Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 598

Support Swells for British Fracking

When David Cameron’s Conservative party rolled its way through elections this spring, we surmised that the new government, unencumbered by the demands of coalition politics, might be capable of kick-starting British shale production. Cameron has long been a fracking booster, and his appointment of shale-friendly Amber Rudd as his new energy minister signaled a renewed commitment to the controversial drilling technique. Rudd wasted little time getting to work, last month unveiling a plan to expedite the local approval process, one of the biggest hurdles to British shale development thus far.

But the Conservative party isn’t the only one touting the potential benefits of exploiting Britain’s estimated 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet of shale gas. In what can only be read as a boon to fracking’s political clout, Labour’s shadow energy minister has cautioned greens against their opposition. The BBC reports:

Bryony Worthington – now Labour shadow energy minister – says fracking will create less CO2 than compressing gas in Qatar and shipping it to Britain. […]

“We have to be realistic,” she told BBC News. “We are going to be using gas for a long time because of the huge role it plays for heating homes and for industry. “The important thing is to minimize the carbon emissions from gas. That means if we can get our own fracked gas, it’s better to use that than importing gas that’s been compressed at great energy cost somewhere else.”

Her point is a valid one—domestically sourcing natural gas from shale formations could potentially cut British emissions by displacing LNG imports, which necessarily involve energy-intensive liquefaction processes and international shipping. Moreover, boosting domestic production could help shore up the UK’s energy security, which is currently being threatened by rapidly declining North Sea oil production. As the Telegraph explains, plunging oil prices are tightening the screws on an already struggling region:

Falling oil prices could lead to the closure of 140 fields in the North Sea over the next five years as operators accelerate plans for decommissioning amid drastic cost cutting, [leading energy consultancy Wood MacKenzie] has warned…Even a partial recovery to around $70 a barrel would leave 50 oil fields facing early closure, the Edinburgh-based firm said.

The UK has the shale reserves, it has the environmental, economic, and strategic incentives to tap it, and now, it seems, it has the political will necessary to overcome the local intransigence that has so far forestalled any UK shale boom. Will it be able to follow America’s lead? We’ll be watching.

Obama Doubles Down on Free Community College

With his second term waning, and with college affordability emerging as an increasingly important issue in the Democratic primary, President Obama is redoubling his push for the free community college initiative he unveiled at this year’s State of the Union. The president traveled to Michigan yesterday to rally support for the $70 billion program and announce the creation of a new College Promise Advisory Board, led by Second Lady Jill Biden. The Detroit Free Press reports:

Giving students two years of free community college is simply an extension of America’s historical emphasis on the importance of education, President Barack Obama told a crowd of about 1,000 at Macomb Community College.

Referencing previous federal efforts to increase educational opportunities for Americans, including the GI Bill, Obama tried to reinvigorate his plan to give at least two years of free community college to students who maintain a high grade point average.Accompanied by Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden and herself a community college professor, Obama announced an independent College Promise Advisory Board, led by Biden, that will highlight existing programs providing free community college. The board will try to recruit more states and communities to do likewise and will also enlist celebrities in a public awareness campaign to press for tuition-free community college.

President Obama’s position is relatively moderate in the context of current presidential primary politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed making community college and four-year public colleges entirely taxpayer-funded. Hillary Clinton has endorsed Obama’s free community college plan, as well as putting forward a $350 billion debt-free tuition plan of her own.

All of these initiatives, however, are typical of blue model thinking: They represent misguided efforts to double down on an existing system that worked in the past, but works less well today—rather than shooting for something more suited to the modern labor market and economic landscape.Community college completion rates are extremely low. Just a quarter of people who enroll in a community college class today will have a degree in the next five years, and many enrollees require remedial coursework. There is little reason to think that pouring even more government funds into a system that allows so many students to fall through the cracks will be particularly effective. Moreover, there is the problem of diminishing returns: Since 44 percent of the population already earns an associate or a bachelor’s degree, it’s likely that the remaining 56 percent would probably benefit less from an associate degree, even though it is just as expensive to get them one. In short, as we wrote in April, the president’s community college plan “spend[s] money we don’t have offering programs that are unlikely to work very well for people whom the educational system has already failed to reach for 12 years.”Another element of the agenda the president pitched in Michigan, however, looks more promising:

He also announced $175 million in Department of Labor grants across the country to help with apprenticeships, with awards going to 46 organizations, institutions and businesses pledging to train workers in health care, information technology, advanced manufacturing and more.

On-the-job training programs are probably a better use of resources for many (though, of course, not all) of the students who would be affected by Obama’s free community college plan. Further credentialing is not always the answer; apprenticeship programs focused narrowly on career development can serve many students well, creating a path to good jobs for young Americans who aren’t interested in spending years on a college campus. To be sure, a German-style apprenticeship model, for example, probably can’t work as well here as it does in Europe, but exploring new vocational tracks and models could help spark initiatives that do work here. Local, state, and federal policymakers should be focused on this kind of experimentation, rather than on rearguard actions to prop up an old and inefficient system.

Clinton Tacks to the Right of President Obama on Foreign Policy

Hillary Clinton unveiled her foreign policy in a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, laying out positions that are more activist than the Obama Administration’s stances, despite putting her shoulder behind the Iran deal. The NYT reports:

[M]ost of her speech and discussion afterward was an effort to navigate a careful line between claiming credit for the Iran deal while also expressing skepticism by positioning herself as tougher than her former boss and perhaps more devoted to keeping rifts with Israel from breaking out into the open. She was clearly positioning herself as the candidate best poised to take on Iran’s challenge and influence in the Middle East.

“Distrust and verify” would be her approach, she insisted, turning Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” line about the Soviet Union on its head. She went on to describe Iran as a “ruthless, brutal regime,” words far harsher than Mr. Obama has used as he has sought to coax the Iranians along in the years of perilous diplomacy. She added, “I will not hesitate to take military action” if Iran seeks to obtain a nuclear bomb despite its commitments, a deliberately stronger formulation than Mr. Obama’s “all options are on the table.”

She also implied criticism of the president’s handling of Vladimir Putin:

[Mrs. Clinton] sought to distinguish herself from the president on foreign policy, calling for a tough reassessment of American policy toward Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and she seemed, by implication, to suggest that the Obama administration had not responded strongly enough to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing military action in Ukraine. She noted the recent reports of Russian troops in Syria and argued “we need a concerted effort to up the costs on Russia and Putin — I am in the camp that we have not done enough.”

Polls show a deep dissatisfaction with America’s current foreign policy approach, and Hillary is showing she’s aware of that. Furthermore, her own instincts on foreign policy are significantly to the right of President Obama’s. She has a hard line to walk: Much of the Democratic base is closer to the president’s position, but distancing herself from the president on Russia and Iran will help her in the general election—and reflects her personal views. Moreover, her GOP opponents are going to tag her with the Libya mess, and her endorsement of the Iran deal, however nuanced and finely parsed, will be another controversial stance in 2016.

Nevertheless, Clinton has staked out a foreign policy position that differs significantly from the stance of the man she served as Secretary of State.

Shale Stumbles Abroad

Shale has transformed America’s energy landscape virtually overnight. In 2005, the U.S. was producing just over 5 million barrels of oil per day; today, that number is well over 9 million. This energy renaissance has prompted no shortage of hand-wringing from the world’s petrostates, jealous of their share of an increasingly crowded global market, and it’s also kicked off a race to see who might be able to catch up to the American boom. And though the U.S. doesn’t have the world’s largest shale reserves, it remains the only country reaping the benefits of commercial production. Why?

The answer, in brief: Shale’s success relies on much more than possessing the resource, and so far no other nation has been able to replicate the long list of necessary ingredients for really benefitting from shale (that includes favorable geology, deep capital markets, a healthy drilling services industry, the space in which to drill, landowner possession of mineral rights to help circumvent local opposition, access to water, and, as we’ve seen most recently, the ability to get off the ground during a period of sustained high oil prices).Approximating those conditions abroad, however, is not impossible, and countries like China, Argentina, Russia, the UK, and even Saudi Arabia are working on doing so. So how are they doing? So far, the results of their efforts have been uneven, as a FT report on the global state of play for shale shows. The U.K. and Russia, for example, have seen domestic opposition to shale and U.S. sanctions, respectively, limit their pursuit of the resource—though Gazprom has decided to open a Siberian play to development in 2018. Saudi Arabia is faced with water shortages that challenge its ability to extract the resource, but the country nevertheless believes it can increase its output to 500 million cubic feet per day by 2018. According to the FT, China has done the best, after the U.S. The story cites the case of the Fuling field, where “Sinopec, one of the large state-controlled oil groups, has increased production faster than ex­pected, reaching 460m cu ft a day last June.”This halting, intermittent progress probably isn’t what the companies and governments keen on following the American example were hoping for when they first started chasing the shale bandwagon. For the near future, that is, shale seems set to remain an American-dominated phenomenon—and it could remain so for even longer if global oil prices stay as low as they now are.

Europe’s Refugee Crisis Is Also a Migrant Crisis

“Don’t ask me why I’m leaving. Let me ask you in return—for what should I stay?”, one would-be Iraqi immigrant asked the Wall Street Journal. These words could well serve as the epitaph of a generation that is fleeing the Middle East—and they point out why Europe’s immigration trouble is likely far from over. As European leaders scramble to deal with the refugee crisis, they run the risk that leniency, however humanitarian, may inspire another wave of immigrants from abroad:

Inspired by phone calls and Facebook posts from friends hiking through the Balkans, crossing into Germany or simply touching dry land in Greece, people from countries long plagued by war and instability say they are seizing a pivotal moment.

“This is a golden opportunity,” said Osama Ahmed, 27 years old, who lined up Sunday at Baghdad International Airport, heading for Greece via Turkey with five friends. “It’s totally nonsense to stay in Iraq when there is a chance to go.”[..]“We got many phone calls and emails from friends already abroad telling us to leave Iraq now—immediately—since the European authorities are being easy on migrants,” said Mr. Ahmed [another aspiring Iraqi immigrant], who said his plan is to reach Belgium.

One of the big problems that Europe faces is that the line between refugees (those fleeing war zones, whom the EU nations are obligated by law to shelter) and economic migrants is much blurrier in real life than on paper. These Iraqi men on the one hand are leaving behind a war zone and a collapsing government; on the other hand, as the Journal and their own words make clear, their move—and their destinations—is one of choice. They are both refugees and migrants.

The character of the new immigration is confirmed by European asylum statistics: around three-quarters of new working-age asylum claimants last year were male, for instance, and as many have noted on Twitter, the photos of the immigrants waiting in Calais or on Lesbos seem to reflect a similar ratio.Those in Europe who take a send-them-back approach often highlight the economic migration aspects, while leaders and citizens who wish to offer greater succor emphasize the refugee status. But the rhetorical distinction can only be taken so far. What Europe is now facing actually both: a hybrid of refugee and migrant crises that its laws, as well as peoples, are unprepared for.European leaders need to start thinking about adjusting their paradigms to take both realities into account. This would likely include increased border security, revamped foreign policy, and increased aid, particularly for the victims of the Syrian Civil War. The pattern of offering humanitarian asylum which then increases the appeal of immigration, leading to more arrivals, is not sustainable. Unfortunately, there are many worse and war-torn places in the world than there are places in Europe.

China Retools Military

Last week, we (along with many other analysts) expressed doubt about President Xi Jinping’s allegedly peaceful rationale for cutting 300,000 military personnel. And now, the Nikkei Asian Review provides clearer evidence that skepticism was warranted:

China’s armed police force, chiefly responsible for keeping social order, will be reorganized and renamed. Units in charge of border protection and other duties will be transferred to the State Council. The resulting savings on personnel costs will be put toward the development of cutting-edge missiles, armed vehicles and other military technology.

Beijing will also raise soldiers’ compensation as it shaves troop numbers, seeking to boost morale and tamp down spreading dissatisfaction with the Xi government’s anti-corruption efforts.

Far from a sign of peaceful intentions, troop reductions are part of China’s extensive efforts to improve its air and naval capabilities as it takes a more aggressive stance in the East and South China seas. Don’t be fooled by Xi’s rhetoric; Beijing remains as committed to its revisionist ambitions as ever.

Is Government Unionization a Free Speech Issue?

Since the Supreme Court has the power to stir up controversy like few other American institutions, public debate about government unionization is certain to intensify in coming months. This fall, the justices will take up Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which concerns the question of whether public sector workers can be required to pay “agency” fees to unions for collective bargaining expenses. Rebecca Friedrichs, an Orange County schoolteacher, believes that compulsory agency fees violate her First Amendment right not to subsidize speech to which she objects. Depending on how, and how broadly, the Court rules on this question, Friedrichs could be the most consequential labor case since at least the 1970s.

Allowing public employees to unionize has to be one of the worst policy ideas of the last 50 years. But to frame the issue as one of free speech is to overlook the fact that government unions do the greatest harm to the public, not individual government workers. Unions paralyze administrations, bankrupt cities, stifle local political life, and flout sovereignty. A ruling against the California Teachers Association would be a far greater victory for the cause of good government than for the First Amendment.All discussion about public unions is shaped to some degree by labor’s decline in corporate America. Over the last three decades, private unions have lost members at a clip of roughly 150,000 per year on average. The collapse of private unions, a once reliable and wealthy constituency for the Democratic Party, has been an enormous political boon for public sector unions, because it increased demand for their resources. This decline has also neutralized Democrats’ ability to object to government unionization on principle. Back when the steel, coal, and autoworkers unions had real clout, many Democrats were openly opposed to expanding unions’ reach into the public sector. In a 1937 letter to the President of the National Federation of Federal Employees, President Franklin Roosevelt famously and forthrightly explained why “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” But, having just signed into law the National Labor Relations Act and spearheaded other union-friendly initiatives, FDR could say that without anyone accusing him of being anti-worker. Now, however, the Democratic Party can’t point to any significant achievements in strengthening unions, because no one has any good ideas about how to revive labor in the private sector. Their union bona fides are nothing like FDR’s were, so even Democrats who have serious misgivings about government unions’ right to exist must tiptoe around the point.This is unfortunate, because Democrats, who hold most state and local offices in blue America, often grasp the nature of problem with special clarity. In Lessons of Hope, his memoir about serving as Michael Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein writes “[l]ike anyone who first encounters the teachers’ contract in New York City, I had trouble believing that certain parts of it were real.” Klein marveled at how poor teachers were not fired but “excessed.” Their jobs were eliminated “ostensibly through no fault of [their] own,” and they were sent off to find and claim an open position at some other unfortunate school, against the wishes of that school’s principal and even if it meant bumping a new teacher out of a job. (An annual ritual in many school systems, this “dance of the lemons” practice is featured in the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman.) Never having worked in city government before, Klein was continually amazed at the United Federation of Teachers’ stunts, but these bizarro-world labor rules have been in place for years, among a variety of professions, and across the unionized public sector. Buzz Bissinger relates in his 1998 book A Prayer for the City that the Philadelphia Police Department “couldn’t hire sketch artists but instead under union rules had to give police officers art lessons.”Unions have placed onerous workforce regulations into contracts through collective bargaining negotiations as well as into state laws by applying political pressure. Both tactics are daunting to overcome. Unlike with agency fees levied for collective bargaining purposes, a union non-member can opt-out of funding what the Supreme Court calls “political or ideological projects.” But, under current law, unions are allowed to collect dues for these purposes unless workers explicitly object. Since only a small percentage go to the trouble of doing so, the money keeps flowing in. The Center for Responsive Politics maintains a list of the “Top Organization Contributors” to federal political campaigns, parties, and other groups since 1990. Three out of the top six slots are occupied by government unions. Unions’ “taxing power” is an even more effective weapon on the state and local level. In 2012, California voters nixed Proposition 32, which would have prohibited unions from automatically deducting dues intended for political purposes. Unions and their allies spent $73 million to defeat this ballot initiative, $21 million from the California Teachers Association alone.As for reforming workforce regulations via collective bargaining, the problem there is that almost nothing comes for free. Even changes with overwhelming public support often must be offset by some compensating financial advantage. In 2007, the autopsies of two Boston firefighters who died in a fire revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. City government moved during the next bargaining round to institute random drug and alcohol testing for all firefighters but was thwarted until, following an arbitrator’s ruling, it agreed to grant a quid pro quo pay increase of 1.5 percent.City budgets are mainly devoted to salaries and benefits which are, in turn, determined by collective bargaining contracts. Authorizing collective bargaining in the public sector means creating entities not only with an incentive to maximize their own benefit at the expense of taxpayers, but, in the case of union leadership, a legal obligation to do so as well. To fail to push city budgets to the brink of insolvency, and sometimes beyond, is, for union leadership, tantamount to leaving money on the table. Though no local government has declared bankruptcy since Detroit in June 2013, the ongoing struggles of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools show that it’s only a matter of time before the next surge of municipal insolvencies. As Kristi Culpepper, a Kentucky state official and influential public finance analyst recently explained to Bloomberg, “Can you imagine a scenario where the CEO of a large corporation announced that the corporation is approaching insolvency, and the employees responded by asking for a raise? That is what is happening with Chicago Public Schools.”A government with a unionized workforce is not truly sovereign; its commitment to the public is qualified by its legal commitment to accept collective bargaining. I once attended a city council meeting that took place while contract negotiations were underway and witnessed a series of the city’s duly elected officials stand up and publicly plead with union leadership to settle on reasonable terms. Who is in charge here?Public employee unions are often likened to Tammany Hall, but the comparison is unfair—to Tammany Hall. For all their flaws, the old political machines reliably turned out voters and thus kept levels of civic participation high. During the era of rule by government union, local voting rates have plummeted. According to New York City’s Board of Elections, turnout in mayoral elections has declined from over 90 percent in the early 1950s to 26 percent in the recent 2013 election. Unions contribute substantially to voter apathy through bolstering one-party rule by Democrats. Far from being discontent over consistently uncompetitive elections and the lack of rival interest groups, unions celebrate their success at stifling local democracy: “We elect our bosses” boasts the American Federal State County Municipal Employees union in its promotional materials. Even at the height of their power, labor legends like Walter Reuther of the United Autoworkers and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers of America could not have made that claim.States could quickly restore sanity to government budgets and administrations by rolling back their public labor laws. But that’s unlikely. With the federalist solution to government unionization unavailing, it therefore falls to the Supreme Court to save states from themselves.The Left’s tendency to see the argument against government unionization as an attack on all organized labor is somewhat understandable, in that conservatives do often conflate the cases against public and private labor. Conservatives oppose unions because a weaker labor movement means a weaker Democratic Party and, in their view, a stronger economy, and because “compulsory unionization” cannot stand as a matter of principle. The Right tends to insist that under no circumstances should any worker, ever, be required to pay a cent in dues or fees to a union to which he does not wish to belong. “Right-to-work” laws, such as exist in 25 American states, prohibit compulsory fees.Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association argues for the essential justice of right-to-work within the government employment context by raising the question of whether states’ public labor laws violate the First Amendment, and in the Roberts Court it may find a receptive audience. The conservative justices, Alito in particular, have painted a target on Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), which relied on earlier decisions about private labor disputes to uphold the constitutionality of agency fees for government workers. The Abood Court saw no reason why, if the avoidance of free-ridership and the promotion of labor peace justified the existence of the private-sector agency shop, the same reasons would not apply equally well in the case of Detroit’s public schools.Justice Alito believes that the Abood Court was not sensitive enough to the First Amendment concerns surrounding the imposition of agency fees in the public sector. Why does the law protect a teacher’s right to withhold financial support from a campaign to protect seniority when her union pursues it through lobbying but not when it does so at the bargaining table? In recent jurisprudence regarding narrower public labor questions, Alito has gone out of his way to question Abood’s reasoning. Writing for a 7-2 majority in Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000 (2012), he stated that “The justification for permitting a union to collect fees from nonmembers—to prevent them from free-riding on the union’s efforts—is an anomaly.” And it’s not only agency fees that Alito has a problem with on First Amendment grounds, but also unions’ legal ability to rely on an “opt out” system of dues collection: “An opt-out system creates a risk that the fees paid by non-members will be used to further political and ideological ends with which they do not agree.”Friedrichs contemplates a future in which government unions function in a manner somewhat like Planned Parenthood, the American Association of Retired Persons, and the National Rifle Association. These groups are often vilified for their political influence despite depending heavily, if not exclusively, on annual appeals to donors for their funding. Some conservatives even argue that right-to-work strengthens unions, because leadership must work harder to earn members’ dues. Perhaps. It’s difficult to imagine that public unions’ decline will be as precipitous as private unions’, if for no other reason than school districts aren’t economically vulnerable like the steel and auto industries were. Nonetheless, decades of experience with right-to-work states attests that unions are weaker when they lack the power to tax workers.To put a human face on things, Friedrichs is about the firefighter who believes that, during contract negotiations, when city managers say they can afford a 2 percent but not a 5 percent raise, they’re being sincere and not just poormouthing, as his IAFF local alleges. Or the teacher who would be happy to accept a higher salary in exchange for less-stringent job protections, while watching union leadership pursue the opposite course funded by her agency fees. The agency fee regime is particularly unjust to young teachers who are compelled to financially support “last-in-first-out” (LIFO) contract provisions that explicitly threaten their own interests. Again, younger teachers can prevent unions from using their money to support LIFO through lobbying, but at the bargaining table they have no such right of refusal.Compulsory agency fees should offend all freedom-loving Americans. That said, should the Court rule against Friedrichs, it would be a minor defeat for the First Amendment, but a catastrophe for future generations still burdened with trillions in pension debt, failing school systems designed to maximize benefits for their adult workforces rather than the children forced to attend them, and once-great cities bankrupted by rapacious compensation demands. These are the parties who have faced the full brunt of government unions’ strategy of “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs,” and thus have the most riding on Friedrichs’s outcome. After their decades-long run of systematically plundering state and local budgets, nailing government unions on First Amendment violations feels a bit like going after Al Capone for tax evasion.

Where There Isn’t Fire, There’s the Blue Model

If rapid increases in fire safety have dramatically reduced the number of fires in the U.S., how come we still have so many professional firefighters? In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Fred S. McChesney writes:

[B]eing a firefighter these days doesn’t involve a lot of fighting fire.

Rapid improvements in fire safety have caused a dramatic drop in the number of blazes, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Buildings are constructed with fire-resistant materials; clothing and curtains are made of flame-retardant fabrics; and municipal laws mandate sprinkler systems and smoke detectors. The striking results: On highways, vehicle fires declined 64 percent from 1980 to 2013. Building fires fell 54 percent during that time. When they break out, sprinkler systems almost always extinguish the flames before firefighters can turn on a hose.

But oddly, as the number of fires has dropped, the ranks of firefighters have continued to grow — significantly. There are half as many fires as there were 30 years ago, but about 50 percent more people are paid to fight them.

Despite the decrease in the number of fires, powerful public unions representing firefighters have kept salaries high and hiring on the increase. In an extreme example, Los Angeles saw the average firefighter making more than $142,000 in 2013 (factoring in overtime and bonuses). Furthermore, “Exorbitant overtime costs are fueled by union-negotiated minimum-staffing levels that often mandate four firefighters per engine be on duty at all times, regardless of the cost or workload.”

While large cities will always need to retain a staff of professional firefighters, there are many municipalities that depend nearly entirely on volunteers. Using the example of Pasadena, Texas, McChesney argues that, for cities of a certain size, the volunteer model is not only tenable but preferable—and if all cities of this size were to follow suit, “municipalities would save more than $8.8 billion a year in base pay.”The move to reduce the budgets of fire departments may be politically unpopular—everyone loves a firefighter, and rightly so. Americans will always be grateful to those willing to risk their lives for the public good. We should also be grateful, however, that they are forced to do so far less often today than in previous decades. Since that is true, it’s worth considering the case for re-evaluating current hiring practices. Read the whole thing here.

China’s Troubles Trip Up Africa

The faltering Chinese economy is raising serious concerns in Africa, where many countries looking for development capital had thrown in their lot with Beijing. From Kenya to South Africa, Chinese companies have inked contracts to build railroads, develop mines, and drill for oil.

Yet now some of China’s biggest trading partners in Africa fear that their bet on Beijing may prove to be a losing one, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Without the Chinese, there’s no money,” said one Angola-based financier, who said he feared retribution from [Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos], whose family controls much of the economy. “The country hasn’t prepared itself by developing in other areas.”

While forging closer economic ties with China, Angola and others also sought to consolidate their political power and aspire to Beijing’s state-led growth model. But those that bet on China’s demand for their oil and iron ore are realizing Beijing might not always be buying—and might not be able to teach them how to hang on to power indefinitely, either.

China’s slowdown is exposing significant weaknesses in the much-discussed Africa boom: Africa’s progress appears to have had a lot to do with China’s previously insatiable demand for commodities and massive Chinese infrastructure investments. Those happy days appear to be coming to an end, however, and the consequences could resonate beyond Africa’s borders.

Many of the countries most reliant on Chinese involvement are hotbeds of terrorist activity, for example. If China retreats in places like Sudan and Nigeria (which is in the midst of an expensive effort to fight Boko Haram and root out corruption), weaker economic conditions will only exacerbate preexisting problems—and as unfortunate as that will be for Africa, it’s not great for the rest of the world, either.

Glowing GMO Chickens Could Kill Bird Flu

Remember bird flu? Avian influenza has captured more than its fair share of headlines since its first appearance in Hong Kong in 1997, partly because the H5N1 virus can kill, but also due to worries that it might one day mutate into something far deadlier. A group of British researchers believe they may be on to something that could help prevent such a doomsday scenario from occurring, and get this: it involves glow-in-the-dark chickens. Reuters reports:

At Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, scientists are using genetic engineering to try to control bird flu in two ways: by blocking initial infections in egg-laying chickens and preventing birds from transmitting the virus if they become infected. […]

But these promising chickens – injected with a fluorescent protein to distinguish them from normal birds in experiments – won’t likely gatecrash their way into poultry production any time soon. Health regulators around the world have yet to approve any animals bred as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for use in food because of long-standing safety and environmental concerns.

Merely demonstrating that these genetically modified chickens are more bird-flu resistant is just a first step, however. If you thought genetically modified crops generated a green backlash against “unnatural” scientific tinkering, just wait for the wave of doom mongering certain to be unleashed if these GM chickens start moving towards commercialization.

It’s obviously hugely important to make sure these modifications are safe, both for chickens, for humans, and for the environments in which these chickens will live. But while in the course of their opposition to GMOs greens will frequently fall back onto concerns over health and safety (despite the fact that study after study has exonerated the technology), in this case health and safety is precisely the reason to keep pushing forward with this research. Disease is a terrifying aspect of the human condition in large part because it so often seems outside of our control; the possibility of engineering a solution to a deadly virus is therefore exciting, to say the least.The scientists have used a fluorescent protein in their research to help distinguish the modified chickens, but if commercialized that glow-in-the-dark trait won’t be a part of the new technology. That’s one less thing for Chicken Little environmentalists to lose their heads over.