The Rag Blog

Thirty-Year Plan Uses Wind, Taxes, Pig Fat; Consumers Pay More

[Rachel’s introduction: Denmark is working steadily to conserve energy and get itself loose from the grip of Big Oil without falling into the twin traps of Big Coal and More Nukes. Their plan is succeeding. Here’s how it works.]

HORSENS, Denmark — Nothing goes to waste in the new Danish Crown slaughterhouse in eastern Denmark. Even the inedible fat of 50,000 pigs killed and processed here each week is used to heat the plant.

Turning pig blubber into heating oil is one of several techniques Danish Crown uses to save heat, water and electricity. The abattoir recently developed a method of scalding and removing hair from pig carcasses that conserves heat.

“We redesigned the whole manufacturing process to save energy,” says Soren Eriksen, technical director of Danish Crown, a meat company that produces $11 billion of pork and beef annually. “Everything is reused.”

Danish Crown is part of Denmark’s successful 30-year effort to keep its energy consumption in check. Through a wide variety of government- driven initiatives, this small northern European country has overcome one thorny challenge of global warming: how to dramatically reduce energy consumption while maintaining a solid growth rate and low unemployment. The downside is higher taxes and costs for businesses and consumers.

Today hundreds of thousands of Danish homes and other buildings are warmed by surplus heat from power plants. Government policies have spurred developers to build homes with thick insulation, and consumers to buy energy-efficient appliances. Utilities that can’t meet government energy-savings guidelines can buy credits from companies that have invested in efficiencies.

The result of these and other policies is that Denmark’s energy consumption — the amount of fuel it uses to heat its buildings, drive its cars and power its economy — has held stable for more than 30 years, even as the country’s gross domestic product has doubled, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris group that tracks energy prices and policies. During the same period, energy consumption in the U.S. has risen 40%, while its GDP has quadrupled. The average Dane uses 6,600 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, compared with 13,300 for the average American. [Peter Bach]

“You can’t just sit back and wait for market forces to do this for you,” says Peter Bach, a civil engineer who has worked as a regulator at the Danish Energy Authority for 26 years.

Some of Denmark’s approaches can’t be easily replicated elsewhere. U.S. policy makers and businesses have resisted the type of aggressive intervention and regulation behind Denmark’s successes, concerned about higher costs and taxes, reduced competitiveness and slower growth.

But in Denmark, much of the country’s energy sector is in the hands of nonprofit cooperatives, with residents as shareholders, which makes it easier for government to direct policy with little opposition from business interests. With a population of 5.5 million people, Denmark also is a social welfare state that puts a higher priority on things like generous health care, free schools and guaranteed pensions than on profits, low taxes and individualism.

Danish consumers and businesses clearly pay a price for the energy programs. A Dane buying a new car must pay a registration fee of approximately 105% of the car’s value, plus additional taxes on fuel. Danish companies pay 43% more per megawatt hour of electricity than companies in the U.S., 24% more than in France and 19% more than in England, according to Dansk Industri, an industry trade association. Denmark’s high energy costs and its costly social-welfare system likely slow its economic growth in comparison to the U.S., but haven’t kept its economy from becoming one of Europe’s strongest, says Jonathan Coony, an energy specialist at the World Bank.

Yet Denmark has remained dogged about conservation. Like other countries, Denmark embarked upon its energy-saving crusade after 1973, when Arab nations temporarily cut off oil exports to countries that supported Israel. Many nations, including the U.S., relaxed their efforts as soon as the geopolitical situation stabilized. But Denmark, along with Japan, was one of the few countries that persisted.

Denmark was heavily dependent on imported oil in the 1970s, and the oil crisis helped set off a prolonged economic recession. To cope with the immediate energy shortage, driving was banned on Sundays. Some towns turned off street lights and schools cranked down the heat.

The experience convinced government officials that the country couldn’t rely on foreign oil. So in 1976, a government led by the Social Democratic Party laid out a series of ambitious energy plans, including developing renewable energy from wind turbines, exploring the North Sea for oil and natural gas, and conserving energy. Denmark is now self-sufficient in energy and actually exports oil, gas and electricity.

Radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr may have become more important in hiding than he was when he could dare come out in public.

On Monday he pulled his six Cabinet ministers out of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and on the same day sponsored a demonstration 20,000 strong against a major provincial government. The previous week, he had brought hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into the streets of An-Najaf and other cities to protest Maliki’s refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Can the Maliki government survive the defection of a major Shiite faction?

In the wake of the departure of Sadr’s ministers, rumors swirled in Baghdad that Maliki was considering resigning. He was said to be under siege by the leaders of the other parties in his coalition, who want the posts for themselves, and who were engaging in vicious infighting that threatened to tear the alliance apart. Plagued by American demands that his government meet specific benchmarks on national reconciliation and harried by gruesome mass bombings that left hundreds dead this week in Baghdad, Maliki seems more in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant than of being overthrown.

A member of parliament from another branch of Maliki’s Dawa party, Abdul-Karim al-Unaizi, admitted to the Associated Press that “the withdrawal will affect the performance of the government, and will weaken it.”

Maliki is said to be considering the appointment of technocrats in place of the ministers who resigned. But in the Iraqi system, a prime minister gains support from lawmakers by bestowing ministries on their parties, and technocrats would bring Maliki no support. He is already heading a minority government and can often not muster a quorum for a meeting of parliament.

The Sadrists are the second major Shiite party to withdraw from the ruling coalition, leaving Maliki with fewer than 100 direct supporters in a parliament of 275, and making him deeply dependent on other political forces, especially the Kurds. The Sunni Arab delegates in parliament, under severe pressure from American forces convinced they are linked to the insurgents, have also begun talking about withdrawing their ministers from the national unity cabinet. At any moment, 50 parliamentarians can initiate a vote of no confidence against Maliki, though for now that possibility seems remote.

Nassar al-Rubaie, leader of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, pledged last week that his party, which has not withdrawn from the legislature, “will have a major role in working on a timetable [for withdrawing foreign troops] in parliament.”

CHICAGO, April 23 (Reuters) – Sgt. Eric Edmundson arrived at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed hospital in October 2005 with a severe head concussion, a victim of one of the many roadside bombs that are a part of daily life for soldiers in Iraq.

Six months later, after intense physical rehab and an infection that made control of his limbs futile, his morale hit bottom. The Department of Veterans Affairs gave him the choice of a nursing home or returning home from a Richmond, Virginia facility, his family said.

“We felt the VA had a ‘wait and see’ attitude, and our belief was that time was our enemy,” said Eric’s father Edward, who left his job at Conagra Foods in North Carolina to be his son’s full-time health advocate. “So we took him home.”

Unsatisfied with the outcome, Eric and his family eventually found treatment at a private hospital, and began a slow path to recovery. But his story is unusual. Wounded vets are seldom treated at private hospitals, which say they offer expertise for severe brain injuries like Eric’s. The VA is resisting using their services, setting up a clash over care for some the war’s most seriously wounded veterans.

Of the nearly 24,000 wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third suffer from some degree of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to the General Accounting Office.

The government has been on the defensive about veterans’ medical care after a probe found shoddy living conditions of recovering wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the jewel in the military’s health care system.

A newly-appointed Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors was formed by U.S. President George Bush in response. A major topic is whether the civilian sector could be used more in treating traumatic brain injury, one of the fastest growing injuries of the war.

“That is a $64,000 question, and one that the Commission will be studying,” as it holds hearings in advance of drawing up recommendations for Bush, said Edward Eckenhoff, president of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington and a member of the commission.

CASE BY CASE

The VA has four hospitals to treat severe brain injuries, in Minneapolis, California, Florida and Virginia. Critics say the total of 48 hospital beds in the entire VA system devoted to the brain injuries is inadequate to meet demand.

Barbara Sigford, the VA’s National Director for Physical Medicine and Rehab, said the agency’s expertise in spinal cord injuries and amputations, often intertwined with brain trauma, has been growing for the past 20 years.

“This isn’t new for us by any means,” she said. “I would say that seldom is it in someone’s best interest to transfer them to another (civilian) program.”

Sigford said there is no issue of overcrowding since the four VA trauma centers are running at about 80 percent capacity.

For their part, private hospitals said they have been building expertise by treating tough brain injuries for decades, whether for construction accidents or car crash victims. The VA by contrast has been caring for mostly chronic illness in Vietnam and World War II veterans, they say.

Jeremy Chwat, executive vice president of the advocacy group, the Wounded Warrior project, said the VA does a good job of caring for critical patients once they arrive, but that it could use assistance in the long road of rehabilitation.

The mainstream US media will sidestep this point, but al-Maliki pretty explicitly said that the reason he called off the wall building is that he doesn’t want his government compared to that of Israel. That is, the Adhamiya wall is being likened in the Arab world to the Apartheid Wall being built by the Israelis in the West Bank. Al-Maliki made the statement in Cairo, and when he referred to the “other walls” he didn’t want the one in Adhamiya compared to, he pointed toward Israel. The Western press is bringing up the Berlin Wall as part of his meaning, but the videotape makes it absolutely clear that his referent was Israel’s project. On the other hand, Nassar al-Rubaie, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi parliament, did warn that the US is building a series of Berlin Walls in Baghdad.

The politics of the wall points to the ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian issue is absolutely central to the difficulties the United States is having in being accepted in Iraq. Many Iraqis perceive the US presence as just an extension of Israeli occupation of Arabs and Arab land, and routinely refer to US troops as “the Jews.”

The Israeli government has grossly mistreated the Palestinian people, the current condition of which is grave. The wall the Israelis are building is built on Palestinian land and has stolen more land from Palestinians and has in some instances run through Palestinian villages, cutting them in two and separating families. The Apartheid Wall has provoked demonstrations.

So being a foreign military force in an Arab country and looking like they are building security walls similar to that of the Israelis just puts the US and its ally, al-Maliki, in a very difficult position.

Not to mention that walling people up is intrinsically unappealing as a governing strategy. Mahmud Osman, a member of parliament in the Kurdistan Alliance and a former member of Paul Bremer’s Interim Governing Council, told al-Zaman that the Adhamiya wall is “the peak of failure” for the new security plan and “a violation of human rights.” He added that the wall “is a clear sign of the failure of the American and government policy for safeguarding security.” Other MPs complained that the policy would create and reinforce sectarian divisions in the capital.

On my day off, I do all the jobs that have accumulated over the week; those we try to put off – until … forever.

Sweeping the patios and cleaning the garden is one of them.

Ages ago we used to have enough water, and at quite high pressure to enable me – and others – to wash off the dust and sand that accumulate as a result of sand storms and unusually dusty weather. It used to be quite an enjoyable task for me because I love water. I would spray the walls and sniff the odor of freshly sprayed plaster. I would wash the trees and spray the flowers to make their colours brighter still. At the end of all this spraying I would reluctantly put down the hose, take up the brush to lift the dirt and put it in the garbage bin. Every one of my kids used to fight over this watery duty; but they would run away from the very last detail – lifting the accumulated dirt.

Now the situation has changed … we can no longer wash the patios, no longer wash the trees, just barely water the plants and sprinkle the dry grass. The patios have to be dry-swept, the garage and the pavement outside, too.

No one offers to help – until the very end, when I prepare to lift the accumulation to throw it away. At that moment my son comes running, “You haven’t thrown them away have you??”, “No, they’re right here”.

Very carefully, he goes through the dry dirt, twigs and leaves to pick out small metal cylinders, dusty and shiny at the same time; some longer, some shorter; he inspects them carefully – just in case. The odor of gunpowder lingers in them. He washes and dries them, and adds them to his hoard. “I think, with this lot I will beat Hammoudi; last week he had more than me!”

This what we have gained.

Shiny cylinders on our doorstep.

Shiny cylinders on our roofs.

Shiny cylinders penetrating our lives in – oh – so many ways.

04/21/07 “ICH ” — — Mobilizing to save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring the economy’s natural support systems, eradicating poverty, and stabilizing population. We have the technologies, economic instruments, and financial resources to do this. The United States has the resources to lead this effort. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute sums it up well: “The tragic irony of this moment is that the rich countries are so rich and the poor so poor that a few added tenths of one percent of GNP from the rich ones ramped up over the coming decades could do what was never before possible in human history: ensure that the basic needs of health and education are met for all impoverished children in this world. How many more tragedies will we suffer in this country before we wake up to our capacity to help make the world a safer and more prosperous place not only through military might, but through the gift of life itself?”

It is not possible to put a precise price tag on the changes needed to move our twenty-first century civilization off the overshoot-and-collapse path and onto a path that will sustain economic progress. What we can do, however, is provide some rough estimates of the scale of effort needed.

To fund the needed restructuring of the energy economy, we rely on shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. For meeting our social goals, the additional external funding needed to achieve universal primary education in the more than 80 developing countries that require help is conservatively estimated by the World Bank at $12 billion per year. Funding for an adult literacy program based largely on volunteers will take an estimated additional $4 billion annually. Providing for the most basic health care in developing countries is estimated at $33 billion by the World Health Organization. The additional funding needed to provide reproductive health care and family planning services to all women in developing countries is less than $7 billion a year.

Closing the condom gap by providing the additional 9.5 billion condoms needed to control the spread of HIV in the developing world and Eastern Europe requires $2 billion—$285 million for condoms and $1.7 billion for AIDS prevention education and condom distribution. The cost of extending school lunch programs to the 44 poorest countries is $6 billion. An estimated $4 billion per year would cover the cost of assistance to preschool children and pregnant women in these countries. Altogether, the cost of reaching basic social goals comes to $68 billion a year.

“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (Abandon all hope, you who enter here) Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy; ‘Inferno’

04/22/07 “ICH” – — – There is an inordinate frenzy to occupy the White House in 2009. Perhaps Mr. Bush’s overreach and abuse of Executive powers has inspired candidates; or it may simply be the idea of rescuing the United States from her various dilemmas. What is undeniable is that while some candidates may be sincere in their aspirations, others simply want a chance to kill in our name. Twitching fingers ready to commit genocide, one presidential candidate had even been practicing how to commit mass murder to a tune.

Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) while on a campaign in N. Carolina, was videoed singing “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys “Barbara Ann”.[i]

To this ‘hero’ of the Vietnam War, the White House means not only prolonging the Iraq war and the death of more Americans and slaughter of Iraqis, which he has strongly endorsed , but also the genocide of innocent Iranians. Given that he is lagging behind in fundraising, it comes as no surprise that he should target Iran, lie about Iran’s aspirations to destroy Israel, and hope to receive AIPAC’s blessings and be bank-rolled by them. No doubt, in spite of inciting mass murder, the mainstream media will boost his popularity with the backing of AIPAC, and he will be the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican elections – the war hero who learned nothing from Vietnam and the killing massacre that went on there.

It is up to us, the American people to evaluate our standing at home and in the world. Have we reached the ‘point of no return’, the gates of hell described by Dante, where the likes of McCain will lead our future to more lies and bloodshed? Not only has our country been run amok by the current Administration, but those who look to step into their shoes are planning to take us to far darker places. McCain is not only a United States Senator who represents the people of Arizona, but he is a high profile representative of the United States. What message are we giving to the world when presidential candidates walk around telling the world that America will “bomb, bomb, bomb” whomever they don’t like?

The Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading initiative at the center of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, another blow to a program besieged by allegations of financial conflicts of interest and cronyism, people familiar with the matter said yesterday.

The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states.

“That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. “You don’t get to override the law,” he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. “But the fact of the matter is that you did.”

The Education Department’s inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., said he has made several referrals to the Justice Department about the five-year-old program, which provides grants to improve reading for children in kindergarten through third grade.

Higgins declined to offer more specifics, but Christopher J. Doherty, former director of Reading First, said in an interview that he was questioned by Justice officials in November. The civil division of the U.S. attorney’s office for the District, which can bring criminal charges, is reviewing the matter.

Doherty, one of the two Education Department employees who oversaw the initiative, acknowledged yesterday that his wife had worked for a decade as a paid consultant for a reading program, Direct Instruction, that investigators said he improperly tried to force schools to use. He repeatedly failed to disclose the conflict on financial disclosure forms.

“I’m very proud of this program and my role in this program,” Doherty said in the interview. “I think it’s been implemented in accordance with the law.”