Drugs, education, acceptation

Hey my dear readers,
I was fooling around the net when I saw that amazing documentary on the way past government dealt with drugs (see War on Drug) and the fact it did not work.

The film is very well directed with a lot of power messages from past presidents, authors and other World personalities I would recommend that movie.
Now the message sent was half clear on the solution they would propose. They talked about hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, to end up saying they should legalize and regulate marijuana... a little bit of a dimension problem. Hence not a bold move; a move that looks more like (scary) baby step. While some personalities really said it clear that you need to understand the drug addict (I do believe that too), for me you can win a war if you look at your own people, meaning Americans should educate and care about their backyard. The reality that the US is the first consumer far ahead of all the others means that they have a wrong angle of attack towards their social system. You don't do drugs if your happy unless you're an idiot that like to shoot himself in the foot or you suffer from complexes that are reflecting your society (examples are pouring like Congolese prostitutes in Pointe Noire's night clubs).

"If I was President" (W.J.)
I believe you cannot fight this war unless you act on both end of the rope: production and consumption. They spend millions in destroying the crops, why not spending these millions in subventions for crops that could make farmers quit the drug business? If cocaine pays that much, lets the country create a new economy based on subventions to farmers: 1kg of corn the price of 1kg of cocaine! that makes the poor farmer a man sustaining his family AND abandoning the cocaine business. Let them do that for 5 years and you'll see the drug harvesting dropping 90%. Now I only mentioned the subvention, but it can be that they would get hospitals and schools or free electricity/water and lesser direct subvention. The message that Colombian farmers send to their government is "you don't help us, so we're going somewhere else to find help". Now that can be reversed, not without some corruption and abuses of course but no great system goes without abuses and corruption.
At the same time you regulate and control the cocaine production to a certain volume of total mass a year. All farmers must be registered, all produced crop weighted and registered. Heavy fines to whoever is caught producing more, the most important is IGNORING THE DRUG LORDS.
That would basically be a development plan to fight the drug system in Colombia, by redirecting their workforce towards a legal trade, looking beyond drug production and letting drug Lords like sitting ducks. Trade would probably react by increasing the price but that's just like the Oil price, it follows the international geopolitic tensions. The result would be price increase on the other end (consumption end), so the market would shift to another country till it has nowhere else to run.
If it is not the best of options, prone to create lots of abuses, better these abuses than lack of sovereign control and uncontrollable violence.

Now a bit of Maths

• Cocaine farming monthly wedge = 1000 USD per household (67000 households, several sources like this one).

• Development of a new farming economy, based on subvention (wood or whatever sort of crop that would fit the local ecosystem) = overall (direct and indirect subventions) 1500 USD per household (counting conservatively 15% being coca farmers we talk about 450000 households, 18% of colombian population)

• Total development plan = 675 MUSD/year that we can top up to 1 BUSD/year (GDP for agriculture being 26.3 BUSD in 2010, 9% of Colombia's GDP the same year)

I don't plan to come and speak directly to Mr President, nor do I think I hold the truth of it, but if a PhD in chemistry can figure this out imagine what an expert in economy can implement then!!! To finish with my little prose of the day, the one thing that I really liked in this documentary was that the countries that implemented different approach to this social issue did not try to hit the consumer any-more. They tried to understand the sociological illness behind the drug consumption. Some European countries are a long way to understand that (e.g. I know the social issues in France and the refusal to accept some truths) and the message the populations send to their governments should be more acknowledged. Eventually there is a parallel to be drown with human traffic (e.g. prostitution) and arm smuggling, also increasing dramatically, especially in Europe.

The end of the World (and the Carbon news) in Brazil

Tomorrow is doomsday, and I already heard of the "doomsday program" so I'm hoping someone will read that before power shuts down :-).

Programation of the last day:

06:30 - Beginning of the End of the World
07:00 - Meteor shower
08:30 - First Tsunamis arrival
10:00 - OVNIs welcoming
10:30 - Gangnam Style flashmob of the OVNIs
11:36 -Initiation of general destruction
12:00 - Alignement of all planets of the Solar System, followed by a huge Eclipse
12:00 a 14:00 - lunch break
14:15 - Earth magnetic pole inversion
15:00 - Super Global Warming
16:30 - Initiation of the Earthlings annihilation
17:00 - Nilwayne Nilrex show
18:00 - Alien Earthling revelation
19:00 - Prisoner rescue from area 51 and Varginha (Brazil equivalent of Area 51)
20:00 - Re-opening of tunnel São Tomé Das Letras/Machu Picchu (they call this city in Brazil city of the stars...)
21:00 - Approximation of planet Nibiru
22:00 - Revelation of UFO's secret friends
23:00 - Bowser's arrival to finish up the job
23:30 - End of the World

So before all of that happens I made a selection of carbon news for you to read before it's too late:
Rio de Janeiro wants to monitor real time its carbon emission (in Portuguese). Already Pdt Obama is making Climate Change one of his top priorities for his second term when in Europe (UK to be precise) the carbon emission reductions are being delayed to the next term, meaning they don't want to wear and bear the responsibility of such a controversial task in the current economic environment. Now I am a big fan of CCS so I was quite please to see this article claiming CCS would be key to reduction of carbon emission and commitment to global targets.To close the loop on Brazil, there is a quick post from the CCS Institute explaining how to manage CCS projects in developing countries (that is considering Brazil as a developing country, which is an entire debate by itself).
Hopefully I see you all sometimes in the future!!

World Energy Outlook(s)

hey,
November has been intense in high profile publications. IEA has recently made the presentation of its new book publicly available and BP released his yearly World Energy review that you can found here.What we can take out from these publications is the increase in energy consumption and oil demand despite the increase of the oil price, Renewable energies seem to be stable in growth which is not the best of  news, especially with the global economical environment and the huff-n-puff attitude of the (mostly European) governments. Their lack of commitment towards private companies effort makes nonviable large projects (like in Florange, France, with ArcelorMittal's questionable willing that would have been troubleshooted if European governments really made an effort). Global CCS Institute made an urging publication to call for European CCS funding before other countries take the lead and gets all the technological advance. Combining this with IEA's overview on European gas dependance, it is time to "take our fingers out of our arses" (old rig joke). I kind of grow tired of saying that (well, not really tired ha!) but I know that the effort towards renewable energies will be made by the private sector. One example is that bloomberg article recently talking about solar energy to involve EOR technologies (in a nutshell, these techs helps you to take more oil out of a reservoir). The private sector might become the best (and only?) player in renewable energies.
One "good news" about the reports (BP's) is that the proven oil reserves tend to grow over the years with the ever evolving characterization and exploration technologies. One example is Brazil, which doubled it's proven reserves in 10 years through Pre-Salt discoveries and subsequently Angola if you consider the geological history that the 2 countries share. For a proof look at this gif picture developped by the Nova Scotia museum (image found here):

This gif is very northern hemisphere centric but look at the division between South America and Africa! Right were the Pre-Salt discoveries were made in Brazil used to be Angola, and recent findings proved that theory to be right. Russia has also seen greatly increased it's own reserves over the past decade. Nevertheless IEA projects that increase in consumption will boost the diversification of the energy sources from now to 2035 (guys, less than 25 years now, that only from 1987 to date and if you look back, not much has been created, only improved). While IEA looks at how much we can save by optimizing our production and consumption lines, BP has been looking at 2011's production and consumption. An interesting set of slides is IEA's slide 7 on 2035's projected gas trade flow (gloomy future for Europe) and 2011 gas trade movements (page 29).
To finish in a bright note, BP says the renewable sources are increasing year on year, though IEA says not fast enough and that is echoed by the CCS institute.
The IEA's World Energy Outlook is available on sale for a couple of hundreds of dollars  \o/
The BP statistical review is for free (at least) and you can even do a year on year to try to do some predictions yourself!!

a good read to you then!

Brésil: 10 ans d'émission réduite de CO2

Bonjour,
je suis tombé sur cet article ce matin  qui concerne une  étude faite au Brésil montrant que l'essort du biodiesel grace à la production d'éthanol (le Brésil est un des pionniers) a évité la production de 177 millions de tonnes de CO2, soit 7 jours de production mondiale (données 2009). Donc j'ai continué mes petites recherches sur le CO2 et je suis tombé sur quelques sites intéressants comme CO2 now, qui fournissent des données mensuelles sur l'émission de CO2, utilisant le fameux observatoir de Hawaï:

 

J'ai aussi trouvé le site de l'ONU sur la météorologie (OMM) qui fait des études annuelles sur l'émission de gaz à effet de serre (Novembre 2012 en français).
Maintenant le même Brésil (à travers Petrobras) vient de mettre en place un système de surveillance des gaz à effet de serre à Natal dans le nordeste, grâce au système suédois DOAS (Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy) développé conjointement avec Petrobras.Sont fous ces brésiliens!!!

The scary 4 degrees

I like infographics, they're simple, to the fact and kind of easy to understand... incredibly inaccurate also (because of it's simplicity). Anyway here is why we should really put our hands into a more sustainable energy production and consumption (credits to the World Bank):

Today's new on Carbon dioxide

CCS funding process may be flawed

Hi you all,
I had a quick go on some interesting news concerning CO2 and the capture process, CCS.
First is a new way of reducing GHG trough a chain of carbonate reaction involving pulverised rock.
We saw this week the huff-n-puff reactions of the industrial putting in jeopardy a couple of projects: Florange in France,  NER300 funding program are making the cover.
But there are good news, such as this company, Ryncosmos promoting portable CO2 emission reduction for houses and cars. Alstom is working with Dow for the past 4 years now to develop some amine system to catch CO2 more efficiently. Talking about amines, some nice research made in Laval University to increase the efficiency of regeneration of the amine beds (if you don't have access to the article, there is a good review for CCJournal here).
Eventually you can have a look on the same journal the featured articles on CO2  compression ( that's for the radicals!!!)

25 Bright (and Simple) Ideas to Save Energy

Hey everybody,
very neat post from the IEA, International Energy Agency, sitting in Paris (France). This is already quite surprising when you think about it because the IEA is big on renewable energy auditing and advertising and France is not really the country where there is a lot happening when compared to neighbouring countries or the USA, Australia...
Anyway they just issued a summary of 25 ideas to save energy, at home, at work, while driving or even using your computer. It is simple, clear and save you some energy which in the end means more sustainability. You can check it out here! They even released a printout format for you to take it away with you.

Ocean Pollution

Today I present you my little contribution to the fight against ocean pollution. I am following for sometimes now people like Philippe and Alexandra Cousteau, TEDxOilspill... all this since the Macondo disaster (Reuter gave another news last month... 2 years after and still potentially dangerous!), that led me to increase my awareness to mightiness and fragility of our oceans. See for yourself below, and big thanks to Masters Degree!