NGO Another Way (Stichting Bakens Verzet), 1018 AM Amsterdam, Netherlands.

 

Edition 03: 06 November, 2010.

Edition 18 : 12 November, 2014.

 

01. E-course : Diploma in Integrated Development (Dip. Int. Dev)

 

 

Quarter 1.

 

 

SECTION A :  DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS.

 

 

Study value : 04 points out of 18.

Indicative study time: 112 hours out of 504.

 

Study points are awarded only after the consolidated exam for Section A : Development Problems has been passed.

 


 

First block : Poverty and quality of life.

 

Study value : 02 points out of 18.

Indicative study time: 57 hours out of 504.

 

Study points are awarded only after the consolidated exam for Section A : Development Problems has been passed.

 

 

First block : Poverty and quality of life.

 

First Block : Section 1. Analysis of the causes of poverty. [26.50 hours]

First Block : Section 2. Services needed for a good quality of life.

First Block : Exam. [ 4 hours each attempt]

 

 

Block 1 of Section 1. Analysis of the causes of poverty. [26.50 hours]

 

Part 2 : In depth analysis of the causes of poverty. [14.00 hours]

 

01. In depth : definition of poverty.

02. In depth : some factors linked with poverty.

03. In depth : debts and subsidies.

04. In depth : financial leakages : food and water industries.

05. In depth : financial leakage : energy.

06. In depth : financial leakage : means of communication..

07. In depth : financial leakage : health and education.

08. In depth : financial leakage : theft of resources.

09. In depth : financial leakage : corruption.

10. In depth : the industry of poverty.

 

Report on Section 1 of Block 1 : [06.00 Hours]

 

 

Part 2 : In depth analysis of the causes of poverty. [14.00 hours]

 

05. In depth : Financial leakage : energy.

 

“Instead of promoting access to energy and supporting development, fossil fuel extraction has been shown to correlate with higher levels of poverty, child mortality and malnutrition, civil war, corruption, authoritarian governance and gender inequality. ” (Bast, E. and others, The fossil fuel bailout : G20 subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) with Oil Change International, London, November 2014. (Box 5, p. 41)).

 

Look at slide :

 

05. Financial leakage : energy. 

 

“Nearly two-thirds of historic carbon dioxide and methane emissions [1854-2010] can be attributed to 90 [private and state-owned] entities”. ( R.Heede, Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emission to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854-2010, Climate Change, Vol. 122, Issue 1-2, January 2014, pp. 229-241. Springer Science-Business Media, Berlin, January 2014, p. 238). The present wealth of industrialised countries is directly related to their energy use over time, so they are mostly responsible for the climate change which has taken place. However non-industrialised energy producing countries and shareholders of individual for profit energy corporations have also benefitted from the sale of their fuels and must also bear a share of the costs and responsibility of solving the climate change problem.  This involves leaving most of the known fossil reserves in the ground. For more on this see W.McKibben, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, Rolling Stone Politics, New York, 02 August 2012.

 

 “…the only way to impose “immediate and severe curbs” on fossil fuel production/consumption would be to impose an EMERGENCY CONTRACTION in the industrialized countries: drastically retrench and in some cases shut down industries, even entire sectors, across the economy and around the planet — not just fossil fuel producers but all the industries that consume them and produce GHG emissions — autos, trucking, aircraft, airlines, shipping and cruise lines, construction, chemicals, plastics, synthetic fabrics, cosmetics, synthetic fiber and fabrics, synthetic fertilizer and agribusiness CAFO [Concentrated Anmial Feeding Operation.” ( Smith, R. Sleepwalking to Extinction : Capitalism and the destruction of life and earth,  Adbusters, The Epic Human Journey, Part 4, Vancouver, 14 November, 2013.)

 

Seven countries have together contributed more than 63% to the historic warming of the earth’s temperature over the past 200 years. By far the biggest contributor is the United States, with 21,57%, followed by China (9%), Russia (8.4%), Brazil (8.4%), India (6.7%), Germany (4.71%) and the U.K. (4.5%). The figures include the use of fossil-based fuels (especially coal) and other  causes such as deforestation and the mitigating (coolant) effect of aerosols. If statistics are considered on a pro-capita basis, The United Kingdom and the United States are the major countries on the top of the list, followed by Canada, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. (Matthews H.D. and others, National Contributions to Observed Global Warming, IOP Science, Environmental Research Letters, Vol.9, No.1, IOP Publishing, Bristol, 15 January, 2014.).

 

Solar energy

 

You can use this world solar irradiation map to have an idea of the importance of solar resources in your chosen project area.

 

1. Research.

 

What are your conclusions on solar irradiation resources in your project area ?

 

Collect more detailed information on solar irradiation in your project area. If no specific information is available for your area,  collect information on your region. If that is also unavailable, collect solar irradiation information on your country.

 

What are your conclusions ?

 

Transformation of energy into a commercial product.

 

2. Research.

 

Which initiatives for the  small-scale transformation of local energy resources have been applied in your project area? If no specific information is available for your area,  collect information on your region. If that is also unavailable, collect solar irradiation information on your country.

 

What is the potential for small-scale transformation of local energy in your chosen area?

 

Which initiatives for large-scale transformation of local energy resources, if any,  have been applied in your chosen  area ?

 

Which large-scale  transformations of energy are imported into your project area ?

 

What are your conclusions ?

 

Energy : one of the main causes of financial leakage.

 

You have already made a list of imported energy resources in your analysis.

 

In the preceding section on «the transformation of energy», you have considered the importation into your project area of energy transformed on a large scale.

 

Energy can be in a natural form (for example, coal, biomass, natural vegetable oils) or transformed (for example, electricity, industrial fertilisers, petrol).

 

3. Research.

 

Make an analysis of the energy requirements of your project area.

 

Why can’t they be met through local production?

 

An extraordinary confirmation of the vital importance of world-wide control by the United States over the fossil fuels market was provided by President Barack Obama in his Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, 24 September, 2013 as published by the Washington Post, Washington, 24 September, 2013.

 

“The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region [the Middle East and North Africa]. We will confront external aggression against our allies and partners, as we did in the Gulf War….We will ensure the free flow of energy from the region to the world. Although America is steadily reducing our own dependence on imported oil, the world still depends on the region’s energy supply and a severe disruption could destabilize the entire global economy.”

 

The world’s biggest banks (“climate killer banks”) have invested € 232 billion in coal mining and the construction of coal-fired power plants and the companies running them since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005 :

 

“Big banks are destabilizing our climate system. Since the Kyoto Protocol came into force, banks have nearly doubled their support for the coal industry, the single largest source of [man-made] CO2 emissions heating up our planet. ” (Schücking H. et al, Bankrolling Climate Change, Urgewald, groundWork, Earthlife Africa Johannesburg, Bank Track, Sassenberg, December 2011, p. 58.)  The list of the top 20 “climate killer banks”, led by J.P.Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley can be found on p. 15.

 

“… in spite of banks’ verbal commitments towards addressing the climate crisis, their financial commitments to the coal industry have almost doubled since 2005, the year the Kyoto Protocol came into force.” ((Schücking H. et al,as above, p. 47)

 

Leading energy investment banks have failed to measure the carbon footprint of their investments in conventional energy. For a discussion of this subject, refer to : Collins, B. Bankrolling Climate Disruption : The Impact of the Banking Sector’s Financed Emissions, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), San Francisco, October, 2012.

 

In his speech in acceptance of  The Right Livelihood Award 1999 the German politician Hermann Scheer said  «Solar energy is the energy of the people. To use this energy does not require big investments of only a few big corporations. It requires billions of investments by billions of people.”

 

The direct price to the consumer of alternative energy and photovoltaic energy in particular has recently become competitive with that of conventional energy. (R. Schleicher-Tappeser, How renewables will change electricity markets in the next five years, Elsevier, Energy-Policy (2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.04.042).  In his conclusion (Section 4) the author refers to the self-organisational and chaotic elements implicit in the application of the subsidiarity principle to energy supplied at the lowest possible market level. This is typical  of  integrated development projects where energy used in a given project areas is expected to by sustainably generated and consumed there. 

 

“The world already has a large stockpile of ‘unburnable carbon’. If countries intend to meet their commitments to the 2ºC climate target, at least two-thirds of existing proven reserves of oil, gas and coal need to be left in the ground. Yet governments continue to invest scarce financial resources in the expansion of fossil fuel reserves, even though cuts in such subsidies are critical for ambitious action on climate change and low-carbon development.” ” (Bast, E. and others, The fossil fuel bailout : G20 subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) with Oil Change International, London, November 2014. (Executive summary)).

 

The giant fossil fuel multinationals themselves not only cause severe financial leakage from poor areas. They will destroy the world unless they are stopped. Students must study the article Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, M. Mckibben, Rolling Stone Politics, New York, 02 August 2012) carefully.

 

Unburnable carbon is a climate issue, and it also could  be a financial one: according to the Carbon Tracker  Initiative (CTI), as much as 80% of the coal, oil and gas reserves of private companies (such as Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal) are now ‘unburnable,’ and this unburnable carbon represents potentially ‘stranded’ assets. (Bast, E. and others, see above, p. 13).  “But fossil fuel companies continue to invest heavily in exploration for new resources, with $674 billion spent in 2012 to find and develop new oil, gas and coal resources.” (Bast, E. and others, see above, p. 14)  “In 2013, total investment in renewable energy was only $250 billion, which contrasts sharply with the over $1 trillion in fossil fuel energy investment.” ((Bast, E. and others, see above, p. 18)  

 

McKibben writes :

 

“We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

 

“Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value…..at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. ”

 

“Much of that profit [of fossil fuel companies] stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free….. Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry.”

 

Citing climate activist Naomi Klein, McKibben states that “wrecking the planet is the fossil-fuel industry’s business. It’s what they do.”

 

Compare this with the over-optimistic statements made by Leonardo Maugeri minimizing the dangers of shale oil , shale gas and fracking  in  Section 9, Shale and Tight Oil & Gas versus the Environment of his report Oil : The Next Revolution. The unprecedented upsurge of oil production capacity and what it means for the world, Discussion Paper 2012-10, Geopolitics of Energy Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, June 2012, pp. 68-73. Maugeri’s report is apparently designed  to promote the strategic interests of the United States and their multinational industries. On p. 66 of the report, even Maugeri concludes that:

 

“A revolution in environmental and curb-emissions technologies is required to sustain the development of most unconventional oils” ominously continuing the same sentence saying “…along with a strong enforcement of already existing standards, rather than massive over-regulation. Without such a revolution, a continuous dispute between the industry and environmental groups will force government to delay the development of new projects.” And we couldn’t have that, could we?

 

How and the extent to which the highly pollutant fracking industry in the United States obtained full exemption from compliance with fundamental environmental  and health regulations in the United States is described by R.L.Kosnik in The Oil & Gas Industry’s Exclusions and Exemptions to Major Environmental Statutes,( Oil & Gas Accountability Project (OGAP), Earthworks, Washington, October, 2007).  The bypassed regulations include the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), the Safe Drinking Water Act  (1974), the Clean Water Act (1977),  the Clean Air Act (as amended 1977), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (1986).  That so many fundamental statutory rights of citizens be systematically set aside for private profits in the energy sector  in the United States is truly a sign of our times.

 

>Some 40% of coal mined in the United States is publicly owned. It is exploited under leases to private coal-mining companies, who pay just US$ 1.03 per ton for it, with public revenues during the Obama administration of just US$ 2.3 billion. Much of it is dumped on the European and Asian markets with an enormous profit for the private parties and disastrous results for world-wide emissions of CO2, carrying social costs between US$ 52 billion and US$ 530 billion depending on the type of coal and the discount rate applied, at the same time blocking or limiting the rate of adoption of renewable energies. Plans to greatly INCREASE heavily subsidised coal exports from the U.S.A. would cause nearly 17 billion tons more CO2 pollution against the 5.344 billion  tons “savings” from the U.S. EPA Clean Power Plan 2020-2030.  For full details see : Aubry, T., Leasing Coal, Fueling Climate Change : How the federal coal leasing program  undermines President Obama’s Climate Plan, Greenpeace USA, Washington, 2014.

 

There are many examples showing the social costs of exploitation by oil companies for their shareholders’ profit at expense of the public and its quality of life. For one well-known and fully documented example see Amnesty International and others, No Progress : An Evaluation of the Implementation of UNEP’s Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, Three Years On, London, July 2014.

 

 4. Opinion.

 

What do you think of Hermann Scheer’s statement?

 

Fertilisers.

 

Our urine (and our composted faeces) provide sufficient fertiliser for the food production we need to survive. Recycling of urine and faeces therefore plays one of the most important roles integrated development projects under the Model.

 

With use of urines and faeces as fertilisers hunger can be avoided. Urine from family members mixed with household grey water (without faeces!) in a ratio of 1 part urine and 10 parts of grey water provide 20 litres of immediately usable risk-free  fertiliser per person per day, for the cultivation of fruit and vegetables. For a family with five members, that is about 100 litres of fertiliser per day.

 

Check the list of  annexes to the  main index  of the Model and, especially, the  list of key words used during this course, for other texts on the recycling or urine and faeces.

 

Fertilisers: recycling of urine and  faeces : minimum per person per year (500 litres being 400 litres urine; 100 litres faeces) providing 5.7 kg N (nitrogen), 0.6 kg P (phosphorus), and 1.2 kg K (potassium).  This is enough to grow 230 kg of cereals per person.<

 

For a project area with 50.000 people: 285.000 kg  (285 tons) of N ; 30.000 kg  (30 tons of P); and  60.000 kg K (60 tons). Enough for 11.500.000 kg  (11.500 tons) of cereals.

 

Price in month  8/2008 of fertilisers based on N = € 300/ton x 285 = Euro 85.500 ; based on P = € 820/ton x 30 = € 24.600 ; based on K = €330/ton x 60 = €19.800.

Total  value at rates applying month 8/2008= € 129.900/year.

 

Suppose urine and faeces were to be recycled in your project area.

 

5. Opinion.

 

What would that mean to food security in your project area?

 

What would the savings in the costs of importation of food into the project area be?

 

Cooking fuels.

 

Suppose a local industry  (one production unit for each 1500 inhabitants) for the manufacture of mini-briquettes using in part  recycled domestic waste, local crop waste, and specially grown crops were to be set up in your project area.

 

Refer to part  01. Introduction, then part  06 Costs and benefits analysis :introduction, then part 07. Costs and benefits analysis : details of section 3 :Costs and benefits analysis of block 8 Economic aspects  of the course.

 

6. Opinion.

 

Make a calculation of the financial benefits for your chosen area taking the elimination of the need to search for wood, and  to purchase wood and other cooking fuel  costs, automatic reforestation, and the potential offered by the Kyoto treaty into account.

 

Energy as an instrument of sustainable production.

 

7. Opinion.

 

Make an  analysis of the basic energy requirements for your chosen area necessary for a good quality of life for all.

 

Is it possible to locally  supply (potentially) the necessary energy?

 

Make yourself familiar with the Kyoto protocol  to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

 

8. Opinion.

 

Which factors make it difficult for small-scale projects to qualify for benefits under the Kyoto treaty ?

 

Why did the Bush Administration refuse to sign the Kyoto protocol ?

 

 First  block : Poverty and quality of life.

Index : Diploma in Integrated Development  (Dip.Int.Dev)

 List of key words.

 List of references.

  Course chart.

 Courses available.

 

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