I'll agree, it's always worth being skeptical when a corporate executive says cost is not the chief consideration. But the rant posted by CamilleRoy below ignores some crucial considerations.

1) It totally ignores the fact that a major reason for establishing centers of R&D in China and India is because China and India are not just sources of labor, they are major emerging markets for products.

2) There appears to be no acknowledgment of the fact that in both China and India, high tech salaries are rising rapidly. The reserve army of unemployed rural laborers keeps lower-income worker wages from rising as quickly (although those too are reported to be going up) but the same is not true for the highest level programmers, engineers, and designers. The point I was trying to make is that the higher you go on the value chain the less pure labor costs are the driving factor, and the more other factors become significant.

And I quote: "a fact that has set off a firestorm of political outrage among both Republicans and Democrats."

But come on, does the point that Republicans are willing to stir up fears of Arab terrorism for political reasons really need any belaboring?

Chas,

If you'd been following this blog, you'd know that the term "peak oil" gets referenced here practically every day. We've also run interviews with Kunstler, and reviewed several books about peak oil several years ago.

But if your starting point is that we're all completely doomed, and nothing we can do will prevent a near-term mass die-off, well, have a nice day!

Hey Chas,

I've seen that paper before, and thanks for posting parts of it here. I think it _would_ be useful to engage on some of the issues. I'm going to read the Dukes paper Hanson references and see if I can contact him to talk about his data is being interpreted. Rather than follow up here, I'll probably post about it, I'm hoping tomorrow or early next week.

Strange as it may seem, I am well acquainted with the BLOCKQUOTE tag, and I used to use it all the time, until we were banned from using it because it didn't work well with one of our new design elements, after a redesign that dates back so far into ancient history that I can't for the life of me remember what the actual reason was.

But thanks for the comment!

Hey, I haven't been more active responding to letters here (or posting actually) this week because of some sad family stuff, but I just wanted to jump in and say that there is a great, diverse bunch of viewpoints here. To the letter-writer who castigated me for not talking about nuclear power -- i have looked a little bit at nuclear in previous weeks, but this post was just trying to narrowly look at the _potential_ for renewables.

Further research is required, without doubt!

Well, it's clear I need to learn more about carbon sinks! These may be the best batch of letters on a post I've seen yet. I'm going to look into some of the points made here and post again, soon.

Thanks, everyone -- particularly Ross Keogh.

Q

I am really sorry not to have been more active in responding to letters this week, and it's probably a little late now to dive into this conversation.

i've been in transit dealing with personal family matters, which is why posting frequency has fallen and responsiveness here hasn't been so great.

but suffice is to say, I'm fascinated with the diverse responses here, and will be more in the mix next week.

You have a point sir, but only because I could not lay my hands on their annual income figures, having left my copy of Sachs at home. My _memory_ is that it something like 67 billion dollars a year.

Four hundred people. Sixty billion dollars a year.

Tax the rich.

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to write this before people start hearing it. I am not an advocate of unrestricted free trade. My own opinions follow pretty closely the views of economist Joseph Stiglitz, as laid out in his recent book Fair Trade for All. His proposal there, is that richer countries should be required to allow unrestricted access to their markets to poorer countries, but not vice versa. Thus, say, Egypt must open up its markets to sub-saharan Africa, but is not required to open up its own markets completely to the United States or European Union.

I'm also pretty much in the camp of Jeffrey Sachs, who can be described as pro-globalization but constantly at war with the IMF and the World Bank. In his book The End of Poverty he notes that in the last twenty years, the absolute number of people in the world who are defined as living under conditions of "extreme poverty" has declined from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion. This is largely due to the growth of India and China as a result of participitation in the global economy.

America workers get laid off and get new jobs that pay less than old ones because of globalization. We have a responsilibity, as a nation, to create a safety net that cushions that pain. But I personally think it's a great thing that so many hundreds of millions of people in China have climbed out of grueling existences that the vast majority of Americans have no experience of or connection with.