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The Big Squeeze

High Food Prices Incite Rising Anger By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The global food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments. In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns. “It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,’’ said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.’’ Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many fac-

Preparing for a Future of Ever More Costly Oil As oil prices hover near $120 a barrel, the steadily rising cost threatens a system that has supplied cheap energy for more than a century. “This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet deJAD mand with new supplies.” MOUAWAD What is striking about the persistently high price is that it is not tied to a shortage ECONOMIC ANALYSIS of oil, a sudden embargo or an exporter cutting off its supply. The weak dollar, worries about terrorism and speculation on commodity markets have certainly played a role. But, of course, so has demand. Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers:

The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years — to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years. All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year. And that’s only 22 years away, a short time for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades. The pursuit of oil will be just part of the energy Continued on Page 4

KRISHNENDU HALDER/REUTERS

Villagers near Hyderabad recently jostled for rice being sold by the government. tors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels. In Asia, governments are putting in place measures to limit hoarding of rice after some shoppers panicked at price increases and bought up everything they could. Even in Thailand, which produces 9 million more metric tons of rice than it consumes and is the world’s largest rice exporter, supermarkets have placed signs limiting the amount of rice shoppers are allowed to purchase. But there is also plenty of nervousness and confusion about how best to proceed and just how bad the impact may ultimately be, “This is a perfect storm,’’ President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador said recently at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún, Mexico. “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodiJOON MO KANG

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Less Force in the Fortissimo, Orchestras Told By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — They had rehearsed the piece only once, but already the musicians at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were suffering. Their ears were ringing. Heads throbbed. Tests showed that the average noise level in the orchestra during the piece, “State of Siege,” by the composer Dror Feiler, was 97.4 decibels, just below the level of a pneumatic drill and a violation of new European noise-at-work limits. Playing more softly or wearing noise-muffling headphones were rejected as unworkable. So instead of having its world premiere on April 4, the piece was dropped. “I had no choice,” said Trygve Nordwall, the orchestra’s manager. “The decision was not made artistically; it was made for the protection of the players.” The cancellation is, so far, probably the most extreme consequence of the new law, which requires employers in Europe

to limit workers’ exposure to potentially damaging noise and which took effect for the entertainment industry in April. But across Europe, musicians are being asked to wear decibel-measuring devices and to sit behind see-through antinoise screens. Companies are altering their repertories. And conductors are reconsidering the definition of “fortissimo.” Alan Garner, an oboist and English horn player who is the chairman of the players’ committee at the Royal Opera House, said that he and his colleagues had been told that they would have to wear earplugs during rehearsals and performances. “It’s like saying to a racing-car driver that they have to wear a blindfold,” he said. One problem is that different musicians are exposed to different levels of noise depending on their instruments, the concert hall, where they sit in an orchestra and the fluctuations of the piece they are playing. In Britain, big orchestras now routinely

measure the decibel levels of various areas to see which musicians are subject to the most noise, and when. Orchestras are also installing noiseabsorbing panels and placing antinoise screens at strategic places, like in front of the brass section, to force the noise over the heads of other players. “You have to tilt them in such a way so that the noise doesn’t come back and hit the person straight in the face, because that can cause just as much damage,” said Philip Turbett, the orchestra manager for the English National Opera. Conductors are also being asked to reconsider their habit of “going for a big loud orchestration,” said Chris Clark, the orchestra operations manager at the Royal Opera House. Composers, too, are being asked to keep the noise issue in mind. “Composers should bear in mind that they are dealing with people who are alive, and not machines,” said Mr. Nordwall.

Enforcement in the Amazon

Picturing Life on the Range

Brazil is blockading roads and raiding lumber yards to catch illegal loggers.

A photographer uses old photography methods to depict modern cowboys.

WORLD TRENDS

ARTS & STYLES

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SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

On Torture and Justice Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality? The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the United States not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders. We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence. These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to

prisoner abuse, including brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture. Mr. Bush told ABC News recently that he knew of these meetings and approved of the result. Those who have followed the story of the administration’s policies on prisoners may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and offering a detailed plan for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners. The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life. We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of the disastrous effect on America’s standing in the world? Did anyone? Only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Serious Solutions Needed on Climate Imagine if President Bush announced a plan for Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs that declared: They will cease accumulating nuclear weapons by 2025. We will accomplish this through incentives and voluntary action, without mandates. Mr. Bush would be ridiculed, but in essence, that’s the plan he announced for climate change recently. He set a target for halting the growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, without specific mandates to achieve that, and in the meantime he blasted proposed Senate legislation for tougher measures as unnecessary. Unnecessary? When scientists detect accelerating melting in the Arctic and confidently predict centuries of coastal retreats and climate shifts, endangering the only planet we have? Now let me pause for a special request: If you’re a skeptic about climate change, stop reading here. That’s because the skeptics have mostly made silly arguments — that climate change is a “hoax’’ — when there is a much better argument available for them: that the remedies favored by environmentalists, like a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions, probably won’t do the job. Threerespectedclimateexpertsmade that troubling argument in an important essay in Nature recently, offering a sobering warning that the climate problem is much bigger than anticipated. That’s

largely because of increased use of coal in booming Asian economies. For example, imagine that we instituted a brutally high gas tax that reduced emissions from American vehicles by 25 percent. That would be a stunning achievement — and in just nine months, China’s increased emissions would have more than made up the difference. China and the United States each produces more than one-fifth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. China’s emissions are much smaller per capita but are soaring: its annual increase in emissions is greater than Germany’s total annual emissions. “We’ve gotten this hopelessly wrong,’’ said Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the authors of the Nature article. “If we approach this from reducing emissions we get nowhere. Driving Priuses may be good, but it’s not going to accomplish what we need.’’ Mr. Pielke and his colleagues argue that the best hope for salvation will be investment in new technologies — and that’s why I asked the climate deniers not to read this column, for it can sound a bit like President Bush’s “solution.’’ The difference is that Mr. Bush has used modest investments in hydrogen as a substitute for immediate action, while what we need is vast investments on top of a drive to curb emissions through a carbon tax and a cap-and-

trade system. In the best of worlds, it will be enormously difficult to persuade China and India to rely less on coalfired power plants, and it will be utterly impossible unless we take serious steps ourselves. “The message is, let’s change light bulbs and let’s be more efficient,’’ Mr. Pielke said. “But let’s do more than that. The solution lies in transformational technologies.’’ Solar power is one of the most hopeful technologies but still produces about 0.01 percent of American electricity. The United States allocates just $159 million for solar research per year — about what we spend in Iraq every nine hours. Other renewable technologies, including wind power, also merit far more investment. Then there is geo-engineering, or tinkering with our planet to overcome our past tinkering. One proposal is to fertilize the sea with iron particles to encourage the growth of plants that would suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So the next president should start a $20 billion-a-year program (financed by a pullout from Iraq) to develop new energy technologies, backed by a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system. The bottom line is that none of the presidential candidates focus adequately on climate change, for this will be one of humanity’s great tests in the coming decades— and so far we’re failing.

PAUL KRUGMAN

Running Out of Planet to Exploit Limits of the Death Penalty In recent decades, the Supreme Court has looked for ways to limit the death penalty, but the court is hearing arguments in a case that could reverse that trend — and extend capital punishment to additional crimes. The court should stand by its past rulings that murder is the only crime committed by one person against another that can be punished by death. The current case involves a horrific crime. Patrick Kennedy was found guilty of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter and was given a death sentence. There appear to be questions about the strength of the case against Mr. Kennedy, but his lawyer’s objection to the sentence, and the issue before the Supreme Court, is that executing him would be unconstitutional. (A decision on the case is expected in June.) Since it reinstated capital punishment, the court has held that the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits applying it to some defendants, such as the mentally retarded, and to certain crimes. In a 1977 case involving the rape of an adult, Coker v. Georgia, the court said “the death penalty, which is unique in its severity and irrevocability, is an excessive penalty for the rapist who, as such, does not take human life.’’ Since then, the court has repeatedly interpreted Coker as holding that the

death penalty cannot be applied in cases of person-on-person violence other than murder or reckless disregard for life. Louisiana thought it saw an opening in Coker, however, in cases of child rape, which the decision did not expressly mention. The state passed a law making rape of a victim younger than 12 punishable by death. We believe capital punishment is always wrong and unconstitutional, but there are specific reasons not to affirm Mr. Kennedy’s sentence. The court would be overturning its own well-settled precedents. It would also be rejecting a nearly national consensus. Louisiana is one of just a handful of states that punish child rape with death, and the only one that does so for first-time criminals. No other Western nations do that, and the few countries that do — including Saudi Arabia and Egypt — are not ones to emulate. If the court allows the death penalty for child rape, it would be opening the door for the same punishment to be extended to other crimes. That would be wrong, particularly now, when the growing number of cases of innocent people being freed from death row is turning popular opinion against capital punishment. The court should reverse Mr. Kennedy’s unconstitutional sentence.

Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel. In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.’’ Now, oil hovers near $120 a barrel. It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth? How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views. The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst. The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meateating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again. The third view is that the era of cheap

: AIDE A LA LECTURE Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.

LEXIQUE Dans l’article “Tourism Saves a City But Drains Its Spirit,” page 7: TO HERALD: annoncer PRISTINE: immaculé REMNANT: vestige DWELLING: demeure TO DEFILE: souiller TO JAR: jurer, détonner Dans l’article “As Kenya Bleeds, Safari Business Suffers,” page 7: TO PACE: marcher de long en large GAME: gibier FLAWED: ici, entachée d’irrégularités TO WIELD: brandir STAMPEDE: ruée irraisonnée INCUMBENT: en charge, titulaire RIGGING: trucage

Dans l’article “An Actor, Once Troubled, Gets the Superhero Role,” page 8: SHORTHAND: sténographie TAG: étiquette LOWLIFE: crapule MAYHEM: grande confusion, bazar VILLAIN: la traître, le méchant Dans l’article “Critics Who Offer a Few Words on Fragrances,” page 8: LICE (SG LOUSE): poux BANE: fléau TO CHIDE: gronder

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “With Guns and Fines, Brazil Takes On Loggers,” page 3:

resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit. I find myself somewhere between the second and third views. There are some very smart people — not least, George Soros — who believe that we’re in a commodities bubble. My problem with this view, however, is this: Where are the inventories? Normally, speculation drives up commodity prices by promoting hoarding.

An ever-growing world economy tests the limits of natural resources. Yet there’s no sign of resource hoarding in the data: inventories of food and metals are at or near historic lows, while oil inventories are only normal. The best argument for the second view, that the resource crunch is real but temporary, is the strong resemblance between what we’re seeing now and the resource crisis of the 1970s. What Americans mostly remember about the 1970s are soaring oil prices and lines at gas stations. But there was also a severe global food crisis. In retrospect, the commodity boom of

TO TAKE ON: ici, s’attaquer à, se mesurer à; mais l’expression peut aussi signifier: devenir à la mode; se mettre dans tous ses états; louer (une maison) ou même embaucher; le contexte sera donc déterminant!

Dans l’article “Critics Who Offer a Few Words on Fragrances,” page 8: WURLITZER ORGAN: allusion aux instruments fabriqués par la compagnie Wurlitzer: orgues de théâtre d’accompagnement de films muets, et jukeboxes (on disait, à l’époque Rock n’ Roll un Wurlitzer pour un jukebox); la connotation, pour un parfum, est donc d’une forte personnalité, dégageant de l’énergie et un brin de nostalgie.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “21st Century Cowboys, 19th Century Cameras,” page 8: EDWARD S. CURTIS: (1868-1952) photographe légendaire des Amérindiens. Son grand oeuvre “The North American Indian”, somme inégalée de photographies des peuples premiers d’Amérique du Nord, a demandé 27

1972-75 was probably the result of rapid world economic growth that outpaced supplies, combined with the effects of bad weather and Middle Eastern conflict. Eventually, the bad luck came to an end, new land was placed under cultivation, new sources of oil were found in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, and resources got cheap again. But this time may be different. For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe, the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources. Meanwhile, resources are getting harder to find. And the bad weather hitting agricultural production this time is starting to look more fundamental and permanent than El Niño and La Niña, which disrupted crops 35 years ago. Even if it turns out that we’re really at or near peak world oil production, that doesn’t mean that one day we’ll say, “Oh my God! We just ran out of oil!’’ and watch civilization collapse into anarchy. But rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it. Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling.

ans de travail (1907-1930), pendant lesquels il a sillonné les Etats-Unis pour photographier quelques 80 tribus (environ 50,000 prises de vue, 2,500 photos retenues, 4,000 pages de texte en 20 volumes, préfacés par le président Theodore Roosevelt). Financé au départ par J.P. Morgan, il a eu la volonté de témoigner d’une culture et de traditions en train de disparaître, et a accompagné ses photos de plus de 10,000 enregistrements sur cylindre de cire de langues et de chants indiens. On lui a reproché d’avoir “arrangé” ses photos pour aller dans un sens de pureté, et de non mélange avec la société occidentale, et ainsi d’avoir occulté la misère sordide de certaines réserves. On sait que certaines de ses photographies sont posées, retouchées (il en effaçait toute trace d’homme blanc ou d’équipement non indigène), que parfois les habits d’apparat étaient historiquement inexacts. Il n’en reste pas moins que les photos sont exceptionnelles par leur nombre et par leur beauté, et que sans lui, nombre de ces peuples seraient tout bonnement inconnus du public.

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008

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With Guns and Fines, Brazil Takes On Loggers By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

ALTA FLORESTA, Brazil — A convoy of six black sport utility vehicles pulled into a lumberyard unannounced here one recent morning. Out popped about two dozen members of Brazil’s security and police forces, packing sidearms and rifles. But the weapon the foreman feared most was carried by a separate group of agents of Brazil’s national environmental agency: bright yellow tape measures. “Thirty-eight! Seventy!’’ the agents shouted from the logs clustered in the thick mud as they quickly went to work. One agent, Mario Rubbo, jotted down the volume of each log for comparison with what the lumberyard had declared to state authorities. Discrepancies could mean fines or criminal charges. This is Operation Arc of Fire, the Brazilian government’s tough campaign to deter illegal destruction of the Amazon forest. It is intended to send a message that the government is serious about protecting the world’s largest remaining rain forest, but so far it has stirred controversy for its militaristic approach to saving trees, and the initial results have been less than promising. “I am playing a game we are fated to lose,’’ Mr. Rubbo said. “The game is 12 to 1 against us and there are two minutes to turn it around. But I just try to do my part here.’’ The operation began in February after new satellite data showed that deforestation had spiked in the second half of 2007 after three consecutive years of declines. The new data rattled the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which has been trying to play a bigger role in discussions about global climate change amid mounting scientific evidence that some 20 percent of annual global greenhouse emissions come from the clearing of tropical forests, including the burning, decay and decomposition of the land. The government says it will now spend $118 million over at least the next year to crack down on illegal loggers. It has mobilized some 600 officials in three states — Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondonia — as well as 175 cars and trucks and four airplanes. Already, the authorities have issued $25.9 milMery Galanternick contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

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A Brazilian environmental police officer measured the volume of wood found in March in Alta Floresta in central Brazil. lion in fines, made 19 arrests and seized more than 39,000 cubic meters of wood, which has been transferred to local governments, said Kézia Macedo, an analyst with the federal environmental agency, known as Ibama, in Brasília. But the challenges are daunting. The Amazon is vast, with some 3.4 million square kilometers still forested. The 48 police officers and two dozen environmental agents involved in Arc of Fire here seem minuscule for the territory in northern Mato Grosso. That is one reason the agents are mostly concentrating on bottlenecks where the wood must be transported, catching loggers coming in and out of Alta Floresta, a city of about 50,000 people in northern Mato Grosso. Here in Mato Grosso, Brazil’s giant agricultural state where the most deforestation has occurred, Ibama agents are confronting a powerful governor, Blairo Maggi, the world’s largest soybean producer, known in Brazil simply as the “King of Soy.’’ Governor Maggi is a forceful advocate for agricultural expansion.

Ibama agents privately suggest that Governor Maggi exerts a strong influence over Mato Grosso’s state environmental agency. The state officials have successfully challenged Ibama’s method of measuring wood volumes and criticized the deforestationdetection system of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. After averaging 20,000 square kilometers a year in the 1990s, deforestation in Brazil had slowed to 11,000 square kilometers a year in 2006, before increasing again last year. From August to February an average of 700 square kilometers was deforested a month, according to the National Institute for Space Research. It is tough to say if the agents are managing yet to turn back the trend. In the operation’s first month, February, deforestation in Brazil rose another 13 percent over January, some 88 percent of it in Mato Grosso, the space research institute reported. Local industry officials are not happy. They say Arc of Fire is stifling commerce in an industrious

town that answered the call of the military government in the 1970s for Brazilians to colonize the Amazon before foreigners did. “This strategy to put handcuffs on us is killing our morale,’’ said Vicente da Riva, the president of Alta Floresta’s rural association. At the Ibama headquarters here, agents study satellite data from the space institute and Google Earth on computers. One night a group of five Ibama agents drove 13 kilometers out of town on a midnight “blitz.’’ Rodrigo Almeida, the Ibama leader, explained that agents had caught several trucks at this spot where two dirt roads merge into the main highway into town. “Rodrigo, are we are doing the right thing?’’ asked Paulo Iribarrem, a burly 17-year Ibama veteran, breaking a momentary silence. “Don’t worry, pal, this is just the first stage’’ of the operation, Mr. Almeida replied. “There is more to come.’’ The agents stopped one passenger car, and a motorcycle or two passed by. But after nearly two hours, they called it quits and headed home.

In a Tough Race, Democrats Harbor Notions of a Dream Ticket By PATRICK HEALY

If and when President Barack Obama is preparing his first State of the Union message, would he want Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton suggesting how she would write it better? Alternatively, would the poll-obsessed Clintons want to wake up in the White House residence in 2009 and read about Vice President Obama’s skyhigh popularity ratings, and how they make her look like his stern old lady? The Clinton and Obama campaigns have been hearing for months suggestions of a so-called Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama “dream ticket.” Former New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo has pressed the idea most aggressively — it came up in during the candidates debate on April 16— while a major Clinton supporter in Pennsylvania primary, Governor Ed Rendell, has backed the idea as well. And some uncommitted superdelegates — the party leaders and elected officials whose votes may determine the nominee — see such a unity ticket as a way to short-circuit a bitter fight for the nomination all the way to the Democratic convention in August, and to blend the voter bases of the two candidates. “It would be great to see them onthesameticket—theyhadattracted so many new voters and so much excitement, it seems so obvious,” said Sam Spencer, an uncommitted superdelegate from Maine. “Hillary would be the LBJ of 1960 — both served longer and had more experience, and LBJ was willing to take the vice presidency. And Obama would only come into his own more as vice president.” All that stand in the way are a few troublesome details — like the fact that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton want to be done with each other starting right now. And that former President Bill Clinton, too, bitterly believes that the Obama camp has portrayed him as a brutish and race-baiting campaigner, according to two associates of Mr. Clinton. On top of that, Obama aides assert, Mrs. Clinton’s baggage would damage Mr. Obama’s image. To be precise, aides for both candidates would not rule out the idea of a joint ticket — though it was hard to hear it through all the laughing. Indeed, some Clinton aides said that Mrs. Clinton, should she catch up and surpass Mr. Obama in the fight for delegates, would almost certainly have to offer him the vice presidential slot, given his tremendous popularity. Indeed, each might be in a position to argue that he or she has the right of first refusal on the vice

presidency — though Obama aides said that the oddity of having a former president as the spouse of a sitting vice president might be great enough to rule out asking Mrs. Clinton (or at least use it as an excuse to do so), a point on which several political analysts concurred. “It’s one thing to keep your running mate on message — it’d be much more difficult for Obama to keep a former president of the United States on his message as well for four or eight years, especially one with the skills and disposition of President Clinton,” said Joel K. Goldstein, an expert on the vice presidency and a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law. “And if Hillary is the presidential nominee, Obama might not want to accept a spot that really isn’t the second spot — it’s the third spot, behind Bill Clinton,” he added. To that end, Obama and Clinton aides said, and other superdelegates concurred, it is hard to see the ticket at this stage. “There’snotachanceinflying hell that these two are going to get together,” said Jon Ausman, an uncommitted superdelegate from Florida. “This has turned into a battle of egos, and strong personal animosity has slipped into this. Not to mention, the vice president is usually a halfstep or step in stature below the presidential candidate, and in both cases neither of them falls into that mold.” But history has shown that politicians can put aside their anomosities for the sake of victory. Ronald Reagan picked George H.W. Bush in 1980 and John Kerry chose John Edwards in 2004, even though the two couples were not great fits as ideological soulmates or personalities. Beyond blending their respective voting blocs, however, it is not clear whether either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton would provide much of a boost as a vice presidential candidate. Aides in both camps expect most Democratic voters to ultimately unify behind the nominee, despite the ill will of the primary. Moreover, the tone of both campaigns has been brutal toward the other. “He has gone sharply negative — there are so many negative ads that he has up, I can’t keep track of them,” said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, referring to Mr. Obama. Nor has the Clinton side eased up on suggesting that Mr. Obama has electability problems — words that the Republicans are likely to throw back in Mr. Obama’s face if he is the nominee, and especially if he chooses Mrs. Clinton as his running mate.

BE MONTE CARLO

Dislike may preclude a traditional way of finding party unity.

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Preparing for a Future Of Ever More Costly Oil From Page 1

Middle East are in the midst of exceptional economic booms and need cheap energy to keep growing and modernizing. William Chandler, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that if the Chinese were using energy like Americans, global energy use would double overnight and five more Saudi Arabias would be needed just to meet oil demand. India isn’t far behind. By 2030, the two counties will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today. What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation’s

challenge. The world’s total energy demand — including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, as well as renewable energy sources like wind, solar and hydro power — is set to rise by 65 percent over the next two decades, according to the I.E.A. But petroleum, the dominant fuel of the 20th century, will remain the top energy source. It accounts for more than a third of the world’s total energy needs, ahead of coal and natural gas. Refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel, oil has no viable substitute as a transportation fuel, and that is not likely to change much in the next 30 years. The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from. Over the past century, the world burned through a trillion The world burns 85 million barrels barrels of oil. Another 1.2 trillion of petroleum daily. barrels of known conventional oil reserves wait to tapped, according to BP, one of the world’s biggest oil companies. It sounds like a lot. But given the current rate of growth in demand, a trillion of those barrels will be used up in less than 30 years. Many analysts estimate The U.S. burns another trillion barrels of yetabout one-quarter of to-be-found oil remains, but in the world’s oil. remote places like the Arctic Ocean where it will be expensive About one of to extract, or in countries that every nine might restrict access. barrels of world U.S. CONSUMPTION oil goes into That might not sound like such American a bad thing for those concerned gasoline tanks. about carbon emissions and climate change. High prices might end up forcing people to U.S. oil consumption has spiked since 1980: conserve and encourage the UNITED STATES +21% development of alternatives. But the energy crunch might also result in a global scramble for resources, energy wars, and much U.K. Italy France Germany Denmark higher energy prices. Japan Finland Switz. Sweden Some oil executives are soun+2 +0.2 ding the alarm bell. At a recent energy conference, John Hess, the chief executive of Hess Cor–13 –14 –14 poration, the international oil company, warned that an oil criThese other developed nations –18 –20 have either held their oil sis was looming if the world diconsumption steady or cut it since dn’t deal with runaway demand 1980 (estimates through 2007). and strained supplies. –32 –33 For one thing, the world’s oil Source: Energy Information Administration supplies are already stretched. BILL MARSH/THE NEW YORK TIMES Countries outside of the OPEC cartel — which have been the first energy secretary in the 1970s, once main source of new oil discoveries and said the United States was capable of production since the 1970s — have said only two approaches to its energy polithey expect little to no growth this year cy: “complacency or crisis.” in oil production. The United States is the only major Some experts are not quite so worindustrialized nation to see its oil conried. They argue that the oil industry is sumption surge since the oil shocks of a cyclical one. “We’re in a bubble right the 1970s and 1980s. About a quarter of now,” said Robert Mabro, a well-known the world’s oil goes to the United States oil expert at the Oxford Institute for every day, and of that, more than half Energy Studies. “Prices are rising begoes to its cars and trucks. cause everyone expects them to do so. “The country has been living beyond We’ve seen the same thing in the real its means,” said Vaclav Smil, a promiestate market.” nent energy expert at the University of Still, the growth in oil consumption Manitoba in Canada. “The situation is almost certainly will need to slow in dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. coming years. But it seems unlikely But people don’t realize how dire the that developing nations will cut their situation is.” consumption first. China, India and the

Burning Through Oil ...

JUSTIN MOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Diversion of grain to fuel has helped increase prices, adding to pressures on farmers like this one in Laos. NEWS ANALYSIS

Blaming Biofuels for the Spread of Hunger By ANDREW MARTIN

The idea of turning farms into fuel plants seemed, for a time, like one of the answers to high global oil prices and supply worries. That strategy seemed to reach a high point last year when the United States Congress mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels. But now a reaction is building against policies in the United States and Europe to promote ethanol and similar fuels, with political leaders from poor countries contending that these fuels are driving up food prices and starving poor people. Biofuels are fast becoming a new source of debate in global diplomacy, putting pressure on Western politicians to reconsider their policies, even as they argue that biofuels are only one factor in the seemingly inexorable rise in food prices. In some countries, the higher prices are leading to riots, political instability and growing worries about feeding the poorest people. Food riots contributed to the dismissal of Haiti’s prime minister, and leaders in some other countries are nervously trying to calm anxious consumers. At a conference in Washington, representatives of poor countries that have been hit hard by rising food prices called for urgent action to deal with the price spikes, and several of them demanded a reconsideration of biofuel policies adopted recently in the West. Many specialists in food policy consider government mandates for biofuels to be ill advised, agreeing that the diversion of crops like corn into fuel production has contributed to the higher prices. But other factors have played big roles, including droughts that have limited output and rapid global economic growth that has creElisabeth Rosenthal and Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting.

ated higher demand for food. That growth, much faster over the last four years than the historical norm, is lifting millions of people out of destitution and giving them access to better diets. But farmers are having trouble keeping up with the surge in demand. While there is agreement that the growth of biofuels has contributed to higher food prices, the amount is disputed. Work by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington suggests that biofuel production accounts for a quarter to a third of the recent increase in global commodity prices. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Growing more corn for ethanol means fewer crops are grown to eat. predicted late last year that biofuel production, assuming that current mandates continue, would increase food costs by 10 to 15 percent. Ethanol supporters maintain that any increase caused by biofuels is small and that energy costs and soaring demand for meat in developing countries have had a greater impact. “There’s no question that they are a factor, but they are really a smaller factor than other things that are driving up prices,’’ said Ron Litterer, an Iowa farmer who is president of the National Corn Growers Association in the United States. According to the World Bank, global food prices have increased by 83 percent in the last three years. Rice, a staple food for nearly half the world’s population, has been a particular focus

of concern in recent weeks, with spiraling prices prompting several countries to impose drastic limits on exports as they try to protect domestic consumers. A fifth of America’s corn crop is now used to brew ethanol for motor fuel, and as farmers have planted more corn, they have cut acreage of other crops, particularly soybeans. That, in turn, has contributed to a global shortfall of cooking oil. Spreading global dissatisfaction in recent months has intensified the foodversus-fuel debate. Recently, a European environment advisory panel urged the European Union to suspend its goal of having 10 percent of transportation fuel made from biofuels by 2020. Europe’s well-meaning rush to biofuels, the scientists concluded, had created a variety of harmful ripple effects, including deforestation in Southeast Asia and higher prices for grain. C. Ford Runge, an economist at the University of Minnesota, said it is “extremely difficult to disentangle’’ the effect of biofuels on food costs. Nevertheless, he said there was little that could be done to mitigate the effect of droughts and the growing appetite for protein in developing countries. “Ethanol is the one thing we can do something about,’’ he said. But August Schumacher, a former under secretary of agriculture who is a consultant for the Kellogg Foundation, said the criticism of biofuels might be misdirected. Development agencies like the World Bank and governments did little to support agricultural development in the last two decades, he said. He noted that many of the upheavals over food prices abroad have concerned rice and wheat, neither of which is used as a biofuel. For both those crops, global demand has soared at the same time that droughts suppressed the output from farms.

High Food Prices Incite Rising Anger Across Globe From Page 1 ties are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries.’’ In Asia, if Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia steps down, which is looking increasingly likely amid postelection turmoil within his party, he may be that region’s first high-profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation. In Indonesia, fearing protests, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by about $280 million. In Senegal in March, one of Africa’s oldest and most stable democracies, police in riot gear beat and used tear Reporting was contributed by Lydia Polgreen from Niamey, Niger, Michael Slackman from Cairo, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Thomas Fuller from Bangkok and Peter Gelling from Jakarta, Indonesia.

gas against people protesting high food prices and later raided a television station that broadcast images of the event. “Why are these riots happening?’’ asked Arif Husain, senior food security analyst at the World Food Program, which has issued urgent appeals for donations. “The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you’re hungry you get angry quicker.’’ In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.’’ Leaders who ignore the rage do so at their own risk. President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about

la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families. “’If there is a protest against the rising prices,’’ he said, “come get me at the palace and I will demonstrate with you.’’ When they came, filled with rage and by the thousands, he huddled inside and his presidential guards, with United Nations peacekeeping troops, rebuffed them. Within days, opposition lawmakers had voted out Mr. Préval’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, forcing him to reconstitute his government. Fragile in even the best of times, Haiti’s population and politics are simmering. The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In India, people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of dal are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few more meals.

World food prices have risen as much as 45 percent since 2006. A dump in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where people look for food. seasoning their daily lentils, their chief source of protein, with the usual onion and spices because the price of cooking oil was now out of reach. These days, they eat bowls of watery, tasteless dal, seasoned only with salt. In Haiti, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES and sugar, typically conManinder Chand, an auto-rickshaw sumed only by the most destitute. “It’s salty and it has butter and you driver in New Delhi, said his family had given up eating meat altogether for the don’t know you’re eating dirt,’’ said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to last several weeks. Another rickshaw driver, Ravinder eating them more often in recent months. Kumar Gupta, said his wife had stopped “It makes your stomach quiet down.’’

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008

LE MONDE

5

BUSINESS OF GREEN

Global Warming Fix Moves Past Emissions

Irish Town Commits To Conserving Energy

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

STEVEN R. KNOWLTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A wind turbine at the Dundalk Institute of Technology, part of a goal to reduce Ireland’s need for fossil fuels. By KAREN FREEMAN

DUNDALK, Ireland — Dundalk, on Ireland’s east coast, is testing technologies to reduce the country’s thirst for fossil fuels. The goal is innovation on a local scale, developing clean energy sources and reducing energy demand in a 4square-kilometer site called a Sustainable Energy Zone. The project is part of a European Union program to encourage pilot projects that can be scaled up to regional or national levels. Dundalk is working with two other towns, in Austria and Switzerland, on a total budget of about $40 million, said Aideen O’Hora, the project manager for Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government agency in charge. But the biggest changes are taking place in Dundalk. The zone has a bit of everything — an industrial park, a college campus, a high school, a hospital, a hotel, other businesses and two housing developments — in a town of about 30,000 people. The fiveyear project will be a year old in June, but other initiatives got a head start, and the town of Dundalk is already seeking money for an energy-conscious expansion that could double its size. The first thing visible is a wind turbine 60 meters high that has dominated the campus of the Dundalk Institute of Technology since 2005. It is the inspiration for a bigger one that will provide power to Xerox Corporation in the industrial park. Self-powered streetlights on the campus and in the industrial park are being tested. But most of the work is less obvious or is in the planning stage. For example,

a wood-fueled system with a gas boiler backup will deliver heat and hot water to many buildings in the zone through underground pipes. And inside the H. J. Heinz plant, which produces frozen dinners for dieters, clever engineering has helped save energy. Energy conservation in the zone means improving the insulation for both new and existing homes. And Sustainable Energy Ireland says that by 2010, renewable energy will account for at least 20 percent of the heat in the zone and at

Sustainable power and renewable resources are a way of life in Dundalk. least 20 percent of the electricity used by businesses. That timetable looks overly modest to Lawrence D. Staudt, an American engineer who moved to Ireland in 1985 while working for a Vermont-based windpower company that went out of business six months later. Mr. Staudt, now the director of the Center for Renewable Energy at the Dundalk Institute of Technology, says Ireland is ideally suited for wind power because of its perch in the northern Atlantic, and he is eager to see it move ahead. The limiting factor is Ireland’s electrical grid, which is being updated. The

winds (and wave-power energy potential) are strongest on the western coast, but the country needs some “big pipes’’ to carry the power to more populous areas, Mr. Staudt explained. “Ireland will become an exporter of green electrons,’’ he predicted. The turbine is the largest commercial wind turbine on a college campus, Mr. Staudt said, and it has cut the college’s electricity costs in half. It will pay for itself — the cost was about $2 million — in seven and a half years, he added. At Heinz, a big chunk of its electricity bill comes from freezing the dinners, said Shane Kearney, the chief engineer. The system uses compressed ammonia. “The greater the pressure, the harder it is to pump,’’ he said. “We took the pressure down to where the motors didn’t have to work so hard. That took 30 percent off the freezing bill in the first year.’’ Then utilities workers took a critical look at the compressed-air system used to drive machinery and found that fixing leaks quickly made a big difference in costs. “When we plugged the leaks,’’ Mr. Kearney said, “we could drop the third compressor. Turned out it was there to keep the leaks happy.’’ There is more work to do. For example, the heat drawn from the refrigeration apparatus could be used to heat water for cleaning, but the generation of the heat and the cleaning of the plant take place at different times of the day, and the storage of warm water could lead to bacterial growth — unacceptable in a food plant. Still, Mr. McNally thinks a way may be found to do it safely.

A Cleaner, Leaner Jet Age Is About to Dawn By MATTHEW L. WALD

Jet fuel is now the largest expense for most airlines, and for American carriers each penny increase in price per gallon costs nearly $200 million a year. The industry is also becoming increasingly nervous about what happens when that fuel is burned. Aviation is responsible for about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, and that share will rise as air travel continues to grow. So the industry is scrambling to build greener airplanes — to save weight and improve engine efficiency, with an eye toward reducing operating costs and emissions. In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace. In the longer term, the fuel itself may change; scientists are looking for an aviation version of ethanol, something that can be made from plants rather than petroleum. The newest aircraft will swap out many of the conventional hydraulic systems that control flaps, slats and other parts and replace them with electric motors, saving weight. New aircraft will use motors to pressurize the cabin for

PRATT & WHITNEY

Changes in aviation will include geared jet engines, electric motors, new materials and fuel mixtures. the same reason. The geared jet engine will enter commercial airline service around 2013, if all goes well, and it will be less noisy and more efficient in its use of air. Mitsubishi has selected the engine for its new regional jet, and All Nippon Airways has agreed to buy 15 of them. Bombardier, in Montreal, has listed the geared turbofan as a choice for a new line of regional jets it will build. Those new regional jets and other new planes, like Boeing’s new 787, will also use more composites to improve passenger comfort. Companies building private jets have switched to composites but used the weight advantage to build a bigger plane, rather than a plane of the same size with a lighter weight.

Corrosion is a problem on aluminum airplanes. But composites do not rust, and they are not subject to metal fatigue, although they are subject to other deterioration. The 787 is one of the first to use the new electric motors instead of hydraulic pumps. At Honeywell, a major manufacturer of aircraft parts, Robert H. Smith, vice president of advanced technology, said electricity is “safer, lighter and greener.’’ The long-term change, though, may come in the fuel itself. For example, the Institute for Air Science at Baylor University in Texas ran a 60-hour test of a turboprop airplane, a twin-engine King Air, with one engine flying on a mixture of 80 percent jet fuel and 20 percent biodiesel, and the other on straight jet fuel. Whenever the plane landed, it was obvious which engine was using the mixture because it had much less soot on its cowl, said Grazia Zanin, the director of renewable aviation fuels development at Baylor. But “we don’t think biodiesel is the answer,’’ she said, partly because it does not function well at the extremely cold temperatures that jets must endure at high altitudes. The industry will have to find some solution, Ms. Zanin said, because as carbon output becomes a major concern, “commercial aviation as we know it today is not going to survive.’’

The charged and complex debate over how to slow down global warming has become a lot more complicated. Most of the focus in the last few years has centered on imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies. Leaders of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change — the scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year with former Vice President Al Gore — have emphasized that marketbased approach. All three presidential candidates are behind it. And it has framed international talks over a new climate treaty and debate within the United States over climate legislation But now, with recent data showing an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency, a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late. The economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: “Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.’’ What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. And time is critical, they say, as China, India and other developing nations march headlong into the modern world of cars and electric consumption on their way to becoming the dominant producer of greenhouse gases for decades to come. Indeed, China is building, on average, one large coal-burning power plant a week. In a recent article in the journal

Nature, researchers concerned with the economics, politics, and science of climate also argued that technology policy, not emissions policy, must dominate. “There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary —itis,’’saidtheauthors,RogerA.Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University ofColorado;TomWigley,aclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University in Montreal. “The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation?’’ Proponents of treaties and legislation that would cap emissions don’t disagree with this call to arms for new, low-carbon technologies. But they say the cap approach should not be ignored, either. “You can do a tremendous lot with available technology,’’ said Professor

Advocates say the climate debate has to include new technologies. Najam, one of the authors of the intergovernmental panel’s report on policy options. “It is true that this will not be enough to lick the problem, but it will be a very significant and probably necessary difference.’’ At the same time, China and India continue to insist that economic growth is both their priority and right. They argue that the established economic powers should be responsible for spearheading the research to reduce carbon emissions. After all, the United States and Europe spent more than a century growing wealthy by burning fossil fuels. Developing countries repeatedly made that point recently in Bangkok in the latest round of United Nations talks over the shape of a new climate agreement. But the United States rejected a proposal from China that 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product of industrialized countries be used to disseminate nonpolluting energy technologies.

Wasted Energy Efficiency’s role in cutting emissions is a matter of debate. Most scientists agree that both cleaner fuels and greater efficiency are needed. Here is how much energy goes unused, by sector.

66%

71%

OF ENERGY LOST

OF ENERGY LOST

ELECTRICITY Most is generated from coal and natural gas; the heat from burning those fuels is largely lost. Then transmission lines leach out electricity, as much as 10 percent of what is generated.

20% LOST

Needed: lighter vehicles with more efficient engines. Plug-in hybrids, using electricity generated from carbon-free sources, could drastically reduce energy loss and emissions.

TRANSPORTATION

20% LOST

INDUSTRY Efficiency can be improved by harnessing excess heat to power production.

Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS

Higher efficiency lighting and appliances would decrease energy loss. Reduced demand for heating and cooling from improved insulation and architecture would lower energy use. BILL MARSH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

6

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: GADG ETS

Tiny Computers That Assist, Inform and Entertain By PETER WAYNER

For his doctoral thesis, Rafael Ballagas worked with other students to build a magic wand that gave tours of Regensburg, Germany. Tourists could wander around the city, wave the wand to “cast a spell” and hear a voice tell them the history of where they were standing. It sounds like magic, but the truth is a bit more mundane. The wand is just a cellphone, said Mr. Ballagas. “It’s packaged in a shell. It’s got a skin,” he explained. The cellphone keeps track of tourists’ locations and notifies them when they get near a noteworthy part of Regensburg. When the tourists finish touring, the cellphone recalls their trip with information about every stop along their path. Computer designers are working to develop more of this kind of magic by embedding the latest chips in new places and giving them new powers. The goal is computers that are practically invisible to people and more fully integrated into their lives. Mr. Ballagas’s project is a step along the way; perhaps that is why Nokia hired him to work in its Palo Alto, California, research lab. But in the future, computer chips will be finding homes in even odder places than magic wands. Imagine an umbrella with a cellphone embedded in the handle. It could call up the weather forecast for the day and the handle could glow green if the outlook was fair. But if a storm was coming it could start to flash red at a pace based on the probability of rain. A platform like this opens up new business models and opportunities for advertising. The umbrella might be free — if you’re willing to listen to it whisper advertising offers in your ear: “You know that raspberry-pimento-vanilla coffee you like? The store you’re about to pass just took a fresh batch out of the roaster.’’ Leah Buechley is a postdoctoral researcher in the Craft Technology Group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which studies software applications in traditional handicrafts. She is selling the LilyPad Arduino, a small flower-shaped disk with a computer chip at the center,

Leah Buechley’s shirt, top, and a motion-sensitive bracelet, have computer chips embedded in them. Nicole Predki’s suit, left, has sensors that control her music.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEVIN MOLONEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

which can be sewn into clothes. Sensors like accelerometers, for measuring acceleration or detecting and measuring vibrations, and light detectors are attached with wires to the “petals,” so the chip can track the wearer’s motion. The main board costs $19.95 and addons cost from $7.95 for a tricolor L.E.D. to $24.95 for an accelerometer (sparkfun. com). Dr. Buechley says the boards can be worn as soft computers “in a noninvasive, non-weight-bearing way.” One dancer used a leotard covered with sensors to control a player piano with her movements. There was no need to pay a pianist to stay in sync. While there are many opportunities

for fun, Dr. Buechley said the real market could be devices to help the elderly. She is exploring how to knit clothes that monitor a person’s heart rate, breathing and joint movement. Other examples of sensors and displays being integrated into unexpected areas include the PhyTalk system from Phytech, an Israeli company. It uses sensors placed on fruit trees or other crops to provide information to farmers. One sensor monitors tiny changes in stem diameter, while another tracks size and growth of fruit. Avi Lulu, the company’s chief executive, said the system could reduce irrigation costs while increasing yields. “We are not irrigating what we think the

By ANNE EISENBERG

By ANNE EISENBERG

El-E, a robot directed by laser pointer by Hai Nguyen of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been built to retrieve objects.

STANLEY LEARY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

rect a robot, and even when robots navigate to the right spot, it is hard for them to grasp a particular object unless, for instance, they have a three-dimensional computer model of it, Professor Kemp said. Guided by the laser pointer, though, El-E can fetch objects with no need for elaborate computer modeling. The robot is not on the market; it is a laboratory prototype, about to be tested with patients at the ALS Center at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said Dr. Jonathan Glass, the center’s director. The robot may fill an

Robots to help around the house, ready at the click of a button. important need there. “I’ve had patients tell me if they drop their cellphone, they may spend several hours trying to lean down and pick it up,” Dr. Glass said. “And it fills a psychological need, too, not to have to ask for help.” Andrew Y. Ng, an assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University in California who is developing robot technology for people to use at home, said Professor Kemp’s use of the laser pointer was highly effective. “It is simple, elegant and clever,” he said, ”one of those solutions that many of us wish

“It’s like being a kid in a candy shop,” Dr. Igoe said. “You start to be critical. When you can have all of it, you start to get sick and you eat it only when you want it.” Cost is one issue, he said. Potential loss of privacy is another. With embedded computing, he said, “the end goal is not the communication but the quality of life that the communication affords.” Dr. Igoe offered an example: the Toyota Prius, an electric hybrid, and many other new cars report fuel consumption instantaneously to the driver. Whenever you can help people “measure how they do something, they change how they do it,” he said. It becomes a livein video game, but a live-in video game with a purpose.

Polaroid Looks to the Future, But With a Dose of Nostalgia

Pointing an Assistant In the Right Direction Robots may soon perform useful chores around the house with a simple point and click. One robot in development at an Atlanta laboratory is commanded by humans with an ordinary laser pointer, the same kind used by lecturers presenting slide shows. Here, though, the pointer tells a robot what to fetch. Shine its bright light on a dropped medicine bottle on the floor, and the robot will go to the spot, retrieve the bottle and roll back with it. The robot does not yet say, “Your medicine bottle, sir,” but that may also happen someday, said Charlie Kemp, an assistant professor and roboticist in the department of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He created the robot with support from graduate students and colleagues. This dexterous robot may be especially helpful in assisting people with severely restricted mobility— for instance, those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Professor Kemp was inspired to create the robotic system partly because of what he had learned about helper monkeys. These animals fetch objects for quadriplegics who hold laser pointers in their mouths and shine them on items they want retrieved. He named his one-armed robot El-E, because, among other reasons, her lifting style reminded him of an elephant using its trunk. El-E’s novel interface, the laser pointer, is important because it simplifies a longstanding problem basic to getting a robot to fetch, said Gaurav S. Sukhatme, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, who has played with El-E at the Atlanta lab. “The pointer gives the robot just enough context and guidance to solve the really hard problem of figuring out which object among many lying around in a room to pick up,” Professor Sukhatme said. “People in artificial intelligence have been working on this problem for a long time.” Just pointing to an object with natural gestures usually is not enough to di-

plants need; we’re irrigating what the plants really need,” he said. Some plant lovers might be interested in Botanicalls, a simpler project developed by the New York University program in interactive telecommunications. It will measure soil moisture and send a message to the owner when the soil is too dry. When the plant gets the water, it also sends a thank-you note. That might be useful, but it’s easy to see how computer chips, if they become too common, could be trivialized. Tom Igoe, who leads physical computing for the N.Y.U. program, said his students were beginning to think critically about whether embedded computing was always worthwhile.

we had thought of ourselves.” El-E rolls along on wheels. When a laser pointer illuminates a spot in the room, she detects the spot with her wide-angle camera, then trains her camera eyes on it to get the position of, say, the cellphone or book, Professor Kemp said. Then she lumbers off, her built-in laser range finder scanning across the surface for the target. Once she reaches it, a camera in her hand looks down to get the measure of the object before she grabs it. Another point-and-click household robot offers a two-way voice and video system that lets parents visit with their children even when the parents are in a faraway hotel. This robot, ankle high and shaped like a disc, is connected to a home wireless network; its out-of-town owners can turn on a laptop computer and use the Internet to call the robot sitting in the living room. Then they can use the laptop’s mouse and keyboard to send the robot rolling around the room. On the computer screen, they see what the robot is seeing with its cameras, and they can talk with anyone near the robot’s sound system. The robot, called ConnectR is being tested by its manufacturer, iRobot, said Colin Angle, chief executive. ConnectR’s camera system can show out-of-town parents the words in a book their children are holding at home, so they can read them a bedtime story from it. It “will allow people to visit virtually regardless of where they are in the world,” Mr. Angle said.

Millions of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed. Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones. This fall, the company expects to market a handsize printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds. Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch. The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 5 centimeters by 7 centimeters, the size of a credit card. The printer opens like a makeup case with a neat, satisfying click. Inside, no cartridges or toner take up space. Instead, there is a computer chip, a 5-centimeter-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated. When the image file is beamed from the camera to the printer, a program translates pixel information into heat information. Then, as the paper passes under the printhead, the heat activates the colors within the paper and forms crisp images. The unusual paper is the creation of former employees of Polaroid who originated the process there. They spun off as a separate company, Zink Imaging, in 2005 after Polaroid’s bankruptcy and eventual sale to the Petters Group Worldwide in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The Alps Electric Company in Tokyo will make the printers. The potential market for instant printing of photos captured by phones and digital cameras is vast and largely untapped, said Steve Hoffenberg, an analyst at Lyra Research, a market re-

JOYCE DOPKEEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A battery-powered printer from Polaroid, below, can receive and print photographs from a cellphone. Edwin Land founded the company, a pioneer in instant gratification.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LARS KLOVE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

search firm in Newtonville, Massachusetts. “There’s an explosion in picture taking,” he said, “primarily because of the sheer number of camera phones out there on a worldwide basis.” Lyra projects shipments of about 880 million camera phones in 2008. But it may be hard for the new printers to find a niche. About 478 billion photographs will be taken worldwide in 2008, Mr. Hoffenberg said, most of them by camera phones, but only a tiny fraction of those clicks will end up as prints. “People can just post picture files on a Web page, or e-mail them to other people,” he said. “These days people have many options.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008

LE MONDE

7

L I V I N G : D E S T I N AT I O N S

A Cloistered Kingdom Slowly Opens To Travelers

Tourism Saves a City But Drains Its Spirit By SETH MYDANS

LUANG PRABANG, Laos — As the sky grows light along the Mekong River here, it is no longer the quiet footfalls of Buddhist monks that herald the day but the jostling and chattering of hundreds of tourists who have come to watch them on their morning rounds. “Here they come! Here they come!’’ a tour guide cries over his loudspeaker. “Hurry! Hurry!’’ The monks appear, a column of bright orange robes as far as the eye can see, walking quickly and silently with their begging bowls. The tourists cluster around them with their cameras and reach out to hand them food. Luang Prabang, a place of mists and temples in the mountains of central Laos, was until recently one of the last pristine remnants of traditional culture in a region that is rapidly leaving its past behind. Today, Luang Prabang displays preservation’s paradox. It has saved itself from modern development by packaging itself for tourists, but in the process has lost much of its authenticity and cultural significance. Like some similar places around the world, this small 700-year-old city of fewer than 20,000 people is being transformed into a replica of itself: its dwellings into guest houses, restaurants, souvenir shops and massage parlors; its rituals into shows for tourists. “Now we see the safari,’’ said Nithakhong Somsanith, an artist and embroiderer who works to preserve traditional arts. “They come in buses. They look at the monks the same as a monkey, a buffalo. It is theater.’’ The Buddhist heart of Luang Prabang — the tranquillity that attracts visitors

Tourists descend on the Buddhist monks’ daily processions in Luang Prabang, Laos.

By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL

DAVID LONGSTREATH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

from abroad — is being defiled, he said, adding, “Now the monks have no space to meditate, no space for quiet.’’ Luang Prabang was chosen as a World Heritage Site in 1995 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, which determined that its architectural ensemble was culturally significant and worthy of protection. Its strict guidelines on renovation and new construction have helped preserve the narrow streets, small structures and relatively light traffic of a past era. “The problem is that they took care of the hardware but not the software, the culture,’’ said Gilles Vautrin, a restaurant owner from France who has lived here for nearly a decade. “The city is being gentrified,’’ he said. “It will be a museum city. It will be a hotel city. Maybe the tourists will like it, but it won’t be the same Luang Prabang.’’ The morning scene of monks seeking alms is spectacular, a seemingly unending procession that includes the occupants of the city’s 34 temples. But as they walk down the main

street, Sisavangvong Road, they must thread their way through crowds of tourists and food vendors who call out their price, “Dollar! Dollar!’’ The scene may be jarring, said Rik Ponne, who works for Unesco in Bangkok, but “it is not a complete disaster.’’ “This is a very interesting moment in time in Luang Prabang, when we have probably reached the carrying capacity,’’ he said. “It is a question of whether the Lao government is willing to make policy decisions about maybe limiting tourism on the site or limiting its impact.’’ Already the core of the city is losing its population as development drives up prices and residents move away, leasing their homes as guest houses and restaurants. “You cannot find people living in houses like family,’’ said Vilath Inthasen, 25, a native of Luang Prabang who is a manager at Couleur Café. Mr. Vilath spent eight years as a monk here and, like many others, he used that time in the temple to prepare for what has become the city’s only industry. “If you are a monk, you can learn

English and go into tourism,’’ he said. “Most of the people who work in restaurants are former monks.’’ Traditionally, young men in Laos become monks for several months or years before returning to life outside the monasteries. While the tourism brings jobs and money, he said, it disrupts the way of life he grew up with. “I am afraid our culture will start to disappear,’’ he said. “Now bars can stay open until midnight. Normally we don’t do this in Laos.’’ This loss of culture is critical because Luang Prabang is not simply an architectural monument, like the temples at Angkor in Cambodia. “When you look at the architecture, it is interesting but normal, very normal; the temples are a little bit rough, not refined,’’ said Laurent A. Rampon, the former chief architect and director of the cultural preservation office here. “What is really interesting in Luang Prabang is all that together,’’ he said. “It is the ambience of the city, the daily life, the temples and the monks. In Luang Prabang, when the ambience is gone, it will not be Luang Prabang any more.’’

As Kenya Bleeds, Safari Business Suffers By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

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Tourists have been avoiding the Masai Mara game reserve, above, because of Kenya’s recent violence. A tourist and guide, left.

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Reuben Kyama contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

Trying to expand the Saudi Arabian economy beyond oil.

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KEEKOROK, Kenya — Nancy Holan just had the safari of her life. She and a friend flew to Kenya from Detroit at the end of February and as they cruised the wide open plains, they had the lions, zebras and elephants all to themselves. “It was wonderful,’’ she said. Not far away, Isaac Rotich, a highend safari guide, paced an empty game lodge in freshly polished safari boots. He can spot a 15-centimeter lizard 15 meters away, and tell you the name —in Kiswahili, English and Latin — of the plant it is sitting on. He has spent years building this career and was making $30,000 a year, a large amount of money in these parts. Now he is afraid of losing it all. “We’re hurting, big time,’’ Mr. Rotich said. This is what Kenya’s legendary safari business has become: wonderful for tourists, disastrous for just about everyone else. Tourism is one of Kenya’s biggest industries, but the violence that exploded after a flawed election in December has eviscerated the business, with bookings down 80 to 90 percent in most areas. Even after a peace deal was signed at the end of February, government and tourism officials worried that it could take months — if not years — to recover. Kenya’s rival politicians are sharing power. But the long-term economic consequences are just beginning to sink in. “We will work very hard to see what we can salvage,’’ said Rose Musonye Kwena, an official at the Kenya Tourist Board, who estimated that even if there was no more major violence this year business would still be down 50 percent. The images of machete-wielding mobs caused a tourist stampede, and uncertainty over Kenya’s direction has caused a wave of cancellations, leaving dozens of hotels closed and thousands of guides, drivers, cooks, waiters, masseuses, wood carvers and bead stringers out of work. A continued tourism meltdown could push millions of Kenyans toward poverty. Kenya’s billion-dollar tourism industry, which injects critically needed foreign exchange into the economy, is hardly the only victim. The election crisis, which started when Kenya’s election commission declared the in-

If you were running a restrictive Islamic state where the women can’t drive and restaurants are segregated between families and single men, the last idea that might occur to you is to invite Westerners in to have a look. And yet, that’s exactly what Saudi Arabia is doing. As part of a group of reforms, the kingdom is trying to develop the country as a tourist destination, first for domestic travelers and later for international ones. Westerners are starting to visit the country on group tours, a process that has become easier with loosened visa rules. The country’s starkly different customs are part of the appeal for visitors — some even claim to see advantages in wearing the abaya, the formless black robe that women must wear in public. So are its intact culture, historical sites and diversity of climate and topography. It used to be that tourists could visit Saudi Arabia only through the Discover Saudi Arabia program, run through Saudi Arabian Airlines. But last April the government passed a law allowing domestic travel agencies to bring in foreign tours. If all goes as hoped, the new arrangement will speed the visa process and give foreign tour operators greater flexibility. “Saudi Arabia today faces a big challenge, which is its image,’’ said Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, secretary general of the Supreme Commission of Tourism of Saudi Arabia. “It is very important for us that people come and see it as it is. Seeing is believing.’’ Saudi Arabia has long been one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations — for Muslims making a pilgrimage to Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Millions of pilgrims visit each year for either the hajj, which is a pilgrimage at a prescribed time, or umrah, a visit to the sites at any other time of the year. NonMuslims are forbidden to enter these places. Nonreligious tourists made up only 7 percent of the country’s foreign tourists in 2006, and most of those visitors came from the Middle East. The ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, is instituting changes to diversify

TANZANIA Lake Ndutu

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cumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, the winner of a closely contested race, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging, has killed more than 1,000 people and balkanized Kenya, with hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes. The violence punched a hole through the economy, disrupting coffee and tea production, knocking down the stock market’s value and bruising transport, manufacturing, construction and nearly every other industry. Last year, the country had more than two million tourists. In January, there were only 55,000 new arrivals, well below projections. The truth is that most

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GUILLAUME BONN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

of the violence has subsided and it never really touched the tourist areas, like the Masai Mara. But many Western governments think otherwise. Australia is still warning its citizens traveling to Kenya to have a high degree of caution. “These warnings are a real problem for us,’’ said Calvin Cottar, the owner of an upscale safari camp. He said people have not wanted to come to Kenya if they think “they will be drinking Champagne while somebody is getting hacked to death over the hill.’’ Cottars 1920s Mara Safari Camp is

one of the most luxurious lodges in Kenya, charging up to $710 a night per person, and is usually fully booked at this time of year. At the end of February, it was deserted. The only guests were a couple from Kenya who paid cut-rate local prices, which allow the lodges to stay open — but just barely. The staff at Cottars threw on their fezzes and best smiles. But underneath they seemed down. Their salaries have been halved. The tips have dried up. Daniel Lanke, a waiter at Cottars, just enrolled his ninth child in private school but now, he said, “I can’t even buy him socks.’’

the country’s economy and insulate it against shifts in the oil market. International tourism isn’t part of that program, but domestic tourism is. The government estimates that Saudis who might take holidays in Saudi Arabia are a $15 billion market, and that the international tourism market is tiny in comparison. Still, international tourists have value to the government as part of a public relations campaign. Saudi Arabia does surprise most tourists. “Most people think of it as a vast desert with oil wells popping up all over it,’’ said Robert Parda of Advantage Tours, one of the few American companies that run tours to Saudi Arabia. It is a closed country, but a wealthy one, with a mix of modern buildings and ancient architecture. Although non-Muslims cannot see Mecca and Medina (and those with Israeli stamps on their passports cannot enter the country at all), most can visit the old souks of cities like Jidda, which is well-preserved. But the biggest draw of Saudi Arabia may be the closed nature of the country itself. The tour operators interviewed for this article said that the majority of clients who went on their Saudi tours were exceptionally well traveled. The country is a place Western tourists go when they’re looking for something totally different, a culture little touched by the Western world. Saudi Arabia’s leaders believe that the growth of domestic tourism would solidify their culture, said Prince Sultan bin Salman. The government says it will monitor the response to the tourism from the local communities. “We’ve seen how things sometimes happening in a hurry can be detrimental to society and social change,’’ the prince said. “We’re not in a hurry to do more than we can swallow.’’

8

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

An Actor, Once Troubled, Gets the Superhero Role By DAVID CARR

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBB KENDRICK

21st Century Cowboys, 19th Century Cameras By RANDY KENNEDY

For more than 20 years the photographer Robb Kendrick has traveled around the United States, Canada and northern Mexico visiting places where people still herd cattle for a living. Such areas, where development has been slow and cellphones are too far from the nearest tower to work, are increasingly rare. Mr. Kendrick, a longtime contributor to National Geographic, fits in well in these places not only because he is a sixth-generation Texan, raised in ranch country in the state’s northern region, but also because of the unusual method of photography he favors. It was patented and popularized at a time when the idea of the American cowboy was itself just being created. He doesn’t need batteries or memory cards or even film for his pictures. Mostly he just needs time and lots of patience. And as he labors, moving methodically from beneath the hood of his wooden box camera to a portable field darkroom, bearing wet iron plates that he has painstakingly prepared, he thinks of himself not as simply making pictures but also as taking part in the world of the cowboys who are the subjects of his otherworldly tintype portraits. “The tendency of cowboys is to think of photographers as very demanding, high-maintenance people,” Mr. Kendrick said. “And in the end I think they really respect the fact that I have to work for these pictures. They respect any kind of honest hard work.” Mr. Kendrick, 45, belongs to a growing group of commercial and art photographers — including gallery stars like Sally Mann and Chuck Close — who have retreated in recent years from the ease and exactitude of the digital age and taken up the difficult, ethereal techniques of early photography, including the ambrotype (in which a unique image is created on a glass plate), daguerreotype (on polished silver) and tintype (usually on tin-plated iron ). The latest result of Mr. Kendrick’s twin obsessions — with tintypes and the men who continue to make their livings on horseback — is “Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century,” a new collection of 148 tintype portraits published by the University of Texas Press. The pictures — made by exposing and developing the metal plates after they have been coated with a light-sensitive

Vintage portraits of modern cowboys: at the B Bar ranch in Oklahoma, top, and rest time in Montana. Robb Kendrick employs the tintype techniques of early photography to create the images. HOLLY WILMETH

solution of silver nitrate — are a kind of ideal meeting of subject and style. Many of the cowboys yearn to have been born in the 19th century. And the tintypes, with their sepia tones, blurred peripheries and ghostly aura, take the cowboys back to the era when such photographs were taken by traveling commercial photographers. Mr. Kendrick’s impulses may be more nostalgic and sociological than artistic, but the best of the pictures have a timeless power that evokes — oddly, given that Mr. Kendrick’s pictures are of cowboys — the portraits of North American Indians taken by Edward S. Curtis in the early 1900s. For the new book, and an earlier one, “Revealing Character,” published in 2005, Mr. Kendrick estimates conservatively that he has covered more than 64,000 kilometers of often lonesome road

in his pickup truck and visited more than 60 ranches, towing a trailer that he uses as a darkroom. Mr. Kendrick has long been drawn to cowboys as subjects, in part because he grew up around so many in Hereford, Texas, but also because he finds the endurance of their culture and mythology — more than a hundred years after the last great cattle drives — to be as fascinating as that of other groups he has photographed, like Sherpas in the Himalayas or the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico. “Many cultures threatened by socalled progress can lose much in a matter of one or two generations,” he writes in the new book. “But cowboys — actual working cowboys, in all their manifestations — proudly and determinedly endure.”

LOS ANGELES — Look at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man without a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big coverage in the news media was when he was in trouble with the law. Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, “Iron Man,” it bet on Mr. Downey, and the resurgent actor rose to the challenge. For years Mr. Downey has been tagged with two shorthand references: “The greatest actor of his generation” (for his Oscar-nominated role in “Chaplin”) was usually quickly followed by “drug-addled lowlife” (based on multiple arrests for drug possession). Mr. Downey earns both of those tags, but there is no mistaking that he has the ambition to be the former. He has appeared in “Natural Born Killers,” “Less Than Zero” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” among some 50 other films. Now sober, highly productive (he’ll be in Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” this summer and has just finished filming “The Soloist,” about a homeless schizophrenic) and very much engaged as he sits in his home in Brentwood, Mr. Downey seems less surprised than the rest of us. “The people who made this movie said they were going to screen-test some people, and I thought: ‘Well, that’s how I got “Chaplin.” Maybe this will work again,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to spend a hundred million bucks on a movie, why not see who works?” It doesn’t take much more than a viewing of the “Iron Man” trailer to sense that Mr. Downey walked on the set and said, “Yeah, I got this.” And there is a sincere logic behind his casting in this estimated $130 million movie, scheduled to open between April 30 and May 3 worldwide. The story of Tony Stark, a geniusinventor-billionaire-arms dealer, is plenty textured: he likes big weapons and fast women and seems to have misplaced his conscience, so it makes sense that the man who steps into both his suit of armor and his role as superhero has grappled with vice. After a life of squandered promise spreading mayhem everywhere, our hero has a neardeath experience and finds within himself the angel of his better nature. Sound familiar? “I’m not the superhero type,” the Stark character explains. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, some of them publicly.” The parallels between Mr. Downey and his character on screen run throughout the film. “There are things we know about just from reading the newspaper,” said Jeff Bridges, who plays a surprisingly affable villain to Mr. Downey’s superhero. “He doesn’t have to do anything to make it happen. The audience brings that darker part of the story into the theater. And his wit and improvisation bring it home.” Jon Favreau, the writer of “Swingers” and the director of “Elf” and now “Iron Man,” said that casting Mr. Downey was not a source of stress. “Nobody went to see a movie about the pirate ride at Disneyland,” Mr. Favreau said by phone. “They got interested in it because of Johnny Depp. When Robert was cast in ‘Iron Man,’ it was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. He was not the obvious choice, but my larger fear was making a mediocre movie; the landscape of the

Critics Who Offer a Few Words on Fragrances By RUTH LA FERLA

JAMEL TOPPIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The reaction to a fragrance can be visceral, and personal. That is not news to Luca Turin, a scientist and fragrance expert. He describes Attrape-Coeurs, an amber violet perfume from Guerlain, as “an intense radiant Wurlitzer organ blast of rose violet and iris notes,” but says of Creed’s Love in White: “If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.” Mr. Turin, author of “Perfumes: The Guide,” written with his wife, Tania Sanchez, is a dominant voice in a chorus of critics airing their views in books and

magazines and on the Web. That chatter, however, is the bane of the fragrance industry, which, when it comes to romancing products, has traditionally claimed the last word. “Perfume is the only art in which there’s never been a true word spoken,” Mr. Turin said in an interview. Today reviewers on Web sites and blogs like aromascope.com, scentzilla. com, boisdejasmin.com and perfumeposse.com are fierce, responding to certain fragrances with rapture or, as often, with venomous contempt. An enthusiast on nowsmellthis. blogharbor.com described Poison, from Dior, as “a warm, luxurious velvet blan-

ket draped across a satin settee. On the same site, the perfume was assailed as “a railroad spike through the brain.” When they wish to be especially critical, bloggers designate a scent as a “scrubber,” the kind of smell you can’t wash off fast enough. Not surprisingly, these critics’ uncensored comments have been anathema to the Estée Lauders and Cotys of the world. “No question, the industry people are unnerved,” said Rochelle R. Bloom, the president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. “I often get calls from executives pleading, ‘Can’t you do something about all this chatter?’ ”

superhero is very picked over. I knew that Robert’s performance would elevate the movie.” When serious actors take on jobs involving comic books and hours in machines and makeup, they generally suffer through it for the paycheck. Mr. Downey is having none of that. At 43 he is thrilled to be fit enough — he had spent the morning receiving instruction in wing chun, a Chinese martial art built on aggressive, close combat — to play a hero. He views the Big Comic Book Movie as a kind of arrival after years of lead roles in movies like “The Singing Detective” and “The Gingerbread Man,” which had cinematic pedigrees but little in the way of audiences. “I’ve been in big movies before and never had a problem with them,” he said. “What is creepy and obvious is that the market was suddenly flooded with morons who thought, ‘If I’ve got $500,000, I can make a baseball cap that has a company name on it and say I’m a filmmaker.’ ” “On the contrary,” he added, “I am thrilled to have made this movie with

INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

“I seem to have been the person who’s had to wait the longest for this kind of gratification.” ROBERT DOWNEY JR.

The star of “Iron Man”

Jon. I seem to have been the person who’s had to wait the longest for this kind of gratification. “It took a while. Richard Attenborough,” he said, referring to the director of “Chaplin,” “told me that one day your ambition will supersede all of these other impulses you have, and that will help set you straight.” Today Mr. Downey appears to be happily married, to the producer Susan Levin, and to have a good relationship with his teenage son from a previous marriage, Indio, who stopped by at the end of the interview. The grand piano in his relatively modest house occupies much of his free time. It’s the kind of story that might make some misty, but Mr. Downey is more prone to the mystical. He said he has left his self-destructive past behind him and moved on with his life. “I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore,” he said, “and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore.”

Commentators on coty.com prompted Coty, which makes fragrances by David Beckham and Jennifer Lopez, among others, to think of reissuing its greatest hits, scents like Emeraude and L’Origan, said Stephen C. Mormoris, a senior vice president of global marketing. Such developments cannot come soon enough for Ms. Sanchez. In “Perfumes: The Guide,” she chided that the perfume industry “hasn’t yet figured out the benefits of relaxing control.” She told of a prominent blogger threatened with a lawsuit by a perfume company because she had deemed its product only “O.K.,” and “a little disappointing.” “When a sleek luxury goods company unleashes its lawyers on a suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance,” Ms. Sanchez wrote, “we know the world is changing.”