[未归类] 〓DIES IN FLAMS〓tracywlz-Eco&times分析 [复制链接]

From The Times

March 31, 2009

Nicolas Sarkozy’s threat to walk out of global summit

Anglo-Saxon gibe strains relations with Obama

Charles Bremner in Paris and Philip Webster

President Sarkozy yesterday threatened to wreck (destroy) the London summit if France’s demands for tougher financial regulation are not met(实现).

France will not accept a G20 that produces a “false success with language that sounds good but contains no commitments”, his advisers said.

Asked if this meant a possible walk-out, Xavier Musca, Mr Sarkozy’s deputy chief of staff for economic affairs, said: “A basic rule with nuclear deterrence is that you do not say at what point you will use the weapon（可作为政府说话公信度素材）.”
（France government once said）

The French threat dramatically raised the temperature hours before President Obama arrives in London today. If carried through, it would ruin a summit for which Mr Brown and Mr Obama have high ambitions, believing it vital to international recovery.

Blow for Brown as leaders prepare to stall

Any deal on coordinated action(同样的行动) to
pump money into the world economy（从世界经济抽出钱） looks set to be delayed until a second G20

Mr Sarkozy, who blames the “Anglo-Saxons” for causing the economic crisis, told his ministers last week that he would leave Mr Brown’s summit “if it does not work out”.

A deal to tighten regulation will be one of the key features of the G20 accord but France wants a global financial regulator, an idea fiercely opposed by the United States and Britain. Mr Brown has described the notion as ridiculous.

Germany and other nations are reported to be against a global regulator and sources said that President Sarkozy must know that the proposal would not make progress（取得进步）.

Instead, countries will agree that their national regulators should cooperate more（更多合作）. So-called colleges of supervisors are likely to be established to monitor the activities of companies that operate in several countries.

British officials said it looked as if Mr Sarkozy was picking a fight he could present as a victory back home. （挑起一场战争因此他可以表现出一个胜利的离开）

Mr Sarkozy’s threat underlines the emerging splits（分歧） between world leaders. Germany and France have led opposition to plans to coordinate public spending（公共费用）, championed（supported） by the Administration of President Obama.

[提出改善建议]The importance of action to ease the economic decline will be underlined today by a report from the OECD, the umbrella group（庇护团体） for Western democracies. It now expects the economies of its 30 member nations to slump by（decrease by） 4.3 per cent this year, against the 0.4 per cent drop that it forecast last November.

The group also warns(argument 可以使用此小词)
that unemployment will reach 10 per cent by next year in most developed nations.

不难发现underline,是一种很好的替代emphasize

Populism

Will there be blood?

Mar 26th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

The revival of American populism is partly synthetic, but mostly real

Reuters

A WEEK or so ago America was seized by a spasm of fury（一阵怒火） over the bonuses paid to executives at AIG, a troubled insurance company. Across the country Americans were enraged that people who had helped to cause the financial meltdown were being rewarded for their incompetence. And Washington responded in kind（以货贷款）.

Congressmen queued up before the television cameras to tell everybody how upset they were（这句写得很形象啊）. Larry Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, described the bonuses as “outrageous”. Even Barack Obama tried to drop his ultra-cool persona to say how “angry” he was. The House voted overwhelmingly to impose a 90% tax on such bonuses.

The media responded to the storm of outrage by producing a stream of articles on American populism—the political disposition that damns established institutions, from Wall Street to Washington, and tries to return power to “the people”. Newsweek devoted almost an entire issue to the subject.

But no sooner was the ink dry on these articles（形象地比喻） than the populist storm seemed to blow itself out. Many of the journalists who had been fanning the flames of anger attended a white-tie Gridiron Dinner in Washington on March 21st to perform silly song-and-dance routines. Wall Street rallied two days later when the treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, published his plan to tackle toxic assets held by banks. Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, suggests that bonus legislation “may not be necessary” now that 15 of the top 20 “bonus babies” at AIG have agreed to give their bonuses back.

Was the fuss over AIG a sign of a new populist mood in America? Or was it just a storm in a teacup? It is hard to answer this question in a country in which anger is a form of entertainment and where the political parties have turned partisanship into a fine art. Television personalities such as Bill O’Reilly are always angry about something or other. Many of the politicians who proclaimed their outrage at the “malefactors of great wealth” are delighted to take campaign contributions from the very same malefactors.

But, for all that, there are good reasons for taking the resurgence of populism seriously. One is the breadth of the discontent in the country. Left-wingers complain that Mr Obama is selling out his supporters in order to rescue irresponsible financial institutions. Right-wingers worry that he is using taxpayers’ money to save people from the consequences of their own profligacy. This fear has plenty of resonance outside the world of political enthusiasts: a recent Harris poll shows that 85% of Americans believe that big companies have too much influence on politicians and policymakers.

Another factor is the size of the slump（失败的程度）. America has lost almost 2m jobs in the past three months. The number of job openings is down 31% from a year ago. Consumer confidence is falling on all fronts（各个方面）. Mortgage delinquencies are at a record high. The future of attempts to stimulate the global economy is also in jeopardy: European leaders have implied that they will oppose pressure from Americans and Chinese to produce their own stimulus programme at the forthcoming G20 meeting.

America may be witnessing the return of an old-fashioned version of populism, driven by economic anxiety and directed at economic interests. The people who gave the name to “populism” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were worried about a prolonged agricultural depression and furious at the vested interests in Wall Street and Washington who, they thought, were responsible for that depression. Populists accused the elites of turning America into a land of “tramps and millionaires（the poor & rich）”.

This brand of populism went underground during the boom years, but Franklin Roosevelt revived it during the Depression. In one of his most passionate speeches, in 1936, he attacked the “economic royalists” of big business and the Republican Party.

In the 1960s economic populism was trumped by (won) cultural populism. The Republican Party championed the interests of the “silent majority” against bra-burning feminists, civil-rights activists and effete liberals who were more interested in protecting the rights of criminals than preserving law and order. The Democrats made desultory attempts（断断续续的尝试） to revive economic populism in 2000 and in 2004: Al Gore campaigned for “the people against the powerful” and John Kerry denounced outsourcing companies. But this proved to be no match for the Republicans’ cultural populism. Now economic populism is returning to the heart of American politics.

This economic populism is made particularly potent by the long-term decline of faith in American institutions. The General Social Survey has been polling Americans about their confidence in major institutions (among other things) since 1972. The preliminary data for 2008 show a marked drop in confidence in every American institution since 2000 except military ones and education. The proportion of people expressing “a great deal of confidence” fell from 30% in 2000 to 16% in 2008 for big business, from 30% to 19% for banks, from 29% to 20% for organised religion, from 14% to 11% for the executive branch and from 13% to 11% for Congress. It was up, to 52%, for the armed services. These figures are the stuff that nasty movements are made of.

Populism poses serious problems for both political parties, not least because (the very institutions which they spend their lives squabbling over) are some of the least respected in the country, just above television and the press. The danger for Mr Obama and the ruling Democrats is that the administration is relying heavily on private investors and Wall Street banks to implement its various rescue plans. This inevitably means rewarding some of the people who were responsible for the crisis. The president hopes that his budget will channel destructive anger into support for his policies. But he could also find his administration blown off-course or even swept aside by popular outrage(大众愤怒).

Oil mergers

Well matched

Mar 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Oil firms have started buying each another again

Bloomberg

WHEN the going gets tough（强硬起来）, the solvent get buying. That, roughly, was the philosophy of the titans of the oil industry last time the price of their product plummeted, in the late 1990s. Hunting for oil had become less profitable thanks to the falling price, whereas preying on rivals had become easier, thanks to plunging share prices. Thus Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and TotalFinaElf were born. So when Suncor and Petro-Canada, two big Canadian oil firms, announced a C$19.3 billion ($15.8 billion) merger(合并) on March 23rd, the industry’s biggest since 2006, speculation mounted that another wave of deals might be imminent.

Suncor and Petro-Canada say the merger will help them withstand the trying times（overcome the hard time）. The bosses of the two firms think they can save C$300m a year on operating costs and C$1 billion a year in capital expenditure. These savings are possible thanks chiefly to the two firms’ complementary investments in Canada’s tar sands, where oil is found in a particularly impure and viscous form, requiring a lot of expensive processing. The two firms plan to share pipelines and other infrastructure at existing facilities and future ones.

The two companies also hope their merger will help reduce inflation in the oil-sands region, which took off amid a mad rush to develop new projects when the oil price was high. Petro-Canada recently delayed a development called Fort Hills after the projected cost rose from C$14 billion to C$25 billion in just over a year. It believes the merger will help reduce the bill again by dampening competition for scarce labour and equipment.

Tar-sands operations are a natural focus for consolidation. They are expensive to run and so are more exposed to the falling oil price. At the very least, tar-sands firms will struggle to finance expansions with the oil price so low. But Canada’s tar sands remain an attractive investment because they provide long-lived reserves in a stable country—a rarity in the oil business these days. That is why Total (as it is now known) recently offered to buy UTS Energy, a tiddler that is one of Petro-Canada’s partners in the Fort Hills project.

Much the same logic applies to takeovers of coal-bed methane firms, which extract natural gas from coal deposits. BG, a British gas firm, has just succeeded in buying an Australian coal-bed methane firm, Pure Energy Resources, for A$1 billion ($729m). Last year it spent A$6 billion on another, Queensland Gas. ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell have also made recent investments in coal-bed methane.

Indeed, over 40% of takeovers in the oil and gas business last year involved “unconventional” resources such as tar sands and coal-bed methane, according to Chris Sheehan of IHS Herold, a research firm. He expects more such deals this year, as the industry’s giants snap up unconventional reserves （随着某个方面的巨人抢到了非通常传统的储量）that their smaller, cash-strapped（身无分文的）
owners cannot afford to develop.

But Mr Sheehan does not expect the giants of the industry to snap one another up（使某个上升）, as they did in the blockbusting deals of the 1990s. For one thing, they are already so big that further mergers would raise competition concerns. Moreover, with the exception of Exxon Mobil, which has tens of billions stashed away(concealed), they would struggle to raise the money. Instead, middling firms are likely to be the main targets. Rumours are rife, for example, of an imminent bid for Santos, an Australian firm with several liquefied natural gas projects in the works. And the Western oil majors are not the only buyers on the prowl(徘徊中): in recent years state-owned oil firms from countries such as China and India have become much more acquisitive.

GM and Chrysler

Wagoner’s fast exit

Mar 30th 2009
From Economist.com

General Motors and Chrysler get a little more time; GM's boss does not

A QUICK death is usually reckoned preferable to a lingering one. But the slow-motion pile-up involving General Motors and Chrysler sees both patients stuck in critical condition. A deadline for both car companies to present restructuring plans had been set for Tuesday March 31st, but now the Obama administration has elected not to turn off the life support and instead to give both carmakers another chance to show how they might yet recover.

The decision comes at a price. Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of GM for nearly nine years, was asked to quit during a meeting on Friday with the presidential task-force that is overseeing the restructuring of America’s ailing car industry. His exit, announced on Sunday, is the most visible sacrifice that GM is making to keep itself in business. The company, already in receipt of $13.4 billion in emergency loans, had wanted another $16.6 billion to stay on the road. But the carmaker’s plans to revive its business were judged incomplete and far from sweeping enough to（绝对彻底） ensure long-term survival. Thus the government will provide working capital for 60 days while the car company thinks again about its survival plans.

The task of convincing unions and creditors that they must accept tougher restructuring conditions will fall to Fritz Henderson, who replaces Mr Wagoner as chief executive and Kent Kresa, who assumes the role of chairman. By splitting the two roles that Mr Wagoner filled and replacing around half the board GM may have a chance of striking a taking a more aggressive stance. The likeable and decent Mr Wagoner, was widely criticised for not taking a more confrontational approach, particularly in his dealings with the unions.

Allowing GM to limp on for another 60 days is hardly a vote of confidence. Smaller and weaker Chrysler is reckoned to have no chance of going it alone. It had asked for another $5 billion to add to the $4 billion it had already received. Instead it is getting 30 days to secure a potential tie-up with Italy’s Fiat or shut down. Along with GM, its recovery plans were predicated on fanciful forecasts of market share and hoped-for sales that were simply impossible in the midst of the current economic crisis. The taskforce’s assesses that Chrysler is “unrealistic or overly optimistic”: these are kind words for a patient that may not have long for this world.

Chrysler’s sales have plummeted this year. Even if a Fiat alliance does result in some small, fuel-efficient European vehicles getting to the American market it will be a couple of years before the tie-up is running properly, developing the vehicles that Chrysler cannot afford to do alone. In the meantime America’s government could be on the hook for plenty more cash if it allows Chrysler to survive.

At least the Obama administration has gone some way to curing part of the problem that GM and Chrysler faced in dealing with creditors and unions. As negotiations between them and the car companies continued up to the weekend it seemed that neither presumed that Barack Obama would allow GM and Chrysler to go under. As a result neither were prepared to make the hefty concessions could possibly convince the presidential task-force that the pair were deserving of big supplies of emergency cash. But now the drip feed has been wrenched away.

GM and Chrysler have but a short time to see if this has the desired effect. But the prognosis is not good. Increasing the pressure may help but the car companies are trying to cure in a matter of weeks chronic ills that have lingered in some cases for
decades.

The alternative option is a structured bankruptcy of either or both firms. One official calls that a “quick rinse” of maybe only a few weeks, to wash away debts and return the firms to bouncing health. Other officials have likened it to a surgical process, cleanly cutting out the carmakers’ creditors. In fact it is likely to be far messier with mass lay-offs and cries of foul from aggrieved creditors. (关于申请破产的评价) Otherwise why not begin the process immediately? It may be the lingering fear that a patient going under the knife does not always pull through.

The economy

A faint sound of applause

Apr 2nd 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Some signs suggest that the recession is lifting, but the path to recovery is fraught with danger（充满危险）

Getty Images

THE current recession has broken many of the rules of business cycles, but not this one: when something gets cheap enough, buyers emerge.

America’s housing bubble seems mostly deflated. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index, house prices through January were down 29% from their all-time peak. Relative to incomes, houses are now 10% undervalued, and relative to rents they are fairly valued, thinks Paul Dales of Capital Economics, a consultancy.

This is luring buyers back. House sales rose unexpectedly in February. The National Association of Realtors estimates that up to 45% of existing homes sold were “distressed” properties—those in, or close to, foreclosure. In Nevada, which with California, Florida and Arizona was the epicentre of the boom and bust, fourth-quarter sales were more than double their level a year earlier. Keith Kelley, a Las Vegas estate agent, has an investor interested in offering about $80,000 for a foreclosed, four-unit apartment building which, fully let, could bring in over $25,000 a year in gross rent. He has two buyers interested in paying $220,000 for a five-bedroom house that sold in 2004 for more than triple that. Their monthly mortgage payment would be about half the rent on a similar property. Even so, he says, “I still talk to buyers waiting to see when we get to the bottom.” Indeed, homes may be fairly valued now but could get dirt cheap if, as commonly happens, prices overshoot.

The stabilising of the housing market is one of several tantalising glimmers（急促短小的闪光） that the end of the recession may be in sight. In March factory purchasing managers were their least gloomy about new orders since last August. Vehicle sales rose 8% in March from February. New claims for unemployment insurance have stopped rising. Gross domestic product, which shrank at a 6.3% annual rate in the fourth quarter, probably shrank at a similar rate in the first, but the composition of the drop was more encouraging; it was driven not by the collapse in consumer spending, but by sinking output as businesses sought to bring inventories into line with lower sales. Second-quarter growth “has a good chance of being positive”, according to Ian Morris and Ryan Wang, economists at HSBC, though “the risks…are still huge.”

What has brought this turnabout? In part, the normal corrective powers of the economy. Larry Summers, Barack Obama’s main economic adviser, has noted that current annualised vehicle sales of about 9m are well below the 14m necessary for replacement and rising population, while annualised housing starts are about a quarter of the rate needed to support the forming of new households.

The improvement is also the expected response to monetary and fiscal stimulus, both of which have been exceptionally aggressive. The Federal Reserve, having lowered short-term interest rates in effect to zero, has intervened in bond markets to push down long-term mortgage rates as well. On April 1st paycheques were due to begin reflecting the tax cuts in Barack Obama’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus.

As investors have shifted their economic outlook from catastrophic to merely grim, the stockmarket has shot higher, by 19% on April 1st from its 12-year low on March 9th. Like houses, stocks look cheap. Strategists at Deutsche Bank estimate that investors can expect to earn an additional seven percentage points over the long run from holding stocks instead of Treasury bonds, the highest such “equity risk premium” in at least 25 years. Mr Summers says it may be “the sale of the century”.

Yet even if the bottom in economic activity is in sight, a robust recovery almost certainly is not. Housing usually leads the way out of recession as falling interest rates unleash pent-up demand. But easy credit in earlier years has turned many renters into homeowners already. At the end of last year 67.5% of households owned their home, down from a peak of 69% in 2006 but still well above the 64% that prevailed from 1965 to 1997. Moreover, many prospective buyers cannot take advantage of low mortgage rates because higher down-payments are now required.

The tonic of lower interest rates has been dulled by the dysfunctional financial system. That is why credit markets have not reflected the optimism of stocks and are forcing corporations to pay punitive yields on the bonds they issue (see chart).

Consumer spending may also be depressed for some years to come by the record 18% collapse in household net worth over the course of last year, a drop of $11 trillion. That is a chief reason why the OECD on March 31st released an exceptionally gloomy prognosis, predicting that the American economy would shrink by 4% this year and not grow at all next year. Deflation, it said, “may become a threat”.

The greatest risk of renewed recession or stagnation comes from the banking system. As long as home prices keep falling and unemployment keeps rising, banks’ bad loans will keep mounting. Huge questions hang over the Treasury’s plan to remove those loans, and many economists think it must commit more public capital than the already authorised $700 billion in TARP money. Perversely, a continued stockmarket rally could undermine the chances of more aid, lulling some in Washington to believe enough has been done.

Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, understands that. “The big mistake governments make in recessions”, he said on March 29th, “is…they see that first glimmer of light, and the impetus to policy fades.” Yet he hurt his own case the same day by saying that more TARP money is not needed for now because some banks will repay the government capital they have previously received. That is bad news, not good news: banks are lining up to repay the money to free themselves from political interference, even though the loss of capital will constrain their lending. That increases the odds of a multi-year, Japanese-style credit crunch.

Even if the administration wants the money, Congress at present is in no mood to grant it. The Senate and House budget resolutions were silent on the administration’s request for $750 billion in extra funds (with a budgeted cost of $250 billion). The administration is wisely waiting for tempers to cool before asking for the money.

４．９

Germany's Constitutional Court

Judgment days

Mar 26th 2009 | KARLSRUHE
From The Economist print edition

The little-known judges on Germany’s Constitutional Court exert real influence, not only at home but also abroad

WHEN the principality of Baden merged with two others to form Baden-Württemberg in 1951, its former capital, Karlsruhe, was given a consolation prize: the Constitutional Court of the new federal republic. Modestly housed in squat blocks, the court is far from the capital, Berlin. Yet the federal government (and the states) are forever grappling with its edicts. Any toughening of police powers to deal with terrorism seems to provoke objections in Karlsruhe. So do lesser matters, such as whether commuters can deduct transport costs from taxes or whether bars can let smokers light up. “The Constitutional Court is often called the third chamber of the legislature,” notes Dieter Grimm, a former judge. “There is something in it.”

Now the court is to rule on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, which critics say could put the judges out of business. In February it heard arguments that the treaty would give the EU the attributes of a state without making it democratically accountable, and would sap the court’s powers to protect the fundamental rights of Germans. Yet few court-watchers expect the judges to throw Lisbon out. Germany’s EU membership is enshrined in the constitution; and the court has long-standing partnerships with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Lisbon would tilt the balance of power a bit toward Luxembourg, but not as far as its opponents fear. Judges on the Constitutional Court will not discuss the case, but its vice-president, Andreas Vosskuhle, notes that Germany has often gained influence through the EU. He is right. Moreover, even as the Constitutional Court has been shaping post-war Germany, German jurisprudence has spread to affect Europe and much of the world.

The Constitutional Court is in some people’s eyes Germany’s most powerful institution. Almost 80% of Germans trust it; less than half have confidence in the federal government and the Bundestag, the lower house. Although a political player, the court is seen to be above politics. Parties nominate judges, but they are usually approved unanimously（全体同意） by the legislature. Unlike America’s Supreme Court justices, Germany’s seek consensus and seldom write dissenting opinions. （寻求舆论的意见，几乎没有反对的）Any citizen may bring a constitutional case, an antidote to Nazi notions of justice, and some 6,000 a year do so.

The court is revered（说服） partly because Germans’ affinity for the rule of law is greater than for democracy德国人对法律法规的爱好远多于民主, some scholars say. Germany’s “constitutional patriotism” resembles the American idea of a nation founded on rights and values（法律的目的）. But Germans have a different notion of these. American rights—to bear arms and speak freely, for example—are “small and hard”, argues Georg Nolte, a scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin. Germany’s, by contrast, are “fat and flexible”.

The German constitution, or basic law, which will mark its 60th birthday on May 23rd, is a never-again document. Its first article declares that “human dignity shall be inviolable”. It endows Germany with a weak president and strong state governments. Its freedoms do not extend to those who would destroy freedom, which may explain how Holocaust-denial can be a crime despite freedom of speech.

The court has elaborated rights that the constitution’s authors never envisaged. The Lüth decision of 1958 held that constitutional rights affect citizens’ relations not just with the state but also with each other, a judgment so far-reaching as to be termed a “juridical coup d’état”. The court developed a notion of the “duty to protect” basic rights from threats stemming from private action or social forces. In 1983 the court created a right for individuals to control their personal information. Last year, when considering plans to snoop on the computers of suspected terrorists, it found a right to the “integrity of information-technology systems”. “German society is over-constitutionalised,” observes Donald Kommers, of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

Hans-Jürgen Papier, the court’s president, thinks its reputation for activism is exaggerated. Since 1951 it has judged laws, or parts of laws, unconstitutional in just 611 cases, a small fraction of the number it has considered. But it happens enough to keep the government busy. Recently, for example, it told the government to reinstate a tax deduction for commuters who live near their jobs, one of a number of tax rulings（支配，统治，裁决） that is causing the finance minister heartburn（妒忌）. The court did not say that commuting costs must be tax-deductible, only that treating people who live close to work differently from those who live far away was unconstitutional.

Friction has increased over the balance between freedom and security. On rights it deems absolute, the court is implacable. In 2006 it said the air force could not shoot down a plane commandeered by terrorists even to prevent a greater disaster. The court often tells lawmakers to do a better job of balancing means and ends（收支平衡）. A decision striking down a state law allowing investigators to monitor suspects’ computers ruled that such powers are permitted only with a judge’s warrant and evidence of a grave crime. That was meant to be a warning to the federal government, which was preparing its own law. Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister, has occasionally struck back; last year he grumbled that some of the judges’ musings were “not democratically legitimate”. Mr Papier says that such tensions between the court and the executive are not new.

In a world densely populated with rights, every legal act is likely to infringe at least one other. The court uses “proportionality” to decide what can be allowed. The judges subject any infringement to a whole gamut of tests. The answers reveal, for example, where a journalist’s right to free speech ends and a citizen’s right to privacy begins. Possessing a little cannabis is fine, says proportionality, because law enforcement must be balanced against the right to “free development of personality”.

Invented by Prussia in the 18th century to limit the Kaiser’s power, proportionality has influenced constitutions from Canada’s to South Africa’s. Mr Nolte calls it “the prime example of the migration of constitutional ideas”. Even America’s Supreme Court, which employs its own form of rights-balancing, is taking an interest. Justice Stephen Breyer referred to proportionality in a recent opinion on gun control, provoking scholarly excitement.

In the meshing of the German constitution with European law, proportionality provides a lubricant. Each side is jealous of its prerogatives but eager to avoid confrontation. Since 1974 Karlsruhe has made the transfer of powers to Europe conditional on the protection of Germans’ basic rights; if these are infringed, the court insists, it can reclaim them. The ECJ, meanwhile, acts as the “motor of European integration” (and on human-rights issues Strasbourg has the last word). Think of an Alexander Calder mobile rather than a pyramid, suggests Renate Jaeger, the German judge on the human-rights court. Occasionally there are conflicts. Strasbourg told the German court that its pro-paparazzi ruling in a case brought by Princess Caroline of Monaco struck the wrong balance between press freedom and privacy. In February the ECJ upheld an EU directive on data collection, using defence of the single market as justification for what looked to Germans like a public-security matter. That raised hackles in Germany.

Lisbon, if ratified, will change things, by giving the European Commission and the ECJ a bigger role in justice and security affairs. Rainer Nickel of the University of Frankfurt foresees a “quantum leap” in the erosion of the Constitutional Court’s powers. But judges are more sanguine（有希望的）. European courts collaborate closely and there is little reason for this to change, whether Lisbon is ratified or not. “It’s a shared learning process,” Mr Vosskuhle argues.

He will become the court’s youngest-ever president when Mr Papier retires next year. Karlsruhe, he thinks, will
have its hands full coping with the implications of new technologies such as genetic engineering, with “sustainability issues” like demography and climate change and with growing threats to “equal living conditions” across Germany, another constitutional issue.（很好的例子啊） It seems certain that there will be life after Lisbon.

How Neil Strauss became Mr Doom

Barack Obama and nuclear weapons

Peace, love and understanding

Apr 6th 2009 | PRAGUE
From Economist.com

Barack Obama proposes a world free of nuclear weapons

AFP/Shutterstock

AMERICA has the “moral responsibility” to lead a campaign to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, Barack Obama told a cheering crowd in Prague on Sunday April 5th. He offered the world a goal of eradicating nuclear weapons, although he admitted that it might not be achieved in his lifetime.

Two decades earlier, in the Velvet revolution of 1989, Czechs brought down a nuclear-armed empire without a shot,（捷克政变） Mr Obama told an audience of some 20,000 people who had gathered in the shadow of Prague castle. Most of the youthful spectators, who had waited since before dawn to hear the American president, were too young to remember the cold war or the Prague Spring of 1968.

He described a 21st century in which nuclear powers agreed to reduce arsenals, countries without nuclear weapons pledged not to acquire them and all countries enjoyed the right to civilian nuclear power, ideally drawing their fuel from a tightly controlled “international fuel bank”.对于核的希望

He drew rather louder applause when he echoed the soaring rhetoric of his presidential campaign, suggesting that his election to office is the achievement that most inspired his audience. He earned resounding cheers when he talked about the turns of history that had allowed “someone like me” to become America’s president.

Mr Obama said that America would seek a legally binding treaty with （寻求一种合法的条约）Russia on reducing stockpiles of strategic arms by the end of the year. His administration would also “immediately and aggressively” seek American ratification of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.

As a first step towards outlawing nuclear weapons, America should seek a new treaty that verifiably ended the production of fissile materials “intended for use in state nuclear weapons”. Existing non-proliferation agreements should be buttressed with beefed up inspections and “real and immediate consequences” for countries caught breaking the rules.

The president told the crowd that al-Qaeda wanted to obtain a nuclear bomb and described the prospect of nuclear-armed terrorists as the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security”. This hawkish talk did not impress his audience, who reacted with silence.

Working with Russia, Mr Obama went on, America would launch a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world and work to thwart those smuggling such materials. America would host a summit on nuclear security within the next 12 months. But as long as nuclear weapons existed, America would maintain an arsenal powerful enough to deter any adversary and guarantee that defence to allies.

Other details were left distinctly vague. Mr Obama did not spell out what the “consequences” for rule-breaking nations might include. Hours before Mr Obama spoke in Prague, North Korea, the secretive Stalinist state, launched a long-range rocket apparently capable of being used as a missile. Mr Obama told the crowd this “provocation” underscored the need for (unspecified) action at the United Nations Security Council.

Czechs in the crowd were divided in their reactions when the American leader reiterated his support for an anti-missile defence system designed to ward off the threat from Iranian ballistic missiles.

“As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile-defence system that is cost-effective and proven,” Mr Obama said, using wording that seemed to allow him wriggle room should missile-defence technology not prove its worth. If the Iranian threat were eliminated, the driving force for missile defence-construction in Europe would be “removed”, Mr Obama added.

He continued his day in Prague by meeting the 27 leaders of the European Union’s member nations for a brief summit hosted by the Czech government, which holds the rotating six-month presidency of the EU, a task somewhat complicated by the collapse of that same government in a failed confidence vote late last month. Tensions showed. A plea from Mr Obama to “anchor” Turkey in Europe by pressing ahead with talks on admitting Turkey to the EU earned a public rebuke from Nicolas Sarkozy, who said that was a matter for members of the EU. In line with his country’s public opinion, he believes Turkey should never be given full membership of the European club.

The environment

Biofools

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Farming biofuels produces nitrous oxide. This is bad for climate change

MANY people consider the wider use of biofuels a promising way of reducing the amount of surplus carbon dioxide (CO2) being pumped into the air by the world’s mechanised transport. The theory is that plants such as sugar cane, maize (corn, to Americans), oilseed rape and wheat take up CO2 during their growth, so burning fuels made from them should have no net effect（连锁反应） on the amount of that gas in the atmosphere. Biofuels, therefore, should not contribute to global warming.

Theory, though, does not always translate into practice, and just as governments have committed themselves to the greater use of biofuels (see table), questions are being raised about how green this form of energy really is. The latest come from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.

The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of biofuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as maize and rape probably negates by itself any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.

Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around longer. The upshot is that, over the course of a century, its ability to warm the planet is almost 300 times that of an equivalent mass of CO2. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who was involved in writing the ICSU report, said that although the methods used by Dr Crutzen could be criticised, his fundamental conclusions were correct.

N2O is made by bacteria that live in soil and water and, these days, their raw material is often the nitrogen-rich fertiliser that modern farming requires. Since the 1960s the amount of fertiliser used by farmers has increased sixfold, and not all of that extra nitrogen ends up in their crops. Maize, in particular, is described by experts in the field as a “nitrogen-leaky” plant because it has shallow roots and takes up nitrogen for only a few months of the year. This would make maize (which is one of the main sources of biofuel) a particularly bad contributor to global N2O emissions.

But it is not just biofuels that are to blame. The ICSU report suggests N2O emissions in general are probably more important than had been realised. Previous studies, including those by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-appointed body of experts, may have miscalculated their significance—and according to Adrian Williams of Cranfield University, in Britain, even the IPCC’s approach suggests that the global-warming potential of most of Britain’s annual crops is dominated by N2O emissions.

The broader issue, therefore, is the extent to which humanity has hijacked the “nitrogen cycle”, as the passage of that gas into and out of the atmosphere is known, for its own use. Alan Townsend, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of those trying to calculate the extent of this change. What seems certain is that the nitrogen cycle is changing faster and more profoundly than the carbon cycle, which has attracted much more attention.

This week Dr Townsend, and others involved in something called the International Nitrogen Initiative, are meeting in Paris to try to organise an international assessment of what is going on. This would do for nitrogen what the IPCC has done for carbon. To some, worries about nitrogen will doubtless seem to be no more than the latest environmental bandwagon. But the case of biofuels shows that without proper consideration of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2, it is too easy to rush headlong into轻率行动 expensive methods of mitigation(缓解) that actually make things worse.