Articles by Andy Brett

Friedman drives home the geo-green point.

Last Thursday, Tom Friedman again returned to his geo-green pulpit. Citing the Set America Free coalition, Friedman asserts that the solutions to our foreign oil addiction (and 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline) are "already here."

Sounding remarkably similar to a Max Boot column in the LA Times (mentioned here on Gristmill in March), Friedman advocates the two-pronged approach of electric plug-in vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles. These powers combined result in 500 mpg.

My reaction: Flex-fuel? Great. Shifting our massive fleet of cars and trucks to run off of electricity? Maybe not so great. After all, don't we get over 50% of our electricity from carbon-intense coal?

My resulting back of the envelope calculations are below the fold.

The last doubling of the world’s population has already happened.

As the world's population moves to cities (at the rate of a million new denizens a week), the shift is having some interesting effects on the world's population totals. Stewart Brand noted that cities are population "sinks." People move into town and the birth rate goes down to the replacement level and keeps on dropping.

This has some interesting implications. Depending on who you ask, world population is going to go up to at least 9 billion people. It's after it hits that level, though, that things get interesting. Brand mentioned the possibility that if the birth rate goes just under the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman to 1.85, by the year 2300 the world population is somewhere between two and three billion. I'm assuming that he is citing this PDF from the UN. Even though 2300 is a long way off, check out page 3 of that report; by 2200 it's already down to 3.2 billion.

Talk about a jump in per capita GDP ...

Reform at the World Bank.

When Paul Wolfowitz was nominated and confirmed to be the next head of the World Bank, many people were more than a little upset. His neo-conservative label preceded him. However, Wolfowitz and the World Bank have done admirable things both times that they've been in the news since then.

There's this move to help the world's largest emerging energy market grow up as a renewable one.

Wolfowitz has also called for cuts in agricultural subsidies in developed countries because of their adverse effects on poorer countries that cannot compete against the treasury of the world's largest economy. The effects on African nations are particularly devastating, and Wolfowitz appears to be making that continent a priority for his tenure.

The current melee going on over at the world's second largest (collective) economy is largely over agricultural subsidies. Farm spending makes up nearly half of the EU's budget, nearly 49 billion Euros a year.

Maybe he's pulling the (sheep's) wool over our eyes, but just looking at what he's done since his appointment, this guy doesn't sound half bad.

Robert Neuwirth gets down and dirty

While the housing market here gets ever more media attention, over one billion people -- a sixth of the world's population -- live in "squatter cities," where deeds and titles to land are non-existent.

A closer look at the media, however, reveals this column today on that very subject. Carol Lloyd reviews "Shadow Cities," by Robert Neuwirth, a fascinating first-hand account of four of these squatter cities (I would be remiss if I did not note the coverage it got over at WorldChanging as well).

Among other things, Neuwirth:

• notes that in some places, "squatter infrastructure" rivals the official infrastructure;
• highlights the fact that these cities have simply developed on their own, free of government control until attempts are made to shut them down; and
• contrasts the notion of property in squatter cities with American notions (Carol Lloyd expounds on this in her article).

(And there's no way to do his work justice with three bullet points, so I apologize for that.)

The lessons here for cities in the developed world are many; I'm still trying to get a handle on them myself. Neuwirth is "perhaps the first journalist to travel the globe living in the most deprived and violent shantytowns." I'd love to be the second.

In addition to the book, Neuwirth also has a blog on squatter cities. Lloyd's article, Neuwirth's blog and lecture, and the coverage at WorldChanging all provide excellent further reading.