“FROM THE FOSSIL FUEL ERA TO THE AGE OF LIGHT: Transition Strategies”by Hazel Henderson, futurist,
economist and author
Seminar on New World Trends and the Future of Oil and Energy
CENTROPEP, Caracas, Venezuela
June 12-14, 2000© Hazel Henderson, June 2000
In my book, The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1988) I traced the history of the fossil-fuelled Industrial Revolution and the evolution of positivist science and classical and neo-classical economics in the UK and Europe. I showed how economic theories of value changed over this period – leading to the Keynesian revolution from the late 1930s through the 1970s. I showed the lag in economic theories in properly evaluating the role of factors of production – particularly the special role of energy (which was subsumed under “capital” or “land.”) I showed how this error had lulled industrial societies into under-pricing and overuse of energy. This, together with their political, corporate and military power had contributed to their addiction to petroleum. I viewed OPEC’s quadrupling of the price of oil in 1973 as a necessary correction toward full-cost pricing (even though environmental damage and other externalities were still not included). The imbalances in world energy consumption continued to become more extreme – exacerbated by the global hegemony of the US dollar. (Figure 1, Energy consumption, per capita in Bangladesh, Japan and the USA 1987 (in gigajoules)).
My service from 1974 until 1980 as a member of the Technology Assessment Advisory Council of the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) led to my research into more benign, diverse, decentralized forms of solar, wind, tidal, wave and biomass sources of energy and the huge unexploited opportunities for energy-efficiency improvements. At that time, the powerful trade associations and lobbyists for the coal, oil and nuclear energy sectors had influenced the US Congress to subsidize them to the tune of some $150 billion. The fledgling renewables sectors were left to compete unaided on this unfair, tilted playing field. The Carter Administration accepted the many reports from the OTA on the need to increase efficiency of all energy uses: in machinery, agriculture, construction, transportation and the household sectors. Many small programs were pushed through a resistant Congress, from insulating houses and rating appliances, increasing automobile mileage to setting up the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. During this period, energy consumption was de-linked from US GDP-growth due to efficiency gains. By 1992, this new “supply” of “conserved” energy represented 24.3% of US consumption (27.9 quads) almost equaling the 29.4% of petroleum (33.7 quads) with renewables of 5.6% (6.4 quads). The balance was in natural gas at 18.1% (20.8 quads). Coal at 16.9% (19.4 quads) and nuclear at 5.7% (6.5 quads). By 1998, efficiency gains were the largest “source”, 28% bigger than oil and six times bigger than nuclear power and total consumption was 94.7 quads. [1] (Figure 2, Energy Consumption Per Dollar of GDP, 1972-1996) Thus, in the USA, despite our massive energy consumption, population growth and the doubling of automobiles on our highways, the US Energy to GDP Ratio (E/GDP) has steadily declined. From the E/GDP of 1 (i.e., a one-to-one ratio) in 1960, to an E/GDP of 0.64 by 1998 (i.e., the energy intensity of our economy had almost been cut by half). The OPEC price increases clearly contributed to this change, together with price volatility and fears of supply disruptions. [2] Demand-Side Management (DSM) became a competitive service. (Figure 3, Percentage of Peak Load Growth Met By DSM, 1992-2000). The recent petroleum price increases have led to scapegoating of OPEC. Even with mid-2000 prices of $25-30 per barrel, in inflation-adjusted terms – these prices are really half of what they were in 1975. Furthermore, OPEC’s share of the prices consumers pay in North America and the European Union for gasoline are only between 1/5 and 1/3 of the total, due to local taxes and refinery mark-ups. Many US interests, particularly small producers and investors in costly exploration, actually want oil prices to remain high. Vice President Al Gore criticized the big oil refiners for high US gasoline prices, and on June 20th, called for a US anti-trust investigation. Between 1998 and 2000, the acceleration of technological changes and the growth of the e-commerce sector has speeded up the growth of the energy-efficiency ratio and led to an overall increase in US productivity. This has led to today’s ongoing debates about the “New Economy” of information (which substitutes for much “bricks and mortar” and transportation). However, much research is needed to systemically verify these pathways of substitution. Economist John A. Laitner’s review of these issues and his preliminary estimate of their effects, might additionally conserve 5 quads in the USA, reducing current energy forecasts for 2010 and lowering carbon emissions by 80 million metric tons.[3] The current stock market shakeout of the electronics sector and “dot com” companies is similar to that which occurred in earlier stages of technological evolution, from railroads and electricity, to telephony and automobiles. Each of these waves of technological innovation produced thousands of start-up enterprises. This ended with the consolidation of these sectors under three or four giant producers – or, as in the case of electric utilities and telephony, government-regulated monopolies. Currently, both telephony and electric utilities have been de-regulated and both are spearheading their own e-commerce revolutions. For example, the Houston-based energy giant, ENRON, now sees itself as a trading platform and electronic-marketplace for energy futures and water futures. ENRON sees its gas pipelines as both rights of way for fiber optic cables, and to carry hydrogen (widely seen as the successor to petroleum). The environmental ranking of new energy sources became part of the equation. (Figure 4, Environmental Ranking of New Energy Sources) In addition, the now-consolidating oil “super-majors,” (e.g., Shell and BP Amoco) are increasingly investing in solar and hydrogen. Of course, most of the USA’s energy demand is still met by fossil fuels (petroleum 39.4%, natural gas, 23.2% and coal 23%) with the balance of 14.7% equally met by renewables and nuclear. However, with rising public concern for the environment and climate change, the fossil fuel component will decline, with natural gas becoming the cleanest fuel of choice in the mix. Meanwhile, public pressure on automobile companies and California’s “zero-emission” standards are now paying off in electric and hybrid vehicles. They compete with the new Toyota and Honda hybrids (with approximately 80 miles per gallon performance) now in US showrooms. The good news is that these technological advances, together with e-commerce are a peaceful path toward reducing oil dependence. This makes military intervention to assure oil supplies unlikely in the future. Climate change was added to the policy mix by 1994 (Figure 5, Energy-Efficient Lighting Prevents Pollution) Beyond all these changes, which have caused OPEC countries to steadily lose market share to the “super-majors” and non-OPEC producers – additional challenges include:
· The increasing uncertainty of most energy forecasts with widely-divergent estimates of the world supply/demand balance and the need for OPEC oil. These forecasts, according to Dr. Fadhil J. Chalabi, Executive Director of the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies, are based on assumptions of market conditions at the time they are made. These are bound to change with economic, political and technological developments – rendering them worthless.
· US dollar-denominated prices for petroleum have proved a double-edged sword. Focus on the price (in whatever currency) has meant loss of control, since today’s electronic currency markets trade between $1.5 and $2 trillion per day, 90% of which is speculation.
These turbulent currency markets are dominated by the US dollar, the de-facto global reserve currency. Thus, OPEC plays into the hands of US policy-makers and financial markets and their “Washington Consensus” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Thousands of young currency traders can devalue a currency at the tap of a computer key, while speculative attacks (“bear raids”) are common in these un-regulated markets.[4] As mentioned, the price system is also constantly distorted by fiscal and tax policies and other political considerations. This continues to allow US dollar-holders to purchase assets at below fair value, as with the US-based AES Corporation’s takeover of Venezuela’s key electric utility, Grupo La Electricidad de Caracas.[5] Yet OPEC still controls the lions share of the world’s proven oil reserves. It is this commodity, oil, not the price it commands, which is key. Adjusting price-bands may work only in the short-run. As an advisor to the South Commission in 1988-1989, I urged the countries of the South Commission to set up a jointly-operated computerized barter-trading system for all South countries’ major commodities, including oil. Today’s advances in Internet and e-commerce make such a barter network even less costly and more efficient. Globalization and the Old Economy-New Economy Shift Today’s globalization of economics, finance, markets and trade is driven by two mainsprings. The first is technology which has accelerated innovation in telematics, computers, fiber optics, satellite and other communications; their convergence with television, global multimedia, electronic bourses for trading stocks, bonds, currency, commodities, future options and other derivatives; and the global explosion of e-commerce and the Internet. (Figure 6, Emerging Era of Global Interdependence, Six Globalizations) All of this is short-handed by markets and media as the “New Economy.” The second is the fifteen-year wave of deregulation, privatization, liberalization of capital flows, opening of national economies, extension of global trade and the export-led growth policies that followed the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed currency-exchange regime in the early 1970s. All this became known as “The Washington Consensus,” and it was rooted in the economic paradigms of the now receding Industrial Age and its fossil-fueled, heavy-machinery sectors – now dubbed the “Old Economy.”
Some economic historians have pointed to earlier thrusts toward globalization: from the fifteenth century explorers of the Americas and the East Indies[6] to the open trade regimes in this century, which collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s and contributed to igniting World War II. Yet today, the evidence is in. Today’s globalizations are new and are leading to the radical restructuring of national economies and societies — creating the rapid bifurcation between the Old Economy, and the networked societies and e-commerce cultures of the New Economy. (Figure 7, Restructuring Industrial Economies) Not surprisingly, globalization has unwittingly strengthened social movements, such as libertarianism, human rights, feminism and environmentalism. All joined forces with labor unions in opposing the World Trade Organization (WTO). Reactions to globalization, and to ‘Western’ technologies and ideas have included rising fundamentalism (Christian in the USA, Muslim in many countries) and new searches for identity in ethnicity or nationalism – and the conflicts these often engender.
Diverse traditional values, cultures, and institutions, which form the “cultural DNA codes” of different societies are consequently steam-rollered. Lower prices on the Internet are promoted as a boon to consumers, while the costs pile up elsewhere, unnoticed or get paid by someone else – or get passed on to future generations in ecosystem losses. Finance, which is supposed to serve the world’s real production and exchange processes has de-coupled from the ‘bricks and mortar’ of real economies of local places and communities. Commodities are under-valued today, not only due to unequal terms of trade, but also due to the “de-materializing of the Internet and e-commerce. Today, globalizing electronic markets offer a ‘fast-forward’ view of what we can expect. Over half of Business Week’s one hundred biggest global corporations in 1999 are in information and financial services. Currently, they unwittingly accelerate the “digital divide” addressed at US President Clinton’s April, 2000 White House seminar. The dominance of the below-full-cost price system (today’s prices still do not include social and environmental costs) expands their market-shares – as does Metcalfe’s Law. Most large corporations in the “smokestack” industrial sectors are buying electronic technologies and software to increase their energy and materials efficiency. (Figure 8, Working the Web) Today’s growing volume of world trade accounts for less than 10 percent of the twenty-four hour global currency trading of US 1.5 to $2 trillion every day – a bubble de-linked from the economies of “Main Street.” The “digital divide” begins with offshore tax havens: Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Antigua, Liechtenstein, Panama, the Netherlands Antilles, the Bahamas, Luxembourg, and the Channel Islands. More than twenty thousand corporations are chartered in the Cayman Islands and the deposits in its 575 chartered banks now total some $500 billion. Only 106 of these banks have a physical presence in Cayman and an estimated 1.5 million of such corporations now operate ‘offshore’ in secrecy–up from 200,000 in the late 1980’s. US citizens account for some 40 percent of these assets.[7] Today, socially-conscious New Economy investors, venture capitalists, executives and even Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are coming to grips with the “digital divide.” Summers announced recently that he would crack down on money-laundering, drug kingpins and try to shut down tax havens.[8] The corruption and disordering of the world’s money-systems makes barter and counter-trade, payments unions, such as existed in the former COMECON countries, more attractive. Some 25% of world trade is conducted in barter today.
The need to expand into renewable resources, “green” energy technologies and environmental protection and restoration is now on the radar screen of venture capitalists, as well as, the oil “super-majors.” OPEC may need to get on this renewable technology train before it leaves the station. Today’s faulty accounting and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) still makes it easier to follow the herd than to look at the underlying deep processes at work and find really cutting edge new businesses. Today’s forms of globalization look good because traditional accounting disenfranchises a significant minority, ignores the running down of natural resources, and discounts future risks. Meanwhile, visionary enterprises and business plans are beginning to underpin the great transition now underway from the Industrial Age (Old Economy) to the information-rich “Age of Light” (Figure 9, Age of Light), New Economy. Higher oil prices are kick-starting additional business opportunities in hydrogen, fuel cells, solar, wind, wave and biomass companies. Much financing goes into continuous improvements in resource-utilization, energy storage and efficiency gains. Globalization has triggered new risks and the new inequalities. These include the further marginalization of social groups, indigenous peoples and whole countries, such as many in Africa; as well as the widening gaps between rich and poor and the new division between ‘info-rich’ and ‘info-poor’. In many OPEC countries, off-grid solar electricity can better the lives of rural people and prevent in-migration to cities. The overall increase in global poverty is documented in successive editions of the UNDP Human Development Report. Within one generation, according to the Living Planet Index assembled by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the London-based New Economics Foundation, around 30 percent of Nature’s productive capacity has been lost. A total systems view of productivity – beyond economics and GNP-measured progress is shown in Figure 10. (Figure 10, Total Productive System of an Industrial Society) A new report, Pure Profit from the World Resources Institute, focuses on ecosystem risks overhanging the balance sheets of many Old Economy companies, for example, in the energy, chemical, pulp and paper industries.
Why should OPEC countries feed the USA’s petroleum addiction when so many countries need investments in longer-term, more sustainable, renewable energy and e-commerce “info-structure”. US citizens don’t own most of the world’s oil and finding more is increasingly costly – despite new seismic technology. There is even a new thesis that the productivity gains of the New Economy are just the effect of cheap oil.[9] Even though cyber-libertarians, Internet entrepreneurs and electronic currency traders do not like earthbound constraints, the laws of thermodynamics still operate. One cannot fill a car’s gas tank with a ‘virtual gallon of gasoline’ or drive across the ‘flow of services’ of a bridge. All this was pointed out by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in 1971.[10]
Although improvements in communications and materials sciences have led to a profound de-materializing of OECD economies, today’s debates involve the extent to which, this process – which futurist Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization,” can continue substituting services, knowledge, communications, recycling and renewables for virgin natural resources. Between four-fold and ten-fold efficiency increases in energy and materials use are possible. Here is where investments in people and social infrastructure are key. Societies cannot continue de-materializing their economies without investing in education, health and maintaining infrastructure, social architecture and human capital for further advances in research.[11] Knowledge, human capital, trust, cohesive values and sound management of the planet’s biodiversity and natural resources are now the key factors of production.
Today, investors cannot ignore that ever more problems and issues have become global—beyond the reach of national governments: from climate change, cross-border pollution, desertification and loss of bio-diversity to space junk. Proliferating weapons-trafficking, drugs trading and unregulated currency favor the business of organized crime. Nuclear and toxic wastes must be contained. Epidemics spread by air travel, as well as global terrorism, cannot be addressed by any nation acting alone. Overall profits of global criminal businesses and networks in 1994 were estimated at US$750 billion-US$1 trillion. Some US$ 500 billion is laundered into the global financial markets.[12] We cannot avert our gaze in the globally interdependent world we have helped create. Powerful new biotechnologies such as: cloning and genetically-modified organisms require international safety-testing, labeling and standards. Socially-responsible companies and investors can support and even capitalize on global standards that raise the ethical floor under the global marketplace. (Figure 11, Capitalizing on Global Standards) Meanwhile, dealing with the continued growth of mega-cities – while maintaining safety-nets – requires massive public and private investments. Nations face all these problems of sovereignty at the same time that their tax revenues are eroding and diverted into tax havens or Swiss banks. Powerful special interests lobby in most countries for tax favors—undermining the redistributive role of taxation and exacerbating the digital divide. The tax bases of municipalities and local governments are also eroding. In the US, the explosive growth of Internet e-commerce is based on tax-subsidies and cheap access to telecommunications systems which resulted in the NASDAQ market bubble – now deflated to more realistic levels. Money itself has morphed into information, as debit cards, credit cards and trillions of digitized bits flow between millions of computers, and escape money-supply regulators at the Federal Reserve. All these new problems and issues are driving national governments into pooling or sharing their sovereignty to set up or strengthen international agencies, rule-making bodies and global standards. (Figure 12, Playing Global Standards) OPEC’s raison d’etre involved such sovereignty issues[13] – all of which need re-thinking and re-strategizing for today’s challenges.
Money has become the curse of democratic political processes in many OECD and developing countries aspiring to become more democratic.[14] For example, London-based The Economist reported (February 1, 1997, pg. 25) that in 1991 Portugal paid Auto Europa, Ford and Volkswagen $254,000 per job created, while the state of Alabama, USA, ‘bribed’ Mercedes-Benz with $167,000 per job created. Such subsidies have propped up the fossil-fuels sectors and stifled innovations of clean, zero-emission cars. (Figure 13, Government Subsidies) Few such subsidies finance the small companies building the new sustainable “green,” clean energy sectors. Meanwhile, OPEC countries can leap-frog huge infrastructure costs with off-grid solar photovoltaics, wind and biomass energy – as well as accessing the internet directly with solar-powered radio, computerized with modems.[15] OPEC can also take advantage of the new mechanisms of the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change (1998). These include the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Joint Implementation (encouraging cross-country partnerships in “green” technology) and Emissions Trading (ET), which has commenced in Chicago and on other futures exchanges to trade “credits” in SO2 and CO2 (sulfur oxides and carbon dioxide). These new e-commerce networks are expanding rapidly, even though the USA has yet to ratify Kyoto – because so many companies recognize the new profit opportunities in reducing their polluting emissions and investing in less-polluting technologies. OPEC countries can take full advantage of these new revenue streams allowable as they shift toward natural gas (with 50% reductions in CO2 emissions) and for all cleaner processes and investments in renewables. To take full advantage of these new revenues, OPEC countries will need to overhaul their national accounts (GNP/GDP) to fully account for their existing infrastructure as assets (the USA created such a new asset account as of January, 1996 and Canada followed suit in 1999). Such asset accounts should fully calculate all un-priced ecological assets: water services of forests and watersheds, biodiversity resources for pharmaceuticals, tidal and wind energy assets and their huge daily insolation rates[16] (e.g., sunlight reaching Amazonia each day is equivalent to some sixty hydrogen bombs, according to Peter Bunyard).
As money continues to become interchangeable with information, there will be a continuing flight into pure information-based electronic trading systems and the growth of pure high-tech barter. Two billion people on this planet, particularly in rural areas and in Africa, have never had access to the world of money and banking. (Figure 14, Two Ways of Transacting) They can now trade directly by expanding their face-to-face barter systems and linking with socially-concerned buyers in the USA, Canada and Europe via the Internet. There is much additional good news brought by the globalization of the new networked information economy, including distance-learning, pioneered in Mexico, and college courses for people confined to their homes. Other positive aspects of today’s uneven globalization are the rapid proliferation and sharing of concepts of sustainable development, commonly defined as development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
We in the USA, Europe and other industrial countries are well into a new phase of the New Economy of Information. We are transiting to the Age of Light, not only of light wave technologies (photonics, solar energy, etc.) but also of deeper knowledge of our world and ourselves. Scarce human time and attention, as well as living ecosystems are recognized as more valuable than money. At the same time, we live in “mediocracies” where a few media moguls now control the attention of billions of people—for better or worse. This has changed politics forever. We are already living in the new Attention Economy,[17] (Figure 15, New Attention Economy) and shifting away from material goods, still measured by the traditional Gross National Product (GNP). (Figure 16, GNP Problems) Burgeoning services are slowly added to GNP and such re-calculations account for much of the recent “rise” in productivity. More intangible factors in living standards are measured by new scorecards such as the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life IndicatorsSM, a co-venture of mine with the Calvert Group, Inc., family of socially-responsible mutual funds with over $6 billion under management. (Figure 17, Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life IndicatorsSM Desk Reference Manual) A pioneering initiative to correct the GDP was the 1989 Caracas Report. New Ways to Measure Economic, Social and Environmental Change for the South Commission. I was honored to contribute to this Volume and facilitate its publication in the USA in 1990.[18]
As our economies “dematerialize” toward more services, it will be harder for business and governments to hype wasteful goods-based GNP-growth in the global economy. They will be accountable for, and need to assess progress in human health, education, human rights and environmental quality. This requires measuring toxic wastes, resource-depletion, health, water and air quality, public safety, poverty gaps and overall quality of life. Newly-aware citizens, consumers, employees, and investors are driving the growth of socially-responsible corporations, codes of conduct, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in accounting, and the $2.2 trillion invested in “clean, green, ethical” companies in the USA alone. (Figure 18, CERES, Global Reporting Initiative) If GDP was re-categorized and re-calculated for the USA and similar Attention Economy sectors in other countries, we would find that these information/services sectors already are even more dominant than they appear in the revisions. Mass media and entertainment are a growing percentage of global trade, much of it promoting the worst in human behavior and values. Global e-commerce is predicted by Forrester Research to reach $3 trillion by 2003. Yet, twenty-eight percent of US citizens are “down-shifting”— in typical Attention Economy style, tuning out this culture of information overload and costly mass consumption-oriented value system[19]. They are choosing more free time and less money income and moving to quieter, less expensive, rural towns where life is slower, commuting easier, and communities are still intact. Consumers are seeking their own (not advertisers’) definitions of “quality-of-life.” In addition, Attention Economy consumers increasingly demand global corporations to reduce emissions and employ fair labor standards and promulgate codes of conduct.
Today’s haphazard globalization can be shaped, democratized and shared. Education and healthcare are now recognized as key sectors of information economies. Knowledge, intellectual, social and ecological capital are the key factors of production. Fossil-fuels have served well as platforms for the Industrial Age. There will be continuing shifting sands as we move from the Old to the New Economy. Today, many governments are trying to tackle the monopoly effects of Internet-markets and corporate mega-mergers. The Information and Solar Age sectors will continue to grow worldwide – particularly in China and India. A paradigm shift is underway (Figure 19, Post Cartesian Scientific Worldview). OPEC was an early leader in calling for a New International Economic Order. The issues OPEC addressed: unequal terms of trade, poverty and the need for development are still with us. I expect to see OPEC reassert its leadership in the economic transition now underway – by maintaining its orderly price band and re-taking control over the trading of its oil. This control can be exercised by the use of a new OPEC electronic barter trading facility, whereby its members can meet their needs for a myriad of other commodities, manufacturing equipment, trucks, tractors and consumer goods – without need for any reference currency[20], while conserving its petroleum assets for future innovative uses. OPEC can also invest a significant percentage of its revenues in an Innovative Technology Fund to assure that OPEC countries will have a growing stake in the knowledge economies of the Solar Age. Perhaps, in the future, OPEC will also stand for Organization for Promoting Energy Conservation, as Venezuela’s pioneers advised. Hazel Henderson, a global futurist, has authored many books, the latest: Beyond Globalization, Kumarian Press, 1999. The new Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life IndicatorsSM manual is available from The Calvert Group, Inc., P.O. Box 30348, Bethesda, MD 20814 or www.calvert.com.
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Footnotes:
[1] Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter, Vol. XVI #1, Spring, 2000, Pg. 8
[2] Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life IndicatorsSM, eds, H.Henderson, J. Lickerman, P. Flynn, The Calvert Group, Bethesda, MD, Pg. 93
[3] John A. “Skip” Laitner, US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC; email for a copy: [email protected]
[4] Henderson H. and Kay, Alan, “ Foreign Exchange Transaction Reporting System (FXTRS), FUTURES, Elsevier, U.K., Vol 31, (1999) pp. 759-777.
[5] Business Week, June 26, 2000, “This Yanqui-Raider Wouldn’t Go Home,” Page 12.
[6] See, for example, Landes, D. (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, W. W. Norton & Co., an important interpretation of economic development which embraces culture, climate and geography.
[7] Morgenthau, R. (9 November 1998) ‘On the Trail of Global Capital’ New York Times p. 125.
[8] Business Week, “The Globo-Cop at Treasury,” April 14, 2000
[9] The Economist, “Oil and The New Economy,” Apr. 1, 2000, Pg. 72
[10] See my review in Harvard Business Review, (1971)
[11] See for example Lamberton D., ed. (1971) The Economies of Information and Knowledge, Penguin Books.
[12] Castells, Manuel,Vol III, p. 169.
[13] Betamcourt, Rómolo, Venezuela: Oil and Politics, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1979
[14] Kay, A, F, (1998), ‘Locating Consensus for Democracy’, Americans Talk Issues Foundation, US.
[15] See for example, the US-based Solaria Inc’s joint project in Nigeria with Worldspace Satellite, Inc. to provide village access to the internet.
[16] Chichilnisky, Graciela, Development and Global Finance: The Case for an International Bank for Environmental Settlements, UNDP, New York, NY 1997
[17] H. Henderson, Building a Win-Win World (McGraw-Hill UK, 1996, 1997), Chapter 5.
[18] Redefining Wealth and Progress; The Caracas Report on Alternative Development Indicators, TOES Books, NY, 1990
[19] Merck Foundation, Harwood Group, Silver Spring, MD, USA (1995)
[20] Henderson, op. cit. Building a Win-Win World, Chapter 9, “Information, the World’s New Currency, Isn’t Scarce, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA, 1996