Getting to grips with the future

Despite the fog.

In America and Europe, the economic crisis increasingly resembles an existential one. Solutions for an alternative future do exist, but as French sociologist Alain Touraine points out, politicians are reluctant to embrace them

Alain Touraine

I have some very bad news for you. Europe is not suffering from one crisis but three. In the wake of the financial crisis, we had a monetary and economic crisis, which has now given rise to a political crisis, which in Europe is characterised by a lack of vision and initiative that prevents us from taking control of our future.

The first crisis, which was also the most visible one, culminated with the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank in New York in September 2008. It was a financial crisis that seriously affected the United States, Britain and continental Europe. However, other parts of the world recovered from it very quickly and even returned to significant growth.

In early 2010, many people believed we were on our way to recovery when a second crisis — this time a budgetary and economic one — emerged in Europe. It began, in dramatic fashion, with the news that Greece was on the verge of bankruptcy. Amid talk of contagion, citizens of other European countries discovered that the symptoms of the virus — enormous budget deficits, rapidly increasing public debt and an inability to reduce unemployment — were present in their own states. This crisis was above all a political one, because it demonstrated the incapacity of European countries to manage their economies, to reduce public spending, to increase tax revenues, and most importantly to relaunch growth.

The West is now in the throes of a third crisis, and one that is perhaps less easy to grasp, which is characterised by the absence of a civilisational project. For centuries, the European West has concentrated all of its resources in the hands of ruling elites: initially absolute monarchs and latterly capitalist elites. In so doing, it was able to conquer most of the world. But this conquering model had two inherent problems. The first of these was that society as a whole was brutally subjected to the ruling power. From the king’s subjects to workers in industry, from the colonised to women and children, every category of the population was subjected to extreme forms of domination. Thus the Western model was marked by unbreakable link between conquest and subjugation.

Europe has not defined a model to replace modernisation

The second problem was that the concentration of power in the hands of elites resulted in the formation of nation states which spent several centuries at war with each other, that is until the 20th century, when Europe sought its own annihilation in two world wars and a wave of totalitarian regimes.

The conflict between European nation states only ceased with the emergence of American hegemony and the creation of the European Union, which implied a weakening of nation states. However, the social system inherent in this European model took more time to disappear. The people overthrew the kings, the workers obtained social rights, the colonies were liberated, and women obtained rights, although they are still subject to a certain measure of inequality. But after the Belle époque, that is to say the years of social democracy in the second half of the 20th century, Europe — which had been liberated from the suffering and madness of the past — found itself without a model of development, and without a project for the future.

In previous centuries, the greatest voices for progress rang out from Europe; but today Europe is silent, empty, first and foremost because it has not been able to define a model to replace modernisation.

However, such an initiative is not impossible and we already know the main themes that must be the priorities for the coming century: environmentalists have convinced us that economic rights must be combined with rights of nature. Cultural movements have taught us that our support for majority rule must be tempered by respect for the rights of minorities. Women have discreetly set about constructing a society whose main objective is to reconcile opposing extremes, which prioritises internal integration over external conquest. However, all of these major projects, which urgently need to be transformed into policy, hold more sway in public opinion than they do in parliaments.

Political debate ignores that production economy has left Europe

Although we may be able to devise a model for a future society, we lack the necessary political and more importantly intellectual instruments to overcome these ongoing crises. At best, it seems that we are only able to minimise their most negative consequences. As it stands, financial capital is the only economic sector which has undergone a rapid and strong recovery, and it is a recovery that is once again propelling us towards further social inequality. At the same time, the production economy has been steadily removed from Europe, a development that is largely ignored in political debate. In short, our political and intellectual powerlessness has not been caused by the crisis — on the contrary it is the principal cause of the crisis, and this is a clear indicator of where our priorities should lie.

There will be no exit from these economic crises if it is not accompanied by an emergence from cultural and political crisis. On this basis, it is clear that we urgently need a political recovery and an intellectual and cultural renaissance. Belgium and the Netherlands have been devastated by chauvinism and xenophobic populism. Political life in France and Italy stands in ruins and must be completely reconstructed. On a brighter note, in view of the dominant role of the United States, Obama’s victory over a Republican Party led by its most reactionary and least intelligent wing has been a much needed development.

The best economists have taught us of the crucial importance of political and social solutions in overcoming economic crises, but their advice has yet to be heeded by our politicians. We cannot expect to make progress in small steps, because we will not know if we are moving forward or backwards. So we need to be brave, we urgently need to imagine, envision and construct our future, and to cut though the fog and the silence that have prevented us from discovering the political tools we need to construct it.

Source - PressEurope

Rise of the Right

The fall of parliamentary seats into extremist hands represents the biggest shake-up on the continent since the disappearance of communism.

Marcel Antonisse / AFP-Getty Images

A supporter of far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders holds a poster supporting him outside the Amsterdam court where he's being tried on charges of inciting racial hatred

Sweden has revealed the future direction of Europe, and not for the first time. For decades, Sweden led the way in defining the mixed model of free trade and social solidarity that became the European ideal. Not anymore. In the election this month Swedish voters joined their less successful EU neighbors in turning their backs on traditional politics, in which the pendulum swung between parties advocating more free trade and parties on the center left advocating more solidarity—but no further. Now even the solid Swedes have ushered in to Parliament a block of single-issue politicians obsessed with the perceived loss of national identity and angry about immigrants and other outsiders who supposedly threaten their Swedishness.

Thus the arrival of a new politics in Europe. A decade ago extremist politics was confined to fringes and street protests. It has now arrived as a parliamentary force and is beginning to change how other parties behave and speak. The binary politics between a Christian democratic right and social democratic left, with a small space for classic liberal parties, is now over. The world’s biggest democratic region, the 46 nation-states grouped in the Council of Europe, is now giving birth to a centrifugal politics with identity replacing class alignment. No single party or political formation can win control of the state and govern on the basis of a manifesto with majority support from voters. Even Britain requires a coalition to have a majority in the House of Commons. Belgium and the Netherlands still have not formed governments months after elections produced inconclusive results.

Postwar Europe had one great foe and one great friend to produce unity of political purpose, even if big parties battled over priorities. Social and Christian democrats were united against sovietism and Moscow’s proxy parties on the communist left. The United States allied itself to the moderate right and left to create NATO, support the suppression of nationalisms with the creation of the European Union, and wean Europeans away from protectionist economics in favor of open trade and competitive markets.

Now Europe no longer faces an agreed common threat, despite the best efforts of an Islamaphobe right to present Muslims as an alien invading force that must be confronted and contained. Nor is the United States an inspiration any longer. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been quagmired in their respective wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from which most Europeans recoil with dismay. The recession and banking crisis are blamed on unregulated American free markets. Even the business minister for David Cameron’s new Conservative government, Vince Cable, was heard lashing out at the evils of capitalism and the “murky world” of corporate behavior at his party conference this month in Liverpool.

Without a common foe and without agreement that the Atlantic alliance is an overwhelming priority, politics in Europe has lost its moorings. The politics of Gemeinschaft (community) is replacing the politics of Gesellschaft (society). New communities of true believers are forming all over Europe. Those who trace their national woes to immigrants—or nuclear power, or the EU, or Muslims, or Jews, or market economics, or the United States—are uniting in new political communities, all of them harmful to society. To govern a society requires compromise and a choice of priorities. The guiding impulse of the new identity politics in Europe is to reject, to cry “No!”

Sweden now has to live with an ugly nationalist identity party, the Sweden Democrats, with 20 members of the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament. Despite the pretty name, the Sweden Democrats are anti-immigration and anti-Muslim, and call for authoritarian solutions to Sweden’s growing social crisis. Swedish unemployment stands at 9 percent after four years of a center-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt. But high unemployment does not automatically mean a turn to the left. Swedish Social Democrats saw their vote slumped to 30 percent—the lowest in a century—and had never before lost two elections in a row.

The conversation among Social Democrats was typical of the disarray on the European left. The Swedish party leaders had begun talking to themselves, believing their own rhetoric when it was obvious fewer and fewer voters did. Traditionally the party was staunchly anticommunist and pro-industry, but it had drifted toward the fuzzy left, led by Mona Sahlin, a product of 1970s feminist-leftist politics. The party allied itself with a hard-left party and with the Greens, producing an election manifesto calling for more taxation and higher public spending. That platform was roundly rejected by voters. The middle classes liked the tax cuts offered by the center right. Many in the dwindling Swedish working class turned to the new Democrats of the hard right.

The decay of the centrist ruling parties is being hastened by European electoral systems based on the 19th-century philosophy of proportional representation, which allows even small parties to gain a share of the seats in Parliament. This is now preventing any coherent leadership from emerging in Europe. Each movement or group can create its own party to maintain its electoral purity. Recent elections fought under variations of proportional representation have seen the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant parties into national parliaments. Some parties, like Jobbik, which also calls itself “The Movement for a Better Hungary,” are anti-Semitic. The nationalist right in East Europe seeks to downplay the Holocaust by comparing the crimes of European communism with the industrialized extermination of Jews in Nazi death camps.

Voters’ support for the extreme right in Europe can no longer be downplayed as a marginal, country-specific phenomenon. The world’s biggest democratic region is now the breeding ground for extreme-right politics. The most recent election totals are 11.9 percent in France (National Front); 8.3 percent in Italy (Northern League); 15.5 percent in the Netherlands (Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom Party); 28.9 percent in Switzerland (Swiss People’s Party); 16.7 percent in Hungary (Jobbik); and 22.9 percent in Norway (Progress Party). There are also significant parties of the extreme right in Belgium, Latvia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Most of these parties have either seen significant gains since 2000, or did not even exist a decade ago. The fall of parliamentary seats into extremist hands represents the biggest shake-up in European politics since the disappearance of communism. In all these cases, the latest vote totals represent an increase between 5 and 15 percent since the beginning of the century. Most of these parties have seen significant gains since 2000, or did not even exist a decade ago. This support from voters has reduced considerably the mandate to govern of traditional parties and eroded the self-confidence of the once dominant formations of post-war politics.

Nor can this new politics be quarantined. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy, searching for a populist boost to his fading political fortunes, launched a campaign of angry criticism and forcible expulsions against the Roma minority. Even many backers of Sarkozy were shocked by the crudeness of rounding up an ethnic minority for deportation. One European commissioner, Viviane Reding from Luxembourg, compared Sarkozy’s expulsion of the Roma to the expulsion of the Jews in World War II, and came close to calling Sarkozy a Nazi, provoking a suitably angry rebuttal from the French president. But there is no question that the spectacle of a centrist like Sarkozy playing to the fringe is a harbinger of more to come. Germany’s Social Democrats, a traditional party of the center left, are playing on the same fears by accusing Chancellor Angela Merkel of failing to speed up compulsory integration for immigrants. Even Britain’s new coalition government, which is not racist or extreme, has pushed through a savage limit on foreigners being allowed to work in Britain. Despite squeals from employers worried about such crude protectionism, David Cameron has to throw some anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant red meat to voters who last year sent two far-right British National Party politicians to the European Parliament.

The decline of the ruling parties undermines the entire European project. Having spent a decade fretting and fussing over its constitution, the EU elites in Brussels have no answer to the slow disintegration of national political parties. The project of building a united Europe requires national parties that can command majority support, including support for granting greater powers to the EU elite, which has yet to command much respect on its own. The inward-looking, infighting Brussels governing class regulates a weak regional economy that now has 23 million unemployed, and no plan of attack. No commissioners ever lose their job, no matter how crude or incompetent they are. Europe now has three presidents—for its Commission, Council, and Parliament—but no leadership.

The EU leadership gap creates another easy target of opportunity for the extreme right, which is adept at exploiting the resentments stirred by economic decline. In the years of strong European growth in the 1960s, foreign workers were seen as adding value to national economies, but now they are blamed for stealing jobs. And the EU’s newly opened borders are blamed for letting in the outsiders. Nationwide rightist parties go on the attack. And regional communities like Catalan, Flemish, or Scottish nationalists reject staying within Spain, Belgium, or the United Kingdom. The dreams that a common European economic and social liberalism would replace the old atavisms of nation-first politics are on hold.

Voters looking to community and identity are shaping a new politics in Europe. Those who think the new populist right is taking politics back to prewar fascism are too alarmist. Europe’s democracy remains strong, perhaps just too strong, as political parties fragment and the din of competing voices grows louder. The myth of “Eurabia,” or the takeover of Europe by Muslims, is a myth for the same reasons. The majority of Europe’s 20 million Muslims aspire to integrate into a middle-class European lifestyle, and while their numbers are growing, in no nation are they on track to become anything more than just another small minority community. What Europe needs is a confident leadership that can unite its splintering communities behind a vision that can say more than no.

Source - Newsweek

Culture shock for Latin American left

Hugo Chávez and co have improved the lives of millions in poverty, but it has come at a price

Luis Hernandez Navarro 

Unlike in Europe, the left in Latin America is still winning elections – albeit with difficulty. After 12 years in power, President Hugo Chávez has just seen his party win Venezuela's election with a much reduced majority. In Brazil the Workers' party is on the way to its third presidency in a row – though Dilma Rousseff must run off against the centre-right José Serra. And Ecuador's Rafael Correa has survived an attempted coup. They all face similar challenges – heavy pressure from regional oligarchs, and civil unrest from their grassroots social base. To understand this, look at how the left came to power in the first place.

In the 80s Latin America emerged from the dark days of military dictatorship with the hope that democracy would bring social justice. It was not to be. Forced to accept the free-trade doctrines of the Washington consensus, the weak and ill-prepared governments of the day auctioned off public resources at bargain-basement prices, mainly to Spanish capital and were drawn into global capitalism. The elite benefited, while the majority gained nothing. Jobs barely increased, public sector wages were "readjusted", and poverty rose dramatically. Workers suffered a double disadvantage: their labour cost more than that of their Chinese counterparts, and they were less well educated than eastern Europeans.

As the redistributive and welfare roles of government were progressively abandoned, the image of the old nation state began to erode. Poorer sectors of society dissociated their idea of national identity from the state. There was a deep crisis of political representation: traditional parties alienated voters, and the politicians who replaced the military quickly exhausted their credibility.

This was the context in which the left came to power. In the last two decades mass mobilisations – particularly of indigenous peoples – brought down four presidents in Argentina, three in Ecuador, and one each in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Social movements challenged US hegemony and stopped the privatisation of state enterprises and natural resources, building a new sense of identity forged by ethnic and regional demands and uniting the excluded and marginalised. Before the centre-left's electoral victories, a cultural victory had already been won.

In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador new constitutions were the expression of these new pacts: a legal framework recognising collective social and environmental rights and creating the conditions for radical democracy, emerging from the decolonization of states.

These progressive governments have driven a reconstruction of the architecture of power and geopolitics. Throughout the continent there has been a profound redefinition of the relationship with the US and global financial organisations, expressed in the rejection of the policies of the White House and the emergence of new institutional arrangements favouring regional integration on the continent's own terms.

It was no accident that the ambitious US-backed initiative for a free-market framework – the Free Trade Area of the Americas – was torpedoed, or that Ecuador did not renew the contract for a US military base at Manta. Foreign relations are flourishing in other directions, however: solidarity with Cuba and active diplomatic ties with Iran, and growing Chinese investment.

The central element of this redefinition has been the demand for national control of natural resources – which has produced major conflicts with multinationals. Today the states have greater control over resources, but social and indigenous organisations have criticised governments for continuing to base their strategies on an "extractivist" model – in which they remain primarily producers and exporters of raw materials.

These grassroots challenges over the exploitation of natural resources are gaining in strength, despite the international boom in the price of raw materials. Additional challenges have emerged – the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador accused Correa of being authoritarian, and environmental groups argue that he has given undue concessions to large mining companies. In Brazil the MST – the landless workers' movement – has criticised President Lula for failing to make advances in land reform. In Venezuela there is discontent with the ruling bureaucracy and the "Bolibourgeoisie" – those who have become wealthy under Chávez's socialism, which reveres Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who won Venezuela's freedom from Spain. In Bolivia, the more radical indigenous groups have criticised new gas exploration projects.

The extraction of natural resources has brought considerable new income to the continent, which these governments have used to finance social programmes and to combat poverty. During Lula's two terms his family plan has reached 50 million of Brazil's poorest people. In Venezuela 60% of tax income was dedicated to social programmes between 1999 and 2009; the poverty index fell from 49% to 24%, and the level of extreme poverty from 30% to 7%. Economic elites in each country have attacked this social spending, but corporate profits have actually increased – in Brazil under Lula, three banks earned $95bn in eight years.

The social transformation under way in Latin America has not yet produced definitive results. Disputes over the role of the state and the direction of regional integration and development policy have not been resolved. The waters of change are turbulent – and are likely to remain so for several years to come.

Source - Guardian

The Solvable Problem of Energy Poverty

Spread of Electricity Need Not Harm Climate, says UN Report

Respiratory illness from cooking on primitive stoves, like this one in Ethiopia, will be causing 4,000 premature deaths each year by 2030 if nothing is done to address the problem.

Photograph by Lynn Johnson, National Geographic

Marianne Lavelle

The United Nations’ goals for fighting extreme poverty—an effort being assessed at a summit this week in New York—will fall short unless nations also work to bring electricity and modern, safe cooking technology to the billions of “energy-poor” people around the globe, a new report says.

The worsening problem of energy poverty, however, can be solved without breaking the banks of nations—and without a significant worsening of the climate change problem, said the study released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and two UN bodies, the Development Programme (UNDP) and the Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

Providing modern energy to the very poor—the population that the United Nations seeks to reach in its Millennium Development Goals program—would require an annual investment of about $41 billion per year over the next five years, or just 0.06 percent of global GDP, said the report.

Tackling the larger goal of universal energy access— reaching all 1.4 billion people who lack access to electricity and the 3 billion relying on unventilated and inefficient wood, charcoal, and dung cooking stoves—would require only a modest increase in carbon dioxide emissions, the report calculated. That’s because the amount of fuel needed to address basic needs is small, and the opportunities for using cleaner energy are great. If the world takes the problem on, by 2030, global electricity generation would be just 2.9 percent higher, oil demand would rise less than 1 percent and carbon emissions would be just 0.8 percent higher than the world’s current trajectory.

“This is what is most compelling—the evidence that there is no reason why we should not make this commitment,” said Kamal Rijal, the UNDP’s policy adviser on sustainable energy and co-author of the report. “The money is not a problem and in terms of climate it is also not as big as people think. And from a health standpoint, it would save so many lives.”

More Deadly Than AIDS

The report said that if nothing is done to address energy poverty, by 2030 nearly 4,000 people per day around the world will die due to the toxic smoke and indoor fires from unsafe primitive cookstoves—more than the premature death estimates for malaria, tuberculosis, or HIV/AIDS. The “greatest challenge,” the report said, is in sub-Saharan Africa, where only 31 percent of people have electricity and 80 percent are using so-called “traditional biomass” for cooking. Exposure to burning crop waste, wood, or dung burned on open fires causes lung and heart disease as well as acute respiratory ailments.

The report was released amid a three-day summit on progress toward the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a kick-off to this week’s opening of the General Assembly. Nearly 140 heads of state and high-ranking government officials were expected to attend the session to identify what remains to be done to reach the goal adopted by the UN in 2000 to address the world’s most extreme poverty by 2015.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has signaled that he views access to energy as essential for reaching that goal, after a special advisory panel this spring detailed the importance of energy in assuring proper function of health clinics and schools, providing pumping capacity for clean water and sanitation, and assuring delivery of food. Ban is expected to call on the United Nations to adopt a goal of universal world energy access by 2030.

Of course, the UN already had has trouble gaining the financial commitments needed to achieve its Millennium Development Goals on poverty without adding a new challenge on energy. The UN has called for nations to set aside 70 cents of every $100 generated by their economic activity to fight poverty. But only five European countries now meet that level of giving, and the United States, which has never agreed to the target, spends no more than 20 cents per $100 of GDP.

Targeting Solutions For Rural Poor

To finance global energy solutions for the poor, aid agencies will need to break from thinking that they need to fund huge projects or model initiatives, said Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane, co-founder of Solar CITIES, a nonprofit organization that works with residents of the poorest neighborhoods in Cairo, Egypt, and other African countries to install rooftop solar water heaters and home-scale biofuel systems. Instead, Culhane, who was a 2009 National Geographic Emerging Explorer, argues that aid organizations should use their financial clout to buy in huge quantity the materials needed for small energy and cooking projects and make them available to people in poor communities at a radically reduced cost. That would liberate their innovation and entrepreneurial skills, he says.

For example, a biogas digester that takes less than a day to turn kitchen scraps and other organic waste into clean-burning methane that can be used for cooking and electricity would cost $400. “For people living on $2 a day, this is a tough investment,” said Culhane. But with help to buy such systems for groups of residents, communities could easily switch from primitive cookstoves and tackle waste-related health problems at the same time.

“We need to emphasize ‘parts and patterns’ rather than ‘packages and services,’ ” he said. “People can be fairly easily given capacity building training to solve their own energy problems.”

Just such an effort to address the cookstove problem was launched Tuesday by the United Nations Foundation, the nonprofit begun by media billionaire Ted Turner to support the UN in its work. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a $50 million U.S. contribution to the public-private partnership, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.

In addition to biogas digesters, potential solutions include advanced biomass cookstoves that greatly reduce the products of incomplete combustion, and stoves that use liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG (of which propane is a form).

Advanced biomass and biogas are considered carbon-neutral fuel sources by some experts, because they offset more emissions than they create. And even though LPG is not free of greenhouse gas emissions, it would greatly reduce global warming and health impacts compared with fuels currently used in primitive cookstoves. Inefficient wood and waste stoves create black carbon particulate emissions, a large contributor to climate change that has a devastating impact on health. Women and children are disproportionately affected by respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia that can be caused by breathing in the smoke, says Richenda Van Leeuwen, senior director on energy and climate for the UN Foundation.

A variety of financing approaches—public-private partnerships like the cookstove alliance and microfinance—will be needed to reach the world’s energy-poor, said Van Leeuwen. The UN Foundation is working on coordinating a group of 20 UN agencies to develop a multi-year campaign to address the energy poverty issue.

Solar technology is one way to reach the world’s energy poor at an affordable cost, said Van Leeuwen. Even though the cost of big solar arrays on homes in the developed world continue to be expensive, solar lamps with battery storage that could provide good night lighting in a room and enough power to charge a cell phone are available for less than $30, she said. “While solar might be one of the most expensive options for rich people, it might be one of the least costly for the poor,” she said.

For the energy-poor who live outside of cities, local energy solutions such as solar or wind energy would be less expensive than connection to centralized power stations by extending electrical grids, the IEA-UNDP report said. About 85 percent of the people in the world who lack electricity live in rural areas, the report said.

The IEA has calculated that 100 kilowatt-hours per person annually is the amount of electricity needed to provide basic energy needs to those who now have none. The average U.S. household, with about three people, uses 11,040 kilowatt-hours per year.

Source - National Geographic

Afghanistan’s Lithium Wealth Could Remain Elusive

The Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia is one of the world's large untapped reserves of lithium, a key metal for batteries. Geologists say Afghanistan has similar lithium wealth, but as in Bolivia, politics likely will be the deciding factor in resource development.

Photograph by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, Bloomberg/ Getty Images

By Henry J. Reske

Somewhere in the trackless lands that make up much of Afghanistan (map), just to the right or left of the Old Silk Road, there are apparently huge caches of untapped wealth in the form of metal and stone prized in both the ancient world and the modern: gold, copper, and lapis lazuli, to name a few.

In recent days, the U.S. military and geologists working with the Pentagon have pointed to the deposits, whose value has been estimated at about a trillion dollars, as an elixir that promises to drastically alter the troubled Afghanistan economy. The portion of this underground store with perhaps the greatest promise, they suggest, are the deposits of lithium, the soft metal used in the small batteries that power ubiquitous electronics like cell phones, laptops, and iPods, and widely seen as the storage solution that will spur an electric car revolution. Afghanistan could be transformed from a war-torn economy dependent on narcotics trade to the wellspring of a new energy future—the Saudi Arabia of lithium.

However, as with much about the country that is known as the Graveyard of Empires, all is not as it seems.

Afghanistan’s metal and mineral deposits—far from newfound—have been known and fantasized about for millennia. But the ability to harvest the riches does not currently exist. And, in the case of lithium, the market is uncertain.

A Long-Known Treasure

The Afghanistan Ministry of Mines reports on its website that the country has been known as a source of precious stones and minerals for thousands of years. However, it was not until the 1800s that systematic attempts, first by the British and then the Geological Survey of India, were undertaken to assess the resources.

“From the 19th Century onwards, various geological expeditions investigated areas along the main caravan routes and later along the arterial motor roads,” the Ministry reports.

Efforts to map and tap the resources were launched sporadically in the 20th Century.

But these gambits were interrupted by continual conflict, including invasions by the Soviets in 1979, and by the United States and Great Britain in 2001, as well as by civil war and the Taliban siege. But by 2004 the British Geological Survey, the United States Geological Survey, and the Afghanistan Geological Survey and Ministry of Mines renewed efforts to evaluate the resources. The USGS said back in 2007 that it was clear Afghanistan had significant undiscovered resources.

Michael T. Klare, author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum, notes that Great Britain, India, and the Soviet Union had little success in tapping Afghanistan’s riches. And it’s not at all clear it will be any different this time around.

“In the past we were unable to get at it because of the constant warfare and lack of infrastructure such as railroads,” he said.

Klare suggests that China, a prodigious builder of railroads, may be the only candidate with the ability to undertake such a project, but it would face obstacles as daunting as the mountainous terrain. “They will probably be dealing with warlords who will want bribes,” he said. “There are no regulatory bodies, no rule of law. That is the likely outcome.” He said it could take decades for actual production of minerals to begin.

The development of lithium deposits is particularly problematic.

Certainly demand for lithium has skyrocketed with the proliferation of cell phones, portable computers, and other electronic devices that rely on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. A 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report notes that the use of lithium in cell phone batteries skyrocketed from 1.8 metric tons in 1996 to 170 metric tons in 2005.

And, as with oil, the United States flipped from producer to a prodigious importer dependent on foreign sources for more than half its lithium use. Chile (map) is the leading lithium producer in the world, and top source of imports for the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest market report on lithium.

Chile’s neighbor to the north, Bolivia (map), also has huge stores of lithium, but these have not yet been developed. Foreign mining companies have been wary of President Evo Morales, who has nationalized many of Bolivia’s industries, and has made clear his intention to maintain state control of resources, even as he aims to develop the country’s lithium reserves.

Lithium’s Uncertain Future

Meanwhile, despite predictions of future surging demand for lithium, market conditions deteriorated during the economic slowdown, according to the USGS report. “Sales volumes for the major lithium producers were reported to be down between 15% and 42% by mid-2009,” the report said. “Consumption by lithium end-use markets for batteries, ceramics and glass, grease, and pharmaceuticals all decreased. The leading lithium producer in Chile announced it would lower its lithium prices by 20% in 2010.”

And although auto companies continue to explore the use of lithium energy storage for electric cars, the hybrids on the roads today continue to use nickel metal hydride batteries. Although most observers believe there will be a transition to the lighter, smaller and more efficient lithium batteries in transportation, there have been voices of skepticism. Former Honda engineer and hybrid expert John German said in an interview late last year with the HybridCars.com website that he believed lithium ion batteries were not yet able to deliver enough range to be the storage solution of choice in all-electric vehicles. German did think lithium had a role in hybrid gas-electric vehicles, like those already on the road. Former Bell Labs director Don Murphy, an expert on lithium ion batteries, drew similar conclusions in a speech in the Silicon Valley earlier this year; he said he thought that lithium battery technology would improve, but slowly.

But the debate on lithium batteries and cars may not matter to the citizens of Afghanistan.

Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies based at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, predicted that mineral wealth “would not do much good for the ordinary people of Afghanistan and probably will make things worse, not better.” The country has the classic conditions to fall victim to what has been called the “resource curse.”

“In very poor countries, when suddenly a new source of wealth is discovered, various factions fight to control that wealth, to keep it in their own hands and they use the military and the police to control it causing a perpetual state of corruption and violence,” Klare said.

This scenario has played out in Nigeria (map), with its oil, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (map), with its large supply of minerals. “The Congo,” Klare said, “has seen nothing but woe since the discoveries there.”

Source - National Geographic

Replacing Oil Addiction With Metals Dependence?

China’s rare-earth minerals monopoly gives it key clean energy supply role.

China is the source of nearly all the rare-earth minerals used in the motors and batteries of hybrid and electric cars, raising fears that the new energy economy will mean the same old foreign dependence.

Photograph by Paul Sancya, Associated Press

By Catherine Ngai

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

Words better suited to a high school chemistry class than a high-level policy debate—terms such as praseodymium and dysprosium—have raised alarms around the world about the future of the alternative energy economy.

Seventeen metals on the periodic table of elements have caused the commotion from Tokyo to Washington, D.C. They are known as rare-earth metals, important ingredients in making the motors and batteries of hybrid and electric cars, high-efficiency LED lights, solar panels and wind turbines. The vast majority of the world’s supply of these metals comes from one source—China—raising the issue of whether foreign dependence will bedevil the new energy economy just as it has been a standing feature of the economy powered by fossil fuel.

(Related: “Electric Car Explosion Coming to the U.S.”)

“This issue isn’t just about mining. It’s about the entire supply chain, from mining, refining, incorporation of metals, and then into final products that go to consumers,” said David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. “We’re paying a lot of attention to the clean energy supply chain. Our role in this is critical going forward. We’re looking at strategic review and not just at policy.”

‘A One-Nation OPEC’

Rare-earth metals, also called rare-earth minerals, include element number 21, scandium; number 39, yttrium; and the 15 lanthanides, numbers 57-71, on the periodic table. However, the name is a misnomer. Rare-earth metals are often found in a cluster, but are not actually rare. Rather, they are valuable because it is difficult to find the minerals concentrated in great enough amounts so that mining the deposit makes economic sense.

The United States, second only to China in energy consumption, is not devoid of rare-earth metals. But the only U.S. mine, near the Mojave National Preserve in Mountain Pass, California (map), became inactive in 2002 after 50 years of production, largely because of economic and environmental issues. The mine, for a time owned by Chevron, was taken over in 2008 by Molycorp Minerals LLC, which has spent more than $400,000 since that time lobbying Congress on rare-earth minerals, according to its Senate disclosure records. On its website, Molycorp says it has plans to modernize and expand the mine and bring it back into full production “with appropriate federal assistance for research, development and capital costs.”

Legislation already has been proposed in the U.S. Congress to extend subsidies and funding to reopen domestic mines, and the focus on the issue intensified after a dispute erupted between Japan and China over rare-earth minerals last week. Japanese industry sources accused China of withholding crucial supplies, an accusation that Beijing denied, but the Japanese government vowed to take action. Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara of Japan said Friday that Tokyo aims to secure more mining development rights overseas to diversify its sources of rare-earth minerals. “Relying on one country is not good,” Maehara said at a news conference.

The discussion this week was much the same in Washington, D.C. Last year, 90 percent of the U.S. imports for rare-earth metals were from China, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. But this year, according to USGS, the figure is 97 percent.

“Just as we’ve seen with our reliance on foreign oil, the United States’ total reliance on foreign sources of rare earths puts us in a perilous situation,” said Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in a prepared statement accompanying legislation she introduced to create a U.S. strategic stockpile of rare-earth minerals and to provide federal loan guarantees to assist the domestic mining industry. “Some have compared China to a one-nation OPEC for rare earths— and China’s recent actions signal that they are well aware of their immense power over the supply of this sought-after commodity.”

Even though demand for rare-earth minerals presumably would rise as electric cars and more alternative energy and efficiency applications came to market, consumption of those products has actually decreased dramatically during the economic downturn, according to a USGS report. In 2009, the estimated value of these products imported by the United States was $84 million, a 55 percent decrease from $186 million imported in 2008.

Some academics aren’t too concerned that the United States would be held hostage by China over rare-earth minerals.

“The fact is that the more the Chinese and American economics are interrelated, the less likely conflict might be,” said Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank in Washington, who has written extensively on energy issues. “What would it [China] gain at the end of the day? They would risk a trade war with a country where a huge volume of its liquid capital assets are invested.”

At the hearing Thursday, one of the witnesses, Roderick Eggert, a professor and director of the division of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines, confirmed that mineral resources were still abundant, and that China’s supply and low prices are currently sufficient to meet the world’s needs.

“Markets provide incentives for investments that reinvigorate supply and reduce supply risk, Eggert said. “The Chinese mineral deposits are quite large and rich . . . and will satisfy [world demand] and have been meeting demand in the last few years.”

Critical to National Defense?

But there’s an important backstory: national defense.

Besides green energy, rare-earth minerals are essential in creating weapons. “Smart bombs” that use neodymium-iron-boron magnets to control the direction when dropped from an aircraft, lasers that employ neodymium, yttrium-aluminum-garnet used to determine the range of enemy targets at distances over 22 miles, and neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets used for sound system components used in psychological warfare are among the many, according to a 2004 USGS paper.

The U.S. Department of Defense is currently in the early stages of evaluating its dependency on these minerals, as well as the potential national security risks, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The jury is still out on alternative energy. With the advancement of new technology, certain products, such as high-efficiency solar cells, do not even need rare-earth metals. Other renewable energy products, such as wind turbines, can be created without rare-earth minerals, but their use is highly advantageous and makes for a much more efficient process.

“Are they critical to the [alternative energy] sector? It’s hard to say that they have the choke hold on the industry,” said Mark Brownstein, deputy director of the energy program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “These are valuable materials in that they have facilitated a tremendous innovation in some of the basic building blocks of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. The continued access isn’t only important to existing renewable energy, but also for future advances.”

Catherine Ngai is a reporter for Medill News Service in Washington, D.C.

Source - National Geographic

Descubren una lengua con 800 hablantes

• El koro se parece a las lenguas vecinas 'como el inglés al japonés'. Se calcula que un idioma muere cada dos semanas.

Investigadores en busca de lenguas muertas dijeron el martes que descubrieron un idioma desconocido para la ciencia y hablado sólo por 800 personas en el noreste de India.

La lengua, llamada koro, pertenece a la misma familia que el tibetano y el birmano, informaron los lingüistas Gregory Anderson, del Oregon's Living Tongues Institute, David Harrison, del Swarthmore College de Pensilvania, y Murmu Ganesh, del India's Ranchi University.

Anderson, Murmu y Harrison, apoyados por la National Geographic, tuvieron que conseguir un permiso especial del Gobierno de India para visitar el estado de Arunachal Pradesh, fronterizo con Bután y China, donde se encuentran los hablantes koro.

Según Anderson, la mayoría de las personas que habla koro es de edad avanzada.

"Si hubiéramos esperado 10 años para hacer el viaje, podríamos no haber encontrado el número de hablantes que encontramos", dijo Anderson en un comunicado.

Los residentes de la región del Himalaya, donde crían cerdos y cultivan arroz y cebada, hablaban dos idiomas conocidos llamados aka y miji, pero los lingüistas oyeron palabras nuevas palabras que resultaron ser koro.

"No tuvimos que ir muy lejos en nuestra lista de palabras para darnos cuenta de que (el koro) era muy diferente en todas las formas posibles", dijo Harrison en un comunicado.

Por ejemplo, mientras la palabra aka para cerdos es 'vo', quienes hablan koro lo llaman 'lele'. También cuenta con una gramática única.

"El koro no podía sonar más diferente del aka", escribe Harrison en 'The Last speakers', un libro publicado por 'National Geographic' sobre el trabajo. "Suenan tan diferentes como, por ejemplo, el inglés y el japonés", agregó.

Harrison cree que el koro puede tener su origen en el comercio de esclavos. El investigador ha estado informando durante años sobre las lenguas muertas y existen estimaciones de que una lengua se extingue cada dos semanas. Muchas lenguas son habladas sólo por algunos residentes ancianos de una región y muchas, como el koro, nunca han sido escritas o grabadas de algún modo.

"De acuerdo a las estimaciones científicas, el koro añade sólo una entrada a la lista de 6.909 lenguas de todo el mundo", dijo Harrison.

Source - El Mundo