tentacles containing pneumatocyst cells, which act like little harpoons that lodge in prey to sting and kill them.

The location and number of pneumatocysts dictate whether jellyfish are processed for human consumption. While dried jellyfish with soya sauce is a delicacy served in Chinese weddings and banquets, not all kinds of jellyfish can be eaten, says Richardson.

According to Richardson, the species increasing in number aren’t generally eaten.

- from abc

‘Happiness: Lessons from a new science’, by Richard Layard.

In a nutshell, ‘Happiness’ is a summary of the scientific study of happiness. It is possible to measure it, argues Layard, and we can work out what causes more of it and less of it. Thus equipped, we should structure our society around those things that make us happy. “Here we are as a society,” writes Layard, “no happier than fifty years ago. Yet every group in society is richer, and most are healthier. In this new land of opportunity, what are we not doing that we could?”

There is some brilliant cultural analysis here, as Layard picks apart what drives our culture. Individualism, status, competition, all things proven to make us unhappy, but pursued nonetheless, written into policy in the form of performance related pay or schools rankings. For this, Layard blames the unholy synergy between Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: “From Darwin’s theory of evolution many people now conclude that to survive you have to be selfish and to look after No. 1: if you don’t, you get taken for a ride. From Adam Smith they also learn, conveniently, that even if everyone is completely selfish, thing will actually turn out for the best: free contracts between independent agents will produce the greatest possible happiness.”

Under the guidance of this free market philosophy, our current society revolves around the idea of growth, of having more. As Layard points out, we are no happier now than we were fifty years ago, even though our incomes have doubled. Although being poor can be miserable, and an increase in income can lead to an increase in happiness, that ceases to be true once our basic needs are met. In the developed world, our needs were some time ago. Our continued pursuit of economic growth may now be working against our dreams of happiness.

Instead, we should unite around a new vision of the common good, using Jeremy Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. So, we should monitor happiness as well as, or instead of, GDP. We should ease inequality, and help the poor. Since mental illness is one of the leading causes of unhappiness, we should do everything we can to prevent it. Family and relationships are the most important factor in happiness, so flexible working, shorter working hours, and better child care are important. Community should be encouraged, so anything that brings people together should be supported or even subsidised. Advertising to children should be banned. On a personal level, avoid comparing yourself with others. Appreciate what you have. Seek to ‘do good’, rather than ‘do well’.

There’s a lot to cheer about in these recommendations, and it has been great to see politicians adopting the ideas. David Cameron has certainly been inspired. A move towards a more compassionate society, towards greater community, better work and more stable families is a vision we could all agree on, and Layard has done us a great service putting the scientific case for something that we can all feel intuitively.

However, I do have a vague sense of disquiet about the extent to which happiness can be a guiding ethos. There is surely more to a good society than the pursuit of happiness for all. Surely there are rights and wrongs – gross inequality is not wrong because it makes us unhappy, but because it is morally unjustifiable. I’m not sure that happiness is a sufficient guiding principle for a society.

The greatest happiness for the greatest number of people also leaves large loopholes. Shopping for bargain fashion items at Primark, for example, makes many people very happy. Since Primark has many more customers than it has sweatshop workers, it must cause more happiness in the world than sadness. According to a cost-benefit analysis of happiness, Primark is therefore a good thing.

Those considerations aside, ‘Happiness’ is a great book, full of insights into human nature and the consumer culture.

- from

I think using Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution here is wrong. It has nothing to do with making us unhappy. We dont have any physical advantage in our body to survive. Its our developed brain which provides cooperation between individuals gave us evolutionary advantage. All living things except human, can cooperate within their group only in a selfish manner. But humans are not like that. Using Darvin for expoitation of others is an economist agenda. They are short sighted. They care only the economic growth and their upward going graphs. They are the real problem in the society.

They make rules that never allows sharing. copyright laws, patents etc. Reject those idea. Use Free Softwares. Gnu.org

In 1649, Gerrard Winstanley led one of the UK’s most notable political protests, when his group of forty ‘diggers’ took up residence on St George’s Hill, near Weybridge. They planted vegetables, erected their own homes, and invited anyone to come to join them, promising to ‘work in righteousness and lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasury for all.’

Winstanley believed that oppressive social structures kept people in poverty. If access to land was restored, people would form communes and look after themselves in a happy and democratic anarchy. Nobody would work for the oppressive upper classes if they had their own land to farm, and social hierarchies would crumble.

Needless to say, the local authorities were scandalised and called the army. When the army decided not to move them on, they resorted to intimidation. There were beatings and arson attacks, crops were trampled, and eventually Winstanley was hauled into the courts and the camp disbanded. The occupation lasted from April to August, and after similarly unsuccesful projects in other parts of the country, the diggers finally abandoned their efforts in 1651.

Despite their lack of success, the diggers movement was profoundly influential. It inspired the American revolutionaries, pioneered many of the principles of communism, and is often cited as the birth of ‘direct action’ protest in Britain.

350 years on, the diggers’ cause is still unresolved. Land ownership in the UK is a subject we rarely talk about, but it remains a deeply rooted inequality, stretching right back to old class structures. 70% of the UK is owned by just 1% of the population, with big landowners including the queen, the military, and many duchies and inherited estates. The Duke of Westminster owns my office in London, part of estates that total 140,000 acres. Two thirds of Britain is owned by just 6,000 landowners. Houses and land remain hugely expensive and beyond the grasp of many people, while vast estates remain unused and in private hands. Because the monarchy and the government are among those landowners, and many more of them sit in the House of Lords, reform is not on the cards any time soon.

Fortunately, the legacy of the diggers lives on. Today the radical protest collective The Land is Ours are due to move onto some disused land near Hammersmith. They will pitch tents and dig composting toilets, and start building themselves an eco-village. Raised beds will be assembled and the former industrial land turned into a productive growing space. Volunteers will head out to meet local residents and tell them what is happening, bringing the community into the project.

The last occupation of this type was in 1996, when 500 activists occupied a site on the banks of the Thames and made themselves homes and permaculture gardens. They lived there for five months until the landowners, Guiness, evicted them with the help of the riot police.

Who knows how long this particular protest will last, perhaps the summer. Whether or not it survives, it’s a bold and subversive statement, and may highlight the neglected issue of land reform once again.

- from makewealthhistory

The crucial question is, on what terms does the Treasury plan to guarantee or to repurchase or to otherwise deal with the bad assets that the banks have? These assets are mortgage-backed securities. They are securities derived from subprime loans that were made in an atmosphere of regulatory laxness and complicity and fraud, basically, during the Bush administration, which came to take over the system of housing finance and to infect it with assets which nobody trusts, which nobody can value. And nobody really knows what’s in the files, what’s on the loan tapes of those—that underlie those securities. So the question that need to ask is, before we issue a public guarantee, does the Treasury of the United States plan to conduct a meticulous audit of the assets that underlie the securities that they’re expecting to take off the banks’ books, so that the taxpayer, can have an idea of what, if anything, these securities are worth?

And the problem is that when the little bit of checking that has been done appears to reveal that a very large fraction of these securities contain, on the face of it, misrepresentation or fraud in the files. And so, we are looking at an asset which nobody, no outside investor doing due diligence on behalf of a client for whom they have some responsibility, would touch. And that is the issue. That’s the problem.

If that is indeed the case, then it’s fair to conclude that the large banks, which the Treasury is trying very hard to protect, cannot in fact be protected, that they are in fact insolvent, and that the proper approach for dealing with them is for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to move in and take the steps that the FDIC normally takes when dealing with insolvent banks.

And the sooner that you get to that and the sooner that you take these steps, which every administration, including the Bush administration, actually took in certain cases—replacing the management, making the risk capital take the first loss, reorganizing the institution, guaranteeing the deposits so that there isn’t a run, reopening the bank under new management so that it can begin to function again as it should have all along as a normal bank—the sooner you get to that, the more quickly you’ll work through the crisis.

The more you delay and the more you try to essentially prop up an institution whose books have already been poisoned, in effect, by this—the practices of the past few years, the longer it will take before the credit markets begin to function again. The functioning of the credit markets is absolutely essential to the success of the larger package, of the stimulus package and everything else, in beginning to revive the economy.

This really is not a political issue. This is an issue which should be determined after you have had—made an evaluation of the solvency of the institution, of whether its assets are sufficient to cover its liabilities. That’s a technical determination.

The proper authority for making that is neither Timothy Geithner nor David Axelrod; it’s Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She has the authority, and she should be the one who’s making that determination, again, not on political grounds, not on whether the public is angry, as it justifiably is, over the compensation packages these banks have been paying to themselves, but whether the banks themselves are viable as—whether they’re meeting their capital requirements, whether they in fact have assets on their books sufficient, to keep them solvent. And if that’s not the case, there’s a clear chain of responsibility, and it’s not a political decision. It’s a technical decision. It’s a banking regulation decision that needs to be taken.

When you’re dealing with a bank which is essentially solvent, then you can make these judgments. But when you’re dealing with a bank which has already basically rendered itself insolvent by virtue of its complicity—it’s basically seeking for easy money, for big profits, out of mortgage originations and underwriting fees in the last part of this decade—then you’re dealing with a bank which is already underwater. The risk capital is already worth nothing. It’s being held up only by the expectation of a federal bailout.

The problem with leaving the management in place is that you cannot rely on the existing management to give you a full and fair accounting of what is in the books of the bank and what the practices of the bank are. That is why you need to bring in a new team. You need to bring in a team which is nominated by the FDIC, which has as its first objective coming clean, going through the books of the bank and separating the good assets from the bad assets, the assets which are—which have a reasonable chance of continuing to earn income from the assets which need to be written down or written off. Then you can make an assessment of just how big the losses are and what has to be done, whether the bank itself should be closed, which is sometimes the case; whether it can find a merger partner, which is sometimes the case; or whether what you do is reorganize it, isolate the bad assets from the good assets and relaunch the good assets as part of a new bank. One thing or another has to be done. And when it’s done, you can begin to basically grow the economy on the basis of these new newly reconstructed credit institutions.

But so long as you’re dealing with the old management and so long as you’re dealing with the old practices and so long as you don’t have a clean audit of the books, the chances are that the bank is going to behave in ways which are not constructive, which do not contribute to the growth of the economy, and which leave all kinds of suspicions present in the system about the integrity of the institution and of the regulatory process. And that’s the problem the Treasury Department seems to be determined not to face.

And so long as it doesn’t face it, we’re not going to get out of this, and the Treasury Department is not contributing constructively to the success of the recovery plan, which the Congress is about to enact. And that will mean that the recovery plan itself will be, sort of after the fact, too small to deal the problem of unemployment, which is just growing at the rate of a half a million jobs a month. That’s the dilemma that we’re in.

The term “nationalizing banks”, is a political misleading term. I learned a few months ago that in 1982, at the time of the Latin American debt crisis, the Reagan administration’s FDIC had a contingency plan to nationalize the major banks in the case that a major Latin American country—let’s say Mexico or Argentina or Brazil—had defaulted outright on its debt. This was not something that administration would have wanted to do. In the end, they didn’t have to do it. But they had a plan to do it, if it was necessary because the banks were rendered insolvent by the running to ruin of a major class of assets.

We have a major class of assets—that is to say, all of these subprime mortgage-backed securities—which have run to ruin. They should never have been issued in the first place. They are very, very highly likely to default. They were issued on terms which makes them basically unmarketable, because there is not adequate loan documentation. And when there is loan documentation, that documentation evidently indicates that the loans are likely to go bad, so that nobody outside will buy them. That’s a problem that exists in the banking system, and the regulators simply have to deal with it.

We’re not in 1945 in Attlee’s Britain, where we are taking the commanding heights of their economy or anything like that. We are doing what regulators always have to do, in conservative and liberal administrations, when faced with major intractable insolvencies in the financial system. If you don’t deal with that, the problem of fraud and loss just gets worse. And the losses that are incurred after insolvency are losses that fall on the taxpayer, because they come against deposits that are insured. So, one way or another, until we deal with this, the taxpayers’ liability just gets bigger and bigger.

Whether it was the New Deal or World War II that ended the Depression?

First of all, there is a grave understatement in those arguments about what the New Deal actually did. And that understatement is typically because the unemployment figures that many people are accustomed to using for the 1930s don’t count people who actually worked for the New Deal. This is Michael Steele’s distinction between jobs and work. But people who were building the Lincoln Tunnel or the Triborough Bridge or the aircraft carrier Yorktown are counted as work relief and not as employed, and there were many millions of those. And when you put them into the figures, you find that the New Deal actually reduced unemployment from 25 percent in 1933 to about—to less than ten percent in 1936. It went up again in ’37 and then came back down again to about ten percent before the war. So, a major, major improvement in unemployment did occur under the New Deal.

It is true that the war made a major transformation in the economy. It drove unemployment to zero. But it also did something else. It gave the American family, the American household, a financial cushion, which was the war bonds that people accumulated during the war that formed the basis for the financial prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. And that is what made the—made it possible for the private financial system, which collapsed in 1929, to recover in the 1950s and ’60s. And I think that point is very important, because what it shows you is that when the financial system goes down, as it seems to have gone down in the last couple of years, recovery requires a long time. And the precondition for recovery is not fixing the banks; it’s fixing the balance sheets of the households, the creditworthiness of the American family.

And the problem that we have here is the fall in housing prices, people who have mortgages that are worth much more than their houses, which is rendering the entire borrowing base of the American economy basically insolvent. And it will lead to make it extremely difficult for the mechanisms of credit to work again, until you’ve done enough basically to stabilize housing, to stabilize jobs and incomes, and then make it possible for banks—for any reasonable bank, even a solvent bank—to look at its borrowers and say, “Gee, this is a good credit risk,” and for that matter, for the borrowers themselves to feel, “Gee, this is a good time to come in and borrow and get that new car.” That’s the issue that they’re going to face. It’s going to take a long time and major change. And that’s why I say the whole package here is probably not adequate, but it’s a good—that said, what Roosevelt did in ’33 wasn’t adequate either. It was simply a start. And that’s where we are.

The Predator State refers to the takeover of state power by private interests masquerading behind conservative principle and basically acting for private clients and private profit. That was the Bush administration in a nutshell. The title goes back to Veblen and a bit to my father’s New Industrial State, and it’s an attempt to capture in two words a phenomenon that I think really has transformed our economy, much for the worse in the last several decades.

Professor James Galbraith talking with Amy Goodman.

James Galbraith is economist, a professor of public affairs and government at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

- from democracynow

a ground-breaking study by Oil Change and other NGO’s calculated that Shell was the world’s most carbon intensive oil company, per barrel of oil equivalent to be produced. The main reason for this is its massive expansion into Canada’s climate intensive dirty oil sands.

The report looked at the carbon intensity of the total resources of the four largest international oil companies – Shell, BP, Exxon and Chevron – and found that Shell was the worst.

Even this exercise was difficult due to the lack of reporting on data by the companies. Now a new analysis of climate risk disclosure by fossil fuel companies published by Ceres and the Environmental Defence Fund backs up this analysis. It paints a fascinating picture of the lack of information given by companies to investors about the climate risk of their operations. Shell gets heavily criticised, although is no means the worst.

The report noted that “Royal Dutch Shell’s disclosure of the significant climate risks it faces from its investments, particularly those in non-conventional fuels, did not provide the range of information needed by investors as outlined in the Global Framework.”

The report concludes with the Oil Change briefing paper that both Shell’s tar sands and oil shale investments are problematic. “Because of the substantial greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands and their contribution to global warming, their development presents a considerable climate risk to Shell and its shareholders.”

CERES and EDF note that Shell states, “As easy-to-access oil gets rarer, unconventional resources such as Canada’s oil sands will become increasingly important sources of energy.”

They argue that “This disclosure did not fully address the concern that tar sands development will release extensive quantities of greenhouse gases. Shell did disclose information on how it plans to make oil sands mining compatible with Shell’s emissions reductions efforts … Shell’s disclosure of information on unconventional fuels failed to provide clear, comprehensive information that investors can use to judge Shell’s exposure to and management of climate risks.”

Essentially Shell is trying to square a circle with oil sands – it knows that its business survival depends on reducing carbon emissions. But its business strategy is to exploit tar sands that have a much higher carbon intensity and hence higher emissions. So it knows it has to lower emissions, but has chosen to exploit a technology with high emissions. If it doesn’t make sense to you it doesn’t make much sense to Shell either, but still the company is doing it, with the panacea that CCS technology will somehow sort the problem out. If CCS does not work, or governments introduce tight climate standards, Shell is up the proverbial creek, with its whole business strategy in ruins.

Its not just tar sands Shell has a problem with either. The report notes “Shell is also actively engaged in securing government leases in the Western U.S. for development of oil shale, another unconventional oil resource. Oil shale development shares tar sands’ high greenhouse gas intensity, and also requires significant water resources. In its 10-K annual filing, Shell did not address how its oil shale investment fits within plans to mitigate global warming pollution.”

The climate stakes are just too high for Shell to “not address” these issues. But even if we think Shell is bad, its not the worst. Although it criticised Shell, the report said that “the company had the best climate risk disclosure” of all the oil and gas companies, “indicating the low level of disclosure in this sector.”

This is a situation that should not be allowed to continue by the regulatory authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

- from priceofoil