Foreign Affairs Articles

Sunday, July 17, 2011

IMPORTANT: No More Alternative Energy!

Have you recently heard about what the governments are going to do with alternative energy? If you have you must agree that this is horrible, not only for the environment but also how we look. What I mean by that is, humans now look like they don't care about the environment and care more about money. Unfortunately, in this system, the only reason why the governments don't go to alternative energy is because they think it is to expensive. This is an introduction to another economical article. Stay Tuned.

Get Off Oil: Foreign Policy September-October 2010

Get Off Oil
Americans borrow $1 billion a day to import oil. Oil can cause environmental problems that soon become permanent. Studies put the cost of dealing with gasoline as extremely expensive because gasoline is composed of benzene, toluene, and xylene, which studies say affect our health, like shortening our life spans. Studies also show that cancer is caused by these three chemicals in gasoline. Oil not only causes health problems, but it also costs a lot of money to buy and to import.
American politicians have said that “foreign oil” or oil from places other than the U.S. is a problem. Unfortunately, the American politicians have come up with either expensive or impossible solutions to get rid of foreign oil. Thus the matter is left unsolved. Drilling for oil in the U.S. may help with some of the U.S. payments for foreign oil , but it won’t help with undermining O.P.E.C.’s control of the oil market. When the U.S. pays for oil, most of the oil goes to transportation like cars, trucks and buses, but only 2% of the oil goes to making electricity which is where politicians are focussing their policies on. The only environmental policy that Obama has found to discourage high-carbon emissions is a program called “cap and trade”. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Obama will get his policy passed through Congress.
Obama can turn to a portfolio of other steps that he can use to find solutions to get the U.S. off oil sooner. For example there is hydrogen. Hydrogen is good because it is quicker ????.
Here are 5 things he can do now:
1. Boost the popularity of plug-in hybrid cars
2. Transform vehicles that travel all the time like buses into natural gas users
3. Allow alternative fuel to be purchased like alcohol based fuel.
4. Require more efficient forms of eternal combustion engines
5. Encourage car companies to use carbon composite materials when building their cars. This will make the car lighter and will require smaller engines to propel them.
   
   If Obama were to use these solutions, he may reduce the amount of oil transported to the U.S. by 10% over the next decade which could shatter the oil companies’ transportation monopoly, which is about 95% in the U.S.. If Obama doesn’t take action soon, Americans will have a harder life than ever. For example, Americans will fall into greater debt, contribute to climate and environmental changes and will give themselves even more health problems than they already have.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Middle Kingdom Meets Magic Kingdom: The Economist 2010

Middle Kingdom Meets Magic Kingdom

Some kids, as young as toddlers stumble into a small building set in between a fast-food joint and a dusty drug store. The students enter into a box shaped room, it looks like a run down school room with the addition of interactive video screens. These interactive video screens allow the kids to touch Disney related icons. The interactive system helps the kids to learn English. For example, when they show a picture of Mickey Mouse with a paintbrush and paper it would say, ”Mickey Mouse is painting”. Pictures and words help the students learn.

This type of schooling costs around $1,800 a year. For people in China this is a large sum of money just for English classes. But, Disney claims that this type of schooling produces impressive results in t he children. Each classroom has a local and western teacher to help the students. The teachers and programs use pictures and words that the students can relate to and to help the information sink in better.

There are 10 schools in Shanghai and 5 in Beijing. Disney plans to double that number in the next year. The older schools already have waiting lists for the classes, but training and staff are limited and when they aren't the teachers can’t always get to the schools. Disney hopes to keep doubling their numbers every year.

Disney’s focus groups - the people who discuss the pros. and cons. Of the English classes with recent statistics- find that for Chinese parents, “education means everything”. English in particular is viewed as a ticket to the wider world or English helps their kids succeed when it comes to finding a job or living in an English speaking country says Mr. Sugermen, manager of the Disney English Programs.

Children’s English –language education in China is growing by 12% every year and will reach $3.7 billion by 2012. Adele Mao, an analyst at OLP Global, a research and consulting firm, thinks the market is already near $6 billion a year and is growing by 20% every year.

The rewards are huge not only for the students and their families but also for Disney. Since the children have become so attached to Mickey and Goofy, they will probably ask their parents to buy them toys of Mickey and Goofy and to go to the theme park. That is why the classes are also beneficial for Disney.

The Yimbys: Foreign Policy September/October 2010

Russia: Prime Minister Vladamir Putin says he has big plans for Russia’s nuclear energy. In 2001, when Vladamir Putin was the president of Russia, he signed a package of laws about importing nuclear fuel that was purchased. This process allowed trading to happen. Over the last decade this process made $20 billion. Russia has also purchased fuel from Bulgaria, Czech, Republic, Latvia, Libya, Romania, Suburbia and Uzbekistan. Russia also bought depleted uranium from power plants in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. An estimated 700,000 tons of radioactive uranium tailings (including waste from Russia) are being held in Siberian cold storage. Mayak is known for having the number of ecological disasters. However, for Vladamir Putin, it means big money. $$$

Mexico: Barack Obama may be rethinking off shore drilling. But Mexican Felipe Calderon’s main concern is that his country is not drilling enough. Their oil production has decreased by 1 billion barrels since 2004. Pemex, an oil monopoly or a company with an exclusive right to oil wells, is drilling new oil wells everywhere to find oil. All of Mexico’s wild life should be afraid because according to Pemex’s safety record more than 1,000 Pemex workers have died in industrial accidents in the last 20 years. After all, Pemex is responsible for the 1979 toxic disaster.

Ghana: The Ghana government has tried to make good come from trash. Ghana basically wants to make electricity come from the gases of the trash heaps. Ghana hopes they will reach the goals of generating 50 megawatts of electricity out of trash over the next 15 years. In Ghana, so many people look through the trash that there is hardly anything left to make electricity from gas. In 2008, Ghana spent $250 million on importing trash from Canada and Western Europe.

Netherlands: The Netherlands has so few prisoners that they hard to close 8 prisons and cut more than a thousand jobs. Belgian has the opposite problem. They have 10, 400 prisoners and they need more space. The Belgian government is thinking of renting 500 Dutch prisons for $38 million a year to send their prisoners to.

Australia: Australia is worried about the growing opium producing poppies because they don’t want to increase crime, drug abuse and terrorism. Poppies are legal to grow in Australia for medicine like for pain relief. So, Tasmania has taken the opportunity to grow poppies and rake in $60 million per year.