Yes, we currently subsidize fossil fuels!

This seems like a no-brainer. How did this not happen sooner?

Group of 20 leaders are close to an agreement on phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels in an effort to curb global warming, though no fixed dates have been set, reports Reuters.

Several G20 countries subsidize fuel such as coal and oil, at a cost of about $300 billion, to keep prices artificially low for consumers, which boosts both demand for hydrocarbons and emissions, reports Reuters.

Obama aide Michael Froman told Reuters that phasing out fossil fuel subsidies worldwide could cut greenhouse gases by up to 12 percent by 2050, citing estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency. He said United States would agree to the cuts as well.

Ever wonder what Swedes do during those long winters?

STOCKHOLM – “I saw a wonderful statue earlier. I always knew it was there, but today I measured it and soon we’ll knit a sweater for it. We’ll meet up on site to stitch it and take a picture for our blog.”

Maskan (“the stitch”), one of three code-named female founders of the Stockholm “guerrilla knitting” group, Stickkontakt, is telling me about their upcoming knitting graffiti action. Inspired by the Houston group, Knitta Please, Stickkontakt decorate everything from lampposts and bins to park benches and tree trunks with colorful yarns. “We often have political messages,” Maskan tells me. “But sometimes we don’t. Once, we decided to celebrate Sweden’s few female statues by dressing up four of them as super heroines.”

There is a zero tolerance policy for graffiti in Stockholm; any unauthorized street art must be removed within 24 hours. But that hasn’t dissuaded guerrilla knitters.

“We’re hoping that our actions – which can hardly be called vandalism – will serve as a kind of gateway to making people more open to street art in general,” says Maria, cofounder of another knitting graffiti group called Masquerade.

Maria and her friend Lina, the other cofounder of Masquerade, see knitting graffiti as fun, harmless, quirky, and soft, with the potential for a global impact. In fact, they recently returned from a trip where they used knitting graffiti to “tag” along the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia, Mongolia, and China. [csmonitor.com]

Crowd-sourcing

You know that I'm a foodie and this article would have appealed to me anyway, but the thing that really caught my attention is the word "crowd-sourcing". I guess that's the verb for how a wiki is created. I would say that evolutionary improvement can be made through the "crowd-sourcing" of a recipe, but that's not the way to make revolutionary steps or to produce real novelty or innovation. So, what do you think of the word? And what do you think of the process it describes?

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.

The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes. [NYTimes.com]

happy birthday to me!

Norman Borlaug - Father of the Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug, who revolutionized agriculture, increasing crop yields to feed millions of people died last week. As the world continues to confront expanding populations and increasing environmental degradation, what will be the next wave of agricultural innovation?

Here's a bit of his obituary from Economist.com:

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”.

Crop diseases drew his attention first, inspiring him to turn from forestry to plant pathology under Charles Stakman, a lifelong mentor, at the University of Minnesota. Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right. Rust had devastated the Midwest in the 1930s, and Mexico shortly before he went there. So Mr Borlaug first bred wheat cultivars for rust-resistance, a ten-year task, and then crossed them with Norin, a dwarf Japanese variety, to produce a shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which, when properly charged with water and fertiliser, gave three times the yield.

This was the wheat that swept India in its “Green Revolution”, raising yields from 12m tonnes in 1965 to 20m by 1970, causing the country to run out of jute bags to carry it, carts and railcars to transport it, and places to store it; that made Pakistan self-sufficient in wheat by 1968; that almost doubled yields even in Sudan, on the edge of the Sahel. The famines and huge mortality that had been predicted for the second half of the 20th century never came to pass. More food led not to more births, but fewer, as the better-fed had smaller families. Global grain production outpaced population growth, and Mr Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Greens attacked him, saying his new varieties used too much water and costly chemical fertiliser; his link with DuPont was noted. They complained that traditional farming was disrupted and diversity replaced by monoculture. Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread.

Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved. The gene for rust-resistance in rice, for example, might be put into all other cereals. He hoped he might live to see it.

Meanwhile what he called the “Population Monster” was breathing down his neck, or rather ticking, like Captain Hook’s crocodile. Every second brought two more people, crying to be fed. By 2050, he wrote in 2005, the world would need to double its food supply. Some 800m were malnourished as it was. Mr Borlaug loved to talk of reaching for the stars, but his day-to-day motto was an earthly one. Get the plough. Start growing now.

What do France and Bhutan have in common?

From ForeignPolicy.com. What do you think? Is it valid, good or reasonable to measure Gross National Happiness? Well-Being per Capita?

Nicolas Sarkozy's government is rolling out a "revolutionary" new economic indicator:

France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, beckoning other countries to join in a "revolution" in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis. [...]

France — whose growth has lagged its peers in recent decades according to standard measures — will also try to convince other governments to change their economic tracking, Sarkozy said

"A great revolution is waiting for us," he said. "For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."

"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.

One minor quibble: Sarkozy should really give some credit to King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan, the true pioneer of gross national happiness.

Skeptics can (and will) look at this new innovation as a ploy for France to "juke the stats," since its short workweek and social benefits look a lot more impressive than its GDP growth.

That aside, the transformation of Sarkozy's economic message has been pretty astounding. The president came to power promising privitization and economic modernization and was lambasted by French left-wingers for his attachment to "Anglo-Saxon" economic models. But since the economic crisis (and his own popularity crisis) he's made a habit of attacking the Anglo-Saxons for their free-market orthodoxy and consulting with market-skeptics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz on new economic indicators.

Where have you gone, Sarko l'Américain?

Health care vs. Free trade?

Here's a trade-off that will not be good for us. From Economist.com:

ALTHOUGH Barack Obama alarmed free traders last year with protectionist-sounding pronouncements on the campaign trail, such as one about the need to renegotiate NAFTA, optimists among them dismissed this as mere posturing designed to placate restive trade unions. Yet a decision by the White House to impose punitive tariffs (35% for the first year, falling by five percentage points a year, to 25% in the third year) on Chinese-made pneumatic tyres now raises serious doubts about Mr Obama’s commitment to free trade...

Simon Evenett, a trade economist at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, argues that Mr Obama’s decision is a clear affirmation of the power of American labour unions in shaping its trade policy. It appears that Mr Obama is desperate to shore-up support from unions and the left of the Democratic Party for health-care reform—his most pressing domestic concern—and is prepared to risk repercussions on trade.

If so, heightened economic tensions between America and China are a heavy price to pay. Mr Prasad says that “an escalating trade war between these two large economies has the potential to disrupt the world trading system”. The China-America spat also comes soon before the leaders of the G20, the group of big rich and emerging economies, meet in Pittsburgh on September 24th. Global co-operation has been crucial amid efforts to encourage economic recovery. It would be a tragedy if it that were derailed by posturing over tyres and chicken.

Einstein Quote of the Day

I've always held a special place in my heart for math, and this quote sums it up:

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.