THE differences between Western and Eastern, particularly Confucian and Buddhist-based, cultures and attitudes towards crisis, hardship and austerity are great, like day and night.
As debtmocratic Greece has shown in the current debt crisis, the ordinary Greeks have resorted to violent demonstrations, strikes and public anger over the various austerity measures being tied to the proposed eurozone and International Monetary Fund rescue package.
While the public outburst over the corrupted Greek government is somewhat justified, their reaction is grossly different from the Confucius and Buddhist-influenced Asians.
The ordinary Greeks should take a very hard look at themselves, and ask honestly whether they should bear a big part of the blame for the serious debt crisis that Greece is in now instead of only violently pointing their fingers at the government for all the blame.
The way the Confucius and Buddhist-influenced Asians would have reacted in such situations would have been totally different. They would have taken the blame mostly on themselves.
We all know that the Japanese economy has not been performing well for the last 20-odd years but do we know the social costs of this slump?
The number of Japanese who committed suicide in Japan in 2009 stayed above 30,000 for the 12th straight year, with suicides due to hardships of life and job losses rising sharply, states a Japanese police survey. More significantly, suicides traced to job losses surged 65.3% to 1,071 while those due to hardships in life jumped 34.3% to 1,731.
More worrying, depression continued to top the list of reasons for the suicides. Perhaps even more worryingly, the number of suicides per 100,000 people came to 24.1 among those in their twenties, an all-time high for that age category, and 26.2 among those in their thirties, a record for the third year in a row.
Not surprisingly, the number of suicides jumped in October 2008 – a month after Lehman Brothers collapsed. This taking-all-the-blame on oneself instead of looking for easy scapegoats can also be seen at another level. In 2009, monthly suicides increased year-on-year from January to August.
They were especially rampant from March to May as fiscal year-end fund demands picked up during the period.
From 1990 onwards, even as the ordinary Japanese increasingly suffered under the grossly inept Liberal Democratic Party, one has not seen the violent demonstrations, strikes and public anger that is being seen in Greece, at present.
Instead they take their own lives, probably in shame. As the ordinary Japanese suffers in silence, the economy stumbles from one recession to another. The cycle repeats.
Now, with the global economic recovery in full swing, the ordinary Japanese gets another cyclical and temporary respite from the rising economic hardship.
Safety upgrades are critical but could mean higher prices for oil and gas
A culture of tighter safety and more experienced regulators might have prevented the BP Deepwater Horizon leak. But equipment modifications and new technology will be needed to minimize the risk of such deepwater oil leaks. According to some petroleum engineers, recommended technology upgrades could price some deepwater resources out of the global energy market.
A mess: Workers clean up oil from a beach on Grand Isle, LA, earlier this week. Credit: U.S. Coast Guard/PA2 Gary Rives
This could help extend the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling instituted by President Obama last month. "I tend to be kind of a glass half empty guy, but I think there's a 50/50 chance that the current six-month moratorium will stretch out," says Paul Bommer, a senior lecturer in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Documents and statements released by various federal investigators point to several decisions and at least one faulty piece of equipment that allowed uncontrolled gas and crude to blow out and destroy the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, initiating the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Engineers contacted by Technology Review insist that conclusive answers will come with completion of the investigations, but criticize, for example, BP's decision to install a continuous set of threaded casing pipes from the wellhead down to the bottom of its well. "The only thing I can figure is they must have thought it was a cost-cutting deal," says Bommer of BP's well design.
This can be problematic in deep, high-pressure wells for two reasons. First, it seals off the space between the casing and the bore hole, leaving one blind to leaks that sneak up around the casing pipe (as the BP Deepwater blowout is suspected to have done). Second, the long string gives gas more time to percolate into the well. A preferred alternative in high-pressure deepwater is a "liner" design in which drillers install and then cement in place a short string of casing in the lower reaches of the well before casing the rest of the well. This design enables the driller to watch for leaks while the cement is setting. "It takes a more time and costs a little more but it's a much safer way to do it," says Geoff Kimbrough, vice president for deepwater operations at Houston-based drilling consultancy New Tech Engineering.
Kimbrough cautions that transforming corporate cultures will take time because choosing the more conservative operation can easily cost $10 million to $20 million. Not all companies have leaders who readily support these decisions, says Kimbrough: "The courage to do that doesn't come overnight. It comes from years and years of support from senior management."
Regulatory ideas for how to push a culture of safety appear in a 30-day safety review delivered to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar late last month, and include establishing new drilling guidelines, operator certification requirements, and tougher inspection regimes. Kimbrough says the Interior Department must simultaneously boost its internal training so that it can effectively review drilling plans.
Attention has also focused on the failed blowout preventer, or BOP, that could have saved the Deepwater Horizon. The Interior safety review calls for upgrades to BOPs to address various failure mechanisms that may have doomed the Deepwater Horizon, such as placement of redundant shear rams strong enough to cut through the toughened threading between casing pipes.
One inherently safer option that many petroleum engineers are considering is bringing BOPs to the surface. In this scheme the BOP on the wellhead thousands of feet below the ocean surface is backed up by a second BOP on the drill rig that would be accessible for more regular inspection and testing. Doing so would mean hardening the risers that link the wellhead and the drill rig to handle extreme pressures.
It's a suggestion that Kimbrough thinks is impractical. "The cost would be somewhere near prohibitive," he says. "Just the cost to develop the system would be astronomical." Mandating something like that would delay new drilling by at least several years. "You're talking about years to develop and test and prove up something like that."
But Bommer says the potential costs are likely to be small compared to the economic impact and incalculable ecological damage that the Gulf region has sustained from BP's leak. In Bommer's view, if such "brute force" safety engineering pushes oil and gas companies to question whether it's economically viable to tap deepwater reserves, so be it. "Cost is the last thing people should be thinking about now," he says.
Another area pegged for technology development is deepwater leak response. BP's ad-hoc response to the Deepwater Horizon leak has revealed the lack of equipment and procedures for high-pressure remote operations. BP's CEO Tony Hayward acknowledged as much last week, saying that despite assurances in its drilling permit applications, BP "did not have the tools you would want" to respond to a deepwater leak.
In fact, the tool shortage for deepwater intervention is an issue long recognized by petroleum engineering researchers. The months-long process of drilling a relief well was, until now, the only proven fallback available in cases where the BOP fails to stop a blowout. A 2003 presentation by Texas A&M University researchers modeling deepwater blowouts cited reliance on relief wells as evidence of a "fatalistic mind-set in the industry."
The lack of progress since then supports that assessment. Since 2005 Congress has left deepwater research primarily in the hands of the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, a U.S. Department of Energy-supported petroleum industry consortium in Sugar Land, Texas. But RPSEA has focused its $17 million annual budget for deepwater R&D on production-related issues.
Drilling engineers say the BP accident could finally provide the impetus for deepwater response tools. Funding to perfect some of the schemes that BP has thrown at the spill, they say, should spawn an entire deepwater response industry, analogous to the well-control contractors who secure hundreds of dangerous onshore wells per year worldwide.
James Pappas, RPSEA's vice president of technical operations, claims that his consortium is already beginning to refocus its research agenda toward safety-related R&D. For example, he sees an opportunity to improve sensing capabilities inside deepwater wells after the drill bit is pulled: "That's a weak spot right there, a blind side, that we haven't really addressed as an industry."
But Pappas and other engineers acknowledge that better training, BOPs, and response tools may not convince an outraged country that a sequel to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is impossible. They say it may take more radical upgrades to drilling technology to lift the current six-month moratorium. "We have to go back to square one and prove that we're reliable and responsible enough to take care of our business," says Pappas.
There's great progress afoot. Just don't breath the air or drink the water.
Gordon G. Chang,
It is the best of times for China's environment.
Chinese officials are determined to clean up their air, land and water. This month Beijing said it would subsidize purchases of electric cars and plug-in hybrids in a pilot program in five cities. The central government already offers a tax break for purchasers of smaller-engine vehicles and will follow up this year with a nationwide subsidy for gasoline-powered cars with engines no larger than 1.6 liters. These programs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, will cover more than 4 million vehicles by 2012. The finance ministry, in recent days, announced it will also subsidize the manufacture of high-efficiency electric motors and power generators.
While cap-and-trade legislation is stalled in the swamp we call "Congress," the Chinese are racing ahead. At the end of last month Beijing said it would start a domestic market for trading carbon emissions by 2014. Just about half of the credits granted pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism are for projects in China. The Chinese government is committed to reducing, by 2020, carbon emissions intensity--the amount of energy used per unit of gross domestic product--by as much as 45% over 2005 levels.
Even Beijing's social engineering programs are helping Mother Earth. The one-child policy, for example, saves 1.83 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year according to official estimates.
Last year China spent $34.6 billion in clean-energy initiatives, about twice the U.S.,which has an economy three times as large. "The Chinese aren't waiting around," noted Senator John Kerry last month. They have, he said, "surpassed us in renewable energy investment."
China is now the world's number one market for wind energy, the number one manufacturer of solar panels and the number one builder of nuclear energy generating stations. "Well, folks," writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "Sputnik just went up again: China's going clean-tech." The country is no longer "Red," he assures us. We should, on the contrary, call it "Green China" now.
That's a catchy moniker, but you still wouldn't want to live there. It is also the worst of times for China's environment. The country stands on the edge of a monumental environmental crisis, perhaps the worst in world history, or at least the worst since the flood in Biblical times. Sixteen of the world's 20 dirtiest cities are located in the People's Republic, including the worst, Linfen, a coal-mining center in Shanxi province.
The rivers run black, the skies are dark gray, the land poisoned by a deadly brew of chemicals and metals. Weather patterns are changing, and storms seem more violent. Parts of the country are now uninhabitable due to sustained environmental degradation. Conditions across Green China are, in general, deteriorating. There are around 750,000 premature deaths each year due to air pollution alone.
That was the conclusion of the World Bank, relying on official Chinese data, in 2007. The Financial Times reported that Beijing forced the institution to suppress this ghastly statistic. "The World Bank was told that it could not publish this information," an unnamed advisor to the bank told the FT. "It was too sensitive and could cause social unrest."
A statistic could cause social unrest? This unfortunate episode illustrates why, despite all the money spent by the government, China's environment continues to get worse. The country's one-party state is suppressing information that could lead to citizens promoting, demanding and working for positive change. China does not have an environmental problem as much as it has a political one. To cripple potential rivals, the increasingly insecure Communist Party stepped up its campaign this year to suppress citizen groups, including those that have been so effective in creating environmental awareness.
Thomas Friedman extols the virtues of Chinese authoritarian leaders--he referred to them as a "reasonably enlightened group of people" last September--and thinks they do a swell job when it comes to the environment, but the regime that puts together wind turbines also built the disastrous Three Gorges Dam and is now working on the monumentally misconceived South-to-North Water Diversion Project. Today's leaders, unfortunately, are still waging Mao's war against nature.
And they are losing. Energy intensity, for instance, is going up. In the first quarter it jumped 3.2%, reversing the trend of the last half-decade. This unwelcome development is a direct result of Beijing's emphasis on heavy industry in its most recent fiscal stimulus campaign. Due to this and other factors, Chinese officials said this month they are "not very optimistic" on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, emissions are going in the wrong direction as well, up 1.2% in the first quarter of this year, a reversal of another trend.
We should not be surprised: Communist Party plans to promote economic growth trump just about everything else. That's why Beijing no longer publishes Green GDP statistics, which measure growth minus the cost of environmental degradation.
The Chinese may one day live in a green society with a clean environment, but that will only happen after they demand and build a new, open political system.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.
