Soul Integration and Re-Creation
Karma free perfected health
Updated December 24, 2008
"The Energy Centre" will report weekly on essential, shocking and unusual news that affects people on a global bases.
Good reads recommended by Sophia's Book Club
Our kids
- Out of 35 million Americans 12.4 million kids do not have enough food
- 25% of all kids 13-15 year olds in China work illegal
- Child prostitution 33% of all kids all over the globe are sold for sex
- 1.1 million kids in USA and 500 million globally are mistreated and abused
- 55% of all kids are malnourished globally
- 13% of all kids under 16 years of age are forced to marry
- 12-15 year old kids 33% globally get pregnant
- 40% of all kids globally do without any education
They need love, education and food plus clean water
Looming food crisis 4-30-08
By Laura MacInnis
GENEVA (Reuters) - Global food shortages and higher prices are more likely to cause malnutrition than outright famine, at least in the near-term, the coordinator of a new United Nations task force said on Wednesday.
John Holmes, who also serves as the U.N.'s top humanitarian aid official, said it was too early to estimate how much extra money will be needed to confront crises stemming from increasingly unaffordable food staples in poor countries.
"People, particularly those on the lowest incomes, will be eating less and less well," he told a news conference in Geneva, where much of the U.N.'s emergency aid operations are managed.
"I don't think that in the very short term we are talking about starvation and famine," Holmes said.
Protests, strikes and riots have erupted in developing countries around the world in the wake of dramatic rises in the prices of wheat, rice, corn, oils and other essential foods that have made it difficult for poor people to make ends meet.
"It is not possible as yet to put a figure on what the immediate humanitarian needs may be for the forthcoming year," Holmes said. "We need to put those funding needs together."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced on Tuesday that he was launching a task force to ensure a solid, coordinated international response to the food crisis.
Holmes said that group would likely include the heads of key agencies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Food Program, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization and International Fund for Agricultural Development.
VULNERABLE GROUPS
The task force will work to draft a strategy on both short- and long-term responses to food supply strains, which economists have linked to factors including high fuel and fertilizer costs, the use of crops for biofuels, and commodity market speculation.
Holmes called on donor governments to provide extra money in response to the crisis that has touched countries from Peru to Indonesia to Afghanistan to Senegal, and squeezed the World Food Program's efforts to feed millions of people.
Young children, who can face life-long health problems from malnourishment, as well as pregnant and nursing mothers, are among the most vulnerable groups in developing countries, where food crises also stand to trigger political unrest.
"The challenges here are likely to be of sufficient dimension that we will be asking for additional contributions," Holmes said, noting that the U.N.'s pot of rainy-day cash -- known as the Central Emergency Response Fund, or CERF -- had already disbursed money for various food-related crises.
"CERF is available for precisely these types of situations," he said. "Will CERF be big enough to respond to those needs? That is a question I cannot answer yet."
Ban has made climate change and food security two of his top priorities as U.N. chief, a post he has held since January 2006.
The South Korean national chastised countries on Tuesday for not taking more seriously warnings from the Food and Agriculture Organization and others about the likely pinch of food prices.
"We predicted even two to three years ago that this crisis would come. I am sorry that the international community had not listened more attentively," he told a public lecture in Geneva.
The looming food crisis
Land that was once used to grow food is increasingly being turned over to biofuels. This may help us to fight global warming - but it is driving up food prices throughout the world and making life increasingly hard in developing countries. Add in water shortages, natural disasters and an ever-rising population, and what you have is a recipe for disaster. John Vidal reports
John Vidal, August 29, 2007, The Guardian - The mile upon mile
of tall maize waving to the horizon around the small Nebraskan town of
Carleton looks perfect to farmers such as Mark Jagels. He and his
father farm 2,500 acres (10sq km), the price of maize - what the
Americans call corn - has never been higher, and the future has seldom
seemed rosier. Carleton (town motto: "The center of it all") is
booming, with $200m of Californian money put up for a new biofuel
factory and, after years in the doldrums, there is new full-time,
well-paid work for 50 people.
But there is a catch. The same fields that surround Jagels' house on the great plains may be bringing new money to rural America, but they are also helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana and Oklahoma, food aid for the poorest people in southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive.
Challenged by President George Bush to produce 35bn gallons of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce US dependency on imported oil, the Jagels family and thousands of farmers like them are patriotically turning the corn belt of America from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank. Only a year ago, their maize mostly went to cattle feed or was exported as food aid. Come harvest time in September, almost all will end up at the new plant at Carleton, where it will be fermented to make ethanol, a clear, colourless alcohol consumed, not by people, but by cars.
The era of "agrofuels" has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1bn gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use.
"Probably hasn't looked any better than it looks right now," Jerry Stahr, another Nebraskan farmer, told his local paper recently.
Jagels and Stahr are part of a global green rush, one of the greatest shifts that world agriculture has seen in decades. As the US, Europe, China, Japan and other countries commit themselves to using 10% or more alternative automobile fuels, farmers everywhere are rushing to grow maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oil seed rape, all of which can be turned into ethanol or other biofuels for automobiles. But that means getting out of other crops.
The scale of the change is boggling. The Indian government says it wants to plant 35m acres (140,000 sq km) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300m acres (1.2m sq km). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1bn acres (4m sq km) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16m acres (64,000 sq km) now to 65m acres (260,000 sq km) in 2025.
While this may be marginally better for carbon emissions and energy security, it is proving horrendous for food prices and anyone who stands in the way of a rampant new industry. A year or two ago, almost all the land where maize is now being grown to make ethanol in the US was being farmed for human or animal food. And because America exports most of the world's maize, its price has doubled in 10 months, and wheat has risen about 50%.
The effect on agriculture in the UK is price increases all round. "The world price [of maize] has doubled," says Mark Hill, food partner at the business advisory firm Deloitte. "In June, wheat prices across the US and Europe hit their highest levels in more than a decade. These price hikes are likely to trigger inflation in food prices, as processors are forced to pay increased costs for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat."
UK flour millers, for example, need 5.5m tonnes of wheat to produce the 12m loaves sold each day in the UK. The majority of this wheat is grown in the UK, and in the last year milling wheat prices moved from around £100 a tonne to £200 a tonne. Hovis raised the price of a standard loaf from 93p to 99p in February and has said more increases are on the way. In France, consumers have also been warned that their beloved baguette will become more expensive.
The era of cheap food is over, says Hill. World commodity prices of sugar, milk and cocoa have all surged, prompting the biggest increase in retail food prices in three decades in some countries. "Meat, too, will cost more because chicken and pigs are fed largely on grain," says Hill. "And while anyone growing grains will be better off, dairy and livestock producers may well struggle in this environment."
But the surge in demand for agrofuels such as ethanol is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The UN World Food Programme, which feeds about 90m people mostly with US maize, reckons that 850m people around the world are already undernourished. There will soon be more because the price of food aid has increased 20% in just a year. Meanwhile, Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, the price of the staple tortilla quadrupled in Mexico in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.
In the US, where nearly 40 million people are below the official poverty line, the Department of Agriculture recently predicted a 10% rise in the price of chicken. The prices of bread, beef, eggs and milk rose 7.5 % in July, the highest monthly rise in 25 years.
"The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue," says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, and author of the book Who Will Feed China?
It is not going to get any better, says Brown. The UN's World Food Organisation predicts that demand for biofuels will grow by 170% in the next three years. A separate report from the OECD, the club of the world's 30 richest countries, suggested food-price rises of between 20% and 50% over the next decade, and the head of Nestlé, the world's largest food processor, said prices would remain high as far as anyone could see ahead.
A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," says the US Department of Agriculture.
In seven of the past eight years the world has actually grown less grain than it consumed, says Brown. World stocks of grain - that is, the food held in reserve for times of emergency - are now sufficient for just over 50 days. According to experts, we are in "the post- food-surplus era".
The food crisis, Brown warns, is only just beginning. What worries him as much as the new competition between food and fuel is that the booming Chinese and Indian populations - the two largest nations in the world, with nearly 40% of the world's population between them - are giving up their traditional vegetable-rich diets to adopt typical "American" diets that contain more meat and dairy products. Meat demand in China has quadrupled in 30 years, and in India, milk and egg products are increasingly popular.
In itself, this is no problem, say Brown and others, except that it means an accelerated demand for water to grow more food. It takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and increased demand will require huge amounts of grain-growing land. Much of this, of course, will need to be irrigated. "Water tables are now falling in countries that contain over half the world's people," Brown points out. "While numerous analysts and policymakers are concerned about a future of water shortages, few have connected the dots to see that a future of water shortages means a future of food shortages."
New figures from the World Bank, he says, show that 15% of the world's present food supplies, on which 160 million people depend, are being grown with water drawn from rapidly depleting underground sources or from rivers that are drying up. In large areas of China and India, the water table has fallen catastrophically.
Scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed. Earlier this year, water specialists from hundreds of institutes around the world published the biggest ever assessment of water and food. Their conclusions were chilling. With the earth's water, land and human resources, it would be possible to produce enough food for the future, they said. "But it is probable that today's food production and environmental trends will lead to crises in many parts of the world," said David Molden, deputy director general of the International Water Management Institute.
Climate change, meanwhile, is leading to more intense rains, unpredictable storms, longer-lasting droughts, and interrupted seasons. In Britain, the recent floods will result in a shortage of vegetables such as potatoes and peas, and cereals such as wheat. This comes on top of a 4.9% rise in food prices in the year to May - well over consumer price inflation - and a 9.6% hike in vegetable prices.
Britain can get by, but elsewhere climate change is proving disastrous. "I met leaders from Madagascar reeling from seven cyclones in the first six months of the year," Josette Sheeran, new director of the World Food Programme, told colleagues in Rome recently. "I asked them when the season ends and was told that such questions are becoming more difficult to answer. Farmers know that predictable patterns in weather are becoming a thing of the past. How does the global food supply system deal with such changing risk?"
The answer is: with ever greater difficulty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020 as a result of climate change. "Anything even close to a 50% reduction in yields would obviously pose huge problems," said Sheeran. Within a week, Lesotho had declared a food emergency after the worst drought in 30 years and greatly reduced harvests in neighbouring South Africa pushed prices well beyond the reach of most of the population.
All this is far too gloomy, say other analysts and politicians. Earlier this year, Brazil's president, Luiz Lula, told the Guardian that there was no need for world food shortages, or any destruction of forests to grow more food at all. "Brazil has 320m hectares [3.2m sq km] of arable land, only a fifth of which is cultivated. Of this, less than 4% is used for ethanol production ... This is not a choice between food and energy."
Others say that the food price rises now being seen are temporary and will fall back within a year as the market responds. Technologists pin their faith on GM crops, or drought- resistant crops, or trust that biofuel producers will develop technologies that require less raw material or use non-edible parts of food. The immediate best bet is that countries such as Argentina, Poland, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will grow more food for export as US output declines.
Back on the great plains, meanwhile, ethanol fever is running high. This time last year, there were fewer than 100 ethanol plants in the whole United States, with a combined production capacity of 5bn gallons. There are now at least 50 more new plants being built and over 300 more are planned. If even half of them are finished, they will help to rewrite the politics of global food.
Misuse of billions of Climate dollars
By Ed Cropley
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades.
"The World Bank's foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon," Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital.
"Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank's attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts," he said.
Before they agree to any sort of restrictions on emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling global warming, poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts.
The money will be used for everything from flood barriers against rising sea levels to "clean" but costly power stations, an example of the "technology transfer" developing countries say they need to curb emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide.
As well as the obvious arguments about how much money will be needed -- some estimates run into the trillions of dollars by 2050 -- rich and poor countries are struggling even to agree on a bank manager.
At the week-long Bangkok conference, the World Bank pushed its proposals for a $5-10 billion Clean Technology Fund, a $500 million "adaptation" fund and possibly a third fund dealing with forestry.
However, developing countries want climate change cash to be administered through the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which they feel is much less under the control of the Group of 8 (G8) richest countries.
"Generally we have been unpleasantly surprised by the funds," said Ana Maria Kleymeyer, Argentina's lead negotiator at the meeting.
"This is a way for the World Bank and its donor members to get credit back home for putting money into climate change in a way that's not transparent, that doesn't involve developing countries and that ignores the UNFCC process," she said.
(Editing by Michael Battye and Alex Richardson)
Malaria outbreaks!
LONDON (Reuters) - Climate change could bring malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, British doctors said on Thursday.
With the exception of Lyme disease, insect-borne diseases are largely unknown in Britain. But global warming could change that in a few decades, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).
"Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall may increase the spread of infections like malaria that have previously been virtually non-existent in the UK," the organization's Head of Science and Ethics, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, said.
Hotter weather also poses a significant risk of an increase in skin cancers, sunburn and sunstroke.
The BMA said the state-run National Health Service needed to invest in prevention and treatment for serious health implications relating to climate change.
Around the world, scientists believe climate change could have potentially devastating consequences for human health.
A major study of the global risks by Tony McMichael of Australia's Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health concluded in January that climate change posed a more fundamental threat to health than the economy.
McMichael predicted that between 20 million and 70 million more people were likely to be living in malarial regions worldwide by 2080.
10 brand new planets in our solar system
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers using robotic cameras said on Wednesday they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had found the youngest planet yet.
The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
The robot team is called "SuperWASP," for Wide Area Search for Planets, and the cameras look for planets transiting, or crossing in front of, their stars. The light from the sun fades just slightly when this happens, and astronomers can extrapolate the size and location of the planet.
Most planets around other stars have been found using a different method, measuring the tiny tugs that a planet makes on its sun's gravitational field.
Don Pollaco of Queen's University in Belfast and colleagues used banks of cameras in Spain's Canary Islands, South Africa, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, France and Australia to discover the 10 new extrasolar planets.
The planets range in mass from half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One orbits its sun once a day and is so close that its daytime temperature could reach about 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,300 degrees Celsius).
Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and colleagues said they found a baby planet while using radio astronomy to examine a disk of gas and rocky particles around the star HL Tau.
This star is thought to be young, also -- 100,000 years old compared to our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun.
They found a clump that appears to contain rocky pebbles.
"We see a distinct orbiting ball of gas and dust, which is exactly how a very young protoplanet should look," Greaves said in a statement.
"In the future, we would expect this to condense out into a gas giant planet like a massive version of Jupiter. The protoplanet is about 14 times as massive as Jupiter and is about twice as far from HL Tau as Neptune is from our Sun."
Anita Richards of Britain's Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, said the finding "gives a unique view of how planets take shape."
"The new object, designated HL Tau b, is the youngest planetary object ever seen," she added.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Will Dunham and Sandra Maler)
How much, what and where!
(This list is a partial list not complete)
Mind control:
US 15%
UK 15%
Russia 10%
China 30%
Japan 15%
rest of Europe 7%
Africa 0%
India 0%
New Zealand 8%
Australia 3%
Genetic foods:
US 85%
Canada 6%
UK 70%
China 60%
Russia 20%
New Zealand 15%
Australia 0%
South America 25%
Africa 25%
India 10%
Japan 20%
Italy 3%
France 6%
Germany 15%
Sweden 15%
Nano-tachnology in foods
US 25%
China 35%
Australia 10%
New Zealand 0%
Russia 15%
South America 25%
India 25%
Japan 4%
Germany 5%
Sweden 0%
UK 35%
Italy 15%
France 15%
Cloned foods:
US 20%
UK 0%
Russia 4%
Canada 15%
China 20%
rest Europe 10%
South America 15%
Africa 0%
India 10%
Spying on private citizens:
US 17%
UK 11%
Africa 0%
Russia 25%
New Zealand 12%
Australia 0%
China 15%
Japan 20%
India 10%
South America 0%
General sickness mind, emotions, body:
US 58%
UK 48%
Africa 15%
India 20%
Russia 40%
New Zealand 24%
Australia 10%
Canada 40%
China 25%
Japan 15%
Malignant Cancer cases (reported and unreported)
US 30%
UK 30%
Japan 25%
China 29%
Russia 20%
South America 15%
Canada 10%
New Zealand 15%
Australia 25%
Sweden 6%
5 countries do Chem-trails on a regular bases weekly or more:
UK 25%
US 25%
China 30%
South America 15%
Canada 15%
Earth hour Austrailia turns off lights!
By Michael Perry
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Lights at Sydney's iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge were switched off on Saturday, along with lights in many high-rise office blocks and restaurants around Australia for Earth Hour 2008.
As many as 30 million people are tipped to switch off lights and televisions around the world to help fight climate change with around 370 towns and cities in more than 35 countries taking part in the event, organizers say.
Australians held candle-lit beach parties, played poker by candle light, floated candles down rivers and dined by candle light during Earth Hour.
One pub in southern Victoria state was offering free beer to anyone who came with a black balloon, to symbolize every individual's carbon footprint.
During the first Earth Hour in Sydney in 2007, more than 2 million businesses and households turned off their lights for one hour to raise awareness about climate change.
This year Earth Hour has gone global, with cities including Atlanta, San Francisco, Bangkok, Manila, Ottawa, Dublin, Vancouver, Montreal, Phoenix and Tel Aviv joining Sydney by switching off their lights.
Ionic buildings to be plunged into darkness include San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago's Sears Tower and Soldier Field Stadium football ground, as well as the 553-metre (1,815 ft) CN Tower in Toronto.
Earth Hour asks residents in participating cities to switch off lights and non-essential electrical items for one hour at 8 p.m. local time to rally public opinion about the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels that scientists blame for causing global warming.More than 3,500 businesses across the world have agreed to turn off their lights during Earth Hour 2008. McDonald's Australia has committed to turning off its Golden Arches nationally.
SEEING THE LIGHT
Suva in Fiji and Christchurch in New Zealand were the first two official participating cities to go dark in the Asia-Pacific.
In Christchurch, media reported about 2,000 people gathered in the city's Cathedral Square to show their support, with about 60 businesses taking part.
Energy distribution company Orion said power consumption in Christchurch dropped 12.8 percent during Earth Hour.
Earth Hour was about more than one night, said Andy Ridley, executive director for Earth Hour.
He said it was about inspiring people to make daily changes that will help achieve Earth Hour's ultimate goal of reducing emissions by 5 percent.
"What makes Earth Hour a unique event is that it brings together governments, business and householders who all play a part in switching off the lights," Ridley said in a statement.
During last year's Earth Hour in Sydney, essential lights were kept on for safety reasons, including street lights. Power provider Energy Australia said the event cut electricity consumption by 10.2 percent.Earth Hour organizers said they did not know how much energy would be saved globally from the 2008 lights off, but would calculate Australia's savings and announce it on Sunday.
In Bangkok, some of the city's business districts, shopping malls and billboards will go dark, although street lights would remain on. One major hotel is inviting guests to dine by candlelight and bookings were brisk, the hotel said.
Elsewhere in the region, NGOs said Japan was not on the Earth Hour list because they already had their own two-hour version of "lights-out" every June and December, during which the Tokyo Tower, some castles and other landmarks go dark.
March 28, 2008 NEWS updates
NEWS
ALASKA:
New Protections Eyed For Ice-Dependent Alaska Seals
BRAZIL:
Brazil, Venezuela Pledge Deeper Energy Integration
CHINA:
Lhasa Monks Accuse China Of Lying Over Unrest
CHINA:
Airport Project Threatens Rare Hong Kong Dolphins – Group Warns
INDIA:
Asia Must Reverse Massive Deforestation Trend : UN
INDIA:
Olympics A Chance To Tell China Of Rights: Dalai Lama
IRAQ:
Brave Woman Sprinter Leads Iraqi Olympics Charge
NETHERLANDS:
Greenpeace Protests Against Philips' Recycling Policy
RUSSIA:
Russia Tells Plant Polluting Lake Baikal To Clean Up
UK:
Ancient Skeletons Found On 2012 Site
UK:
Titanic's Shipyard Builds Record Tidal Generator
UK:
Irish State Utility To Halve Carbon Output By 2020
Shock and Awe: Watching the Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse 
You've likely heard the news by now that a chunk of ice the size of Connecticut dramatically and unexpectedly broke from Antarctica yesterday.
I don't want to spend too much time on the details of the news: there are many good news reports out there outlining the details of what occurred. But I do want to convey the horror I felt when I learned about this.
Between the Arctic Ice melt, the glacial retreat, and the beginnings of Antarctica's collapse, I'm not certain what additional evidence is required to see that climate change is occurring.
While the melts we see to date of Arctic and Antarctic ice don't change the sea level significantly, the looming threat of major ocean currents shifting and of the greater Antarctic Ice Shelf (the one on *land*) collapsing are out there. These proverbial canaries in the coal mine should serve to help us take the threats seriously and do something about it.
I'll leave you with a series of pics of the ice in question. Hopefully they'll inspire as much awe in you as they have in me.
Click pic to enlarge
Read more from this blogger at Brave New Leaf | Let us know what you think of this feature
The Expected Economic Impact of an Energy Downturn
I have been asked to give a short talk about the expected economic impact of an energy downturn. The talk is to be part of public health program called "Integrating Environmental Dilemmas: A Teach-in on Energy, Climate Change, Water, Agriculture and Population." I expect that the audience will be university students. The talk will be recorded, and will appear on the internet. This is a draft of the talk.
Good afternoon. My topic today is the expected economic impact of an energy downturn.
Let's talk a bit first about the energy downturn. As everyone is aware, the price of gasoline and diesel has been rising recently. The reason the price is rising is because the world's supply of oil cannot keep up with demand.
[break]
I have illustrated the situation we are facing in Figure 1. Demand for oil is rising, and is expected to continue to rise in the future, at least partly because of the growth of economies such as those in China and India. The supply of oil has leveled off. Many people believe that sometime in the next few years, supply may actually begin to fall. Even if the supply remains level, there will be a growing gap between demand and supply.
Earth Is Finite
What is happening is that the earth is finite, and we are starting to reach some of its limitations. At this point, most of the "easy to extract" oil has already been removed. There is still oil in the ground, but what remains is becoming more and more difficult to remove.
When we try to find alternatives, we encounter limitations of other types. In some situations, natural gas might be a substitute, but in North America it is also in relatively short supply. Coal is in better supply, but it has serious climate change issues.
Biofuels might be a substitute, but today's biofuels use huge amounts of agricultural land and fresh water, and both of these are in limited supply. Biofuels as they are currently produced compete with other uses for land and water, and because of this, drive up the price of food.
Even the minerals that we might use in batteries, and the uranium we might use in nuclear reactors, are becoming increasingly difficult to extract. We have already removed most of the high quality ores of many minerals. What is left is ores of lower concentration. These ores can still be extracted, but it takes more energy resources to process this ore. The energy resources used for processing the ore are often oil and natural gas, and they themselves are in increasingly short supply.
Immediate Economic Impacts
We are all aware that the price of oil is rising, and with it the price of things made from oil, including gasoline, diesel fuel, and asphalt. Since there is some possibility of changing from one fuel to another, the rising cost of oil also causes the price of other fuels, such as natural gas and coal, to rise. Electricity is made from coal and from natural gas, so its price also tends to rise.
Food prices are also rising. In part, this is because of the higher cost of oil used in growing crops and transporting them to market. Food prices are also rising because biofuels are utilizing food crops. The crops used for biofuels compete with other crops for land, fresh water, and fertilizer, driving up costs of production. Also, total production of food crops has not been able to keep up with demand, including biofuel use, and this further adds to price increases.
Impacts of Higher Food and Oil Prices
A major impact of higher food and oil prices is to squeeze out discretionary spending, such as eating out at restaurants and flying overseas on vacation. Some students may have to temporarily drop out of college, if their families can no longer afford to help with tuition. Families will cut back in many different ways to keep their budgets balanced.
Another impact of higher food and oil prices is more defaults on loans. We first heard about higher default rates on subprime mortgages. As prices of food and energy continue to rise, defaults can be expected to spread to other kinds of loans, such as credit card debt, auto loans, and student loans.
As families cut back on spending, financial difficulties can be expected to spread to businesses. Some types of businesses that are particularly vulnerable include restaurants, airlines, auto manufacturers, and home builders. Businesses with high levels of debt are especially vulnerable, since a drop in revenue is likely to make it difficult to make loan payments.
Financial institutions, such as banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and pension funds are also likely to be affected by rising default rates. When individuals or businesses take out loans, these loans are often held by one of the various types of financial institutions. If there are defaults, it adversely affects these institutions. Banks and hedge funds often borrow money themselves, so may they find themselves squeezed in the middle if default rates rise. Insurance companies and pension funds may find themselves unable to meet their obligations, if defaults become a serious problem.
Higher energy prices in the past have lead to recessions, including the very severe recession that took place in 1973 to 1975. It is likely that higher energy prices are one of the causes of the current recession.
Longer Term Impacts
The graph I showed earlier suggested that the gap between oil supply and demand is likely to get wider, as time goes on. If the shortfall in oil continues to get worse, and it is not possible to offset this shortfall in other ways, this recession may become permanent. The recession may get worse with time, turning into what we would think of as a long-term depression.
We are now reaching limits of many kinds. One way of representing the economy at various points in time is as disks of various sizes. Each year, society has various resources available to it, in terms of oil, natural gas, fresh water, soil productivity, many types of minerals, good climate, and people available to work with these resources. Based on the investments we have made over the years, society is able to produce a collection of goods and services using these resources. The amount of these goods and services has been growing. Let us look at this graphically.
In the recent past, the economy has been growing:
With a long-term recession, it may change to a no-growth economy:
More likely, the economy will decline as resources deplete:
(TOD readers: In the article The financial crash has a simple cause and a simple solution, Jerome a Paris discusses the fact that since 2002, the US median wage has stagnated. Thus, for a large share of the population, we have already reached the "no growth" scenario. This lack of growth in median wages is likely the reason that the financial services industry developed new forms of loans that made home-buying look more affordable than it really was. The lack of growth in median wage is also a likely reason that those same schemes are now falling apart. To the right is the graph Jerome showed.)
With a declining resource base, the median wage, adjusted for inflation, is likely to decline. This decline in median wage means that default rates on loans are likely to increase, and that discretionary spending will continue to decline.
Future Promises
It is not very obvious just looking at an array of discs, but a change from a growing economy, to a flat or declining economy, is really a major change. With a growing economy, future promises are relatively easy to fund:
The reason promises like interest payments and social security payments are relatively easy to fund in a growing economy is because these payments are generally not growing as fast as the economy as a whole. When promises such as these are made, the expectation is that the payments will be less of a burden in the future, because the economy will have grown. With this growth, there should be plenty of funds left over for other things.
With a flat or declining economy, funding for promises becomes almost impossibly difficult. Food and energy costs become a bigger share of the economy, over time, because of energy shortages. Future promises like interest, social security, and Medicare payments also become bigger, relative to the total. I have illustrated this in another graph. The combination of the two types of increases, that is the food and energy costs plus the cost of future promises, becomes a huge problem. There is not enough left over for "everything else".
Lenders Will Soon Catch on to Decline
If the economy is in long-term decline, it will not be very long before lenders start to catch on. Some creditors may actually figure out that the economy is not growing, and that it is not likely to grow in the future, because of energy shortages and other limits. Other lenders may only figure out that the default rate is very high, and, because of the way the economy is headed, it can only go higher. Regardless of their reasoning, many lenders are likely to come to the same conclusion, namely, that it no longer makes sense to offer loans.
For the United States, the balance of payments deficit is very much like debt. For years, the United States has been importing nearly twice as many goods as it exports. Once trading partners realize that the US economy is in long-term decline, they will realize that it will be almost impossible for the United States to make up for its export shortfall in the future. They are also likely to realize that buying US treasury bonds is not a good substitute for an even trade balance, since the Treasury bonds are likely to decline in value in the future, in terms of the goods they can buy. These issues could lead to a crisis in US imports of all kinds.
World Is Headed for a Credit Unwind
It seems likely that the world is now headed for a major unwind of credit. There has recently been a crisis in the financial markets. This crisis looks very much like the beginning of a major shift toward reduced credit availability. As energy supplies get tighter, economic conditions are likely to get even worse. People will be spending more for food and gasoline, so will be more likely to default on loan payments. If people are out of work, they are more likely to share living spaces. This will reduce demand for houses, and further depress prices.
I expect that the shift toward reduced credit availability will expand in the future. This may even be the "great unwind", in which debt and financial instruments of all types, including derivatives, become very much less common. The real question now is what form the unwind will take. How major will it be? Will it take place in steps, or will large sections of it occur all at once?
The impact of a credit unwind is very much like cutting up a person's credit cards. The person (or business or government) still owes as much debt as in the past, but the organization has no way of obtaining new credit. The debtor must now repay the loans out of current income, in addition to paying current expenses out of income. For many, this will not be possible. Bankruptcy seems likely for many, including a large number of businesses and some governments.
It is possible that a correction to the balance of payments situation, mentioned previously, could be part of the unwind. If this happens, imports of all kinds could drop by as much as half, very quickly.
Looking Ahead 20 or 30 Years
If we look ahead 20 or 30 years, it seems likely that the world will be very much poorer. Personal autos may be rare. Electricity may be unreliable. It is likely that we will have much less in the way of goods and services than we have today. A growing population may add to our problems. If the smaller supply of goods and services is divided among more people, living standards are likely to be much lower than they are today.
If the world is much poorer, I would expect social security and Medicare to be drastically scaled back or even eliminated. There will be so little goods and services in total that society cannot afford to set aside much for the disabled and elderly.
I expect that in 20 or 30 years, many business and governments will have failed. Bonds of these businesses and governments will have little value. Stocks of companies that remain in business will continue to have value, but this value may not be high compared to the cost of available goods. Inflation rates are likely to be high, reflecting the lack of goods and services for people to actually buy if they do have money.
Insurance companies and pension plans own stocks and bonds of other companies. When these other companies fail, the insurance companies and pension plans are likely to encounter financial difficulty as well. People who were counting on insurance companies and pension plans for benefits are likely to get nothing, or to receive benefits that are worth very little, because of hyperinflation. I expect most people will choose to continue to work as long as they are physically able to work, because of the poor retirement and pension benefits available.
My expectation is that over the next 20 or 30 years, globalization is likely to be scaled back. A decline in air travel will make it more difficult to manage international businesses. There will be less trust for other countries, because of all the defaults. Countries expecting to import goods are likely to need a corresponding amount of goods to export.
Nature of the Transition
The exact timing and shape of transition from our current economic system to the one that will be in place twenty or thirty years from now is not yet clear. Ideally, the transition will be a slow one, planned by governments. It seems at least equally likely that the transition will involve one or more crashes. Such a crash could be accompanied by bank failures or by hyperinflation.
Health Care Services
Since this talk is part of series of talks related to public health, I will close by making a few comments about changes I expect in the healthcare field.
I expect that over the next 20 or 30 years, health care services are likely to be drastically scaled back. In a poorer world, I expect that services of all kinds are likely to become less important relative to actual physical goods, and medical services will not be an exception. Fees paid to physicians are likely to be scaled back even more than health care services in general, because few will be able to afford the high fees physicians currently charge.
If there is a shortage of oil, transportation is likely to be an issue, for both healthcare employees and for patients. Smaller facilities, within walking distance of patients, may become more important.
Because we are running into limits in so many ways, I expect that electrical interruptions will become more common in the next 20 or 30 years. These may even become a problem early on, for a whole host of reasons, including lack of water for cooling, lack of fuel for power generation, and poor upkeep of the electrical grid. Healthcare providers would be wise to plan for the day when elevators and electronic records may not be available.
Conclusion
I am sorry all of these predictions are very downbeat. As the world reaches it limits, it is clear that the growth paradigm that we are used to will have to end. Decline is in fact quite likely. The economic world does not deal well with economic decline, so economic problems are likely to be among the more severe ones facing the nation and the world, in the years ahead.
Thank you.
Studies: Iraq costs US $12B per month
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
(3974 U.S. soldiers dead)
The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.
Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.
Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.
Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.
In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing "significant" future resources to the wars, "requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge."
These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.
No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.
In their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.
That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.
Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004's, the CBO reports.
The reasons are numerous: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to "reset," that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.
Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early — to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes — and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.
Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.
This factor figures most in the category of veterans' medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.
"The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything," Bilmes noted in an interview.
For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans' brain injuries, a costly category.
The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don't encompass many "hidden" items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost — on which CBO approximately agrees — and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.
Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.
Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.
When Stiglitz testified on Feb. 28 before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the ranking Republican, New Jersey's Rep. Jim Saxton, complained that such projections are too imprecise to help determine relative costs and benefits of the Iraq war.
Saxton said a rapid U.S. pullout could lead to full-scale civil war and Iranian domination of Iraq, "enormous costs" that he said should be weighed in any calculation.
Fight for Oil
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With oil above $100 a barrel and Arctic ice melting faster than ever, some of the world's most powerful countries -- including the United States and Russia -- are looking north to a possible energy bonanza.
This prospective scramble for buried Arctic mineral wealth made more accessible by freshly melted seas could bring on a completely different kind of cold war, a scholar and former Coast Guard officer says.
While a U.S. government official questioned the risk of polar conflict, Washington still would like to join a 25-year-old international treaty meant to figure out who owns the rights to the oceans, including the Arctic Ocean. So far, the Senate has not approved it.
Unlike the first Cold War, dominated by tensions between the two late-20th century superpowers, this century's model could pit countries that border the Arctic Ocean against each other to claim mineral rights. The Arctic powers include the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.
The irony is that the burning of fossil fuels is at least in part responsible for the Arctic melt -- due to climate change -- and the Arctic melt could pave the way for a 21st century rush to exploit even more fossil fuels.
The stakes are enormous, according to Scott Borgerson of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant commander.
The Arctic could hold as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits, Borgerson wrote in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
Russia has claimed 460,000 square miles (1.191 million sq
km) of Arctic waters, with an eye-catching effort that included
planting its flag on the ocean floor at the North Pole last
summer. Days later, Moscow sent strategic bomber flights over
the Arctic for the first time since the Cold War.
SCRAMBLING AND SLEEPWALKING
By contrast, he said of the U.S. position, "I don't think we're scrambling. We're sleepwalking ... I think the Russians are scrambling and I think the Norwegians and Canadians and Danes are keenly aware."
Borgerson said that now would be an appropriate time for the United States to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which codifies which countries have rights to what parts of the world's oceans.
The Bush administration agrees. So do many environmental groups, the U.S. military and energy companies looking to explore the Arctic, now that enough ice is seasonally gone to open up sea lanes as soon as the next decade.
"There's no ice cold war," said one U.S. government official familiar with the Arctic Ocean rights issue. However, the official noted that joining the Law of the Sea pact would give greater legal certainty to U.S. claims in the area.
That is becoming more crucial, as measurements of the U.S. continental shelf get more precise.
Coastal nations like those that border the Arctic have sovereign rights over natural resources of their continental shelves, generally recognized to reach 200 nautical miles out from their coasts.
But in February, researchers from the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released data suggesting that the continental shelf north of Alaska extends more than 100 nautical miles farther than previously presumed.A commission set up by the Law of the Sea lets countries expand their sea floor resource rights if they meet certain conditions and back them up with scientific data.
The treaty also governs navigation rights, suddenly more important as scientists last year reported the opening of the normally ice-choked waters of the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
"Of course we need to be at the table as ocean law develops," the U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's not like ocean law is going to stop developing if we're not in there. It's just going to develop without us."
(Editing by Philip Barbara)
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Feb 23, 2008 - 11:54:00 PM
Could Primordial Black Holes Deflect Asteriods on a Collision Course with Earth?
Written by Ian O'Neill
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are getting mischievous again. These artefacts from the Big Bang could be responsible for hiding inside planets or stars, they may even punch a neat, radioactive hole through the Earth. Now, they might start playing interplanetary billiards with asteroids in our solar system.
Knocking around lumps of rock may not sound very threatening when
compared with the small black holes' other accolades, but what if a
large asteroid was knocked off course and sent in our direction? This
could be one of the most catastrophic events yet to come from a PBH
passing through our cosmic neighborhood…
As a race, we are constantly worried about the threat of asteroids
hitting Earth. What if another large asteroid - like the one that
possibly killed the dinosaurs around 65 million BC or the one that blew
up over Tunguska in 1908 - were to come hurtling through space and
smash into the Earth? The damage caused by such an impact could
devastate whole nations, or plunge the world as we know it to the brink
of extinction.
But help is at hand. From the combined efforts by groups such as NASAs Near Earth Object Program and international initiatives, governments and institutions are beginning to take this threat seriously. Tracking threatening Near Earth Asteroids is a science in itself, and for now at least, we can relax. There are no massive lumps of rock coming our way (that we know of). The last scare was a comparatively small asteroid called "2008 CT1" which came within 135,000 km of the Earth (about a third of the distance to the Moon) on February 5th, but there are no others forecast for some time.
So, we now have NEO monitoring down to a fine art - we are able to track and calculate the trajectory of observed asteroids throughout the solar system to a very high degree of accuracy. But what would happen if an asteroid should suddenly change direction? This shouldn't happen right? Think again.
A researcher from the Astro Space Center of the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow has published works focusing on the possibility of asteroids veering off course. And the cause? Primordial black holes. There seems to be many publications out there at the moment musing what would happen should these black holes exist. If they do exist (and there is a high theoretical possibility that they do), there's likely to be lots of them. So Alexander Shatskiy has gotten to the task of working out the probability of a PBH passing through the solar systems asteroid belts, possibly kicking an asteroid or two across Earths orbit.
Shatskiy finds that PBHs of certain masses are able to significantly
change an asteroids orbit. There are estimates of just how big these
PBHs can be, the lower limit is set by black hole radiation parameters
(as theorized by Stephen Hawking), having little gravitational effect,
and the upper limit is estimated to be as massive as the Earth (with an
event horizon radius of an inch or so - golf ball size!). Naturally,
the gravitational influence by the latter will be massive, greatly
affecting any piece of rock as it passes by.
Should PBHs exist, the probability of finding one passing though the
solar system will actually be quite high. But what is the probability
of the PBH gravitationally scattering asteroids as it passes? If one
assumes a PBH with a mass corresponding to the upper mass estimate
(i.e. the mass of the Earth), the effect of local space would be huge.
As can be seen from an asteroid map (pictured),
there is a lot of rocky debris out there! So something with the mass of
the Earth barrelling through and scattering an asteroid belt could have
severe consequences for planets nearby.
Although this research seems pretty far-fetched, one of the calculations estimate the average periodicity of a large gravitationally disturbed asteroids falling to Earth should occur every 190 million years. According to geological studies, this estimate is approximately the same.
Shatskiy concludes that should small black holes cause deflection of asteroid orbits, perhaps our method of tracking asteroids may be outdated:
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Tonnes of fish, from carp to exotic tropical specimens, have washed up dead along 320 km of beach on Taiwan's outlying islands because of cold temperatures, a local official said on Friday.
About 45 tonnes of fish, some wild and some farmed, appeared on the tourism-dependent Penghu Island archipelago in the Taiwan Strait from February 14 following a cold snap, county environmental staffer Hsu Ching-fang said.
Local media said on Friday that 10 times that amount of dead fish was still in the water, adding it was the worst mass killing off Penghu in 30 years.
"Every beach in Penghu has been hit with fish in varying amounts," Hsu said. "This is something we haven't seen before."
Temperatures dipped below 9 degrees Celsius for three days in early February, unusually low for subtropical Penghu.
That weather came along with snow storms in nearby China.
Government agencies have allocated T$1.06 million ($34,000) for daily beach cleanups, Hsu said.
Tourists can still use the beaches, which are normally known for their windswept expanses of white sand and offshore coral.
(Reporting by Ralph Jennings; Editing by Ken Wills)
LONDON (Reuters) - Thousands of hopeful astronomers around the world tried to catch a glimpse of the year's only total lunar eclipse -- but those watching from Britain saw little more than cloud.
Watchers from the eastern United States saw it easily Wednesday night and had posted dozens of successful pictures on the Internet -- but by mid-morning none had been posted from Britain, where it should have been most visible between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. British time Thursday (10 p.m. and 11 p.m. EST Wednesday).
"It's been pretty grim," said John Mason, spokesman for the British Astronomical Association. "There were a couple of gaps in the cloud for a couple of seconds from where I was but nothing else."
During the eclipse, the Earth lined up directly between the Sun and Moon, covering the latter with the Earth's shadow. Depending on atmospheric conditions on Earth, the moon should have appeared blood red, rusty or grey.
The Royal Astronomical Society had promised a "spectacular sight", saying that unlike a solar eclipse it could be viewed without any special equipment.
But in the event, special equipment would have been unnecessary anyway. The next lunar eclipse will not be seen until December 2010.
"It's bad luck," said Royal Astronomical Society spokesman Robert Massey. "But it's always one of these things when you're watching from the UK."
By Jim Wolf - Analysis
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The shot that slammed into a crippled U.S. spy satellite Wednesday has raised fears of a new arms race in the heavens and increased tensions on Earth.
Thirteen months after China destroyed an aging satellite with a missile, the operation also added to concerns about disruption of space assets vital for 21st-century global commerce and security.
The craft was hit 247 kms (153 miles) over the Pacific, the Pentagon said, using arms designed for the ship-based leg of a multibillion-dollar shield against missiles that could be tipped with chemical, germ or nuclear warheads.
The Bush administration has insisted it was not trying to demonstrate anti-satellite capabilities of the Lockheed Martin Corp "Aegis" ballistic missile defense -- though experts said the effect was just that.
The administration said its goal was to protect populated areas from the spacecraft's unused supply of deadly hydrazine propellant -- an explanation many called unpersuasive.
The Pentagon said on Thursday it was very confident it had hit the fuel tank. The 5,000-pound (2,270 kg) satellite was struck by a Raytheon Co Standard Missile-3 fired from the USS Lake Erie northwest of Hawaii, the Pentagon said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, responding to Chinese criticism of the event, said in Honolulu the United States "certainly would be prepared to share" resultant data with Beijing -- "whatever appropriately we can."