THERE is a lot less “stuff” being produced in the US and China as a consequence of the financial crisis.
According to Joe Kishore writing at The World Socialist Website:
“Manufacturing in the US is collapsing, with a key index falling to its lowest level in 20 years on Friday. Other figures released yesterday show a downturn in production throughout the world.
“The Institute for Supply Management reported that its key index, the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), fell to 32.4 in December from 36.2 in November.**
“Economists had expected a much slower decline to 35.4. It is the lowest reading of the index since June 1980. A figure below 50 indicates contraction in manufacturing…
“Meanwhile, the China Purchasing Managers Index rose slightly to 41.2, from a record low of 40.9 in November. However, the figure is still far below 50, signaling continued contraction in Chinese manufacturing as exports collapse.”
This must translate into fewer greenhouse gas emissions, but I haven’t seen any relevant calculations. In particular, what will the global recession mean in terms of reduced carbon emissions?
Furthermore, if, as Freeman Dyson suggests, the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible, less “stuff” is good news.
********
**December 2008 Manufacturing ISM Report On Business http://www.ism.ws/ISMReport/MfgROB.cfm.
Click on the chart for a larger view.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“less “stuff” is good news”
In the long-term, perhaps. But in the short to medium term, the transition to a ‘less stuff’ economy will cause untold misery for many millions, if not billions.
Furthermore, if, as Freeman Dyson suggests, the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible, less “stuff” is good news.
sorry Jennifer, but i surely hope that you can do a better analysis!
for a start, loss of money will often force people into older, more dirty technology.
on the other hand the collapse of the US car industry was partly based on their unwillingness to build anything but SUVs.
the crisis offers a chance, when money pumped in by the states is used to advance green technologies.
the main problem, too much money moving freely around the world, and a lack of real value has so far NOT been addressed. (there is more trading done in commodities than there are actually available).
How much is too much money and why shouldn’t it move around the world freely?
Some of that money will be invested in better, greener technologies in countries without that investor base.
There’s an alternate route. It’s time we realized that the people we have entrusted with running our economic systems in the West don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to taking care of the majority. I am not advocating a hippie-dippie, Greenie environment, run by people wearing ‘Earth’ shoes and waving the peace sign. I’m talking about an objective analysis of capitalism as we know it. It’s about as far from Adam Smith’s vision of capitalism as communism is from Marx’s perspective.
The world is being run by self-serving corporations. In North America, it is the mandate of a corporation to make a profit for the shareholders. They have no choice. The shareholders don’t care where the profits come from, or how they are obtained, they simply want the profits. To get those profits, corporation advocate paying minimal wages and maximizing pricing. In a market system, that’s supposed to operate on the basis of supply and demand, but that’s a theory. In practice, markets are artificially manipulated by stock markets, corporate interests and even governments, through lobbying.
Corporations have no allegience to the countries they represent. They will go wherever the costs are least and the profits are maximized. That has meant producing their goods in countries where the costs of labour are lowest and selling them in countries where the profits are maximum. It has also meant creating agreements like NAFTA in North America, where corporations have the right to sue over government or private intervention that interfere with their profits. In other words, the people in countries are losing their rights to govern themselves to corporate interest.
That has to stop. Obama talked about re-writing NAFTA. The US thought NAFTA would be an advantage to them, but when they found out it worked both ways, they balked. Here in British Columbia, Canada, we depend on logging as a major source of income. When certain corporate interests in the US saw that US companies were buying our lumber, because it was cheaper, they lobbied the US government to impose tariffs on our lumber. They argued that our government was subsidizing the logging industry, when in fact they were carrying on with our way of life. In other words, the US was trying to impose their way of life on Canadians.
The US tariffs were a direct contravention of NAFTA, and the legal bodies involved told them so on many occasions. The US was ordered to repay the tariffs and they balked. They have had it all their own way, both with imposing tariffs contrary to the agreement and imposing their way of life on us. For example, they talked our government into modifying our unemployment insurance downward to suit their more right-wing system.
This notion of making the world an international market, with international rules, has to be examined. When corporations become independent of the wills of local government, it is going too far. People must have the ability to determine their own way of life without fear of having to please corporate interests. In a nutshell, we need to examine the ‘free’ in free enterpise. That concept works to a degree when the scope is small. but when it enlarges to an international level, where corporations are free to do as they please, that spells big trouble for the average person.
If the average worker, through unionization, or other means, went on a rampage of maximizing wages, there would soon be legislation to curb that practice. Even if the system was mediated on a supply and demand basis, it would never be tolerated. Why then are corporation allowed to run roughshod? The answer is simple: they and their representatives run the governments. It’s time we realized that and took steps to prevent it.
We have gone, in Canada, from a system in the 1950’s, where a breadwinner on a modest salary could buy a home and raise a family, to a system today where it takes two salaries to do the same. Meanwhile, corporate taxes have been slashed while the taxes of the average Canadian have risen dramatically. Not only that, we give them handouts of millions of dollars, and they still complain we are not doing enough to encourage investment. Crap!! It has gone too far and it’s time people took back their countries and stopped appeasing corporations.
We trusted the corporate mentality to guide us just as we have entrusted the IPCC with climate change issues. The corporations have lead us into a world financial crisis, and we are bailing them out!! How sick is that? Let’s give our heads a shake and get off this insanity, both with the corporate mentality and the carbon trading nonsense.
“on the other hand the collapse of the US car industry was partly based on their unwillingness to build anything but SUVs.
the crisis offers a chance, when money pumped in by the states is used to advance green technologies.”
This sort of wide eyed stupidity barely merits a response. As if the problems in the US auto industry were so simple. If you look at the numbers of vehicles actually sold, SUV’s dominate. They are a consumer preference.
What should not be a preference is wasting taxpayers money on “green” technologies, whatever they are.
The ignorance shown by this type of article is typical of the left.
An economy does not only produce “stuff”. It produces services as well. Economic growth allow us to spend more money on health, education, welfare, scientific research and a host of other goods that make our standard of living so high.
This expenditure can be either public or private, and can only be generated by a growing dynamic economy that responds to market signals.
This is amply demonstrated by the economic growth we have seen globally over the last 30 years and in Australia over the last 10 years.
The Albanian and Cuban economic model is not recommended. All those happy Albanians and Cubans enjoying the fruits of their collective labour. I only wish the moonbats would join them.
And what is wrong with “stuff” anyway? My “stuff” allow me to enjoy a level of comfort (like air-conditioning) and a richer more fulfilling life (I can but books and DVD’s and recreational items) than my parents generation could possibly imagine.
The socialist-lefty-moonbats want us all to live in a cave to satisfy their smug ideology.
Falling economic growth means falling living standards means more poverty. Fodder for the revolution I guess. We must stop the viscous spread of wealth and prosperity.
No information on what the downturn in manufacturing means in terms of reduced emissions? Surely someone is compiling this type of information? … or is it too politicaly incorrect?
“there is more trading in commodities than there are actually available”
Well done sod; I had thought your capacity for asinity had diminished but that is good; speculative bubbles aren’t built on scarcity but irrational demand; the tulip bubble is the first and still an excellent example; the resource bubble of the 60s with Poseidon is a better one because there was no resource or commodity at all; speculation, like most human qualities, can be a good thing; it is the source of investment funds after all; but the idea that private investment is bad while government investment is sound is ridculous; the current financial crash was a direct result of government and ideological investment via the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac instruments; government designation of value is always less real than market valuation, but neither is perfect; the carbon trading schemes and the forced redirecting of funds into otherwise non-commercial ‘green’ energy is already bubbling and will be a long term disaster because the ideological base of this funding has no proven value; that is, what value do you put on the idealised natural form which AGW is referential to?
Comment from: jennifer January 4th, 2009 at 9:05 am “No information on what the downturn in manufacturing means in terms of reduced emissions? Surely someone is compiling this type of information? … or is it too politicaly incorrect?”
There is a model somewhere that will “give” you these answers.
Jen: ‘No information on what the downturn in manufacturing means in terms of reduced emissions? Surely someone is compiling this type of information? … or is it too politicaly incorrect?’
Even more politically incorrect to ask whether green anti-consumerist sentiment rippling down from the AA demographic (ie, the economically elite that influences the behaviour of the aspiring Bs and so on) is one of the underlying causes of asset devaluation. People act as if the ‘financial crisis’ is some kind of technical aberration, rather than a genuine marking down of the future value (ie, the worth or price) of just about everything on Earth. When people are expected to boycott ‘stuff’ on an increasing global scale, the economy as we know it, does not work. Or, to state the obvious, in a way the our computer modelers will understand, when you run economic projections with less demand, value declines. When projected demand is low enough, a tipping point is reached. The project, company, nation or whatever becomes non-viable. Asset devaluation causes financial crisis, not vice versa.
This is obviously not a genie that can be re-bottled any time soon. Conspicuous consumption is not about to become hip and cool in the foreseeable future. So we have a real problem here.
The situation is perfect for all manner of soft and hard totalitarians to make their pitches for control. Its likely to be revenge time for the barbecue bores with their technocratic utopias. Happy New Year.
Here is a chart of “World Greenhouse Gas Emissions”:
http://www.wri.org/image/view/9529/_original
Manufacturing of all sorts looks to produce about a fifth of them. So a 10% contraction in world manufacturing–
http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2009/01/02/this-sounds-bad/
–might reduce global emissions by about 2%.
Jimmock, sanctimonious posturing about conspicuous consumption is hip and cool amongst the AA demographic, actual behaviour maybe not so much.
mitchell; your “World Greenhouse Gas Emissions” makes an interesting comparison with Fig 7.3 from AR4;
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch07.pdf
Fig 7.3 is on p 515; it shows the CO2 fluxes on an annual basis; ACO2 is made up of 6.4 for fossil fuels and 1.6 for land use change; these constitute 3.67% of the total emissions; table 3, p26 of the DOE report gives the total of ACO2 as 2.91%;
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
With 98.5% of CO2 emissions reabsorbed ACO2 remaining in the atmosphere is ~0.05%. The AGW crowd talk about CO2 displacement and isotopic distinction to prove that all of the 1.5% non-absorbed and accumulated CO2 is ACO2 but this does not make sense.
cohenite – is the problem that natural CO2 dominates anthro CO2 30:1 in the overall annual emissions, so you’d expect the ratio to be the same in the annually accumulated increment as well? That had never occurred to me. It suggests a lack of mixing before natural CO2 reuptake, but I’ll have to look into it. I’ll do some carbon-cycle homework and report back.
mitchell; of further interest are these pieces about ACO2 and its contribution to the incremental increase;
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html#Extra_how_much_human_CO2_is_in_the_atmosphere
Ferdinand, who is a sceptic in respect of ACO2 having far less effect than AGW posits, argues that all of the increase in CO2 is due to ACO2; alternatively, Segalstad argues for the contrary;
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/ESEF3VO2.htm
The isotopic part of the debate seems to have been overlooked recently by AGW proponents; perhaps they’ve read section 10 of Segalstad who calculates that ACO2 is 16% of the 40% increase in CO2 using 1750 as a baseline. This definitely is an issue which needs some more attention.
Sorry; Segalstad calculates that at least 96% of the atmospheric CO2 is consistent with natural sources, which is similar to AR4 and DOE calculations.
Here is the picture I have put together so far. In the inanimate world, carbon in general is 99% 12C and 1% 13C. 12CO2 is photosynthetically metabolized a little more quickly than 13CO2 and so there is a slight deficit of 13C in plant carbon and thus in fossil carbon, relative to the inanimate world (something like a fiftieth of a percent less 13C). The atmosphere shows not only an absolute increase in CO2 ppm relative to the preindustrial, but also a slight dilution of 13CO2, consistent with the newly introduced CO2 having been slightly richer in 12CO2 than the atmosphere into which it was introduced. To sum up, there is more CO2 than before, and a greater fraction of 12CO2 than before.
(For the foregoing, I was assisted by the following paper: http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/164/4/691 )
Now the question is, how much of a given year’s increment of atmospheric CO2 is actually anthropogenic CO2? For this I’ll just rely on the AR4 figure. Out of all the annual flows of anthropogenically released carbon (red arrows), the biggest is the cycling between atmosphere and ocean surface. It says that about 20 GtAC, out of an atmospheric reservoir of 165 GtAC, participates – an eighth of it, in other words. So you might suppose that of the annual extra 8+ GtAC, an eighth of it goes into the ocean within a year, but that it has meanwhile been replaced by an equivalent amount of older ACO2 released *from* the ocean. I infer, therefore, that it really is legitimate to say that the “extra atmospheric CO2” is anthropogenic, but that a significant fraction of it has been shuttling between atmosphere and ocean, rather than just sitting in the air.
I’ll have a look at Engelbeen vs Segalstad and get back to you. Though maybe not tonight!
mitchell porter “I infer, therefore, that it really is legitimate to say that the “extra atmospheric CO2″ is anthropogenic, but that a significant fraction of it has been shuttling between atmosphere and ocean, rather than just sitting in the air”.
So anthropogenic CO2 from the ocean has this little tag on it stating its source and it’s date of in-gassing?? Yes…I have skimmed the theory about the different isotopes, which I presume survive their dunking in the briny.
What I think is that the IPCC has demonstrated their competence really well with the hockey stick affair. They allowed a guy with one year’s experience as a Ph. D to act as a lead author and produce a graph that contradicted an earlier graph put out by the IPCC showing the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. When the guy was revealed as incompetent, the IPCC snuck a revised edition of the hockey stick into the AR4 review 6 years later, even though Susan Solomon, one of the IPCC leaders, asked the working group to take a closer look at bristle cone data. They ignored her. With the bristle cone data removed, the hockey stick become nothing and that’s why they were advised to remove it by NAS.
The entire working group were exposed as knowing one another personally. This is the peer review system everyone brays about, yet we go on quoting the IPCC as if it is an impartial body. Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert, was forced to resign over what he saw as impartiality by another IPCC bigwig, Kevin Trenberth.
So, we are supposed to accept the IPCC graph which ‘theorizes’ that anthropogenic CO2 is recycled, and actually accounts for a higher level of the natural CO2? Maybe you, not me.
What do you mean by “or is it too politicaly incorrect?”
One thing is for sure, the GFC is a great opportunity for the NEW industry, commer, and generators that emerge from the GFC to be as efficient and sustainable as possible.. but of course this would require a cap and trade (or tax) on carbon to tweak things along.
cohenite, I’ll say this for Segalstad – if someone wanted to independently examine the basics of the CO2 consensus, he’s be a good testing ground. He disputes everything: the interpretation of the ice-core data, the rejection of most pre-Keeling measurements, the ocean-surface buffer concept, and the atmospheric residence times. Most people (like Engelbeen) just dispute the magnitude of climate sensitivity.
I cannot promise to “audit” Segalstad’s arguments properly any time soon – though thank you for pointing him out – but I did run across Engelbeen responding to Segalstad in the final comment here
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=820
and there’s also a link to a lengthier discussion which is largely Engelbeen versus everyone. His main point seems to be that Segalstad is confusing the atmospheric residence time for a single CO2 molecule (which Engelbeen says is indeed about 5 years) with the time for restoration of equilibrium levels of CO2. Possibly he’s referring to the atmosphere-ocean cycling I mentioned but I can’t confirm that without a closer look.
Gordon, I was indeed reasoning on the assumption that the IPCC diagram is roughly correct. As always, how these discussions proceed depends on the extent of initial disagreements. The IPCC would say that that diagram and its numbers are deduced from observation; Segalstad would say they are garbage in garbage out, the result of circular reasoning. To examine the basis for the diagram would involve the sort of literature review I’ve just put off when faced with Segalstad. So, not today, not this week, but perhaps in some future iteration of the discussion.