All things considered, good news for the U.S. economy from the Commerce Department today. New home sales in July rose by a startling 9.6 percent, month over month, far above expectations. Orders for durable goods also jumped by 4.9 percent. Both readings were the largest month-to-month percentage increases in recent memory.
Caveats, as usual, apply. The margin of error for new home sales sampling is very high, so those stats need to be viewed warily. (Although it should be noted that the Commerce Department revised the figures for May and June upward, so fears that the data were overstating the reality in those months appear to have been unwarranted.) New home sales in July were still 13.4 percent lower than the rate registered one year ago, and the median price of a new home dropped 12 percent from last year. As for durable goods orders, if transportation goods (read: planes) are excluded, the rise was only 0.8 percent, which was actually .1 percent less than economists were predicting.
But perhaps most important, the number of months it would take to sell off the existing inventory of new homes dropped to 7.5, the lowest level since April 2007, suggesting that excess supply is finally being worked out of the market.
The shoots? Today they are very green.
Monsanto is not the first company I think of when assigning blame for sabotaging climate talks, but according to 37 percent of the voters in the Friends of the Earth Angry Mermaid contest, the biotech seed company is the most egregious offender on the planet, edging out Shell and the American Petroleum Institute.
The award, says FoE, is meant to "highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions."
Agriculture giant Monsanto was nominated for promoting its genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to climate change and pushing for its crops to be used as biofuels. The expansion of GM soy in Latin America is contributing to major deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.... Monsanto also wants GM soy to be funded under the Clean Development Mechanism.
Seems to me that there is a bit of a contradiction at work here. If Monsanto believes that GM soy should qualify as a carbon offset under the Clean Development Mechanism, wouldn't that mean that the company would support a strong agreement on emissions at Copenhagen? If a world carbon tax regime or cap-and-trade scheme became reality, wouldn't that make Monsanto's products more valuable? (Providing, of course, that anyone could prove that GM soy plantations or GM corn-derived biofuels really did result in a net decline in greenhouse gas emissions, which seems highly dubious.) But I'm betting the voters in FoE's poll did not stop to think this through. Monsanto has become one of those brands that inspires overwhelming kneejerk antipathy -- the American Petroleum Institute never had a chance, even though API has done far more to fight action on climate change than any biotech company.
And of course, good reasons to distrust Monsanto are legion. I wrote earlier this summer about hints that the U.S. Department of Justice was considering antitrust action against Monsanto, based on the company's near complete monopoly power in huge sectors of the U.S. seed market. On Monday, the Associated Press published a blockbuster expose of Monsanto's anti-competitive practices in the seed business, written by Christopher Leonard (no relation), that makes a darn good case for trust-busting.
Among the goodies dug up by Leonard: When Monsanto licenses its gene traits to independent companies, the terms of its contracts include a clause that requires the licensee to destroy its inventory of seeds in the event of a change of ownership. What this means is that Monsanto's competitors have no chance to bid against Monsanto in any potential buyouts.
Monsanto's provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto's traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.
Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.
"If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw."
Maybe the Angry Mermaid can help?
Over the weekend, my Twitter feed overflowed with references to an Associated Press investigation of the climate change hacked e-mails, citing it is as definitive proof that "the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked."
In reaching that conclusion, the story provides useful context to the e-mails, polls outside scientists for their reactions to the contretemps, and pulls no punches in describing bad behavior by the climate researchers at East Anglia University. It finishes with this coda:
The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in reference to a published story.... The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.
Aha, shouted the climate skeptic blogosphere, which wasted no time in parading the e-mail in question, written by AP reporter Seth Borenstein, earlier this summer:
Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
For the skeptics, this e-mail is enough to prove that Borenstein "is just too damn cozy with the people he covers." I don't know about that. It seems like typical due diligence from a reporter, in a conversational style appropriate to interaction with sources that you trust. Formerly a top aide to Senator James Inhofe, Marc Morano is, without doubt, a master at the art of wildly hyping. He is a primal font of climate skepticism, with the amp always turned up to 11. I like David Roberts' summary:
Morano's entire job is to aggregate every misleading factoid, every attack on climate science or scientists, every crank skeptical statement from anyone in the world and send it all out periodically in email blasts that get echoed throughout the right-wing blog world and eventually find their way into places like Fox News and the Weekly Standard. From there they go, via columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, into mainstream outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post.
For a good example of how Morano conducts his business, here's an attack on none other than Seth Borenstein, which he published in August at his blog, ClimateDepot.
When you cover a beat as a journalist, it doesn't take long to learn who is trustworthy and who is a tool. Indeed, one of the big problems with mainstream journalism is that too many reporters don't let their readers know what they really think about the sources they quote or cite. I haven't been able yet to find a copy of Borenstein's report on the above-mentioned study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- which argued, by the way, that natural causes, not humans, were responsible for rising sea surface temperatures -- but I'll bet that Borenstein did not tell his readers that Mark Morano was "wildly hyping" it. And that's a shame, because the more we know about Mark Morano's tactics, the more we can understand why climate researchers who have to deal with his misrepresentations on a daily basis were driven to injudicious decisions.
As for me, I think Morano is a tool. And for the record, his old boss thinks the same of me.
A generally informative Wall Street Journal article on plans by Citigroup and Wells Fargo to pay back their TARP bailout funds starts with some odd framing: (italics mine)
Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. won agreements to begin extracting themselves from the U.S. government's grip by paying back a total of $45 billion in aid, marking a major milestone in the year-long effort to rescue the American financial system.
Grip? Doesn't that imply some kind of firm embrace? Some kind of pressure applied by the entity in question? And doesn't the formulation "extracting themselves" conjure up images of efforts to get out of a romantic relationship gone horribly sour? While How the World Works does not subscribe to Matt Taibbi-levels of paranoia about the White House's relationship to Wall Street, it does strain credulity to describe the Obama administration's treatment of the banks as "tough" or with any another adjective implying the significant exertion of force. President Obama's mild observation on Monday that the banks "now have a greater obligation to the goal of a wider recovery, a more stable system and more broadly shared prosperity" does not bring to mind the image of a stern taskmaster. We should all be so lucky to have romantic partners who shower us with cash, ask little in return, and gracefully agree to depart the scene once their caresses are no longer appreciated.
The phrasing, which the Journal repeated in the coverline on its home page, seems to me pretty good evidence of right-wing bias seeping out from the editorial pages into the news coverage, which is exactly what we all feared when Rupert Murdoch took over, and precisely what the New York Times' David Carr described yesterday in his column, "Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal".
Craig Perkins is a bike geek who works for the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. His "group performs applied research involving the surfaces and interfaces relevant to next-generation thin film photovoltaic technology."
Put the two together and what do you get? Dreams of solar-powered scooters!
An excerpt from his most recent blog post:
On a clear day you have about 1000 watts per square meter of [sunlight]t bearing down on you. It is a testament to the efficiency of the bicycle that it is entirely possible that some day, just the sunlight hitting your body could provide the power to scoot around on two wheels. Skeptical? An in-shape cyclist might produce a few hundred watts of power for a short length of time. Let's assume that us normal folks produce about half of that, about 150 watts. If we take the area of the typical human shadow to be 0.7 square meters, then we have about 700 watts of light hitting you and your clothing on a clear day. How much of that light energy might we capture, and how? Some of my fellow geeks are actually working on integrating thin film photovoltaics with clothing and other textile products. Let's assume they are successful. The current world record efficiency for thin film photovoltaics stands at right around 20 percent. Putting those numbers together yields an estimate of 140 watts of harvestable photovoltaic power, a level very comparable to the energy cost of cycling.
All of those people out there who think Lycra-clad cyclists are a fashion monstrosity? Just wait until that Lycra incorporates thin film photovoltaic technology! Then we'll talking some serious threads.
Even if the fate of the world did not hang on the outcome of climate change negotiations between 192 nations in Copenhagen, Denmark, the spectacle would be fascinating solely from the vantage point of history. The Industrial Revolution isn't just responsible for pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the countries in which technological progress, fueled by cheap energy, originally took off ending up using their new powers to dominate the entire globe over the last 200 years.
The processes that caused climate change are therefore inextricable from a history of imperialism and colonialism and uneven economic development. When developing nations ask for cash and technology to help them adapt to a clean energy future, they aren't just trying to guilt-trip the rich countries for all the tons of greenhouse gases they have alread emitted -- the so-called "carbon debt." In a very real way they're also asking for reparations to compensate for the creation of the rift that has divided the world into "developed" and "developing" nations.
Because that's what it has come down to -- how much cash will the rich nations pony up to get the poor nations to sign up for a deal? The big news on Monday was that the group of 77 developing nations (which includes big greenhouse gas emitters like China, India, and Brazil) briefly walked out of the negotiations. The reason was summed up by a Nigerian delegation official who said the European offer of about $10 billion dollars over the next three or four years was "pathetic."
"There will be no commitments from the G77 until we get better assurances about financial and technology transfers," the official said.
The developed nations want $100 billion a year. It strains credulity to think that they will get anything close to it. Energy analyst Geoffrey Styles is on the mark when he observes that it would be "political suicide" for any American president "to explain to the electorate -- particularly with so many of them already exercised over growing deficits and the current tax burden -- why they must pay higher taxes to send carbon-debt payments to some of the same countries that are competing for our jobs and industries, on the basis that previous generations of Americans put more CO2 into the atmosphere than past generations of Chinese, Indians and Brazilians."
As noted by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, the U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern utterly dismissed the notion of reparations for carbon debt.
Stern acknowledged that the emissions of rich nations over the past two hundred years of industrialization had caused global warming, telling a press conference, "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere." But, Stern added, "the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations -- I just categorically reject that."
On the other hand, the U.S. and Europe are just as unlikely to get the kind of commitments by developing nations to reduce emissions that they want either. I'm in the camp that thinks everybody needs to reduce their emissions, and that talk about a supposed "betrayal" of the Kyoto Protocol, which lets developing nations completely off the hook, is over-wrought. But the historical record that encourages poorer nations to feel the rich nations have a responsibility to help them navigate towards a clean energy future explains exactly why they will refuse to sacrifice their own chances for economic growth.
How much of all the the rhetoric is bluster and positioning, while the real haggling gets done behind closed doors? I have no idea. I could just as easily see the entire thing collapse in a chaos of discord as I can a real deal getting hammered out in time for the world leaders to sign at the end of this week.
Herding 192 cats to a compromise that involves issues as weighty as economic growth, a warming planet, and the history of domination of the whole world by a handful of countries in Europe and the United States might be one of the hardest things to accomplish that humans have ever set out to do. The problem certainly won't be solved this week. But the sheer volume of rhetoric emerging from Copenhagen seems to be one indicator of just how high the stakes are, and how bad everyone would look if no deal gets done.
Was Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein so miffed at Obama's comments on "60 Minutes" Sunday night -- "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street" -- that he canceled on a meeting between top bankers and the president at the White House Monday morning?
That's the take that New York Magazine's DailyIntel is pushing, calling it a "diss" of Obama by Wall Street, and suggesting the meeting is "probably not even happening."
Citi chair Richard Parsons, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, and Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein ... have all canceled on the president, citing "inclement weather."
Daily Intel, observing bluish skies from outside her cubicle window, called Amtrak to see if there was in fact a problem on the Northeast Corridor: "Trains are running like three, four minutes late, but there's no big delays," an employee told us. While Weather.com shows clouds and fog on 95, it's not severe enough to hinder a day trip.
Clearly, the weather is not a problem: It's just relations between Wall Street and the White House that have frozen over.
Daily Intel is wrong on at least one point. Bloomberg News reports that the meeting went ahead as planned and the three missing executives participated via conference call. Bloomberg also reports that fog in Washington resulted in flight delays that prevented Blankfein et al from making the meeting.
Despite Amtrak trains running on time and clear weather on I-95, it seems at least possible that Lloyd Blankfein might have a little trouble making an 11:00 a.m. Washington meeting if he was sitting on the tarmac at La Guardia or JFK because of bad weather in Washington. The Wall Street Journal reports that Mack's U.S. Air flight out of Westchester New York was grounded because of bad weather, and quotes a Goldman spokesman as saying that Blankfein's commercial flight was delayed. (For what it's worth, WeatherUnderground reports that there was heavy fog in D.C. this morning.)
Anyway, don't these guys have private jets?! Just kidding.
But come on. These are big boys we're talking about. Everyone knows that Obama's comments on "60 Minutes" were politically motivated; a flanking (and likely ineffective) maneuver attempting to assuage popular anger at the banking industry. Skipping a meeting because of hurt feelings due to a Kabuki show stance doesn't seem like the kind of behavior that earns a Goldman CEO the big bucks.
If you want to read a real evisceration of Obama's banking rhetoric, Yves Smith as usual, is scathing. But I would like to take issue, at least a little bit, with respect to the historical revisionism that is portraying Obama as nothing more than a pawn of the financial industry. Has everyone forgotten the hedge fund showdown over the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler?
Back in April, the President told the nation that he did not "stand" with the hedge fund speculators who were "endangering" Chrysler and GMs future. His rhetoric was similar to that expressed last night on CBS. And he clearly meant it. The White House held firm, prevailed in bankruptcy court, saved a lot of jobs, and possibly even a huge swath of the domestic American auto industry. Shouldn't we at least mention this episode, which the right-wing assailed as socialist interference with the sacred precepts of the holy contract, when trying to establish Obama's populist credentials?
The test of course, will be if Obama's turning-up-the-rhetoric is reflected in any overt attempt to ensure that the Senate passes a banking reform bill along the lines of what the House passed on Friday. The House bill is by no means perfect but it does represent some incremental improvement on the way things currently stand.
Which brings us to the real story of this administration. The White House is pushing health reform, a climate bill, and banking regulation. The House has passed major bills on each issue. The Senate has not. How does Obama keep Joe Lieberman from filibustering a health care bill or anything else? That is the question.
A conversation about globalization.
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E-Books: Satan or Saviour?