New Quaker Notebook

The non-profit organization CorpWatch has issued its report detailing the bungled reconstruction effort in Afghanistan:

A highway that begins crumbling before it is finished. A school with a collapsed roof. A clinic with faulty plumbing. A farmers' cooperative that farmers can't use. Afghan police and military that, after training, are incapable of providing the most basic security. And contractors walking away with millions of dollars in aid money for the work. The Bush Administration touts the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan as a success story. Perhaps, in comparison to the violence-plagued efforts in Iraq and the incompetence-riddled efforts on the American Gulf Coast, everything is relative.

This is a war-ravaged country being rebuilt by outsiders—where engineers, consultants, and mercenaries make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make $5 per day. This is a must read investigative report. The report is available as a PDF document.

Related Tags: Afghanistan, CorpWatch, Fariba Nawa

Loonie forecasting

Today the Globe and Mail reported that the Canadian loonie (dollar) rose as high as 90.41 cents against the US dollar, closing at the end of the day at 90.38 cents. It hasn't been this close to parity since 1978. There are now mixed predictions for eventual parity—something the two economies haven't seen since November 1976—as "rising gold and energy prices, souring sentiment against the US dollar and robust global investment demand" help to make this scenario another painful remembrance of things past.

While We Slept

We've all been so wrapped up in our own home-made misery over rising gas prices for our insatiable gas-thirsty automobiles, or perhaps over our self-created phantasms now blossoming so luxuriantly in the Middle East, that we didn't even notice that our side of the Southern Hemisphere was effectively realigned during last two days.

Today Bolivian president Evo Morales nationalized his country's entire oil and gas sector as he ordered the military to occupy the country's energy fields, giving foreign petrochemical companies six months either to renegotiate contracts with the Bolivian government or to leave the country. "The looting by the foreign companies has ended," he declared.¹

Yesterday "Peru recalled its ambassador from Venezuela to protest what it said was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's 'persistent and flagrant' interference in Peru's presidential election," referring to Chavez's endorsement of Ollanta Humala in what is likely to be a runoff in elections in Peru—well, that and the fact that Chavez called the other candidate, Alan García, a thief.²

And then there was the interesting document-signing in Cuba over the weekend. The left-leaning Bolivian president "signed a pact with Cuba and Venezuela on Saturday that rejects US-backed free trade and promises a socialist version of regional commerce and cooperation."³

I knew a man who had trouble sleeping at night. His insomnia, he said, was the direct result of his fear that something bad would happen overnight. I think I begin to understand him now.

Children of the Corn

I can't say I really like paying $3.11 for gas—but it's actually a good thing. I say let the price of gas go higher, much higher, into the stratosphere. Until we are forced to confront the inevitable bankruptcy of our pervasive reliance on fossil fuels, we won't stop and won't discontinue what is really self-destructive behavior. And it isn't that we are addicted to oil: we are trapped, tethered, enslaved by an energy practice that pervades every aspect of American culture.¹ A competent federal energy policy could have prevented this situation, but now we have in its place merely blustery rhetoric and wagging fingers of blame. We blame the oil industry (or their CEOs) for benefiting from the high prices, forgetting that you have to go into big business with the corporations you have, not the corporations you want.² My concern is that the rhetoric whirling about now is going to blow the conversation into the same rut, pushing us into the same pointless direction. Instead of searching for innovative solutions to the internal combustion engine, instead of burning oil, we're thinking about burning corn.

In this context, corn is ethanol. Says the US Department of Energy:

Ethanol is an alcohol-based alternative fuel produced by fermenting and distilling starch crops that have been converted into simple sugars. Feedstocks for this fuel include corn, barley, and wheat. Ethanol can also be produced from "cellulosic biomass" such as trees and grasses and is called bioethanol. Ethanol is most commonly used to increase octane and improve the emissions quality of gasoline.

Ethanol can be blended with gasoline to create E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. E85 and blends with even higher concentrations of ethanol, E95, for example, qualify as alternative fuels under the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct). Vehicles that run on E85 are called flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs) and are offered by several vehicle manufacturers.³

Corn isn't the only thing you can make into ethanol, but its 70% starch constitution makes it a top candidate. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 tripled the amount of biofuel that has to be mixed with gasoline, and that will probably turn out to be a product of corn.⁴

Corn is the big American agricultural product. This heavily-subsidized farm product is now the sweetener of choice (corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup) for soft drinks and sweetened foods, and it's heavily used as food for feedlot cattle.⁵ With the new rise in gas prices, there is now renewed interest in using corn as a fuel, including making your own via ethanol stills.⁶ By the same token, according to a recent Cornell University study, it takes 70% more energy is needed to make ethanol than is actually in ethanol. "If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol," they report, "a total of about 97 percent of US land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States."⁷

The rut in our thinking, the tired road Americans seem willing to travel again and again, is in failing to look beyond the short-term gains in lowering gas prices by embracing a solution that actually speaks to the long-term, but in a fashion that simply recycles the same failed policy.

Afghanistan, Inc.

Loonie forecasting

While We Slept

Children of the Corn