Tag Archives: world

Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

by EbonyBirdsong1 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are pro-business reforms good for economic growth? You’d think so, but the evidence is actually unclear. So Evan Soltas tried a different approach to the question: taking a look at countries that had big, sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index:

This is, I think, a reasonable way of doing things: Even if you are distrustful of the index, as am I, if the World Bank says that your country is in the top 5 percent of reformers in some year, there’s probably something to that. In my sample, it took at least a 10-point increase in the ease of starting a business to qualify as a “reform” year. That is like going from India to China.

A bit of Greek-letter math later, he has an equation that links per-capita GDP growth with the World Bank index:

What I find is that neither term has a significant coefficient. In fact, I can bound the effect of pro-business reforms quite precisely around zero, with a 95-percent confidence interval for the effect of a 10-point reform on the level of per-capita output of -1.4 percent to 3.5 percent. That is far away from the claim that such a reform could double per-capita output.

Now, this isn’t nothing. The reforms led to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percent. And especially in poor countries, there may be other compelling reasons to adopt pro-business reforms. But if Soltas is right, the economic benefits are modest.

Sadly, Soltas did not put this in colorful chart format, which he needs to do if he expects to meet the expectations of his fans. But the bottom line is simple: the United States is already one of top performers in business friendliness. Incremental improvements are all that’s left to us, and the impact of improvements plateau at high levels anyway. More than likely, pro-business reforms in the US would have little to no effect on economic growth. Here’s Soltas:

Maybe the lesson here is to beware the TED-talk version of development economics. Shortening the time it takes to incorporate a small business is not a substitute for deeper institutional reforms, such as those that support investment in human and physical capital, remove economic barriers that hold back women and ethnic or religious minorities, or improve transportation, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Easy pro-business reforms should not distract countries from pursuing changes that, while harder to make, we know to be richly rewarding in the long run.

Roger that.

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

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BinC Watch: It’s Sunday Morning, So Today It’s "Meet the Press"

by MackBlank40688 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, is upset with the way the press treats Donald Trump:

Most politicians will drop a talking point if it gets labeled with Four Pinocchios by The Fact Checker or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact….But the news media now faces the challenge of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Trump makes Four-Pinocchio statements over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false. He appears to care little about the facts; his staff does not even bother to respond to fact-checking inquiries.

But, astonishingly, television hosts rarely challenge Trump when he makes a claim that already has been found to be false.

This has been a problem during the primaries, but I’m pretty sure it’s set to change. Now that Trump is the presumptive nominee for a major party, with a real shot at becoming president, he just can’t get away with being the bullshitter-in-chief. The press is going to treat him a lot—

Hmm? What’s that? I should check out Meet the Press this morning? Sigh. What fresh hell awaits?

Trump has been retailing this particular tidbit of bullshit for months, and it’s not just untrue, but obviously untrue. Conservatives know it perfectly well, because they’re constantly talking about the high tax rates in Sweden and Germany and France and so forth, and trying to demonstrate that these high tax rates have strangled their economies. There’s really no disagreement about this.

But there’s good news! Since Trump has said this before, I already have the relevant chart at hand. No need to waste my time looking up the numbers and tossing them into Excel. So here it is. Not only are we not the highest, we’re the third lowest among rich economies:

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BinC Watch: It’s Sunday Morning, So Today It’s "Meet the Press"

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Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

by AlfredoCormier Posted on May 4, 2016

Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

By on May 4, 2016Share

Florida’s coral reefs are disintegrating much faster than expected. And who’s to blame? Oh, you know, just the ENTIRE OCEAN.

Ocean water is growing increasingly acidic as it absorbs the extra CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere, and now that water is eating away at the limestone foundations of coral reefs. A new study found that in the northern section of the Florida Keys’ reef — the third largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world — 6 million tons of limestone have disappeared over the past six years.

This wasn’t unexpected. It’s just that scientists had predicted the reef’s “tipping point,” where coral development is so severely limited by ocean acidification that reefs erode, was a good 40 years off — not today.

Ocean acidification is different from coral bleaching, another threat to reefs, though both have a common cause (climate change) and a common effect (dying corals). We’re looking to our most resilient corals to survive the challenges of living in today’s oceans.

We hope we never have to hold a farewell party for Florida’s coral reef, but ocean acidification is spurring along that unsavory outcome. Here’s to hoping we can usher this uninvited guest out of our coral reefs before it’s too late.

Watch our video on ocean acidification to learn more:

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This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

by KristinRayner Posted on May 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Subscribe to the podcast and learn more at revealnews.org.

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of fresh water 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told US officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret US report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle—which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s and Haagen-Dazs ice cream—is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meatcentric.

“Nestle reckons that the earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current US diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max”…

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. (Nestle) stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach…the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

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This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

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Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work

by Myrna Posted on May 2, 2016

Scientists are working on ways to recycle and reuse carbon dioxide, rather than storing it underground, to fight climate change. Visit site –  Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work ; ; ;

Original article – 

Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work

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Even the world’s largest food company knows the American diet is an environmental catastrophe

by MichellQka Posted on April 30, 2016

Even the world’s largest food company knows the American diet is an environmental catastrophe

By on Apr 30, 2016 7:00 amShare

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of freshwater 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told U.S. officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret U.S. report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken, and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians, and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle — which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s, and Haagen-Dazs ice cream — is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meatcentric.

“Nestle reckons that the earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2,500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current U.S. diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max” …

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. [Nestle] stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach … the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

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Why China (really) is losing its appetite for coal

by JulissaU46 Posted on April 27, 2016

Why China (really) is losing its appetite for coal

By on Apr 27, 2016Share

China announced this week it intends to halt construction of about 200 new coal plants, the likes of which would have accounted for 105 gigawatts of generating capacity. Avoiding 200 new coal plants may not sound like a huge step for climate change at first, but it accounts for more electricity capacity than all of Britain and makes a dent in the staggering number of coal-fired plants the world has planned.

The pressures leading to this decision are just as important as the news itself. China’s hunger for coal has been shrinking rapidly and coal-fired plants have been operating at an average of around 50 percent capacity, hinting at the wild inefficiencies in the country’s energy infrastructure. But this isn’t only a story of ruthless economic pragmatism or China’s hankering for international political capital — it’s also one of citizen accountability.

“Chinese people are saying, ‘We demand cleaner air,’” said Melanie Hart, China policy director at the Center for American Progress. Hart detailed recent moves to install real-time air-monitoring technology across the country. By comparing real-time air quality to national standards, people now have a stark picture of a government failing to follow through on its environmental promises. The Chinese Communist Party “are now allowing the citizens to have an unprecedented role in holding local officials to account over air pollution,” she told Grist.

Citizen pressure could lead China to make even bigger changes down the road. But with a country as big as China, change takes time.

And there is, as always, some fine print: China’s new guidelines provide exemptions for coal projects linked to peoples’ livelihoods, a vague phrase that could perhaps apply to personal coal-fired heating in homes. The country as a whole is going to still be using a lot of coal, but the new guidelines still show Chinese officials are serious about restricting its growth.

“One thing to understand about China is that it’s really like a giant cruise ship,” Hart said. “When the economic command in Beijing starts to turn the wheel and change direction, it takes a while for the entire ship to swing around.”

Swinging the ship around will indeed be slow and arduous — and will include hardships for coal and steel workers in the transition toward a service-based economy. China can do a lot to ease that transition with retraining and reemployment programs. And over time, when that ship is pointing the right way, the world will be a lot better off for all the coal it avoided burning.

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

by CalebB87yltepl Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I kinda sorta listened to Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech this morning. You know, the one we were all looking forward to because it was written by an actual speechwriter and would be delivered via teleprompter. That’s Trump being presidential, I guess.

So how did Trump do? That depends on your expectations. For a guy who never uses a teleprompter, not bad. By normal standards, though, he sounded about like a sixth grader reciting a speech from note cards. On content, it was the same deal. Compared with normal Trump, it wasn’t bad. By any real-world standard, it was ridiculous.

Fact-checking his speech is sort of pointless, basically a category error. Trump is a zeitgeisty kind of guy, and that’s the only real way to evaluate anything he says. In this case, the zeitgeist was “America First”—and everyone’s first question was, does he know? Does he know that this is a phrase made famous by isolationists prior to World War II? My own guess is that he didn’t know this the first time he used it, but he does now. Certainly his speechwriter does. But he doesn’t care. It fits his favorite themes well, and the only people who care about its history are a bunch of overeducated pedants. His base doesn’t know where it came from and couldn’t care less.

So: America First. And that’s about it. Trump will do only things that are in America’s interest. He will destroy ISIS, crush Iran, wipe out the trade deficit with China, eradicate North Korea’s bomb program, and give Russia five minutes to cut a deal with us or face the consequences. Aside from that, Trump’s main theme seemed to be contradicting himself at every turn. We will crush our enemies and protect our friends—but only if our friends display suitable gratitude for everything we do for them. We will rebuild our military and our enemies will fear us—but “war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” We will be unpredictable—but also consistent so everyone knows they can trust us. He won’t tell ISIS how or when he’s going to wipe them out—but it will be very soon and with overwhelming force. He will support our friends—but he doesn’t really think much of international agreements like NATO.

Then there was the big mystery: his out-of-the-blue enthusiasm for 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwar. Where did that come from? In any case, the Pentagon is obviously already working on all three of these things, so it’s not clear just what Trump has in mind. (Actually, it is clear: nothing. Somebody put these buzzwords in his speech and he read them. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what any of them mean.)

So what would Trump do about actual conflicts that are actually happening right now? Would he send troops to Ukraine? To Syria? To Libya? To Yemen? To Iraq? Naturally, he didn’t say. Gotta be unpredictable, after all.

But whatever else you take away, America will be strong under Donald Trump. We will be respected and feared. Our military will be ginormous. No one will laugh at us anymore. We will proudly defend the values of Western civilization. This all serves pretty much the same purpose in foreign policy that political correctness, Mexican walls, and Muslim bans serve in Trump’s domestic policy.

And there you have it. Did he really need a teleprompter for that?

Originally posted here – 

Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

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Gorillas in Danger of Extinction

by Myrna Posted on April 25, 2016

The population of the world’s largest primate, the Grauer’s gorilla, has plummeted 77 percent over the last 20 years, with fewer than 3,800 remaining. Continued here: Gorillas in Danger of Extinction ; ; ;

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Gorillas in Danger of Extinction

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Coral bleaching has swept 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef

by MinnieBCHogplu Posted on April 23, 2016

in hot water

Coral bleaching has swept 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef

By on Apr 23, 2016comments

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

We knew coral bleaching was a serious issue in the Great Barrier Reef, but the scope of just how widespread it was has been unclear — until now.

Extensive aerial surveys and dives have revealed that 93 percent of the world’s largest reef has been devastated by coral bleaching. The culprit has been record-warm water driven by El Niño and climate change that has cooked the life out of corals.

The unprecedented destruction brought leading reef scientist Terry Hughes, who runs the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, to tears.

“We’ve never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it’s like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once,” Hughes said in a press release.

The Center conducted aerial surveys and dives at 911 sites spanning the full 1,430-mile length of the reef. They show the hardest hit areas are in the northern part of the reefs, which have also endured some of the hottest water temperatures for prolonged periods.

More than 80 percent of reefs surveyed there showed signs of severe bleaching. The southern end of the reef fared better, but overall the bleaching represents a massive blow to biodiversity at the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Great Barrier Reef also faces pressure from ocean acidification and fishing impacts, ramping up concerns over how to protect one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet.

Beyond its beauty, the Great Barrier Reef also has a huge economic benefit on the Australian economy. It generates $4.45 billion in tourism revenue annually and supports nearly 70,000 jobs, according to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

The damage caused by this round of bleaching will be felt for decades, but it’s not the only reef around the globe to feel the heat of climate change. 2015 marked the third global coral bleaching event ever recorded. This one been the longest of the three as hot ocean temperatures fueled by El Niño and climate change have caused reefs to suffer across every ocean basin.

While every basin has been hit, some reefs and coral species have survived through the event. That has scientists trying to quickly understand why the survivors made it through. That knowledge could be crucial to ensure reefs continue to survive as oceans temperatures continue their inexorable rise and water becomes more acidic due to climate change.

“We can’t afford to sit by and watch climate change drive all the world’s coral reefs to extinctions by the end of the century,” Julia Baum, a reef researcher at the University of Victoria, said.

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