Views from Frank Adam in Sedgley:
Bury South Labour Party
- Frank's Column, December 2007
DFirst a seasonal English point: the word 'merry' was originally happy in the sense of having no troubles, rather than the more positive happiness of being jolly. This explains the, "Let nothing you dismay," line.
May we hope that the party funding laws are sorted soon, besides individual cases. Note the press has chosen not to harry the foreign resident Lord A pouring ten millions into the Tory Party; and is very quiet that Rupert Murdoch took US citizenship to be allowed to buy US papers and film firms which the US insists are home owned. It is myopic that UK does not care about foreign press and unelected boardroom interference; but tolerates silly comments about its closest economic partner and support - the €U! Ditto while UK has been and is less protectionist in every sense than the USA, it is berated as "nanny" while the US is praised for free markets while it protects its steel and cars - and bananas.
The SUV fashion is a scam to protect US motor manufacturing by classifying for taxes lots of overweight cars as, "light trucks." Oil prices are turning the screw on SUV's, alias Chelsea tractors and proving a point Marx pioneered correctly. He was the first to think in terms of the entire global economy as one system - even if Keynes did the maths. This was not too difficult to slip into in the mid 19th century when only Britain was a serious manufacturer - but already dependent on imported food as the US is now reliant on Arab oil since 1970. Faraday first found that light, electricity and heat were all one spectrum but Maxwell to proved it mathematically, even as Newton's maths proved Copernicus. With the Soviet dictatorship out of the way, the West might actually score improved reading marks in its climate SATS.
Demand is such, and rising as China and India industrialise, that despite US touchiness about its independence and self assurance after two centuries of self-contained economy, the USA is going to have to drp from taking quarter of the planet's oil, and double motor taxes to World levels. We might even see its internal free market solve the sub prime housing scandal - which also underlines the Marx point of one global market - by shoving the poor to the suburbs to dig their gardens for fruit and veg while the rich return to town to be able to walk to work and pleasure. However the far more flexible internal governance of the USA has already seen several states and cities go ahead with climate warming measures by-passing its bushed Federal government.
The Carbon Trust supplement in the Observer summed up the state of play on climate change options. However this massive review was coy about any big direct government plans or push - though the CT is a Quango. Compare the Dutch efforts over the Zuyder Zee and the Delta Plan - or the British and US government actions to win WW II.
The Market is full of goodies but the weakness is somebody outside has to enter to buy and activate them. We might not be able to beat markets, but as a society we have to enter their ring to use them coherently - or not, for which our children will not thank us. This column might not be traditionally ideological but hopefully it justifies public sector active initiatives and therefore the politics of funding public policy to the point of establishing public (supported) firms to make what is necessary when there are no other clients in the market to buy what is needed by the common-wealth (republic in Latin for grammar school fans). For centuries governments kept arsenals, and in the late 30's HMG paid the motor and aero industries to establish shadow factories for the coming fray.
Currently Photo-Voltaics are made of Silicon and power rural traffic lights, calculators and meteo stations, but are four times the average price of electrical power. It follows that putting a dozen millions into inventing cheap solar PV panels so that every building has a couple of kilowatts capacity on the roof, is the quickest way to a modular energy supply replacement - at least for day work. At least one Israeli firm is knocking on this door with Titanium Dioxide - the white paint pigment. So where are our boffins?
Another simple - short term - move is to double petrol prices to drive everybody into diesel which gives 30% extra mpg and so saves a quarter of the original oil. As for clean power to extract hydrogen from the sea and shut down all fossil fuel stations and provide clean water for all; try the latest edition of the India - Israel report on Zaslavsky's power towers: <http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/wz-w/projekte/new_et-brochure_zaslavsky.pdf> Alternatively: http://www. Israel21c.org, and click technology, then also click related stories.
- FDA
