and it looks like we're out of time but for more on the stories we covered go to our t. dot com slash usa or talk about our you tube page at youtube dot com last r.t. america and christine for south you have a great weekend. issue is that so much the same you're going to get a lot of the play areas. and some in the world's supply disasters are major economic and trading power the forces of globalization punish the. the earth the uk. the think they'll. see the sun

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celeb. hello and welcome to cross. stop guying peter lavelle japan's agony in the world's x. globalization we are told is a process that can benefit all that's when times are good but when a disaster hits a major economic controlling power the forces of globalization punish the entire international system where does japan go from here. to. discuss the impact of japan's multiple tragedies i'm joined by patrick young in vienna he is the executive director of d.d. advisors and dallas we have lloyd dumas he's a professor of political economy economics and public policy at the university of texas at dallas and author of the book the technology trap and in chicopee we cross a michael lynch he is president of strategic energy and economic research and another member of our cross talking yelena hunger all right gentlemen this is

crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want michael i'd like to go to you first the first question a lot of people are asking looking at these horrific tragedies being played out in japan is what about the global recovery the fragile global recovery how much of it is japan's derailing right now temporary or long term going to affect the global recovery of the last two years. well the hope is that it's going to turn out to be fairly moderate impact on the global economy the fear is that if japanese industry finds itself disrupted for a lengthy period then stock markets around the world could take a hit and we could be back in a double dip recession but that's that still remains to be seen whether that's going to happen ok what are you patrick i mean what are the it when we look at the the macro scale the global scale here is that we just mentioned here a lot of people are looking at the industrial capacity of japan which is key to its economic prosperity because it's a mess export country what would it take for us for investors in for the

international community be worried about japan's recovery i think what it's really going to take peter is is the whole idea of we see further problems in terms of how we're going to fund the recovery because really the difficulty here is with government government have shot all their bullets they've spent all that money japan's more noticeably than anybody else i mean they've got two hundred percent debt to g.d.p. ratio i mean that's three times the government debt of the united states of america and the united states of america doesn't look pretty by any extent and i think really the problem is that we're going to see ultimately that governments are going to try and kick the can further down the road in terms of keeping the economy going but ultimately japan's impact on the global economy is not going to really help us in the short to medium term i think we'll find it difficult to avoid a double dip recession but at the same time i believe that actually in the medium to longer term this event is going to mark the end of or at least the beginning of the end of the terrible recessions of the terrible stock bear market that has

played to japan for the past twenty years but it's interesting lloyd a lot of people are looking into it from a very different trajectory because japan is in mazing million get it but it's indebted to itself and and the japanese are horrendous savers here i mean taking virtue from the subsidies some people say it is a kind of a blessing an economic blessing in disguise long term it will actually make the japanese government spend a lot of the savings that have been accumulated and to actually modernize the economy. he very difficult for me to believe that this is any kind of a blessing for japan or anyone else it's a terrible tragedy and it seems to me one of the things that illustrates is that has a downside to it that is we become dependent on each other and when some disaster occurs in a particular area that's especially important it makes sense shock waves through the rest of the world economy for instance there was an earthquake i believe it was in taiwan a number of years ago it hit near a facility that manufactured a lot of the semiconductor chips on which the world depended is

a very serious matter i don't know the extent to which these industry is damaged by these events but it can certainly send shock waves all over the world and possibly trigger a double dip recession michael you think about that there are people that are saying that if the japanese can recover quickly enough from these tragedies they are trading partners will look elsewhere and i'm thinking about our china and south korea south korean economy makes many of the same thing to the japanese do i mean this is something that the japanese have to be very worried about remain competitive as they reconstruct. i think it is there's always the possibility that you know you'll see car sales shift for example especially south korea's is very closely competitive. but i think what you're going to see you know the sendai area was not a big industrial area with most of the damage occurred so i think what you'll find is that in the course of a week or two industries will be able to patch things together and they'll be up in

operating not not at full capacity but close to full capacity in most of the japanese industrial sector and the exports specially so yeah i think you'll see some some work shifted to factories in china south korea for example but i think the japanese are very resilient people and i think we will see a recovery there when you think about that patrick i mean it is we as many point he's already had. oh i mean i think the whole history of years later is i mean i've just come back from seoul i'm actually just was there until two days ago very clearly the people of south korea are incredibly upset and worried about what's happened to their near neighbor in japan but at the same time of course i mean there is a possibility that we're going to see some shifting of things like semiconductor production in favor of korea the south koreans are making increasingly better and better cars which could substitute in the u.s. market and i would have to say i somewhat disagree with something that lloyd said which is you know this is

a peril of globalization i mean i think before we had globalization of this sort of earthquake it had japan then they would just switch the light side and that would have been the end of the economy i actually think that you know the whole benefit of globalization is the incredible mobilization of the efforts that we've seen around the world because this is just not tit for tat or if there was some competition this is a whole business of growth and that's why the first people who were on the scene in the course of the last few days from the international community to try to help were actually the biggest trading partners with japan and also actually the biggest economic competitors with japan because it's all in all of our best interests as lloyd has also said to absolutely do everything we can to try to help this terrible tragedy lawyer is going to go to you anyway i mean the perils and then the benefits of globalization i think in this program we've already hit upon that i mean does cut both ways and which way it will we still don't know go ahead. yes i think what concerns me is the tendency toward over concentration of suppliers for critical elements in

a few places that exposes us to dangers from natural disasters and that's a real downside but i think it's also true as was just said that this interdependence internationally is a very powerful thing a very positive thing and certainly economic growth is not a zero sum game we help each other in circumstances like this and in more normal times i think though part of what happens in japan although send is not in austria larry itself part of what happens economically in japan is the pendant on what happens to those nuclear reactors because if things go to wrong and the wind shifts and the radiation drifts more over japan there could be a very serious difficulty in getting people mobilized getting people out of their homes to do what needs to be done within japan itself in other areas let's all hope that that doesn't happen but that still remains to be seen ok well lou you kind of jumped ahead of me i was going to reserve the energy part for a lot of part of the program but michael if i go to you i guess a lot of it does kind of depend on what direction we'll go into is what's going to

happen with those nuclear power plants which as we are doing this program no one seems to know what's going to happen there and then unfortunately it is a pessimism is set in there i mean not only for japan but for the entire nuclear industry globally a lot of stake right now and i don't want to forget about talking about oil on this program as well go ahead michael. yeah there's no question that i think that nuclear power station which has seven plants i think for those will be just lost forever which is going to mean a nice little boost in oil consumption in japan as they switch over the oil and later l.n.g. to replace that i don't think that will have a big impact on world markets because they're still relatively slack despite the high prices which might seem to indicate otherwise but yeah you've got you've got to think that outside of places like china. maybe there is people are going to have second third or fourth thoughts about nuclear power now obama has said he's still

pushing ahead but i think they're going to fight it the industry is going to fight just so much public resistance when you think about there patrick is it still an open question here because i mean as i explain to my colleagues on this program we've been debating nuclear energy as long as we've all been alive you know it consciously alive anyway go ahead. absolutely and i think one of the big worries for me is not in this discussion but i think in the general needs media that there's been an incredible amount of sensationalization of what is of clearly a very very difficult and precarious position but i wonder because it looks to me as if the whole nuclear industry our thoughts on of her being free and more by the simpsons television cartoon show than they have by logical and reasonable analysis and certainly when you look at the idea of you know mrs merkel who in germany is clinging on to power with only by a thread a suddenly said are. simply because she's trying to find anybody who might vote for in the near future that it's not good for business and it's not good for the economy and i would posit two things in terms of the nuclear debate one is that i

think we need nuclear anyway i do of course think that we need to look at the idea of were these plants are placed in relation to fault lines and so on the second thing i think is to kick the ball into the very long term court and maybe this is something that the japanese are going to pick up and run with because they've been an incredible nation of long term researchers and that is moving away from fission power in the nuclear world towards fusion power because fusion power is a lot safer a lot easier to use but of course it's going to take ten maybe twenty years of scientific development before we get there the difficulty is with the way that the politicians are reacting at the moment we could all be living in mud huts in caves by the time they get around to actually building these plants because certainly there's no sensible debate for words or energy ok lloyd what do you think about that i mean when you look at our history to stay with his irrespective of the outcome of this tragedy being played out in japan today. i certainly hope not at least not in the long run nuclear power is an inherently dangerous technology it's not just natural disasters we have to worry about but also things like ordinary

human error and even targets for terrorists for example in terms of ordinary human error the churn all blacks' and involved design problems with the reactor and the shutting off with a number of safety systems and the operation of the reactor at levels that were known to be dangerous as a result of human error we will never get rid of human error we need to deal with technologies for energy and other purposes that are much less dangerous and give us a much more a much larger margin for error human fallibility and make us less of a target for terrorists in the short term we're not going to be able to do without nuclear power but as we move in in the future toward the future the energy direction should be in the direction of renewables jump in here i want to continue i want to continue this important discussion or after a short break we'll continue our discussion on disaster state.

ok tom are in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture. looks. at. wealthy british scientists and not on the title.

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if you can. welcome back you can get a little reminder we're talking about japan's triple disasters and its impact on the global economic recovery. ok. but first let's see what russians think about the global economic recovery all encompassing predicting the disaster in japan has hardly the country its people and has a great impact on the world that's many now say it might disrupt a lot of economic recovery the public opinion agency love us and ask russians to assess the prospects of russia's economy. sixty three percent say it will remain at the current level sixteen percent seen negative changes and fifteen percent say

it's about improvement but will to pass earthquake tsunami and nuclear disaster have the global economic impact and really modify the course of recovery. ok patrick i'd like to go back to you and there's been three things to mention of this program and i want to tie them tightly together a possible double dip nuclear energy and the price of oil because they are all tightly interconnected and the oil producers and i must say mr gadhafi must be extremely happy right now with what's happened in japan and the powers that be in our brain they must be very happy as well because the addiction to oil remains it doesn't change ok but we can obviously as you point out here we have different opinions in media and how to look at it and make our energy for civilian use what's the triad for you what do we push what do we drop push away from just be keep away from a double dip. i don't think we can avoid the double that peter i'm sorry to sign so

pessimistic it may not be particularly deep trouble there but i think it still has to happen all prices are simply too high for it to manage to sustain the economy and that as you say the addiction is there and it's going to stay there equally i think in terms of what's going to take place in japan it's going to obviously be a long road to rebuild and we wish to plan every success within that in terms of the nuclear debate i'm sorry i really totally disagree with lloyd i mean i think lloyd is coming out with really a sort of a lovely liberal children storybook theory of were energy is going to go in the future the simple truth is that there's a huge amount of capacity being built for fission at the moment in places like china alone i mean twenty million gigawatts or something some huge number i just simply don't even manage to comprehend and they've got more plants coming along i think the idea that you can mix up fission power with fusion power demonstrates actually the level by which the debate is not being looked at credibly and ultimately this concept of renewable energy is a sham there is no such thing as

a sustainable renewable energy that can get there without government subsidy we need a great deal of research into the whole process of energy before we're going to get there and ironically that's why the double dip is going to be good for us because the double dip recession is going to push people to look for new technologies and we're going to find new ways of being dealing with energy rather than simply falling back on old fashioned remedies that aren't going to work ok lloyd if i go to you in a way you and patrick agree on one level and disagree radically on another i mean if it's really inevitable that we're going to stay with nuclear power for a long time to come because of oil do you agree with that or not because we cannot remain so with. the way at the prices that we have now. for some time to come we will be reliant to some extent on nuclear power but nuclear power has been a heavily subsidized technology from its very beginning so to say that renewable energy would require subsidies or that's a problem is ridiculous both oil exploration and nuclear power of been heavily

subsidized right from the get go and if they hadn't been they probably wouldn't have developed especially nuclear power to the extent that it has in terms of this being some sort of a liberal fantasy the state for example the state of north dakota alone in the united states has enough developed will wind capacity to produce about twenty or thirty percent of all the energy needs of the united states all the electricity needs this is no kind of fantasy i was an engineering professor before i became a professor of political economy and i assure you we have the capacity to develop renewable energy even more than today and supply all of our energy needs with it eventually but in the shorter term we will have to move to wean ourselves off of oil gradually and off a nuclear power as well and i hope these events in japan if they have any positive result at all will get a same the way from nuclear power and toward safer energy technologies michel if i go to you know one of the tragedies of this huge tragedies in japan is that japan

can't walk away from nucular energy even if it wanted to right now even in light of what's happening at this moment. well no i mean they rely on nuclear power for i think about forty percent of their electricity supply and there's no way they could replace the short term now they may find that they can shut down some reactors for maintenance and upgrading but you know you're going to find five years from now they'll probably be using about as much nuclear powers are using today it's just impossible to make that kind of change quickly you know these are huge investments you know putting in their money when mills would take forever for example or even natural gas turbines which is more of the best alternative so i think what you're going to see is that those four units will be shut down probably the others will come back online at some point just as a three mile island they brought the second unit back on and if i could point out

a chernobyl the same thing there is still one of the plant to chernobyl is generating energy even after that or if you get actually patrick what about you i mean when again we look at japan's energy dilemma in a way it's a kind of a dilemma for the entire developing and developed world to mean even is tragic is this technology has been as we speak right now we don't have a whole lot of alternatives and medium term in some people say long term. i think absolutely right and i mean michael's quite correct you know the japanese can't wean themselves off nuclear overnight i don't think they should be doing so because i mean i do disagree with the idea that we should be turning away from nuclear i think in the medium to long term there's definitely a much better argument to be made for fusion power than there is for any of the sort of recyclable renewable energy sources which simply have not scaled up when they've actually been put into production so far and i think you know the japanese people have a huge dilemma but on the other hand i suppose in one way i have incredible faith in the japanese people because they are incredibly resilient they're stoical and they're a brave people who've managed to overcome incredible problems in the past and in

that respect i'm thoroughly confident that they're going to manage to find some incredible energy solutions which we're also going to see many researchers around the world working on and i actually think that the solution to our energy problem is something quite different to any of the things we're necessarily talking about in this program today because what we really need is new thinking rather than necessarily going along all of the silos that we've been going along for many years lloyd if i can go to you in dallas one of the countries that is we know that has an insatiable energy appetite and that's china what do you think working inclusions do you think the chinese are drawing now looking at what's happening and japan its energy energy dilemma is there and china's growing energy dilemmas that just simply needs more in more in more energy and oil isn't going to do it in they're going to go to a comic energy they have no choice. well they do have a choice and the chinese are investigating renewable energy technologies and energy

conservation let's not let's not forget that if we use less energy and to accomplish the same things we need less energy to be generated that can solve an important part of the problem too as for renewable energy being impossible to scale up there are tens of thousands of homes in texas that are powered by wind power now including mine so it certainly isn't that distant technology or something that's difficult to do and it could be done much better also for an island country like japan there are thermal power from the oceans there's a possibility of using wave power there there are tidal power generators for instance there are some in canada that can be scaled up i'm not saying that we can get off nuclear power quickly i don't think we can there is a big investment involved and there is a period of time involved as well but this business about nuclear fusion has been going on now we've been told for about the last thirty years that in ten to twenty years we'd have effective nuclear fusion reactors we still have yet to see them so

maybe someday there will be a safer form of nuclear power but there isn't today and i would like to see us move away from that power toward the kinds of natural forces which drive all of the motion on the earth that occurs in natural processes there's plenty of solar energy plenty of wind energy plenty of title energy and lots of other forms to say for renewable energy michael one of the reasons why countries go to the nuclear option is because they have energy sovereignty and energy independence again i mean all of us on this program of heard in energy independence since we were children but that's one of the reasons why a country like japan but yeah i remember jimmy carter saying it ok gerald ford excuse me but you know that's why countries like japan go to this guy because the ok all right does anybody want to topple you and here i think you're right but richard nixon. and this is why countries go this route to make specially island country like japan. there's a limited resources for energy they've done this i mean we have to remember the obvious truth this is a country that was the first victim of that of atomic weapons i mean they know it's

power ok my point is is that they would have already gone down all these green routes wouldn't they if they had could have been a paper that was beneficial on a massive scale. take of actually for years been sort of have government programs to subsidize the construction of solar and wind energy and the problem is it has not made a huge contribution the utilities of course are huge companies and can and they prefer to focus on the large plants nuclear power was seen as a way as in france of getting a fair amount of independence although you have to remember you know back in the seventy's we had a shut off of uranium supplies from australia canada after the nuclear nuclear test in the explosive test in india for example so the problem is nothing's really provides you with complete independence you always run the risk that for example you know where you have seven reactors in one place and it turns out there's a tsunami there or somebody finds out there was

a design flaw in some particular type of plant and everybody around the world as the plants down for maintenance something you see occasionally in the airline industry although usually they're able to cope with it and it doesn't turn out to be a devastating long term problem but you know yeah there's just unfortunate just no solution remains a very good source of energy ok patrick last word on this program thirty seconds what's the world learn from these tragedies. the world learned from these tragedies that we have to of course try to make our nuclear power as safe as possible but there's really no option because the other technologies aren't sufficiently efficient the fact is that the japanese people are a great people they're going to rebuild their economy but in the meantime we're probably going to suffer a double dip recession not just as a result of this event but actually because of bad governance and bad government over the years and therefore unfortunately the economic outlook doesn't look too good but i believe that japan is going to be among the nations that are going to power us into the next wave of innovation which is going to lead us to new and

exciting energy sources ok patrick thank you for ending this program on a positive note considering the tragedies that we have talked about many thanks to my guest today in vienna dallas and she could be and thanks to our viewers for watching if you are the see you next time and remember cross talk rules. a time when you're broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.