Flit(tm)

Is the PRC, our future food savior?

One of the things that infuriates me about the EU's "frankenfoods" phobia is how their resistance to genetic engineering impoverishes the African farmer. Africa ends up with low yielding seeds and Europe doesn't hold itself morally accountable for the resulting poverty. But the chinese don't care about GM and if the PRC takes an interest in African agriculture on a scale with its present interest in mining and timber, African leaders will no longer need to kowtow to irrational EU fears and will be able to increase yields using GM seeds. That will significantly increase both global food supply and energy supply through biofuel acreage.

HT: Thomas Barnett

Letter to the Paper LX

I'm going to our eparchial assembly in a bit but I decided to take a quick dip into the Catholic blogosphere first. Mark Sheas disappoints as usual when he's talking about the Bush administration because he has no understanding of the underlying dynamics or issues and is relatively uninterested in developing same. Just for old times sake I dropped a mini primer on our actual foreign policy developed by this administration.

Our actual foreign policy for some time under this administration has been to promote 'regional sheriffs' to do much of the heavy lifting and to defuse the possibility of the world ganging up on the US in order to balance our power (this balancing phenomenon happens every time a dominant world power emerges) and drag us down. For Asia we have three major sheriff candidates, India, Japan and the PRC.

N. Korea's submission to the PRC is a recognition of their status as local sheriff and so the US pulls back on threats encouraging the sheriff dynamic. But who is the sheriff in the Middle East? There are no candidates right now. The closest we have is Iraq itself, a sheriff that is years away from being ready. But their armed forces emergence into competent, even-handed action against militias gives a bit of hope that a decade from now they will be able to emerge as sheriff. That has something of a protective effect on Iran.

In short, while some were chanting about no blood for oil and even about bronze aged barbarians, we developed our first real foreign policy that fit the post-cold war age under this administration. It's even marginally more moral than our previous cold war realpolitik because the playing field is still tilted for the local sheriffs to be free states and to encourage liberty in their regions. In 20 years the historians may even notice.

It's going to get burnt anyway

It's pretty safe to say that Dr. James Hansen is not my favorite scientist. But I do find myself in curious agreement with one part of his recent testimony and DC talking tour, that we're not going to stop oil from getting burnt anytime soon. "Practically, I don't see how we can stop putting the oil in the atmosphere, because that's owned by Russia and Saudi Arabia" he said and there's a great deal of truth to that. The second part of his idea is that we could stop coal use, "what we could do is stop the coal" in his words. That's nonsense on stilts. The same problem, that the fossil fuel is under the control of countries not much interested in sacrificing energy use for the prevention of global warming is just as much a problem for coal as for oil. Wikipedia's got the stats. They don't paint a picture of a world where we could "stop the coal".