Peak oil passes, doomsday yet to come

In a surprise turnaround, oil industry experts say “peak oil” has already occurred while opponents of fossil fuel use say alternative energy means even further environmental devastation.

The switcharoo has occurred after the Guardian’s crusading George Monbiot – scourge of industry and greenies alike – outed his old enemy, Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency. Monbiot quotes Birol as saying, "We think that the crude oil production has already peaked, in 2006."

But deception is not Monbiot’s main complaint. It is that this has not lead to the collapse of the global economy – indeed, it is on the way back – but that there is too much fossil fuel to replace “easy oil.” Natural gas liquids and tar sands are two such sources, while modern economies have become more resistant to “resource shocks” leading to an increase, not a decline, in environmental destruction. Monbiot adds:

As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they'll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world's surface.

We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.

Going down, down, down
News of New Zealand’s further slide down the ladder of world competitiveness was overlooked in the rush to condemn the budget as lacking in vision and solutions to the country’s ills.

The only good news, comparatively speaking, in the IMD’s annual survey was that Australia had slipped, too, from fifth to ninth. New Zealand, though, has dropped out of the top 20, passed by none other than a newly-revitalised Britain under the Tory-led coalition.

Momentum is important on such charts and is difficult to change, going up or down. It is instructive that the countries heading higher (US, Hong Kong, Sweden, Taiwan, Qatar and Germany, in the top 10) can be identified in advance from already known material.

It is the same for those that are falling, such as New Zealand, Finland, Austria, Korea, Ireland and Chile. It will take at least another term of National-led government before New Zealand shows signs of reversing its decline. The alternative of a Labour-led government doesn’t bear thinking about.

Last weekend’s congress produced a series of back-to-the-future policies, mainly aimed at recovering what National is busy destroying. It is tedious to go through these but one is worth noting: rises in minimum wages so that workers have more to spend.

This is Keynesianism at its worst (why not double wages by fiat and do the job properly?) and need not be refuted here. But to refresh your understanding of why miniumum wages exist, try this Austrian economics exposé of Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days TV series, which has started screening in the US.

This debate is at the sharp edge of any discussion between economists of the left and right. Labour’s arguments suggests its defeat in November on commonsense alone will be larger than anyone expects.

DSK and the Kiwi female columnist
The likely ascension of France’s Finance Minister, Christine Legarde, to replace her political opponent, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the IMF, has mainly concentrated on issues other than what he achieved in office.

Ms Legarde is likely to face two other candidates in a vote at the end of June but they won’t come close because the US and Europe are not going to let go of the IMF while the euro-zone debt crisis remains the running sore of the global financial system.

Ms Legarde, a lawyer rather than an economist, also wants a full five-year term, enough to take her past the next French election, which her sponsor, President Nicolas Sarkozy, was expected to lose to Mr Strauss-Kahn.

The twist is typically French and conspiracy theorists have been active to explain this to puzzled outsiders. The truth is less opaque. Not only is Mr Strauss-Kahn a shocking sexual predator, explained here by the Daily Telegraph’s Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, but he is hypocrite.

For evidence, you need only look to a local columnist, who quotes his policy of “more financial sector reform and a tax on financial activities, calls for more attention to be paid to inequality and social cohesion.” She goes on to say:

Strauss-Kahn said the "Washington Consensus," preaching that privatisation and deregulation "would unleash growth and prosperity," "is now behind us."

And:

Strauss-Kahn notes that the IMF has been here before. As one of its founders John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1933: "The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success.

"It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it."

A bit like left-wing females must feel about him now.

Where have all the sceptics gone?
Media people like to be shocked and amazed at the gullibility of their readers, listeners and viewers to obvious scams, deceptions and all-round bad behaviour.

That is why they love the internet and Facebook, where this activity can be found in abundance. As a result you would expect the media generally to be watching out with more than a little scepticism.

Not so, as the story about an American woman who claimed she injected her eight-year-old daughter with botox and who would be getting other cosmetic procedures in due course.

The story attracted world-wide criticism after the woman, named as Kerry Campbell, appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to describe the anti-wrinkle injections as of part her daughter Britney's preparations for beauty pageants.

The Britney reference alone should have been a giveaway but, no, the story turned up locally and even spurred the NZ Herald to a front-page panel and similar shock-horror stories to replace the sharks.

The fact that “Kerry Campbell” was a hoax is not the surprise, however. It is that this had already been exposed back on March 24, the day after the UK tabloid The Sun had first run the story.

A San Francisco fashion website, Bella Sugar, blew the whistle by discovering “Kerry Campbell” did not exist. Read full story at the Chicago Tribune.