Ecobella Blog

Entrepreneurial cycles and periodic crises are inherent to the free market economy. In the past dynamic and creative societies have prospered thru innovation. Today is not the exception of the rule.

Examples…

In the late 19th Century, during the Grover Cleveland administration, “the panic of 1893″ occurred. The stock market plunged and it seemed that U.S. capitalism (the world’s leading economy at the time) was irretrievably sinking. While that happened, the country’s electrification accelerated, telephones began to ring insistently, the first cars rode down the highways, shipyards launched huge ships designed with new technology, man’s voice was recorded in wax cylinders, and something called “the cinema” captured images in motion. Capitalism was a lot more than just a catastrophe at the stock exchange or uncertainty over the value of the dollar.

One generation later came “the panic of 1907.” It was Teddy Roosevelt’s last year. Banks were swamped by an avalanche of people withdrawing their savings. Again disaster struck and again the pessimists announced the end of capitalism. But that happened in the years when commercial aviation spread its wings, U.S. engineers joined the two oceans by the Panamanian waist, and began to change the urban profiles of Chicago, Manhattan, and eventually the rest of the world.

The Crash of 1929 was like a financial and market earthquake. President Hoover could not foresee it and F. D. Roosevelt later erred in the way he picked up the pieces. But it was a period when the English (who were also much affected) gave us television and antibiotics, the United States developed plastics and nuclear energy. After World War II, out of every dollar generated by the blood-soaked planet, 50 cents were produced in the United States. The Crash of ‘29 was a thing of the past.

May we go on? The financial crisis of 1973, when the price of oil rose sky high, the gold standard came to an end, and a severe inflationary process began (only to end a few years later under Carter’s administration), developed along with impressive space journeys, the popularization of computer communications, amazing discoveries in the fields of physiology and medicine (the DNA, anticancer drugs, spectacular surgical operations). The technical and scientific gap between the First and the Third World became a daunting trench.

In 1987, the credit system failed again. The savings-and-loans went bankrupt. They were killed by inflation, and their burial cost was a whopping $500 billion. But those were the glorious years of the Internet, mobile telephony, the inglorious agony of the USSR and its satellites, a preamble to the prosperous era of Bill Clinton that made us dream of a fantasy where economic cycles were a thing of the past.

The true engine of the market economy is not its financial system but the amazing creativity of its entrepreneurs and innovators.

Today we are faced with multiple challenges. We are midst of economic fallout as most of us have never experienced. We are threatened by relying on our energy needs on a small region around world. We are faced with Peak Oil just around the corner. We have doubled the CO2 level in our atmosphere (if the laws of thermodynamics work no doubt that would bring other effects). People are going mad against everyone. We are in the midst of a crisis of leadership in the world.

So how do we pull out of this one. The same way the world has done it in the past. Thru leadership and innovation. I bet this time innovation is going to be on renewable clean technologies.

For an alternate view of the same principles follow: http://www.firmaspress.com/950.htm

Terra Preta can store twice as much carbon on soil even after thousands of years.

By burning carbon without oxygen (pyrolysis) and mixing it with soil we can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while enhancing soil to do what we want it to do, that is to retain nutrients for plants, to retain CO2 to enhance soil productivity.

Agri Char technology offers the possibility of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via fast growing plants, and permanently sequestering that carbon in the soil.

President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for White House Chief of Staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., a top Republican and best friend of defeated GOP presidential nominee John McCain, said “This is a wise choice by President-elect Obama. He’s tough but fair — honest, direct and candid. These qualities will serve President-elect Obama well.”

Emanuel gave a speech at a Pickens Plan meeting in Chicago where he clarified he supports converting auto industry which is 70% of our energy use into using natural gas. Converting only 5% of the cars into gas, it would have a dramatic impact on the environment and a dramatic effect on the auto industry.

5th November 2008

Prices of major grains and oilseeds such as corn, wheat, soyabeans, and palm oil that are used to make biofuels are tumbling, indicating green fuels have played virtually no role in the recent global surge in food prices.

Corn and soyabeans have lost more than half of their value, whereas wheat now costs 55% less than at its highpoint in March of this year. Canola fell from a high of $730 (€568.7) a tonne earlier this year to $400/tonne in late October.

Prices of other internationally-traded farm products are following the same downward slope. Both cocoa and coffee have lost more than 40%, and cotton has experienced a similar trend.

Major agricultural commodities are seeing dramatic drops, disproving the opinions of food-versus-fuel critics.

Heavy demand for corn from ethanol producers was sighted as a significant source of corn futures to record highs in June, but since then the sharp decline of corn along with other commodities shows that this was mistaken.

Corn is down about 50% from its record high in June, even as the amount of the grain used to produce the renewable fuel in the US remained the same.

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