Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist
Here's a toss up. I desperately wanted to abandon the column prepared for today, sharing instead thoughts on the Olympics, Jamaica's performance as well as potential lessons we might take from our athletes' excellence and China's preparation for the games-displaying the long run view an ancient civilization effortlessly embraces and tremendous foresight linking their infrastructural and societal development needs into the 21st century.
I thought, however, the issue of competition for critical resources and world energy crunch in face of an ineffectual United Nations, changing concentrations of economic power plus the prospect of the lone superpower sending ambiguous signals to potential client states such as Georgia should remain.
Yet, the double 'Bolt' of lightning demands an immediate, even if brief comment. His individual performances were phenomenal. They surely presage better to come.
Genes do matter
Such excellence is achievable given talent, tenacity and application. Genes do matter, but the latter two attributes denote character. We should take example from this into other spheres of national life.
I honestly cannot share Jacques Rogge's view of his celebratory actions as unworthy. Bolt surely would have etched his name on the 100 metres record a little deeper had he run straight to the tape but there is time for that. He already held that record. His goal was simply gold. He, if anyone, had every right to display youthful exuberance.
While all this was going on, though, we had alarming developments on the Russian border.
For more than a decade now the Russians have viewed themselves as disrespected and on occasion, considered or made to feel irrelevant.
Nuclear arsenal and its safekeeping aside, their vast natural resource endowment - oil and gas in particular - makes them anything but irrelevant to continued buoyancy of the globalisation enterprise.
To have what they view as a threat on their borders, defensive shields and a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation absorbing so many parts of their once powerful if at times militarily overrated empire, escalation to open hostilities was so predictable that even a foreign and international relations novice could have foretold it with one ear and one eye completely impaired.
Today's world of 'peak oil', the 'war on terror', unprecedented United States budget and trade deficits twinned with an international financial infrastructure tottering from collateralised mortgage crisis reaching across the United States to Europe, the time has surely come for displays of statesmanship, not bluster.
But what is the forum, what is to be the modern day counterpart of post-war Bretton Woods if the United Nations and World Trade Organisation do not fit the bill? And will Brazil, China and India be invited beyond the ante-room to the main banquet hall? Will as some apparently hasty and unthinking pundits suggest Russia be uninvited?
'Peak oil' is an insight revealed by geophysicist M. King Hubbert ([M is short for Marion, seemingly the wrong gender - not sure whether it's a birth certificate misprint) describing the way in which the rate of petroleum production from a field tends to resemble a bell-shaped curve.
The rate of extraction rises rapidly to a peak following exploration, discovery, fast infrastructure development and exploitation. At the top of the curve production declines as the resource is depleted.
There is no consensus on this theory but its proponents and adherents seem to be growing. Oil prices are rising as demand seems likely to explode. Whatever happens, whoever is correct in the prognosis, the situation does not look good.
Fuel consumption
Energy demand derives from four main sources: transportation, industrial, residential and commercial usage. Transportation is by far the largest. The United States consumes around 21 million barrels of oil a day, up from 17 million a decade ago - relatively, a small increase.
China on the other hand consumes about seven million barrels per day, an increase over the same period of about three million barrels per day - relatively, a large increase given original consumption. The increase is almost 50 per cent compared to the USA's 17 per cent over the same period. The point here is rate of increase.
As industrial production increases in China, Brazil and India, and as the middle class expands in these countries, choosing to drive cars - even the mini vehicle TATA of India proposes - will cause explosive increases in demand for oil to 2040.
T. Boone Pickens, among US entrepreneurs, thinks he has the scenario grasped in a nutshell. Presidential campaigning creates drillers and unbelievable believers. But oil is not the only scarce resource. Water is next. Spain's water rich region refuses to give to its water-starved tourist enclave. And California is not without its water squabbles.
The man-made resource, money - temporary abode of purchasing power one economist called it — and its myriad substitutes derivatives, collateralised securities, hedge funds, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac securities, etc, all must combine with technology and the animal spirits of entrepreneurs to drive globalisation.
War on terror unending
But the 'war on terror' as currently conceived is unending. Its demand for resources is huge - this is not to ignore the hundreds of thousands of lost and destroyed lives - funded almost single-handedly by the US. Recall the deficit, millions without health insurance, hence care, the current account deficit with China holding the bulk of the Treasuries.
If finite natural resources are being rapidly depleted, global money and credit shrink, demand for both increases while consumer confidence and wealth go south as simultaneously, hostile relations threaten between the lone existing and former super power.
Do we have any say in the way our planet is to be managed economically and sensibly husbanded?
wilbe65@yahoo.com
