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Sunday, December 15, 2002
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Donivan Bessinger writes: The one ethical standard is to serve the balance of life on all levels. One must not become preoccupied with executing a certain plan or project. One must remain preoccupied with the balance of the whole. Even as a member of a board or some other form of governing assembly, a person must act individually with reverence for life, and seek to direct collective actions toward ethical outcomes, concerned with means as well as ends. If the system of natural ethics confers the obvious benefits of improved understanding, it also imposes some definite responsibilities. The practice of ethics requires knowledge of the situation in which one is acting, and knowledge and skill in applying means. In that sense, "good ethics" begins with good science. Ethics also requires effort to seek to "know oneself," and to develop awareness of the interactions of the forces within ourselves with the world around us. "Thinking sincerely," as Schweitzer put it, is thinking toward increased awareness of relationships in life. (12/15/02) | |
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Bert Knorr writes: As the main ideologue behind war on Iraq and the aggressive new doctrine of pre-emption and unbridled U.S. military supremacy, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is a key part of the inner circle of war planners in the Bush administration. For his extreme hawkishness, he has been dubbed "the velociraptor" by the conservative London Economist. Following Sept. 11, Wolfowitz wanted to go after Iraq first. But he was initially rebuffed, as there was no credible link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Bombing Afghanistan, however, could be positioned as a "just response" to the terrorist attacks. The velociraptor's too-candid gaffe about "ending states who sponsor terrorism" was a bit over the top. But following the rout of the Taliban and the "axis of evil" speech in January, "regime change" was to become openly embraced and espoused by President Bush himself, though it has been cosmeticized of late to "disarming Iraq" and making Saddam Hussein comply with U.N. resolutions. ... The earliest incarnation of the doctrine of pre-emption was the draft Defense Planning Guidance written under the supervision of Wolfowitz for then- Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and President Bush "the father." It argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy should be to "prevent the emergence of a new rival" and use American military dominance to "establish and protect a new order." "We will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations," the draft states. U.S. intervention overseas would be "a constant fixture" of this policy. This came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. (12/15/02) | |
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New York Times -- WHICH events of recent days are likely to have the most significant long-term impact on American business and the economy? ... To my mind, it was not the Bush administration's new team of economic policy makers, who dominated the headlines last week. Nor the efforts to clean up Wall Street. And not the buildup of troops to fight a war in Iraq, either. No, my money is on the barely noticed introduction by Honda and Toyota of a handful of experimental fuel cell vehicles to be tested by the State of California. The possibility of running cars on fuel cells has been heavily promoted in business circles in recent years, and for good reason. Imagine a global economy no longer dependent on oil and the internal combustion engine. Fuel cells, because they produce energy from pure hydrogen rather than from petroleum, emit only water and heat as waste, potentially generating power without burning fossil fuels. By making it possible to shift from petroleum to other primary energy sources, fuel cells could ease the threat of global warming without taking away the freedom and mobility that Americans and Europeans take for granted — and the rest of the world is determined to get for itself. China and India, with more than one-third of the world's population, could sustain rapid growth for decades without choking the sky with pollutants and climate-damaging carbon dioxide. (12/15/02) | |
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New York Times: Magazine --This year you moved from the Center for International Development at Harvard to Columbia and started the Earth Institute, which is dedicated to the idea of sustainable development. What is that? ... Sustainable development means rising living standards for everybody in a way that's not going to destroy our ecosystems, cause mass extinctions and add to enormous problems in climate or water scarcity. The links between the physical environment and the economic environment are much more profound than economists have recognized. If they really want to get to the core of what's happening in Africa, they had better start understanding AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and nitrogen-depleted soil. These are important phenomena that help to explain why the poorest countries are not achieving economic progress. ... That seems like common sense. Why do you even need the idea of sustainable development? ... In academia, the scientists and the policy types rarely deal with one another directly, especially on problems of the poor. The idea of the Earth Institute is to focus not on the disciplines but on the problems and to bring together five main areas in an intensive dialogue: the earth sciences, ecological science, engineering, public health and the social sciences with a heavy dose of economics. ... The term sustainable development showed up in the 80's, and it wasn't very popular. Why not find another, more marketable, catch phrase? ... I resisted the term also because a lot of people said what sustainable development means is that the rich have to cut their living standards sharply to make room for the poor. But my own analysis doesn't suggest that the reason that poor people are poor is that rich people are rich. I think rich people are rich because they have developed technology successfully to address a lot of challenges and because they were lucky enough not to have some of the ecological barriers that the poor have. (12/15/02) | |
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New York Times -- The Bush administration proposed the largest increase in automotive fuel economy in more than a decade today, calling for a 7 percent improvement in the performance of sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans. Critics, including many environmentalists and top Democrats, said the proposal demanded no more of the auto industry than it had already committed itself to achieve on its own. But the plan was praised by some moderates, and auto executives called it a challenge. The proposal would require automakers to increase the average fuel economy of so-called light trucks by 1.5 miles per gallon, to an average of 22.2 miles per gallon, by the 2007 model year. The administration said that would reduce gasoline consumption by 2.5 billion gallons through that year. "I'm sure everyone who doesn't know about the industry will say, `Gee-whiz, what's a couple of tenths of miles per gallon per year?' " said Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who announced the proposal in Washington. "This is going to be challenging for the industry to meet, but we feel they can do it." (12/15/02) | |
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Sorry! We appologize to our television viewers ... We are experiencing some technical difficulties. ... Please standby. ... (12/13/02) | |
9:08:57 PM 
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2003
Timothy Wilken.
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