Tag Archives: taiwan

Trump Floats Nonsense Idea of Privatizing Airports and Dams

by JaimeLockett Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Philip Howard attended Tuesday’s infrastructure confab with President Trump. The Guardian reports on what he told them:

Donald Trump is considering privatising America’s airports and dams as part of an infrastructure building programme that could exceed past estimates of a trillion dollars….“America can do much more than it has, and can do what other countries in Europe and Australia have done, by harnessing private capital,” Howard said. “So it could privatise a number of assets such as airports and dams, and get a lot of capital from that, as well as increase the tax base.”

Hundreds of airports around the world have been privatised or partly privatised but, Howard noted, virtually none in America….Last year the Cato Institute, a conservative thinktank, published a paper that endorsed privatising the nation’s more than 500 commercial airports, which are currently owned by state and local governments and rely on the federal government for capital improvements.

Is Trump really thinking about this? Who knows. But I’m a little mystified. The federal government can’t privatize airports that are owned by states and cities. And even if it could, states and cities would get the money. So what’s the point?

I’d say Trump had four big domestic priorities when he took office:

Repeal Obamacare.
Cut taxes for the rich.
Spend $1 trillion fixing roads and bridges.
Build a wall.

The Obamacare effort has already crashed and burned. His tax plan apparently won’t work with Obamacare in place, so now he’s delaying that to take another run at health care. He doesn’t have anywhere near enough support for his infrastructure plan, which is why he’s desperately scanning the horizon for weird ideas to fund it. And the wall hasn’t gone anywhere yet. It may yet make progress, but even Trump admits it won’t cover anything close to the whole border.

On foreign policy, he’s crashed and burned on his immigration plan; reversed himself on Russia; launched a strike on Syria with no apparent follow-up plan; still has no proposal for defeating ISIS; caved in to China on Taiwan; and has gone soft on trade.

So what has he done? He’s signed a few bills reversing some Obama executive orders, but that’s about over since the easy stuff has an early May deadline. He produced a kinda-sorta budget, which was even deader on arrival than most presidential budgets. He managed to pick a name off a list and nominate him to the Supreme Court, something he apparently considers a helluva hard day’s work. Beyond that, he’s tweeted, convened some “listening sessions,” held a couple of rallies, watched uncounted hours of TV, played lots of golf, and generally developed a reputation as the laziest president in anyone’s memory. Is there anything important I’m missing here?

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Trump Floats Nonsense Idea of Privatizing Airports and Dams

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Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

by PerryDallachy7 Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

Germany is upset at new tariffs on carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate:

Germany’s foreign minister on Friday morning said the Trump administration is taking a “dangerous step” after the Commerce Department announced a tariff on imports of foreign steel, indicating the tax could become a new source of conflict with the powerful U.S. ally and trading partner.

….“The U.S. Government is apparently prepared to provide American companies with unfair competitive advantages over European and other producers, even if such action violates international trade law,” Gabriel’s statement read. “I very much fail to comprehend the decision.”

FWIW, none of this is really a Trump thing. The International Trade Commission began investigating dumping claims against Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, and Turkey in early 2016, and finished up its work before Trump took office. The vote determining that these countries were dumping product in the US below cost was unanimous.

I don’t know what the Obama or Clinton administrations would have done if they’d had the final decision on this, but my guess is that they would have done the same thing as Trump, and the targets of the tariffs would have complained and threatened to take the case to the WTO. So there’s nothing much new here. It’s just another steel tariff. Because, you know, all the previous ones over the past four decades have been so successful.

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Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

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Rare Visit to Taiwan by Siberian Crane Is a Bird-Watcher’s Dream

by Myrna Posted on June 2, 2016

The only Siberian crane ever seen in Taiwan set off a frenzy by sightseers, the hiring of a 24-hour guard and environmental efforts to welcome such migratory species. Link:   Rare Visit to Taiwan by Siberian Crane Is a Bird-Watcher’s Dream ; ; ;

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Rare Visit to Taiwan by Siberian Crane Is a Bird-Watcher’s Dream

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Earthquake Warning Systems Exist. But California Won’t Pay for One.

by JoelParrott Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

As Bay Area residents clean their streets and homes after the biggest earthquake to hit California in 25 years rocked Napa Valley this weekend, scientists are pushing lawmakers to fund a statewide system that could warn citizens about earthquakes seconds before they hit.

California already has a system, called ShakeAlert, that uses a network of sensors around the state to detect earthquakes just before they happen. The system—a collaboration between the University of California-Berkeley, Caltech, the US Geological Survey (USGS), and various state offices—detects a nondestructive current called a P-wave that emanates from a quake’s epicenter just before the destructive S-wave shakes the earth. ShakeAlert has successfully predicted several earthquakes, including this weekend’s Napa quake. It could be turned into a statewide warning system. But so far, the money’s not there.

“For years, seismic monitoring has been funded, essentially, on a shoestring,” says Peggy Hellweg, operations manager at UC-Berkeley’s seismological lab.

Maintaining ShakeAlert in its current state costs $15 million a year—a tiny fraction of the estimated $1 billion in damage caused by the Napa quake. Turning it into a statewide early-warning system would require installing new earthquake sensors throughout the state, building faster connections between sensors and data centers, and upgrading the data centers themselves. Since many of California’s population centers, including the Bay Area, sit on fault lines, a warning system would likely give residents little time to prepare, ranging “from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds,” depending on a person’s proximity to the earthquake’s epicenter, according to ShakeAlert’s website—not enough time to leave a large building, but perhaps enough to take cover under a desk or table. Warnings could be deployed via text messages, push notifications, or publicly funded alert systems. Setting the whole thing up could cost as much as $80 million over five years—and keeping it running would cost more than $16 million annually, according to a USGS implementation plan published earlier this year.

In September 2013, the California legislature passed a bill requiring the state’s emergency management office to work with private companies to develop an early warning system, but forbade it from pulling money from the state’s general fund. The effort got a boost last month when the House appropriations committee approved $5 million for the system, the first time Congress has allocated money for a statewide system. But the project is still short on funding.

An earthquake early-warning system would not be a unprecedented: Similar systems already exist in China, India, Italy, Romania, Taiwan, and Turkey. In Mexico City, a warning system connected to sensors 200 miles to the south gave residents two minutes’ warning before a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck earlier this year—enough time for many to leave buildings and congregate in open areas.

More than 200 people were injured following last weekend’s Napa earthquake, 17 of them seriously, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Among those hit was a boy who was hit by debris from a falling chimney.

On Monday, the USGS said the likelihood of a “strong and possibly damaging” aftershock (magnitude 5.0 or higher) occurring within the next week was around 29 percent.

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Earthquake Warning Systems Exist. But California Won’t Pay for One.

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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

by JonathonSundber Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Vikram Bath takes on the cult of Finland today. What’s that? You didn’t realize Finland had a cult? Well, it does in the education community, where Finland’s consistently high scores on the international PISA test make it the go-to destination for education writers looking for agreeable junkets they can turn into long-form thumbsuckers about how American schools are doing everything wrong.

But Bath points out that Finland isn’t actually the world’s top performer on the PISA test. Shanghai does better. So does Hong Kong. Now, maybe those are cherry-picked examples that owe their success to government authorities who game the tests, and therefore deserve to be ignored. But Japan does better too. And South Korea. And Taiwan. So why have they fallen out of vogue lately in the popular press? Why do we hear endless tributes to Finland instead? Bath suggests the reason we like Finland is fairly obvious:

“Be like Shanghai” is for the Wall Street Journal crowd. Shanghai is rote memorization and beating your kids and no bathroom breaks and pretending you aren’t numbed by classical music. Finland is culture and castles and liking classical music because you’d be a better person and maybe windmills.

Fine. Asian countries are culturally different. Maybe it makes sense to look instead at countries that are more similar to America. The problem is, Finland isn’t really much like America either. It’s ethnically pretty homogeneous and has extremely low rates of poverty. Obviously tackling poverty would be great, but facts are facts: we’re not likely to reduce our poverty rate to 3 percent anytime soon. So does that mean we’re stuck with no place to aspire to at all?

No. There is still a much, much better non-Asian model. It’s Massachusetts.

14% of children in Massachusetts live in relative poverty. That’s still below the US average, but much more American-like than Finland.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has already figured out how to deal with all the existing regulations imposed by the US government.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has figured out how to cooperate productively with US teachers unions.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has demonstrated how to get results from US-trained teachers rather than masters holders from Finnish research schools, of which the world only has so many.

Unlike Finland, Massachusetts has experienced success teaching real American students who go home every day to be subjected to American parenting styles.

I’d add a fairly large caveat to this: When you disaggregate scores, Massachusetts still does well, but not spectacularly well. Judging from the latest NAEP scores for eighth graders, Massachusetts does a great job with its white students, a good job with its black students, and a fairly mediocre job with its Hispanic students. Overall, they perform pretty well, but part of that is due to the fact that Massachusetts has a very high proportion of white students and apparently does a superb job of teaching them.

Nevertheless, Bath’s point is well taken. But you might want to choose a different state: New Jersey, which has a high composite score not because it’s mostly white (it’s about 60 percent white), but because it does an outstanding job of teaching kids of all colors. Judging by NAEP scores, it ranks among the top four states in both math and reading for whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Of course, New Jersey’s poverty rate is pretty low, and we know that poverty is a prime cause of poor educational outcomes. This helps account for New Jersey’s high scores, and also acts as an object lesson in not fetishizing particular countries, states, or programs. This stuff is complicated, and there’s no point in just substituting one simplistic analysis for another. That said, I’d say Bath is worth listening to. We should take good ideas from wherever we can find them, but there’s not much reason to go haring around the world looking for educational lodestars to emulate. We have 51 laboratories of democracy right here at home, all of which are more culturally similar to each other than any foreign country is. And some of them do pretty well, already working within the framework of American culture, American laws, American ethnic makeup, and American parents. Why not study them instead?

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Is it Time to Replace the Cult of Finland With the Cult of New Jersey?

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U.S. tries to have it both ways with solar trade policy

by JudithCedillo Posted on February 18, 2014

U.S. tries to have it both ways with solar trade policy

By

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Remember how the U.S. trade representative announced last week that he would haul India before the World Trade Organization to try to force the country to accept more solar-panel imports? It’s a reaction to India’s efforts to protect its own solar industry as it massively boosts its renewable energy capacity.

Darnedest thing: The U.S. government on Friday moved closer to imposing trade restrictions that would limit imports of Taiwanese-made solar components into the U.S. Reuters reports:

The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled on Friday that Chinese solar panels made with cells manufactured in Taiwan may harm the American solar industry, bringing it closer to adding to the duties it slapped on products from China in 2012.

The U.S. arm of German solar manufacturer SolarWorld AG had complained that Chinese manufacturers are sidestepping the duties by shifting production of the cells used to make their panels to Taiwan and continuing to flood the U.S. market with cheap products. …

The value of Chinese solar product imports in the United States fell by almost a third from 2012 to 2013, while imports from Taiwan rose more than 40 percent, although from a much smaller base, according to ITC data.

American solar-installation companies have denounced the move to slap new duties on Taiwanese-manufactured components. That’s because they rely on cheap Asian manufacturers to help keep the price of solar arrays low.

“Just this past week, the U.S. Trade Representative publicly condemned the protectionist solar policies of India because, in his words, protectionist policies would ‘actually impede India’s deployment of solar energy by raising its cost,’” said Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy. “By raising the cost of solar for American homeowners, SolarWorld is poised to inflict critical damage on an industry which last year added more than 20,000 solar installation, sales, and distribution jobs to the U.S. economy.”

American solar-panel manufacturers have a different perspective, as you might expect. The dispute puts the U.S. government in a tight spot — is it best to protect panel installers or panel manufacturers? The New Republic recently explained the dilemma:

If the administration doesn’t ratchet up tariffs on Chinese solar makers, it will be accused of speeding the demise of what little solar-panel manufacturing remains in the U.S. That will further erode the administration’s claims that clean energy would bring the country lots of “green” manufacturing jobs. But if the administration ultimately imposes hefty new tariffs on imported Chinese panels … the price of solar power across the country could rise, slowing the advance of a fast-growing, though still niche, green energy source. And that would hurt the firms that are succeeding best in the U.S. solar business today — not those making the panels, but those bolting them onto American rooftops.

Whatever happens, it would be nice to at least see the U.S. show as much sympathy for solar manufacturers in impoverished India as it shows for its own.


Source
China calls for fair handling of escalating solar dispute with U.S., Reuters
CASE Calls U.S. ITC SolarWorld Decision Damaging to U.S. Jobs, Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy
The Next Battle in Our Trade War with China, The New Republic

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Talks on Antarctic Marine Reserve Fail to Reach Agreement

by Myrna Posted on November 1, 2013

Talks aimed at creating one of the world’s largest marine reserves in the waters off Antarctica ended in failure in the face of resistance from Russia, China and Ukraine, delegates said. See the original post: Talks on Antarctic Marine Reserve Fail to Reach Agreement ; ;Related ArticlesActivists Feel Powerful Wrath as Russia Guards Its Arctic ClaimsDealBook: Building a Portfolio With a Focus on a Single Sector: WaterEarthquake Shakes Remote Area of Taiwan ;

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Talks on Antarctic Marine Reserve Fail to Reach Agreement

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Earthquake Shakes Remote Area of Taiwan

by Myrna Posted on October 31, 2013

Taiwan’s government-backed Central News Agency said that the 6.3-magnitude tremor was felt all over the island, but that no injuries or damage had been reported. Source: Earthquake Shakes Remote Area of Taiwan ; ;Related ArticlesBill Limiting Pesticide Use on Hawaii Island Is VetoedWhite House Will Focus on Climate Shifts While Trying to Cut Greenhouse GasesLooking for a Way Around Keystone XL, Canadian Oil Hits the Rails ;

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Earthquake Shakes Remote Area of Taiwan

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NOAA weather-monitoring program hit by sequester cuts

by JuliaPage Posted on June 11, 2013

NOAA weather-monitoring program hit by sequester cuts

By John Upton

NASA

COSMIC satellites. Sequester cuts could see the planned second generation of this weather-monitoring array axed.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is trying to figure out how to meet sequester cuts demanded by Congress — without upsetting Congress by furloughing the agency’s weather forecasters.

One proposed solution might sound fine if you just want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, but it’s not so fine if you care about improving the accuracy of such forecasts in the coming years.

An earlier proposal from NOAA that would have required employees of the National Weather Service to take some furlough days this year was recently nixed amid tornado-induced horror at the thought of meteorologists being kept away from work.

The agency’s new plan would see funds drained instead from the COSMIC-2 satellite program, the second phase planned in a joint U.S.-Taiwan project that aims to improve weather forecasting. From Politico:

“The beauty of this program is it generates an extraordinary amount of useful data and we don’t have to pay the whole freight,” said Clifford Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

“It is an extraordinary mistake to take away the money,” he told POLITICO. “This will be really controversial in the discipline.” …

A half-dozen COSMIC satellites — launched in cooperation with Taiwan — have been operating as a pilot program of sorts since 2006. COSMIC-2 seeks to build on this success by replacing the aging fleet with new satellites equipped with enhanced GPS receivers that are able to generate better quality data.

The estimated 10-year cost is $420 million, of which Taiwan would pay half. But getting off the ground in the NOAA budget has proven difficult.

And Politico points out that the sequester has already eaten into satellite programs designed to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts:

The March 1 sequester has already cut about $54 million from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R), a package which hovers over North America and provides a steady stream of weather monitoring.

In an era of weird weather, this might not be such a smart idea.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Japan and other nations say no to U.S. wheat, worried about GMOs

by Grover Nusom Posted on May 31, 2013

Japan and other nations say no to U.S. wheat, worried about GMOs

By John Upton

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Japan wants to make sure its noodles remain untainted by GMOs.

Japan cancelled a bid on 27,500 tons of Pacific Northwest wheat on Thursday — the first bite taken out of America’s wheat export market after a rogue genetically engineered strain was discovered growing like a weed on an Oregon farm.

Other international buyers also reacted negatively to the news, with South Korea suspending its tenders to import U.S. wheat and European Union countries being urged to step up genetic testing of American imports. Taiwan said it may seek assurances that all imported wheat from the U.S. is GMO-free, the Wall Street Journal‘s MarketWatch reports.

From Agence France-Presse:

“As long as the situation remains unchanged, we have no choice but to avoid bidding for the product,” [a Japanese government] official said …

“We are asking US authorities to disclose information related to the incident as quickly as possible,” the official said. …

Japan imports around five million tonnes of wheat a year, 60 percent of which is from the US, making it one of the largest importers of the crop. …

In Brussels, the European Commission said Thursday it has asked EU member states to check imports of wheat from the United States which may be tainted with the genetically modified strain.

The budding global backlash is a reminder that while America is a friendly place for most GMO crops, other countries consider transgenic foods to be abhorrent. GMO wheat has not been authorized to be grown or sold anywhere in the world. Monsanto ceased efforts to market the transgenic wheat in 2005 when it became clear that America’s export-dominated market would not tolerate it.

America is the world’s biggest wheat exporter, shipping $8 billion worth around the world every year. Australia is No. 2. While many wheat buyers may now look to Australia to boost its exports, experts told Reuters that it was unlikely the country’s growers could meet a spike in demand.

This is not the first time that transgenic crops have popped up where they were not wanted. From Reuters:

The latest finding revives memories of farmers unwittingly planting genetically modified rapeseed in Europe in 2000, while in 2006 a large part of the U.S. long-grain rice crop was contaminated by an experimental strain from Bayer CropScience , prompting import bans in Europe and Japan.

The company agreed in court in 2011 to pay $750 million to growers as compensation.

Monsanto should prepare to face the ire of the world. And it was already very unpopular. Just last weekend saw rallies held around the globe in opposition to the company’s genetically modified products and business practices.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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