Current Table of Contents

• Green.view: A is for earth
  

  The world will soon know more about carbon dioxide

  SINCE the start of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere has increased by about 25%—from about 280 parts per million to over 370 parts per million. As concerns over climate change increase, scientists are being asked difficult questions about the extent to which carbon is being put into, and taken out of, the atmosphere. Precise answers to questions like these is necessary to reliably forecast changes in earth’s climate. But there are massive gaps in our understanding of what happens to carbon dioxide after it has been produced.

  Unfortunately, essential data on the geographic distribution of CO2 does not yet exist. Currently, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, based in the United States, monitors emissions from a global network of ground-based sites. But there are not enough stations to give the kind of resolution that climate modelers need. Consequently, the processes that regulate the exchange of CO2 between the oceans, atmosphere and biosphere are poorly known. This is a problem. For example, current measurements from ground stations suggest that only half of the CO2 released into the atmosphere has remained there. There rest has been absorbed by the oceans and land-based ecosystems, but understanding where, how and why this happens is difficult without more data. ...

• Market.view: Unintended consequences
  

  Central banks may be forced into action

  HERE comes the cavalry, part two. In recent months, authorities have been relying on fiscal measures, bank bailouts and money-market interventions to try to solve the credit crunch. Higher-than-desired headline inflation meant they were reluctant to cut interest rates. Now it looks as if they will have to turn to monetary policy after all.

  A series of pretty dreadful economic statistics has given them no choice. The odds of a 50 basis point (half a percentage point) cut in the Fed funds rate rose to 90% on Friday, on the basis of futures-market prices. On Thursday, a more dovish tone from the European Central Bank suggested that the inflation hawks in Frankfurt might be willing to give ground soon. And three quarters of analysts polled by Bloomberg believe the Bank of England will cut rates on October 9th. ...

• Art.view: A happening in Paris
  

  Auctioning off the remains of a chanteur's life

  JACQUES BREL (pictured below) was a celebrated French chanteur with a lean, well-lived-in face, best known for the sad songs he wrote about people who were unfulfilled in love and life. He was a romantic figure, a drinker and a smoker, who died of lung cancer at the age of 49 and was buried in Polynesia within a few yards of Paul Gauguin's grave. The flavour of his work is well captured by the lyrics of one of his best-known songs, called “Amsterdam”: "In the port of Amsterdam/ there are sailors who weep/ who weep without making tears/ who cry inside themselves". David Bowie, an English rock singer, liked the song well enough to record it.

  Next week in Paris, Sotheby's is auctioning the manuscript of “Amsterdam”. It is expected to be the most expensive lot—estimated at €50,000-70,000 ($79,500-112,000)—in a remarkably comprehensive sale of Brel's manuscripts, recordings, photographs and personal belongings, which include his pilots' licence, his wallet, and his pipe. Sotheby's refuses to identify the seller, but it is clearly an intimate of Brel's who believed that his reputation would last a lot longer than that of an ephemeral pop singer. ...

• Tech.view: Land of milk and money
  

  China finds melamine and milk don't mix

  AS AN industrial chemical, melamine has many genuinely useful applications. But a protein booster for milk is not one of them. How melamine got into baby food in China, killing four infants and sickening 54,000 to date, is a scandalous tale of greed, criminal negligence, political cover-up and shoddy science.

  Melamine is used to make durable work-surfaces for kitchen cabinets and bathroom furniture, and is formed into heat-resistant jugs, bowls, dinnerware, and other household items. To be accurate, such products are made not from melamine, but from melamine resin—a thermosetting plastic produced by combining melamine with formaldehyde. ...

• Europe.view: Pipelines and pyramids
  

  The world's headache becomes eastern Europe's migraine

  WHAT does the collapse of the pyramid scheme formerly known as the western financial system mean for the ex-communist world? The short-term answer is bad, and the longer-term answer even worse.

  In the 1990s, a downturn in western markets proved to be surprisingly good news for new Europe: rich-world managers wanting to cut costs turned to outsourcing in countries that they had previously seen as too risky. The burgeoning private sector in the former planned economies had a huge productivity advantage: lots of under-employed and well-educated workers who regarded salaries of a few hundred dollars a month as a fortune. Low costs compensated for bad infrastructure (remember those dreadful telephones?) stifling bureaucracy (“I’ll be at the customs office all day”) inexperienced management (team-building exercises, anyone?) and a rudimentary banking system (“Cash only, please”). ...

• Asia.view: Calm panic
  

  Bad times can be good for good governments

  AS THE territory’s officials love to boast, Hong Kong truly is a global city. Typically, this is a huge benefit, as it means energy, intellect and products from the world are easily available. But in times like this, it also means slogging through the global muck.

  On September 29th, a major local supermarket chain pulled from its shelves a number of the world’s most popular treats—M&Ms, Snickers, Oreos, and a slew of Cadbury products—after concerns were raised that they all contained melamine, a poisonous industrial chemical added to milk in China to disguise dilution. A day later, Lipton joined the list. ...

• Business.view: The first law of banking
  

  Don't ask if your money is safe

  GIVEN that you should never shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, it was perhaps unwise of your correspondent to walk into his local branch of JPMorgan Chase and ask, “Could somebody please explain the deposit insurance rules to me? I want to know if my money will be alright if the bank goes bust.”

  “Could you come with me, sir?” was the cashier’s urgent reply, leading me briskly out of the public area where the question might alarm other customers. Once in a private room, she visibly relaxed. She explained that before the past few days, nobody had asked about the deposit rules in years—in fact, the first time she was asked, she had to look them up. ...

• Green.view: Testing metal
  

  When thinking globally requires unpleasant action locally

  LAST Thursday, at a conference on aluminium smelting in Germany, environmental activists tripped the fire alarms. Later, they set off a deafening rape alarm in the main auditorium, and suspended it out of reach of the indignant organisers using helium balloons. They also chucked in a few stink bombs, and scattered leaflets among the bewildered crowd.

  Protesters from the same group have chained themselves to machinery, suspended banners from building facades and blockaded construction sites, to name just a few of the activities that have got them arrested, all in the name of “Saving Iceland”, as their organisation is called. Their grievance is simple: they do not think that power companies should be building dams and drilling wells for geothermal plants in pristine parts of Iceland, simply to provide power for aluminium smelters. ...

• Market.view: Oiling the system
  

  It may seem unfair, but a bailout is essential

  SUSPICION of banks is a recurrent historical theme, from President Andrew Jackson’s opposition to “money power” in the early 19th century, to the British Labour party’s suspicion of the “bankers’ ramp” that forced it from office in 1931.

  So there is a natural temptation to think that the current crisis may be entirely artificial, a device dreamed up by bankers to help them out of a hole. But if there is a conspiracy, it is extremely well organised and extraordinarily risky. ...

• Art.view: Her little paradise
  

  Selling a garden from root to blossom

  THE auction taking place on October 4th in a nursery garden in rural France, 60km from Angers and the Loire, is almost certainly unique. There will be 210 lots of rare and collectible trees from the 10-acre (four hectare) nursery at Domaine des Rochettes which has been lovingly created by a friendly but formidable French woman named Ghislain de Preaulx-Carlo.

  Francis Briest, of Artcurial Briest-Poulain-F.Tajan, a Parisian auction house, believes it to be the first tree sale in Europe or the United States. The auction’s only distant precedent was Sotheby’s sale of Wollemi pines, newly discovered survivors of the Jurassic period, in Sydney in 2005, when the top lot of 20 young trees fetched A$149,187 ($125,000). ...

• Tech.view: From toilet to tap
  

  Thank Prince Albert for clean water and drains

  FEW would imagine that Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, is one of the fathers of public health and modern technology. And yet the industrial world—and Britain, in particular—owe this undemonstrative and devoted family man from Coburg a debt of gratitude far greater than the many monuments, bridges and concert halls erected in his honour.

  Apart from insisting that all the profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851 be used to establish museums and colleges in nearby South Kensington, Albert played a vigorous part in creating—and staffing with leading German chemists—the forerunner of the technological powerhouse that became Imperial College. ...

• Europe.view: Frontlines and backtracks
  

  Laying down the law, or just laying down?

  WHETHER you look at soft or hard power, Europe’s ability to defend itself appears wobbly. A poll in the Financial Times this week showed that German public opinion strongly opposes the use of force to defend the Baltic states, even if they come under military attack from Russia. True, that is not an imminent threat, and probably never will be. But it hardly sends a comforting signal to the hard men and hotheads in Russia who may think that such a stunt would have a chance of success.

  Things are also looking pretty gloomy at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. As the custodian of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Council has perhaps the best claim to be the repository of the ideals of liberty and justice on which Europe likes to think its civilisation is based. ...

• Asia.view: Devil's bargain
  

  Hunger once again stalks North Korea

  IN RECENT weeks, the list of unknowns about North Korea has shot up. Kim Jong Il, the country’s 66-year-old dictator, has been out of sight since early August. Is he dead? Paralysed with a stroke? Or is he merely lying low in order to draw international attention to his regime’s antics?

  If the second, is he still in charge of the country, and if so are the Dear Leader’s inchoate utterances being parsed by his younger but presumably powerful consort, Kim Ok, rather like Mao Zedong’s young nurses guarding the bedchamber during the Great Helmsman’s last days? As for the six-country process to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions: does the regime’s threat this past week to get the Yongbyon nuclear reactor up and running again represent an abandonment of that process, or is it merely bluster in order to extract bigger concessions from the United States? ...

• Business.view: Virtuous in New York
  

  Giving while Wall Street burns

  IT IS not just the financial system that is melting down in New York. Traffic in the city will also grind to a halt. While the after effects of misdirected greed paralyse Wall Street, an influx of self-proclaimed do-gooders will cause the gridlock on the roads.

  On Monday morning, the bell of the Nasdaq stock exchange was rung by Bob Harrison, chief executive of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which holds its annual meeting this week—an event The Economist has dubbed the Philanthropy Oscars. At the same time, the United Nations is holding its annual General Assembly, including a special session on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals for reducing poverty, at which one of the world’s pre-eminent philanthropists, Bill Gates, is expected to make a big announcement about his mission to eradicate malaria. ...

• Green.view: The greening of gardening
  

  Horticulture will change as the climate does

  GARDENS are more than just yard decorations for the green-thumbed: they also express a worldview. As concern over climate change grows, environmentally sensitive gardens are becoming more popular. Many gardeners try to conserve water and avoid the use of pesticides, preferring instead biological controls, manual removal and companion planting, in which certain plants are grown next to each other to protect both from pests or diseases. Commendable as these measures are, they are only a beginning.

  Gardens need not change in the way that a natural ecosystem must in response to climate change. With humans around to pluck out unwanted weeds and provide nutrition, garden plants are cosseted, and thrive in non-optimum conditions, because they are not subject to the struggle for existence that plants in the wild are. ...

• Market.view: Bright spot
  

  British equities look promising

  BARGAIN hunters in equities will have noticed an encouraging sign last week. On September 17th, the yield on British equities, as measured by the FTSE All-Share index, was higher than the yield on 10-year gilts (see chart). This last happened in March 2003, just at the start of a rally in the London market that saw it double over four years.

  Why does this matter? Dividends grow over time whereas the interest on government bonds is fixed. Admittedly, a good deal of dividend income comes from the banks, which will cut their payouts. But oil and telecom companies are also good payers, and across the entire market, dividends are more than twice covered by profits. ...

• Art.view: Winds of change
  

  Damien Hirst and the future of auction houses

  “AUCTION rooms are democratic”, Damien Hirst told The Economist just before the two-day sale of 223 of his new works at Sotheby’s London branch last week. “That’s what I like about them. Anyone with enough money can buy what they want—immediately. They just have to be prepared to make that final bid.”

  But democratic is not the same as open. ...

• Tech.view: Blind man at the brake
  

  A little automation could save lives

  TIME and again, evidence shows computer-controlled vehicles have fewer accidents than those driven by people. Still, we have a pathological reluctance to surrender control. We seem to find all-too-frequent deaths caused by human carelessness somehow preferable to the obscure possibility of death by bloodless automaton.

  The rail crash on September 12th—America’s deadliest in 15 years—would have been wholly preventable had an electronic controller been allowed to intercede. Instead, a Metrolink commuter train heading north from Los Angeles with 220 people on board collided head-on with a southbound Union Pacific freight train, killing 25 people and injuring 135 more. ...

• Europe.view: Keep calm and carry on
  

  Giant spiders will not attack Estonia—official

  THE Baltic states are full members of NATO. In theory, that means they need worry about external threats no more than any other NATO member. If they come under threat from, say, Russia, they are entitled to exactly the same protection under Article IV (political support) and Article V (military support) as any other country in the alliance.

  But viewed from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania it doesn’t quite feel that way. Baltic officials have been privately and semi-publicly urging NATO to increase its visible presence in the Baltic states, both in terms of planes, ships and soldiers, and through high-profile visits. If the response is cool, they question the alliance’s resolve. ...