Love Is Real Medicine
Love Is Real Medicine
Loneliness fosters cardiovascular disease. Fortunately, there's an antidote.
By Dean Ornish, M.D., Newsweek, October 3, 2005
People who survive a heart attack often describe it as a wake-up call. But for a 61-year-old executive I met recently, it was more than that. This man was in the midst of a divorce when he was stricken last spring, and he had fallen out of touch with friends and family members. The executive's doctor, unaware of the strife in his life, counseled him to change his diet, start exercising and quit smoking. He also prescribed drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. It was sound advice, but in combing the medical literature, the patient discovered that he needed to do more. Studies suggested that his risk of dying within six months would be four times greater if he remained depressed and lonely. So he joined a support group and reordered his priorities, placing relationships at the top of the list instead of the bottom. His health has improved steadily since then, and so has his outlook on life. In fact he now describes his heart attack as the best thing that ever happened to him. "Yes, my arteries are more open," he says. "But even more important, I'm more open."
Medicine today focuses primarily on drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules. Yet love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well. If a new medication had the same impact, failure to prescribe it would be malpractice. Connections with other people affect not only the quality of our lives but also our survival. Study after study find that people who feel lonely are many times more likely to get cardiovascular disease than those who have a strong sense of connection and community. I'm not aware of any other factor in medicine—not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery—that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death.
In part, this is because people who are lonely are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors. Getting through the day becomes more important than living a long life when you have no one else to live for. As one patient told me, "I've got 20 friends in this pack of cigarettes. They're always there for me. You want to take away my 20 friends? What are you going to give me instead?" Other patients take refuge in food, alcohol or drugs: "When I feel lonely, I eat a lot of fat—it coats my nerves and numbs the pain." But loneliness is not just a barrier to fitness. Even when you eat right, exercise and avoid smoking, it increases your risk of early death.
Fortunately, love protects your heart in ways that we don't completely understand. In one study at Yale, men and women who felt the most loved and supported had substantially less blockage in their coronary arteries. Similarly, researchers from Case Western Reserve University studied almost 10,000 married men and found that those who answered "yes" to this simple question—"Does your wife show you her love?"—had significantly less angina (chest pain). And when researchers at Duke surveyed men and women with heart disease, those who were single and lacked confidants were three times as likely to have died after five years. In all three studies, the protective effects of love were independent of other risk factors.
Awareness is the first step in healing. When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival. We are hard-wired to help each other. Science is documenting the healing values of love, intimacy, community, compassion, forgiveness, altruism and service—values that are part of almost all spiritual traditions as well as many secular ones. Seen in this context, being unselfish may be the most self-serving approach to life, for it helps free both the giver and recipient from suffering, disease and premature death. Rediscovering the wisdom of love and compassion may help us survive at a time when an increasingly balkanized world so badly needs it.
Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. His books include "Love and Survival" and "Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease." For more information, go to pmri.org or ornish.com.
Read the article at the original source
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
A Saner Health System for America
A Saner Health System for America
Frog-Marching America to a Saner Health System
'If you have a grenade with the pin pulled out, it’s hard to ignore.'
By Matt Miller, Fortune, Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Epic bureaucracy and waste. Thousands dead for lack of basic services. Delays, paralysis, "blame games." I'm not talking New Orleans here—all of the above are standard procedure in our dysfunctional health-care system, where 18,000 people die each year for lack of insurance, according to the Institute of Medicine. The only thing more depressing than this toxic gumbo of injustice and inefficiency is the fact that no political leader has tried to shake things up since the Clinton health plan imploded 11 years ago.
Until now. If you're convinced that Washington's tinkering-as-usual will never drive the change we need, John Kitzhaber may be your man. Kitzhaber, 58, is the doctor-turned-politician who was Oregon's Democratic governor from 1995 to 2003. He was the force behind Oregon's innovative Medicaid reform in the early 1990s, when the state expanded coverage to poor folks and paid for it by limiting the procedures Medicaid would cover. Critics cried "rationing"; Kitzhaber replied, "You bet." We ration anyway, he argued; better to make the choices transparent and wise via community input and hard-nosed assessments of the value of care. How else can you promote the most cost-effective health for the broadest possible group? Sadly, the consensus eventually eroded, and Oregon's system reverted to the national norm.
But Kitzhaber is back, and he's itching once again to, as he puts it, "pass something illegal." Operating from a local foundation he heads, this self-appointed gadfly is launching a campaign to put a statewide health initiative on the ballot that would require waivers from federal rules to be implemented (i.e., violate the law). It would thus force Washington—and the press—to compare Oregon's idea with health care's insane status quo in ways that finally get people's attention.
Kitzhaber's approach is to add up all the public money available in Oregon for health care (including Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax subsidy for employer-provided health care) and then redirect that money's deployment. He's working with private- and public-sector groups to reach a consensus on the best way to spend this $6.3 billion, or $1,800 per person, to promote health for every Oregonian. The idea is to come up with a conceptual framework voters will be asked to approve, with details to be worked out in legislation. Whatever the fine print, the new model won't look like today's mishmash, in which aging millionaires effectively have their pills paid for by uninsured young families who earn $30,000. It will cover everyone, yet leave people free to spend whatever they want above a publicly funded basic benefit. The analogy Kitzhaber uses is public education: When funding gets tight, we don't say, "Let's cancel 11th grade." We trim the basic offering (e.g., larger classes); the reverse happens when coffers are flush.
Kitzhaber is essentially asking insurers, providers, and politicians to come to the table as citizens in search of a common good. They'll focus first on how to optimize health with the dollars available. Only then will they assess the economic impact on current stakeholders and how to mitigate it in ways that don't undermine the larger goal.
To the standard American voter, that may sound sweet, lovely—and utterly delusional. Insurers and bureaucrats working together to solve practical problems? Please. Kitzhaber, who concedes that such governance won't happen in D.C. on its own, believes that Oregon's civic spirit is still sufficiently intact to be a model for the nation. (He's also quick to point out that his public education model doesn't mean switching to a Canadian-style single-payer system. It simply ensures equity and universality in the way public resources are allocated.) Kitzhaber's political strategy is to provoke—to be, as he calls it, "the random factor." "If you have a grenade with the pin pulled out," he says, "and you roll it into the Beltway in 2007 when everybody's jockeying to run for President ... it's going to be real hard to ignore."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love.
Read article at the original source
Frog-Marching America to a Saner Health System
'If you have a grenade with the pin pulled out, it’s hard to ignore.'
By Matt Miller, Fortune, Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Epic bureaucracy and waste. Thousands dead for lack of basic services. Delays, paralysis, "blame games." I'm not talking New Orleans here—all of the above are standard procedure in our dysfunctional health-care system, where 18,000 people die each year for lack of insurance, according to the Institute of Medicine. The only thing more depressing than this toxic gumbo of injustice and inefficiency is the fact that no political leader has tried to shake things up since the Clinton health plan imploded 11 years ago.
Until now. If you're convinced that Washington's tinkering-as-usual will never drive the change we need, John Kitzhaber may be your man. Kitzhaber, 58, is the doctor-turned-politician who was Oregon's Democratic governor from 1995 to 2003. He was the force behind Oregon's innovative Medicaid reform in the early 1990s, when the state expanded coverage to poor folks and paid for it by limiting the procedures Medicaid would cover. Critics cried "rationing"; Kitzhaber replied, "You bet." We ration anyway, he argued; better to make the choices transparent and wise via community input and hard-nosed assessments of the value of care. How else can you promote the most cost-effective health for the broadest possible group? Sadly, the consensus eventually eroded, and Oregon's system reverted to the national norm.
But Kitzhaber is back, and he's itching once again to, as he puts it, "pass something illegal." Operating from a local foundation he heads, this self-appointed gadfly is launching a campaign to put a statewide health initiative on the ballot that would require waivers from federal rules to be implemented (i.e., violate the law). It would thus force Washington—and the press—to compare Oregon's idea with health care's insane status quo in ways that finally get people's attention.
Kitzhaber's approach is to add up all the public money available in Oregon for health care (including Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax subsidy for employer-provided health care) and then redirect that money's deployment. He's working with private- and public-sector groups to reach a consensus on the best way to spend this $6.3 billion, or $1,800 per person, to promote health for every Oregonian. The idea is to come up with a conceptual framework voters will be asked to approve, with details to be worked out in legislation. Whatever the fine print, the new model won't look like today's mishmash, in which aging millionaires effectively have their pills paid for by uninsured young families who earn $30,000. It will cover everyone, yet leave people free to spend whatever they want above a publicly funded basic benefit. The analogy Kitzhaber uses is public education: When funding gets tight, we don't say, "Let's cancel 11th grade." We trim the basic offering (e.g., larger classes); the reverse happens when coffers are flush.
Kitzhaber is essentially asking insurers, providers, and politicians to come to the table as citizens in search of a common good. They'll focus first on how to optimize health with the dollars available. Only then will they assess the economic impact on current stakeholders and how to mitigate it in ways that don't undermine the larger goal.
To the standard American voter, that may sound sweet, lovely—and utterly delusional. Insurers and bureaucrats working together to solve practical problems? Please. Kitzhaber, who concedes that such governance won't happen in D.C. on its own, believes that Oregon's civic spirit is still sufficiently intact to be a model for the nation. (He's also quick to point out that his public education model doesn't mean switching to a Canadian-style single-payer system. It simply ensures equity and universality in the way public resources are allocated.) Kitzhaber's political strategy is to provoke—to be, as he calls it, "the random factor." "If you have a grenade with the pin pulled out," he says, "and you roll it into the Beltway in 2007 when everybody's jockeying to run for President ... it's going to be real hard to ignore."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love.
Read article at the original source
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Leaders Who Won't Choose - Fiscal Irresponsibility
Leaders Who Won't Choose by Fareed Zakaria
"Leaders Who Won't Choose
In Washington, it's business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, September 26, 2005
"Adversity builds character," goes the old adage. Except that in America today we seem to be following the opposite principle. The worse things get, the more frivolous our response. President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."
This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts—in fact, he expanded them—and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.
Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.
People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.
Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created. The only period—other than the current one—when the United States avoided hard choices was Vietnam: spending increased on all fronts. The results eventually were deficits, high interest rates and low growth‹stagflation.
Bush is not the only one to blame. Congressional spending is now completely out of control. The federal coffers are being looted for congressional patronage, and it is being done openly and without any guilt. The highway bill of 1982 had 10 "earmarked" projects—the code word for pork. The 2005 one has 6,371. The bill, written by the House transportation committee, is called the Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, or TEA-LU (in honor of chairman Don Young's wife, Lu). This use of public office for private whims would seem more appropriate in Saudi Arabia than America. Perhaps next year's bill will include a necklace for Mrs. Young.
The U.S. Congress is a national embarrasment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.
Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. We need to secure the homeland, fight terrorism and have an effective foreign policy to advance our interests and our ideals. We also need a world-class education system, a great infrastructure and advancement in science and technology.
For all its virtues, the private sector cannot accomplish all this. Wal-Mart and Federal Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the United States. For that and for much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?
Read at the original source
"Leaders Who Won't Choose
In Washington, it's business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, September 26, 2005
"Adversity builds character," goes the old adage. Except that in America today we seem to be following the opposite principle. The worse things get, the more frivolous our response. President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."
This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts—in fact, he expanded them—and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.
Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.
People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.
Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created. The only period—other than the current one—when the United States avoided hard choices was Vietnam: spending increased on all fronts. The results eventually were deficits, high interest rates and low growth‹stagflation.
Bush is not the only one to blame. Congressional spending is now completely out of control. The federal coffers are being looted for congressional patronage, and it is being done openly and without any guilt. The highway bill of 1982 had 10 "earmarked" projects—the code word for pork. The 2005 one has 6,371. The bill, written by the House transportation committee, is called the Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, or TEA-LU (in honor of chairman Don Young's wife, Lu). This use of public office for private whims would seem more appropriate in Saudi Arabia than America. Perhaps next year's bill will include a necklace for Mrs. Young.
The U.S. Congress is a national embarrasment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.
Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. We need to secure the homeland, fight terrorism and have an effective foreign policy to advance our interests and our ideals. We also need a world-class education system, a great infrastructure and advancement in science and technology.
For all its virtues, the private sector cannot accomplish all this. Wal-Mart and Federal Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the United States. For that and for much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?
Read at the original source
Monday, September 19, 2005
How to Escape the Oil Trap by Fareed Zakaria
How to Escape the Oil Trap by Fareed Zakaria
How to Escape the Oil Trap
Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are now awash in oil money, and no matter what the controls, some is surely getting to unsavory groups.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, August 29, 2005 U.S. Edition
If I could change one thing about American foreign policy, what would it be? The answer is easy, but it's not something most of us think of as foreign policy. I would adopt a serious national program geared toward energy efficiency and independence. Reducing our dependence on oil would be the single greatest multiplier of American power in the world. I leave it to economists to sort out what expensive oil does to America's growth and inflation prospects. What is less often noticed is how crippling this situation is for American foreign policy. "Everything we're trying to do in the world is made much more difficult in the current environment of rising oil prices," says Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World." Consider:
Terror. Over the last three decades, Islamic extremism and violence have been funded from two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, not coincidentally the world's first and second largest oil exporters. Both countries are now awash in money and, no matter what the controls, some of this cash is surely getting to unsavory groups and individuals.
Democracy. The centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy—encouraging democracy in the Middle East—could easily lose steam in a world of high-priced oil. Governments reform when they have to. But many Middle Eastern governments are likely to have easy access to huge surpluses for years, making it easier for them to avoid change. Saudi Arabia will probably have a budget surplus of more than $26 billion this year because the price of oil is so much higher than anticipated. That means it can keep the old ways going, bribing the Wahhabi imams, funding the Army and National Guard, spending freely on patronage programs. (And that would still leave plenty to fund dozens of new palaces and yachts.) Ditto for other corrupt, quasi-feudal oil states.
Iran. Tehran has launched a breathtakingly ambitious foreign policy, moving determinedly on a nuclear path, and is also making a bid for influence in neighboring Iraq. This is nothing less than an attempt to replace the United States as the dominant power in the region. And it will prove extremely difficult to counter—more so, given Tehran's current resources. Despite massive economic inefficiency and corruption, Iran today has built up foreign reserves of $29.87 billion.
Russia. A modern, Westernized Russia firmly anchored in Europe would mean peace and stability in the region. But a gush of oil revenues has strengthened the Kremlin's might, allowing Putin to consolidate power, defund his opponents, destroy competing centers of power and continue his disastrous and expensive war in Chechnya. And the "Russian model" appears to have taken hold in much of Central Asia.
Latin America. After two decades of political and economic progress in Latin America, we are watching a serious anti-American movement gain ground. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela—emboldened by his rising oil wealth—was the first in recent years to rebel against American influence, but similar sentiments are beginning to be heard in other countries, from Ecuador to Bolivia.
I could go on, from Central Asia to Nigeria. In almost every region, efforts to produce a more stable, peaceful and open world order are being compromised and complicated by high oil prices. And while America spends enormous time, money and effort dealing with the symptoms of this problem, we are actively fueling the cause.
Rising oil prices are the result of many different forces coming together. We have little control over some of them, like China's growth rate. But America remains the 800-pound gorilla of petroleum demand. In 2004, China consumed 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. The United States consumed 20.4 million barrels, and demand is rising. That is because of strong growth, but also because American cars—which guzzle the bulk of oil imports—are much less efficient than they used to be. This is the only area of the American economy in which we have become less energy-efficient than we were 20 years ago, and we are the only industrialized country to have slid backward in this way. There's one reason: SUVs. They made up 5 percent of the American fleet in 1990. They make up almost 54 percent today.
It's true that there is no silver bullet that will entirely solve America's energy problem, but there is one that goes a long way: more-efficient cars. If American cars averaged 40 miles per gallon, we would soon reduce consumption by 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day. That could translate into a sustained price drop of more than $20 a barrel. And getting cars to be that efficient is easy. For the most powerful study that explains how, read "Winning the Oil Endgame" by energy expert Amory Lovins (or go to oilendgame.com). I would start by raising fuel-efficiency standards, providing incentives for hybrids and making gasoline somewhat more expensive (yes, that means raising taxes). Of course, the energy bill recently passed by Congress does none of these things.
We don't need a Manhattan Project to find our way out of our current energy trap. The technologies already exist. But what we're searching for is perhaps even harder—political leadership and vision.
Read at the original source
How to Escape the Oil Trap
Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are now awash in oil money, and no matter what the controls, some is surely getting to unsavory groups.
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, August 29, 2005 U.S. Edition
If I could change one thing about American foreign policy, what would it be? The answer is easy, but it's not something most of us think of as foreign policy. I would adopt a serious national program geared toward energy efficiency and independence. Reducing our dependence on oil would be the single greatest multiplier of American power in the world. I leave it to economists to sort out what expensive oil does to America's growth and inflation prospects. What is less often noticed is how crippling this situation is for American foreign policy. "Everything we're trying to do in the world is made much more difficult in the current environment of rising oil prices," says Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World." Consider:
Terror. Over the last three decades, Islamic extremism and violence have been funded from two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, not coincidentally the world's first and second largest oil exporters. Both countries are now awash in money and, no matter what the controls, some of this cash is surely getting to unsavory groups and individuals.
Democracy. The centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy—encouraging democracy in the Middle East—could easily lose steam in a world of high-priced oil. Governments reform when they have to. But many Middle Eastern governments are likely to have easy access to huge surpluses for years, making it easier for them to avoid change. Saudi Arabia will probably have a budget surplus of more than $26 billion this year because the price of oil is so much higher than anticipated. That means it can keep the old ways going, bribing the Wahhabi imams, funding the Army and National Guard, spending freely on patronage programs. (And that would still leave plenty to fund dozens of new palaces and yachts.) Ditto for other corrupt, quasi-feudal oil states.
Iran. Tehran has launched a breathtakingly ambitious foreign policy, moving determinedly on a nuclear path, and is also making a bid for influence in neighboring Iraq. This is nothing less than an attempt to replace the United States as the dominant power in the region. And it will prove extremely difficult to counter—more so, given Tehran's current resources. Despite massive economic inefficiency and corruption, Iran today has built up foreign reserves of $29.87 billion.
Russia. A modern, Westernized Russia firmly anchored in Europe would mean peace and stability in the region. But a gush of oil revenues has strengthened the Kremlin's might, allowing Putin to consolidate power, defund his opponents, destroy competing centers of power and continue his disastrous and expensive war in Chechnya. And the "Russian model" appears to have taken hold in much of Central Asia.
Latin America. After two decades of political and economic progress in Latin America, we are watching a serious anti-American movement gain ground. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela—emboldened by his rising oil wealth—was the first in recent years to rebel against American influence, but similar sentiments are beginning to be heard in other countries, from Ecuador to Bolivia.
I could go on, from Central Asia to Nigeria. In almost every region, efforts to produce a more stable, peaceful and open world order are being compromised and complicated by high oil prices. And while America spends enormous time, money and effort dealing with the symptoms of this problem, we are actively fueling the cause.
Rising oil prices are the result of many different forces coming together. We have little control over some of them, like China's growth rate. But America remains the 800-pound gorilla of petroleum demand. In 2004, China consumed 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. The United States consumed 20.4 million barrels, and demand is rising. That is because of strong growth, but also because American cars—which guzzle the bulk of oil imports—are much less efficient than they used to be. This is the only area of the American economy in which we have become less energy-efficient than we were 20 years ago, and we are the only industrialized country to have slid backward in this way. There's one reason: SUVs. They made up 5 percent of the American fleet in 1990. They make up almost 54 percent today.
It's true that there is no silver bullet that will entirely solve America's energy problem, but there is one that goes a long way: more-efficient cars. If American cars averaged 40 miles per gallon, we would soon reduce consumption by 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day. That could translate into a sustained price drop of more than $20 a barrel. And getting cars to be that efficient is easy. For the most powerful study that explains how, read "Winning the Oil Endgame" by energy expert Amory Lovins (or go to oilendgame.com). I would start by raising fuel-efficiency standards, providing incentives for hybrids and making gasoline somewhat more expensive (yes, that means raising taxes). Of course, the energy bill recently passed by Congress does none of these things.
We don't need a Manhattan Project to find our way out of our current energy trap. The technologies already exist. But what we're searching for is perhaps even harder—political leadership and vision.
Read at the original source
Building in Green - William McDonough
Building in Green
"Building in Green
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening.
By Sarah Schafer and Anne Underwood, Newsweek International, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005
When American architect and industrial designer William McDonough visited the dusty Chinese village of Huangbaiyu, the villagers greeted him and his entourage of U.S. executives with a marching band, red carpet and fake red flowers to pin on their lapels. One anxious county official wearing a new blue dress shirt, still creased from the packaging, ordered volunteers to
hold up an inflatable rainbow arch that had begun to sag. Foreign delegations often swing through rural towns, but McDonough is not just another big shot looking for a glimpse of "ordinary Chinese life." He's co-chair—together with Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan—of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. And he plans to change life in Huangbaiyu—and, for that matter, across China. "We hope whatever we do will make you happy," he announced to the curious crowd.
Huangbaiyu is set to become an experiment in ecologically balanced living, and McDonough is the visionary behind it. He and a team of Chinese and Americans have been charged with turning the village into a model of environmentally sound living. The team has begun construction on the first two demonstration homes and expect to build about 50 more by November to house some of the town's 400 families. If all goes as planned, families will move into a town center, increasing the amount of land available for farming, rather than live scattered about as they are now.
It's a challenge, to say the least. McDonough's team can spend only $3,500 per house. To pull it off, they're using local labor and local materials, all of which will either biodegrade safely or be completely recyclable. To avoid the pollution that is released during the firing of bricks, the walls are made of pressed-earth blocks. Between the blocks is straw, a byproduct of the local rice harvest that would otherwise go to waste. Walls are a half-meter thick, so houses are well insulated and won't need a lot of heating. Solar panels on the rooftops provide electricity and heated water. "We're doing everything with nothing," McDonough says.
China has a lot riding on the Huangbaiyu experiment—and so does the rest of the world. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western countries a century or two to accomplish. The plan is to move 400 million people—about half the rural population—into urban centers by 2030. Doing so will require expanding towns into cities and even building new metropolises from scratch. That also means creating education, security and economic policies to help the masses adjust to the speedy transition from an agrarian to an urban society. How China manages this transformation will have a huge impact on the country's—indeed, the world's—environment, and its social stability. McDonough's projects in the village of Huangbaiyu and six major cities are China's biggest experiment in ecologically sound development. If all goes well, his brand of ecodesign could serve as a model for China's new urbanism. "China wasted 200 years already," says Nie Meisheng, president of the China Housing Industry Association. "We have to catch up."
It's too early, of course, to say whether the plan will succeed or fail. McDonough has completed designs for the six new districts in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou plus the village, but he's so far built mainly parks, waterways and roads. The goal is to have the first of the city sites ready for habitation in a few years. Although his plan has won the support of China's leaders—President Hu Jintao likes to repeat phrases from the Chinese translation of McDonough's book, "Cradle to Cradle"—the project relies on funding that is being raised by local governments and is not assured. And McDonough must first overcome a thousand gritty realities of life in China that could sidetrack his vision.
It makes a certain sense that China is turning to McDonough for an urban design vision. He believes that industrial cities could be far more efficient than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with ecological principles in mind instead of taking shape piecemeal. This notion would be impractical in most countries but could work in China, where the government has the wherewithal to impose its plans on citizens.
Efficiency is also key to relieving one of China's biggest roadblocks to modernization—its demand for energy. The Chinese use three times more energy per square meter to heat and cool buildings than Europeans and Americans, according to professor Yuan Bin at Beijing's Tsinghua University school of architecture. China is already the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States. Although only 23 million Chinese own cars, China produces 16 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions and is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2 within 30 years. If each person in China used as much energy as an average American, they would swallow up the world's entire current supply of petroleum. "China cannot consume energy like the U.S. because we have 1.3 billion people," says Yuan Bin.
If McDonough's method could be summed up in a phrase, it might be to leave nothing to chance. In each of the six cities, he is starting with a thorough examination of the land to be developed. He figures out how rainwater runs off and enters aquifers, how animals migrate, what plants grow where. He studies sunlight angles and wind patterns. Then he sketches in parks, which interconnect so citizens can walk or ride bicycles from one to the next and wildlife can carry on without disruption. Next comes the plan for the infrastructure, beginning with the angle of the streets. He slants them at a 15-degree angle to the winds in order to break up cold winter blasts and help keep city air clean. And orienting them on a diagonal rather than a rigid east-west grid also maximizes the sunlight that reaches apartments year-round. The cities are zoned for mixed residential, commercial and industrial use to ensure that transportation connects residences to the workplaces. Shops will be on the ground floor, residences above, and the rooftops will have farm plots. Bridges over the streets will connect the plots. The farmers will live downstairs.
Energy efficiency will be maximized through new types of building materials and a solar-powered energy grid. McDonough has begun by developing a polystyrene made by BASF without ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons but with excellent insulating qualities. "Buildings can be heated and cooled for next to nothing," he says. "And they'll be silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them." He's also working on new toilet bowls that are so slippery you can flush them with a light mist. Bamboo wetlands nearby would purify the waste, and the bamboo could be harvested and used for wood.
McDonough would like to see China's cities powered chiefly by solar panels. China, he says, is uniquely qualified to get solar power off the ground by virtue of its scale. "We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs," he says. "Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them."
McDonough's ideas have worked well, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States. He's designed green developments for communities and corporations, including the Gap and Ford. The headquarters for the clothing retailer the Gap in California has a roof with vegetation on it, a raised floor for better heating and cooling, and makes good use of daylight. The building exceeds California's energy requirements by 30 percent; Pacific Gas and Electric named it the second most energy-efficient building in the state.
In China, McDonough's plans for all six city districts have passed the government's standards test; three have gotten the green light. In Zhejiang province, the group has integrated the city of Ningbo's water system, creating wetlands that help conserve rainwater and protect animal and plant life. In Jinan, McDonough and his team are trying to clean up land contaminated by toxins from a steel plant. Outside Chengdu, in Sichuan province, they're trying to preserve an ancient landscape with old trees that would otherwise be leveled to make room for buildings and roads. "We're just at the beginning," McDonough said. "If you really want to see something, give us a few years."
Many prominent companies have gotten involved. Vermeer Manufacturing Co. of Iowa contributed an earth-block press for Huangbaiyu. Hewlett-Packard is donating computers for the schools. BP has given solar collectors. Intel is sponsoring an American anthropology Ph.D. student, Shannon May, to live in the model village for 14 months. May will study local habits and report back to Intel so it can figure out how to design products for rural Chinese. She'll also work on her dissertation, which will explore "the dissonances between what the Americans hope to accomplish here and what actually happens on the ground." The whole world will be eager to see the results.
Read article at the original source
"Building in Green
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening.
By Sarah Schafer and Anne Underwood, Newsweek International, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005
When American architect and industrial designer William McDonough visited the dusty Chinese village of Huangbaiyu, the villagers greeted him and his entourage of U.S. executives with a marching band, red carpet and fake red flowers to pin on their lapels. One anxious county official wearing a new blue dress shirt, still creased from the packaging, ordered volunteers to
hold up an inflatable rainbow arch that had begun to sag. Foreign delegations often swing through rural towns, but McDonough is not just another big shot looking for a glimpse of "ordinary Chinese life." He's co-chair—together with Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan—of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. And he plans to change life in Huangbaiyu—and, for that matter, across China. "We hope whatever we do will make you happy," he announced to the curious crowd.
Huangbaiyu is set to become an experiment in ecologically balanced living, and McDonough is the visionary behind it. He and a team of Chinese and Americans have been charged with turning the village into a model of environmentally sound living. The team has begun construction on the first two demonstration homes and expect to build about 50 more by November to house some of the town's 400 families. If all goes as planned, families will move into a town center, increasing the amount of land available for farming, rather than live scattered about as they are now.
It's a challenge, to say the least. McDonough's team can spend only $3,500 per house. To pull it off, they're using local labor and local materials, all of which will either biodegrade safely or be completely recyclable. To avoid the pollution that is released during the firing of bricks, the walls are made of pressed-earth blocks. Between the blocks is straw, a byproduct of the local rice harvest that would otherwise go to waste. Walls are a half-meter thick, so houses are well insulated and won't need a lot of heating. Solar panels on the rooftops provide electricity and heated water. "We're doing everything with nothing," McDonough says.
China has a lot riding on the Huangbaiyu experiment—and so does the rest of the world. Beijing is now orchestrating an industrial revolution, hoping to telescope into a few decades what it took Western countries a century or two to accomplish. The plan is to move 400 million people—about half the rural population—into urban centers by 2030. Doing so will require expanding towns into cities and even building new metropolises from scratch. That also means creating education, security and economic policies to help the masses adjust to the speedy transition from an agrarian to an urban society. How China manages this transformation will have a huge impact on the country's—indeed, the world's—environment, and its social stability. McDonough's projects in the village of Huangbaiyu and six major cities are China's biggest experiment in ecologically sound development. If all goes well, his brand of ecodesign could serve as a model for China's new urbanism. "China wasted 200 years already," says Nie Meisheng, president of the China Housing Industry Association. "We have to catch up."
It's too early, of course, to say whether the plan will succeed or fail. McDonough has completed designs for the six new districts in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou plus the village, but he's so far built mainly parks, waterways and roads. The goal is to have the first of the city sites ready for habitation in a few years. Although his plan has won the support of China's leaders—President Hu Jintao likes to repeat phrases from the Chinese translation of McDonough's book, "Cradle to Cradle"—the project relies on funding that is being raised by local governments and is not assured. And McDonough must first overcome a thousand gritty realities of life in China that could sidetrack his vision.
It makes a certain sense that China is turning to McDonough for an urban design vision. He believes that industrial cities could be far more efficient than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with ecological principles in mind instead of taking shape piecemeal. This notion would be impractical in most countries but could work in China, where the government has the wherewithal to impose its plans on citizens.
Efficiency is also key to relieving one of China's biggest roadblocks to modernization—its demand for energy. The Chinese use three times more energy per square meter to heat and cool buildings than Europeans and Americans, according to professor Yuan Bin at Beijing's Tsinghua University school of architecture. China is already the second largest energy consumer in the world, after the United States. Although only 23 million Chinese own cars, China produces 16 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions and is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2 within 30 years. If each person in China used as much energy as an average American, they would swallow up the world's entire current supply of petroleum. "China cannot consume energy like the U.S. because we have 1.3 billion people," says Yuan Bin.
If McDonough's method could be summed up in a phrase, it might be to leave nothing to chance. In each of the six cities, he is starting with a thorough examination of the land to be developed. He figures out how rainwater runs off and enters aquifers, how animals migrate, what plants grow where. He studies sunlight angles and wind patterns. Then he sketches in parks, which interconnect so citizens can walk or ride bicycles from one to the next and wildlife can carry on without disruption. Next comes the plan for the infrastructure, beginning with the angle of the streets. He slants them at a 15-degree angle to the winds in order to break up cold winter blasts and help keep city air clean. And orienting them on a diagonal rather than a rigid east-west grid also maximizes the sunlight that reaches apartments year-round. The cities are zoned for mixed residential, commercial and industrial use to ensure that transportation connects residences to the workplaces. Shops will be on the ground floor, residences above, and the rooftops will have farm plots. Bridges over the streets will connect the plots. The farmers will live downstairs.
Energy efficiency will be maximized through new types of building materials and a solar-powered energy grid. McDonough has begun by developing a polystyrene made by BASF without ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons but with excellent insulating qualities. "Buildings can be heated and cooled for next to nothing," he says. "And they'll be silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won't hear them." He's also working on new toilet bowls that are so slippery you can flush them with a light mist. Bamboo wetlands nearby would purify the waste, and the bamboo could be harvested and used for wood.
McDonough would like to see China's cities powered chiefly by solar panels. China, he says, is uniquely qualified to get solar power off the ground by virtue of its scale. "We're not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs," he says. "Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them."
McDonough's ideas have worked well, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States. He's designed green developments for communities and corporations, including the Gap and Ford. The headquarters for the clothing retailer the Gap in California has a roof with vegetation on it, a raised floor for better heating and cooling, and makes good use of daylight. The building exceeds California's energy requirements by 30 percent; Pacific Gas and Electric named it the second most energy-efficient building in the state.
In China, McDonough's plans for all six city districts have passed the government's standards test; three have gotten the green light. In Zhejiang province, the group has integrated the city of Ningbo's water system, creating wetlands that help conserve rainwater and protect animal and plant life. In Jinan, McDonough and his team are trying to clean up land contaminated by toxins from a steel plant. Outside Chengdu, in Sichuan province, they're trying to preserve an ancient landscape with old trees that would otherwise be leveled to make room for buildings and roads. "We're just at the beginning," McDonough said. "If you really want to see something, give us a few years."
Many prominent companies have gotten involved. Vermeer Manufacturing Co. of Iowa contributed an earth-block press for Huangbaiyu. Hewlett-Packard is donating computers for the schools. BP has given solar collectors. Intel is sponsoring an American anthropology Ph.D. student, Shannon May, to live in the model village for 14 months. May will study local habits and report back to Intel so it can figure out how to design products for rural Chinese. She'll also work on her dissertation, which will explore "the dissonances between what the Americans hope to accomplish here and what actually happens on the ground." The whole world will be eager to see the results.
Read article at the original source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)