http://countercurrents.org/oneall260608.htm



Will The World Survive GM Cultures And The Damage To The Earth'sEco-Systems?

By Siv O'Neall

26 June, 2008

Axis Of Logic



Monsanto and the other major biotech companies – Syngenta, Bunge, Cargill, etc. – are all set on owning the world's food supply. Monsanto is by far the leader in this nightmare of destroying organic agriculture and millennia-old biodiversity.



They have no respect whatsoever for the lives and the livelihood of farmers or, for that matter, any concern for the people who are exposed to severe health hazards from eating genetically modified foods. Corporate profit is all that counts.



The greatest long-lasting danger from GMOs is the destruction of the earth's eco-systems – the degradation of the soil, the depletion of water resources and the proliferation of pests that were until now barely known, since they were kept under control by the natural balance of predatory insects keeping those that are harmful to the crops from having their potentially damaging effect. More later about this natural equilibrium.



The bio-tech industries have taken a big and dangerous step towards destroying the earth as it has been known for thousands of years. Organic agriculture, biodiversity and natural pest control have made the earth a place for sustainable farming for millennia. However, at this point of delicate balance for the earth's survival, bio-tech corporations want to put an end to everything that is natural in order to make short-term profit from huge monocultures of the genetically modified products that they are falsely marketing as our saviors from world hunger and poverty. [1]



India is one country that has been severely hit by the bio-tech industry with accompanying disasters.



What follows after the farmers change over to GMO seeds after millennia of planting and making a livelihood in organic farming is a horror story of bad harvests, huge debts, increased costs for herbicides and fertilizers (in spite of the companies' promises of lower costs), and the suicides of thousands of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala – among the Indian states that are hit the worst.



This has been going on for decades and if it were not for a lot of activism being focused on this problem, there is no chance that anything would change, since the corporations are tied in firmly with the governments in the heavy-handed corporatism that rules the world today. The farmers are lured into buying the GM seeds because of low-interest loans and obscene propaganda about giant harvests, less work and lower costs. Bio-tech PR claims there is no need for pesticides and less need for fertilizers, all of which has proved to be inaccurate. Added to this, these seeds are not adjusted to the eco-systems where they are being planted. They frequently need more water than is available and the results are disastrous.



One woman is in the forefront of the fight against the bio-tech industry. Her name is Vandana Shiva and she is based in Delhi. Dr. Vandana Shiva, a former particle physicist, has for the past three decades done more than anyone else as an activist to attract the attention of the world to the deadly corporate horror story of genetically modified products. She attacks the problem from all angles, educating and organizing protest demonstrations through her organization Navdanya.



Navdanya means “nine seeds”, and is a movement promoting diversity – fighting against the privatization of water, campaigning against Basmati biopiracy and generally leading a fight for the rights of rural farmers to a decent livelihood, uncompromised through biopiracy such as is taking place in India and all over the world. Biodiversity, the way farmers have been cultivating the land for millennia is her central argument and monocultures at the giant industrial farms are her principal enemy. She talks about food fascism and the bio-tech industry see her as their most prominent enemy in their vicious attempt of controlling the world's food supply.



Vandana Shiva says on her Navdanya website:



"When I found that dominant science and technology served the interests of [the] powerful, I left academics to found the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), a participatory, public interest research organisation.



"When I found global corporations wanted to patent seeds, crops or life forms, I started Navdanya to protect biodiversity, defend farmers' rights and promote organic farming.

"Navdanya/RFSTE's journey over the past two decades has taken us into creating markets for farmersand promoting tasty, healthy, high quality food for consumers. We have connected the seed to the kitchen, biodiversity to gastronomy. And now we have joined hands with Slow Food to celebrate the quality and cultural diversity of our food."



SIU [2] magazine writes about Vandana Shiva:



"In fact, listening to her may make you rethink many of the world’s established social and political paradigms.

"For example, the generally acknowledged argument that the Green Revolution, at the very least, led to an increase in food production is one of them. 'No, it did not increase production. Wheat and rice production increased, not the overall food production,' argues Shiva, and launches into a lecture that concludes that whatever increase there was had nothing whatsoever to do with the Green Revolution, and that overall it has been a disaster for agriculture and food security in India."



The Mealy Bug, the deadly gift from Monsanto



The latest horror news on GMOs is the Mealy Bug that has been said to be "the deadly gift from Monsanto to Vidarbha, set to destroy all crops and plants". Vidarbha is the eastern part of Maharashtra state, in western India. It is India's most developed and urbanized state. In a press note Kishor Tiwari, President of 'Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti' – a farmers advocacy group – writes that the Mealy Bug is a virus that is imported with the Bt Cotton sold by multinational corporation Monsanto. In the coming summer season it will have an effect on a larger area covering almost all crops and next year it will be set to destroy not only cotton crops but all other food crops as well. Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS) has urged the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to ban Monsanto Bt. Cotton seeds in the agrarian crisis that has hit West Vidarbha. This is of the most urgent importance in order to save more than 3 million distressed and debt-trapped Vidarbha cotton farmers.



The London based Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) posts the following from Ram Kalaspurkar, organic farmer, Vidarbha Organic Farmers Association, Yavatmal, Maharashtra, India :



"I am an organic farmer residing at Yavatmal in the state of Maharashtra. Our organisation, Vidarbha Organic Farmers Association, has been propagating organic farming since 1994. We have been helped a lot by Dr Vandana Shiva. She was the first person to tell us about terminators. Right now, we are working for her organisation Navdanya."



ISIS on their web site has published a letter from Ram Kalaspurkar who refers to a study where they have found that 'Organic Cotton Beats Bt Cotton in India'. They firmly recommend a return to organic cotton, saying that Bt cotton is a trap that has to be avoided. In the article published by ISIS there are photos of plants infested by mealy bugs.

All the infested plots had the Bollgard label, which is supposed to control pests. It is made clear that the mealy bugs have never been found in the region before BT cotton seeds were introduced. (The mealy bug had, however, been found in China two years earlier.)

After the death of the cotton plants, the bug goes over to nearby plants and it has already shifted to Congress weed and many other weeds and plants in fields close by.



The Monsanto website claims:



"Bollgard II technology offers cotton growers efficient, effective pest control with fewer pesticide applications than in conventional cotton crops."



This is just one example of what has proved to be the totally false propaganda pumped out from Monsanto.

Rhea Gala reports from Andhra Pradesh – from VIDARBHA JAN ANDOLAN SAMITI (the following quoted passages are excerpted from the same VJAS source)



"In the fertile regions of Andhra Pradesh ‘white gold’ monocultures of the high-yielding hybrids of ‘Green Revolution’ cotton had turned the state into the pesticide capital of the world even before the advent of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton. Now, however, the revolution is turning full circle as more and more farmers are opting for low input organic methods that are healthier and economically far more rewarding."



The message is now :



"Return to Organic Cotton and Avoid the Bt Cotton TrapNo more debt, pesticides and suicides for Indian cotton farmers who avoid Bt-cotton and regain livelihood, health, independence and peace of mind with organic methods."



Several Non-Governmental Organizations are working in many villages promoting non-pesticide management (NPM). The government has until now supported high-chemical-input cotton production at national and state level and this has sent the wrong messages to farmers. GM cotton is falsely promoted as the answer to reducing pesticide use, and it is one of many reasons why farmers are giving in to the pressure to grow GM cotton.



"Farmers initially saw the system of industrial production as timesaving and requiring far less knowledge of soils and pests; however it soon proved to be a relentless treadmill. It degraded the soil, depleted scarce water resources and proliferated cotton pests beyond the farmers’ worst nightmares, as both yield and profit progressively diminished."

Research backs up the case for NPM and organic cotton. A report entitled "Bt cotton vs. Non Pesticidal Management of cotton: Findings of a study by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture 2004-05 compares Bt and NPM cotton in Andhra Pradesh."



The findings are unequivocally in favor of organic cotton. There are vast numbers of beneficial insects that get killed off from GM Bt cotton. Those insects are predators that attack and kill off most of the harmful insects and pests.



"It reports conclusively that Bt cotton is more prone to pests and diseases and that beneficial insects are more prevalent on NPM cotton. It also reports that the cost of pest management of Bt cotton is 690 percent higher than in NPM farming systems and that seed cost of Bt cotton is 355 percent higher than conventional varieties (‘Organic cotton beats Bt Cotton in India’ SiS 27)".



Recreating the natural balance of predators and pests



"The skill of managing pests without recourse to synthetic pesticide requires knowledge of life cycle and behaviour, vigilance, an armoury of pest specific deterrents, and a healthy community of natural predators of pests. To control pests such as the spotted bollworm, American bollworm, tobacco caterpillar, pink bollworm, aphids, jassids, thrips, white fly and mites, each of which is capable of causing between 30 and 50 percent damage to a crop, natural predators are the most effective year after year."



Conclusion



Vandana Shiva [3] by no means limits her activism to Bt cotton. She sets as her goal to recreate natural biodiversity in rice and all the other crops that the bio-tech companies are trying to take over with their GM seeds and products. There exist 100,000 varieties of rice evolved by Indian farmers and the diversity and the 'perenniality' have to be kept alive if we want to save our environment. Genetically modified seeds will lead to increased use of agri-chemicals and will thus increase environmental problems as well as human health problems.



Vandana Shiva addresses principally the dangers of GM farming in India, but the danger to the environment and to the livelihood of millions of people is obviously world-wide. Biodiversity represents the sustenance and livelihood base of small farmers all over the world and a sane environment is naturally the key to the continuation of healthy lives for the billions of people in the world.



Footnotes:



[1] The problem is global, but strong resistance to GMO seeds and foods contaminated by GMOs is taking place in Europe. Corporate-friendly governments are trying to follow in the steps of U.S. pro-GM policies. The European Commission is ambivalent on the issue, but the people of Europe represented by numerous NGOs are leading the fight against this scourge of industrial GM farming in order to save the world from the dangers to people's health and from the destruction of the earth's eco-systems.

See report from ISIS – "Dr. Mae-Wan Ho warns that further indulgence in GMOs will severely damage our chances of surviving the food crisis and global warming; organic agriculture and localised food systems are the way forward"

[2] The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU) is a Norwegian agency that promotes international cooperation in education and research.

[3] For more information on Vandana Shiva and her activism, see 'Monocultures, Monopolies, Myths and the Masculinisation of Agriculture'



(Emphasis added - B.M.)

Indian Artists are live at Ashok Art Gallery's Show

ASHOK ART GALLERY

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Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou - Gbeti Madjro

Here a little "summer present" for all the people who have supported Analog Africa in recent years.
2008 has been a very exciting year and a humbling experience, thank you!!
This video was especially edited by Mario Stahn (from Rockstahn Media in Frankfurt) for Analog Africa using 45 minutes of video material found in various places in Africa. One of them I got in Niamey and shows Orchestre Poly-Rythmo performing Gbeti Madjro in front of "La Voix du Sahel", Niger´s state owned broadcaster.

Interrogating Martyn..

I've been trying to produce a meaningful blog entry for a couple of weeks now but for some reason I seem to do better at randomly rambling on to Dave Rinehart of Resident Advisor than at writing down my own thoughts, as you can see in this interview on their website. I'm looking forward to the Resident Advisor night during Sonar in Barcelona this weekend, with Conforce and Daniel Bell..

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Is Keith Olbermann turning into Bill O’Reilly?

Is it just me? Or is Keith Olbermann turning into Bill O’Reilly?

The bombastic commentary. The narcissism. And, of course, the misogyny.

I’d thought that once Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, it would be safe to start watching Countdown again. Without Keith’s daily anti-Hillary target practice, I might even be able to watch it without cringing.

Wrong!

There's more here.

Social Networking with Enemies

Have you ever wondered why you can only make "friends" in social networks? At best, you are able to neutrally "connect". Everything about people you don't like is politely ignored - they normally don't even get a message when you turn down their friendship request.

This thinking that the world only consists of nice people being friendly to each other is of course very childish. From the early philosophers over the founders of modern sociology to Karl von Clausewitz's writings on war, we have learned that society is as well structured by conflicts and less nice attitudes towards each other. So, if we really want to build a social graph that represents all relationships among all people*, we have to model enemies and antagonistic relations as well.

So, I was glad to read that humankind has made big progress. Based on XFN (XML Friends Network), we now have a list of specifications for XEN (XML Enemies Network):

XEN is an extension of XFN. Negative relationship terms have been omitted from XFN by design. (...) XEN values can be used in conjunction with microformats such as hCard, rel-nofollow and vote-links, specifically rev="vote-against". (...)

The interesting byproduct of asserting these relationships correlates to the ancient proverb, "Any enemy of my enemy is my friend". By merging the XEN lists, it should be possible to generate XFN relationships on the fly based on shared enemies.

This feature actually might be nice for political activism. You are looking for people who might want to protest with you against the much hated surveillance-enhancing interior affairs minister? No problem, just look for his enemies.

A few examples:

evil-twin: An evil twin is the concept in fiction of someone equal to a character in all respects, except for a radically inverted morality. Symmetric. If the evil twin is literally a twin brother or sister, it should be combined with the XFN value of sibling.

rival: Someone in the same field of study/activity with whom you are vying for recognition and/or advancement. Often symmetric.

nuisance: Someone who annoys you but not to the point of antagonism.

Of course, you sensed it:

XEN is not a microformat. It is a joke.

But like any good joke, XEN tells us a lot about the difficulties of modeling social relations. It even reflects the fact that there can be several different versions of yourself being represented online - think the drunk yourself at the proverbial facebook picture:

The evil twin value can be applied to a version of yourself from an alternate universe or timeline.

You can now - thanks to XEN - tell everybody, and especially your boss, that you hated what you did and even regret the fact that were at that party in the first place. And you can do it with microformats! Now, that is identity management at its current peak.

*The social graph is an idea I don't particularly like, but that is a different story.

Bush Needs To Be Impeached NOW!

By Timothy V. Gatto

11 June, 2008
Countercurrents.org

If there is one thing that Dennis Kucinich has, it’s the courage to tell the truth, even when the deck is stacked against him. In this case he has an entire Congress (or most of them) that seem to want go along to get along. It will be a cold day in hell when the Articles of Impeachment that he delivered in Congress last night, all 35 of them, ever get out of the Committee where they will sit on them until the new elections , mainly because the majority of Democrats in the House have no sense of justice and of course, no spine.

I was glued to C-Span last night. I was mesmerized by the litany of abuses that this sitting President has perpetrated on not only the people of America, but the World. Step by step, Kucinich meticulously brought every charge against George W. Bush and backed those charges up with times, dates and testimony from Administration insiders. This Congressman has done his homework; there was not a single thing I believe he missed. There were a few things that I didn’t even know this President was responsible for, and I follow him like a hawk.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich read each charge in the same way. He always invoked the phrase that Bush failed to live up to his oath and protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. He ten went to Article 2, section 3 that he must he must faithfully execute the laws of the land. Rep. Kucinich went on to make 35 charges against the President. He mentioned the flawed intelligence leading up to the Iraq War that The President had prior knowledge of and he used this flawed knowledge to deceive Congress. He talked of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which issued White Papers with fraudulent information that Iraq was manufacturing nuclear weapons.

Kucinich also brought up as an article of impeachment, the fact that Bush had known about the National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had stopped their nuclear weapons program in 2003, yet he continued to claim that they were close to manufacturing a nuclear weapon, even though they knew that this information had been discounted by US intelligence.

The Articles’ of Impeachment numbered 35. Each was more damning than the one before. He made the case that of this Administration’s systematic deception that was aimed directly at the American people so that this Administration could pursue what it thought appropriate, regardless of the laws of the United States.

You will be able to see the entire broadcast of Rep. Kucinich’s appearance very soon. I watched it live for over three hours. Everything from the President’s cover-up of Global Warming, to the NSA spying on American citizens was mentioned. The case to me was rock solid. There were so many abuses of power of the Bush Administration that even if the judiciary committee threw out half of the articles of impeachment, there would be more than enough evidence to remove Bush from office.

This MUST be done so that Bush cannot pardon the people in his administration. He must be removed from office to show the American people that we will never suffer another law-breaking tyrant in the Executive Branch. His Impeachment proceedings against Vice-President Cheney are still in the Judicial Committee. Why? When is Congress going to take their Constitutional Oversight responsibilities seriously? To this writer, it seems that we don’t have on dysfunctional branch of government, we have two. Congress needs to wake up and go to work. Even in this election cycle they still have an obligation to do their jobs that we pay them for. The things that I heard last night, again and again, made me quite disgusted with my government. This has got to stop, and today is as good a day as any.

We know that the Republicans will try to stop this impeachment proceeding. The question I have for the Republicans is how can they stop these proceedings in good conscience when they understand the number of laws that this President has broken? Is it good government to let “one of your own” willfully flaunt the laws of this nation and thumb his nose at the Constitution? That would be a travesty. It would not bode well for these Republicans in their election efforts now that the truth has been told. We need to get past this criminal administration and bring the rule of law back to this country. We are viewed by the World as a “Rogue State”, a country that willfully ignores the Geneva Conventions and The World Court. This American has been ashamed of his nation’s performance over the last seven years. I’m sure that many Americans other than this one are feeling the same way. At this particular point, your party affiliation should not enter the picture. What is wrong is wrong and that should be the standard, regardless of the office one holds. This is a country of law. When those laws are broken and circumvented, we lose the basic principles of whom and what we are. President Bush should be held to the same standard that we hold all Americans. To do less would impugn our reputation and make America a nation that let’s itself be dominated by lawbreakers.

timgatto@hotmail.com

www.liberalpro.blogspot.com

IdentityCamp: Lessons Learned in Bremen

The IdentityCamp in Bremen on the weekend was a blast: Focused discussions, energized participants, great weather, a relaxed atmosphere, and interesting interdisciplinary exchange. It seems to have been the first time that the Identity 2.0 crowd really discussed in an open and in-depth way with the privacy people, which was exactly what we hoped would happen. It’s impossible to summarize all the sessions, but here are some interesting observations that I took away from it:

"The buzzword of the day seemed to be OpenID." (Sid Arora). But at the same time, the OpenID community to me left the impression that they are a bit desperate. A number of big players have become OpenID providers, but nobody except for a few blogs and some platforms is consuming OpenIDs issued by other parties. So the session on "Killer Applications for OpenID" left me with the feeling that OpenID is still very much a solution looking for a problem. A way out may be using OpenID not only for authentication, but also for attribute exchange. There are some active attempts into this direction. Dennis Blöte is currently developing a system which uses OpenID for the different online services at Bremen University (e-learning, exams, administration, etc.). Here are his slides.

Convergence of Standards: Infocards and OpenID are moving closer to each other. The best known case for this is using CardSpaceInfoCards for authenticating towards the OpenID provider. But there is more going on, e.g. in creating mobility: The Higgins InfoCards selector stores Infocards online, so you don’t depend on your own machine all the time – which used to be a big plus for OpenID. Johannes Feulner showed the gateway OpenIDbyCard.com he built, which you can use for logging into an OpenID relying party directly with the CardSpace InfoCards interface. One of the problems in building this system was that the attribute semantics were not 100% equivalent to each other. Another approach, which Dick Hardt is working on, is to “tunnel” OpenID Tokens with Infocards. According to Johannes, the latter approach can not translate claims and does not work with self-issued cards, and the relying party needs an upgrade. In the gateway approach, you have to trust the gateway; in the tunnel approach, you have to trust the OpenID provider. Johannes also has a nice OpenID phishing demo online at IDTheft.fun.de.
Update: There is also convergence between CardSpaceInfoCards and Shibboleth, as Tobias Marquart reports.

We now know what "Identity 3.0" officially means. Caspar Bowden presented on the recently acquired U-Prove technology and how Microsoft plans to integrate it into the Identity Meta-System. Christian Scholz has a good summary. Caspar provided a typology of the generations of identity management:

1. Identity 1.0: centralized IdM like Passport. The problem was that one IdM is way too powerful.
2. Identity 2.0: SAML or OpenID like. The problems here are that all IdMs are too powerful, and you have the extra-problem of phishing.
3. Identity 3.0: smart client-side crypto. Using minimal disclosure tokens, you achieve multi-party security and privacy. By this, you get more independent of the identity provider, which is a good thing from a privacy perspective. The problems here are unresolved patent issues.

Data portability is a complex topic with a number of issues unresolved. Aside from competition issues and the big players not really pushing a standard here for obvious reasons, there is also no common vision on what exactly should be portable, and by whom. In general, the Data Portability Working Group seems not to be too active, especially not on the policy front. I learned at the camp that it depends on your normative perspective on identity. If you want your identity to be coherent and all the different facets open to all of the members of your social environment, you want full portability. This seems to be the case for those folks who are friends with their co-workers anyway. If you want your different roles not connected to each other and prefer a strict division between the private and the public life, you want less portability. At least you want to be able to control who gets to see what, and even when. The general focus is moving from single sign-on to data synchronization. Most people agreed that it would be nice to be able to update your contact data on all platforms you are a member of with one click. The more difficult issue is relationship data, which in the end is not identity management, but societal management. One more reason to get more social scientists in this discussion. But you also need a ton of lawyers, because if company X relies on the IDs provides by company Y, this creates a business relationship between them, too.

"The topic least understood by the participants (at large) seemed to me to be national identity (and their respective cards)." (Sid Arora). This is understandable, as OpenID, Cardspace, and other instances of Identity 2.0 are not really part of most developments around governmentally issued electronic ID cards. This camp was a nice opportunity for people who work on these different corners to meet and exchange views. This is especially important when discussions are starting about the possible use of OpenID in e-government contexts, which happened in Bremen. A lot of scepticism was raised towards this idea, though, mainly because of security issues and the too central role of the identity provider. Caspar Bowden got applause for his question:

"Why use the lowest standard (OpenID) for the most security-relevant use case (government authentication)?"

There was a huge interest in trust online. Which mechanisms generate trust in the offline world, and what is different in online environments? Tina Guenther’s presentation sparked such a lively discussion with her attempt to break down the research questions and get some first insights that she even offered a well-attended second session on Sunday for getting deeper into this.

You can reduce the need to trust with data minimization. A lot of the open questions discussed in the other sessions also boil down to "Who do you trust"? Your government? A corporation like Yahoo? The members of your social network? If the idea of a loosely coupled identity meta-system is that you do not need high trust among all parties, then I see two possible solutions:

1. Everyone becomes his or her own identity provider and does not have to worry about IdPs collecting their digital traces.
2. The amount of exchanged data is reduced in general, so you don’t have to trust all kinds of parties. This is where Identity 3.0 with minimal disclosure tokens and zero-knowledge proofs is very promising.

Semantics is the big challenge, not technology. Once Microsoft and IBM sort out the patent issues between U-Prove and Idemix, and the protocols and libraries are available for the public, the technology problems are more or less solved. Most of this (except for the minimal-disclosure crypto) is not rocket science anyway, but normal protocol plumbing. The problem is the translation of the complex social and legal issues around identity into these protocols. How to come up with a reference list of identity tokens for age, location, contacts and all kinds of other issues? How to organize the management of relationship data? Which contractual relationships are implicitly or explicitly involved that need to be sorted out? The idea of having Creative Commons-like licenses for your personal data, which then can be described in a lawyer-readable, a human-readable, and a machine-readable form met quite some interest. But this is mainly a usability issue. The different use cases you want for this are much more complex and diverse than the few standard types of re-using text or music.

This leads to the conclusion by many participants: An interdisciplinary perspective is really needed on the issue of identity. We came pretty close to the ideal, but some perspectives were still missing:

"There was a healthy mix of disciplines represented, including computer scientists and programmers, lawyers, sociologists, social media / web developers and even a few curious students from the Bremen University of Arts, where the event was hosted. A couple historians and policy makers mixed in would have been nice, but considering the method in which such an IdentityCamp was organised (or lack thereof), it was brilliant." (Sid Aora)

There is a great interest in follow-up. People are eager to have the next IdentityCamp and go into the issues more in depth and even develop a common vision. Check the IdentityCamp page regularly to see how we will stay in touch.

A big "thank you" goes to our sponsors: University of the Arts Bremen, big Bremen, Kuppinger Cole + Partner, artundweise, hmmh Multimediahaus, Mister Wong, Spreadshirt, and Pure Tea.

"Machine-Readable Government" from 1987 to 2008

At a brainstorming session about future research issues at our section today, I mentioned the term "machine-readable government", which met a lot of interest. I did some quick research on where the term came from. Interesting outcomes:

German hackers in the 1980s

Surprise: The term seems to come already from 1987. First time I could find it was mentioned in the media was in 1988, in an article in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel about the mailbox and hacker communities in Germany. The term "maschinenlesbare Regierung" was attributed to Chaos Computer Club co-founder Klaus Schleisiek, but it seems to have been a common concept for the first generation of German hackers, as the book about CCC founding father Wau Holland by Daniel Kulla tells us.

It is unclear to me if there was more detailed conceptual thinking about this, or if it was just an ironic catch-phrase.

More recently, the term was again used in the context of the German introduction of Freedom of Information Acts, see e.g. this 2003 CCC congress lecture by CCC co-founder Gerriet Hellwig.


Barack Obama / Lawrence Lessig in the U.S.

More recently, the term has been used for describing some ideas of the Barack Obama campaign in the United States. Obama has quite progressive plans for a more transparent government and the use of open standards for this, see his "technology and innovation" concept paper.

Obama does not say "machine-readable government", but the idea is roughly the same:

"Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities. Greater access to environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves."

Larry Lessig's interpretation and endorsement of this does not use the term "machine-readable government" either, but was interpreted as such by a number of bloggers. Lessig says about Obama's ideas:

"the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington."

This interpretation of course is strongly related to Lessig's current interest and work on a more transparent and less corrupt government. He also announced a first practical project last year in the field of legal texts and decisions:

"Legal Commons (beta): Taking inspiration from the liberator and manumitter of government documents and legal cases, Carl Malamud, Creative Commons will enter into a joint venture with public.resource.org to collect and make available machine readable copies of government documents and law. Carl and I have committed to freeing all federal case law by the end of 2008. Importantly, this effort will not set up competing systems to the emerging ecology of great free law services (Cornell's LII, or Columbia's Altlaw.org). We instead will help gather and make available the resources those services use to provide their amazing service. So look for a tarball of all federal cases by the end of 2008, in parsable and usable plain text."

What's next?

Of course, freeing government information on public spending, on environmental or health data, or on government and parliament decision-making (voting records, contacts with lobbyists etc.) is great, and making this available in machine-readable standardized form is even better. But as we have learned from Creative Commons: "machine-readable" does not automatically translate into "human-readable" or "citizen-readable".

I see two upcoming challenges in this field:

1. Developing tools that make this information digestible by normal citizens. It should be fairly easy for plain environmental data like "compare air pollution over time in all states and tell me if there is a relation to power plants nearby". But social and relational data, such as data on the policial process, is much harder to digest in standardized forms. A contact with a lobbyist can mean a whole range of things, for example. It will be tough to come up with the semantics for this in the first place.

2. Even if this should be possible, the interpretation of such complex datasets is not really easy. This is a challenge for activists and political groups that will want to build tools around this data, and others who will do mash-ups from those. I certainly see the danger of mistaking correlation for causality here, as well as other reasons for blaming the wrong person or factor. In general, I am not sure if this in the long term will lead to better quality of political debates and decisions. You can also imagine a future where the political opponents only throw statistics at each other, and where the discourse over values and social visions gets even more marginalized.

That said, of course I totally agree that more transparency of government is better than less. And if machines can help us aggregate and digest the information, we should really give it a try.

PS: If anybody knows more comprehensive literature around these ideas, please let me know!

Update: The broader term for this (which is also much more common in the english-speaking world) is "open government". This also includes citizen wikis on government and parliament people and activities as well as similar approaches, where the data is not necessarily in standardized - i.e. machine-readable and digestable - formats.

Some sources on this:

• Ethan Zuckerman: Towards the principles of open government data
• O'Reilly Radar on the Open Government Summit
• David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller and Edward W. Felten: Government Data and the Invisible Hand (pre-print)
  
• Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg: The Power of Information: An independent review
• Ellen Miller: Case Study. Why Transparency is a Good Thing
• Jerry Brito: Hack, Mash, & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency
• The Sunlight Foundation has a long list of available government data from the U.S., including links to APIs and XML-formatted data.

Thanks to Markus Beckedahl for the helpful hints and links.

Why are Oil Prices So High?

Why are oil prices so high? This is the question being asked with increasing frequency in many countries around the world. Some would have you believe that the blame should be placed on "greedy oil companies", "Arabs", "speculators" or "OPEC".

While speculation is happening with investors and hedge funds looking to commodities for returns that are not being seen in the stock or property markets, there are underlying fundamental reasons which mean prices are likely to stay high.

Last November the International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook report. Traditionally the agency has projected energy supply based on projected demand.

The agency has projected that India and China will lead the increase in energy demand making 45% of total growth. Oil imports for these two countries combined will grow to 19.1m barrels a day by 2030 compared to 5.4m barrels a day in 2006.

Demand for oil will grow to 116m barrels a day by 2030, an increase of 37% on 2006 oil usage. In this report back in November the International Energy Agency warned the price of a barrel of oil could rise to $159 by 2030 due to high growth in demand. This estimate now looks very conservative.

The reality is there have been some fundamental changes.

Before if the United States went into recession, this would lower demand for oil and prices fell. Now with China, India and other rapidly developing nations demanding ever increasing quantities of oil a recession in America is unlikely to lead to falling oil prices like it did in the past. Were per capita oil use in China and India to reach the same level as in the United States, this would fully deplete the world's remaining proven oil reserves in just 15 years and prospective resources, in 26 years.

The other fundamental change is that there is little excess production capacity. While Saudi Arabia would like the world to think it could increase production if it deemed it "beneficial" to the stability of the market, this is just an illusion of control. The reality of the OPEC cartel is that while sticking to production quotas may have benefited the group as a whole, individual countries have always "cheated" consistently and repeatedly exceeded their production quotas. In the past this has lead to significant downward pressure on prices.

This time the signs are that the world is at or near its maximum oil production capacity. Does this mean Peak Oil has arrived? In my opinion - not yet.

New production will continue to come online in the coming years which is likely to raise worldwide maximum oil production. So we haven't reached peak production... yet.

What we may be experiencing is what Robert Rapier calls Peak Oil Lite, with the early effects of Peak Oil arriving. Demand is rising faster than supply. In its July 2007 report the International Energy Agency predicts OPEC spare capacity will decline to minimal levels by 2012. The lack of spare capacity means, that price volatility increases with price spikes occurring in the event of supply disruption.

So what we are likely to experience prior to Peak Oil is Peak Export. According to Eugene Linden in BusinessWeek when it comes to oil our biggest concern should be the amount of "global oil available for export".

According to the Export Land Model developed by Jeffrey Brown - exports decline faster than production declines, the rate at which exports decline accelerates over time and only a small percentage of a producing country's production is exported following peak production.



According to a report in last week's Wall Street Journal, fresh information from the US Department of Energy shows the quantity of petroleum products shipped by the top exporting countries in 2007 fell 2.5% last, while prices increased 57%.

Net exports from major producers Mexico, Norway and Venezuela have fallen in every year since 2005.

With the rise in prices individual producing countries in OPEC had every incentive to "cheat" and yet exports fell. The influx of wealth into the Middle East has led to a boom in domestic demand. It seems that Middle Easterners aspire to the same gas guzzlers and energy rich lifestyles as Americans. Soaring profits from high-price crude have fuelled a boom in oil demand in Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East, leaving less oil for export. In 2007 the output of the region's six largest oil exporters - Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar - fell by 544,000 barrels a day. During the same period domestic demand increased by 318,000 barrels a day, leading to a decrease in net exports of 862,000 barrels a day.




A recent report from CIBC World Markets also indicates that as much as 40% of Saudi Arabia's expected production increases will be offset by rising internal demand by 2010, and Iranian exports will decline by more than 50% for similar reasons.

Indonesia recently withdrew from OPEC as it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, to a net importer of oil.

The Wall Street Journal report comments that the fall in oil exports "defies traditional market logic." Perhaps that should be blind faith that OPEC nations can turn on the taps if prices rise "too high". It seems even oil traders are unsure what is driving prices as according to one market analyst quoted by BBC News "we really don't know what the fundamentals are doing at any point in time." Much of the information on fundamental factors in the oil market is not public or freely available.

In simple terms demand is outstripping supply and prices are rising. This is how the market is supposed to work.

Other fossil fuel prices tend to follow oil. IEA's latest World Energy Outlook forecasts coal is set to rocket in demand, increasing by 73% from 2005 to 2030. This means coal's share in global energy demand will rise from 3% to 28%. It is predicted by 2015 America will go from being a net coal exporter to a net coal importer. Coal is the most carbon intensive way of generating electricity and this report predicts that rather than becoming a smaller part of the energy mix, coal is predicted to play a much bigger role.

With a presidential election this year in the United States and gas prices at record levels, oil and energy in general is set to be a key issue. There is the opportunity to have a serious debate about energy - a fundamental part of our lives which has been taken for granted for far too long. However the responses from the presidential candidates so far have not been encouraging.

In 2002 McCain declared that ethanol is a "giveaway to special interests in corn-growing states as the expense of the rest of the country." In 2003 he put out a press release saying "Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality." He went on to describe it as "highway robbery." Hillary Clinton signed a letter saying that there is "no sound public policy reason for mandating the use of ethanol".

McCain, Clinton and Obama all seem to have drunk the ethanol Kool Aid and seen the bright white light that has converted them to E85. In 2008 none of these presidential candidates seems to have anything negative to say about ethanol.

In 2006 Barack Obama along with four Republican and one Democrat senator introduced the Coal-To-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act.

There have also been accusations made against "Big Oil", "OPEC" (including by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and suggestions that a "gas tax holiday" or "windfall tax" would fix everything. It's always easier to find a scapegoat.

One bandaid being suggested from some quarters, is to open up drilling in the United States in areas which are currently off limit. This would give access to 19 billion barrels of oil enough to meet US needs for approximately two-and-a-half-years or world demand for just over 7 months at current rates of consumption.

To quote the head of the International Energy Agency:
"All countries must take vigorous, immediate and collective action to curb runaway energy demand.

The next ten years will be crucial for all countries... We need to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favor of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies."

Further Reading:
The Ethanol Scam in "Gusher of Lies"

You can read more on what the energy policies of McCain, Clinton and Obama should be in this Open Letter to the Next President.

Why are Oil Prices So High?

Why are oil prices so high? This is the question being asked with increasing frequency in many countries around the world. Some would have you believe that the blame should be placed on "greedy oil companies", "Arabs", "speculators" or "OPEC".

While speculation is happening with investors and hedge funds looking to commodities for returns that are not being seen in the stock or property markets, there are underlying fundamental reasons which mean prices are likely to stay high.

Last November the International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook report. Traditionally the agency has projected energy supply based on projected demand.

The agency has projected that India and China will lead the increase in energy demand making 45% of total growth. Oil imports for these two countries combined will grow to 19.1m barrels a day by 2030 compared to 5.4m barrels a day in 2006.

Demand for oil will grow to 116m barrels a day by 2030, an increase of 37% on 2006 oil usage. In this report back in November the International Energy Agency warned the price of a barrel of oil could rise to $159 by 2030 due to high growth in demand. This estimate now looks very conservative.

The reality is there have been some fundamental changes.

Before if the United States went into recession, this would lower demand for oil and prices fell. Now with China, India and other rapidly developing nations demanding ever increasing quantities of oil a recession in America is unlikely to lead to falling oil prices like it did in the past. Were per capita oil use in China and India to reach the same level as in the United States, this would fully deplete the world's remaining proven oil reserves in just 15 years and prospective resources, in 26 years.

The other fundamental change is that there is little excess production capacity. While Saudi Arabia would like the world to think it could increase production if it deemed it "beneficial" to the stability of the market, this is just an illusion of control. The reality of the OPEC cartel is that while sticking to production quotas may have benefited the group as a whole, individual countries have always "cheated" consistently and repeatedly exceeded their production quotas. In the past this has lead to significant downward pressure on prices.

This time the signs are that the world is at or near its maximum oil production capacity. Does this mean Peak Oil has arrived? In my opinion - not yet.

New production will continue to come online in the coming years which is likely to raise worldwide maximum oil production. So we haven't reached peak production... yet.

What we may be experiencing is what Robert Rapier calls Peak Oil Lite, with the early effects of Peak Oil arriving. Demand is rising faster than supply. In its July 2007 report the International Energy Agency predicts OPEC spare capacity will decline to minimal levels by 2012. The lack of spare capacity means, that price volatility increases with price spikes occurring in the event of supply disruption.

So what we are likely to experience prior to Peak Oil is Peak Export. According to Eugene Linden in BusinessWeek when it comes to oil our biggest concern should be the amount of "global oil available for export".

According to the Export Land Model developed by Jeffrey Brown - exports decline faster than production declines, the rate at which exports decline accelerates over time and only a small percentage of a producing country's production is exported following peak production.



According to a report in last week's Wall Street Journal, fresh information from the US Department of Energy shows the quantity of petroleum products shipped by the top exporting countries in 2007 fell 2.5% last, while prices increased 57%.

Net exports from major producers Mexico, Norway and Venezuela have fallen in every year since 2005.

With the rise in prices individual producing countries in OPEC had every incentive to "cheat" and yet exports fell. The influx of wealth into the Middle East has led to a boom in domestic demand. It seems that Middle Easterners aspire to the same gas guzzlers and energy rich lifestyles as Americans. Soaring profits from high-price crude have fuelled a boom in oil demand in Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East, leaving less oil for export. In 2007 the output of the region's six largest oil exporters - Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar - fell by 544,000 barrels a day. During the same period domestic demand increased by 318,000 barrels a day, leading to a decrease in net exports of 862,000 barrels a day.




A recent report from CIBC World Markets also indicates that as much as 40% of Saudi Arabia's expected production increases will be offset by rising internal demand by 2010, and Iranian exports will decline by more than 50% for similar reasons.

Indonesia recently withdrew from OPEC as it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, to a net importer of oil.

The Wall Street Journal report comments that the fall in oil exports "defies traditional market logic." Perhaps that should be blind faith that OPEC nations can turn on the taps if prices rise "too high". It seems even oil traders are unsure what is driving prices as according to one market analyst quoted by BBC News "we really don't know what the fundamentals are doing at any point in time." Much of the information on fundamental factors in the oil market is not public or freely available.

In simple terms demand is outstripping supply and prices are rising. This is how the market is supposed to work.

Other fossil fuel prices tend to follow oil. IEA's latest World Energy Outlook forecasts coal is set to rocket in demand, increasing by 73% from 2005 to 2030. This means coal's share in global energy demand will rise from 3% to 28%. It is predicted by 2015 America will go from being a net coal exporter to a net coal importer. Coal is the most carbon intensive way of generating electricity and this report predicts that rather than becoming a smaller part of the energy mix, coal is predicted to play a much bigger role.

With a presidential election this year in the United States and gas prices at record levels, oil and energy in general is set to be a key issue. There is the opportunity to have a serious debate about energy - a fundamental part of our lives which has been taken for granted for far too long. However the responses from the presidential candidates so far have not been encouraging.

In 2002 McCain declared that ethanol is a "giveaway to special interests in corn-growing states as the expense of the rest of the country." In 2003 he put out a press release saying "Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality." He went on to describe it as "highway robbery." Hillary Clinton signed a letter saying that there is "no sound public policy reason for mandating the use of ethanol".

McCain, Clinton and Obama all seem to have drunk the ethanol Kool Aid and seen the bright white light that has converted them to E85. In 2008 none of these presidential candidates seems to have anything negative to say about ethanol.

In 2006 Barack Obama along with four Republican and one Democrat senator introduced the Coal-To-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act.

There have also been accusations made against "Big Oil", "OPEC" (including by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and suggestions that a "gas tax holiday" or "windfall tax" would fix everything. It's always easier to find a scapegoat.

One bandaid being suggested from some quarters, is to open up drilling in the United States in areas which are currently off limit. This would give access to 19 billion barrels of oil enough to meet US needs for approximately two-and-a-half-years or world demand for just over 7 months at current rates of consumption.

To quote the head of the International Energy Agency:
"All countries must take vigorous, immediate and collective action to curb runaway energy demand.

The next ten years will be crucial for all countries... We need to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favor of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies."

Further Reading:
The Ethanol Scam in "Gusher of Lies"

You can read more on what the energy policies of McCain, Clinton and Obama should be in this Open Letter to the Next President.