| 01 June 2004 | Tuesday | 12 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Effects of climate change
Power without responsibility
Why Pakistan is not 'shining'
For a country such as Pakistan, dependent as it is on large amounts of imported fuel oil, changes in the oil market are of great consequence. The recent upward trend in the price of crude oil which crossed $41 a barrel a few days ago has enormous implications for Pakistan's economy.
What is happening to the global oil market? Are we seeing an upward secular trend which will keep pushing prices up? What are the implications for Pakistan for a continuing increase in oil prices?
Not too long ago, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the OPEC, was concerned with plummeting oil prices. The price of crude oil had dropped to $10 a barrel, a level at which these countries, including Saudi Arabia, were finding it difficult to meet their domestic capital requirements.
There was a glut in the oil markets and consumption was not increasing as rapidly as the supply was rising. The laws of supply and demand came into operation and the price continued to decline.
The question then asked was whether such a precipitous fall in oil prices would, over the long term, squeeze out marginal producers, thus making the countries in the OPEC once again dominant in the oil market.
A consensus had been reached, particularly in the United States, that for stability in the market, price of crude had to range between $25 and $30. Within this price range the non-OPEC producers could continue to operate without losing money while the consumers of oil could still buy the commodity without hurting their businesses. Today's price is way beyond that range.
The situation has changed dramatically in recent months for three reasons: First, there was a sharp increase in economic activity in the United States which led to an equally significant increase in its demand for oil.
Second, China became a major consumer of the commodity; according to some estimates as much as 40 per cent of the increase in world demand for oil is accounted for by the rising Chinese consumption.
Third, the market sentiment changed dramatically from the perception that the long-term supply of oil was much larger than its demand to the one according to which demand would outstrip supply by a wide margin. This perception brought the speculators into the market and they began to buy future stocks in anticipation that the price would continue to increase.
What is the real situation and how should a country like Pakistan protect itself from the severe cycles to which the oil market has been subjected? On the demand side, two contradictory trends are in place.
The first one has resulted in a steady decline in the content of oil for each additional percentage increase in global GDP. This means that as world output continues to increase, the demand for oil would not be increasing at the same rate.
The other trend is the increased demand in large economies in Asia - China and India in particular. The economies of these two Asian giants have been growing at very rapid rates and in both the demand for oil continues to increase at a rate higher than the increase in GDP.
In some other large Asian countries demand is also on the rise. For instance, Indonesia, a large producer of oil and a member of the OPEC became a net importer in February and March as its economy began to strengthen.
The reason for this is that additional output increases in these three countries as in all other parts of the developing world come from energy intensive activities rather than knowledge based activities that now account for the bulk of additional output in more advanced economies.
Exactly how these two conflicting trends will balance out is very hard to determine. This is why speculators have begun to play such an important role in determining the price of oil.
The world oil market revolves around decisions taken in three capitals: Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Washington in the United States and Beijing in China. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the world's largest producer of oil, pumping 8.5 million barrels a day.
It also has the world's largest oil reserves. The United States is the largest consumer of oil, while China has the largest share in the increase in global demand for the commodity. Let us see how these three countries are addressing the problem created by the latest upheaval in the oil markets.
On May 22, finance ministers from the group of eight industrialized countries demanded that OPEC states raise their production. They argued in the communiqui issued after their deliberations that "lower oil prices could be of benefit to the whole world economy."
The Saudi Arabians heard the message and, since they are the only country with much spare capacity, they announced that the kingdom would pump an additional 600,000 barrels a day, bringing its output to 9.1 million barrels daily. They also hinted that they were prepared to go further and would be ready to produce the current maximum of about 10.5 million barrels a day.
The Saudi government has told the International Energy Agency that they are willing to increase their maximum capacity to between 11.5 million and 12 million barrels a day. Although they will need additional investments to bring this about, they believe they can quickly mobilize the amounts required.
They would also like to maintain a buffer capacity of two million barrels a day. The Saudis are in a comfortable position since the current crisis has put them back in the driver seat in so far as the oil market is concerned.
In so far as the United States is concerned, experts agree that the administration of President George W. Bush contributed to the current crisis in several ways.
First, it failed to recognize that the demand for petrol in America was increasing very rapidly because of the number of petrol-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles that were now on the road, and in part also because of the ever-increasing distances the commuters were travelling between their places of residence and places of work.
The United States needed deep structural changes in the transport sector before the amount of per capita consumption of oil could be reduced to the levels in other developed countries.
Second, Washington allowed the value of the dollar to fall sharply in 2003. Since OPEC countries price oil in dollars, they wanted to compensate for the decline in the value of the American currency by increasing the price of their output.
Third, the US continued to increase strategic reserve by pumping 120,000 barrels a day into it. Washington wished to build a buffer of reserves in case a terrorist attack disrupted the supply of oil. The result of all these factors was a tightened oil market.
In so far as Beijing is concerned, it also played a role by allowing its economy to expand at a breathtaking rate of more than 10 per cent a year. China has now become the world's second biggest consumer of oil after the United States.
It plans to build as much new electricity-generating capacity in each of the next two years as the entire output of Britain today. This would add to the country's consumption of energy.
The number of vehicles on China's already crowded roads will increase six-fold to 120 million in the next decade and a half and that will put additional pressure on the price of oil.
While the Chinese are now engaged in reducing the rate of economic expansion, the US has done practically nothing to bring about an adjustment in its own demand.
Would there be a correction in the price of oil as more supplies from Saudi Arabia enter the market, or are we seeing a permanent increase in the price of this important commodity? An answer to this question was given by the market by the way it shrugged off the Saudi decision to pump more oil and the indication given by it that it was prepared to expand its capacity to produce.
The markets are now convinced that the long-term oil price will be on the rise. The price of crude declined on May 24, the day after the Saudi announcement, but hit a new record of more than $41 to a barrel the following day. According to Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela's energy minister, "the history of cheap oil may have ended."
If the price of oil continues to increase over the medium and long-term what would that imply for Pakistan's economy? Even with a large cushion of foreign exchange reserves available, the country cannot afford to pay an increasing amount for the import of oil.
There are three options available to it. First, to make a greater effort to increase supply of energy from domestic resources, Pakistan needs to do more to tap the reserves of natural gas that are available for exploitation.
It should also begin to use coal for producing electricity. And, most important of all, it must invest in hydroelectricity generation. The controversy surrounding the construction of a dam at Kalabagh must be settled and work on this important project must begin as soon as possible. Other sites suitable for producing hydropower should also be developed.
Second, Pakistan must move towards an economy that is more efficient in energy use. This can only be done by a significant restructuring of electricity tariffs. The current structure results in the industrial and commercial sectors subsidizing household consumption. The tariffs should be adjusted so that beyond a minimum amount of consumption, households will have to pay international prices for electricity use.
Third, the country needs to develop a transport sector that factors in energy consumption as an important aspect. Pakistan has allowed its railway system to deteriorate to the point where a significant proportion of long-haul goods traffic is done by trucks.
This is not efficient in terms of energy use. Also, the stock of trucks uses lower-powered inefficient engines. Not only do the trucks on the Pakistani roads use more fuel per ton-mile of goods moved, they also play havoc with the environment. The levels of pollution in some of the country's cities are now amongst the worst in the world.
The current oil shock has provided Islamabad's policymakers with an opportunity to move towards an energy-efficient economy. By failing to do so, Pakistan will end up sacrificing a significant amount of growth in its gross domestic product.
Effects of climate change
"Unless we stop now, we will really doom the lives of our descendants. If we just go on for another 40 or 50 years faffing around, they'll have no chance at all, it'll be back to the Stone Age. There'll be people around still. But civilization will go." - James Lovelock, The Independent, May 24.
When James Lovelock calls for a massive expansion in nuclear power generation to ward off the worst effects of climate change, as he did in a front-page article in The Independent recently, you have to pay attention.
The future may view him as the most important scientist of the 20th century, and he is revered by the Green movement, which hates nuclear energy. But now he writes: "Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilization... I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."
Love lock is an independent scientist who grew wealthy by inventing equipment to measure the presence of CFCs, the chemicals used in spray cans and refrigerators that were destroying the ozone layer before they were banned. But his real claim to fame, on a par with Darwin's and Galileo's, was his insight that the Earth is a living system.
He often regrets having named that system "Gaia" (after the Greek goddess of the Earth), because the Green movement and various New Agers started using it as a beautiful metaphor, and delayed its acceptance as a valid scientific observation for several decades.
But it is finally being accepted by the scientific community worldwide (with a name change to Earth System Science to placate the guardians of academic orthodoxy): last December the scientific journal Nature gave Lovelock two pages to summarize recent developments in the field.
Lovelock has always been worried about radical climate change, because the essence of the Gaia hypothesis is that the current composition of the Earth's air and seas - the global temperature regime, the salinity of the oceans, even the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere - has been shaped over the eons by the activity of living things. Our planet would be radically different, he argues, if living things did not actively maintain the status quo that is so hospitable to life.
The concept of Gaia is no more mystical than the notion that triple-canopy tropical jungles create a local micro-climate under their leafy ceiling. The emerging "earth system science" just studies the hugely more complex system of biological interactions and feed backs, involving millions of species, that has evolved over several billion years to optimize conditions on Earth for living things. But this system that can lurch into massive change if some major input (like the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) is changed.
Recent evidence, including last summer's unprecedented heat wave in Europe and new data on the speed that the Greenland ice-cap is melting, has persuaded Lovelock that global warming is now moving far faster than most studies anticipated, and will have calamitous effects on key support systems of human civilization like food production in decades rather than centuries.
He doesn't believe that current efforts to reduce the output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases through the Kyoto accord (which has still to be ratified, in any case) and the encouragement of power generation by wind, wave and solar power can possibly cut carbon emissions enough in time.
"I think we should think of ourselves as a bit like we were in 1938," he said. (He's 84, so he remembers.) "There was a war looming, and everybody knew it, but nobody really knew what the hell to do about it."
The Kyoto protocol, he said, is "the perfect analogy for the Munich agreement," because it would solve nothing: the cuts it mandates in greenhouse gases are tiny, while it lets politicians look like they are doing something." And the Greens' attachment to renewable energy is "well-intentioned, but misguided, like the left's attachment to disarmament in 1938."
So the man who was among the first to warn of climate change says that there should be a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces hardly any carbon, to deal with the inevitable growth of demand for power without toppling the world into climate change so abrupt and extreme that it would cause a massive human die-off. The problems of radioactive waste and the danger of nuclear accidents are minuscule by comparison, and there is no third alternative.
Only France and Japan among the developed countries get most of their electrical power from nuclear energy. No new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States or Britain for over 20 years: the "fear factor" linked to the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed the market dead.
But those were local disasters that caused limited local damage, not massive and irreversible changes for the worse in the whole planetary environment, and with better design and more attention to safety they might have been avoided.
Would we be on the brink of massive climate change now if the nuclear power industry had continued to replace fossil-fuel-burning plants at the rate we expected in the late 1950s and early 1960s? Almost certainly not. We'd have a much smaller problem, and more time to deal with it. James Lovelock has done us all a favour: this debate is long overdue.
Power without responsibility
In an ideal world, the United Nations Security Council would pass a resolution urging the United States to bring forward its elections and request John Kerry to withdraw so that George Bush could get re-elected for another four-year term. Let's get it over with.
One immediate benefit would be that George Bush could send for Ariel Sharon and kick some butt and tell him to stop butchering Palestinians and demolishing their homes. To stop treating Palestinians as if they were Jews in Nazi Germany.
Of course, it is a pipe dream and an absurd suggestion but can anyone come up with anything better? Surely not the UN resolution co-sponsored by the United States and Great Britain that would have a multinational force placed under the control of a US military commander and which would stay for long as "it was necessary."
Iraq is to be given full sovereignty. "Go forth and live your lives in dignity. We have set you free," is the message emanating from the White House and 10 Downing Street. There is, of course, the fine print. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Chairman Mao so astutely observed.
Tony Blair in his mode of absolute certainty (weapons of mass destruction!) says that the new and sovereign Iraqi government will have a veto power over the US-led multinational force.
Why not stipulate this in the UN resolution? Somehow, one cannot visualize someone like Donald Rumsfield taking orders from an Iraqi government as to the deployment of US troops.
There is no such thing as conditional sovereignty. What is being passed to the Iraqis on June 30 is responsibility but not real power. "Power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages," is how Rudyard Kipling had described it in a conversation with Lord Beaver brook.
Iraq's oil revenue fund would be handed to the interim government but there would be an international advisory board to monitor the management of the fund. Who would appoint this advisory board? Will the multinational force be subject to Iraqi law? The answer to this: "You must be joking." So what kind of sovereignty are we talking about? I haven't the foggiest idea.
More importantly, George Bush has said that the violence will intensify before June 30 and will continue after it for pockets of "bad guys" will still be on the loose because these "bad guys" consider "liberty" to be an anathema and are prepared to lay down their lives in their perverted cause. A new twist on Patrick Henry's words - "Give me slavery or give me death," - is the slogan that these "bad guys" are raising.
What will happen to the investigations into prisoner-abuse after June 30? Will some kind of statute of limitations apply? What happened at Abu Ghraib has brought apologies from all and sundry.
Major General Geoffrey D. Miller who was the commander at Guantanamo is now in charge at Abu Ghraib. He has claimed that all interrogations at Guantanamo were done "to the standards of American humane detention and interrogation that reflected America's values."
Should we assume from this that the interrogations at Abu Gharib deviated from America's values? Or that the sickening pictures we keep seeing of acts so bestial that they make one vomit were the work of a few? How many is few? We are told that 99 per cent of the coalition army is made up of men and women who are noble and honourable and valiant. That leaves one per cent. That's still more than the handful of sergeants and privates who are being held responsible.
Robert Fisk gives a whole new perspective to the prisoner abuse and it's a disclosure that has not been touched upon in any of the investigations that we have seen on television, and that is the Israeli connection. Robert Fisk is a highly respected journalist.
His credentials are impeccable. He writes in London's The Independent: "The actual interrogators accused of encouraging US troops to abuse Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail were working for at least one company with extensive military and commercial contacts with Israel.
The head of an American company whose personnel are implicated in the Iraqi tortures, it now turns out, attended an 'anti-terror' training camp in Israel." Surely those up the chain of command, all the way to Donald Rumsfeld must have known this. Or is he too busy fighting the war on terror to be bothered about such trivial details?
But we keep getting stumped by the rhetorical question: is Iraq not a better place without Saddam Hussein? If one says that it is, then ipso facto, one must approve of what is being done in Iraq. Tony Blair uses this argument whenever he is asked about weapons of mass destruction.
He has still not given up on them and he is waiting for the Iraq Survey Group. Ahmed Chalabi has run into turbulence and the CIA has stopped funding him and he is being accused of playing 'footsie' with the Iranians. Good old Shakespeare.
He was right on the button when he wrote of the tangled web we weave when we first set out to deceive. But there is a difference between strategic deception and tactical deception. What is the difference? It is not for lesser mortals to know. It comes in the category of classified information.
When a new Iraq dawns, the memory of Abu Ghraib will be erased. Just to make sure this notorious prison is being torn down. What will replace it? Why not a burial ground for the Iraqi dead, those men, women and children who got caught in the crossfire and lost not only their lives but their humanity? At present, they are simply called collateral damage, which is not very dignified.
Not all of them were " bad guys". But how were we supposed to know? They had no halos over their head. In a sense, they have already been liberated.
Why Pakistan is not 'shining'
"India Shining" was former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's re-election slogan. But an overwhelming majority of the neglected poor in India, who neither saw nor felt the "shine" he was talking about, took a historic decision to improve their lot. In defiance of all expectations and conventional wisdom, they showed their prime minister and his government the door.
This verdict of the Indian electorate must serve as a watershed for the godforsaken and suffering millions all over the world. It must also awaken the realization in all rulers that being in the good books of the White House and the World Bank alone is not in any way an assurance of their political survival, especially when the teeming masses of their country are living under inhuman conditions, and are deprived of even the most basic amenities.
The same sort of decision is desperately needed from the Pakistani electorate, that has been force-fed a steady diet of state propaganda since the October 1999 military take over about the ever-expanding reserves, amounting supposedly to over $13 billion, even though there appear to be no visible benefits.
What are the insurmountable barriers preventing the Pakistani voters from seizing the opportunity offered to them every two or three years to transform their destiny? Political pundits, as usual, blame feudal lords, political big shots and religious leaders for steering and stifling the aspirations of the people, thereby denying them any chance of bringing about meaningful change.
However, a close look at the poll results of the last five general elections will reveal that political big shots, feudal lords and religious leaders have themselves regularly lost elections even in their home constituencies at one time or another.
Pir Pagara lost twice from his home seat in Khairpur, which would have been unimaginable in days of yore. Apart from him, the late Nawab Sultan Ahmed Chandio of Larkana, the son of the biggest jagirdar of Sindh, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Begum Naseem Wali, Asfandyar Wali, Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, the relatives of Ghulam Mustafa Khar (who could not contest himself in 2002 owing to the education bar), Syed Fakhar Imam, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, Nawabzada Nasrullah, Air Martial (Retd.) Asghar Khan, Illahi Buksh Soomro, Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani and Qazi Akhtar, to mention but a few, lost their own home seats in the general elections between 1988 and 2002.
Let us not forget the 1970 general elections in which most of the political as well as feudal and religious big shots, particularly in Punjab, lost out to the socialist slogan of roti, kapra aur makan raised by the Pakistan Peoples Party. Does this show the dominance of or control by the political, feudal and religious elite?
The leadership that materializes through the ballot box can only be a reflection of the electorate itself. A Russian writer once wrote that the people get the kind of leaders they deserve.
The voters cannot escape responsibility for the shortcomings of the leaders they elect, particularly when, despite their failings, they are elected to office once again in subsequent polls.
Admittedly, the politicians are corrupt and have badly let the people down, and betrayed them time and again. So then, why do the people continue to vote for the same turncoats and opportunists? No one is forcing them to do so.
The above examples amply illustrate that the people are capable of rejecting the political, religious and feudal giants when they want to. But they do not seem to be able to make correct choices based on merit and principles on a consistent basis.
This is so because the voters have insatiable expectations of gratification through patronage. Unfortunately, these expectations have become ingrained in the people.
In most civilized democracies, people vote on issues and manifestoes and lend their support to the party or leader who, in their view, will turn in a good performance while at the helm of affairs in the country.
At the very least, they refrain from once again backing those who have blatantly abused their trust. But in this country, politics based on principles, issues and truth has been a casualty to opportunism, expediency and personal needs for a long time. In fact, this sort of politics takes precedence over national interests, honesty and decency - the hallmarks of a viable political system.
A democratic system is like a highly tuned, sophisticated machine with multiple parts, each assigned a specific, important function and responsibility but all working in unison.
Supreme among these is the accountability of corrupt, incompetent and insincere leaders and political parties at the polls by the electorate to keep them on the straight path. This is what was witnessed in the Indian elections some time ago. Without this, the system cannot operate.
For its part, the Pakistani electorate seems to have voluntarily and altogether too readily surrendered this constitutional right and responsibility at the altar of opportunism and expediency.
The voters are supposed to jettison bad blood from the body politic through a judicious application of their vote. But in the 2002 polls, it is unfortunate that the voters, in fact, injected more bad blood into the veins of this already emaciated system by electing the most disreputable and undesirable elements and giving them a free rein - as long as they remain in a position to share the spoils of power.
From this, one can only conclude that the Pakistani electorate does not want to see honest, sincere and competent leaders at the helm. The inability of the electorate to take over the function of accountability necessitates military takeovers and special accountability courts which are an anathema to the spirit of genuine democracy. At best, these can be regarded as ad hoc measures rather than durable long-term solutions.
Rigging has become part and parcel of our political dispensation. The phenomenon has permeated across the board at every level, so much so that it has become impossible to hold an election for even the lowest office in the land without some form of rigging taking place.
We in Pakistan excel at this dubious art and continuously come up with new and novel innovations to pervert the results of the polls to suit our own purposes. But if the people were politically active and remained alert then no amount of rigging could alter or pervert their verdict. If accountability through the ballot box fails then the offenders must be dealt with through other means.
In 1977, a few sporadic instances of rigging sparked the PNA (Pakistan National Alliance) movement and led to the eventual downfall of the PPP government. But since then, the people seem to have lost all perception of their own power and have tamely accepted the bogus results of subsequent elections in silence that betokens complacency and lack of interest, regardless of how distorted and rigged those results might be.
Election results in Pakistan have further been marred by voter apathy. Turnout figures have been steadily plummeting over the last five general elections in Pakistan.
Official figures claimed a turnout of almost 40 per cent in the 2002 election but the real figure was, in fact, closer to 25, compared to a turnout figure of nearly 55 per cent in the recent Indian elections.
It is felt that the general public stays away from polling stations out of disgust and disappointment at the letdowns and betrayals they have repeatedly suffered. But they must realize that they alone have the power to right the wrongs.
Walking away in disgust and surrendering this power will not cure the ailment. Positive action is needed on their part. That is what happened in India. The poor and the deprived felt betrayed by the Vajpayee government. But their response was to vote him out of office, not to sit at home and lament their misfortunes.
Voter apathy and inaction can only lead to a bigger mess. Medical treatment is sought by a sick man who chooses not to overlook his ailment and stay at home. Only when the disease has reached such an advanced stage that nothing further can be done to treat him does a state of hopelessness descend upon him.
We have not reached that stage yet. Much can be salvaged, provided the electorate shakes of it stupor and takes the future into its own hands. It must play its part rather than surrender the game by default.
The apathetic have no right to complain of whatever misfortune that might befall them as a consequence of their inaction. How much further must we fall and how much more hardship and humiliation must we bear before we open our eyes and realize that the future depends on us and that we need not be bound to the past?
In order to establish a stable, progressive democracy in Pakistan and ensure a better future for the coming generations, the people will have to step forward and produce a new crop of honest, capable and sincere leaders. The incumbent old guard politicians, already decaying under the burden of their glaring faults, can no longer withstand the force of the winds of change.
Change is a dynamic force. It has a life of its own and throws up its own leaders once the wheels go into motion. An infusion of clean, fresh blood is urgently needed here. Waiting for our present elected leaders to save us from ruin is an exercise in futility. We must recognize this truth before it is too late for us.