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But the sugary summer cooler Rooh Afza, with a poetic name that means “soul refresher” and evokes the narrow alleys of its birthplace of Old Delhi, has long reached across the heated borders of South Asia to quench the thirst of generations. In Pakistan, the thick, rose-coloured syrup — called a sharbat or sherbet and poured from a distinctive long-neck bottle — is mixed with milk and crushed almonds as an offering in religious processions. In Bangladesh, a new groom often takes a bottle or two as a gift to his in-laws. Movies even invoke it as a metaphor: In one film, the hero tells the heroine that she is beautiful like Rooh Afza. And in Delhi, where the summer temperatures often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the city feels like a slow-burning oven, you can find it everywhere. The chilled drink is served in the plastic goblets of cold-drink vendors using new tricks to compete for customers: how high and how fast they can throw the concentrate from one glass to the next as they mix, how much of it they can drizzle onto the cup’s rim.
In an undated image provided to The New York Times, Hakim Abdul Majid, who founded Rooh Afza in 1907 at his small herbal medicine shop in Old Delhi. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times)
The same old taste is also there in new packaging to appeal to a new generation and to new drinkers: in the juice boxes in children’s school bags; in cheap one-time sachets hanging at tobacco stalls frequented by labourers; and in high-end restaurants, where it is whipped into the latest ice cream offering. In an undated image provided to The New York Times, Hakim Abdul Majid, who founded Rooh Afza in 1907 at his small herbal medicine shop in Old Delhi. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times) As summer heat waves worsen, the drink’s reputation as a natural, fruits-and-herbs cooler that lowers body temperature and boosts energy — four-fifths of it is sugar — means that even a brief interruption in manufacturing results in huge outcries over a shortage. Behind the drink’s survival, through decades of regional violence and turmoil since its invention, is the ambition of a young herbalist who died early and the foresight of his wife, the family’s matriarch, to help her young sons turn the beverage into a sustainable business. The drink brings about $45 million of profit a year in India alone, its manufacturer says, most of it going to a trust that funds schools, universities and clinics. “It might be that one ingredient or couple of ingredients have changed because of availability, but by and large the formula has remained the same,” said Hamid Ahmed, a member of the fourth generation of the family who runs the expanded food wing of Hamdard Laboratories, which produces the drink.
In an undated image provided to The New York Times, an ad for Rooh Afza touting it as a drink for the elite: “For all kinds of complaints during the heat season, big big rajas and nawabs always use this.” India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times)
In the summer of 1907 in Old Delhi, still under British rule, the young herbalist, Hakim Abdul Majid, sought a potion that could help ease many of the complications that come with the country’s unbearable heat: heat strokes, dehydration, diarrhoea. In an undated image provided to The New York Times, an ad for Rooh Afza touting it as a drink for the elite: “For all kinds of complaints during the heat season, big big rajas and nawabs always use this.” India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times) What he discovered, in mixing sugar and extracts from herbs and flowers, was less medicine and more a refreshing sherbet. It was a hit. The bottles, glass then and plastic now, would fly off the shelves of his small medicine store, which he named Hamdard. Majid died 15 years later at the age of 34. He was survived by his wife, Rabea Begum, and two sons; one was 14, and the other a toddler. Begum made a decision that turned Hamdard into an enduring force and set a blueprint for keeping it profitable for its welfare efforts at a time when politics would tear the country asunder. She declared Hamdard a trust, with her and her two young sons as the trustees. The profits would go not to the family but largely to public welfare. The company’s biggest test came with India’s bloody partition after independence from the British in 1947. The Muslim nation of Pakistan was broken out of India. Millions of people endured an arduous trek, on foot and in packed trains, to get on the right side of the border. Somewhere between 1 to 2 million people died, and families — including Begum’s — were split up.
In an undated image provided to The New York Times, Rabea Begum, Hakim Abdul Majid’s wife, who decided after his death that profits from Rooh Afza would go to a trust to fund public welfare. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times)
Hakim Abdul Hamid, the older son, stayed in India. He became a celebrated academic and oversaw Hamdard India. In an undated image provided to The New York Times, Rabea Begum, Hakim Abdul Majid’s wife, who decided after his death that profits from Rooh Afza would go to a trust to fund public welfare. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times) Hakim Mohamad Said, the younger son, moved to the newly formed Pakistan. He gave up his role in Hamdard India to start Hamdard Pakistan and produce Rooh Afza there. He rose to become the governor of Pakistan’s Sindh province but was assassinated in 1998. When in 1971 Pakistan was also split in half, with Bangladesh emerging as another country, the facilities producing Rooh Afza in those territories formed their own trust: Hamdard Bangladesh. All three businesses are independent, run by extended members or friends of the young herbalist’s family. But what they offer is largely the same taste, with slight variations if the climate in some regions affects the herbs differently. The drink sells well during summer, but there is particularly high demand in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Around the dinner table or in the bazaars at the end of a day, a glass or two of chilled Rooh Afza — the smack of its sugar and flavours — can inject life.
Employees check bottles of Rooh Afza at a factory in Gurgaon, India, April 14, 2021. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history. Now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (Rebecca Conway/The New York Times)
“During the summer, after a long and hot day of fasting, one becomes more thirsty than hungry,” said Faqir Muhammad, 55, a porter in Karachi, Pakistan. “To break the fast, I directly drink a glass of Rooh Afza after eating a piece of date to gain some energy.” Employees check bottles of Rooh Afza at a factory in Gurgaon, India, April 14, 2021. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history. Now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (Rebecca Conway/The New York Times) In Bangladesh, the brand’s marketing goes beyond flavour and refreshments and into the realms of the unlikely and the metaphysical. “Our experts say Rooh Afza helps COVID-19-infected patients, helps remove their physical and mental weakness,” said Amirul Momenin Manik, deputy director of Hamdard Bangladesh, without offering any scientific evidence. “Many people in Bangladesh get heavenly feelings when they drink Rooh Afza, because we brand this as a halal drink.” During a visit to Rooh Afza’s India factory in April, which coincided with Ramadan, workers in full protective gowns churned out 270,000 bottles a day. The sugar, boiled inside huge tanks, was mixed with fruit juices and the distillation of more than a dozen herbs and flowers, including chicory, rose, white water lily, sandalwood and wild mint.
In an undated image provided to The New York Times, workers at a Rooh Afza factory in India prepare the sugar syrup for the drink. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times)
At the loading dock in the back, from dawn to dusk, two trucks at a time were loaded with more than 1,000 bottles each and sent off to warehouses and markets across India. In an undated image provided to The New York Times, workers at a Rooh Afza factory in India prepare the sugar syrup for the drink. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history — now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (via The New York Times) Ahmed — who runs Hamdard’s food division, for which Rooh Afza remains the central product — is trying to broaden a mature brand with offshoots to attract consumers who have moved away from the sherbet in their teenage and young adult years. New products include juice boxes that mix Rooh Afza with fruit juice, a Rooh Afza yogurt drink and a Rooh Afza milkshake. One survey the company conducted showed that half of Rooh Afza in Indian households was consumed as a flavour in milk, the rest in cold drinks. “We did our twist of milkshake,” Ahmed said, “which is Rooh Afza, milk and vanilla.”
Muslims break their Ramadan fast with snacks and Rooh Afza in New Delhi, April 15, 2021. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history. Now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (Rebecca Conway/The New York Times)
The milkshake “has done extremely well,” Ahmed said. But he is proud of two products in particular. One is a sugar-free version of the original Rooh Afza, 15 years in the making as the company looked for the right substitute for sugar. More than twice the price of the original, it caters to a more affluent segment. Muslims break their Ramadan fast with snacks and Rooh Afza in New Delhi, April 15, 2021. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alike enjoy the sweet and herbal taste of Rooh Afza, a beverage that has endured the region’s turbulent history. Now it is aiming for the palates of a new generation. (Rebecca Conway/The New York Times) “There is growing market for runners, athletes, those who watch what they eat and drink,” said Ahmed, who is himself a runner. The other product comes from a realisation that the original Rooh Afza, with all its sugar and flavour, still has vast untapped potential in India’s huge market. He is targeting those who cannot afford the 750-millilitre bottle, which sells for $2, offering one-time sachets that sell for 15 cents — a strategy that revolutionised the reach of shampoo brands in India. In vast parts of India, the reality of malnutrition is such that sugar is welcome. “The people in India in fact want sugar,” Ahmed said. “It’s only the metros that knows what diabetes is.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 3 |
“Sun & Sea (Marina)” — presented by artists Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite — took the Golden Lion for best national participation at the Biennale, beating 89 other national pavilions. This was the second successive time the prize has gone to a performance piece: In 2017, the winner was the German pavilion, for Anne Imhof’s haunting “Faust.” Saturday’s other big prize, the Golden Lion for best participant in the Biennale’s central exhibition, was won by American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. He showed a stirring 50-minute film, “The White Album,” in which he juxtaposes manifestations of white supremacy with portraits of white people he cares for and is close to. Jafa also showed a set of monumental sculptures of truck tires in chains. “If I could have picked a list, I would’ve picked the same list,” said Catherine Wood, a senior curator specialising in performance at the Tate in London. Wood said the Lithuanian pavilion had “this very clever way of framing people’s everyday activities and leisure” — lying on towels, playing board games, applying suntan lotion, chatting, reading — with a “quite powerful activist dimension” of warnings against ecological disaster and species extinction. “It’s pedestrian movement meeting this overarching framework of a story that was joyful and melancholic at the same time,” she said. The Lithuanian pavilion’s curator, Lucia Pietroiusti — who is curator of general ecology and live programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London — encouraged museums to start thinking outside the box. “The exhibition format is begging for a certain kind of opening up of possibilities,” she said. “We specialise so much, create these niches of specialism. Then we encounter these huge catastrophic situations like climate change or species extinction, and we need to find more ways to connect.” ©2019 New York Times News Service | 2 |
Britain and France vowed to respond to financial market problems on Thursday and called on banks to declare the full extent of the damage to their operations caused by the credit crunch. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called his relationship with President Nicolas Sarkozy an "entente formidable" as the French leader wrapped up a two-day state visit to Britain that both men hailed as launching a new era of cooperation. They agreed to try to enlarge the U.N. Security Council by getting permanent seats for Germany, Brazil, India, Japan and representation for Africa. In sharp contrast to the mutual suspicion that has so often tainted Anglo-French relations, the body language between the two leaders could not have been warmer. Compliments flowed in a press conference staged at the futuristic stadium of Premier League soccer club Arsenal in north London. The club is managed by Frenchman Arsene Wenger and has several Francophone players in its squad. An emotional Sarkozy hailed the "well deserved" reception given to his new wife, model-turned-singer Carla Bruni who he married last month after a whirlwind romance that dented his popularity in opinion polls. Leaders around the world are trying to calm fears of a global economic downturn stemming from a credit squeeze sparked by a U.S. housing loan crisis. But rich nations have yet to agree a joint action plan. "We agreed the need for greater transparency in financial markets to ensure banks make full and prompt disclosure of the scale of write-offs," Brown and Sarkozy said in a statement. Banks have written down more than $125 billion of assets due to the credit squeeze. Some estimates put the scale of bad debts on banks' books as high as $600 billion. Central banks have pumped cash into the financial system to restore confidence among commercial banks wary of lending money to each other. The two leaders urged further discussion with the United States and other to address the crisis.
EURO "TOO STRONG" In a speech in London's financial district on Thursday evening, Sarkozy complained that the euro was too strong while he said the value of the U.S., Japanese and Chinese currencies did not reflect the strength of their economies. He has repeatedly complained that the euro's rise, hitting a record high above $1.59 last week, damages French exporters. Sarkozy also voiced concern at the high price of oil and other commodities. Britain and France are permanent U.N. Security Council members, but moves to broaden its scope have been deadlocked. Brown and Sarkozy suggested some countries could be given longer, renewable terms on the council, perhaps leading to permanent seats. Sarkozy is seeking close ties with Britain to supplement the Franco-German alliance that has traditionally driven the 27-nation European Union. Analysts say that may be because of his difficulties with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Britain has often been criticised in Brussels for lingering on the fringes of the European Union and not joining the bloc's common currency -- with Brown a regular target for sniping. But he stood firmly with Sarkozy at a joint news conference. "We also agreed that we need Britain and France at the heart of Europe, a global Europe, that is reforming, open, flexible, outward-looking," Brown said. The two men agreed action on issues including opening up trade between poor and rich countries, clamping down on illegal immigration, tackling climate change and promoting dialogue between China and Tibet to solve the crisis there. | 1 |
Several thousand climate campaigners marched through London and Stockholm on Saturday calling on governments around the world to take urgent action to tackle global warming. Carrying banners with slogans like "cut carbon not forests" and "actions speak louder than words" protesters in London marched in torrential rain and biting cold past parliament and through Trafalgar Square to rally in front of the U.S. embassy. Some posters carried a picture of US President George W. Bush and the words "Wanted for crimes against the planet". The United States is the world's biggest emitter of carbon gases. British police said 2,000 people took part in the march. Organisers said they estimated the number at 7,000. In Sweden, police said about 1,000 protesters marched through Stockholm in the rain carrying banners reading "make love, not CO2", "kids for the climate" and "flying kills" in Swedish and English. "I've never seen so many people come to a demonstration in Stockholm," said Susanna Ahlfors, 34, marching with her two children. "If we don't act now, things will go really bad. I'm worried about their future." The protesters urged the world to stop driving and start biking and admonished Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for "staying quiet while the water is rising". The marches were among 50 planned around the world and timed to coincide with a meeting of U.N. environment officials and ministers on the Indonesian island of Bali to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions. "This march is a direct message for Bali, indeed for all governments around the world, to take action now," said Andy Wimbush, one of the London march organisers. "We can't wait." Kyoto, which was rejected by the United States, expires in 2012 and as yet there is nothing on the table to replace it. The UN hopes the meeting in Bali will produce a negotiating mandate that will lead in two years to a new global emissions cutting deal. A draft proposal on Saturday said all nations must do more to fight climate change and rich countries must make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts. The four-page draft was written by delegates from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa as an unofficial guide for delegates from 190 nations at the Dec. 3-14 Bali talks. Britain agrees the developed world as the main source of the high carbon levels in the atmosphere should lead the way. It is pushing a Climate Change Bill through parliament that will for the first time set a legally binding target on the government to cut national emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main climate culprit -- by 60 percent by 2050. | 0 |
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 8, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao offered Africa $10 billion in concessional loans over the next three years on Sunday, saying China was a "true and trusted friend" of the continent and its people. The aid offer is double that unveiled by President Hu Jintao at the last summit in Beijing in 2006, as China aims to boost a relationship which politically goes back decades and is now economically booming, to the discomfort of some in the West. Wen brushed aside concerns that China was only interested in Africa's natural resources to help feed its booming economy. "China's support for Africa's development is real and solid and, in the future, no matter what turbulence the world undergoes, our friendship with the people of Africa will not change," he told a summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Besides the loans, Wen said China would help Africa develop clean energy and cope with climate change, encourage Chinese financial institutions to lend to smaller African firms and expand market access for African products. He also called for greater international help for the continent. "Africa's development is an essential part of achieving global development, and as the sincere and dependable friend of Africa, China deeply feels the difficulties and challenges faced by Africa," We said. "China calls on the international community to enhance its sense of urgency, and support Africa's development in an even truer and more effective way." LONG FRIENDSHIP Blossoming trade and business ties have attracted Western criticism that Beijing is only interested in African resources, while Chinese commentators respond that envious Europeans still treat the continent like a colony. China's friendship with Africa dates from the 1950s, when Beijing backed liberation movements fighting colonial rule. Trade has risen sharply in the past decade, driven by China's hunger for resources to power its economic boom and African demand for cheap Chinese products. Still, this has not been without its critics, who say China is only interested in African resources and supports governments with dubious human rights records as a means to get them. The summit was attended by the presidents of Zimbabwe and Sudan, two countries often under fire for their rights records. Wen repeated that China would not interfere in the internal politics of any African country. "The Chinese government and people have always respected the autonomous right of the African people to choose their own social systems. China's support and aid for Africa has never and will never attach any political conditions." Some Chinese commentators have not been so diplomatic in the days running up to the summit, saying the West still views Africa as though it were a colony. "The West is envious of China and Africa drawing closer," popular Chinese tabloid the Global Times, published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, wrote on Tuesday. "Europeans view Africa as their own backyard," the newspaper quoted Chinese Africa expert Xu Weizhong as saying. "Of course they feel uncomfortable about the arrival of the Chinese." Some Africans welcome how China's approach differs from that of Europe or the United States. "China's policy is based on mutual development. Few Western countries have a foreign policy like this -- most are about telling Africans what to do," said Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, executive director of the Africa programme at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. | 0 |
Kerry said progress was vital as Egypt prepares to host the
next round of UN climate talks, known as COP27, in November in Sharm el-Sheikh.
For the meeting to be a success, the 20 richest nations
accounting for 65% of global gross domestic product (GDP) must stay committed
to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as they did at last year's
UN summit in Glasgow, he said. "That is critical," Kerry said in an interview.
"Those 20 countries account for 80% of all (greenhouse gas) emissions. If
those countries move, we solve the problem." Some progress is being made but not enough, and changes also
need to happen more quickly, he said. "There's a lot happening, many people pursuing new
technologies or many people investing," he said, speaking a day after
meeting Norwegian officials. "But we need to be working faster at the government
level to be organising ourselves so that there are more bankable deals, so that
there is a place for money to invest, and that takes some coordination between
government and the private sector." Addressing global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and
the war in Ukraine have taken some focus away from efforts to combat climate
change, Kerry said. At the same time, "it underscores the imperative of
being energy independent and for not being a hostage to gas, a fossil fuel held
by somebody who is ready to weaponise that fuel", he said referring to
Russian President Vladimir Putin. "No country should be dependent that way. Nobody has to
be (with renewables)," he said. | 0 |
Cyprus runs the risk of desertification by the end of this century as it feels the brunt of climate change and drought, an expert warned Friday. Studies project a rise in summer temperatures on the east Mediterranean island of between two and four degrees this century, compared to the 1960 to 1990 reference periods, Professor Manfred Lange, a geophysicist, said in an interview. "I think that there is a very definite potential for dramatically increasing desertification," said Lange, director of the Energy, Environment and Water Research Center at the non-profit Cyprus Institute. By the end of this century, Cyprus can expect an extra two months of days with temperatures exceeding 35 degrees centigrade (95 Fahrenheit) on top of the present summer months of June, July and August, Lange said. There is also likely to be less rainfall and increased evaporation because of higher temperatures. "Cyprus will in fact become more like Abu Dhabi or other states that we know because there is just not enough water," he said. Cyprus now uses energy-intensive desalination to meet some of its water requirements, while its population of around one million live with rationing and a permanent hosepipe ban. Lange said enforcement must be stringent. "People want water but if you want to avert desertification, we need to let nature have its share," he said, adding that while climate change could be slowed, it could not be reversed. The Cyprus Institute is examining the use of concentrated solar power to co-generate electricity and potable water through desalination, technology Lange said could be used elsewhere. "Cyprus could become somewhat of a showcase for this kind of technology and could develop an industry that would indeed then offer to market these devices to neighboring countries," he said. | 0 |
"A city can't live without water," Claudio Orrego, the governor of the Santiago metropolitan region, said in a press conference. "And we're in an unprecedented situation in Santiago's 491-year history where we have to prepare for there to not be enough water for everyone who lives here." The plan features a four-tier alert system that goes from green to red and starts with public service announcements, moves onto restricting water pressure and ends with rotating water cuts of up to 24 hours for about 1.7 million customers. The alert system is based off the capacity of the Maipo and Mapocho rivers that supply the capital with most of its water and have seen dwindling water levels as the drought drags on. The government estimates that the country's water availability has dropped 10% to 37% over the last 30 years and could drop another 50% in northern and central Chile by 2060. The water deficit in the rivers, measured in liters per second, will determine if cuts will take place every 12, six or four days. In each case, a different area would face water cuts each day. "This is the first time in history that Santiago has a water rationing plan due to the severity of climate change," Orrego said. "It's important for citizens to understand that climate change is here to stay. It's not just global, it's local." Certain areas in the city center would be exempt due to the high concentration of capitals. Areas fed by well water or other sources besides the two rivers will also be exempt. | 0 |
A bloc of the world's fastest growing carbon emitters, seen as key to a global deal on climate change, appears for the first time willing to discuss the future of the Kyoto Protocol to get the United States on board. Kyoto binds about 40 rich nations to cut emissions by 2008-12 and developing countries want a tougher second commitment period. That demand is opposed by many developed nations that want to jettison Kyoto to include emerging markets like India and China. Next week's meeting of the environment ministers of Brazil, South Africa, India and China - the so-called BASIC nations - will look at ways to bridge a trust deficit with rich nations, according to its agenda, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. "How long will the Kyoto Protocol survive? Could we envisage a shorter second commitment period designed solely to secure carbon markets?" said the agenda of the meeting to be held in South Africa on April 25-26. "If no second commitment period, what would replace Kyoto?" was another question listed on the agenda. Unmitigated distrust between rich and poorer nations about who should do how much has stalled negotiations for a global deal to fight climate change. Officials say they are less hopeful of a broader deal in Mexico in November. So a willingness on the part of the BASIC nations to soften their stand on the Kyoto Protocol could help break the negotiations logjam and bring on board the United States which never ratified the protocol. An Indian negotiator said the agenda was "realistic" and aimed at exploring "all options to get a good deal for all". The BASIC meeting agenda also said it would consider how elements of the Copenhagen Accord, a political pact that the bloc helped broker last year along with the United States, could be included in the current negotiating process. The Copenhagen Accord sets a non-binding goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times and a goal of $100 billion in aid from 2020. It also lists steps by dozens of nations, including all the top greenhouse gas emitters, to either cut or curb the growth of their emissions by 2020. The Copenhagen conference was originally meant to agree the outlines of a broader global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. The South Africa meeting's agenda also will consider whether the BASIC bloc of nations could be expanded and whether smaller groups of powerful nations such as the G20 bloc and the 17-nation Major Economies Forum could be useful platforms for negotiations. Poorer nations want negotiations to continue on two tracks -- one working on a successor to Kyoto from 2013 and the other looking at longer term actions to fight climate change by all nations. | 0 |
The world is moving towards balancing
environmental protection and economic growth, China's top climate change
negotiator told reporters, in response to a query on how China would work with
a Trump administration on climate change... "If they resist this trend, I don't
think they'll win the support of their people, and their country's economic and
social progress will also be affected," Xie Zhenhua said. "I believe a wise political leader
should take policy stances that conform with global trends," China's
veteran climate chief said. Trump has threatened to reject the Paris
Agreement, a global accord negotiated by nearly 200 governments to battle
climate change that takes effect on Friday. Chinese officials are often hesitant to
weigh in on foreign elections, although they will defend Chinese policies when
attacked in candidates' policy platforms. Xie's comments come as China plans to
launch a national carbon trading scheme in 2017. The scheme is on track and pilot programs
have already traded 120 million carbon allowances with total transactions
amounting to $472.29 million, he added. "It will take time for the market to
be fully operational, but once it's operational, it'll be the largest carbon
trading market in the world," said Xie. China's coal consumption has declined as
the world's second-largest economy slows, but Xie said it was too early to
decide if it had peaked. China's delegation of more than 80
negotiators will begin departing from Tuesday for global climate change talks
in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh set for Nov 7 to 18. | 0 |
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said on Sunday US President Barack Obama was not soft on China and said he hoped he would discuss Tibet with the Indian prime minister in Washington this week. "Obama is not soft on China, he just has a different style," the Dalai Lama told the NDTV news channel in an interview. Obama had called for a resumption of dialogue between the Dalai Lama's envoys and China to resolve the Tibet crisis during his just-concluded visit to Beijing. The Tibetan government-in-exile said last week it was willing to talk to China following Obama's comments. Chinese officials and envoys of the Dalai Lama have held eight rounds of talks, but little of substance has been achieved. The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule, said he was not disappointed over failing to meet Obama during his U.S. visit in October. The Dalai Lama, dubbed a "splittist" by Beijing, says he is merely seeking autonomy for Tibet, which last year erupted in riots and protests against the Chinese presence. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits the United States this week to discuss regional issues, climate change and a nuclear deal. | 1 |
In the throes of a historic drought in the United States, a government agency said on Wednesday that it broke a heat record in July that had stood since the devastating Dust Bowl summer of 1936. Reeling from widespread crop damage in July, Midwest farmers found some comfort on Wednesday in forecasts for rain over the next 10 days, a prospect that could take the edge off rising grain prices and concerns of food inflation worldwide. The scorching month of July turned out to be the hottest month in the continental United States on record, beating the hottest month recorded in July 1936, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said. The January-to-July period was also the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, and the warmest 12-month period, eclipsing the last record set just a month ago. It was the fourth time in as many months that U.S. temperatures broke the hottest-12-months record, according to NOAA. Analysts expect the drought, the worst since 1956, will yield the smallest corn crop in six years, which has fed record-high prices and tight supplies. It would be the third year of declining corn production despite large plantings. Drought and heat fed each other in July, according to Jake Crouch, a scientist at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "The hotter it gets, the drier it gets, the hotter it gets," Crouch said, explaining that dry soils in the summer tended to drive up daytime temperatures further. Weather forecasts on Wednesday for some rains and cooler temperatures in the drought-stricken US Midwest crop belt may provide relief for some late-season soybeans, but the change in the weather is arriving too late to help the already severely damaged corn crop, crop analysts said. "It's definitely better than what we've had but I'd be hesitant to call it a drought-buster. Longer-term outlooks still look like a return to warm and dry," Jason Nicholls, meteorologist for AccuWeather, said of the weather outlook. Nicholls said 0.25 inch to 0.75 inch of rain, with locally heavier amounts, was expected in roughly 75 percent of the Midwest from Wednesday through Friday morning, with a similar weather system expected next week. "No major changes from the theme. There might be a little less rain for southeast Iowa tonight and tomorrow but increased rain in Missouri. There is a little more rain for the weekend in the northwest," said Drew Lerner, a meteorologist for World Weather Inc. Temperatures in the 80s (degrees Fahrenheit) are expected in the Midwest for the next several days, rather than the 90s F and low 100s F that have been slashing corn and soybean production prospects in the world's largest grower of those key crops. DROUGHT POLITICS The crops provide the main rations for livestock from dairy cattle to chickens, so soaring grain prices will put upward pressure on consumer staples like milk and cheese, beef, fish and poultry. Many producers have already started culling the size of their herds to save money and avoid ruinous losses. Corn and soybeans also feed into dozens of products, from biofuels like ethanol to starch, edible oils and lubricants. US corn prices have soared more than 50 percent over the past two months, hitting a record high on July 20. Soybeans, planted later than corn, rose more than 20 percent over the same period and set a record high on the same day. Harvest-time delivery prices have slipped about 7 percent with light rains across parts of the Midwest over the last two weeks which analysts said could help the crop at a time when it was filling pods. The rains were seen as coming too late for the corn crop that has passed its key pollination stage of development when final yields are largely set. At the Chicago Board of Trade, grain prices initially eased on Wednesday and then bounced higher. The government will make its first estimate of the fall harvest on Friday. It already has cut projections for corn yields by 12 percent due to hot, dry weather in the Farm Belt. The drought has wended its way into election year politics. President Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to pass a farm bill that will send disaster aid to more farmers and ranchers. He said the administration will do all it can to alleviate the impact of the drought. "It is a historic drought and it is having a profound impact on farmers and ranchers all across many states," Obama said. With the US election three months away, Obama said Congress needed to complete work on a new five-year farm bill. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, unable to pass a farm bill, proposed a $383 million disaster package for livestock producers before adjourning for the summer. The president said he hoped lawmakers get an earful from their constituents during the five-week recess away from Washington and that they reconvene on September 10 prepared to complete work on a farm bill "immediately." | 1 |
The world still has the funds and ability to fight climate change and nations should not use the financial crisis to delay policies on tackling global warming, a top carbon expert said on Thursday. James Cameron, vice-chairman of London-based Climate Change Capital, said the mobilization of trillions of dollars over recent months had demonstrated the strength and scale of cooperation in tackling a global crisis. "We run the risk that governments will choose to focus on the near-term crisis and allow themselves the delusion that there is more time available to deal with a crisis coming slowly from afar," he told a major carbon conference in Australia. "So I accept that there is a danger that climate change could slip in the priority list for governments," he told delegates. "But we have learned that we are able to cooperate across borders to deal with the financial crisis, and beyond political boundaries, so we can mobilize capital very fast and that we do so in ways that support the continuation of our market systems." He said if governments combined that same capacity to cooperate with a matching urgency in tackling climate change, then the world could deal with both crises at the same time. There are concerns the financial crisis has already called on large reserves of public capital and that countries would be reluctant to make near-term climate change commitments that would cost their economies or threaten jobs. But Cameron, a senior member of one of the world's leading investors in clean-energy projects, said such a short-term focus was unwise. "If you are making investments that are designed to deliver public good in dealing with a crisis that will undeniably cost our economies substantial amounts over decades to come, it trivializes the issue to do a near-term cost-benefit analysis." "We are not, despite the recent drastic fall in the value of stock markets, without the capital to invest in solutions to this problem," he added. Climate Change Capital has more than $150 million in funds under management and focuses on companies and institutions affected by the policy and capital market responses to climate change, the firm says on its website. | 0 |
Travel restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 have kept the tourists away, although some attractions reopened last month. But illegal mining has surged as miners take advantage of the lack of visitors, leaving a trail of environmental destruction in their wake, say researchers and activists. "The waters are being polluted; the biodiversity poisoned; endemic plants dug up (and) trampled; animals and birds poached; (and) litter strewn all over the mountains," said Julia Pierini, head of BirdLife Zimbabwe, a non-profit. Activists, industry experts and some of the miners themselves say rangers employed by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) to protect Chimanimani National Park are involved in the illicit activity. "For the past couple of years, we have been seeing illegal gold miners in the mountains, but suddenly during lockdown we started to see hundreds of them," said Collen Sibanda, vice chairman of the Chimanimani Tourist Association (CTA). "Zimparks is recruiting people. They are organising these syndicates." Lenny Kwaramba told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that he had been mining in the mountains without a license since March. "I thought it was legal because we were working with the rangers," said Kwaramba, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. "We were given a target, we would sell about 40 grams of gold per day," he continued, explaining that as the miners came back down the mountain, the rangers would take the gold and pay them in US dollars. That was until August, when the military and police were deployed to help the rangers evict the miners. "I had to run for my life," Kwaramba said. "They were firing at us. Some (miners) were injured and others are missing." Zimparks spokesman Tinashe Farawo said the authority was looking into claims that the park's rangers had a hand in the illegal gold mining. "We have heard such reports. We are currently investigating the allegations," he said in a phone interview. "We are calling upon (everyone) to forward any evidence that our officers are involved. We want to ensure we protect these forests for the benefit of the future generations." There is no official data on the number of illegal gold miners in the Chimanimani Mountains, but authorities note that around the country their ranks have risen in recent years. As Zimbabwe experiences its worst economic crisis in a decade, with crippling hyperinflation and unemployment, young people are venturing into illegal gold mining in a bid to earn a living. Gold panning in Chimanimani is mostly small-scale and informal, according to a 2016 research paper by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. The paper estimated that the output from artisanal gold panning in the area from 2007 to 2011 was between 600-to-900 kg per year, with less than half of that amount being officially recorded. SACRED PLACES The latest census data shows about 135,000 people live in the area around the Chimanimani Mountains, on the border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. That population, made up of various indigenous communities, is still recovering from last year's Cyclone Idai, which caused $622 million worth of damage, mainly in Chimanimani and Chipinge districts, according to government officials. And now, say locals, they also have to endure the ecological impacts of illegal mining. Pierini at BirdLife Zimbabwe said the mountains are an important watershed area with ecologically sensitive wetlands that provide most of the water used by communities in the valleys below. "With a changing climate, on the back of Cyclone Idai last year and drought conditions this year, mining in the Chimanimani Mountains represents an ecological catastrophe," she said in emailed comments. "If not halted permanently, (it) will no doubt pave the way for another humanitarian crisis," she added. As they follow the gold belt, the miners drain springs, dig up riverbeds and cut into caves, Pierini said. Their activity fills the water with silt, making it unliveable for marine life and largely unusable by people, she noted. The miners also use chemicals such as mercury and cyanide to separate gold from the ore and the soil, leaving people and wildlife downstream with highly toxic water, said Chief Raymond Saurombe, a leader of Chikukwa Village in Chimanimani. "For a chief to be respected, one should have his or her dams, caves and springs," he explained. "Now that all these are being invaded by the miners, We will be soon left with nothing. These sacred places are what give us recognition as chiefs." MINING BAN In response to a rise in illegal mining along riverbeds all over the country, Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said in a cabinet press briefing in September that, apart from a few exceptions, "all riverbed alluvial and riverbed mining on rivers is banned with immediate effect." The Zimbabwean government has for the past few years been trying to register all small-scale artisanal miners, but critics say the lack of implementation means the number of illegal miners continues to grow. As the cabinet works on creating policies to make mining in the country more sustainable, Mutsvangwa said it has resolved to also ban licensed mining activities in the country's national parks. National parks are protected by law, but those protections are sometimes overridden to grant mining rights to big companies, explained Simiso Mlevu, communications officer for the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, an advocacy group. More than 15 mining licenses had been granted in national parks around the country over the past decade, Mlevu said via WhatsApp. Deputy Minister of Mines Polite Kambamura said that small-scale miners should register their mining activities to ensure they follow proper mining standards and do not harm the environment. "It is a punishable offence for one to mine without registration. Besides poor mineral accountability and environmental damage, proper mining standards are not being followed in these areas," he said on WhatsApp. Since law enforcement agents evicted the illegal miners from the Chimanimani Mountains in August, the local communities have had some respite from the gold rush. But as long as miners continue to be drawn to the area, Chief Saurombe fears the mountains' famed legends and mysteries are under threat. "We have our sacred places that include dams with mermaids and caves in the mountains. These sacred places are important to us," he said. | 0 |
Washington,Oct 9 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - With world attention trained on resolving a financial crisis in Western economies, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the poverty-fighting institution is warning developing countries to prepare for tougher times. In an interview with Reuters ahead of weekend meetings of world finance ministers, Zoellick said business failures, bank emergencies and balance of payments crises are all possible in developing countries as the crisis spreads. He said a growing financial squeeze, together with higher food and fuel prices, will only make it more difficult for governments in developing countries to protect the poor. A new World Bank report prepared for the meetings warns that high food and fuel prices will increase the number of malnourished people around the world in 2008 by 44 million to over 960 million. The World Bank chief said the bank had identified around 28 countries that could face fiscal difficulties. He said he would release the details later on Thursday ahead of weekend meetings of finance leaders in Washington. "What we're now moving into is the phase where one has to look more broadly at the danger of developing country growth and there it depends on policies they take and the support we and others can give them," Zoellick told Reuters. "Over the medium and long term, I remain optimistic about the possibilities of sub-Saharan Africa being a pole of growth, but it won't happen automatically, it will require their actions and the right investments," he added. Zoellick said the World Bank was working with developing countries to make them aware of the services the bank could provide to help prepare contingency plans and support countries whose banking systems may come under strain. STAKES ARE HIGH The financial crisis threatens to undo much, or in some cases all, of the progress made in many developing countries over the past several years to lift growth and reduce poverty and disease. Between 1997 and 2007, 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa grew on average 6 percent, most of them non-oil producers. Another 8 countries, all oil producers, grew on average 8 percent over the same 10 years. Zoellick told a news conference earlier there was frustration, fear and anxiety at the difficulties economies may now encounter from a crisis that began in the United States. Better economic management, fewer conflicts, and prospects of high returns on investments have attracted more private sector interest into developing countries. Among those investors has been China, Brazil, India and Gulf countries, spurring so-called south-south investment where one emerging economy invests in another. Zoellick said that despite ripple effects from the financial crisis into emerging economies, he was confident China would continue to invest in natural resources in Africa, while Gulf states look to investments in agriculture. "While we're dealing with today's problems, you have to keep your eye on tomorrow (and) take the problem and turn it into an opportunity," he said. Just as Western central banks and China took unprecedented coordinated action to cut interest rates on Wednesday to restore calm to markets, he hoped they would do the same when it comes to helping the developing world deal with effects from the financial crisis, but also the "human crisis" of increasing malnourishment. The same countries could help by contributing to a World Bank fund to assist developing countries struggling with higher food and fuel prices and that would provide fertilizer to small farmers and energy to the poor. There would also be a need for developed countries to help the World Bank and International Monetary Fund support governments facing balance of payments needs and challenges to do with climate change and trade, he said. "We can play a role but we need the developed countries to also act in coordinated action to support that." | 0 |
Political differences loomed over a summit of European and Latin American leaders in Peru on Friday, threatening to undermine their efforts to fight poverty and global warming. Leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales differed with his regional counterparts over free trade in the run-up to the meeting, while Venezuela's Hugo Chavez ratcheted up tensions in a conflict with neighboring Colombia. Free trade proponents like Peru are losing patience with skeptics like Bolivia's Morales, who accused Peru and Colombia this week of trying to exclude his nation from talks between the European Union and Andean countries. "We can advance at different speeds, but let's advance," Peruvian President Alan Garcia said on Thursday, saying his country should be allowed to move faster with the EU. Morales, a former coca grower, fears free trade deals could hurt peasant farmers in his impoverished country. "We want trade, but fair trade," he told reporters in Lima. The EU is also holding negotiations with Mercosur, led by Brazil and Argentina, and Central American countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the first leaders to arrive for the summit, said after meeting Garcia that the EU was "open, and willing to make the path easier" on trade. Merkel made no mention of a spat with Chavez, who this week called her a political descendant of Adolf Hitler for implying he had damaged relations between Europe and Latin America. Chavez frequently insults conservative leaders, especially U.S. President George W. Bush. At a summit in Chile last year, Spain's king told him to "shut up." Chavez is also embroiled in a dispute with Colombia that raised the specter of war in the Andean region in March. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe accuses him of supporting the leftist FARC guerrillas, and soon before leaving for Lima, Chavez said he was reviewing diplomatic ties with Bogota. Such feuds could dominate the fifth such gathering of leaders from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. They may also struggle to find common ground on how to fight cocaine trafficking, as well as the use of food crops to make renewable biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. Brazil is an advocate of the so-called greener fuels, but many poor countries blame them for pushing up food price. However, the poor nations are increasingly worried about climate change and say rich states must cut carbon emissions. Peru created an environment ministry this week to help it cope with the impact of rising global temperatures, which are melting its Andean glaciers. Peruvian delegates to the summit will push for more concrete measures to combat climate change. "Lots of governments have paid lip service to addressing the threat climate changes poses. We want to urge those governments to take real action," British junior Foreign Office minister Kim Howells told Reuters. | 0 |
An announcement made at the COP26 UN climate conference in Scotland commits its signatories to assuming a "fair share" of the effort to wean the world off fossil fuels. A main aim of the COP26 talks is to secure enough national promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions - mostly from burning coal, oil and gas - to keep the rise in the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But how exactly to meet those pledges, particularly in the developing world -- is still being worked out. Above all, it will need a lot of money. UN climate envoy Mark Carney, who assembled the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), put the figure at $100 trillion of investment over the next three decades, and said the finance industry must find ways to raise private money to take the effort far beyond what states alone can do. "The money is here - but that money needs net zero-aligned projects and (then) there's a way to turn this into a very, very powerful virtuous circle - and that's the challenge," the former Bank of England governor told the summit. Carney's comments reflected a problem often cited by investors who, in the face of a myriad of climate-related risks, need to be sure that they are being accounted for in a transparent and preferably standardised way around the globe. REIMAGINING FINANCE "We need to reimagine finance," said Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, which has joined the alliance, adding that the development of vaccines against COVID-19 showed what collective action could achieve. "We can actually do this for climate, but we can't just cherrypick and greenwash by asking just the public companies, the convenient companies, to move forward without asking all of society to move forward." Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund, said it was crucial to incorporate climate data into everyday macroeconomic reporting. Carney has led an effort to ensure that financial institutions account for and disclose the full climate risks of their lending or investments, forcing the wider economy to price in costs that until now been largely concealed. These include not only the direct effects of more frequent extreme weather events, but also costs such as a loss of government subsidies for fossil fuels, or the knock-on health and environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions. China's central bank governor, Yi Gang, said Beijing was working on a new monetary policy facility to provide cheap funds for financial institutions to support green projects, and that the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the European Union would soon publish a shared definition of green investment. And the vice chair of the global Financial Stability Board, Dutch central banker Klaas Knot, said a mandatory global minimum standard for disclosure of climate risks was now needed for both financial stability and the provision of sustainable finance. 'GREENWASHING' Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, another GFANZ member, said it was remarkable that the initiative would influence $130 trillion in funds, but that it needed scale to work. "If you don't work together, you're going to come up with a lot of nice really speeches, but you're ... in danger of being divorced from reality," she said. Investors are certain to welcome the launch of a global standards body prevent companies giving a flattering picture of their climate policies and business practices in what is already a multitrillion-dollar global market for environment, social and governance (ESG) targeted funds. "We are really focused on greenwashing," said Ashley Alder, chair of IOSCO, the global umbrella body for securities regulators, which helped set up the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). "It's super important, and if you don't have basic information on a globally comparable basis, then you increase the risks of greenwashing enormously." Private sector enthusiasm for mobilising climate-friendly investment also requires the assurance that governments are setting emission reduction goals that are ambitious enough to meet the 1.5 Celsius goal - something that is by no means certain to happen by the end of COP26 on Nov. 12. US climate envoy John Kerry told a meeting of world mayors the pledges made so far gave the world only a 60% chance of capping warming at 1.5 Celsius. He said around 65% of global GDP was now covered by implementable climate change plans. "That means 35% isn't. And we can't do it without that 35%." | 0 |
YANGON, Wed Oct 3,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Myanmar's junta arrested more people on Wednesday hours after the departure of a UN envoy who came to the country to try to end a ruthless crackdown on protests which sparked international outrage. At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Yangon, the former Burma's biggest city and centre of last week's monk-led protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship, witnesses said. In one house near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in the devoutly Buddhist country and starting point for the rallies, only a 13-year-old girl remained. Her parents had been taken, she said. "They warned us not to run away as they might be back," she said after people from rows of shophouses were ordered onto the street in the middle of the night and many taken away. The crackdown continued despite some hopes of progress by UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari on his mission to persuade junta chief Than Shwe to relax his iron grip and open talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he met twice. Singapore, chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) of which Myanmar is a member, said it "was encouraged by the access and cooperation given by the Myanmar government to Mr Gambari". Gambari, in Singapore on his way back to New York but unlikely to say anything publicly before speaking to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, was expected to return to Myanmar in early November, UN sources said. But there were no indications of how his mission and international pressure might change the policies of a junta which seldom heeds outside pressure and rarely admits UN officials. "I don't expect much to come of this. I think the top leadership is so entrenched in their views that it's not going to help," said David Steinberg, a Georgetown University expert on Myanmar. "They will say they are on the road to democracy and so what do you want anyway?", he added, referring to the junta's "seven-step road to democracy". The first of the seven steps was completed in September with the end of an on-off, 14-year national convention which produced guidelines for a constitution that critics say will entrench military rule and exclude Suu Kyi from office. The protests, the biggest challenge to the junta's power in nearly 20 years, began with small marches against shock fuel price rises in August and swelled after troops fired over the heads of a group of monks. The junta says the monk-led protests -- which filled five city blocks -- were countered with "the least force possible" and Yangon and other cities had returned to normal. It says 10 people were killed and describes reports of much higher tolls and atrocities as a "skyful of lies", but Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer agreed with other Western governments the real figure was much higher. "It's hard to know, but it seems to me that the number of 30, which is the number we've officially been using, is likely to be an underestimate," he told Australian radio. Still, the junta appears to believe it has suppressed the uprising and lifted the barricades around the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the focal points of the protests, eased an overnight curfew by two hours and released some of the monks swept up in widespread raids on monasteries. One young monk said 80 of the 96 taken from his monastery were allowed to return during Wednesday night after being threatened verbally but not physically during interrogation. However, there was still a heavy armed presence on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, the second city, witnesses said. The junta is also sending gangs through homes looking for monks in hiding, raids Western diplomats say are creating a climate of terror, and there was no let up in international anger at the harsh response to peaceful protests. In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council, including China, the closest thing the regime has to an ally, condemned the junta's "violent repression". It called on the generals to allow Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN human rights envoy to Myanmar, to visit for the first time in four years. He said thousands of people had been detained. "Light must absolutely be shed on what happened," Pinheiro told the council, which adopted a resolution deploring beatings, killings and detentions. Myanmar said the hearing was being used by "powerful countries for political exploitation". | 2 |
I’m not accusing Musk of being a sleeper agent. The man loves Twitter. He tweets as if he was raised by the blue bird and the fail whale. Three days before locking in his purchase of the platform, Musk blasted out an unflattering photograph of Bill Gates, and next to it, an illustration of a pregnant man. “in case u need to lose a boner fast,” Time’s 2021 Person of the Year told his more than 80 million followers. Musk believed Gates was shorting Tesla’s stock, and this was his response. It got over 165,000 retweets and 1.3 million likes. That’s a man who understands what Twitter truly is. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief executive, always wanted it to be something else. Something it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. “The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation,” he said in 2018. Twitter began “measuring conversational health” and trying to tweak the platform to burnish it. Sincere as the effort was, it was like those liquor ads advising moderation. You don’t get people to drink less by selling them whiskey. Similarly, if your intention was to foster healthy conversation, you’d never limit thoughts to 280 characters or add like and retweet buttons or quote-tweet features. Twitter can’t be a home to hold healthy conversation because that’s not what it’s built to do. So what is Twitter built to do? It’s built to gamify conversation. As C Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has written, it does that “by offering immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. Twitter offers us points for discourse; it scores our communication. And these gamelike features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it feels so good to watch those numbers go up and up.” Nguyen’s core argument is that games are pleasurable in part because they simplify the complexity of life. They render the rules clear, the score visible. That’s fine when we want to play a game. But sometimes we end up in games, or gamelike systems, where we don’t want to trade our values for those of the designers, and don’t even realise we’re doing it. The danger, then, is what Nguyen calls “value capture.” That comes when: 1. Our natural values are rich, subtle and hard-to-express. 2. We are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves. 3. The simplified versions take over in our motivation and deliberation. Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don’t, then no matter — no one sees what we’re saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be or we lose. And that’s what’s happening to some of the most important people and industries and conversations on the planet right now. Many of Twitter’s power users are political, media, entertainment and technology elites. They — we! — are particularly susceptible to a gamified discourse on the topics we obsess over. It’s hard to make political change. It’s hard to create great journalism. It’s hard to fill the ever-yawning need for validation. It’s hard to dent the arc of technological progress. Twitter offers the instant, constant simulation of doing exactly that. The feedback is immediate. The opportunities are infinite. Forget Max Weber’s “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Twitter is a power drill, or at least it feels like one. At about this point, the answer probably seems obvious: Log off! One can, and many do. But it comes at a cost. To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential. It’s become cliché to say Twitter is not real life, and that’s true enough. But it shapes real life by shaping the perceptions of those exposed to it. It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers (it’s not for nothing that The New York Times is now urging reporters to unplug from Twitter and reengage with the world outside their screens). It shapes real life by giving the politicians and business titans who master it control of the attentional agenda. Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is. There is a reason that Donald Trump, with his preternatural gift for making people look at him, was Twitter’s most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was, in effect, a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the whole world bore the consequences. I am not a reflexive Musk critic. He has done remarkable things. He turned the electric car market from a backwater catering to hippies to the unquestioned future of the automobile industry, and he did so in the only sustainable way: He made electric cars awesome. He reinvigorated American interest in space and did so in the only sustainable way: by making rockets more awesome and affordable. He’s made huge investments in solar energy and battery innovation and at least tried to think creatively about mass transit, with investments in hyperloop and tunnel-drilling technology. He co-founded OpenAI, the most public-spirited of the big artificial intelligence shops. Much of this has been built on the back of public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits, but I don’t take that as a mark against him: He’s the best argument in the modern era that the government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve apart. If anything, I fear that Twitter will distract Musk from more important work. Nor am I surprised that a résumé like Musk’s coexists with a tendency toward manias, obsessions, grudges, union-busting and vindictiveness. Extreme personalities are rarely on the edge of the bell curve only because of benevolence. But Twitter unleashes his worst instincts and rewards him, with attention and fandom and money — so much money — for indulging them. That Musk has so capably bent Twitter to his own purposes doesn’t absolve him of his behaviour there, any more than it absolved Trump. A platform that heaps rewards on those who behave cruelly, or even just recklessly, is a dangerous thing. But far too often, that’s what Twitter does. Twitter rewards decent people for acting indecently. The mechanism by which this happens is no mystery. Engagement follows slashing ripostes and bold statements and vicious dunks. “I’m frustrated that Bill Gates would bet against Tesla, a company aligned with his values,” is a lame tweet. “Bill Gates = boner killer” is a viral hit. The easiest way to rack up points is to worsen the discourse. Twitter has survived, and thrived, because it has never been just what I have described here. Much of what can be found there is funny and smart and sweet. So many on the platform want it to be a better place than it is and try to make it so. For a long time, they were joined in that pursuit by Twitter’s executive class, who wanted the same. They liked Twitter, but not too much. They believed in it, but they were also a little appalled by it. That fundamental tension — between what Twitter was and what so many believed it could be — held it in balance. No longer. Musk’s stated agenda for Twitter is confusing mostly for its modesty. He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. I tend to agree with technology writer Max Read, who predicts that Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.” Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he actually acts on it. You shall know him by his tweets. He wants it to be what it is, or even more anarchic than that. Where I perhaps disagree with Read is that I think it will be more of a cultural change for Twitter than anyone realises to have the master of the service acting on it as Musk does; to have the platform’s owner embracing and embodying its excesses in a way no previous leader has done. What will Twitter feel like to liberals when Musk is mocking Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the platform he owns and controls as “Senator Karen”? Will they want to enrich him by contributing free labour to his company? Conservatives are now celebrating Musk’s purchase of the platform, but what if, faced with a deepening crisis of election disinformation, he goes into goblin mode against right-wing politicians who are making his hands-off moderation hopes untenable or who are threatening his climate change agenda? What will it be like to work at Twitter when the boss is using his account to go to war with the Securities and Exchange Commission or fight a tax bill he dislikes? Unless Musk changes his own behaviour radically, and implausibly, I suspect his ownership will heighten Twitter’s contradictions to an unbearable level. What would follow isn’t the collapse of the platform but the right-sizing of its influence. Or maybe not. Betting against Musk has made fools of many in recent years. But I count myself, still, as a cautious believer in Musk’s power to do the impossible — in this case, to expose what Twitter is and to right-size its influence. In fact, I think he’s the only one with the power to do it. Musk is already Twitter’s ultimate player. Now he’s buying the arcade. Everything people love or hate about it will become his fault. Everything he does that people love or hate will be held against the platform. He will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its lustre quite like a game that has been beaten. ©2022 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a think-tank that produces annual terrorism and peace indexes, the Ecological Threat Register uses data from the United Nations and other sources to assess eight ecological threats and predict which countries and regions are most at risk. With the world's population forecast to rise to nearly 10 billion by 2050, intensifying the scramble for resources and fuelling conflict, the research shows as many as 1.2 billion people living in vulnerable areas of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East may be forced to migrate by 2050. By comparison, ecological factors and conflict led to the displacement of some 30 million people in 2019, the report said. "This will have huge social and political impacts, not just in the developing world, but also in the developed, as mass displacement will lead to larger refugee flows to the most developed countries," said Steve Killelea, IEP's founder. The register groups the threats into two broad categories: food insecurity, water scarcity and population growth in one; and natural disasters including floods, droughts, cyclones, rising sea levels and rising temperatures in the other. The result is an analysis assessing how many threats each of some 150 countries faces and their capacity to withstand them. While some, such as India and China, are most threatened by water scarcity in the coming decades, others like Pakistan, Iran, Mozambique, Kenya and Madagascar face a toxic combination of threats, as well as a diminishing ability to deal with them. "These countries are broadly stable now but have high exposure to ecological threats and low and deteriorating 'positive peace', which means they are at higher risk of future collapse," the 90-page analysis found. Killelea said the world now has 60% less fresh water available than it did 50 years ago, while demand for food is forecast to rise by 50% in the next 30 years, driven in large part by the expansion of the middle class in Asia. Those factors, combined with natural disasters that are only likely to increase in frequency because of climate change, mean even stable states are vulnerable by 2050. The IEP said it hoped the register, which may become an annual analysis, would shape aid and development policies, with more emphasis and funding going towards climate-related impacts. | 0 |
Pretoria, June 18, (bdnews24.com/AFP) - Cameroon coach Paul Le Guen declared a state of emergency on his team's World Cup campaign on Friday, a day before the Africans tackle Denmark in Group E at the Loftus Versfeld stadium here. Cameroon lost 1-0 to Japan in their opening game while Denmark were beaten 2-0 by the Netherlands, meaning both sides are in desperate need of a victory to keep alive their hopes of progressing to the knock-out stages. Le Guen was pulling no punches in his assessment of the situation his team have found themselves in since the Japan match. "We've experienced the climate of a group of African players who lost their first World Cup match," he said. "It wasn't a bad thing, but their reactions were different. I prefer people to be very mobilised and aware of the state of emergency." Cameroon's players are rumoured to have been involved in some in-fighting following that defeat but captain Samuel Eto'o went to great lengths to stress that it wasn't the case. "I want to say that there has never been any in-fighting in the group and there never will be," he offered at the end of Friday's press conference. "I'm the captain and as long as my team-mates, my coach and my country have faith in me, there never will be any in-fighting." Whatever the state of mind of the players one thing is for sure, Le Guen will ring the changes. Without giving details, he said he will replace three players for their next game. "Quite simply we didn't play well, we were well below par. I'm going to make some changes, three new players from the start and I'll change a few little things," he said. "I'll do my job as coach and the one who picks the team, I'm aware of my responsibilities. I'm not stubborn. When I see that things aren't working, I change them. "Against Japan I tried to put the players in the positions they play for their clubs, with the exception of Stephane Mbia. When that doesn't work, I change things." That last comment seemed a clear reference to his previous decision to play Eto'o wide right, where Jose Mourinho used him for Inter Milan last season. Le Guen has been much criticised for that choice, even by Eto'o who told French TV channel Canal Plus that his best position was through the middle. But Eto'o insisted that he was not trying to influence his coach and said he will do as he is told. "Paul Le Guen is paid to make these decisions, we're here to represent our country and I'll play wherever he asks me to," said Eto'o. While Le Guen spoke of his own responsibilities, he also called on his players to live up to their Indomitable Lions nickname. "I have to make them realise their responsibilities, I have mine, I pick the team, the tactics, but they need to rediscover a certain spirit," he said. "There's a lot of talk about the spirit of Lions, I've suggested to them that they rediscover that." | 5 |
Computer simulations of the weather workings of the entire planet will be able to make forecasts to within a few kilometers accuracy, helping predict the effects of deadly weather systems. But the world may have to wait 20 to 40 years' for such accurate information on weather events like El Nino as computer capacity grows, a senior British scientist said Thursday. "If we step forward 20 to 40 years into the future of climate science, it is conceivable we can have climate models down to a scale of a few kilometers' resolution," Alan Thorpe, director general of the UK-based European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), told reporters. "That would add a huge amount of information to this variability question." A climate model is a computer-based version of the Earth's climate system, based on physics and complex equations. Such models can be used for weather forecasting, understanding the climate and projecting climate change. A model with a very fine resolution could produce more accurate results but this depends on computer capacity. Thorpe said some climate models are now nearing a resolution of 100 km, compared to around 300 km 10 to 15 years ago. "We are running global weather picture models at a 16 km resolution already so we have the science and the models to reduce the problem of high resolution but we need the computer power to do it," Thorpe said. It would cost up to 200 million pounds to buy a top-end super computer, he added, which is around 7 percent of the UK's yearly science budget of 3 billion pounds. "The impact of climate change needs to be seen as sufficiently important to society to devote this level of resource to it," Thorpe said. Some experts warn that some of the most devastating impacts of climate change could be felt before and during the period 2030 to 2050. Some climate models have been criticized for not being accurate enough or not predicting extreme events far enough into the future. Thorpe said ECMWF scientists are doing a lot of research into so-called tipping points, when there is a rapid change in the climate which is irreversible or which would take a long time to reverse. "Inevitably, those are the aspects of the system we have to worry about most because they are not linear behavior. How many of those there are is still an open question," he added. "If we devoted the whole of the science budget to these questions we could make more rapid progress but we are doing a lot of research on these areas." Some tipping points are seen happening in the coming decades, such as the loss of summer Arctic sea ice or the loss of the Amazon rainforest. | 6 |
By Mia Shanley and Ilona Wissenbach ARE, Sweden July 25 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Germany called a French idea to slap "carbon tariffs" on products from countries that are not trying to cut greenhouse gases a form of "eco-imperialism" and a direct violation of WTO rules. The issue of greenhouse tariffs has met bitter opposition from developing countries such as China and India, who count on the developed world to buy their exports as they build their economies in the face of the worst financial crisis in decades. Matthias Machnig, Germany's State Secretary for the Environment, told a news briefing on Friday that a French push for Europe to impose carbon tariffs on imports from countries that flout rules on carbon emissions would send the wrong signal to the international community. "There are two problems -- the WTO (World Trade Organization), and the signal would be that this is a new form of eco-imperialism," Machnig said. "We are closing our markets for their products, and I don't think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations." European environment and energy ministers are meeting in Sweden to try to come up with a single vision of how the 27-member bloc will fight global warming, ahead of a major environment summit in Copenhagen. The first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions is set to expire in 2012. Final negotiations on a successor climate change pact will take place in the Danish capital at the end of the year. U.S. LEGISLATION The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed legislation that contains carbon tariffs. It would allow the United States to impose duties on imports of carbon-intensive goods such as steel, cement, paper and glass from countries that have not taken steps to reduce their own emissions. Some say such tariffs could be a backup plan for Europe, should United Nations members fail to reach a deal in Copenhagen. But Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren, whose country holds the rotating European Union presidency, said member states currently had no "plan B" beyond landing a deal in Copenhagen. He said there was as yet no official proposal on the table from the French regarding carbon tariffs. "We are absolutely against each try to make use of green protectionism," Carlgren told Reuters. "There should be no threat of borders, of walls or barriers for imports from developing countries." French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said last month such taxes could help create a "level playing field" for European companies competing with international firms from countries that have not put a price on carbon emissions. EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs has said member states should keep the French proposal in mind, but also worries how such tariffs could be viewed by other countries. China said earlier this month carbon tariffs would violate the rules of the WTO and the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol. Such tariffs would represent a radical shift for the WTO, whose goal is reducing barriers to trade. However, the WTO says it is possible to impose import tariffs if such taxes are also imposed on a country's own industry to ensure a level playing field. However, Europe could see some progress on domestic carbon taxes on a national level within the 27-member bloc. Sweden's finance minister, Anders Borg, plans to raise the issue at the next finance ministers' meeting, Industry Minister Maud Olofsson told a press briefing. | 0 |
The lack of sustained military ties between the United States and China is a key challenge for the two countries at a time of tensions in Asia, the US No. 2 diplomat said on Tuesday. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg said US policymakers "continue to find a broad range of areas where we cooperate with China -- not only bilaterally, but regionally and globally" from economic recovery to climate change to the Iran nuclear issue. But military-to-military ties -- which China put on hold in anger at US arms sales to Taiwan earlier this year -- is an exception to a trend of broad official engagement, he said. "The most important (challenge) ... is the continued unwillingness of China to deepen the mil-mil engagement," Steinberg said in remarks at the Nixon Centre in Washington. "We continue to stress that this is not a favour to one country or the other, but is absolutely critical to manage this very complex process of China's own economic growth and military modernization," he said. After the Obama administration notified Congress in January of plans to sell Taiwan up to $6.4 billion in arms, China broke off military-to-military contacts with the United States. In June, China turned down a proposed fence-mending visit by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In addition to dispute over Taiwan -- a self-ruled island over which China claims sovereignty -- US-China security ties have been strained over joint US-South Korean military exercises directed at North Korea but held in seas near China. Steinberg said sustained, deepened bilateral military talks were necessary because of both specific disputes and a deeper disagreement over freedom of navigation in waters near China. "It's frankly unproductive for China to see this as a benefit to be offered or withheld in relationship to other issues," he said. The senior US diplomat also explained the motive behind Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's move to raise sensitive territorial disputes in the South China Sea at the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) last week in Hanoi. China was furious and accused Clinton of attacking Chinese interests in a disputed area rich in energy and key for shipping that Beijing had long succeeded in keeping off the ASEAN diplomatic agenda. China has long-standing territorial disputes with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The South China Sea, where the United States champions freedom of navigation but is neutral on territorial disputes, has been "bubbling around for a long time" and the issue is fraught with potential risks of incidents or ruinous military competition, Steinberg said. "Frankly, the time had come to just make this more explicit and to bring it out in the open ... because it's clearly on everybody's mind," he said, referring to Southeast Asian countries that have sought to raise the issue in a multilateral setting. | 0 |
The risk came into sharp focus earlier this
month when a research facility near Ukraine's national seed bank was damaged,
according to Crop Trust, a non-profit organisation set up by the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organisation. The facility and Ukraine's seed bank are
both based in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, which has come under intense
bombing from Russian forces. Reuters could not determine the cause of
the damage and Crop Trust said only that the research facility had been hit,
but declined to give further detail, citing security reasons. It was a narrow escape. Only 4% of the
seeds in Ukraine's store, the tenth largest of its kind in the world, has been
backed up. "Seed banks are a kind of life
insurance for mankind. They provide the raw materials for breeding new plant
varieties resistant to drought, new pests, new diseases, and higher
temperatures," Stefan Schmitz, the executive director of Crop Trust, told
Reuters. "It would be a tragic loss if
Ukraine's seed bank were destroyed." The director of the seed bank could not be
reached, Ukraine's academy of science declined to comment and Russia's defence
ministry did not immediately reply to request for comment on the damage. Researchers rely on the diverse genetic
material that seed banks store to breed plants that can withstand climate
change or disease. They have become increasingly vital to
ensuring enough food is produced each season to feed 7.9 billion people as the
world's weather becomes more extreme. At the same time, the war between Russia
and Ukraine, the world's third and fourth largest grain exporters respectively,
has added to food price inflation and the danger of food scarcity, with
protests breaking out in developing countries that normally benefit from
Ukraine's grain. SYRIA SAVED BY ARCTIC BACKUP The war in Syria has provided a lesson in
the importance of backing up seeds using the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in
Norway, the world's largest and most important seed backup or duplication
facility. In 2015, the Svalbard vault was able to
send replacement samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions to
researchers in Lebanon after a seed bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo was
destroyed. In total, Svalbard preserves more than a
million seed samples in a vault built in an Arctic mountainside. These include 4% of Ukraine's 150,000 seeds
- representing more than 1,800 crops. The German-based Crop Trust, which is the
only international organisation whose sole purpose is to safeguard crop
diversity, has made funds available to Ukraine to copy seeds, but security and
logistics issues linked to the war and natural cycles mean it is difficult to
speed up the process. Schmitz estimated that at best, about 10%
of Ukraine's seeds could be backed up within a year because they need to be
planted, grown and harvested at the right time before the duplicates can be
extracted and sent to Svalbard. An emergency measure would be to forgo
duplication and just ship the collection to Svalbard, but Schmitz said this
might not be feasible in wartime. The Syrian seeds were from the Fertile
Crescent, the region where settled farming is believed to have emerged, and
Ukraine also has a central place in agriculture. "Agriculture in Ukraine has roots back
in prehistoric times," Grethe Helene Evjen, a senior adviser at the
Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, said, adding many of the country's
seeds were unique. Evjen said the ministry is ready to help
Ukraine duplicate and store all its seeds at Svalbard, but has yet to receive a
request from Ukrainian authorities. | 6 |
The researchers led by Irina Rogozhina and Alexey Petrunin from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences had to go far back into the Earth's history to explain the reason for the melting base of the world's second largest ice sheet. Their observations from radar and ice core drilling data indicated the melt from below and the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kilometres from the summit area of the Greenland ice sheet to the North Atlantic Ocean. "The geothermal anomaly which resulted from the Icelandic mantle-plume tens of millions of years ago is an important motor for today's hydrology under the ice sheet and for the high flow-rate of the ice," Rogozhina said. "This, in turn, broadly influences the dynamic behaviour of ice masses and must be included in studies of the future response to climate change," she added. The North Atlantic Ocean is an area of active plate tectonics. Between 80 and 35 million years ago, tectonic processes moved Greenland over an area where the mantle material heated and thinned Greenland at depth producing a strong geothermal anomaly that spans a quarter of the land area of Greenland.
The study, published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience, also revealed that about half of the ice in north-central Greenland is resting on a thawed bed and that the meltwater is routed to the ocean through a dense hydrological network beneath the ice. The researchers used an innovative combination of computer models and data sets from seismology, gravity measurements, ice core drilling campaigns, radar sounding, as well as both airborne, satellite and ground-based measurements to reveal the secrets of Greenland's past hidden beneath a three-km thick ice sheet. | 0 |
French President Nicolas Sarkozy visits the United States next week looking to reinforce cooperation over Iran and Afghanistan and lay the groundwork for G20 meetings that Paris will lead next year. The two-day trip to New York and Washington follows a rocky period in trans-atlantic relations when many in Europe felt US President Barack Obama was overly focussed on domestic affairs. Freshly boosted by passage of the healthcare reform bill, Obama is expected to step up his diplomatic action and on Friday he sealed a landmark nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia. Sarkozy, whose popularity in France has hit record lows as the economy struggles, will arrive with a package of issues to discuss, ranging from security to climate change and he will also try to restart a drive for global financial reform. "Nicolas Sarkozy will push for the financial regulation agenda agreed at past G20 meetings to be respected because although a lot has been achieved, a lot still remains to be done," an official at the Elysee palace said. Many European leaders and policy makers fear that the pressure to regulate financial markets which built up in the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in 2008 has dissipated as the immediate crisis has eased. Beyond the policy issues, Sarkozy's visit also provides an opportunity to dispel a persistent impression that relations between the two countries have not quite lived up to the hopes of the early days of Obama's administration. The U.S. president has visited France twice since his election, but was widely perceived to have snubbed Sarkozy last year when he turned down the offer of a state dinner, preferring instead to dine alone with his wife, Michelle in a restaurant. Perhaps hoping to end talk of friction, Sarkozy and his wife Carla will dine privately with the Obamas at the White House. French officials say it is the first time such a dinner has been arranged for a head of state and Sarkozy will no doubt hope that the high profile visit will lift his standing back home a week after his centre-right party slumped in local elections. FINANCIAL REFORM Sarkozy's visit coincides with a push by Obama on financial reform but there remains big differences between the United States and Europe over regulation of banks, derivatives markets and hedge funds. Foreign exchange imbalances between the dollar, the yuan and the euro, which Sarkozy has long seen as a major source of instability in the global economy will also be a key subject with France due to take over the G8 and G20 chairs next year. While Sarkozy's comments in the past have focussed on the strength of the euro against the dollar, America's growing impatience with China over the yuan could bring the two sides closer together on the forex issue. Both countries have also stepped up pressure on Iran over its nuclear ambitions, which they say are aimed at developing a bomb, despite denials by Tehran, and both are working towards introducing a new raft of new United Nations sanctions. But there have been plenty of disagreements as well, ranging from the disputed air refuelling tanker deal that European aerospace group EADS pulled out of, to French resistance to boosting its troop presence in Afghanistan. However, France has pledged more staff to train Afghan forces and might face pressure to offer additional help. The U.S. president's National Security Adviser James Jones told French newspapers Sarkozy was regarded as "an important counsellor" and "someone our president likes a lot" but he suggested as well that their relationship could be forthright. "Mr Obama respects communication which is clear and without ambiguity," he said. "There's no time wasted trying to be too polite and not trying to offend anyone." | 0 |
In his first address to the nation as premier, Khan set out his vision for a “New Pakistan” and spoke at length about the need to reshape the country by introducing an Islamic welfare system, reducing poverty and slashing high debt levels. “We have formed a bad habit of living on loans and aid from other countries,” said Khan, speaking under a portrait of his hero and Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah “No country can prosper like this. A country must stand on its own feet.” Khan, 65, a former cricket legend, was sworn in as prime minister on Saturday after his party swept to power in last month’s election. A firebrand populist, Khan’s appeal has soared in recent years on the back of his anti-corruption drive, which has resonated with young voters and the expanding middle class in the mainly-Muslim nation of 208 million people. But Khan has inherited a host of problems at home and abroad, including a brewing currency crisis and fraying relations with Pakistan’s historic ally, the United States. Khan did not shed any light on policy plans to deal with the currency woes that analysts expect will force Pakistan to seek another International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. Instead, Khan focused on debt and said former central bank governor Ishrat Husain would lead a task-force to drive austerity. Criticizing what he called the colonial-era mindset and lavish lifestyles of Pakistan’s ruling elite, Khan announced he would live in a small three-bedroom house instead of the palatial prime minister’s residence. “A SIMPLE LIFE” Khan plans to have only two servants instead of 524 reserved for a sitting premier. He also announced plans to sell a fleet of bullet-proof vehicles to help Treasury shortfalls, a bold move in a country where Islamist militants still pose a threat. “I want to tell my people, I will live a simple life, I will save your money,” he said. Khan appealed to overseas Pakistanis to invest in the country and urged the wealthy to start paying taxes, a perennial problem in a nation famous for tax dodging and where less than 1 percent of the population files income tax. “It is your responsibility to pay taxes,” said Khan. “Think of this as a struggle, that you need to pay tax for the betterment of your country.” Khan said Pakistan was in grave danger from the effects of climate change and promised to reduce some of the world’s highest maternal death rates and infant mortality rates. He also spoke passionately about the need to help 22.8 million out-of-school Pakistani children in a nation where the literacy rate hovers above 40 percent. Khan, who has never held a government position, named his 21-person cabinet over the weekend, opting mostly for experienced politicians. Opponents criticized the choices, saying about half of the cabinet had served under the former military dictator Pervez Musharraf and were part of the old guard. On Sunday, Khan announced he will oversee the interior ministry. A former playboy of the London social scene who has since adopted a pious persona, Khan said he wants Pakistan to build a welfare state akin to some found in the West, which he said are modeled on the ideas first voiced by Prophet Mohammad in the holy city of Medina. “I will spend money on those who God has not given enough to,” he said. | 0 |
But there they were. On a hillside off a winding mountain road in a lost corner of southern France, the forbidden crop was thriving. Early one recent evening, Hervé Garnier inspected his field with relief. In a year when an April frost and disease have decimated France’s overall wine production, Garnier’s grapes — an American hybrid variety named jacquez, banned by the French government since 1934 — were already turning red. Barring an early-autumn cold snap, all was on track for a new vintage. “There’s really no reason for its prohibition,” Garnier said. “Prohibited? I’d like to understand why, especially when you see the prohibition rests on nothing.” Garnier is one of the last stragglers in a long-running struggle against the French wine establishment and its allies in Paris. The French government has tried to rip the jacquez and five other American vine varieties out of French soil for the past 87 years, arguing that they are bad for human physical and mental health — and produce bad wine. But in recent years, the hardiness of the American varieties has given a lift to guerrilla winemakers like him, as climate change wreaks havoc on vineyards across Europe and natural wines made without the use of pesticides have grown in popularity. Despite France’s pledge in 2008 to halve the use of pesticides, it has continued to rise in the past decade. Vineyards occupied just over 4% of France’s agricultural area but used 15% of all pesticides nationwide in 2019, according to the Agriculture Ministry. “These vines ensure bountiful harvests, without irrigation, without fertilisers and without treatment,” said Christian Sunt, a member of Forgotten Fruits, a group fighting for the legalisation of the American grapes. Showing off forbidden vines, including the clinton and isabelle varieties, on a property in the southern Cévennes region, near the town of Anduze, he added, “These vines are ideal for making natural wine.” American grapes have long played a central role in the tumultuous, and emotional, history of wine between France and the United States — alternately threatening French production, and reviving it. It all started in the mid-1800s when vines native to the United States were brought over to Europe, with a piggybacking louse known as phylloxera. While the American vines were resistant to the pest, their European counterparts did not stand a chance. The ravenous lice attacked their roots, choking off the flow of nutrients to the rest of the plant — and causing the biggest crisis in the history of French wine. The lice destroyed millions of acres, shut down vineyards and sent jobless French to Algeria, a French colony. After a quarter century of helplessly watching the collapse of Europe’s traditional wine culture, the wine world’s best minds had an epiphany. The cure was in the poison: the American vines. Some vintners grafted the European vines onto the resistant American rootstocks. Others crossbred American and European vines, producing what became known as the American hybrids, like the jacquez. Faced with seeming extinction, France’s wine industry bounced back. “That left an impression to this day,” said Thierry Lacombe, an ampelographer, or vine expert, who teaches at Montpellier SupAgro, a French university specialising in agriculture. “It wasn’t the only time that the Americans, our American friends, came to save the French.” The French wine world split between supporters of grafting and hybrid grapes. The grafters kept producing wine from pinot, merlot, cabernet sauvignon and other classic European grapes. The American hybrids, they often said, smelled like fox urine. Still, the American hybrids thrived all over France. Sturdier and easier to grow, they were especially popular in rural areas like the Cévennes. Families planted them on hillsides where other crops were impossible to grow. They let them grow on top of arbors, cultivating potatoes underneath, as a way to make productive every inch of land. Villagers harvested and made wine together, using a common cellar. If pinot noir is part of Burgundy’s identity, the jacquez became part of the folklore of the northern Cévennes, including the village of Beaumont. And in the southern Cévennes, the clinton (pronounced clain-ton) reigned. “Here, if you serve a glass of clinton at any bar, people will pounce on it,” said Sunt, 70, a retired forest ranger. “If the clinton became legal again, I can tell you that if a winemaker wrote clinton on his bottle, he’d sell 10 times more than if he wrote syrah or cabernet sauvignon.” Today the American varieties make up only a tiny percentage of all French wine. But with grafting and the hybrids production boomed across the land in the early part of last century. Algeria also become a major wine exporter to metropolitan France. With France awash in wine, lawmakers urgently addressed the problem around Christmas in 1934. To reduce overproduction, they outlawed the six American vines — including hybrids like the jacquez and pure American grapes like the isabelle — mainly on the grounds that they produced poor wine. Production for private consumption would be tolerated, but not for commercial sale. The government had planned to follow up with bans on other hybrids but stopped because of the backlash to the initial ban, Lacombe said. Then the war provided another reprieve. It was only in the 1950s — when hybrids were still cultivated on one-third of all French vineyards — that the government really began cracking down on the six forbidden grapes, Lacombe said. It offered incentives to rip out the offending vines, then threatened growers with fines. It then condemned the American grapes as harmful to body and sanity with arguments “not completely honest to try to quell a situation that was slipping away from the government,” Lacombe said. “In fact, the present defenders of these vines are right in underlining all the historical and government inconsistencies,” he added. The clinton and jacquez might have met a quiet death if not for a back-to-the-land movement that, starting in the 1970s, brought people like Garnier to the Cévennes. Originally from northeastern France, Garnier, now 68, was once a long-haired high school student who traveled to see Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin perform in concert. Half a century later, he cheerfully recalls how he avoided mandatory military service after only seven hours on a base during which he asked to see a psychologist, refused to eat with others and was generally annoying. A week after his discharge, aimless hitchhiking brought him in 1973 to the village of Beaumont in the Cévennes where he immediately decided to buy an abandoned property — paying it off mostly by repairing roofs in the region and elsewhere. Some years later, he got into winemaking almost by accident. Two elderly brothers asked him to harvest their jacquez grapes in return for half of the wine production. He learned the history of the forbidden vines and eventually bought the brothers’ vineyards. Today, he makes 3,400 bottles a year of his deeply colored, fruity “Cuvée des vignes d’antan,” or wine from vines of yesteryear. He got around the ban by creating a cultural, noncommercial association, “Memory of the Vine.” A membership fee of 10 euros, or about $12, yields a bottle. With the growing threat of climate change and the backlash against the use of pesticides, Garnier is hoping that the forbidden grapes will be legalised and that France’s wine industry will open up to a new generation of hybrids — as Germany, Switzerland and other European nations already have. “France is a great wine country,” he said. “To remain one, we have to open up. We can’t get stuck on what we already know.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Bombs in Iraq, better commutes in Ireland and melting ice caps are threatening the world's architectural and cultural gems, a nonprofit group said on Wednesday as it named 100 endangered monuments. The World Monuments Fund's list for 2008 for the first time included climate change as a hazard for some of the world's great historic sites. Surging development and commercialism, along with political conflict, also pose risk to sites such as the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. "On this list, man is indeed the real enemy," said Bonnie Burnham, president of the fund. "But just as we have caused the damage in the first place, we have the power to repair it." The group said Peru's Machu Picchu is threatened by unchecked tourism and St Petersburg's skyline will be changed forever if Gazprom's planned skyscraper is built for the state-controlled gas export monopoly. Tara Hill in Ireland, considered a sacred landscape, is now threatened by the development of a highway meant to ease the commute from Dublin. Canada's Herschel Island, situated on the edge of the Yukon and home to ancient Inuit sites, could be washed away in melting permafrost, the group said. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has put that country's entire cultural heritage at grave risk, the nonprofit group said. "The archaeological sites of Iraq are being looted at an alarming rate and the loss is catastrophic," said Michelle Berenfeld, program manager at the fund. "Unlike objects in museums -- for which there is at least some record of their existence and in most cases where they came from -- objects that are stolen out of the ground are completely lost, forever. "In Iraq, where much of these archaeological sites date to the earliest civilizations on the planet, the physical remains of those cultures are the main sources of information we have about them, so stealing them is like tearing out the pages of a history book that can never be rewritten," Berenfeld said. Since 1996, the fund has made more than 500 grants totalling more than $47 million (23.5 million pounds) to sites in 74 countries. While Burnham said the fund cannot be a policeman, it can raise public awareness, which has acted as leverage for funding from other sources. The group said its funds have drawn more than $124 million from other sources. The New York-based group said more than 75 percent of endangered sites on previous lists had been rescued or were well on the way to being preserved. The complete 2008 list can be viewed at www.worldmonumentswatch.org. | 0 |
The 95-year-old queen, who has been fully vaccinated against coronavirus, quipped just four days ago to Palace staff that she could not move much, and she spent a night in hospital last October for an unspecified ailment. "The Queen has today tested positive for COVID," the Palace said. "Her Majesty is experiencing mild cold like symptoms but expects to continue light duties at Windsor over the coming week." "She will continue to receive medical attention and will follow all appropriate guidelines," the Palace said. Charles, 73, the heir to the throne, earlier this month withdrew from an event after contracting COVID-19 for a second time. A Palace source said he had met the queen days before. Elizabeth, the world's oldest monarch, quietly marked the 70th anniversary of her accession to the British throne in early February. Elizabeth, became the queen of Britain and more than a dozen other realms including Australia, Canada and New Zealand on the death of her father King George VI on Feb. 6, 1952, while she was in Kenya on an international tour. She is the first British sovereign to spend seven decades on the throne in a dynasty that traces its origins back almost 1,000 years to Norman King William I and his 1066 conquest of England. DEVOTION TO DUTY In her record-breaking reign, Elizabeth's achievement has been to maintain the popularity of the British monarchy in the face of seismic political, social and cultural change that threatened to make royalty an anachronism. When she ascended the throne, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Harry Truman were running the Soviet Union, China and the United States, respectively, while Winston Churchill was British prime minister. Including Churchill, she has been served by 14 prime ministers - a quarter of the number in Britain since Robert Walpole 300 years ago. During her reign, there have been 14 U.S. presidents, all of whom she has met bar Lyndon Johnson. Elizabeth's quiet devotion to duty has won her support and respect in the United Kingdom and the broader Commonwealth, in contrast to the scandals that have engulfed other members of the royal family. "Wishing Her Majesty The Queen good health and a speedy recovery," opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said. "Get well soon, Ma’am." While public affection for her remains strong, with about four in five Britons holding a favourable view, the monarchy itself has suffered a number of knocks, including a U.S. sex abuse court case against her second son Prince Andrew, raising questions about the long-term future of the monarchy. Andrew last week settled the lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre accusing him of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager. Andrew, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and sex offender, has denied accusations that he forced Giuffre, who lives in Australia, to have sex at age 17 more than two decades ago. British police said last week they had begun an investigation into allegations in media reports that honours were offered to a Saudi national in return for donations to one of Prince Charles's charities. | 2 |
Russian police on Thursday raided a property company owned by the wife of Moscow's former mayor as part of a probe into suspected embezzlement and misuse of city funds linked to a $440 million land deal. The raid on the offices of property developer Inteko opens one of the first cracks in a multi-billion dollar business empire run by Yelena Baturina, the wife of ousted Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. "OMON riot police and people in civilian clothes came to the office and left with the management," an Inteko employee, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. Police also raided Bank of Moscow and the homes of its directors of the bank as part of an embezzlement investigation, the Interior Ministry's investigative department said in a statement. Investigators said they suspect unidentified employees at Bank of Moscow and real estate developer Premiere Estate of using a 13 billion roubles ($444 million) loan to embezzle funds which finally ended up on Baturina's personal account. Luzhkov's removal last autumn and the appointment of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, an ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, triggered a bout of capital outflows from Russia and weakness in the rouble currency. It also heralded ownership changes in assets controlled by the city, including Bank of Moscow, which state-controlled VTB, Russia's No.2 bank, is seeking to acquire. Baturina is the president of Inteko and has a controlling stake in Inteko. BATTLE FOR MOSCOW A probe was launched last December into a complex deal under which a 13 billion rouble loan was used to buy land from Baturina's debt-ridden Inteko. Neither Inteko nor Baturina were named as suspects by the investigators and there was no implication of wrongdoing by either as Baturina received the money through a land deal. Baturina criticized the raid: "It has just been ordered to put pressure on us," she told Interfax news agency. "There are no criminal cases in relation to Inteko or against the employees or leadership and there is no basis for any cases," said Inteko spokesman Gennady Terebkov. Baturina, whose fortune was valued by Russia's Finans magazine at about $1.1 billion this year, and Luzhkov have been assailed by accusations of corruption, though both have denied the allegations. Businessmen say corruption is worst in the construction sector which relies on decisions taken in the mayor's office, but Luzhkov has denied that his wife received preferential access to projects during his 18-year tenure as Moscow's boss. Sending riot police armed with automatic weapons to search Baturina's company is a signal her empire is under attack from powerful groups within the elite after Luzhkov openly challenged Kremlin chief Dmitry Medvedev. Falling foul of the Kremlin is the most dangerous move for any tycoon in Russia and those who dare to challenge the leadership often lose their assets, face prosecution and eventually flee abroad. President Medvedev has promised to improve the business climate and ensure property rights, though investors say one of the biggest barriers for business in Russia is the lack of a consistent rule of law. | 2 |
US President George W Bush leaves for Europe on Monday with his popularity at home at a low point over the Iraq war and tensions abroad over global warming and missile defence. Built around the Group of Eight summit in Germany where his host Chancellor Angela Merkel had hoped to forge an agreement on climate change, Bush's trip includes stops in Eastern Europe to bolster developing democracies. With many Americans clamoring for an end to the Iraq war, the Republican president focused on a softer agenda ahead of the meeting. Laying out his goals last week, Bush asked Congress to double funds for combating AIDS, primarily in Africa, to $30 billion over five years and tried to dispel criticism by proposing a new global warming strategy. He also slapped sanctions on Sudan for what he called the genocide in Darfur. "If you couple Bush's weak position at home with this unpopularity in much of Western Europe, Bush is probably not relishing this trip," said Charles Kupchan, director of Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Particularly on the question of climate change, he will find himself isolated." Europeans gave a cool reception to Bush's plan to bring together the world's biggest polluting countries by year-end to explore ways of limiting emissions and agree on a long-term goal by the end of 2008. Some portrayed it as a defeat for Merkel, who wants the G8 to agree now on a need for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases about 50 percent by 2050. "The general view in Europe is: let's be patient, November 2008 is coming," Kupchan said, referring to the next US presidential election. "It's fair to say every European government is looking expectantly to the post-Bush era." The weeklong tour, with additional stops in the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Albania and Bulgaria, includes several firsts. Bush will meet new French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Germany and Pope Benedict at the Vatican. One of the most watched meetings on the sidelines of the summit will be with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose escalating criticism of the United States has raised concerns about the deterioration of US-Russian ties. Putin vehemently opposes US plans for a missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, seeing it as a threat to Russia. Bush has asked Russia to join in the defence system, saying it is intended as protection from potential threats from other states such as Iran. In a preemptive move that could take some of the tension out of the session, Bush has invited Putin to his family's retreat in Maine next month for two days of talks. In Prague, Bush will talk about the need to advance democracy at an international conference organised by human rights and pro-democracy activists, including former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who was a leader in the "Velvet Revolution" that ended communism in the former Czechoslovakia. "The president also appreciates the Czech Republic's leadership in promoting freedom in some of the world's most tyrannical societies, such as Burma, Belarus and Cuba," White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said. Bush will thank Poland for cooperating in the missile defence system, promoting freedom in Belarus and helping young democracies such as Ukraine, Hadley said. His visit to Albania, the first by a sitting US president, comes as the United States locks horns with Russia over the issue of statehood for Kosovo, which is majority ethnic Albanian. The United States supports a plan proposed by UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari which offers Kosovo independence under international supervision. Russia opposes the plan. The last stop in Bulgaria will highlight promoting democracy in the Balkans. | 0 |
After two weeks of emphasis on domestic issues, Biden is visiting the State Department to turn his focus to foreign policy. In remarks to diplomats at the Harry S. Trump Building in Washington before his formal address, Biden said he intended to “send a clear message to the world: America is back.” “We’re going to rebuild our alliances. We’re going to reengage the world,” Biden said, citing as his top priorities battles against the pandemic and climate change and “standing up for democracy and human rights around the world.” After Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris thanked State Department employees, they met privately with Secretary of State Antony Blinken before what will be Biden’s first foreign policy speech of the administration. Briefing reporters at the White House beforehand, Sullivan also said that Biden would announce a presidential memorandum on protecting the rights of LGBTQ people worldwide. In ending US support for Saudi operations in Yemen’s civil war — which has caused massive humanitarian suffering — Biden will be delivering on a campaign promise. His administration has already announced a review of major US arms sales to Saudi Arabia that were approved by the Trump administration. Both moves have strong support from Congressional Democrats. Biden will also freeze former President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw roughly 12,000 US troops stationed in Germany. Many national security experts from both parties had called Trump’s order shortsighted. Sullivan said the president’s visit will be the first of several to national security departments and agencies, including the Pentagon and the intelligence community. But even though many State Department officials were aghast at the policies of Trump, who derided their work as the “Deep State Department,” Biden will face a diplomatic corps that remains sceptical of the new White House. Some employees have noted with concern that political appointees, not career diplomats, are beginning to fill the top ranks at the department. While that is not particularly unusual — and is within any president’s prerogative — it singes a staff that felt burned by Trump’s efforts to install loyalists with little experience in diplomacy. At least nine new deputy assistant secretaries of state are political appointees, some of whom had previously worked at the department, among dozens of slots that are also open to career diplomats. Biden has also named at least four appointees as senior advisers. The department has not yet released a list of staff members that are being placed in top jobs. “Foggy Bottom is weakened and wary of new slogans and superficial statements of support,” said Brett Bruen, a former State Department consular officer and member of the Obama administration’s National Security Council. He said career State Department employees were “deeply disappointed” by the number of political appointees being installed. “The question being asked around the building is, ‘When will it be our time, and will this be any better than before?’” Bruen said. ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
In a speech that lasted more than two hours -- his longest since taking office two years ago -- Trump also vented about Democrats, a proposed "green new deal," illegal immigrants and criticism of his North Korea summit, while voicing optimism about his own re-election prospects in 2020. Addressing a cheering audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Trump veered off-script to launch a tirade about events that led to the Russia investigation. He mocked his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and former FBI Director James Comey, both of whom Trump fired. "We're waiting for a report by people who weren't elected," Trump said of the Mueller report, which is widely expected to be handed over to Attorney General William Barr in the coming days. Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller in May 2017 to take over the Russia investigation after Trump fired Comey, whose agency had led the probe initially. Rosenstein is expected to step down by mid-March. Swarms of young adults stood to applaud Trump in the packed hotel ballroom where he spoke, at times breaking into chants like "Trump is our Man" and "We Love You." Trump said Comey was Mueller's "best friend," and implied Comey should have been fired before Trump took office. "Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of positions and they leave people for a long time that shouldn't be there and all of a sudden they are trying to take you out with bullshit, okay?" Trump said. "Now Robert Mueller never received a vote and neither did the person who appointed him," he added. Trump still has made no move to fire Mueller, a Republican and respected former FBI director who has conducted his investigation with utmost secrecy. Trump also mocked the Southern accent of Sessions and criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia probe. In November, Trump fired Sessions, a former US senator from Alabama who was among the first Republican lawmakers to back Trump's presidential bid. Trump's face perspired as he lashed out at critics after a stressful week during which his former lawyer Michael Cohen accused the president in congressional testimony of breaking the law. Also, the president concluded a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi without reaching a denuclearization deal. The White House has rejected Cohen's allegations and on Saturday, Trump said his talks with Kim were productive and could lead to an agreement in which other, unspecified nations provide aid to Pyongyang. Trump addressed criticism from the parents of Otto Warmbier, an American student who died after 17 months in a North Korean prison. They had complained when Trump said at a Hanoi news conference that he believed Kim had nothing to do with Warmbier's death. "I love Otto," Trump said, but added he was trying to maintain "a delicate balance" with the North Koreans as he attempts to coax them into giving up their nuclear program. Trump ridiculed a Democratic "green new deal" plan to fight climate change, pointing to provisions such as reducing airplane flights or eating less beef. "This is the craziest plan," Trump said, adding that Democratic support for it would help Republicans politically. He said he believed he will win in 2020, rejecting critics who said lack of support for Trump was behind the Republican loss of the US House of Representatives last November. "Wait 'til you see what happens when I do run," he said. Democratic National Committee spokesman Daniel Wessel quickly hit back on Saturday afternoon, describing the speech in a statement as "a bizarre, unhinged rant." | 0 |
They seemed helpful, but the women’s leader, Martha Agbani, sensed danger. “No, leave it!” she said sharply. “Let the women carry.” It was not the first time she had run into these men in Yaataah, perched on a small hill in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, and she knew their offer contained menace: If she did not pay them, there would be trouble. And one of her main goals was to create work for the women. All her life Agbani had watched as women from Ogoniland, a part of the oil-rich Niger Delta famous for standing up to polluting oil companies, struggled to get by and struggled to be heard over men. And she was determined that men would not disrupt or muscle in on her new project: establishing an enormous nursery to grow hundreds of thousands of mangrove plants to sell to the Nigerian subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, the dominant oil company in Ogoniland and the one responsible for wiping out many of them in the first place. Agbani, a hardy woman with a ready laugh and a kind but no-nonsense manner, was trying to turn her hand to a business that could put money in women’s pockets and go some way to restoring their devastated environment. Mangroves have prodigious natural powers, filtering brackish water, protecting against coastal erosion and providing a sheltered breeding ground for aquatic life, which in turn sustains humans. The Niger Delta is home to one of the largest mangrove ecosystems in the world, one that humans lived in harmony with for centuries. But with the advent of oil production — something that the Nigerian government has come to depend upon for most of its revenue — the mangrove forests suffered. In 2011, the United Nations Environment Program released a major report documenting pollution in Ogoniland, saying it could take 30 years to clean up. But the government agency set up to clean the land and water, the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, has been grindingly slow to act. After two oil spills in 2007 and 2008 killed off thousands of acres of mangrove forests near the village of Bodo, Shell agreed to compensate the community, clean up the oil and replant. Agbani spotted an opportunity. The company would need thousands upon thousands of mangroves, tropical trees that grow in the spaces between land and sea, protecting the coastline and providing vital habitat for baby fish and periwinkles, the sea snails that are a staple of Niger Delta cuisine. She started by growing mangroves in her yard, then started looking for a place to establish a nursery. That is how she came across Yaataah. Once, its creek was home to thick forests of mangroves, but now most were gone, the victims of past environmental disasters and encroachment of invasive nipa palms, brought there long ago by the British. She started planning the project’s rollout there and bused in more than 100 female mangrove planters to celebrate its launch in late 2019. But at the party, Agbani said, she had her first experience with the young men, who suddenly arrived and demanded money as well as the snacks she had brought for the women. When she remonstrated with them, pointing out that the women had come to help restore the land so that their mothers and sisters could once again harvest periwinkles, they physically attacked her. “They were dragging me from behind,” she said. “It all went bad.” Shaken, Agbani and her team left and did not return to Yaataah for months. She decided to base the nursery elsewhere; a local leader agreed to lend her land close to the polluted sites in Bodo. But she could not quite let go of Yaataah. It had a good creek where they could practice cultivating mangroves out in the wild, directly from seeds, rather than first establishing them in the plastic grow bags of the nursery in Bodo. And now, in May 2021, the women were back to plant. Hoisting the sacks onto their heads, and with their skirts above their knees, the women descended the little hill barefoot and slipped into the clear water of the creek. It did not stay clear for long, though, as dozens of feet stirred up the soft sediment. “Something’s sizzling round my legs,” said Agbani, 45, laughing, leaning on a stick and struggling to get a foothold in the mud. “Oh, my god, Martha is an old woman.” The spot was perfect. There was very little oil pollution. Birds, frogs and crickets still sang from their clumps of foliage. Like many a creek of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, it was choked by nipa palms. But Agbani had arranged for villagers to clear a large patch of the palms. The women squelched nimbly through the mud over to the patch and worked quickly, passing the seeds — technically, podlike “propagules” that germinate on the tree — from hand to hand and sticking them in the mud at foot-long intervals, directed by Agbani. “Carry me dey go-o,” one of the women, Jessy Nubani, sang, bobbing up and down as she worked, adapting a popular call-and-response song. The other women sang back in harmony: “Martha, carry me dey go, dey go, dey go.” The young men had shown up again and summoned their friends, who buzzed in on motorcycles to see what they could get. But they stayed on shore. Agbani had given them a round telling-off. Agbani learned activism partly from her mother, who in the 1990s was involved in the Ogoni people’s struggle against the Nigerian government and Shell. Like her mother, Agbani worked for years for the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, set up in 1990 in response to the environmental destruction of the ecologically delicate area by multinational oil companies. And like her mother, she was inspired by the work of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ogoniland’s greatest hero, who was executed by the Nigerian government under military dictator Sani Abacha in 1995. She remembers clearly the day Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested, when she was a teenage student in Bori, his birthplace. She hid in a drain and watched the city erupt. “People were running helter-skelter,” she said. “Soldiers got into the communities. In Bori, they were shooting. People were on the rampage.” That experience, and Saro-Wiwa’s insistence on rights for the oppressed, made her want to fight for her people. And, she said, while there were many organisations focused on the ravaged environment, few looked at the rights of women, who suffered disproportionately from the effects of oil pollution. “Women were always crying. Women were victims of so many things,” she said. “I need to help my women to stand.” In Ogoniland, men often go deep-sea fishing, but women traditionally stay close to shore, collecting crustaceans for their thick, fragrant soups or to sell. When there are no mangroves and thus no shellfish to harvest, Agbani said, “they now depend solely on men.” “That overdependence has been leading to a lot of violence, too,” she said. “You are there just to serve the man.” The way Agbani saw things, the Ogoni people were custodians of a borrowed environment — borrowed from their forefathers and from a generation not yet born. And it pained her to see local young men obstructing and trying to profit from the women’s efforts to rebuild it. “We have a lot of motivation,” she said. “We feel they’ve not really understood what it means, restoring the environment.” As a parting shot, the ringleader of the young men told Agbani that he would see her in court. “I think he was joking. If he wants to sue, that would be nice,” she said ironically, laughing with surprise. “That’ll be a good one.” As she headed out of Yaataah on a bumpy track, headed for the nursery in Bodo, the driver scooted out of the way of a bevy of motorbikes buzzing toward the village. More young men. They had heard that there was money to be had, but they had arrived too late. Agbani was on her way out. © 2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Macron's
lead over rival candidates ahead of next month's election has grown in the wake
of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He is still seen winning the first round and
beating any opponent in a run-off. "We are
at a tipping point where we can make a real difference," Macron told a
news conference, highlighting the war on the European Union's doorstep and the
global challenge of climate change.Read full story Making
France a more independent country will be a key objective, he said, as he
started outlining his platform, vowing to do everything to protect the country
if he remains president. Opinion
polls published over the past weeks see him winning up to 30.5 percent of the
vote in the April 10 first round, from around 25 percent last month. Even if he
succeeds, Macron will need his centrist La Republique en Marche (LaRem) party -
which has failed in all recent local elections - and its allies to win a
parliamentary election in June if he is to have a strong base to implement his
policies. It has been
an unusual presidential campaign, first dominated by the rise of a new
far-right candidate, Eric Zemmour, and now largely overshadowed by the war in
Ukraine, which has seen Macron rise in opinion polls and most other candidates
become inaudible. As Macron
launches his campaign, he can count on an economic boom that French voters have
not seen the likes of in a generation to boost his bid, a point he stressed at
the start of his news conference. Read full story "I had
promised to lower unemployment, despite the crises we did it," he said. | 0 |
WARSAW, Sep 28, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Global financial turmoil should not hamper a new world climate deal because high energy prices remain an incentive to improve energy efficiency, the UN's top climate official said on Friday. Some analysts have said the current crisis sweeping financial markets may leave no money for investments in limiting greenhouse gas emissions amid UN-led talks aimed at clinching a new international deal to tackle global warming. "I have personally not seen an economic analysis that shows the current credit crisis is having a bigger impact on the global economy than current oil prices," Yvo de Boer, head of the Bonn-based UN Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. But he said the uncertainty generated by the credit crunch and the lack of trust in financial markets were obstacles to developing green energy projects despite the spur of oil prices around $100 a barrel. "In spite of what's happening at the moment, I don't have the impression that lack of capital is the issue. It's investment uncertainty that has created the nervousness out there. And I think, if governments are clear in terms of climate change, that could help reduce some level of this uncertainty." "Because if you are about to build a 500 million euro power plant and you don't know if your government will go for greenhouse gas emissions cuts of 5 percent or 50 percent, then that's a very risky decision to make," he said in an interview. INVOLVING U.S., DEVELOPING NATIONS Contrary to many analysts, De Boer expressed optimism on the chances of the United States joining a new global warming accord, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which runs to the end of 2012. "I think it is perfectly possible the United States will sign up to the Copenhagen agreement," said de Boer, who visited Poland to review preparations for December climate talks here. But de Boer added that the reasons Washington did not buy into Kyoto -- mainly its fears the protocol would damage the U.S. economy and the lack of targets for developing countries -- were "as relevant as they were in 1997 (when Kyoto was signed)." Kyoto binds 37 industrialized countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent below their 1990 levels by 2008-12. It sets no target for developing countries. To entice the United States, which is being overtaken by China as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, the United Nations has to engage developing countries. De Boer said that was only possible by safeguarding their economic growth and cutting ambitious climate policy costs. One way to attract developing countries is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows an industrialized country to boost its own emission quota if it invests in clean energy technology in a developing economy. U.N. talks have been split on whether the CDM should include coal power plants with the ability to store carbon dioxide. "That debate is still going on, but my personal view is that for coal-based economies, like China and India, carbon capture and storage would be critical," de Boer said. "And I believe that there are safe ways of storing CO2 underground, like for example storing it in empty gas fields." De Boer said the talks scheduled for December in the western Polish city of Poznan involving environment ministers of the 192 U.N. member states could pave the way for a deal in Copenhagen to replace Kyoto, despite widespread skepticism. | 1 |
In a meeting with his Bangladesh counterpart Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali at his office at The Hague on Wednesday, he said that King Willem-Alexander himself took “keen interest” in Bangladesh’s flood-control efforts and climate change adaptation.He also expressed his government’s continued interest in working with Bangladesh to address the growing challenges posed by climate change.Timmermans said Bangladesh and the Netherlands enjoy “the closest” of bilateral ties.Foreign Minister Mahmood Ali appreciated the Dutch development cooperation projects targeted at water management, agricultural productivity and income generation in hard-to-reach char areas.He also thanked the Dutch government for its contribution to the ‘ILO’s 'Better Work Programme’ being implemented to improve working conditions in Bangladesh’s ready-made garments sector.The minister is currently on a visit to the Hague to attend a “high-level segment” of the Global Oceans Action Summit for Food Security and Blue Growth, being jointly organised by the government of the Netherlands, FAO and the World Bank.During their discussions on a whole range of issues, the two ministers’ agreed to explore the possibility of finding a regular mechanism of bilateral foreign office consultations.Mahmood Ali thanked the Netherlands for offering training to young Bangladeshi diplomats and requested his counterpart to extend the current programme by another five years.The two sides also exchanged views on extending reciprocal facilities and services to each other’s missions in the two capitals.The Bangladesh Foreign Minister invited the Netherlands King to visit Bangladesh “at a mutually convenient time”.He also invited his counterpart to visit the country, an invitation he readily accepted.Bangladesh’s ambassador to the Netherlands Sheikh Mohammed Belal was also present during the meeting. | 1 |
Beijing,Sep 15 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama both vowed to press China on trade and to work with it on climate change if elected, and Obama said he would make shifting Beijing's currency policies a priority. Democratic candidate Obama and Republican candidate McCain laid out their views on Beijing's rising diplomatic and economic power in position papers published by the American Chamber of Commerce in China on Monday (http://www.amcham-china.org.cn). Both senators want China to grant citizens wider rights, but stressed security, economic and environmental issues that make ties between Washington and Beijing globally important and often contentious. The US trade deficit with China hit a record $256.3 billion in 2007. "Central to any rebalancing of our economic relationship must be change in currency practices," Obama said in his policy paper. "I will use all the diplomatic avenues available to seek a change in China's currency practices," he said. Obama said China pegs its yuan currency at an "artificially low rate," making its exports unfairly cheap. He has backed legislation that would define currency manipulation as an illegal subsidy so that the United States could slap duties on more Chinese goods. In his paper, McCain accused his Democrat rival of "preying on the fears stoked by Asia's dynamism," but the Republican candidate also said "China has its obligations as well". "(China's) commitment to open markets must include enforcement of international trade rules, protecting intellectual property, lowering manufacturing tariffs and fulfillment of its commitment to move to a market-determined currency," McCain said. The yuan has appreciated a further 18.47 percent since it was revalued by 2.1 percent to 8.11 per dollar in July 2005, and freed from a dollar peg to float within managed bands. Now one US dollar buys about 6.85 yuan. While the Republican and Democratic candidates have sparred over energy policy, they found some common ground in vowing to bring China into firmer international commitments to control greenhouse gases stoking global warming. The US and China are the world's two biggest emitters of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, and they will play a decisive role in negotiations to forge a global climate pact to build on the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. China has insisted that, as a developing country, it must grow first and not accept any caps until wealthier. Washington has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, noting it did not impose caps on China and other big, developing economies. "Given the environmental challenges so evident in China today, pressing on with uncontrolled emissions is in no one's interest," said McCain. The U.S. could in turn "take the lead" in spreading low-carbon technology to poorer countries. Obama said the two nations must "develop much higher levels of cooperation without delay" to produce new means of reducing the threat from climate change. | 0 |
The report looked at future mining and drilling plans in 15 major fossil fuel producing countries, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, China, India and Norway. Taken together, those countries are currently planning to produce more than twice as much oil, gas and coal through 2030 as would be needed if governments want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Scientists and world leaders increasingly say that holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is crucial if humanity wants to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, such as ever-deadlier heat waves, large scale flooding and widespread extinctions. The world has already heated up roughly 1.1 degrees since the Industrial Revolution. But the planned global expansion of fossil fuel extraction clashes sharply with those climate goals, the report found. If the world remains awash in oil, gas and coal for decades to come, then many countries could find it more difficult to shift to cleaner sources of energy. At the same time, many of the oil wells and coal mines now being approved and developed could prove deeply unprofitable if demand for fossil fuels shrinks, creating economic disruption. By 2030, the report found, the world’s nations are planning to produce 240% more coal, 57% more oil and 71% more natural gas than would be needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Starting Oct. 31, world leaders will gather at a major United Nations climate summit in Glasgow for two weeks to discuss how to reduce their planet-warming emissions. But environmentalists say that governments also need to focus on future plans for fossil fuel extraction, so that they are more closely aligned with proposals to sell more electric vehicles or install more renewable power. “The world’s governments must step up, taking rapid and immediate steps to close the fossil fuel production gap and ensure a just and equitable transition,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. Over the past decade, governments and businesses have slowly begun nudging the global economy away from its long-standing reliance on fossil fuels. Many countries are now planning significant expansions of wind and solar power and cancelling plans for new coal plants. Major automakers like Ford and General Motors are investing heavily in electric vehicles and preparing to phase down sales of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars. But that’s just a start. The International Energy Agency recently looked at what would be needed to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. All of the world’s nations would have to drastically cut their fossil-fuel use over the next three decades until they are no longer adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050, essentially achieving “net zero” emissions. Under that scenario, the agency said, the world’s nations would not approve the development of any new coal mines or new oil and gas fields beyond what has already been committed today. Yet the new report, led by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, warns that many nations are still far out of step with that envisioned future. Even as countries like China and the United States are expecting to cut back on coal extraction in the decades ahead, that would be offset by plans for new mining in places like Australia, India and Russia. The United States, the report found, is still expected to see a major increase in oil and gas production by 2030. The Biden administration has vowed to pause and reform leasing programs for oil and gas drilling on federal lands, although those efforts have been tied up in the courts. The report notes that more than half of fossil fuel production worldwide is controlled by state-owned companies, which are often insulated from market pressures and sometimes legally required to maintain production in order to keep tax revenues flowing. But even countries that depend on private companies to mine for coal or drill for oil often pay subsidies that can keep fossil fuel output artificially high. In practice, it could prove tricky for governments to enact an orderly reduction of fossil fuel production worldwide. Even if the world does shift to cleaner energy, there will still be demand for oil and gas during the transition period. Each country that pumps out oil and gas would prefer to grab as much of that shrinking market share as possible and let others cut back. That dynamic can lead to overproduction worldwide. Making the task even tougher, the world is currently experiencing a severe energy crunch, with Europe, Asia and Latin America all facing shortages of natural gas this fall to supplant their renewable power operations. The International Energy Agency recently warned that nations need to significantly increase their investment in clean energy to overcome these problems, but the disruptions could also bolster calls for more fossil fuel production. China’s government, for example, recently ordered coal companies to increase their mining output to manage an electricity shortage that has led to rolling blackouts nationwide. To address these challenges, the new report calls for closer international coordination “to ensure that declines in fossil fuel production are distributed as equitably as possible, while minimising the risks of disruption.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
The humble chickpea has had a somewhat rocky road to its present popularity, however, suggests a new study published last week in Nature that sequences the genomes of more than 3,000 examples, making it one of the largest plant genome sequencing efforts ever completed. “I’m truly excited to see what else will be uncovered from this massive resource,” said Patrick Edger, a professor of horticulture at Michigan State University who was not involved in the study. The researchers now believe that after chickpeas were first domesticated in Turkey’s southeastern Anatolia region, their cultivation may have stagnated for millenniums. The result was a genetic bottleneck that makes all chickpeas today descendants of a relatively small group from a thousand years ago. What’s more, the modern varieties grown by most farmers are low in genetic diversity, which means that they are at risk of failing under the stress of climate change. By mapping the legume’s genetic makeup in such rich detail, the scientists hope to make it easier for plant breeders — who develop new kinds of crops — to bring diversity back into the chickpea’s genes, giving it a flexible tool kit to survive drought, flooding and diseases. While hummus may have become ubiquitous in American grocery stores only in the past 15 years, chickpeas have long been a staple crop in the developing world, said Rajeev Varshney, a research program director at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India, as well as a professor at Murdoch University in Australia and an author of the new paper. India is the world’s largest producer of chickpeas, growing more than 10 million metric tons in 2019, as well as one of the largest importers. But chickpeas’ status as a developing world crop has meant that they have not received as much attention from breeders as commodities like corn, Varshney said. Chickpea farmers grow a handful of varieties that have been improved over the years without, for the most part, the benefit of genetic information that might give breeders more control over what traits the beans will have. In the present study, the researchers sequenced the DNA of 3,366 samples of chickpeas, ranging from wild relatives of the crop to modern stock. They identified a set of genes the plants had in common, as well as a wide variety of others, including some that scientists had not discovered before. These common genes are likely to handle the basic traits that all the plants share, while the unique genes, on the other hand, may encode special abilities like resistance to drought and protection from diseases. Going further, the researchers flagged sets of genes, some found in older varieties, that may prove helpful to modern chickpeas. The way plant breeding usually works, Varshney said, is that once a genetic trait, like resistance to a fungal disease, is brought into a given variety, all the individuals will have the exact same tool to block infection. That means that if a form of the disease evolves that can get past that defence, the results could be disastrous. “The whole crop — the whole field — will be wiped out,” Varshney said. Using the gene sets identified in this study, and making sure that many different sets are represented in chickpea populations, could be a protection against crop failures, he hopes. And he said that breeding more resilient chickpeas is a process that should start now, using genetic information to speed the process: If farmers wake up one day and find they need a chickpea that can thrive at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, “this would be very challenging,” said Varshney. “It needs to be incremental.” The study also peers into what the chickpea’s genes can tell us about its travels. The bean left the Middle East along independent routes to the Indian subcontinent and the land that borders the Mediterranean. And although patterns in its genes suggest a gradual decline in popularity for thousands of years, the scientists are not sure why that might have been. “Maybe farmers thought, this is not useful,” Varshney said. That changed about 400 years ago, when, according to the data, humans seem to have rediscovered the wonders of the chickpea, for reasons unclear to the researchers. Next time you dunk pita in hummus, you can be glad they did. ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Global warming could devastate China's development, the nation's first official survey of climate change warns, while insisting economic growth must come before greenhouse gas cuts. Hotter average global temperatures fuelled by greenhouse gases mean that different regions of China are likely to suffer spreading deserts, worsening droughts and floods, shrinking glaciers and rising seas, the National Climate Change Assessment states. This environmental upheaval could derail the ruling Communist Party's plans for sustainable development, a copy of the report obtained by Reuters says. "Climatic warming may have serious consequences for our environment of survival as China's economic sectors, such as agriculture and coastal regions, suffer grave negative effects," the report states. Fast-industrialising China could overtake the United States as the world's top emitter of human-generated greenhouse gases as early as this year, and Beijing faces rising international calls to accept mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions from factories, fields and vehicles. But underscoring China's commitment to achieving prosperity even as it braces for climate change, the report rejects emissions limits as unfair and economically dangerous, citing what it says are uncertainties about global warming. "If we prematurely assume responsibilities for mandatory greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the direct consequence will be to constrain China's current energy and manufacturing industries and weaken the competitiveness of Chinese products in international and even domestic markets," it says. The 400-page report was written over several years by experts and officials from dozens of ministries and agencies, representing China's first official response to global warming. With its mixture of dire warnings and caveats, it bears the markings of bureaucratic bargaining. China was one of a few countries that challenged claims about global warming presented in a draft report at a U.N. climate change meeting in Brussels earlier this month. That report was approved after some claims were softened and passages removed. China's own national report says "uncertainties over climate change issues" justify rejecting international limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But other parts of the report assert that the country's brittle environment will be severely tested by climate change. By the end of the century, glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet highlands that feed the Yangtze river could shrink by two thirds. Further downstream, increasingly intense rainfall could "spark mud and landslides and other geological disasters" around the massive Three Gorges Dam. Coastal cities will need to build or strengthen barriers to ward off rising sea levels. Unless steps are taken, water scarcity and increasingly extreme weather could reduce nationwide crop production by up to 10 percent by 2030. Wheat, rice and corn growing capacity could fall by up to 37 percent in the second half of the century. "If we do not take any actions, climate change will seriously damage China's long-term grain security," the report states. China has repeatedly ruled out accepting mandatory international emissions limits, saying that rich countries are responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases and should not look to poorer countries for a way out. "For a considerable time to come, developing the economy and improving people's lives remains the country's primary task," the report says. | 0 |
Global warming is one of the most significant threats facing humankind, researchers warned, as they unveiled a study showing how climate changes in the past led to famine, wars and population declines. The world's growing population may be unable to adequately adapt to ecological changes brought about by the expected rise in global temperatures, scientists in China, Hong Kong, the United States and Britain wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The warmer temperatures are probably good for a while, but beyond some level plants will be stressed," said Peter Brecke, associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. "With more droughts and a rapidly growing population, it is going to get harder and harder to provide food for everyone and thus we should not be surprised to see more instances of starvation and probably more cases of hungry people clashing over scarce food and water." Trawling through history and working out correlative patterns, the team found that temperature declines were followed by wars, famines and population reductions. The researchers examined the time period between 1400 and 1900, or the Little Ice Age, which recorded the lowest average global temperatures around 1450, 1650 and 1820, each separated by slight warming intervals. "When such ecological situations occur, people tend to move to another place. Such mass movement leads to war, like in the 13th century, when the Mongolians suffered a drought and they invaded China," David Zhang, geography professor at the University of Hong Kong, said in an interview on Thursday. "Or the Manchurians who moved into central China in 17th century because conditions in the northeast were terrible during the cooling period," he said. "Epidemics may not be directly linked to temperature (change), but it is a consequence of migration, which creates chances for disease to spread." HALF THE WORLD AT RISK Although the study cited only periods of temperature decline to social disruptions, the researchers said the same prediction could be made of global warming. A report last week said climate change will put half the world's countries at risk of conflict or serious political instability. International Alert, a London-based conflict resolution group, identified 46 countries -- home to 2.7 billion people -- where it said the effects of climate change would create a high risk of violent conflict. It identified another 56 states where there was a risk of political instability. "I would expect to see some pretty serious conflicts that are clearly linked to climate change on the international scene by 2020," International Alert secretary general Dan Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview. Near the top of the list are west and central Africa, with clashes already reported in northern Ghana between herders and farmers as agricultural patterns change. Bangladesh could also see dangerous changes, while the visible decline in levels of the River Ganges in India, on which 400 million people depend, could spark new tensions there. Water shortages would make solving tensions in the already volatile Middle East even harder, Smith said, while currently peaceful Latin American states could be destabilised by unrest following changes in the melting of glaciers affecting rivers. Unless communities and governments begin discussing the issues in advance, he said, there is a risk climate shift could be the spark that relights wars such as those in Liberia and Sierra Leone in west Africa or the Caucasus on Russia's borders. Current economic growth in developing states could also be hit. | 0 |
Scientists
have been able to draw links between a warming planet and hurricanes, heat
waves and droughts, attributing the likelihood that climate change played a
role in individual isolated events. The same can’t be said for tornadoes yet. “This
is the hardest phenomenon to connect to climate change,” said Michael Tippett,
an associate professor of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia
University who studies extreme weather and climate. Even
as scientists are discovering trends around tornadoes and their behaviour, it
remains unclear the role that climate change plays. “For
a lot of our questions about climate change and tornadoes, the answer is we
don’t know,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. WHAT
CAUSES A TORNADO? Tornadoes
form inside large rotating thunderstorms. They occur when there is a perfect
mix of temperature, moisture profile and wind profile. When
the air is unstable, cold air is pushed over warmer humid air, creating an
updraft as the warm air rises. When a wind’s speed or direction changes over a
short distance, the air inside the clouds can start to spin. If the air column
begins spinning vertically and rotates near the ground, it can intensify the
friction on Earth’s surface, accelerating the air inward, forming a tornado. HOW
ARE THEY MEASURED? Like
hurricanes and earthquakes, tornadoes are rated on a scale. The Enhanced
Fujita, or EF, scale, runs from 0 to 5. The
tornado that travelled across northeast Arkansas, Tennessee and western
Kentucky over the weekend was estimated to be three-quarters of a mile wide
with wind speeds that peaked between 158 and 206 mph, giving it a EF rank of at
least 3. Because
it’s challenging to measure the winds in a tornado directly, surveyors usually
evaluate tornadoes by their level of damage to different structures. For
instance, they may look to see if the damage is limited to missing roof
shingles or whether entire sections of roofs or walls are missing. Based on the
level of damage, scientists then reverse-engineer the wind speeds and assign a
tornado a rating. HAVE
TORNADOES CHANGED? Researchers
say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater “clusters,”
and that the region known as tornado alley in the Great Plains, where most
tornadoes occur, appears to be shifting eastward. The overall number of
tornadoes annually is holding steady around 1,200. Tornadoes
in the United States in December are unusual. They typically occur in the
spring. Friday’s tornadoes may have occurred because the wind shear was high
(it tends to peak in the winter) and the weather was warmer than normal. IS
CLIMATE CHANGE THE CAUSE? The
ingredients that give rise to tornadoes include warm, moist air at ground
level; cool dry air higher up; and wind shear, which is the change in wind
speed or direction. Each of these factors may be affected differently by
climate change. As
the planet warms and the climate changes, “we don’t think they are all going to
go in the same direction,” said Brooks of NOAA. For instance, overall
temperature and humidity, which provide energy in the air, may rise with a
warming climate, but wind shear may not. “If
there is not enough shear to make something rotate, it doesn’t matter how
strong the energy is,” he said. SCALE
IS EVERYTHING A
tornado’s relatively small size also makes it harder to model, the primary tool
that scientists use when attributing extreme weather events to climate change.
“We are working at such small scales that the model you would use to do the
attribution studies just can’t capture the phenomenon,” Brooks said. A
SHORTER, SPOTTIER, RECORD The
tornado record is still sparse compared with other types of events. One
possible reason is that tornadoes are relatively local weather events. Tornado
records have largely been based on someone seeing a tornado and reporting it to
the National Weather Service. This means that smaller or unseen tornadoes may
not be reported.
©2021 The New York Times Company | 6 |
China will insist key global climate change negotiations next month build on current treaties that limit the obligations of poor countries in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said. In a phone call with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Monday, Wen said the December meeting in Copenhagen to forge a new pact on global warming should stick to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, the official People's daily reported on Tuesday. The Kyoto Protocol is the treaty formed under the Convention that governs nations' efforts to fight climate change up to the end of 2012, and the talks in Copenhagen are about creating a successor. The European Union says it wants to widen Kyoto, which does not bind emerging economies such as China, the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and would rather craft a new pact than extend and add to Kyoto. But Wen said Beijing will not agree to a new pact that erases the distinction Kyoto makes between rich countries, which must accept binding emissions caps, and developing ones, which must take action on emissions but do not take on binding targets. "The key to whether the (Copenhagen) meeting can achieve success is adhering to the (UN) Convention and the Protocol, holding to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities," Wen told Barroso. Negotiators should "prevent the relevant negotiations from deviating from the principles and stipulations of the Convention and Protocol", Wen added. The Chinese premier's remarks were an amplification of his government's established position. But with the Copenhagen meeting just over a month off, they underscored the divisions that could hinder agreement. Later this month, China and the EU are also to hold a summit also likely to focus on climate change. The 27-country EU has pledged to cut its own emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and to increase cuts to 30 percent if other rich regions take similar action. Chinese President Hu Jintao has said his country will cut its carbon dioxide emissions for every unit of economic output by a "notable margin" by 2020 compared to 2005. | 0 |
Now she is part of a team racing to build giant machines that will use electricity to separate hydrogen from water for major companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Orsted, the Danish offshore wind developer. “We have gone through those toddler years,” said Smith, an executive director at ITM Power, which is run out of an expansive new factory in Sheffield, a faded centre for steel mills and coal mining. “We are playing in the grown-up world rather than in research labs.” A consensus is forming among governments, environmentalists and energy companies that deep cuts in carbon emissions will require large amounts of a clean fuel like hydrogen. Proponents of hydrogen have identified more than a score of potential applications of the element for cutting carbon emissions. It could be used to power long-haul trucks and train and air travel. Energy companies are experimenting with blending hydrogen with natural gas for home heating and cooking. All told, more than 200 large-scale projects are underway to produce or transport hydrogen, comprising investments of more than $80 billion. Daimler and Volvo, the world’s largest truck-makers, plan in a few years to begin mass producing long-haul electric trucks that run on devices called fuel cells that convert hydrogen to electricity. Water will be the trucks’ only emission. “You could imagine an economy that is supported almost entirely by very clean electricity and very clean hydrogen,” said Ernest Moniz, secretary of energy in the Obama administration and now CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative, a research organisation. But he warned that “a lot of things have to happen” for a gas now mainly used in specialty areas to become a “part of the backbone of the energy system.” Among the obstacles that must be overcome: creating enough of the right sort of hydrogen, at a price industries and consumers can accept. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, but it must be separated from some other substance, like water or fossil fuels. For example, industries like oil refining use large quantities of so-called gray hydrogen that is mostly made by separating hydrogen from natural gas. And that process generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than burning diesel. In fact, less than 5% of the hydrogen produced today is emission-free, and that kind costs more than twice as much to make as the grey version — $5 per kilogram versus $1 to $2 per kilogram, according to Bernstein, a research firm. It is also more expensive than conventional fuels, like diesel. Smith’s company in Sheffield is one of the more promising sources for hydrogen made without producing emissions. It makes devices known as electrolysers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This hydrogen is emission-free provided that the electricity comes from sources like wind and solar. Electrolysers have been around for a century, but analysts say ITM’s technology, known as polymer electrolyte membrane, has the advantage of being able to turn on and off rapidly — a big advantage for machines intended to be coupled with wind and solar farms, whose output fluctuates with the sun and breeze. ITM says the value of its contracts has tripled over the last year to 154 million pounds, or about $213 million. Analysts at Barclays, the British bank, estimate that a $65 billion market for such equipment could materialise during the next decade. The prospect of buying into a weapon against climate change has investors piling into ITM, as well as similar companies like NEL in Norway and McPhy Energy in France. Even though ITM loses money, it has a stock market value of about 2.3 billion pounds. The share price has quadrupled since early 2020. Today ITM has 310 employees. When it was still a startup, Peter Hargreaves, one of its original investors, had to rescue the company four times using his own money, he said. “There was no guarantee that the company was going to succeed, that people were going to embrace the hydrogen economy,” said Hargreaves, a founder of Hargreaves Lansdown, a brokerage firm. He added that by now he had been “well rewarded.” Until recently, ITM focused on building small devices for facilities like gas stations, some of them operated by Shell, that served a relative handful of vehicles that ran on hydrogen. Now it is pursuing much larger projects capable of turning out enough hydrogen to fuel fleets of trucks or buses. It has teamed up with Linde, the German industrial gas supplier, which holds a 17% stake in ITM. This year, it moved into the Sheffield factory — the size of two soccer fields, it is said to be the world’s largest electrolyser plant — with the aim of producing industrial-scale facilities. The guts of these gas plants are units with tightly stacked cells, like cafeteria trays, where the separation of hydrogen from water occurs. Many modules can be linked together to make very large facilities that will in turn be able to produce abundant clean hydrogen. Recently, Shell began operating one of ITM’s larger electrolysers at a refinery in Germany. The electricity will come from wind farms, and the hydrogen will be used to remove sulphur from fuels. Later, an expanded facility may produce hydrogen for an aviation fuel that burns with lower emissions. ITM is also working on a plant intended to supply as much as 45 tons of hydrogen a day to an industrial area in the Humber region of northeast England. Power would come from an offshore wind farm. Bigger machines coupled with cheaper renewable energy should improve the economics of hydrogen. Researchers at McKinsey, the consulting firm, expect green hydrogen to be inexpensive enough by 2030 to compete with other sources of energy. For now, however, clean hydrogen projects require government subsidies, and customers still need to be willing to pay more for the energy they produce. For hydrogen to become a major energy source, it will require other big changes, such as regulations that encourage the use of green hydrogen in industry and heating. It will also need better infrastructure and consumers willing to adopt new habits. To take one example, hydrogen has been slow to catch on as a fuel for cars despite advantages that include longer ranges than contemporary electric batteries and the ability to refuel in a few minutes. Shell has already built a network of hydrogen fuelling stations in Europe, but the German car companies have chosen to focus on battery-powered vehicles. There are only 1,200 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in Germany, and Shell concedes hydrogen is attracting few customers. At one Shell gasoline station in Frankfurt, the hydrogen pump was in the back, where customers clean their car interiors. A digital sign designed to display the price of hydrogen was placed near the entrance to the station, but it was dark. Industry projections “are overly optimistic about how easy this is going to be,” said Stephanie Searle, fuels program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington. “It’s going to take a lot of commitment to get there.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Alister Doyle
Environment Correspondent OSLO, May 22 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) -- Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said Tuesday. Scientists and environmentalists issued reports about threats to creatures and plants including right whales, Iberian lynxes, wild potatoes and peanuts on May 22, the International Day for Biological Diversity. "Biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. Global warming is adding to threats such as land clearance for farms or cities, pollution and rising human populations. "The global response to these challenges needs to move much more rapidly, and with more determination at all levels -- global, national and local," he said. Many experts reckon the world will fail to meet the goal set by world leaders at an Earth Summit in 2002 of a "significant reduction" by 2010 in the rate of species losses. "We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, perhaps after a meteorite struck. "Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct," he said. "The cause: human activities." DODO A "Red List" of endangered species, however, lists only 784 species driven to extinction since 1500 -- ranging from the dodo bird of Mauritius to the golden toad of Costa Rica. Craig Hilton-Taylor, manager of the list compiled by the World Conservation Union grouping 83 governments as well as scientists and environmental organizations, said the hugely varying figures might both be right, in their way. "The U.N. figures are based on loss of habitats, estimates of how many species lived there and so will have been lost," he told Reuters. "Ours are more empirical -- those species we knew were there but cannot find." U.N. climate experts say global warming, blamed mainly on human use of fossil fuels, will wreck habitats by drying out the Amazon rainforest, for instance, or by melting polar ice. The World Conservation Union also said that one in every six land mammals in Europe was under threat of extinction, including the Iberian lynx, Arctic fox and the Mediterranean monk seal. "The results of the report highlight the challenge we currently face to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010," European Commissioner Stavros Dimas said. Europe's goal is to halt biodiversity loss by 2010, tougher than the global target of slowing losses. Another report by a group of farm researchers said that global warming may drive many wild varieties of plants such as potatoes and peanuts to extinction by mid-century, wiping out traits that might help modern crops resist pests or disease. The WWF conservation group and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society said that whales, dolphins and porpoises were "facing increasing threats from climate change" because of factors such as rising sea temperatures. A survey in Britain said climate change might actually help some of the nation's rare wildlife and plants -- such as the greater horseshoe bat and the turtle dove -- to spread to new areas even as others faced threats to their survival. | 0 |
COPENHAGEN, Dec 18,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - World leaders tried to rescue a global climate agreement on Friday but the failure of leading greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States to come up with new proposals blocked chances of an ambitious deal. US President Barack Obama and other leaders are trying to reach consensus on carbon emissions cuts, financial aid to poor nations, temperature caps and international scrutiny of emissions curbs. There has been progress in some areas, but gaps remain over emissions targets and monitoring, delegates said. "We are ready to get this done today but there has to be movement on all sides, to recognise that it is better for us to act than talk," Obama told the conference. "These international discussions have essentially taken place now for almost two decades and we have very little to show for it other than an increase, an acceleration of the climate change phenomenon. The time for talk is over." At stake is an agreement for coordinated global action to avert climate change including more floods and droughts. Two weeks of talks in Copenhagen have battled suspicion between rich and poor countries over how to share out emissions cuts. Developing countries, among them some of the most vulnerable to climate change, say rich nations have a historic responsibility to take the lead. The environment minister of EU president Sweden, Andreas Carlgren, said the United States and China held the key to a deal. The United States had come late to the table with commitments to tackle climate change, he said. China's resistance to monitoring was a serious obstacle. "And the great victims of this is the big group of developing countries. The EU really wanted to reach out to the big group of developing countries. That was made impossible because of the great powers," Carlgren said. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen on Thursday with a promise that the United States would join efforts to mobilise $100 billion (61 billion pounds) a year to help poor nations cope with climate change, provided there was a deal. But there were no such new gestures from Obama. He stuck to the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. That works out at 3-4 percent versus 1990, compared with an EU target of 20 percent. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao also reiterated existing targets, although he said the world's top carbon emitter may exceed them. "We will honour our word with real action," Wen said. "Whatever outcome this conference may produce, we will be fully committed to achieving and even exceeding the target." Obama and Wen then met for nearly an hour in what a White House official described as a "step forward." "They had a constructive discussion that touched upon ... all of the key issues," the official told reporters. "They've now directed their negotiators to work on a bilateral basis as well as with other countries to see if an agreement can be reached." Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, urged China and the United States, which together account for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, to act. "The U.S. and China account for almost half the world's emissions. They simply must do their part. If they don't, we will not be able to meet the 2 degree target," he told the conference. 'NOT GREAT' Speaking after Obama's speech a British official said: "The prospects for a deal are not great. A number of key countries are holding out against the overall package and time is now running short." Negotiators failed in overnight talks to agree on carbon cuts. Obama and other leaders failed to achieve a breakthrough in talks on Friday morning. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Chinese resistance to monitoring of emissions was a sticking point. "The good news is that the talks are continuing, the bad news is they haven't reached a conclusion," he said. A draft text seen by Reuters called for a "goal" of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations cope with climate change. It also supported $30 billion for the least developed countries from 2010-2012, and said the world "ought to" limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius versus pre-industrial levels. Scientists say a 2 degrees limit is the minimum to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change including several metres sea level rise, extinctions and crop failures. The aim of the two weeks of talks in Copenhagen is to agree a climate deal which countries will convert into a full legally binding treaty next year, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol whose present round ends in 2012. The United States never ratified Kyoto, and the pact doesn't bind developing nations. Friday's draft text foresees "continuing negotiations" to agree one or more new legal treaties no later than end 2010. | 1 |
Australia's main opposition party vowed on Monday to repeal a carbon pricing scheme expected to become law next month as a key plank for polls due by 2013, threatening to prolong uncertainty in energy investments. "We will absolutely deliver on our mandate. So the first thing we'll do is we'll seek a mandate for repeal," Greg Hunt, opposition climate change minister, said in an interview. Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who lags the opposition Liberal Party in opinion polls, has staked her minority government's future on sweeping economic reform such as taxes on mining and carbon. But voters have been concerned over industry fears the plan to tax carbon emissions will lead to higher costs and job losses, prompting Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott to announce a "blood oath" to repeal the scheme should his party and partners win the next election. The government on Monday labelled the repeal pledge absurd, underscoring the divisive nature of plans to fight climate change by pricing carbon emissions in Australia, the United States and elsewhere. "Of all the blatantly absurd claims we have heard from Abbott in recent months, this 'blood oath' on carbon pricing is the least credible and the most hysterical," Climate Change Minister Greg Combet wrote in a commentary in The Australian newspaper on Monday. "The investment community knows that if Abbott's threat were ever realised it would increase sovereign risk. Consequently, Australia would suffer as an investment destination." The programme will impose a carbon tax on around 500 of the country's biggest polluters from July 2012, before moving to a carbon trade scheme in 2015. It also includes more than A$13 billion in support for green energy investments, compensation for households against higher prices and firms that export goods to countries without carbon costs. The Senate began discussing the package of bills on Monday. A vote is expected by late next week and the government, backed by the Greens, has a majority in the Senate. PROFOUND CONCERN Hunt said the opposition would fight on with their own scheme, despite failing to scuttle the government's programme. "I deal with Australian business each day and there is a huge body of deep profound concern about the impact of the tax, particularly since it is an electricity tax," Hunt said in a telephone interview from Canberra. "It's not difficult to repeal. All that happens is that people stop paying the tax." The opposition backs a scheme that rewards polluters for low-cost steps to cut emissions from business-as-usual levels but the government and some policy analysts say a national cost on carbon is needed to drive change in investment. Combet labelled the opposition policy a fantasy but the ongoing bickering and uncertainty could delay investment decisions needed to achieve a 5 percent cut in emissions by 2020 from 2000 levels. "Everyone is just keeping their options open while all this political uncertainty plays outs," said Tony Wood, leader of the energy programme at the Grattan Institute in Melbourne, an independent think tank. He said a stable outlook for carbon prices could trigger investment in high-efficiency gas power plants. "In the absence of that, other things happen, which are almost certainly either higher costs or more of a threat to security to supply and I think it most likely to be a threat to cost," he told Reuters. | 0 |
A new fund being developed by the World Bank would pay developing countries hundreds of millions of dollars for protecting and replanting tropical forests, which store huge amounts of carbon that causes climate change. The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), announced by the World Bank on Thursday, will be part of U.N. climate change negotiations in Bali in December to shape a global agreement for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. "A lot will depend on what the global agreement will be, but we think potentially this could yield a lot of money," Joelle Chassard, manager of the World Bank's carbon finance unit, told Reuters in an interview. Chassard said the new facility would provide financial incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which offers economic credits for replanting destroyed forests but excludes intact standing tropical forests, the World Bank facility could cover all tropical forests. The facility has already attracted interest from more than a dozen developing countries including Indonesia, Brazil and several in Africa's Congo River basin. The bank expects to first test the mechanism in three to five countries. Deforestation contributes 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and airplanes combined. Environmental groups say that protecting tropical forests from cutting and burning is the most direct and fastest way to mitigate some of the impact of climate change. By creating economic value for tropical forests, the facility can help developing countries such as Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guyana, Suriname and others generate new revenue for poverty alleviation while maintaining the natural benefits such as fresh water, food and medicines that the forests provide local populations. Chassard described the new facility as a research and development tool to determine practical responses to the problem of deforestation. She said the facility would test mechanisms that could encourage governments to reduce deforestation. Part of the testing involves providing participating countries with the means to prove they are reducing rates of deforestation. "It will involve a lot of work on the ground with countries to establish both a physical and institutional infrastructure to demonstrate that they actually avoid deforestation," she said. "Countries will have to demonstrate that physically they have reduced the rate of deforestation." Such a task will not be easy, Chassard acknowledged. It will require countries to determine the present state of their forests in order to measure future deforestation rates, she said. In addition, they have to establish the carbon content in forests where not all trees are equal storehouses, she added. "Countries will need to have the means to ensure they are managing the rate of deforestation throughout the country. You don't want to preserve forests in one part of the country when another region is being cut significantly," she added. The fund initially will have $300 million to finance emission reductions and help prepare countries with the necessary tools to monitor the forests. The global carbon market grew to an estimated $30 billion last year, three times more than in 2005. Carbon funds were created under the Kyoto Protocol as a way to reduce carbon emissions by encouraging governments and the private sector to offset their climate footprint by purchasing carbon credits. | 0 |
China is willing to make its voluntary carbon emissions target part of a binding UN resolution, a concession which may pressure developed countries to extend the Kyoto Protocol, a senior negotiator told Reuters. UN climate talks in Mexico's Cancun beach resort hinge on agreement to cement national emissions targets after 2012 when the current round of Kyoto carbon caps end. China's compromise would depend on the United States agreeing to binding emissions cuts and an extension of Kyoto, which binds the emissions of nearly 40 developed countries, except the United States which didn't ratify it. Developing nations want to continue the protocol while industrialized backers including Japan, Russia and Canada want a separate agreement regulating all nations. China has previously rejected making its domestic emissions goals binding, as they are for industrialized nations now. "We can create a resolution and that resolution can be binding on China," said Huang Huikang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's envoy for climate change talks. "Under the (UN Climate) Convention, we can even have a legally binding decision. We can discuss the specific form. We can make our efforts a part of international efforts." "Our view is that to address these concerns, there's no need to overturn the Kyoto Protocol and start all over again." The proposal was a "gamechanger," said Jennifer Morgan at the Washington-based World Resources Institute. "This is a very constructive and useful statement by China and points to a way forward for an agreement in Cancun." "The devil is in the details but this is a promising development," said Alden Meyer from the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists. At a briefing later, China's chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua said that China's targets could be brought under the Convention. "Developing countries can voluntarily use their own national resources to make their own voluntary emissions commitments, and these commitments should be under the Convention." "COMPROMISE" Huang said China would not shift from demanding that new emissions targets are contained within an extended Kyoto. Beijing has long insisted that its efforts were binding only domestically and could not be brought into any international deal. "In the past, China may have said that there'd be no linking and we will act voluntarily without attaching any conditions, but now after all this is an international effort and can be fully part of that. This is a kind of compromise," he said. "We're willing to compromise, we're willing to play a positive and constructive role, but on this issue (Kyoto) there's no room for compromise." Developing nations, including the world's top carbon emitter China, agreed at a summit in Copenhagen last year to take voluntary steps to curb the growth of their emissions. China's pledge was to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- the amount of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), emitted for each dollar of economic growth. It plans to reduce this by 40-45 percent by 2020 compared to 2005. Huang said that intensity target could be reflected in a resolution. | 0 |
The world has become far too hot for the aptly named Exit Glacier in Alaska. Like many low-altitude glaciers, it's steadily melting, shrinking two miles (3 kilometres) over the past 200 years as it tries to strike a new balance with rising temperatures. At the Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage, managers have learned to follow the Exit and other glaciers, moving signs and paths to accommodate the ephemeral rivers of blue and white ice as they retreat up deeply carved valleys. "Some of the stuff is changing fast enough that we now have signs on moving pedestals," said Fritz Klasner, natural resource specialist at Kenai Fjords. The vast amounts of water stored in glaciers play crucial roles in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural production, contributing to steady run-off for Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus rivers in Asia and elsewhere. But many are melting rapidly, with the pace picking up over the past decade, giving glaciers a central role in the debate over causes and impacts of climate change. That role has come even more sharply into focus after recent attacks on the U.N.'s climate panel, which included a wrong estimate for the pace of melting for Himalayan glaciers in a major 2007 report. The report said Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035, an apparent typographical error that stemmed from using literature not published in a scientific journal. Climate sceptics seized on the error and used it to question the panel's findings on climate change. The evidence for rapid glacial melting, though, is overwhelming. The problem is no one knows exactly what's occurring in the more remote Himalayas and parts of the Andes. Far better measurements are crucial to really understand the threat to millions of people downstream. "There is no serious information on the state of the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayan-Tibetan complex," Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, told a climate science media briefing in late February. The high altitude and remoteness of many glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes is the main reason. DATA IN A DEEP FREEZE To try to fill the gap, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said last month the government would establish a National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Dehra Dun in the north. In Europe and North America, glaciers are generally more accessible and there are more trained people to study them. Switzerland's Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps, has been retreating for about 150 years. But the glacier, which feeds the River Rhone, still stores an estimated 27 billion tonnes of ice, according to www.swissinfo.ch. That's about 12 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. In 2008, a total of 79 Swiss glaciers were in retreat, while 5 were advancing, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring network says. "There are a very small number of glaciers that are monitored," said veteran glaciologist Ian Allison, pointing to less than 100 globally for which there are regular "mass-balance" measurements that reflect how much a glacier grows or shrinks from one year to the next. Such measurements are the benchmark and several decades of data is regarded as the best way to build up an accurate picture of what's happening to a glacier. Glaciers originate on land and represent a sizeable accumulation of snow and ice over the years. They tend to carve their way through valleys as more and more ice accumulates until the point where more is lost through melting than is gained. THAT SHRINKING FEELING "We probably know less about the total volume of glaciers than we do about how much ice there is in the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic because a lot of it is in small mass areas and a lot of it is inaccessible," said Allison, leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's ice, ocean, atmosphere and climate programme. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland analyses mass balance data for just over 90 glaciers and says their average mass balance continues to decrease. Since 1980, cumulative thickness loss of the reference glacier group is about 12 metres of water equivalent, it says in its latest 2007/08 report. Estimates vary but glaciers and mountain caps could contribute about 70 cm (2.3 feet) to global sea levels, a 2009 report authored by Allison and other leading scientists says. The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" report from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales says there is widespread evidence of more rapid melting of glaciers and ice-caps since the mid-1990s. That means run-off from melting glaciers and ice-caps is raising sea levels by 1.2 millimetres a year, translating to up to 55 cm (1.8 feet) by 2100 if global warming accelerates. In Nepal, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development says "mass-balance" measurements would provide direct and immediate evidence of glacier volume increase or decrease. "But there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the region although there are promising signs that this is changing," the centre said in a recent notice. It said that based on studies, the majority of glaciers in the region are in a general condition of retreat. "Small glaciers below 5,000 metres (16,500 feet) above sea level will probably disappear by the end of the century, whereas larger glaciers well above this level will still exist but be smaller," it said. Glaciers have almost vanished from New Guinea island and in Africa and many on Greenland, the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are also melting quickly, dumping large amounts of ice into the sea. BAMBOO STICKS Part of the problem is that glaciers are fickle things to measure, said Allison, and requires legwork and lots of bamboo stakes. These are placed in holes top to bottom, a potentially dangerous job, although satellites and lasers fitted to aircraft are changing this. After a year or so, stakes placed up high will have had snow build up on them, so you can estimate how much snow fell there. Those down low will have lost mass due to melt and evaporation, so there would be more of the canes sticking out. "So you can measure how much height is lowered down below, how much it's gained up top. You'll need to know the density of the snow and ice as well," Allison said. But he said glaciers in one region can all apparently behave differently in response to the same climate signal. "Because the fluctuations that occur in the front depend on how long it takes to transfer the mass from the top of the glacier to the bottom." "You might have an area where all the small glaciers are all rapidly retreating but big glaciers still coming forward because they are still integrating changes that happened maybe 50 years ago," he added. For the millions that live downstream, it is the impacts that are of most concern and among them is the threat of sudden bursting of lakes created as glaciers retreat. About 14 of the estimated 3,200 glaciers in Nepal are at risk of bursting their dams. Ang Tshering Sherpa, from Khumjung village in the shadows of Mount Everest, said the Imja glacial lake could burst its dam anytime and wash away villages. "When I was a child I used to take our yaks and mountain goats for grazing on grassy flat land overlooking Everest," Sherpa said. "What was a grazing ground for yaks in 1960 has now turned into the Imja due to melting of snow," Sherpa, now a trekking and climbing entrepreneur, said in Kathmandu. A glacial lake broke its dam 25 years ago destroying trekking trails, bridges and a hydroelectric plant in the region. Neighbouring Bhutan also faces the threat of bursting dams. Just how much water melting glaciers contribute to major rivers such as the Ganges and Brahmaputra, though, remains unknown. Richard Armstrong, a senior scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, said it was nonsense to think that if glaciers melted there would be no water in the Ganges, a lifeline for millions in northern India. "Even if the glaciers disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't have a huge impact on the water supply. The rest of the river flow comes from rain and melting seasonal snow." He said the centre has put in a proposal to NASA to use satellite data to build a better picture of the area and altitude of glaciers in the Himalayas. "What we want to look at is what's the contribution of melting glacier ice to the downstream hydrology," Armstrong said. "It's really what's of primary importance to the socio-economic impacts of retreating glaciers." Allison and Armstrong and many other scientists have dismissed the row over the U.N. climate panel error as overblown but said it served as a useful reminder of the gaps in global glacier monitoring and the need for a far better picture. "It certainly brought attention to the problem," said Armstrong. | 0 |
Britain’s 95-year-old monarch “has reluctantly accepted medical advice to rest for the next few days,” the palace said in a statement, but it did not provide any details about her illness. “Her Majesty is in good spirits and is disappointed that she will no longer be able to visit Northern Ireland, where she had been due to undertake a series of engagements today and tomorrow,” the statement added. “The queen sends her warmest good wishes to the people of Northern Ireland, and looks forward to visiting in the future.” The queen, who has kept a busy schedule of public appearances in recent weeks, is scheduled to travel to Glasgow, Scotland, for a UN conference on climate change that begins in less than two weeks. In June, two months after the death of Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years, the queen attended a meeting of leaders of the Group of 7 nations in Cornwall, in southwestern England, and hosted President Joe Biden and the first lady, Dr Jill Biden, for tea at Windsor Castle. It was the first time she had met any world leaders since leaving Buckingham Palace for Windsor, her private home, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. © 2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
A US drive to build a more balanced global economy gained the qualified support of China on Wednesday in a sign that Group of 20 leaders may be ready to take joint action to prevent future economic crises. US President Barack Obama and other leaders of the G20 major developed and developing countries are due to meet in Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday, with restoring economic growth and rewriting the rules of finance high on the agenda. Central to the summit -- the third since the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank a year ago -- will be a US plan to correct the imbalances in the world economy by shrinking surpluses in big exporting countries like China and boosting savings in debt-laden nations that include the United States. Obama wants a framework of "mutual assessment" whereby the International Monetary Fund makes policy recommendations on rebalancing to the G20 every six months. Analysts believe Obama's plan will meet resistance from Beijing should it pose any risk to China's export-driven economic growth. So far, China is sounding engaged. "We approve of countries strengthening their macroeconomic policy coordination and together pushing forward the sustainable and balanced development of the world economy," China's Foreign Ministry said. China sounded much less sure about concrete coordinated policy action, saying advice from international financial bodies should be for reference only. A senior Obama administration official said China had warmed to the rebalancing proposal. "I think there has been a significant evolution in their thinking about this issue over the course of the (economic) crisis," he said. Rebalancing the world economy, by getting Chinese consumers to spend more for example, would take a monumental effort. China's private consumption equals little more than a third of its economy. In the United States and Britain, consumption accounted for nearly three-quarters of the economy in boom times. By contrast, Chinese and Indian households last year saved about 40 percent and 32 percent of their disposable incomes. The U.S. savings rate was just 3.2 percent. As a possible sweetener for backing the plan, the United States is offering developing countries a greater role at international bodies like the IMF. Investors will look for hints at the summit as to how quickly the United States and Europe will wind down huge emergency stimulus programs without risking a new recession. Diplomats were working into the night to narrow differences before leaders arrive on Thursday in Pittsburgh, a once grimy steel town chosen by Obama to host the summit in recognition of its growing transformation into a high-tech center. GERMAN COOLNESS Europe also has concerns about the US rebalancing plan. Germany, the world's biggest exporter of goods last year, signaled some coolness to the idea, with a government spokesman saying Berlin wanted to focus on financial market regulation. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso worried the G20 might hold too much sway over the global economy. Barroso told Reuters that "reinforcement should not be done at the cost of existing institutions that have specific, well- established mandates like the IMF, or even the World Bank. We cannot dilute the IMF's position." Also on the summit table are proposals to rework the rules of global finance so banks, and bankers, take fewer risks. The European Union unveiled a blueprint for a banking super-watchdog and a pan-European supervisor that it hopes can be replicated on the global stage. The EU said the watchdog could overrule states such as Britain, which is fighting to keep control over the centerpiece of its economy, the City of London financial center. "Our aim is to protect European taxpayers from a repeat of the dark days of autumn 2008, when governments had to pour billions of euros into the banks," Barroso said. The rules to reform the financial industry -- widely blamed for causing the economic slump -- need approval by the 27 EU national governments and the European Parliament. But the sense of urgency with which the global reform drive was launched a year ago is fizzling as economies recover. The Pittsburgh meetings are the first major summit hosted by Obama and he is under pressure to produce results on a slew of foreign policy problems. On Wednesday, he issued a blunt message to world leaders at his UN debut, saying other countries must shoulder a larger burden in tackling international crises. "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone," Obama said. "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility." Europe also wants a deal on executive pay, a message pushed on Wednesday by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "We clearly want a ceiling on the amount of bonuses, for example, as a percentage of their revenues, as a part of their capital, and that's what we're talking about at this moment," the French president said in a television interview. The senior US official said progress had been made on pay: "I think we're narrowing our differences." He doubted currency issues would feature prominently in G20 discussions, when asked about French concerns about the strength of the euro. TRADE, GLOBAL WARMING ALSO ON AGENDA Also up for discussion will be reforms to the IMF, trade policy and global warming before a crucial round of negotiations on climate change in December. G20 finance ministers earlier this month made little progress on how much industrial nations should contribute to help developing nations deal with global warming. The United States is pressing G20 partners to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, a proposal likely to be resisted by countries such as China and India. India's prime minister called for a strong warning against trade protectionism as he set out for Pittsburgh. Activists from environmental group Greenpeace rappelled off one of Pittsburgh's bridges with a banner displaying the message: "Danger. Climate Destruction Ahead. Reduce CO2 Emissions Now." Protest groups planned marches on the summit site. Concrete barriers were in place outside the PNC Financial Services Group building, suggested by anti-capitalist protesters as a target for rallies on Friday, along with other companies such as Starbucks and McDonald's. | 0 |
The moment of collective grief and anger swiftly gave way to a yearlong, nationwide deliberation on what it means to be Black in America. First came protests, growing every day, until they turned into the largest mass protest movement in U.S. history. Nearly 170 Confederate symbols were renamed or removed from public spaces. The Black Lives Matter slogan was claimed by a nation grappling with Floyd’s death. Over the next 11 months, calls for racial justice would touch seemingly every aspect of American life on a scale that historians say had not happened since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. On Tuesday, Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who knelt on Floyd, was convicted of two counts of murder as well as manslaughter. The verdict brought some solace to activists for racial justice who had been riveted to the courtroom drama for the past several weeks. But for many Black Americans, real change feels elusive, particularly given how relentlessly the killing of Black men by the police has continued on, most recently the shooting death of Daunte Wright just over a week ago. There are also signs of backlash: Legislation that would reduce voting access, protect the police and effectively criminalise public protests have sprung up in Republican-controlled state legislatures. Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, said to call what had transpired over the past year a racial reckoning was not right. “Reckoning suggests that we are truly struggling with how to re-imagine everything from criminal justice to food deserts to health disparities — we are not doing that,” he said. Tuesday’s guilty verdict, he said, “is addressing a symptom, but we have not yet dealt with the disease.” Moments before the verdict was announced, Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, called Floyd’s death “a Selma, Alabama, moment for America.” What happened in Selma in 1965 “with the world watching demonstrated the need for the passage of the 1965 Voting Right Act,” he said. “What we witnessed last year with the killing of George Floyd should be the catalyst for broad reform in policing in this nation.” The entire arc of the Floyd case — from his death and the protests through the trial and conviction of Chauvin — played out against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which further focused attention on the nation’s racial inequities: People of colour were among those hardest hit by the virus and by the economic dislocation that followed. And for many, Floyd’s death carried the weight of many racial episodes over the past decade, a list that includes the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. In the months after Floyd’s death, some change has been concrete. Scores of policing reform laws were introduced at the state level. Corporations pledged billions to racial equity causes, and the NFL apologised for its failure to support protests against police violence by its Black players. Even the backlash was different. Racist statements by dozens of public officials, from mayors to fire chiefs, related to Floyd’s death — perhaps tolerated before — cost them their jobs and sent others to anti-racism training. And, at least at first, American views on a range of questions related to racial inequality and policing shifted to a degree rarely seen in opinion polling. Americans, and white Americans in particular, became much more likely than in recent years to support the Black Lives Matter movement, to say that racial discrimination is a big problem and to agree that excessive police force disproportionately harms African Americans. Floyd’s death, most Americans agreed early last summer, was part of a broader pattern — not an isolated incident. A New York Times poll of registered voters in June showed that more than 1 in 10 had attended protests. And at the time, even Republican politicians in Washington were voicing support for police reform. But the shift proved fleeting for Republicans — both elected leaders and voters. As some protests turned destructive and as Donald Trump’s reelection campaign began using those scenes in political ads, polls showed white Republicans retreating in their views that discrimination is a problem. Increasingly in the campaign, voters were given a choice: They could stand for racial equity or with law-and-order. Republican officials once vocal about Floyd fell silent. “If you were on the Republican side, which is really the Trump side of this equation, then the message became, ‘No we can’t acknowledge that that was appalling because we will lose ground,’” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “‘Our worldview is it’s us against them. And those protesters are going to be part of the them.’” Floyd’s death did, however, drive some changes, at least for now, among non-Republican white Americans in their awareness of racial inequality and support for reforms. And it helped cement the movement of college-educated suburban voters, already dismayed by what they saw as Trump’s race-baiting, toward the Democratic Party. “The year 2020 is going to go down in our history books as a very significant, very catalytic time,” said David Bailey, whose Richmond, Virginia-based nonprofit, Arrabon, helps churches around the country do racial reconciliation work. “People’s attitudes have changed at some level. We don’t know fully all of what that means. But I am hopeful I am seeing something different.” But even among Democratic leaders, including local mayors and recently President Joe Biden, dismay over police violence has often been paired with warnings that protesters avoid violence too. That association — linking Black political anger and violence — is deeply rooted in America and has not been broken in the past year, said Davin Phoenix, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “Before Black people even get a chance to process their feelings of trauma and grief, they’re being told by people they elected to the White House — that they put into power — ‘don’t do this, don’t do that,’” Phoenix said. “I would love if more politicians, at least those that claim to be allied, turn to the police and say, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that.’” The protests that followed Floyd’s death became part of the increasingly acrimonious American conversation over politics. Most were peaceful, but there was looting and property damage in some cities, and those images circulated frequently on television and social media. Republicans cited the protests as an example of the left losing control. Blue Lives Matter flags hung from houses last fall. When support for Trump boiled over into violence at the US Capitol on Jan 6, conservatives expressed anger at what they said was a double standard for how the two movements had been treated. Biden took office in January vowing to make racial equity central to every element of his agenda — to how vaccines are distributed, where federal infrastructure is built, how climate policies are crafted. He quickly made changes any Democratic administration likely would have, restoring police consent decrees and fair housing rules. But, in a sign of the unique moment in which Biden was elected — and his debt to Black voters in elevating him — his administration has also made more novel moves, like declaring racism a serious threat to public health and singling out Black unemployment as a gauge of the economy’s health. What opinion polling has not captured well is whether white liberals will change the behaviours — like opting for segregated schools and neighbourhoods — that reinforce racial inequality. Even as the outcry over Floyd’s death has raised awareness of it, other trends tied to the pandemic have only exacerbated that inequality. That has been true not just as Black families and workers have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic, but as white students have fared better amid remote education and as white homeowners have gained wealth in a frenzied housing market. In a national sample of white Americans earlier this year, Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College, found that even the most racially sympathetic were more likely to endorse limited, private actions, like educating oneself about racism or listening to people of colour than, for example, choosing to live in a racially diverse community or bringing racial issues to the attention of elected officials and policymakers. Still, historians say it is hard to overstate the galvanising effect of Floyd’s death on public discourse, not just on policing but on how racism is embedded in the policies of public and private institutions. Some Black business leaders have spoken in unusually personal terms about their own experiences with racism, with some calling out the business world for doing far too little over the years — “Corporate America has failed Black America,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a board member at PepsiCo, Ralph Lauren and Square — and dozens of brands made commitments to diversify their workforces. Public outcries over racism in the United States erupted across the world, spurring protest in the streets of Berlin, London, Paris and Vancouver, British Columbia, and in capitals in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. White Americans unfamiliar with the concept of structural racism drove books on the topic to the top of bestseller lists. “My mother still says things like, ‘Why do we have to say ‘defund?’” said Erin Lunsford, 29, a musician in Richmond, Virginia, referring to the “Defund the police” movement that evolved after Floyd’s death. “But they understand the concept, and I think they’d vote for it if they could.” The protests against police violence over the last year were more racially diverse than those that followed other police shootings of Black men, women and children over the past decade, said Robin DG Kelley, a historian of protest movements at the University of California, Los Angeles. And unlike in the past, they propelled defunding the police — the most far-reaching demand to transform policing — to the mainstream. “We had more organising, more people in the streets, more people saying, ‘It’s not enough to fix the system, it needs to be taken down and replaced,’” Kelley said. “That has not happened in the United States since the 19th century.” Organizers worked to turn the energy of the protests into real political power by pushing massive voter registrations. By the fall, racial justice was a campaign issue too. Mostly Democratic candidates addressed racial disparities in their campaigns, including calling for police reform, the dismantling of cash bail systems and the creation of civilian review boards. “We will forever look back at this moment in American history. George Floyd’s death created a new energy around making changes, though it’s not clear how lasting they will be,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Colour for Change. “His death pushed racial justice to the forefront and brought a multiracial response like never before, but we must remember this is about making Chauvin accountable and the work of making systemic changes.” One clear policy outcome has been changes to policing. More than 30 states have passed new police oversight and reform laws since Floyd’s killing, giving states more authority and putting long-powerful police unions on the defensive. The changes include restricting the use of force, overhauling disciplinary systems, installing more civilian oversight and requiring transparency around misconduct cases. Still, systems of policing are complex and entrenched and it remains to be seen how much the legislation will change the way things work on the ground. “America is a deeply racist place, and it’s also progressively getting better — both are true,” said Bailey, the racial reconciliation worker in Richmond. “You are talking about a 350-year problem that’s only a little more than 50 years toward correction.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 2 |
President Xi Jinping and Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged on Wednesday to work together more closely on a range of issues, two days ahead of the G20 summit in Hamburg that US President Donald Trump is also due to attend. Trump's testy relationship with both China and Germany is pushing the two countries closer together, despite Berlin's concerns about human rights in China and frustrations over market access. "Chinese-German relations are now about to have a new start where we need new breakthroughs," Xi told a joint news conference with Merkel in Berlin. He said he hoped to make a "new blueprint, set our sights on new goals and plan new routes" for cooperation during his visit to Germany. "We will have difficult discussions, since bringing 20 states together with all their developments and ideas is not easy," Merkel said. Tension is likely both at the summit and outside it. Thousands of protesters are expected to demonstrate for a raft of causes, ranging from anti-globalisation to failure to tackle climate change. Already, German police have used water cannon to disperse around 500 anti-capitalist protesters. Much of the tension will revolve around Trump. In an article for German newspaper Handelsblatt Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe urged the G20 states to continue working together on climate protection, after Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change policy. And World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told Handelsblatt he agreed with Merkel on climate change, saying: "We cannot wait". In contrast to Trump's protectionist stance, Kim also stressed that free trade was key to alleviating poverty and boosting prosperity. Merkel has lashed out at Trump's administration for taking the view that globalisation is creating winners and losers. She told the newspaper Die Zeit that as G20 president, she had to work on reaching agreement rather than contributing "to a situation where a lack of communication prevails". To symbolise their close ties, Merkel and Xi opened a garden at the Berlin Zoo for Meng Meng and Jiao Qing, two giant pandas on loan from China who were seen sitting on wooden benches munching bamboo when a red curtain covering their enclosure was opened. Merkel described them as "two very nice diplomats". Merkel said she and Xi had also talked about wanting to quickly sign an investment treaty that would ultimately turn into a full-blown free-trade agreement. They discussed as well improving cooperation on cyber security and working more closely together on fighting international terrorism. In addition, they discussed bilateral cooperation in countries such as in Africa and Afghanistan, with Merkel highlighting an agreement to jointly build a hydroelectric power plant in Angola. But she added: "In my view we must intensively pursue the human rights dialogue, looking at how different parts of society can better express themselves. In this respect, cooperation in the field of civil society can be further strengthened." | 0 |
Australia's unique tree-dwelling koalas may become a victim of climate change, new research reported on Saturday shows. Australian scientists say that eucalyptus leaves, the staple diet of koalas and other animals, could become inedible because of climate change. "What we're seeing, essentially, is that the staple diet of these animals is being turned to leather," Australian National University science professor Bill Foley was quoted as saying in the Weekend Australian. "Life is set to become extremely difficult for these animals." Increased carbon dioxide reduced nitrogen and other nutrients in eucalyptus leaves and boosted tannins, a naturally occurring toxin, greenhouse experiments by James Cook University researcher Ivan Lawler found. This sharply reduced the levels of protein in the leaves, requiring koalas and other animals to eat more nutritionally-poor eucalyptus leaves to survive. "The food chain for these animals is very finely balanced, and a small change can have serious consequences," the newspaper quoted Dr Lawler as saying. Koalas and greater gliders, a large gliding possum, depend entirely on eucalyptus leaves for food. Some other marsupials, including brushtail and ringtail possums and many wallaby species, feed extensively on the leaves. Many insect species also feed exclusively on the leaves. | 0 |
With his hand on a 5-inch-thick Bible that has been in his family for 128 years, Biden recited the 35-word oath of office swearing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” in a ceremony administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, completing the process at 11:49 a.m., 11 minutes before the authority of the presidency formally changes hands. The ritual transfer of power came shortly after Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her hand on a Bible that once belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights icon and Supreme Court justice. Harris’ ascension made her the highest-ranking woman in US history and the first Black American and first person of South Asian descent to hold the nation’s second-highest office. In his Inaugural Address, Biden declared that “democracy has prevailed” after a test of the system by a defeated president, Donald Trump, who sought to overturn the results of an election and then encouraged a mob that stormed the Capitol two weeks ago to block the final count. But he called for Americans to put aside their deep and dark divisions to come together to confront the coronavirus pandemic, economic troubles and the scourge of racism. “We must end this uncivil war — red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” Biden said in the 21-minute address that blended soaring themes with folksy touches. “We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts, if we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment.”
US President Joe Biden speaks during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the US Capitol in Washington January 20, 2021. Patrick Semansky/Pool via REUTERS
Biden used the word “unity” repeatedly, saying that he knew it “can sound to some like a foolish fantasy” but insisting that Americans had emerged from previous moments of polarisation and can do so again. US President Joe Biden speaks during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the US Capitol in Washington January 20, 2021. Patrick Semansky/Pool via REUTERS “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature,” he said. “For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.” The ceremony on a chilly, breezy but sunny day with a brief smattering of snowflakes brought to a close the stormy and divisive four-year Trump presidency. In characteristic fashion, Trump once again defied tradition by leaving Washington hours before the swearing in of his successor rather than face the reality of his own election defeat, although Mike Pence, his vice president, did attend.
President Joe Biden was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., completing the process 11 minutes before the authority of the presidency formally changed hands. https://t.co/VowTHgFSoz pic.twitter.com/bp3okHMO4D— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
President Joe Biden was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., completing the process 11 minutes before the authority of the presidency formally changed hands. https://t.co/VowTHgFSoz pic.twitter.com/bp3okHMO4D Trump flew to Florida, where he plans to live at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But within days, the Senate will open the former president’s impeachment trial on the charge that he incited an insurrection by encouraging the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to stop the formal counting of the Electoral College votes ratifying his defeat. The sight of the nation’s newly installed president and vice president on the same West Front of the Capitol occupied just two weeks ago by the marauding pro-Trump crowd underscored how surreal the day was. Unlike most inaugurals suffused with joy and a sense of fresh beginning, the festivities on the nation’s 59th Inauguration Day served to illustrate America’s troubles.
A supporter of outgoing President Donald Trump walks by a Black Lives Matter and George Floyd mural during US President Joe Biden's inauguration, in Washington D.C., US January 20, 2021. Reuters
Amid fear of further violence, Washington has been transformed into an armed camp, with some 25,000 National Guard troops joining thousands of police officers and a wide swath of downtown blocked off. With the coronavirus pandemic still raging, Americans were told to stay away, leading to the eerie spectacle of a new president addressing a largely empty National Mall, filled not with people but with flags meant to represent the absent crowd. A supporter of outgoing President Donald Trump walks by a Black Lives Matter and George Floyd mural during US President Joe Biden's inauguration, in Washington D.C., US January 20, 2021. Reuters Many of the usual inaugural customs were scrapped because of the virus, including a lunch with congressional leaders in Statuary Hall, the boisterous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and the gala evening balls where the new president and his wife are typically expected to dance. Instead, Biden will review military units on the East Front of the Capitol and later proceed to the White House escorted by marching bands from all branches of the military as well as university drum lines from the University of Delaware and Howard University, the alma maters of the new president and vice president, respectively. After that, a virtual “Parade Across America” will feature performances livestreamed from 56 states and territories. To symbolise the theme of national unity that Biden sought to project, he will be joined by three former presidents — Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery before the parade. Instead of the formal dances, the new first and second couples will take part in a 90-minute televised evening program hosted by actor Tom Hanks. If the pomp and circumstance were constrained by the challenges of the day, Biden’s determination to get off to a fast start unravelling the Trump presidency was not. He planned to sign 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations in the late afternoon aimed at reversing many of the major elements of the last administration, a dramatic repudiation of his predecessor and a more expansive set of Inauguration Day actions than any in modern history.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris participate in a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Among other moves, he planned to issue a national mask mandate for federal workers and federal property, seek the extension of an eviction pause and student loan relief, rejoin the Paris climate accord, suspend construction of Trump’s border wall, lift the travel ban on certain predominantly Muslim countries, bolster the program allowing young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children to stay, bar discrimination by the federal government based on sexual orientation or gender identity and impose a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris participate in a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) Rarely if ever has a new president moved to reverse so much of his predecessor’s work on his first day in office, but Biden was intent on signalling a clean break from Trump. Some of the orders were more symbolic than substantive, and enduring change will still require legislation. To that end, Biden planned to unveil on Wednesday an immigration overhaul providing a path to citizenship for 11 million people living in the country illegally that will have to be approved by Congress in what is sure to be a contentious debate.
"Democracy has prevailed." Watch President Joe Biden's Inaugural Address. https://t.co/EPzTya587f pic.twitter.com/BotK2BwfBN— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
"Democracy has prevailed." Watch President Joe Biden's Inaugural Address. https://t.co/EPzTya587f pic.twitter.com/BotK2BwfBN Commanding attention in Congress will be a challenge, with Trump’s trial likely consuming the Senate for days or weeks. As it stands, the Senate appeared unlikely to confirm any of Biden’s Cabinet choices on Inauguration Day, another breach of custom. Trump had two of his Cabinet secretaries confirmed on the day he took office, while Obama and Bush each had seven. With Harris’ inauguration, the Senate, evenly divided with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, now flips to the Democrats thanks to her tiebreaking vote as the chamber’s president. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York becomes the Democratic majority leader and hopes to create two parallel tracks so it can consider both nominations and legislation even as it conducts the Trump trial. Biden hoped to use his Inaugural Address to strike a sharply different tone from his predecessor, who favored provocation over conciliation. Biden began working on it before Thanksgiving in a process run by his longtime adviser, Mike Donilon. He received help from Jon Meacham, the historian who is serving as an outside informal adviser, as well as from Vinay Reddy, his speechwriter, while relying on his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who has long been an important sounding board.
Flags representing people unable to attend the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden on the National Mall in Washington on Wednesday morning, Jan. 20, 2021. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)
But even as the new president called for unity, he wanted to use the speech to call out racism in the wake of the George Floyd killing and the siege of the Capitol by extremists. And while he did not want to cite Trump by name, he talked about the need for truth and the consequences of lies after four years in which the president made tens of thousands of false or misleading statements. Flags representing people unable to attend the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden on the National Mall in Washington on Wednesday morning, Jan. 20, 2021. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times) Beyond age, gender and race, Biden could hardly be more of a contrast to the president he succeeded. A longtime senator, former vice president and consummate Washington insider, Biden prides himself on his experience working across the aisle and hopes to forge a partnership with Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and other Republicans. Garrulous and loquacious, known for an incandescent smile, a sometimes overly familiar shoulder rub and a proclivity for gaffes, Biden practices the sort of feel-your-pain politics of empathy mastered by Clinton and the call-me-anytime politics of relationships exemplified by the first President George Bush. At 78, Biden is the oldest president in American history — older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan was on his last — and even allies quietly acknowledge that he is no longer at his prime, meaning he will be constantly watched by friends and foes alike for signs of decline. But he overcame the doubts and the obstacles to claim the prize of his lifetime nearly 34 years after kicking off the first of his three presidential campaigns. While he has strong centre-left beliefs at his core, he is not ideologically driven, willing and even eager to move with the political centre of gravity. The progressive wing of his party remains sceptical and he may find it daunting to hold together his electoral coalition, whose main point of agreement was shared antipathy for Trump. Biden arrives at the pinnacle of power with a tail wind of public support. Fifty-seven percent of Americans view him favourably, according to Gallup, a higher rating than Trump ever saw in office, and 68% approve of Biden’s handling of the transition. But the vast majority of the public believes the country is on the wrong track and, in a measure of the impact of Trump’s drumbeat of false allegations of election fraud, 32% told CNN pollsters that they did not believe Biden won the election legitimately. Biden and Harris bring new diversity to the top echelon of government. Biden is only the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy and Harris broke multiple gender and racial barriers in winning the vice presidency. The Cabinet that Biden assembled has record numbers of women and people of colour as well as the first gay person to lead one of the statutory Cabinet departments.
A member of the National Guard uses his smartphone to record the scene at the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)
Biden, who spent Tuesday night at Blair House, the presidential guest quarters across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, began his public day at 8:50 a.m. when he departed for a service at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle with his wife, Jill Biden, along with Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Joining them were congressional leaders of both parties, including McConnell. A member of the National Guard uses his smartphone to record the scene at the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times) That too was a change in tradition, as most new presidents before taking the oath worship at St. John’s Church, the Episcopal parish across Lafayette Square from the White House. But St. Matthew has its own presidential history as the site of Kennedy’s funeral. Among those attending the swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol were the three former presidents and their wives, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, as well as former Vice President Dan Quayle. In addition to Roberts and Sotomayor, four other members of the Supreme Court were present: Justice Elena Kagan and all three of Trump’s appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, received bipartisan applause when they arrived at the Capitol in appreciation for their show of respect for the transition of power despite Trump’s snub. It was Pence’s first visit since he was rushed out of the Senate chamber two weeks ago to escape the pro-Trump mob, some of whom chanted “Hang Mike Pence” because he refused to try to block the counting of the Electoral College votes as Trump had demanded. Performing at the ceremony were Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Garth Brooks. Set to join Hanks for the evening performance dubbed “Celebrating America” at 8:30 p.m. were stars including Kerry Washington, Bruce Springsteen, Eva Longoria, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Demi Lovato. Celebrity celebration will bracket demonstrations of getting down to business. Biden will sign his orders and memorandums in the Oval Office at 5:15 p.m. to be followed a half-hour later by a virtual swearing-in of his staff. At 7 p.m., Jen Psaki, the new White House press secretary, will hold her first daily briefing, reestablishing a regular opportunity for reporters to question the White House that had all but disappeared under Trump. The Bidens will then spend their first night in the White House, completing a journey that officially began in 1987 and unofficially much earlier. These were not the circumstances the new president might have imagined arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when he set out on this path, but history always has its surprises. ©2021 The New York Times Company | 2 |
In his first address to the nation as premier, Khan set out his vision for a “New Pakistan” and spoke at length about the need to reshape the country by introducing an Islamic welfare system, reducing poverty and slashing high debt levels. “We have formed a bad habit of living on loans and aid from other countries,” said Khan, speaking under a portrait of his hero and Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah “No country can prosper like this. A country must stand on its own feet.” Khan, 65, a former cricket legend, was sworn in as prime minister on Saturday after his party swept to power in last month’s election. A firebrand populist, Khan’s appeal has soared in recent years on the back of his anti-corruption drive, which has resonated with young voters and the expanding middle class in the mainly-Muslim nation of 208 million people. But Khan has inherited a host of problems at home and abroad, including a brewing currency crisis and fraying relations with Pakistan’s historic ally, the United States. Khan did not shed any light on policy plans to deal with the currency woes that analysts expect will force Pakistan to seek another International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. Instead, Khan focused on debt and said former central bank governor Ishrat Husain would lead a task-force to drive austerity. Criticizing what he called the colonial-era mindset and lavish lifestyles of Pakistan’s ruling elite, Khan announced he would live in a small three-bedroom house instead of the palatial prime minister’s residence. “A SIMPLE LIFE” Khan plans to have only two servants instead of 524 reserved for a sitting premier. He also announced plans to sell a fleet of bullet-proof vehicles to help Treasury shortfalls, a bold move in a country where Islamist militants still pose a threat. “I want to tell my people, I will live a simple life, I will save your money,” he said. Khan appealed to overseas Pakistanis to invest in the country and urged the wealthy to start paying taxes, a perennial problem in a nation famous for tax dodging and where less than 1 percent of the population files income tax. “It is your responsibility to pay taxes,” said Khan. “Think of this as a struggle, that you need to pay tax for the betterment of your country.” Khan said Pakistan was in grave danger from the effects of climate change and promised to reduce some of the world’s highest maternal death rates and infant mortality rates. He also spoke passionately about the need to help 22.8 million out-of-school Pakistani children in a nation where the literacy rate hovers above 40 percent. Khan, who has never held a government position, named his 21-person cabinet over the weekend, opting mostly for experienced politicians. Opponents criticized the choices, saying about half of the cabinet had served under the former military dictator Pervez Musharraf and were part of the old guard. On Sunday, Khan announced he will oversee the interior ministry. A former playboy of the London social scene who has since adopted a pious persona, Khan said he wants Pakistan to build a welfare state akin to some found in the West, which he said are modeled on the ideas first voiced by Prophet Mohammad in the holy city of Medina. “I will spend money on those who God has not given enough to,” he said. | 1 |
It’s a question Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup, the couple behind Ganni, the cult Danish brand, have asked themselves again and again. “There have been times where we’re like, ‘Maybe we should just quit,’” Ditte Reffstrup said, sitting with her husband in the lobby of the Greenwich Hotel in New York City last month. It was their first trip to the United States in three years. “But we all know that fashion is not going to go away. If we packed our stuff and closed everything down, there would just be someone taking over and maybe not trying to do better,” she added. The legions of Ganni girls, as their base is known, don’t want Ganni to call it quits, as indicated by the company’s report of 58% growth in sales last year. There are multiple stores in New York and California and plans to open 20 more this year, with at least 10 in North America — Austin, Texas, Dallas, Houston, Toronto and a pop-up in the Hamptons — and two in China. The brand specialises in bright dresses in happy prints, patchwork denim and tailoring infused with a designer sensibility at a relatively affordable price. The majority of the collection is in the $200 to $500 range. There’s a lot of talk of “community,” which means that those who wear Ganni telegraph their identity — their tastes, their interests, their socioeconomics — by wearing the brand. Fashion-loving Ganni girls are flush with the spirit of youth and like to have fun. The company also does a lot of collaborations, recently teaming up with New Balance, Levi’s, Juicy Couture and British designer Priya Ahluwalia, who works with deadstock and upcycled materials, was a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2020 and has done projects with Gucci. Yet the fact that Ganni has built responsibility — a word that has replaced “sustainability” as the preferred terminology for climate and social consciousness — into its business model may not be top of mind for most customers. “It’s a nice add-on, but I don’t think that’s why they are buying,” Ditte Reffstrup said. “Mostly, they love the clothes,” Nicolaj Reffstrup said. For their part, the designers believe a responsible approach to fashion is an obligation. Bigger companies have noticed Ganni’s success. L Catterton, the investment arm of LVMH and Groupe Arnault, acquired a 51% stake in Ganni in 2017. The Reffstrups took over the small cashmere brand, founded by Frans Truelsen, in 2009. At the time, Ditte Reffstrup was a buyer in Copenhagen and felt boxed in by the stereotypes of cold androgyny or flower-crown-wearing bohemian that defined Scandinavian style. Nicolaj Reffstrup was a former tech executive who had raised capital to introduce artificial intelligence software similar to Apple’s Siri assistant. Ditte Reffstrup, who loved to wear Isabel Marant and Adidas, wanted a new way of dressing. Nicolaj Reffstrup had his tech ideals. “If you have a product that’s 3% better than the other guy’s, it will end up dominating,” he said. Well-being and the common good are central to Denmark’s socialist society. It’s no coincidence that Copenhagen, home of the Global Fashion Summit, emerged as the nucleus of fashion’s climate awakening. “When I met Nicolaj 18 years ago, he was talking about global warming and climate change,” Ditte Reffstrup said. Ganni hired its first responsibility manager in 2013 and started mapping its carbon footprint in 2016. “I felt that that was way too late, but looking back now, it feels very progressive,” Nicolaj Reffstrup said. Sourcing responsible fabrics have always been part of Ganni’s mission. In its spring 2022 collection, at least 50% of the styles’ composition materials are made from certified organic, recycled or lower-impact fabrics. By next year, it plans to be rid of virgin leather; the company is testing out leather alternatives made from grape skin waste, mushroom-like materials and a cotton alternative made from bananas. Resale is being tested in British and Scandinavian markets, and Ganni’s re-cut collection, designed from deadstock and upcycled materials, is now among the bestselling products on its website. The company has committed to reducing its greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2027. If all this responsibility sounds incredibly ambitious, the Reffstrups say it is and it isn’t. “A lot of brands or businesses are hiding behind the fact that it sounds complex and esoteric and abstract,” Nicolaj Reffstrup said. “There are so many things you can do. There’s only one problem: It’s going to cost you money.” © 2022 The New York Times Company | 0 |
She was greeted by Myanmar Labour Minister Aye Myint and Bangladesh ambassador to Naypyidaw Anup Kumar Chakma at 10.15am local time Monday.Hasina received a red carpet reception at the airport and was taken to the Royal Naypyidaw Hotel in a motorcade. Myanmarese children wearing traditional clothes stood on both sides of the road and waved flags of the two nations as her motorcade passed.The Prime Minister and her entourage will stay in this hotel during her two-day tour.She would hold bilateral meetings with the Prime Ministers of India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan on the sidelines of the summit, the foreign ministry has said.The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is a regional grouping of seven members from South Asia - Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka - and South East Asia -Thailand and Myanmar.It began in June 1997 from Bangkok with the name BIST-EC –Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand Economic Cooperation – to promote economic cooperation.Later Myanmar joined and the group’s name was changed to BIMST-EC. In 2003 Nepal and Bhutan joined, but the nomenclature of the group remained unchanged.The grouping is currently focused on promoting 14 priority sectors of development and common concerns.
File Photo
Bangladesh is the lead country in the area of trade and investment, and climate change.On Monday, the Prime Minister will meet Myanmar President Thein Sein at the presidential palace. She will then visit the country’s parliament and hold a meeting with the Speaker Thura Shwe Mann.In the afternoon, Hasina is scheduled to have a 30-minute meeting with Nobel laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi.At night, the Prime Minister will attend the dinner hosted by the Myanmar President.On the second day of her visit, she will attend the inauguration of the BIMSTEC summit and attend a joint press briefing.The third summit is also going to be held two years behind the schedule. The last one was held in 2008 in New Delhi and the first in 2004 in Bangkok.Three agreements are expected to be signed in the summit.A memorandum of association (MoA) on establishing climate change centre in India, and a memorandum of understanding on setting up a Cultural Industries Observatory in Bhutan would be signed.A MoA would also be inked for setting up a permanent secretariat in Bangladesh which was endorsed more than two years back.Dhaka has already allotted a premise at Gulshan for the Secretariat.Rohingya issue has strained ties between Bangladesh and Myanmar. The bilateral trade volume between the two neighbours stands at a meagre $100 million.Bangladesh has sheltered thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees who had fled Myanmar during waves of sectarian violence.Officials say there are several hundred thousand unregistered Rohingyas in Bangladesh.The Prime Minister will return to Dhaka on Mar 4, officials said. File Photo | 1 |
Rio de Janeiro's successful bid to host the Olympics in 2016 culminates Brazil's remarkable rise over the past decade from a near basket case to an economic and diplomatic heavyweight. Just as the Beijing Olympics of 2008 marked China's revival as a world power, Rio 2016 may be seen as a stamp of approval on the South American giant's coming of age. After decades of underachievement, Latin America's largest country in recent years has finally made good on the immense promise of its abundant natural resources, vibrant democracy and vast consumer market of 190 million people. Rio's Olympics victory may be the most spectacular sign of Brazil's surging profile under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country's first working-class leader who nurtured an economic boom that has lifted millions of people out of poverty and made him one of the world's most popular leaders. Even the global economic crisis was unable to knock Brazil off its stride for long as the economy swiftly emerged from recession and returned to growth this year. "The financial crisis hit us last and we got out of it first," Lula told the International Olympic Committee meeting in Copenhagen this week ahead of Friday's decision. "We do not have that complex of being second-rate citizens any more." Brazil's seeming inability to live up to its promise was long summed up by the joke that "Brazil is the country of the future -- and always will be." That largely held true during the dark days of the 1965-1984 military dictatorship and the years of runaway inflation and economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s. The country was still struggling in 2002 when, as Lula was poised for the presidency, financial markets crumbled on fears Brazil would go the same way as crisis-hit Argentina. Since then, years of robust growth and Lula's earthy charm, which plays as well at world summits as in Rio slums, have lifted Brazil to economic and diplomatic respectability. By 2006, Brazil had paid off its International Monetary Fund loans early and this year pledged to lend the IMF $10 billion. It has won three coveted investment-grade ratings in the past 18 months and has increasingly taken its place as an equal among major diplomatic powers on issues ranging from world trade talks to climate-change negotiations. World-class companies like oil firm Petrobras and mining company Vale have flourished in recent years, helping spread Brazilian investments and influence throughout Latin America and beyond. NEW PLAYER ON GLOBAL STAGE In the wake of the financial crisis, Brazil has been at the forefront in pushing for more clout for developing nations in international decision-making, raising the profile of the G20 as well as the BRIC group of big emerging markets, made up of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Lula's appeal for South America's first Olympics followed a similar line -- that rich countries have enjoyed more than their fair share of the Games' spectacle and prestige. Brazil's revival has translated into a path out of poverty for about 20 million people, many of whom have benefited from Lula's generous welfare programs. A run of luck also has worked in Brazil's favor, from the commodities price boom that boosted its exports of raw materials such as iron ore and soybeans to one of the world's largest recent oil finds off Rio's coast in 2007. The discovery, which the government hopes will help lift Brazil to developed-nation status, prompted Lula and others to revive the old saying that "God is Brazilian." Yet Brazil still has plenty of challenges to tackle before it joins the elite club of developed nations. The education system suffers from chronic underinvestment and Brazil has no world-class universities, leaving business leaders worried about a lack of qualified labor. Its creaking infrastructure also threatens to cramp its growth. Despite its multiracial identity, racism remains a severe but widely ignored barrier to education and jobs for blacks and indigenous Indians. And for all its economic progress, Brazil remains one of the world's most unequal countries with widespread poverty, lawlessness and illiteracy in its northeast region and the vast Amazon rain forest area. | 2 |
Australia unveiled its most sweeping economic reform in decades on Sunday with a plan to tax carbon emissions from the nation's worst polluters, reviving hopes of stronger global climate action with the largest emissions trade scheme outside Europe. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said 500 companies including steel and aluminum manufacturers would pay a A$23 ($24.70) per tonne carbon tax from next year, rising by 2.5 percent a year, moving to a market-based trading scheme in 2015. "It's time to get on with this, we are going to get this done," said Gillard after a bruising battle to win political support for the scheme, which has polarized voters and business. A parliamentary vote on the scheme is expected before year-end. Australia is the developed world's worst per-capita greenhouse gas emitter because of its heavy reliance on cheap coal for power generation. Emissions are set to rise in the booming economy without a carbon cost, the government says. The stakes are high for Gillard's Labor party, which relies on the support of Greens and independents for a one-seat lower house majority. Her popularity has slumped to record lows over the scheme. With the details now finally released after months of waiting, Gillard will now try to convince voters opposed to the plan ahead of a parliamentary vote, trying to deflect a campaign against it by the hardest hit businesses. "It is absolutely critical that the government sells this very effectively," said Tony Wood, director of the energy program at the Grattan Institute, a policy think tank. Australian retail and clean-energy stocks were expected to be among the winners, and airlines and miners among the plan's losers, but analysts said financial markets overall were tipped to take the policy in their stride. The scheme aims to cut national emissions by 5 percent of 2000 levels by 2020, which would mean a cut of about 160 million tonnes. The package already has the broad support of the Greens and independents, although crossbenchers said they had yet to support extra measures to protect steelmakers and jobs in the vital coal industry. Parliament twice rejected previous attempts to price carbon in 2009 and any fresh rebuff in a vote expected around October would seriously threaten Gillard's government. The danger is that a vigorous campaign by the conservative opposition and business groups opposed to the tax, could erode public support and frighten political backers ahead of elections due by 2013. "This tax is going to go up and up and up as time goes by. I think this package is going to compound the trust problem that has dogged the prime minister. This package certainly sets up the next election to be a referendum on the carbon tax," said conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott. Abbott has seized upon voter fears of a new tax and higher costs from a scheme that aims to transform how the nation generates and uses energy across the economy. To neutralize opposition, Gillard said more than A$24 billion to be raised from pollution permit sales over the next three years would go to households through generous tax cuts worth more than A$15 billion. SCHEME MAY BE LINKED TO OTHERS Australia's scheme will cover 60 percent of carbon pollution apart from exempted agricultural and light vehicle emissions, with Treasury models showing it would boost the consumer price index by 0.7 percent in its first year, in 2012-13 (July-June). It could also aid global efforts to fight carbon pollution, which have largely stalled since U.S. President Barack Obama last year ruled out a federal climate bill his present term. Outside the EU, only New Zealand has a national carbon scheme. "Other countries will look at one of the most carbon polluting economies on the planet that has made one huge stride forward toward putting a price on carbon," said John Connor, chief executive of The Climate Institute. Australia said it hoped to link its scheme, which would cost A$4.4 billion to implement after household and industry compensation, to other international carbon markets and land abatement schemes when its emissions market was running. Europe's system, which covers the 27 EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, has forced power producers to pay for carbon emissions, driving cuts where power plants were forced to switch to cleaner natural gas or biomass. Gillard said her government would spend A$9.2 billion over the first three years of the scheme to ensure heavy polluting industries like steel and aluminum production were not killed off, and help close the oldest and dirtiest power stations. Assistance would come from free carbon permits covering 94.5 percent of carbon costs for companies in the most emissions-intensive and trade-exposed sectors, such as aluminum smelters and steel manufacturers, while moderate emitting exporters would get 66 percent of permits for free. Coal miners, including global giants Xstrata Ltd and the coal arms of BHP Billiton, would be eligible for a A$1.3 billion compensation package to help the most emissions intensive mines adjust to the tax, which would add an average A$1.80 per tonne to the cost of mining coal. "We support action on climate change but are disappointed at the government's lack of genuine consultation," said Xstrata Coal spokesman James Rickards in a statement. The Minerals Council of Australia criticized the scheme as a "dangerous experiment with the Australian economy." Australia, a major coal exporter, relies on coal for 80 percent of electricity generation, which in turn accounts for 37 percent of national emissions. The government would also set up loan guarantees for electricity generators through a new Energy Security Fund, to help the industry refinance loans of between A$9 billion and A$10 billion over the next five years. The government would fund the shut-down or partial closure of the dirtiest brown-coal generators in Victoria state and remove up to 2,000 megawatts of capacity by 2020, replacing them with cleaner gas, while short-term loans would help them re-finance debt and buy permits. Australia's booming liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector, which is due to decide on A$90 billion worth of new projects, would also be included in the scheme, despite calls for 100 percent protection. The sector will receive 50 percent assistance, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said. Steelmakers, including Australia's largest, BlueScope and OneSteel Ltd, will receive 94.5 percent of free permits and A$300 million in grants to help support jobs. "GREATEST CHALLENGE" The scheme also set-up a A$10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to fund new renewable and cleaner generation capacity, such as wind, solar, gas and wave power plants. "This is the moment where Australia turns its back on the fossil fuel age, and turns its face toward the greatest challenge of the 21st century, and that is addressing global warming," said Australian Greens deputy leader Christine Milne, whose party wields the balance of power in the Senate. To soothe voters, with polls showing 60 percent opposition to a carbon tax, the government has offered tax cuts to low and middle-income households, as well as increased state pension and welfare payments. Treasurer Wayne Swan said all taxpayers earning below A$80,000 a year would get tax cuts worth around A$300 a year, which analysts said could actually help boost the struggling retail sector, where spending has been sluggish. | 0 |
Britain, which is co-hosting the virtual summit ahead of climate negotiations in Glasgow next year, has faced accusations of hypocrisy from campaigners for continuing to finance climate-warming oil and natural gas projects abroad. "By taking ambitious and decisive action today, we will create the jobs of the future, drive the recovery from coronavirus and protect our beautiful planet for generations to come," Johnson said in a statement. More than 70 world leaders from countries including China, India, Canada and Japan are due to unveil more ambitious climate commitments at the summit. Britain would be the first major economy to commit to ending public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects. "This policy shift sets a new gold standard for what serious climate action looks like," said Louise Burrows, policy adviser with consultancy E3G. "Britain now has a mandate to mobilise other countries to follow suit." The UK Export Finance agency has offered guarantees worth billions of dollars to help British oil and gas companies expand in countries such as Brazil, Iraq, Argentina and Russia, Burrows said. Johnson had faced particular criticism from campaigners for UKEF's role in backing French major Total's planned $20 billion liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique. The government said the new policy would come into effect "as soon as possible" and would mean no further state support for oil, natural gas or coal projects overseas, including via development aid, export finance and trade promotion. There would be "very limited exceptions" for gas-fired power plants within "strict parameters" in line with the Paris deal, the statement said. | 0 |
Ambassador Tran Van Khoa made the statement when he called on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka on Thursday. After the meeting, the prime minister's Press Secretary Ihsanul Karim briefed reporters. The envoy expressed satisfaction over the extension of the memorandum of understanding on rice trade between Bangladesh and Vietnam and informed that the first consignment of rice from Vietnam is scheduled to reach Chittagong within 15 days. In this context, the prime minister said: "We want to preserve extra food to meet any eventuality." Pointing out Vietnam's socioeconomic development, the prime minister said the Southeast Asian nation achieved remarkable success after the war. "Vietnam is an example to us and we follow it," she said, adding: "We had to fight for independence like Vietnam." The prime minister put emphasis on strengthening connectivity and economic cooperation between Bangladesh and Southeast Asian nations. "Bangladesh and Vietnam could share their experiences in different fields like trade and culture," she said.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina meets with the new Vietnam Ambassador to Bangladesh Tran Van Khoa at her office in the parliament. Photo: PID
Describing poverty as the common problem for the developing countries, Hasina called for working together to eliminate the ‘curse’. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina meets with the new Vietnam Ambassador to Bangladesh Tran Van Khoa at her office in the parliament. Photo: PID "If we work together we can achieve success in this regard," she said. Appreciating the continuous efforts of Bangladesh in combating terrorism and the adverse impacts of climate change, the Vietnamese ambassador said, "We've many commonalities and we can learn from each other." Tran Van Khoa praised Bangladesh’s achievement of 7.24 percent GDP growth in the outgoing fiscal year. The ambassador conveyed the best wishes of Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to the Bangladesh premier. He also handed Hasina a book depicting the life of Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh which also carried ‘unforgettable memories’ of the War of Liberation. Khoa said both countries had recognised their respective Wars of Liberation and emphasised the exchange of visits by high-level delegations. The newly appointed envoy said that his task would be to further strengthen the bilateral relations between the two countries alongside continuing cooperation in various sectors. PM's Principal Secretary Dr Kamal Abdul Naser Chowdhury and Senior PMO Secretary Suraiya Begum were present on the occasion. Bangladesh is to import a quarter million tonnes of rice from Vietnam in order to refill after unseasonal downpours inundated Boro rice crops in April. Official estimates show the lost crops would have yielded about 600,000 tonnes of rice. Unofficial estimates put the number at 2.2 million tonnes of rice. The government has also slashed import duties and floated new tenders in efforts to bring down local prices. | 1 |
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, said he was getting straight back to work on the "planetary emergency" of climate change. But he refused to answer reporters' questions on whether the award would make him change his mind and enter the U.S. presidential campaign as a Democratic candidate before the November 2008 election. "We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing," Gore said, appearing in public nearly nine hours after the award was announced in Oslo. Gore shared the Nobel prize with the U.N. climate panel for their work helping galvanize international action against global warming. "It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," said Gore, standing with his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University faculty members who work with the U.N. climate panel. "This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now." "I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning," Gore added, leaving the 70 journalists hanging by not taking questions. That left unanswered a question on the minds of many in the United States after his Nobel win: would Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, jump in to join a crowded Democratic field of candidates ahead of the presidential election next year. Gore has made it known he is not interested, although some Democratic activists are campaigning for him to get into the race, and the Nobel award on Friday further fueled their hopes. Gore has campaigned on climate change since leaving office in 2001 after the bruising and disputed election result that put Bush in the White House. BUSINESS AS USUAL Gore, who appeared somber rather than elated over the award, said, "For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency." "It truly is a planetary emergency and we have to respond quickly," he said. Gore carried on with his plans despite the life-changing announcement, attending a scheduled meeting in Palo Alto in the heart of the Silicon Valley, where innovators are eager to jump start the clean technology industry. Stanford biology professor Chris Field said the prize "adds tremendous momentum" to work on conservation, efficiency, new technology and carbon capture and storage. "I think we are seeing there is no single solution ... but there are great opportunities in all four areas," Field said. Gore said in a statement earlier that he would donate all of his share of the Nobel prize winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection -- a nonprofit group Gore founded last year to raise public awareness of climate change. "This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis -- a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years," Gore said in his earlier written statement. | 0 |
The occasion, also featuring a bi-national fly-past of fighter jets symbolizing military cooperation in the Middle East and elsewhere, followed a day of talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, a first ladies' tour of Paris, and a dinner for the four at a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. "Great evening with President @EmmanuelMacron & Mrs. Macron. Went to Eiffel Tower for dinner. Relationship with France stronger than ever," Trump wrote in a tweet. The ceremonies bring to an end a visit Macron needs as a boost to France's standing on the world stage - one which could also help a US leader left short of international friends by his stance on free trade and climate change. Trump, also dogged at home by an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, appeared on Thursday to leave open the door for more talks on the Paris accord which he pulled the United States out of earlier this year. Macron arrived standing in a military jeep and surrounded by cavalry - repeating a scene from his inauguration two months ago and reinforcing the message that he heads an important military power. The scene also serves as a reminder of a fierce row that erupted this week between Macron and his armed forces chief, General Pierre de Villers, over proposed budget cuts for the defense ministry. At the parade, the two heads of state sat together in a stand applauding, pointing and touching each other on the arm as military aircraft flew overhead. Trump saluted as military personnel - some in World War One battledress - filed past with the Arc de Triomphe in the background. For France, this year's Bastille Day has an additional poignancy as the first anniversary of one of the deadliest Islamist militant attacks of the past few years. After the parade, his first as President, Macron will head for the Mediterranean city of Nice, where he will join a commemoration for the 86 people who died when a Tunisian man drove a truck at a crowd on the waterfront a year ago. | 1 |
The United Nations's annual World Day to Combat Desertification.will be observed Sunday as 'World Desertification Day'. The theme is ''desertification and climate change—one global challenge'' to focus the world's attention on dangers of desertification and its prevention. Of six billion humans, nearly a fifth are threatened directly or indirectly by desertification, experts warned ahead of the day. China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia, the Middle East, as well as a major part of Africa and swathes of Argentina, Brazil and Chile are in the front line of unacknowledged crisis. In Bangladesh, some non-governmental organisations are scheduled to observe the day, which has yet to get attention due to lack of proper government initiatives. Abu Sumon, director of Wetland and Costal Biodiversity Project under the Department of Environment, said this year global warming has been focused for its alarming impact. Terming desertification another side-effect of global warming, Sumon said, "Recently we have found some plants which grows in harsh environment naturally. We have taken it as an evidence of desertification in northern region of the country." He said Barindra land as the most hard soil in the country. "Another latest phenomenon directly related to the problem is decreasing underground water level." The United Nations has warned that global warming is helping to drive the onward march of parched land and, in years to come, millions of people could be driven from their homes. In April, the UN's top scientific authority on global warming warned that higher global temperatures could have brutal effects on rainfall patterns, runoff from snowmelt and river flows in scores of countries that already battle water stress. Between 80 and 200 million more people could be at risk of hunger by 2080, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated. Some 70 percent of Earth's 5.2 billion hectares (13 billion acres) of agricultural drylands "are already degraded and threatened by desertification," says the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which hosts Sunday's commemorative day. These vulnerable lands are progressively at risk of overgrazing, deforestation and other forms of exploitation, to which climate change is now a powerful addition. Desertification is increasing at an alarming rate, and although serious environmental and social consequences have been recognised for sometime, this issue has not received the level of national, regional and international attention that it deserves, the UN body said. | 1 |
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will not
hold hearings or vote on any nominee to replace long-serving conservative
Justice Antonin Scalia until after the next president takes office next
January. Scalia died on Feb 13. McConnell, a Republican nemesis of Obama during the
president's seven years in office, said he even would refuse the standard
courtesy of meeting with whomever Obama chooses. Under the US Constitution, the
Senate has the power to confirm or reject a president's Supreme Court
selection. With the US presidential election looming on Nov 8,
Republicans were aiming to allow the next president to fill Scalia's vacancy,
hoping a Republican will be elected. "This nomination will be determined by whoever wins the
presidency in the fall," McConnell said, adding that the overwhelming view
of Senate Republicans was that "this vacancy should not be filled by this
lame-duck president." Obama's nominee could tip the court to the left for the
first time in decades. Scalia's death left the court with four liberal and four
conservatives. Not since the contentious nominations by Republican
presidents of Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 has there been
such an intense fight over a Supreme Court vacancy - and Obama has yet to
announce his pick.
Mitch McConnell.
The White House and Senate Democrats condemned McConnell's
stance. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid called it "obstruction on
steroids," adding: "Gone are the days of levelheadedness and
compromise." Mitch McConnell. McConnell and other congressional Republicans have sought to
block numerous Obama initiatives, including his signature healthcare law, the
Iran nuclear deal, immigration policy and efforts to battle climate change. McConnell invoked a past statement by Obama's vice
president, Joe Biden, to help justify Supreme Court inaction. McConnell noted
that Biden, as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman in 1992, argued for
postponing action on Supreme Court nominees during an election year. Biden has since said he was speaking hypothetically because
there was no Supreme Court vacancy at the time. McConnell made his announcement after Chairman Chuck
Grassley and the other Republican members of the Judiciary Committee sent him a
letter saying the panel would not hold confirmation hearings. Grassley had
previously left open the possibility of convening hearings. 'Full and robust
debate' Alluding to the Nov 8 presidential election, Republican
senators told McConnell in the letter they wanted "to ensure the American
people are not deprived of the opportunity to engage in a full and robust
debate over the type of jurist they wish to decide some of the most critical
issues of our time." If the Senate does not consider a nominee until after a new
president takes office, it would be unlikely that the Supreme Court would have
its full complement of nine justices any sooner than early 2017. That would mean the court would be shorthanded for more than
a year, hampering its ability to decide cases. In cases that end in 4-4
rulings, lower-court decisions stand and no national precedent is set. Reid said the Republican strategy was driven by the
Republican party’s right wing. "It’s what Donald Trump and Ted Cruz want,”
Reid said, referring to two of the Republican presidential candidates. But Reid said Senate Democrats would not become "the
obstruct caucus" and block legislation such as appropriations bills in
retaliation for the Republican inaction.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said blocking a hearing
for Obama’s nominee would be unprecedented and would “subject the Supreme Court
to the kind of politics that they've been insulated from for more than two
centuries.” “Since 1875, a president's nominee has never been denied a
hearing unless that president later withdrew that nomination,” Earnest said. In remarks on the Senate floor, McConnell said,
"Presidents have a right to nominate, just as the Senate has its
constitutional right to provide or withhold consent. In this case, the Senate
will withhold it." Chuck Schumer, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership,
predicted that the Republican position would crumble as voters put pressure on
vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents seeking re-election to consider Obama's
nominee. "It’s not just a risky strategy, it's the wrong
strategy and it's going to fail," Schumer said of the Senate Republicans. But Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican Judiciary Committee
member, countered, "I’m not concerned about that (public pressure). We’re
standing for a principle that the next president ought to resolve this
problem." Democrats are badly outnumbered in the 100-member Senate,
falling far short of the 60 votes needed to advance controversial legislation
much less a Supreme Court nomination. Counting the two independents who caucus with them,
Democrats control 46 seats, with the remaining 54 held by Republicans. | 1 |
“MISSING,” they blared. “Your country is on fire.” The immediate reference was clear. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has been widely castigated for taking a vacation to Hawaii last month, and trying to keep it quiet, while Australia was in the early clutches of one of its most devastating fire seasons ever. But the message went well beyond one island getaway. Angry and frightened, Australians have been venting their frustration with Morrison over what they see as his nonchalant and ineffectual response to the disastrous blazes and his unwavering dismissal of the force that has made them so intense: climate change. With thousands fleeing eastern towns this weekend as fires swept from the hills to the coast, the inescapable realities of a warming world were colliding with the calculated politics of inaction. Morrison has minimized the connection between climate change and Australia’s extreme environmental conditions, even as the country just completed its hottest and driest year on record. He has derided calls to end coal mining as “reckless,” prioritising economic interests and loyalty to a powerful lobby. He has opposed taxing heat-trapping emissions or taking other significant steps to reduce them, although a majority of Australians say the government should take stronger action. And he has signalled no change in his policies even as 24 people have died, hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and more than 12 million acres have burned, an area larger than Denmark. On Sunday, weather conditions eased a bit, with light rain in some areas, but blazes were still burning in Victoria and New South Wales, and some towns were being evacuated. “The thing that strikes everyone about the present situation is the federal government’s disengagement and lethargy, to put it politely,” said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, a policy institute. “People are just bewildered,” he added. As the fire conditions worsened over the weekend, Morrison defended his government’s response and announced a military mobilisation — one that he quickly promoted in a video on social media, drawing widespread criticism. He also denied that his government had played down the links between global warming and changes in Australia’s weather patterns. “The government has always made this connection, and that has never been in dispute,” he said. The prime minister said he was undeterred by the anger directed at him. “There has been a lot of blame being thrown around,” he said. “Blame: It doesn’t help anybody at this time, and over-analysis of these things is not a productive exercise.” Morrison’s attempt at damage control came as Australians have been voicing a growing sense since November, when the fires arrived early and with far more force than usual, that the government is no longer protecting them in the way it once did. For much of the time since, the prime minister said that it was not the time to talk about climate change and that those who did were merely trying to score political points. But each surge of the flames into crowded suburbs and coastal getaways has presented a fresh test of Morrison’s defence of the status quo. He has sought to tamp down outrage mostly with photo opportunities and a populist appeal that echoes that of President Donald Trump. Morrison has portrayed those who support greater climate action as effete snobs trying to impose their ways on an unwilling quiet majority. The prime minister published a New Year’s message in newspapers across Australia that pushed back against international pressure for the country to do more. “Australians have never been fussed about trying to impress people overseas or respond to what others tell us we should think or what we should do,” Morrison said. “We have always made our own decisions in Australia.” Critics suggest that his antipathy toward action on climate change has contributed to what they consider a hands-off response to the fires, treating them as a tragedy rather than a turning point. For months, Morrison rebuffed calls for a more forceful intervention by the federal government — like a broad military deployment or the largely symbolic declaration of a national emergency — by noting that firefighting had long been the responsibility of individual states. He changed course Saturday, announcing a call-up of military reservists and new aircraft resources. The prime minister also initially resisted pressure to compensate the thousands of volunteer firefighters who were performing the overwhelming bulk of the work to protect communities. He later relented, approving payments for each of up to about $4,200, or 6,000 Australian dollars. The decision came a week after he cut his Hawaii trip short and returned to Australia following the deaths of two volunteer firefighters. Morrison, who began his professional life in tourism, has been mocked online with the hashtag #scottyfrommarketing. On New Year’s Day, as fire victims surveyed the destruction from the wildfires under orange skies, photos emerged of Morrison hosting the Australian cricket team in Sydney. “It reminds me of the George W Bush moment after Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” said Daniel Flitton of the Lowy Institute, a nonpartisan policy centre in Australia. “He seemed to be out of touch and misread the depths of public concern. That became a lodestone he had to carry for the rest of his term in office.” More recently, Morrison has tried to defend Australia’s environmental policies, portraying his government as taking firm action. He said repeatedly in a news conference Thursday — his first since before Christmas — that the government was on course to “meet and beat” its emission reduction targets. Climate scientists say those targets were low to begin with. And Australia’s emissions have been rising, while the leadership continues to fight for the right to emit even more. During UN climate talks in Madrid late last year, Australia came under heavy criticism for proposing to carry over credits from the two-decade-old Kyoto Protocol to help it meet its targets under the landmark Paris accord. “We are laggards,” said Joseph Camilleri, an emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he specializes in existential threats, including climate change. “What the Australian fires do best is show us that climate change is now with us here and truly,” he added, “and everyone, including Australia, needs to do an awful lot more than we are doing.” Australia’s conservative leaders often point out that the country accounts for only a tiny percentage of the world’s heat-trapping emissions. But some experts called the Madrid maneuver a potentially pernicious example from a country that continues to extract and export huge amounts of coal that ends up being burned in power plants around the world. “The government claims it has reduced emissions,” Hare said. “What they’re using are essentially accounting tricks to justify or explain their reasoning.” In his news conference Thursday, Morrison framed the government’s climate policy in a way he often has before, as something he will not let get in the way of continued prosperity. He also asked Australians to trust the government and to be patient. To many, that appeal did not match the gravity of the fear and anxiety coursing through the country. Jim McLennan, an adjunct professor specialising in bushfire preparedness at La Trobe University, said that many of the regions affected this season had no recent history of severe bushfires, making it difficult for communities to prepare. Australians are also emotionally unready, he added, for the extreme future that most likely awaits them. Some scientists say people may have to throng to cities to escape the threat of bushfires. “I can’t think of a time,” he said, “where we have had so many serious fires occurring in so many different parts of the country at roughly the same time. It is a kind of new world.” Morrison may be able to weather the political storms. The next election is two years away, and he is fresh off a surprise electoral victory in which he was buoyed by support in Queensland, a coal-mining centre. But across the country’s heavily populated eastern coast, the public’s patience is nearly exhausted and turning rapidly to fury. Hours after the news conference Thursday, Morrison visited a fire-ravaged community, Cobargo, to see the damage and pledge support to residents. They heckled him out of town. “You left the country to burn,” one person yelled before the prime minister walked away and set off in his car. In Mallacoota, another devastated community in southeastern Australia where hundreds of people were evacuated by naval ship to the town of Hastings, Michael Harkin, a vacationer from Sydney, said his experience during the fires had intensified his anger toward the government over its inaction on climate change. The Morrison government, he said, was exhibiting “incompetent governance avoiding the inevitable.” “They’re not keeping us safe at all,” he added. c.2020 The New York Times Company | 0 |
WASHINGTON, Thu Jul 31,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Al Gore, long mocked as an exaggerating bore, seems certain to land a lead role at the Democratic National Convention as an internationally recognized defender of the Earth. Eight years after losing one of the closest White House elections ever, Gore is being embraced by party faithful as the Nobel Peace Prize-winning crusader against global warming, and one of the most successful failed US presidential nominees in history. While the Democratic Party has yet to announce its lineup of convention speakers, the former vice president is on an anticipated short list of headliners at the four-day gathering in Denver that opens on August 25, party aides say. "He'll receive a tremendous reception," said Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, a convention delegate. "A lot of us still feel he was cheated" in the 2000 vote, Harkin said. "If he'd been president, we wouldn't have had these (Bush administration) messes the past eight years." "Also, we admire his tenacity in protecting the environment. Many share his vision on what needs to be done," Harkin said. In traveling the world to warn against the threat of climate change, Gore, 60, routinely draws packed crowds and has earned rock-star status among young supporters. On July 17 in Washington, more than 4,000 crammed into Constitution Hall to hear Gore. Tickets, all free, were snapped up within 24 hours after it was announced he would be there. "He's charismatic. He's a strong orator. He has a presence that draws you in," George Chipev, a 20-year-old Georgetown University student, said afterward in listing attributes that even Gore backers admit he lacked in his White House bid. Added Beth Camphouse, 21, a student at James Madison University: "Al Gore is one of the few public figures challenging my generation to do anything. He's inspirational." In addition to the Nobel Peace Prize that Gore won in 2007, the film version of his slide-show lecture and book on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award for best documentary feature that year. In 2006, he helped found the nonpartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. STILL HAS CRITICS After eight years as vice president and 16 years in Congress, Gore has rejected calls to run for office again. "I don't think I'm very good at some of the things that the modern political system rewards and requires, and I've found other ways to make a difference and to serve the public interests," Gore told his hometown newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, last year. "And I'm enjoying them." "You've got to give Al Gore credit," said Shirley Anne Warshaw of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. "He became a star by rising above politics with his passion for the environment. He's now international leader on an issue more and more people care about. There has been no more successful defeated presidential candidate." To be sure, Gore still has critics, particularly ones who accuse him of overstating the threat of climate change, despite mounting scientific evidence. Yet Gore has drawn support on both sides of the political aisle, including Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and John McCain, his Republican rival in the November election. The two embraced Gore's challenge to commit to producing all U.S. electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind power within 10 years in order to get away from carbon-based fuels. "If the vice president says it's do-able, I believe it's do-able," said McCain. Obama said, "It's a strategy that will create millions of new jobs ... and one that will leave our children a world that is cleaner and safer." Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican denounced it. "Unless there is some monumental breakthrough, it is not possible," Session said. "It cannot be the basis of a sound energy policy by any responsible official in America, it seems to me. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think so." During the 2000 White House race, Gore was ridiculed as stiff and wooden. By contrast, Republican foe George W. Bush, then the Texas governor, came across as far more personable, although not as knowledgeable. On Election Day, Gore won the popular vote. But Bush took the White House when a divided U.S. Supreme Court let stand his contested 537-vote margin of victory in Florida that allowed him to capture the decisive, state-based Electoral College. At the 2004 Democratic Convention, Gore joked about it. "You win some, you lose some and then there's that little- known third category," Gore said, drawing laughter, cheers and tears. The Pew Research Center released a poll in May that found 53 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Gore, slightly higher than Obama's 52 percent. Bush's approval rating is under 30 percent, battered by the unpopular Iraq war and the ailing US economy. | 0 |
In comments which underscore how angry the Kremlin still is over the incident, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, called the behaviour of the Turkish air force "absolute madness" and said Ankara's subsequent handling of the crisis had reminded him of the "theatre of the absurd". "Nobody has the right to traitorously shoot down a Russian plane from behind," Peskov told Russia's "News on Saturday" TV programme, calling Turkish evidence purporting to show the Russian SU-24 jet had violated Turkish air space "cartoons". In another sign of tensions after its shooting down of the Russian plane on Tuesday, which resulted in the death of one of the pilots, Turkey's foreign ministry advised people on Saturday to postpone all non-urgent travel to Russia. Peskov said the crisis had prompted Putin, whose ministers are preparing retaliatory economic measures against Turkey, to "mobilise" in the way an army does in tense times. "The president is mobilised, fully mobilised, mobilised to the extent that circumstances demand," said Peskov. "The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat." President Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey will not apologise for downing the jet, but he said on Saturday that the incident had saddened him and that the climate change summit in Paris next week could be a chance to repair relations with Moscow. "Confrontation will not bring anyone happiness. As much as Russia is important for Turkey, Turkey is important for Russia," Erdogan said in a televised speech in the western city of Baliksehir. Peskov said Putin was aware of a Turkish request for him to meet Erdogan on the sidelines of the Paris conference but gave no indication of whether such a meeting would take place. Peskov denied Turkish press reports which said Moscow and Ankara had struck a deal for their warplanes to stop flying along the Syrian-Turkish border, saying military ties between the two countries had been severed and a hot line meant to avoid misunderstandings among their pilots dismantled. Peskov, according to the TASS news agency, also spoke of how Erdogan's son had a "certain interest" in the oil industry. Putin has said oil from Syrian territory controlled by Islamic State militants is finding its way to Turkey. Erdogan has spoken of slander and asked anyone making such accusations to back up their words with evidence. Peskov said he "noted" that Turkey's newly-appointed energy minister, Berat Albayrak, was Erdogan's son-in-law. He added that there could be up to 200,000 Turkish citizens on Russian soil. "What's important is that everyone who is able to use their influence to guarantee at least some predictability in the pattern of Turkey's behaviour," Peskov said. "Russian planes should never be shot down." | 0 |
They have put in some 400,000 mangrove
trees since a restoration initiative started two decades ago, in what was
initially a bid to increase the catch of local fishermen. Now their work has taken on extra
significance as alarm grows over global warming and nature loss, with mangroves
regarded as a key weapon in the fight against climate change. But the surge of international concern
has yet to help this community win the global finance required to expand its
project, highlighting the barriers often faced by groups on the ground seeking
to tap into growing funding flows for nature protection. "Mangroves are important to us
fishermen - we need them because this is the breeding ground of fish,"
said Ilias, 70, recalling how dwindling mangrove forests affected his catch and
livelihood, which prompted him to launch the initiative. Mangroves make up less than 1% of
tropical forests worldwide but are crucial in the fight against climate change
because they are more effective than most other forests at absorbing and storing
planet-heating carbon. Mangrove ecosystems also protect coastal
communities from storm surges, reduce flooding and help shore up food security. Despite their benefits, they are in
decline, with the world's mangrove area decreasing by just over 1 million
hectares between 1990 and 2020, although the rate of loss has slowed in recent
years, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. CHALLENGES In Malaysia, mangroves are often cleared
to make way for infrastructure development and farming, while they are also
under threat from industrial pollution and over-harvesting - including in
northern Penang state, where Ilias lives. As fish catches dwindled for him and
other fishermen in the late 1990s, Ilias mobilised his peers to join him in
restoring the fast-vanishing mangrove forests through the Penang Inshore
Fishermen Welfare Association (PIFWA), which he leads. Their small initiative has won
recognition - to date about 30 local companies have sponsored their
tree-planting as part of corporate social responsibility projects. PIFWA charges the companies a small fee
of 8 ringgit ($2) per tree planted, while participating fishermen are
compensated with allowances for their time and labour. Now, Ilias is hoping to access larger
sums of global funding to plant more trees, but he is struggling with
challenges - from ways to access available money and scale up the project to
other issues like language barriers and a lack of technical expertise. He cited an example from an
international donor that wanted the group to innovate with new ideas and expand
the tree-planting project after an initial round of funding. "We did not have the capacity to
deliver other things, like turning this into an eco-tourism site or getting
more youths involved," he said, adding they did not receive further
support as a result. "We are nervous - we are fishermen
and we can't commit to something we're not confident in delivering," he
told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on a break from planting mangrove saplings. His frustration shows the practical
difficulties of channelling financing to rehabilitate nature where it is
needed, even as more countries and donors invest in so-called
"nature-based solutions", from reforestation to wetland expansion. NEW PLEDGES Over the last decade, less than 1% of
international climate finance has gone to indigenous and local communities to
manage forests that absorb planet-heating carbon emissions and are rich in
biodiversity, according to a recent report from green groups. Nature protection remains under-funded
worldwide, with the UN urging a four-fold increase in annual investment to $536
billion by 2050, to tackle the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity
and land degradation. Lately there has been a rise in pledges,
including at November's UN COP26 climate summit, where about $19 billion was
promised in public and private funding to protect and restore forests. This month, a new global fund was
launched by the Rights and Resources Initiative and Campaign for Nature to help
indigenous and local groups conserving forests and other ecosystems on the
ground access international finance more easily. Environmentalist Meena Raman said making
more small grants available to communities and partnering with local
non-profits to overcome language and knowledge barriers would channel money to
places that have missed out in the past. "Nature provides them with jobs,
and they protect the ecosystem... It's about sustainable livelihoods and
sustaining nature (at the same time)," said Raman, president of Friends of
the Earth Malaysia, a conservation group. BOOST FOR WOMEN Back in Sungai Acheh, a sleepy village
with wooden fishing boats along the river, women said they had also gained from
the mangrove-planting initiative. A group of them has learned from
mangrove-dwelling communities in Indonesia how to turn some of the tree species
into tea, juice and jam, selling the products for 6-8 ringgit each to boost
their household income. "It has not only helped my husband
to increase his fishing catch, but I have benefited from it too," said
Siti Hajar Abdul Aziz, 36, a mother of five. More coastal communities like hers would
gain from protecting nature and improving their livelihoods, if they get
financial support to champion similar initiatives, she added. Siti Hajar hopes one day to find ways to
expand sales of her mangrove products by selling them in places like
supermarkets. "Before this I was just sitting at
home - I have learned so much since I started doing this," she said. | 0 |
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which a year ago refused to cut supply to retain market share against higher-cost rivals, in its 2015 World Oil Outlook raised its global supply forecasts for tight oil, which includes shale, despite a collapse in prices. Demand for OPEC crude will reach 30.70 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2020, OPEC said, lower than 30.90 million bpd next year. The expected demand from OPEC in 2020 is about 1 million bpd less than it is currently producing. Oil has more than halved its price in 18 months and sank to an 11-year low of $36.04 a barrel this week. The drop has helped to boost oil's medium-term use, although OPEC said the demand stimulus of low crude prices will fade over time. "The impact of the recent oil price decline on demand is most visible in the short term," OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri wrote in the foreword to the report. "It then drops away over the medium term." OPEC is increasingly divided over the merits of the 2014 shift to a market-share strategy, which was led by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, and at a Dec 4 meeting failed to agree a production ceiling for the first time in decades. Nonetheless, the report shows that the medium-term outlook - from OPEC's point of view as the supplier of a third of the world's oil - has improved. In the 2014 edition, demand for OPEC crude was expected to fall to 29.0 million bpd by 2020. OPEC said it stopped modelling work on the report in mid-year, since when it has updated its forecast of 2016 non-OPEC supply to a decline. OPEC figures in the report do not include Indonesia, which rejoined in December. The main figures in the report showing OPEC medium-term market share under pressure are unchanged from those in a confidential OPEC report Reuters obtained in November. Resilient shale OPEC initially downplayed the impact of shale oil, although its annual outlook in 2012 acknowledged for the first time that the effect could be "significant". Years of high prices - supported by OPEC's former policy of cutting supply – helped make non-conventional oil such as shale viable. In a change of tack from previous reports, OPEC now says many projects work at lower prices too. "The most prolific zones within some plays can break even at levels below the prices observed in 2015, and are thus likely to see continued production growth," the report said. Global tight oil output will reach 5.19 million bpd by 2020, peak at 5.61 million bpd in 2030 and ease to 5.18 million bpd in 2040, the report said, as Argentina and Russia join North America as producers. Last year's estimates were 4.50 million bpd by 2020 and 4 million bpd by 2040. Under another, upside supply scenario, tight oil production could spread to Mexico and China and bring supply to almost 8 million bpd by 2040, OPEC said. As recently as 2013, OPEC assumed tight oil would have no impact outside North America. The report supports the view that OPEC's market share will rise in the long run as rival supply growth fades. OPEC crude demand is expected to reach 40.70 million bpd in 2040, amounting to 37 percent of world supply, up from 33 percent in 2015. OPEC nudged up its medium-term world oil demand forecast, expecting oil use to reach 97.40 million bpd by 2020, 500,000 bpd more than in last year's report. But factors including slower economic growth, the limited share of the crude cost in pump prices and the falling value of some domestic currencies against the dollar will limit the demand response to lower crude prices, OPEC said. By 2040, OPEC expects demand to reach 109.80 million bpd, 1.3 million bpd lower than a year ago, reduced by energy efficiency and climate-change mitigation efforts. Only a gentle recovery in oil prices is seen. OPEC's basket of crude oils is assumed in the report at $55 in 2015 and to rise by $5 a year to reach $80 by 2020. | 2 |
Finance leaders of the world's top industrialised nations put on a show of solidarity on Saturday in the face of an economic slowdown and conceded that things could get even worse because of the crumbling US housing market. In a communique released after meetings in Tokyo, the Group of Seven said prospects for economic growth had worsened since they last met in October, although fundamentals remained solid and the US economy was likely to escape a recession. "There was a climate of much greater pessimism and worry than in October," said Italian Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. Finance ministers and central bankers from Japan, the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Italy and France said that growth in their countries was expected to slow by "varying degrees" in the short term. They pointed to serious risks from the US property market slump and subsequent tightening of credit conditions, which has slowed the flow of money to the consumers and companies that drive the world's economy. Debt-laden banks have curbed lending as their losses, tied primarily to souring U.S. home loans, rise above $100 billion. That has raised the spectre of a vicious cycle as consumer spending slows, prompting businesses to retrench and cut jobs. Glenn Maguire, Asia Pacific chief economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong, noted that the G7 offered little in the way of detail on coordination action to support the economy. "This economic shock and the economic downturn is largely driven by domestic problems in the US and it really can't be remedied by a globally coordinated action plan," he said. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said global markets may face a prolonged period of unrest. "The current financial turmoil is serious and persisting," Paulson said in prepared remarks issued after the meeting. "As the financial markets recover from this period of stress, as of course they will, we should expect continued volatility as risk is repriced." ALL TOGETHER NOW The G7 leaders urged banks to fully disclose their losses and shore up their balance sheets to help restore the normal functioning of markets. German finance minister Peer Steinbrueck said writeoffs could reach $400 billion. "Going forward, we will continue to watch developments closely and continue to take appropriate actions, individually and collectively, in order to secure stability and growth in our economies," the communique said. Pledges to work together to restore the financial system to health contrasted with divisions over fiscal and monetary policy ahead of the G7 gathering. Before Saturday's meetings, many in Europe had privately expressed alarm over the U.S. Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate-cutting stance after it slashed 1.25 percentage points off of the benchmark federal funds rate in less than 10 days in January. The monetary easing, along with a $152 billion U.S. fiscal stimulus package, threatened to open a rift between the United States and its allies over how to prevent the credit crisis from pushing the world into a downturn. But tensions eased after the European Central Bank stressed the risk to euro zone economic growth, alongside its long-held worry about inflation, signalling that the ECB may soon join the Fed, Bank of England and Bank of Canada in cutting rates. French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said she welcomed that change by the ECB, but wanted more: "It's like the overture of a symphony: you are always waiting for what comes next." European leaders were particularly concerned about the strength of the euro which hit a record high against the dollar after the Fed began its cutting rates in September. However, the currency retreated after the ECB's change of heart. CURRENCY ON BACK BURNER With more pressing economic matters to discuss, foreign exchange issues were relegated to the back burner at Saturday's meeting. The communique contained similar wording as in the October statement, with a focus on encouraging China to allow its yuan currency to appreciate more quickly. Many G7 leaders think the weak yuan gives China an unfair trade advantage, and have called on Beijing to step up domestic investment to help rebalance the world economy. The statement also urged oil exporters to step up production after oil prices briefly topped $100 per barrel last month. It has since retreated, though it spiked up 4 percent to $91.77 on Friday -- its biggest gain in nearly two months -- amid supply snags and a looming U.S. cold spell. | 1 |
With the U.S. Capitol encircled by thousands of armed troops two weeks after a mob laid siege to it, Biden took the oath of office administered by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and became the oldest U.S. president in history at age 78. "To overcome these challenges to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity," he said in his inauguration speech. "We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this - if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts." The scaled-back inauguration ceremony was stripped of much of its usual celebratory spirit. The National Mall, typically packed with throngs of supporters, instead was filled with U.S. flags in a reminder of the pandemic Biden will confront as chief executive. Speaking on the steps of the Capitol, where supporters of then-President Donald Trump clashed with police in a chaotic assault that left five dead and stunned the world on Jan.6, Biden cast his ascension as proof that the attackers had failed to disrupt the underpinnings of American democracy. The violence prompted the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Trump last week for an unprecedented second time, accusing him of incitement after he exhorted his backers to march on the building amid false claims of election fraud. "Here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work on our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground," Biden said. "It did not happen; it will never happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever."
Jennifer Lopez sang “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land” during the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden. https://t.co/EXPUFixUPD pic.twitter.com/9GAJnvSZgw— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
Jennifer Lopez sang “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land” during the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden. https://t.co/EXPUFixUPD pic.twitter.com/9GAJnvSZgw Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, became the first Black person, first woman and first Asian American to serve as vice president after she was sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Latina member. The norm-defying Trump flouted one last convention on his way out of the White House when he refused to meet with Biden or attend his successor's inauguration, breaking with a political tradition seen as affirming the peaceful transfer of power. Trump, who never conceded the Nov. 3 election, did not mention Biden by name in his final remarks as president on Wednesday morning, when he touted his administration's record and promised to be back "in some form." He then boarded Air Force One for the last time and flew to his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida. Top Republicans, including Vice President Mike Pence and the party's congressional leaders, attended Biden's inauguration, along with former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Biden takes office at a time of deep national unease, with the country facing what his advisers have described as four compounding crises: the pandemic, the economic downturn, climate change and racial inequality. He has promised immediate action, including a raft of executive orders on his first day in office. After a bitter campaign marked by Trump's baseless allegations of election fraud, Biden struck a conciliatory tone rarely heard from his predecessor, asking Americans who did not vote for him to give him a chance.
Breaking News: Kamala Harris became the first woman — and the first woman of color — sworn in as vice president of the United States. https://t.co/tO2Vbn92S7 pic.twitter.com/qjvP31HMSr— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
Breaking News: Kamala Harris became the first woman — and the first woman of color — sworn in as vice president of the United States. https://t.co/tO2Vbn92S7 pic.twitter.com/qjvP31HMSr "I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans," he said. "And I promise you I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did." Although his remarks were directed primarily at problems at home, Biden delivered what he called a message to those beyond America's borders, promising to repair alliances frayed by Trump, lead and be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security. He made no specific mention of high-stakes disputes with North Korea, Iran and China. 'SOUL OF AMERICA' Biden's inauguration is the zenith of a five-decade career in public service that included more than three decades in the U.S. Senate and two terms as vice president under Obama. But he faces calamities that would challenge even the most experienced politician. The pandemic in the United States reached a pair of grim milestones on Trump's final full day in office on Tuesday, reaching 400,000 U.S. deaths and 24 million infections - the highest of any country. Millions of Americans are out of work because of pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions. Biden has vowed to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis. His top priority is a $1.9 trillion plan that would enhance jobless benefits and provide direct cash payments to households.
At President Biden’s inauguration, Lady Gaga performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” https://t.co/4gGKCue25u pic.twitter.com/rwUUtb7ICa— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
At President Biden’s inauguration, Lady Gaga performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” https://t.co/4gGKCue25u pic.twitter.com/rwUUtb7ICa But it will require approval from a deeply divided Congress, where Democrats hold slim advantages in both the House and Senate. Harris was scheduled to swear in three new Democratic senators late on Wednesday, creating a 50-50 split in the chamber with herself as the tie-breaking vote. Biden will waste little time trying to turn the page on the Trump era, advisers said, signing 15 executive actions on Wednesday on issues ranging from the pandemic to the economy to climate change. The orders will include mandating masks on federal property, rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending Trump's travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. Although Biden has laid out a packed agenda for his first 100 days, including delivering 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations, the Senate could be consumed by Trump's upcoming impeachment trial, which will move ahead even though he has left office. The trial could serve as an early test of Biden's promise to foster a renewed sense of bipartisanship in Washington. Trump issued more than 140 pardons and commutations in his final hours in office, including a pardon for his former political adviser, Steve Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he swindled Trump supporters as part of an effort to raise private funds for a Mexico border wall. But Trump did not issue preemptive pardons for himself or members of his family, after speculation that he might do so. | 0 |
What remains to be seen is whether the film fulfils a primary aim of its director, Adam McKay, who wants it to be, in his words, “a kick in the pants” that prompts urgent action on climate change. “I’m under no illusions that one film will be the cure to the climate crisis,” McKay, whose previous films include “The Big Short” and “Vice,” wrote in an email to the Times. “But if it inspires conversation, critical thinking, and makes people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders, then I’d say we accomplished our goal.” In “Don’t Look Up,” a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth stands in as a metaphor for the climate crisis, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence playing distraught scientists scrambling to get politicians to act, and the public to believe them. After the film premiered in December, climate scientists took to social media and penned op-eds, saying they felt seen at last. Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted that it seemed like a documentary. Several admirers likened the film to “A Modest Proposal,” the 18th-century satirical essay by Jonathan Swift. Naysayers, meanwhile, said the comet allegory was lost on those who took it literally and questioned why McKay hadn’t been more straightforward about global warming. Writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody said if scientists didn’t like what film critics had to say about science, “the scientists should stop meddling with art.” Either way, at a time when leaders are failing to take the necessary measures to tackle the planet emergency, and the volume and ferocity of so-called “natural” disasters reach ever graver peaks, there is little question that the movie has struck a pretty big nerve. According to Netflix, which self-reports its own figures and was the studio behind the film and its distributor, the film is one of its most popular films ever, amassing an unprecedented 152 million hours viewed in one week. “The goal of the movie was to raise awareness about the terrifying urgency of the climate crisis, and in that, it succeeded spectacularly,” said Genevieve Guenther, the founder and director of End Climate Silence, an organisation that promotes media coverage of climate change. “You can’t have movies that inspire people into action without a cultural acceptance of climate change,” she added, “which is what this movie will help produce.” Hollywood has an uneven history depicting climate change in feature films, if it addresses it at all. Some films made their villains eco-terrorists — see Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Godzilla: King of Monsters.” Or they present ecological collapse as inevitable — as in “Interstellar,” “Snowpiercer” and the Mad Max films. Rare is the film that imagines a world where humans successfully work together to allay the worst of the crisis, save biodiversity and wean themselves off fossil fuels. While “Don’t Look Up” doesn’t provide a happy ending either, McKay has repeatedly stressed that he wants people to work toward that end. Netflix and climate scientists have partnered with an online platform that lists ways people can take action. One of the film’s stars, Jonah Hill, appeared on The Tonight Show and encouraged viewers to ask their congressional representatives to pass HR 794, the Climate Emergency Act. And DiCaprio urged his 19.4 million Twitter followers to get involved. “We have the science,” McKay said on “The Daily Poster,” a website run by David Sirota, a journalist who is also a writer on the film. “We can do this. We have renewable energy. We could invest in carbon removal. There are a lot of things we can do if we have the action, will and awareness.” Hollywood has played a role in defining big issues before. Stanley Kubrick’s satirical “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”— itself reviled at the time by some critics — and “The China Syndrome” shaped attitudes about nuclear power and war. After watching the 1983 television film “The Day After,” which imagined the aftermath of a Cold War atomic battle, President Ronald Reagan wrote in his journal that the film left him “greatly depressed” and hardened his resolve “to see there is never a nuclear war.” In 2012, while discussing his support of marriage equality, then-Vice President Joe Biden credited the television series “Will & Grace” for educating the public. Yet Michael Svoboda, a writing professor at George Washington University and contributor to the web magazine Yale Climate Connections, said while McKay is clearly impassioned about climate change, he was doubtful whether the film delivered a useful message that would produce results. “Is he asking people to become more politically involved? Is he trying to reach across the aisle? That doesn’t seem to be the case at all,” Svoboda said. “Does it create a kind of fatalism, even nihilism, by virtue of its people accepting the inevitability after a good but not particularly well-coordinated fight?” While “Don’t Look Up” took shots at both liberal elites and members of the right, Svoboda noted that by the film’s end it was clearly lampooning Trumpian populism. “It’s unlikely that’s going to reach anyone who’s sceptical of climate change,” he said. All that said, the impassioned responses to the film suggests a hunger for more climate content, said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the think tank Urban Oceans Lab. That could put less pressure on one piece of work to be all things to all people. “I would argue not whether one film is perfect, but that clearly we need a lot more of this stuff,” Johnson said. “Some people are inspired by the dire science projections,” she continued. “Some are inspired by solutions. And some are inspired by focusing on a film that points to the absurdity of the fact that we’re ruining the one planet that it makes any sense for humans to live on.” Johnson added that she hoped that the popularity of “Don’t Look Up” would prompt Hollywood to make more climate focused films. “If you don’t like it, make a better one,” she said. “I’ll watch.” © 2022 The New York Times Company | 0 |
At the end of three weeks of mid-year climate talks, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Patricia Espinosa called on countries to overcome their differences and work together in the remaining months before the key COP26 negotiations in Glasgow. She said governments had "engaged effectively", despite the challenges of virtual working, and made advances in several areas, including common time-frames for emissions-cutting goals and transparency in how countries report their climate action. There are still divisions on the rules governing how global carbon markets will work, the UN climate body noted - and higher-level political guidance will be needed, Espinosa said. Efforts would continue to "ensure maximum progress before COP26", she added. "So much is at stake," said the top UN official. "I urge us to rise to the challenge of our time, to get the job done, to overcome our differences, to fulfill our promises." The June talks were the first official UN climate negotiations to be held since the end of 2019, due to delays caused by the pandemic. The COP26 summit is tasked with finalising rules for the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change so that the pact can be fully implemented, UN officials have said. "We must achieve success at COP26," Espinosa told journalists on Thursday. "It is a credibility test for our fight against the climate emergency - it is central to a green recovery and it is an affirmation of multilateralism when the world needs it most." STUMBLING BLOCKS Many nations have yet to submit stronger climate action plans that were due last year under the Paris accord but thrown off course due to the pandemic. Emissions reductions promised by governments are still a long way from what is needed to meet the Paris goals of limiting global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius and ideally to 1.5C above preindustrial times, the United Nations has said. But a failure by wealthy nations to deliver on longstanding climate finance pledges to help poorer, vulnerable countries shift to renewable energy and adapt to climate change impacts are casting a shadow over the UN-led process. The pandemic has also thrown another spanner in the works with many developing nations struggling to secure access to vaccines, after supplies were mostly bought up by rich countries. That means many delegates do not know whether they will be able to attend the COP26 summit in person. As the conference host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this month his government was exploring with the United Nations how to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to accredited delegations who would be unable to get them otherwise. "The road to COP 26 remains nebulous - COVID-19 remains a serious concern for many of us," Diann Black-Layne of Antigua and Barbuda, representing the 44-member Alliance of Small Island States, told the closing session of the June talks. The group is also still waiting for major progress on climate finance, she added, calling for a "new, scaled-up finance goal" at COP26 for climate-vulnerable nations. Sonam P Wangdi of Bhutan, who chairs the 46-member group of least developed countries at the UN talks, agreed that delivering on climate finance is "critical" to ensure success. Rich nations have come under fire for not yet meeting a promise to raise $100 billion a year from 2020 to help poorer countries tackle climate change. G7 leaders were criticised for not offering a clear roadmap on how that pledge would be met at a summit last weekend, although Germany and Canada committed fresh money. This month's UN climate talks did not produce formal decisions because of their virtual nature, with some delegates struggling with technical difficulties. To push the work forward faster, Alok Sharma, the UK official who will preside over COP26, plans to bring ministers from more than 40 countries together in London in late July. Archie Young, Britain's lead climate negotiator, said he had heard "very clearly the desire for more clarity" on issues around vaccinations and logistical arrangements for COP26. Sharma said London was working with partners on a plan to offer vaccines to all accredited COP26 delegates - including government officials, representatives of green groups and media - and he hoped to set out the details "shortly". | 4 |
Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO, Dec 6 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - After two years of work, and 12 years after their last attempt, 190 nations gather in Copenhagen from Monday to try to avert dramatic climate change -- what one minister called "the most difficult talks ever embarked upon by humanity." Already the sheer size of the measures needed, and splits between rich and poor about who should pay, mean that a historic U.N. pact to fight global warming and ease dependence on fossil fuels may be put off in favor of a less binding "declaration." The conference runs from December 7-18 and will draw 15,000 officials, campaigners and journalists, making it the biggest climate summit yet. U.N. scientists predict ever more heatwaves, floods, desertification, storms and rising sea levels this century. But recession has sapped willingness to invest in a green future, and many opinion polls suggest that public concern about global warming is declining. "These are the most difficult talks ever embarked upon by humanity," said Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim. "The effects will be felt by the rice farmer in Sichuan in China, by Google headquarters ..., or by the oil worker in Norway," he said. "It's much more difficult than disarmament, global trade or previous environmental agreements." PLEDGES FALL SHORT Experts say pledges made so far are not enough to reach the benchmarks that have been set for averting the worst of climate change, such as ensuring that global emissions fall after 2020. And rich nations have not yet come up with cash to help developing nations kickstart a deal. "It's unlikely that we'll achieve what's necessary so that emissions will peak before 2020," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He hoped for a "magic moment" of concessions when more than 100 leaders come to the summit for a final push on the last two days, but added: "It's possible that Copenhagen could end up as a fiasco." After an offer by India on Thursday to slow the rise of its greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning coal and oil, all the top emitters, led by China and the United States, have pledged curbs. "We have a full house in terms of targets from industrialized countries and indications from major developing countries of what they intend to do," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. But he said there was still a "huge challenge" to work out a deal that produces action fast enough to slow climate change. "POLITICAL AGREEMENT?" At best, most experts say the talks will reach a "political agreement" including targets for cuts in greenhouse gases by rich nations by 2020, and new funds for the poor. Agreement on a legally binding treaty text to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol will be put off until 2010. Most say a full treaty is out of reach at least partly because the United States has not yet joined other industrialized nations in passing carbon-capping laws. The U.S. Senate is still debating a bill, although U.S. President Barack Obama will come to Copenhagen on December 9, on his way to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. "What we need is a two-step process with some real momentum and a political agreement coming out of Copenhagen," said Eileen Claussen, head of the Washington-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change. A second step would be a legal treaty. There are also deep rifts between rich and poor nations about how to share the burden of fighting global warming. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have outlined domestic goals on carbon emissions but rejected some core demands by rich nations, including a goal of halving world emissions by 2050. They say the rich -- who have benefited from decades of the industrialization that has boosted carbon emissions -- first have to set deeper cuts in their own output by 2020. So far, cuts on offer by the rich total about 14 to 18 percent by 2020 below a U.N. benchmark year of 1990. Obama will offer 3 percent, or a 17 percent cut judged from 2005 levels. | 0 |
The European Union is unlikely to raise its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent from 20 percent until other countries show greater willingness to follow suit, ministers said on Saturday. The EU has set a target of cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) by 20 percent from 1990 levels over the next decade. It promised ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen in December that it would deepen those cuts to 30 percent if other countries did likewise. The United Nations has fixed a Jan. 31 deadline for countries to commit to emissions cuts and the EU sees no sign that major economies will set comparable targets that soon. "The final evaluation is that it probably cannot be done," Spanish Secretary of State for Climate Change Teresa Ribera told journalists after a meeting of EU environment ministers in Seville, Spain. The decision had been widely expected. The EU, which accounts for about 14 percent of the world's CO2 emissions, is keen to lead climate talks despite its marginalisation at last year's meeting in Copenhagen. Environmentalists had pushed it to adopt a more aggressive target in order to show the way. It has not ruled out adopting a 30-percent cut at a later stage if it can gain concessions from other countries. The nominee for European climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, told a European Parliament hearing on Friday that she hoped the EU's conditions for moving to 30 percent would be met before a meeting set for Mexico later this year. Prior to the Copenhagen talks, the United Nations had called for wealthy countries to cut emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 in order to keep the average rise in global temperatures to within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels. | 1 |
Those votes are likely to win more support than in previous years from large asset managers seeking clarity on how executives plan to adapt and prosper in a low-carbon world, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen activist investors and fund managers. In the United States, shareholders have filed 79 climate-related resolutions so far, compared with 72 for all of last year and 67 in 2019, according to data compiled by the Sustainable Investments Institute and shared with Reuters. The institute estimated the count could reach 90 this year. Topics to be put to a vote at annual general meetings (AGMs) include calls for emissions limits, pollution reports and “climate audits” that show the financial impact of climate change on their businesses. A broad theme is to press corporations across sectors, from oil and transport to food and drink, to detail how they plan to reduce their carbon footprints in coming years, in line with government pledges to cut emissions to net zero by 2050. “Net-zero targets for 2050 without a credible plan including short-term targets is greenwashing, and shareholders must hold them to account,” said billionaire British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, who is pushing companies worldwide to hold a recurring shareholder vote on their climate plans. Many companies say they already provide plenty of information about climate issues. Yet some activists say they see signs more executives are in a dealmaking mood this year. Royal Dutch Shell said on Feb11 it would become the first oil and gas major to offer such a vote, following similar announcements from Spanish airports operator Aena, UK consumer goods company Unilever and US rating agency Moody’s. While most resolutions are non-binding, they often spur changes with even 30% or more support as executives look to satisfy as many investors as possible. “The demands for increased disclosure and target-setting are much more pointed than they were in 2020,” said Daniele Vitale, the London-based head of governance for Georgeson, which advises corporations on shareholder views. COMPANIES WARM THE WORLD While more and more companies are issuing net-zero targets for 2050, in line with goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate accord, few have published interim targets. A study here from sustainability consultancy South Pole showed just 10% of 120 firms it polled, from varied sectors, had done so. “There’s too much ambiguity and lack of clarity on the exact journey and route that companies are going to take, and how quickly we can actually expect movement,” said Mirza Baig, head of investment stewardship at Aviva Investors. Data analysis from Swiss bank J Safra Sarasin, shared with Reuters, shows the scale of the collective challenge. Sarasin studied the emissions of the roughly 1,500 firms in the MSCI World Index, a broad proxy for the world’s listed companies. It calculated that if companies globally did not curb their emissions rate, they would raise global temperatures by more than 3 degrees Celsius by 2050. That is well short of the Paris accord goal of limiting warming to “well below” 2C, preferably 1.5C. At an industry level, there are large differences, the study found: If every company emitted at the same level as the energy sector, for example, the temperature rise would be 5.8C, with the materials sector - including metals and mining - on course for 5.5C and consumer staples - including food and drink - 4.7C. The calculations are mostly based on companies’ reported emissions levels in 2019, the latest full year analysed, and cover Scope 1 and 2 emissions - those caused directly by a company, plus the production of the electricity it buys and uses. ‘TAILWIND ON CLIMATE’ Sectors with high carbon emissions are likely to face the most investor pressure for clarity. In January, for example, ExxonMobil - long an energy industry laggard in setting climate goals - disclosed its Scope 3 emissions, those connected to use of its products. This prompted the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) to withdraw a shareholder resolution seeking the information. Calpers’ Simiso Nzima, head of corporate governance for the $444 billion pension fund, said he saw 2021 as a promising year for climate concerns, with a higher likelihood of other companies also reaching agreements with activist investors. “You’re seeing a tailwind in terms of climate change.” However, Exxon has asked the US.jSecurities and Exchange Commission for permission to skip votes on four other shareholder proposals, three related to climate matters, according to filings to the SEC. They cite reasons such as the company having already “substantially implemented” reforms. An Exxon spokesman said it had ongoing discussions with its stakeholders, which led to the emissions disclosure. He declined to comment on the requests to skip votes, as did the SEC, which had not yet ruled on Exxon’s requests as of late Tuesday. ‘A CRUMB BUT A SIGN’ Given the influence of large shareholders, activists are hoping for more from BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor with $8.7 trillion under management, which has promised a tougher approach to climate issues. Last week, BlackRock called for boards to come up with a climate plan, release emissions data and make robust short-term it targets, or risk seeing directors voted down at the AGM. It backed a resolution at Procter & Gamble’s AGM, unusually held in October, which asked the company to report on efforts to eliminate deforestation in its supply chains, helping it pass with 68% support. “It’s a crumb but we hope it’s a sign of things to come” from BlackRock, said Kyle Kempf, spokesman for resolution sponsor Green Century Capital Management in Boston. Asked for more details about its 2021 plans, such as if it might support Hohn’s resolutions, a BlackRock spokesman referred to prior guidance that it would “follow a case-by-case approach in assessing each proposal on its merits”. Europe’s biggest asset manager, Amundi, said last week it, too, would back more resolutions. Vanguard, the world’s second-biggest investor with $7.1 trillion under management, seemed less certain, though. Lisa Harlow, Vanguard’s stewardship leader for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, called it “really difficult to say” whether its support for climate resolutions this year would be higher than its traditional rate of backing one in ten. ‘THERE WILL BE FIGHTS’ Britain’s Hohn, founder of $30 billion hedge fund TCI, aims to establish a regular mechanism to judge climate progress via annual shareholder votes. In a “Say on Climate” resolution, investors ask a company to provide a detailed net zero plan, including short-term targets, and put it to an annual non-binding vote. If investors aren’t satisfied, they will then be in a stronger position to justify voting down directors, the plan holds. Early signs suggest the drive is gaining momentum. Hohn has already filed at least seven resolutions through TCI. The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which Hohn founded, is working with campaign groups and asset managers to file more than 100 resolutions over the next two AGM seasons in the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. “Of course, not all companies will support the Say on Climate,” Hohn told pension funds and insurance companies in November. “There will be fights, but we can win the votes.” | 0 |
Forty nations held unprecedented talks about ways to slow global warming without derailing world economic growth on the margins of UN climate talks in Bali on Monday. Deputy finance ministers met on the margins of Dec. 3-14 UN climate talks where more than 10,000 delegates are trying to lay the groundwork for a broader treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol global warming pact beyond to 2012. "Having this meeting...having the finance ministers meeting..itself is a breakthrough," Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The meeting will prepare for talks by about 20 finance ministers in Bali on Tuesday. Trade ministers also met at the weekend, the first time the annual UN climate talks have expanded beyond environment ministers. The trade ministers failed to ease splits between Brazil and the United States over green exports. "The role of the finance ministers is to lead this discussion so that we have wider policy options," Indrawati said, referring to taxes or incentives for green technologies such as wind, solar power or "clean coal". The UN Climate Panel, which will collect the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday in Oslo along former US Vice President Al Gore, has said that the strictest measures to offset warming will slow annual world growth by 0.12 percentage point at most. The panel says the impacts of climate change, such as more storms, droughts, mudslides and rising seas, could be far more damaging unless nations make deep emissions cuts to stablise the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air. "We'll talk about the theoretical basis but I don't think we will decide on measures during this finance ministers' meeting," Gabriel Kuehne, deputy director of the German Finance Ministry, said of the two-day talks ending on Tuesday. BILLIONS A UN study projected that net annual investments of $200-$210 billion by 2030 were needed in cleaner areas, such as renewable energies, in a gigantic shift from dirtier fossil fuels. The 190-nation climate talks are seeking to agree on the ground rules for launching two years of negotiations on a broader climate change pact involving all nations to succeed or replace the Kyoto Protocol from Jan. 1, 2013. Kyoto only binds 36 industrialised countries to emissions curbs between 2008-2012. But outsider the United States has no binding goals under Kyoto nor do developing nations led by China and India. The talks will also try to set a timetable for an accord by the end of 2009. "This is the week the world has been waiting for," said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based climate E3G think-tank. In return for committing to slowing the growth of emissions, developing nations want aid to help them adapt to the rising impacts of climate change. Building protective barriers against sea level rise around 50 of the coral islands making up the Maldives in the Indian Ocean alone could cost $1.5 billion, according to Angus Friday, head of a group representing small island states. In one promise of help, Norway said it would provide up to 3 billion crowns ($540 million) a year to slow deforestation in tropical nations. The economist shaping climate policy for Australia's new Labor government said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would not be expected to commit to any interim 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target in Bali. Rudd arrives on Tuesday. "That's there for consideration, but no-one expects this meeting in Bali to reach agreement on anything like that," Professor Ross Garnaut said, describing a UN draft demand for emissions cuts of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 as a guide. -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ | 0 |
“I can definitely say that for my Florida
clients, it’s a topic of conversation and it’s on their radar,” said Diton,
president of the Wealth Alliance, an investment advisory firm. “They’re seeing
that their cost of insurance is rising.” Diton, who splits his time between Boca Raton,
Florida, and Long Island, said he found himself in the same boat. “Personally,
my insurance company increased my premiums quite a bit,” he said of his home in
Florida. “It was pretty challenging to find a lot of choice, and that has
resonated with a lot of people in this state.” While Florida residents are not the only ones
wrestling with this issue, the state’s popularity with retirees means that it
is a problem a growing number will confront, experts say. When drawing up a
budget for living on a fixed income, most would-be retirees think about
services and goods, such as doctor visits or prescription drugs, that are
likely to cost more in the future. Almost no one thinks of home insurance — an
omission insurance professionals warn will be an increasingly costly mistake. Many Americans’ plans to retire in a coastal
Sun Belt state or a scenic mountain hamlet are on a collision course with
extreme weather — and the property damage that follows. “In some regions, we already see changing
weather patterns, most likely driven by climate change, already having an
impact,” said Ernst Rauch, chief climate and geoscientist at the reinsurance
company Munich Re. After absorbing punishing losses from floods,
hurricanes and wildfires in recent years, many insurers are reevaluating their
risk modelling practices. The upshot for many homeowners is higher property
insurance bills. Others can find themselves struggling to get a policy at any
price. “In certain parts of the country, the
insurance situation has really been difficult — in particular, Florida and that
area, including Louisiana and the Gulf states,” said Nancy Albanese, vice
president of personal insurance at BMT Insurance Advisors. “The other market
which is very difficult is California, and some of the Western states that are
exposed to wildfire.” She added: “When we encounter a client who
needs coverage in Florida, we know that’s going to be a huge challenge.” Karen Collins, assistant vice president of
personal lines for the trade group American Property Casualty Insurance
Association, said she and her colleagues were seeing “a very significant
increase in losses recently.” “Natural disasters in particular have been
very, very elevated the past couple of years,” she said. This trend is driving up premiums. According
to AM Best, an insurance industry ratings and analytics firm, the total amount
of homeowners’ insurance premiums Americans paid rose by 8.4% between the third
quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of last year. (An AM Best spokesperson
noted that this aggregate snapshot did not reflect what any individual
policyholder paid.) Albanese said that recently an insurer dropped
one of her clients, who was already paying $22,000 a year to insure a coastal
Florida property. After some scrambling, Albanese was able to find the client
coverage through a “surplus lines” provider — an insurer of last resort for the
highest-risk policies — but at double the cost. “It’s been back-to-back years of these rate
increases, and I can think of at least one client who says they’re planning to
sell their Florida property just because it’s just getting to be outrageous to
insure,” Albanese said. “I’ve also had clients purchase properties in Florida
recently, unaware of what the insurance market was like down there and really
having them be just shocked — they just did not realise how high their premiums
would be.” Diton said that rising property insurance
costs — particularly when combined with higher property taxes in areas where
home values have risen significantly — were especially relevant for clients
considering buying investment real estate for passive income generation. This strategy
is popular among retirees and even some younger investors. When a client is interested in a property,
Diton said that he will lay out a spreadsheet and analyse the expenses. In some
cases, prospective buyers decide against the purchase. “The homeowners’
insurance increase is definitely contributing to the issue for those people,”
he said. Insurance experts who work farther up the East
Coast report similar market conditions. “What we are seeing is the companies
that specialised in writing homeowners’ insurance along the coasts are shutting
down, so we don’t have as many options,” said Robin Jaekel, vice president of
personal lines at Glenn Insurance, a New Jersey insurance agency that does
significant business along the Jersey Shore. “The homeowner costs along the
coasts are definitely impacted.” Hurricanes and nor’easters are the primary
reasons insurers are fleeing the market, Jaekel said. The recent overhaul of
the federally subsidised National Flood Insurance Program compounds the
headache — and expenses — for property owners who are required by their
mortgage holder to carry flood as well as homeowners’ insurance. In many cases, the only policy a homeowner can
get is one that limits the amount of compensation someone can expect after the
most severe storms. “We now have the ‘named hurricane deductible’ on all
policies around here,” Jaekel said. “If it’s a named hurricane, they have a
separate deductible just for that.” Experts in extreme weather say that stories
like these are likely to become much more common in a rapidly warming future.
“Hurricanes along the East Coast of the US are also moving north,” Rauch said.
“The probability has increased in northern US regions as the water has warmed
up.” “This is a huge, long-term issue for every
developed area of the United States,” said Jim Blackburn, professor of
environmental law and co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and
Evacuation From Disasters Center at Rice University, via email. He added that while coastal regions would
probably face some of the greatest challenges because of more intense storms,
increasing rainfall means that even homes situated near — rather than within —
floodplains could become more vulnerable, too. “We have not begun to understand
the impacts of climate change on settlement patterns,” he said. The rising cost of damage from extreme weather
comes on top of a confluence of other factors that are driving the cost of
homeowners’ insurance higher. Supply-chain bottlenecks and a labour shortage
make it more expensive to repair or rebuild homes after a disaster, while home
construction and design trends are to blame as well, insurance professionals
say. In neighbourhoods with older housing stock, rebuilding after a natural
disaster might be more expensive because of measures to bring the property up
to current building code standards. “Building materials themselves are lending
them to more catastrophic losses,” said Jared Carillo, director of foundation
accounts at SmithBrothers, an insurance brokerage in Connecticut. Materials
used in construction today include more synthetics that burn faster and hotter,
such as particleboard, spray foam and wire insulation, he said. Open floor plans are another culprit, Carillo
said: “A fire that starts in the kitchen is going to generate more loss across
the first floor.” Some of the weather changes being monitored by
the insurance industry, such as the northerly drift of “Hurricane Alley,” are
gradual shifts. Others — like the droughts that have exacerbated enormous
wildfires in the Western United States — have hit an inflexion point much more
rapidly. Rauch said that in the 1980s, the average annual insured losses in the
United States from wildfires ranged from $1 billion to $3 billion. “This was the expectation going forward,” he
said. That changed in a heartbeat. “In 2017, for the
first time, insured losses were somewhere in the $16 billion region,” Rauch
said. “It was a massive jump, and 2018 was basically the same.” After a
moderate Western fire season in 2019, 2020 brought another round of
eye-watering losses, roughly in the neighbourhood of $11 billion. It is evidence that even the nimblest of
companies can be caught by surprise at how fast conditions can change. In just
the last four to five years, Rauch said, wildfires have brought significant
changes. “The loss situation was totally different from the decades before,” he
said. Insurance and real estate professionals say
this is especially problematic for people who put roots down decades ago with
the expectation of growing old in those homes and neighbourhoods, only to find
that the ground beneath their feet has shifted. “I do have people that retired here,” said
Patrick Brownfield, personal risk adviser for the insurance broker Hub
International in Jackson, Wyoming. “They’ve had astronomical increases in their
insurance in the last two years,” he said, adding that this leaves those
homeowners with few options. “It’s going to cost them $20,000 a year on their
fixed income, and now they can’t pay the insurance because all their equity is
in their home,” Brownfield said. Deciding to sell, though, can present even
more difficult decisions. “Real estate contracts are now contingent on
the ability to get that insurance,” said Ed Liebzeit, a real estate broker with
Sotheby’s International Realty in Jackson. “People at retirement age are facing two
things,” he said. “If they’re on a fixed income, their insurance is going up,
but so are their property taxes.” This is a drawback of the area’s rapidly
appreciating housing market, he said. The result for retirees, increasingly, is
displacement. “The problem is, they have to leave town
because there’s not another opportunity to buy low and stay here unless they go
to a very small condo,” Liebzeit said. “So most of them are leaving.” ©2022 The New York Times Company | 0 |
EDUARDO FREI BASE, Sat Nov 10, Antarctica (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - With prehistoric Antarctic ice sheets melting beneath his feet, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for urgent political action to tackle global warming. Antarctica has warmed faster than anywhere else on Earth in the last 50 years, making it a fitting destination for Ban, who has made climate change a priority since he took office earlier this year. "I need a political answer. This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action," he said during Friday's visit to three scientific bases on the barren continent, where temperatures are their highest in about 1,800 years. Antarctica's ice sheets are nearly 2.5 kilometers thick on average -- five times the height of the Taipei 101 tower, the world's tallest building. But scientists say they are already showing signs of climate change. Satellite images show the West Antarctic ice sheet is thinning and may even collapse in the future, causing sea levels to rise. Amid occasional flurries of snow, Ban flew over melting ice fields in a light plane, where vast chunks of ice the size of six-storey buildings could be seen floating off the coast after breaking away from ice shelves. "All we've seen has been very impressive and beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful," he told reporters. "But at the same time it's disturbing. We've seen ... the melting of glaciers." It was the first visit by a UN chief to Antarctica. | 0 |
The 73-year-old president and 17-year-old activist dominated the first full day of the gathering, painting starkly different visions of the future, and staking out opposite poles on the signature theme of this year’s forum: how best to manage a world of increasing temperatures, rising seas and catastrophic wildfires. Trump implicitly criticized Thunberg and other activists, saying they peddled warnings of doom at a time when his policies had ushered in a bright new era of economic prosperity for Americans. “They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortunetellers,” the president said. “They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, a mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s.” “This is not a time for pessimism,” Trump declared, adding, “Fear and doubt is not a good thought process.” Thunberg listened, sitting with three other climate activists in the sixth row. An hour later, Thunberg, addressing another Davos audience, rebuked leaders for failing to fix a problem of their own making. She said they had ignored pleas for the world to act on climate change. And she flatly rejected Trump’s assertion that there was much to be optimistic about. “You say children shouldn’t worry,” Thunberg said. “You say, ‘Just leave this to us. We will fix this. We promise we won’t let you down.’ ” Then, a line that did not appear in her prepared remarks: “‘Don’t be so pessimistic.’” The last time the two encountered each other, at the United Nations in September, she glared as she watched him pass before her in the General Assembly building. Photos and video of her expression spread widely, only to be followed by what was widely seen as a sarcastic Twitter message from the president. “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” he wrote. “So nice to see!” Thunberg struck back immediately with her nearly 2 million Twitter followers, briefly changing her bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” she wrote. There was nothing so direct Tuesday, when Trump and Thunberg spoke to separate audiences. Trump celebrated his deregulatory agenda, which he said had unshackled the American economy, allowing the United States to build profitable new energy businesses and to wean itself from energy dependence on what he labelled hostile countries. Trump’s impact on environmental protections has been wide-ranging. He has withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, rolled back a wide range of emissions regulations and empowered a bureaucracy that has sought to undermine the science of climate change. The United States is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in history. The closest Trump’s speech at Davos came to environmental issues was his claim that the United States had the cleanest air and drinking water on Earth. In fact, the Trump administration has pushed through a plan to weaken clean-water regulations. And air pollution in the United States has worsened since 2016, reversing decades of improvements, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Trump dismissed the activists as advocating a form of “radical socialism” that Americans would reject. While he got only perfunctory applause, his message resonated with some in the business-heavy audience. Critics pointed to a contradiction that they said the corporate world had been unable to resolve: how to assuage the appetite for economic growth, based on gross domestic product, with the urgent need to check carbon emissions. “It’s truly a contradiction,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It’s difficult to see if the current GDP-based model of economic growth can go hand-in-hand with rapid cutting of emissions,” he said. Thunberg, for her part, largely repeated the warning she issued at the United Nations last year and for which she has drawn widespread global attention. She spent several weeks in the United States, joining school climate strikes, visiting Native American activists at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, which covers parts of North and South Dakota, and testifying in Congress. There, when asked to submit her remarks, she opted instead to submit a report issued in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spelling out the threats of global temperature rise. Thunberg has always maintained that she has no interest in meeting Trump and suggested that he consult climate scientists if he wants to learn the facts. While the audience warmly greeted her call for action, she, too, was not without her critics. “We have to be a little bit between optimism and outrage,” said Oliver Bäte, the chief executive of the German insurance giant Allianz. “I cannot get up every day outraged. We have to do something.” Earlier in the day, Thunberg, speaking on another panel, brushed off criticism, saying it was more important to pay attention to the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has warned how dangerously close the world is to overspending its carbon budget and triggering irreversible climate effects. Though Trump barely mentioned climate change, he did commit the United States to a World Economic Forum initiative to plant a trillion new trees as a way to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. The president pledged that the United States would work to manage and preserve its forests. On this, Thunberg withheld her praise, warning that such initiatives were often an excuse for inaction. “We are not telling you to offset your emissions by just paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa, while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate,” she said. “Planting trees is good, of course,” Thunberg said. “But it’s nowhere near enough of what is needed, and it cannot replace real mitigation or rewilding nature.” c.2020 The New York Times Company | 0 |
The cause was complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court said. By the time two small tumours were found in one of her lungs in December 2018, during a follow-up scan for broken ribs suffered in a recent fall, Ginsburg had beaten colon cancer in 1999 and early-stage pancreatic cancer 10 years later. She received a coronary stent to clear a blocked artery in 2014. Barely 5 feet tall and weighing 100 pounds, Ginsburg drew comments for years on her fragile appearance. But she was tough, working out regularly with a trainer, who published a book about his famous client’s challenging exercise regime. As Ginsburg passed her 80th birthday and 20th anniversary on the Supreme Court bench during President Barack Obama’s second term, she shrugged off a chorus of calls for her to retire in order to give a Democratic president the chance to name her replacement. She planned to stay “as long as I can do the job full steam,” she would say, sometimes adding, “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.” When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired in January 2006, Ginsburg was for a time the only woman on the Supreme Court — hardly a testament to the revolution in the legal status of women that she had helped bring about in her career as a litigator and strategist. Her years as the solitary female justice were “the worst times,” she recalled in a 2014 interview. “The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.” Eventually she was joined by two other women, both named by Obama: Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010. After the 2010 retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, whom Kagan succeeded, Ginsburg became the senior member and de facto leader of a four-justice liberal bloc, consisting of the three female justices and Justice Stephen Breyer. Unless they could attract a fifth vote, which Justice Anthony Kennedy provided on increasingly rare occasions before his retirement in 2018, the four were often in dissent on the ideologically polarized court.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg at her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in Washington, Jul 21, 1993. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Ginsburg’s pointed and powerful dissenting opinions, usually speaking for all four, attracted growing attention as the court turned further to the right. A law student, Shana Knizhnik, anointed her the Notorious RBG — a play on the name of the Notorious BIG, a famous rapper who was Brooklyn-born, like the justice. Soon the name, and Ginsburg’s image — her expression serene yet severe, a frilly lace collar adorning her black judicial robe, her eyes framed by oversize glasses and a gold crown perched at a rakish angle on her head — became an internet sensation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg at her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in Washington, Jul 21, 1993. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Young women had the image tattooed on their arms; daughters were dressed in RBG costumes for Halloween. “You Can’t Spell Truth Without Ruth” appeared on bumper stickers and T-shirts. A biography, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” by Irin Carmon and Knizhnik, reached the bestseller list the day after its publication in 2015, and the next year Simon & Schuster brought out a Ginsburg biography for children with the title “I Dissent.” A documentary film of her life was a surprise box office hit in the summer of 2018, and a Hollywood biopic centred on her first sex discrimination court case opened on Christmas Day that year. The adulation accelerated after the election of Donald Trump, whom Ginsburg had had the indiscretion to call “a faker” in an interview during the 2016 presidential campaign. (She later said her comment had been “ill advised.”) Scholars of the culture searched for an explanation for the phenomenon. Dahlia Lithwick, writing in The Atlantic in early 2019, offered this observation: “Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.” Her late-life rock stardom could not remotely have been predicted in June 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated the soft-spoken, 60-year-old judge, who prized collegiality and whose friendship with conservative colleagues on the federal appeals court where she had served for 13 years left some feminist leaders fretting privately that the president was making a mistake. Clinton chose her to succeed Justice Byron White, an appointee of President John F. Kennedy, who was retiring after 31 years. Her Senate confirmation seven weeks later, by a vote of 96-3, ended a drought in Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court that extended back to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall 26 years earlier. There was something fitting about that sequence, because Ruth Ginsburg was occasionally described as the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement by those who remembered her days as a litigator and director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s. The analogy was based on her sense of strategy and careful selection of cases as she persuaded the all-male Supreme Court, one case at a time, to start recognising the constitutional barrier against discrimination on the basis of sex. The young Thurgood Marshall had done much the same as the civil rights movement’s chief legal strategist in building the case against racial segregation. Early Legal Landmarks When Ruth Ginsburg arrived to take her junior justice’s seat at the far end of the Supreme Court’s bench on the first Monday of October 1993, the setting was familiar even if the view was different. She had previously stood on the other side of that bench, arguing cases that were to become legal landmarks. She presented six cases to the court from 1973 to 1978, winning five. Her goal — to persuade the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial discrimination but to sex discrimination as well — was a daunting one. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, famous for its liberal rulings across a variety of constitutional fronts, had never recognised sex discrimination as a matter of constitutional concern. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger, who was appointed by President Richard Nixon in 1969, figured to be no more hospitable.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg presides over a mock trial of Shylock after a performance of "The Merchant of Venice," at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, Italy, July 27, 2016. The New York Times
Ginsburg started from the premise that she needed to provide some basic education for an audience that was not so much hostile as uncomprehending. She took aim at laws that were ostensibly intended to protect women — laws based on stereotyped notions of male and female abilities and needs. Ruth Bader Ginsburg presides over a mock trial of Shylock after a performance of "The Merchant of Venice," at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, Italy, July 27, 2016. The New York Times “The justices did not comprehend the differential treatment of men and women in jury selection and other legal contexts as in any sense burdensome to women,” she said in a 1988 speech. She added: “From a justice’s own situation in life and attendant perspective, his immediate reaction to a gender discrimination challenge would likely be: But I treat my wife and daughters so well, with such indulgence. To turn in a new direction, the court first had to gain an understanding that legislation apparently designed to benefit or protect women could have the opposite effect.” So there was a successful challenge to an Idaho law that gave men preference over women to be chosen to administer estates, a practice the state had defended as being based on men’s greater familiarity with the world of business (Reed v. Reed, 1971). There was a case challenging a military regulation that denied husbands of women in the military some of the benefits to which wives of male soldiers were entitled, on the assumption that a man was not likely to be the dependent spouse (Frontiero v Richardson, 1973). Another case challenged a Social Security provision that assumed wives were secondary breadwinners whose incomes were unimportant to the family and therefore deprived widowers of survivor benefits (Weinberger v Wiesenfeld, 1975). In that case, as in several others, the plaintiff was a man. Stephen Wiesenfeld’s wife, Paula, had died in childbirth, and he sought the benefits so he could stay home and raise their child, Jason. After the Supreme Court victory, Ginsburg stayed in touch with the father and child, and in 1998 she traveled to Florida to help officiate at Jason’s wedding. In 2014, in a ceremony at the Supreme Court 42 years after Paula Wiesenfeld’s death, Ginsburg presided over her one-time client’s second marriage. In a 1976 case, Craig v. Boren, which Ginsburg worked on but did not personally argue, the Supreme Court for the first time formally adopted the rule that official distinctions based on sex were subject to “heightened scrutiny” from the courts. In that case, the court struck down an Oklahoma law that permitted girls to buy beer at age 18 but required boys to wait until they were 21. The precise question the court addressed in Craig v Boren may not have been profound, but the constitutional consequences of the answer certainly were. Although the court never adopted the rule of “strict scrutiny” that Ginsburg argued for in her early cases, instead reserving that most burdensome judicial test essentially for race discrimination, the initially reluctant justices had clearly embraced the conclusion that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection included equality of the sexes. It was a moment of personal triumph, therefore, when nearly 20 years after making her last argument before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg announced the court’s majority opinion in a 1996 discrimination case involving the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. By a lopsided 7-1, the court had found that the all-male admissions policy of a state-supported military college was unconstitutional. Virginia had argued that its “adversative” method of educating young men to be citizen-soldiers through a physically challenging curriculum was unsuited for young women. Under legal pressure, the state had set up an alternative military college for women — less rigorous and notably lacking the powerful alumni network that conferred substantial advantages on VMI graduates. That was not good enough, Ginsburg wrote for the majority in United States v. Virginia. She explained that the state had failed to provide the “exceedingly persuasive justification” that the Constitution required for treating men and women differently. “Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less under the state’s obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection,” she wrote, adding: “Generalisations about ‘the way women are,’ estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.” In this majority opinion, the most important of her tenure, Ginsburg took pains to make clear that the Constitution did not require ignoring all differences between the sexes. “Inherent differences between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration,” she wrote, “but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.” Any differential treatment, she emphasised, must not “create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.” In August 2018, Ginsburg visited the Virginia Military Institute for the first time and addressed the corps of cadets, which included nearly 200 women among the student body of 1,700. She knew that her decision “would make VMI a better place,” she told cadets. On June 26, 1996, as Ginsburg delivered her opinion in the VMI case, there was a subtext, not necessarily apparent to the courtroom audience. She described the moment in a speech the following year to the Women’s Bar Association in Washington, DC: how she had glanced across the bench to her colleague, O’Connor, who herself had helped weave the legal fabric that supported the VMI decision. O’Connor, early in her tenure as the first woman on the Supreme Court, had written a majority opinion that ordered an all-female state nursing school in Mississippi to admit men, warning against using “archaic and stereotypic notions” about the proper roles for men and women. O’Connor’s opinion in that 1982 case relied on the Supreme Court precedents that Ruth Ginsburg’s cases had set. And Ginsburg’s opinion in the VMI case in turn cited O’Connor’s 1982 opinion, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. The constitutional circle was closed.
From right, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her fellow justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens leave the Supreme Court building for the casket procession of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in Washington, Sept 6, 2005. The New York Times
The two justices, three years apart in age, with O’Connor the elder, were among the first generation of women to make their way into the highest levels of a legal profession that was hardly waiting to welcome them. O’Connor was offered nothing but secretarial jobs after graduating among the top students in her class at Stanford University’s law school. Ginsburg, one of nine women in her Harvard Law School class of 552, was a law review editor and outstanding student who was recommended by one of her professors for a position as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter. The professor, Albert Sacks, who later became dean of the law school, wrote to Frankfurter, a former Harvard law professor, that “the lady has extraordinary self-possession” and that “her qualities of mind and person would make her most attractive to you as a law clerk.” The justice, who had never hired a woman, declined to invite the star student for an interview. From right, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her fellow justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens leave the Supreme Court building for the casket procession of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in Washington, Sept 6, 2005. The New York Times Their common life experience gave the two women a bond that appeared to grow in intensity despite their opposing views on such important areas of the court’s docket as affirmative action and federalism, and despite their very different origins: one the daughter of Southwestern ranchers and the other the Brooklyn-born daughter of Russian Jews. Shopkeepers Ruth Bader’s father, Nathan Bader, immigrated to New York with his family when he was 13. Her mother, the former Celia Amster, was born four months after her family’s own arrival. Ruth, who was named Joan Ruth at birth and whose childhood nickname was Kiki, was born on March 15, 1933. She grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighbourhood essentially as an only child; an older sister died of meningitis at the age of 6 when Ruth was 14 months old. The family owned small retail stores, including a fur store and a hat shop. Money was never plentiful. Celia Bader was an intellectually ambitious woman who graduated from high school at 15 but had not been able to go to college; her family sent her to work in Manhattan’s garment district so her brother could attend Cornell University. She had high ambitions for her daughter but did not live to see them fulfilled. She was found to have cervical cancer when Ruth was a freshman at James Madison High School, and she died at the age of 47 in 1950, on the day before her daughter’s high school graduation. After the graduation ceremony that Ruth was unable to attend, her teachers brought her many medals and awards to the house. On June 14, 1993, when Ginsburg stood with Clinton in the Rose Garden for the announcement of her Supreme Court nomination, she brought tears to the president’s eyes with a tribute to her mother. “I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons,” she said. Ruth Bader attended Cornell on a scholarship. During her freshman year, she met a sophomore, Martin Ginsburg. For the 17-year-old Ruth, the attraction was immediate. “He was the only boy I ever met who cared that I had a brain,” she said frequently in later years. By her junior year, they were engaged, and they married after her graduation in 1954. Theirs was a lifelong romantic and intellectual partnership. In outward respects, they were opposites. While she was reserved, choosing her words carefully, with long pauses between sentences that left some conversation partners unnerved, he was an ebullient raconteur, quick with a joke of which he himself was often the butt. The depth of their bond, and their mutual commitment to treating their family and careers as a shared enterprise, were nonetheless apparent to all who knew them as a couple. Martin Ginsburg, a highly successful tax lawyer, would become his wife’s biggest booster, happily giving up his lucrative New York law practice to move with her to Washington in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter named her to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Thirteen years later, he lobbied vigorously behind the scenes for her appointment to the Supreme Court. Settling in Washington, Martin Ginsburg taught tax law at Georgetown University’s law school. He occupied a chair that a longtime client, Ross Perot, had endowed for him in gratitude for years of tax advice that had saved the Texas entrepreneur untold millions of dollars. He was also a gourmet cook who did the family’s cooking and, later, baked delicacies for his wife to share with colleagues at the court. (Ruth Ginsburg was, by her own description, a terrible cook whose children forbade her from entering the kitchen.) The Ginsburgs lived in a duplex apartment at the Watergate, next to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where they frequently attended the opera and ballet. Their 56-year marriage ended with his death from cancer in 2010 at the age of 78. In his final days, he left a note, handwritten on a yellow pad, for his wife to find by his bedside. “My dearest Ruth,” it began. “You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.” He added: “What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!!” Their two children, Jane, a professor of intellectual property law at Columbia Law School, and James, a producer of classical music recordings in Chicago, survive, along with four grandchildren. Following their marriage, the couple settled in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Martin Ginsburg, having served in the ROTC during college, was due to spend two years as an Army officer at nearby Fort Sill. Ruth Ginsburg applied for a government job at the local Social Security office. She was offered a position as a claims examiner at the Civil Service rank of GS-5, but when she informed the personnel office that she was pregnant — with Jane, her first child — the offer was withdrawn. A pregnant woman could not travel for the necessary training, she was told. She accepted a clerk-typist job at the lowly rank of GS-2. As one of her biographers, Jane Sherron De Hart, wrote in “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life” (2018), the young wife, soon-to-be mother, and future feminist icon “rationalised the incident as ‘just the way things are.’” It would be years before Ruth Ginsburg made it her life’s work to challenge the web of assumptions and the assignment of roles that limited women’s opportunities. Early in their marriage, with both enrolled at Harvard Law School (Martin Ginsburg had completed his first year before entering the Army), the couple faced a daunting crisis. During his third year of law school, Martin Ginsburg learned he had an aggressive testicular cancer, which was treated with radiation. The prognosis was poor, and he was rarely able to attend class. Other students took notes for him, and Ruth Ginsburg, while attending class herself and caring for their young daughter, typed up the notes and helped him study. He recovered and graduated on time. Harvard Law School was a challenge for women even in the best of times. There were no women on the faculty. During Ruth Ginsburg’s first year, the dean, Erwin Griswold, invited the nine women in the class to dinner and interrogated each one, asking why she felt entitled to be in the class, taking the place of a man. Ruth stammered her answer: that because her husband was going to be a lawyer, she wanted to be able to understand his work. When her husband received a job offer in New York, Ruth Ginsburg asked Harvard officials if she could spend her final year at Columbia and still receive a Harvard degree. The request was denied, so she transferred and received a Columbia degree, tying for first place in the class. In 1972, she became the first woman to receive tenure on the Columbia law faculty. The experience evidently continued to rankle, and some years later, after Harvard announced that it was changing its policy and would now award a Harvard degree to students in similar predicaments, Martin Ginsburg wrote the Harvard Law Record an ironic letter recalling that the incident had left his wife’s “career blighted at an early age.” “I asked Ruth if she planned to trade in her Columbia degree for a Harvard degree,” Martin Ginsburg wrote. “She just smiled.” Harvard gave her an honorary degree in 2011 at a ceremony during which Plácido Domingo, another honorary degree recipient that year, addressed her in song. Ruth Ginsburg, an opera devotee, called it one of the greatest experiences of her life. The Swedish Influence After her graduation from Columbia, Ruth Ginsburg received no job offers from New York law firms. She spent two years clerking for a federal district judge, Edmund L Palmieri, who agreed to hire her only after one of her mentors, Professor Gerald Gunther, threatened never to send the judge another law clerk if he did not. After the clerkship, Ruth Ginsburg returned to Columbia to work on a comparative law project on civil procedure. The project required her to learn Swedish and to spend time in Sweden. The experience proved formative. Feminism was flourishing in Sweden, and there was nothing unusual about women combining work and family obligations. Childcare was readily available. An article by the editor of a feminist magazine caught Ruth Ginsburg’s attention. “We ought to stop harping on the concept of women’s two roles,” the editor, Eva Moberg, wrote. “Both men and women have one principal role, that of being people.” Between 1963 and 1970, Ruth Ginsburg produced a treatise on Swedish civil law, which remains a leading work in the field, along with a dozen other articles and books. But more than this impressive academic output, the most important product of her Swedish interval may have been the effect on the young lawyer of directly observing a different way to organise society. After more prestigious law schools, including Columbia and New York University, would not hire her, she took a job teaching at Rutgers Law School, where she was the second woman on the faculty. In fact, fewer than two dozen women were teaching at all American law schools combined. Her second child, James, nine years younger than his sister, was born during this period. In addition to teaching, she began volunteering to handle discrimination cases for the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought her such cases as complaints by public-school teachers who had lost their jobs when they became pregnant. A childhood friend from summer camp, Melvin Wulf, who had become national legal director for the ACLU, heard about her work and brought more cases her way. Among them was the Idaho case on estate administrators that eventually became her first Supreme Court victory, Reed v. Reed. The 88-page brief she filed in that case, an inventory of all the ways in which law served to reinforce society’s oppression of women, became famous in legal history as the “grandmother brief,” on which feminist lawyers drew for many years. In 1972, the ACLU created a Women’s Rights Project and hired Ruth Ginsburg as its first director. At the same time, she left Rutgers and began teaching at Columbia. It was under the ACLU project’s auspices that she carried out her Supreme Court litigation strategy to persuade the justices that official discrimination on the basis of sex was a harm of constitutional dimension. The implications of this strategy were not immediately apparent, even to those who watched closely as it unfolded. Clearly, Ruth Ginsburg was doing something different in selecting cases in which the victims of disparate government treatment were men. On one level, it was obvious that she was trying to feed the justices a diet of cases they could easily digest: Why should men be treated less generously than women simply because they were men? What the government owed to one sex, it owed to the other, full stop. But for Ruth Ginsburg, something deeper and more radical was at stake. Her project was to free both sexes, men as well as women, from the roles that society had assigned them and to harness the Constitution to break down the structures by which the state maintained and enforced those separate spheres. That was why a widowed father seeking social welfare to enable him to be his baby’s caregiver was the perfect plaintiff: not only because his claim to the benefits that would go automatically to a widow might strike sympathetic justices as reasonable, but because his very goal could open the court’s eyes to the fact that childcare was not a sex-determined role to be performed only by women. Wendy W Williams, an emeritus professor of law at Georgetown University Law Centre and Ginsburg’s authorised biographer, wrote in a 2013 article that Ginsburg’s litigation campaign succeeded in “targeting, laserlike, the complex and pervasive legal framework that treated women as yin and men as yang, and either rewarded them for their compliance with sex-appropriate role behaviour or penalised them for deviation from it.” Williams continued: “She saw that male and female were viewed in law and beyond as a natural duality — polar opposites interconnected and interdependent by nature or divine design — and she understood that you couldn’t untie one half of that knot.” Male plaintiffs were thus essential to the project of dismantling what Ginsburg referred to as “sex-role pigeonholing.” Sex discrimination hurt both men and women, and both stood to be liberated by Ruth Ginsburg’s vision of sex equality. Professor Neil S Siegel of Duke Law School described that vision as one of “equal citizenship stature.” A former Ginsburg law clerk, he described in a 2009 article a moment when “an adoring female visitor to chambers once remarked to Ginsburg that her ‘feminist’ girlfriends just loved the justice for what she had done for American women.” According to Siegel, “the justice replied to the effect that she hoped the visitor’s male friends loved her as well.” ‘A Force for Consensus-Building’ Many who had followed Ginsburg’s litigating career expressed surprise as she began compiling a moderate rather than liberal voting record on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which she joined in 1980. She sometimes appeared more comfortable with the court’s conservative members, who included such judges as Antonin Scalia and Robert H Bork, than with liberal colleagues including Judge Patricia M Wald, another appointee of President Carter’s who was the first woman to serve on that important court. In fact, Ginsburg’s anomalous role as what might be called a judicial-restraint liberal sprang from deep convictions that in a healthy democracy, the judicial branch should work in partnership with the other branches, rather than seek to impose a last word that left no room for further discussion. This was the basis for her criticism of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. In a speech at New York University Law School in 1993, several months before her nomination to the Supreme Court, she criticised the ruling as having “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” While leaving no doubt about her own support for abortion rights, she said the court would have done better to issue a narrow rather than sweeping ruling, one that left states with some ability to regulate abortions without prohibiting them. “The framers of the Constitution allowed to rest in the court’s hands large authority to rule on the Constitution’s meaning,” but “armed the court with no swords to carry out its pronouncements,” she said, adding that the court had to be wary of “taking giant strides and thereby risking a backlash too forceful to contain.” In contrast to Ginsburg’s underlying assumption, there was in fact ample evidence that what had once appeared a steady legislative march toward revision or repeal of the old criminal abortion laws had stalled by 1973 in the face of powerful lobbying by the Roman Catholic Church. And there was also evidence that the backlash against the decision was not a spontaneous response — in fact, polling in the decision’s immediate aftermath demonstrated widespread and growing public approval — but rather was elicited by Republican strategists hunting for Catholic voters, who had traditionally been Democrats. In later years, Ginsburg acknowledged questions about the historical accuracy of her narrative, but she maintained her criticism of the decision. The New York University speech alarmed the leaders of some women’s groups and abortion rights organisations, some of whom lobbied quietly against her when White announced in March 1993 that he would soon be leaving the court. Clinton, making his first nomination to the court, conducted an almost painfully public search among judges and political figures, with contenders including Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York, who turned him down, and Bruce Babbitt, the incumbent secretary of the interior. As the search wound down, it appeared the president had chosen Stephen G. Breyer, chief judge of the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, who had come to Washington at the president’s invitation for an interview. Breyer was in pain from broken ribs suffered in a recent bicycle accident, and the interview did not go well. Martin Ginsburg, meanwhile, had been urging New York’s senior senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to press his wife’s case with the president. Clinton was at first reluctant, grumbling to Moynihan that “the women are against her.” But after a 90-minute private meeting with Ruth Ginsburg on Sunday, June 13, the president made up his mind. He called her at 11:33 that night to tell her that she was his choice. “I believe that in the years ahead she will be able to be a force for consensus-building on the Supreme Court, just as she has been on the Court of Appeals,” Clinton said at the announcement ceremony the next day. The appointment proved highly popular with the public, and she was confirmed on Aug. 3, 1993, over the dissenting votes of three of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans: Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Robert C Smith of New Hampshire. Addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ginsburg said her approach to judging was “neither ‘liberal’ nor ‘conservative.’” She did, however, make clear that her support for the right to abortion, despite her criticism of Roe v. Wade, was unequivocal. In answer to a question from Sen. Hank Brown, R-Colo., she said: “This is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision that she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” Fourteen years later, on a Supreme Court that had turned notably more conservative with the departures of Marshall and O’Connor and their replacement by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr, Ginsburg expressed herself on the subject of abortion in one of her most stinging and widely noticed dissenting opinions. In Gonzales v Carhart, the court by a 5-4 vote upheld a federal law criminalising a particular procedure that doctors used infrequently to terminate pregnancies during the second trimester. In his majority opinion, Kennedy said the law was justified in part to protect women from the regret they might feel after undergoing the procedure. That rationale, Ginsburg objected in dissent, relied on “an anti-abortion shibboleth” — the notion that women regret their abortions — for which the court “concededly has no reliable evidence.” The majority’s “way of thinking,” she wrote, “reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.” It was during that 2006-07 Supreme Court term that Ginsburg’s powerful dissenting voice emerged. Another decision that term provoked another strong dissent. The court voted 5-4 in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co to reject a woman’s pay discrimination claim on the grounds that the woman, Lilly Ledbetter, had not filed her complaint within the statutory 180-day deadline. Alito’s majority opinion held that the 180-day clock had started running with Ledbetter’s first paycheck reflecting the management’s decision to pay her less than it paid the men doing the same job. Ginsburg objected that, properly interpreted, the 180-period began only when an employee actually learned about the discrimination. Congress should make this clear, she wrote, declaring: “The ball is in Congress’s court.” The impact of her unusually direct call to Congress was magnified because she took the unusual step of announcing her dissent from the bench. What might have been seen as a technical dispute over a statute of limitations became a very public call to arms. It worked. Congress voted to overturn what Ginsburg called the court’s “parsimonious reading” of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On Jan. 29, 2009, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill that Obama signed into law. “Justice Ginsburg was courting the people,” Professor Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School wrote in a 2013 essay. Guinier called the oral dissent “a democratising form of judicial speech” that “could be easily understood by those outside the courtroom.” Donning the ‘Dissenting Collar’ Ginsburg took care with her opinions, those for the majority as well as those in dissent. Her opinions were tightly composed, with straightforward declarative sentences and a minimum of jargon. She sometimes said she was inspired to pay attention to writing by studying literature under Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell. Still, it was her dissents, particularly those she announced from the bench, that received the most attention. Playing along with her crowd, she took to switching the decorative collars she wore with her judicial robe on days when she would be announcing a dissent. She even wore her “dissenting collar,” which one observer described as “resembling a piece of medieval armour,” the day after Trump’s election. One of her best-known dissents came in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the 5-4 majority eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by invalidating the provision that required Southern jurisdictions, along with some others, to receive federal permission — “preclearance” — before making a change in voting procedures. “What has become of the court’s usual restraint?” Ginsburg demanded in an ironic reference to conservative calls for “judicial restraint.” And she ended her announcement with these words: “The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama. ‘The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion. That commitment has been disserved by today’s decision.” Among Ginsburg’s roughly 200 majority opinions — seven or eight per term — one of her favourites came in a relatively obscure decision in 1996 called MLB v. SLJ The question was whether a parent whose parental rights had been terminated by a court decree had a right to appeal even if unable to pay the cost of having the official court record prepared. The Supreme Court of Mississippi had ruled that the state had no obligation to pay for the required record, without which the appeal could not proceed. Constitutional doctrine offered no clear path to ruling for the mother, MLB With few exceptions, most notably the right to a lawyer for an indigent criminal defendant, the Constitution does not grant affirmative rights, and Supreme Court precedent rejects the notion that poverty is a condition deserving of special judicial consideration as a matter of equal protection. So Ginsburg anchored her 6-3 decision in a separate line of cases in which the court had treated protection for family relationships as fundamental. “The state may not bolt the door to equal justice” when it came to parental rights, she wrote in an opinion that delicately threaded the needle between unfavourable Supreme Court precedents and those from which favourable legal authority could be extrapolated. “In this context,” Professor Martha Minow, a dean of Harvard Law School, wrote in an admiring essay on the opinion, “Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the court in MLB v SLJ is truly extraordinary.” A decision in 2017 addressed the differential treatment imposed by federal immigration law on unwed mothers and unwed fathers who seek to transmit their American citizenship to their children born overseas. Under the law, the mother could transmit her American citizenship as long as she had lived in the United States for at least one year. For fathers, the requirement was five years. The assumption built into the law was that while the mother’s identity was obvious, it was less so for fathers, who were less likely to assume the responsibility of parenthood on behalf of their out-of-wedlock offspring. Writing for a 6-2 majority in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, Ginsburg found the law to violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The sex-based distinction, she wrote, was “stunningly anachronistic,” reflecting “an era when the law books of our nation were rife with overbroad generalisations about the way men and women are.” Invoking language she had used for many decades, first as an advocate and now as a justice, she continued: “Overbroad generalisations of that order, the court has come to comprehend, have a constraining impact, descriptive though they may be of the way many people still order their lives.” No Fear on the Bench Asked often to explain the success of her 1970s litigation campaign, Ginsburg usually offered some version of having been in the right place with the right arguments at the right time. “How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer,” she wrote in the preface to “My Own Words,” a compilation of her writing published in 2016, “when, for the first time in U.S. history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.” Still, she could not fully deny that she had played more than a walk-on role. “What caused the court’s understanding to dawn and grow?” she asked in an article published in the Hofstra Law Review in 1997. “Judges do read the newspapers and are affected, not by the weather of the day, as distinguished constitutional law professor Paul Freund once said, but by the climate of the era. “Supreme Court justices, and lower court judges as well, were becoming aware of a sea change in United States society. Their enlightenment was advanced publicly by the briefs filed in court and privately, I suspect, by the aspirations of the women, particularly the daughters and granddaughters, in their own families and communities.” Ginsburg was as precise in her appearance as in her approach to her work. She wore her dark hair pulled back and favoured finely tailored suits by designer Giorgio Armani, interspersed occasionally with flamboyantly patterned jackets acquired on distant travels. She appeared on several lists of best-dressed women. Although on the bench she was an active and persistent questioner, in social settings she tended to say little. She often let her more outgoing and jovial husband speak for her, and she struck those who did not know her well as shy and even withdrawn — although in talking about her great love, opera, she could become almost lyrical. Still, there was so little wasted motion that it was nearly impossible to imagine her as the high school cheerleader and twirler she had once been. It was not so much that there were two sides to her personality, as it might have appeared, as that her innate shyness simply disappeared when she had a job to do. She once recalled that before her first Supreme Court argument, she was so nervous that she did not eat lunch “for fear I might throw up.” But about two minutes into the argument, “the fear dissolved,” she said. She realised that she had a “captive audience” of the most powerful judges in America, and “I felt a surge of power that carried me through.” © 2020 New York Times News Service | 2 |
Australia on Sunday joins a growing number of nations to impose a price on carbon emissions across its $1.4 trillion economy in a bitterly contested reform that offers trading opportunities for banks and polluters but may cost the prime minister her job. Australia's biggest polluters, from coal-fired power stations to smelters, will initially pay A$23 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, more than twice the cost of carbon pollution in the European Union, currently trading around 8.15 euros a tonne. The economic pain will be dulled by billions of dollars in sweeteners for businesses and voters to minimise the impact on costs, with the consumer price index forecast to rise by an extra 0.7 percentage point in the 2012-13 fiscal year. The scheme allows emissions trading from 2015, when polluters and investors will be able to buy overseas carbon offsets, or ultimately trade with schemes in Europe, New Zealand and possibly those planned in South Korea and China. Prime Minister Julia Gillard's minority government says the plan is needed to fight climate change and curb greenhouse gas pollution. Australia has amongst the world's highest per capita CO2 emissions due to its reliance on coal-fired power stations. Yet even as it starts, the scheme's future is in doubt. The conservative opposition has vowed to repeal it if they win power in elections due by late next year and have whipped up a scare campaign saying the tax will cost jobs and hurt the economy. Gillard, her poll ratings near record lows and her Labor party heading for a heavy election defeat, hopes that the campaign will quickly run out of steam once the scheme starts. "Cats will still purr, dogs will still bark," Gillard said after Opposition leader Tony Abbott's visit to an animal shelter to warn of higher electricity prices on charities. "The leader of the opposition's fear campaign will collide with the truth."
LEMMINGS But voters remain angry that Gillard broke a 2010 election promise not to introduce a carbon tax and many observers think government hopes of a resurgence after July 1 are unlikely. "The damage is already done," political analyst Nick Economou at Monash University said. "What will be interesting is whether Labor takes the lemming option and follows her over the cliff, or whether it decides that she is the cause of their problems and has to go." A poll by the respected Lowy Institute think-tank found 63 percent of voters oppose the carbon scheme. Many big polluters, such as miners, also remain vehemently opposed and uncertainty over its future is crimping investment in the power sector. UBS has cut its earnings estimates for global mining houses BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto by between 3 and 4 percent ahead of the carbon tax and another tax on mining profits also due to start on Sunday. The Australian carbon scheme is the product of years of fierce bargaining with business and political parties. It will initially cover just under 300 companies and councils that comprise about 60 percent of the nation's roughly 550 million tonnes of CO2. For the first three years, polluters will pay a fixed price for CO2 emissions, reaching A$25.40 a tonne in the final year. From July 2015, emissions trading with regular auctioning of pollution permits will start, along with rules that allow polluters to buy overseas emission reduction offsets, such as Certified Emission Reductions (CERs), part of the United Nation's Kyoto Protocol climate pact. A floor of A$15 a tonne and a cap of A$20 above the expected international price will run till 2018. BILLION-DOLLAR PRIZE, MAYBE Despite the scheme's soft start and openness to international markets, bankers and big polluters remain cautious, with opposition leader Abbott's "blood oath" to repeal the scheme stirring deep unease. Traders are also awaiting final rules on implementing the floor price on international units. Morgan Stanley says it is likely there will be very limited trade in international units until there is certainty on the repeal risk, plus clarity on the 2015-18 floor price and whether Australia agrees to a second commitment period under Kyoto. "Since a domestic unit auction will most likely not occur until after the next election in late 2013, if the Opposition is still talking about rescission and repeal, it is unlikely that a forward market will develop in these units," Emile Abdurahman, executive director of Morgan Stanley Commodities in Sydney, said in emailed comments. For now, repeal remains a real possibility because of the way it has polarised the country, Australian National University climate policy analyst Frank Jotzo wrote in a recent commentary. "Australia's carbon pricing mechanism might enter history as one of the best-designed yet shortest-lived policies for climate change mitigation." | 0 |
Lights went out at tourism landmarks and homes across the globe on Saturday for Earth Hour 2009, a global event designed to highlight the threat from climate change. From the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and London's Houses of Parliament, lights were dimmed as part of a campaign to encourage people to cut energy use and curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Organizers said the action showed millions of people wanted governments to work out a strong new U.N. deal to fight global warming by the end of 2009, even though the global economic crisis has raised worries about the costs. "We have been dreaming of a new climate deal for a long time," Kim Carstensen, head of a global climate initiative at the conservation group WWF, said in a candle-lit bar in the German city of Bonn, which hosts U.N. climate talks between March 29 and April 8. "Now we're no longer so alone with our dream. We're sharing it with all these people switching off their lights," he said as delegates and activists sipped bluish cocktails. The U.N. Climate Panel says greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and will lead to more floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels and animal and plant extinctions. World emissions have risen by about 70 percent since the 1970s. China has recently overtaken the United States as the top emitter, ahead of the European Union, Russia and India. BILLION PEOPLE TAKE PART The U.N. Climate Panel says rich nations will have to cut their emissions to a level between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid the worst effects of warming. Developing nations will also have to slow the rise of their emissions by 2020, it says. Australia first held Earth Hour in 2007 and it went global in 2008, attracting 50 million people, organizers say. WWF, which started the event, is hoping one billion people from nearly 90 countries will take part. "The primary reason we do it is because we want people to think, even if it is for an hour, what they can do to lower their carbon footprint, and ideally take that beyond the hour," Earth Hour executive director Andy Ridley told reporters at Sydney's Bondi Beach. In Asia, lights at landmarks in China, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines were dimmed as people celebrated with candle-lit picnics and concerts. Buildings in Singapore's business district went dark along with major landmarks such as the Singapore Flyer, a giant observation wheel. Other global landmarks that switched off their lights included the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Reserve Bank in Mumbai, the dome of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Egypt's Great Pyramids and the Acropolis in Athens. | 0 |
The first draft of the conference conclusion, which must now be negotiated by the almost 200 countries present in Glasgow and agreed by the close of the two-week talks on Friday, was released early on Wednesday. It asks countries to "revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their nationally determined contributions, as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2022". In the landmark Paris accord, countries agreed in 2015 to limit global warming to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and try to cap it at 1.5C. Since then, scientific evidence has grown that crossing the 1.5C threshold would unleash significantly worse sea level rises, floods, droughts, wildfires and storms than those already occurring, and make some impacts potentially irreversible. Britain has said the aim of the COP26 conference is to "keep alive" the 1.5C goal. "It is time for nations to put aside differences and come together for our planet and our people," Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement before leaving London for Glasgow on Wednesday. "We need to pull out all the stops if we're going to keep 1.5C within our grasp." Soberingly, the Climate Action Tracker research group said on Tuesday that all the national pledges submitted so far to cut greenhouse gases by 2030 would, if fulfilled, allow the Earth's temperature to rise 2.4C by 2100. It said if longer-term targets, so far less supported by concrete action plans, were also fulfilled, warming could be held below 2C. The talks are widely viewed as unlikely to clinch enough pledges to nail down the 1.5C goal this week. But by locking in rules to require countries to upgrade their pledges further next year - a key request from nations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change - it aims to at least keep the target in sight. NO EXTENSION OF SUMMIT The COP26 president, Alok Sharma, said on Tuesday the talks had "a mountain to climb" to secure the necessary commitments. After the draft was released he said he would not seek an extension of the conference beyond Friday's scheduled closure. The document urged countries to speed up efforts to stop burning coal and to phase out fossil fuel subsidies - taking direct aim at the coal, oil and gas that produce carbon dioxide, the primary contributor to manmade climate change, though it did not set a fixed date for phasing them out. Helen Mountford, a vice president at the World Resources Institute, said the explicit reference to fossil fuels was an advance on previous climate summits. "The real issue is going to be whether it can be kept in." Manuel Pulgar-Vidal of the environmental campaign group WWF said the text "recognizes the shortfall of current ambition and the scale of the task we have in front of us", and that it must be "a floor, not a ceiling". He welcomed its mechanisms for enhancing ambition in the future and the mention of fossil fuels. Greenpeace dismissed the draft as an inadequate response to the climate crisis, calling it "a polite request that countries maybe, possibly, do more next year". The final text will not be legally binding, but will carry the political weight of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement. "I believe that it includes all of the elements that me and my bloc have been fighting for," said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, lead negotiator for Panama. "The next step for us is to defend the provisions on ambition, keeping 1.5 alive." WHO PAYS? The draft reminds countries that to stop the planet heating beyond the critical 1.5C threshold, global CO2 emissions must drop 45 percent by 2030 from 2010 levels, on the way to halting their rise altogether by 2050 - so-called "net zero". Under the national climate pledges submitted to the United Nations so far, emissions would be 14% above 2010 levels by 2030. The draft dodges poorer countries' demands for assurances that rich nations, whose greenhouse gas emissions have been largely responsible for historic climate change, will provide far more money to help them cope with its consequences and cut their own emissions. The draft "urges" developed countries to "urgently scale up" aid to help poorer ones adapt to climate change, and says more funding needs to take the form of grants, rather than loans that burden poor nations with more debt. But it does not include a new plan for delivering that money. Rich nations failed to meet a pledge made in 2009 to give poorer countries $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020, and now expect to deliver it three years late. That broken promise has damaged trust, and prompted poor countries to seek tougher rules for future funding. | 0 |
Weather-driven losses to vulnerable islands in the region - now also beset by a dive in tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic - have caused debt levels and borrowing costs to soar. That is leaving them struggling to invest in the climate protection their citizens need, according to the head of the UN-backed Green Climate Fund (GCF). Yannick Glemarec, who visited the Caribbean 10 days ago, said countries such as tiny Dominica are trapped in a cycle of trying to reduce their debt only to have it "explode" again after a hurricane wipes out a large chunk of gross domestic product and more loans are needed to repair the damage. But that is not an inevitable pattern, he added. "If you invest in adaptation, you can have resilient infrastructure," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview on the sidelines of the UN COP26 climate talks. "There is something you can do about this - but for that you need money, you need access to capital." Cripplingly, for many island nations, that cash is not available, either because they find it hard to negotiate the complexities of accessing international public climate finance or because private investors see them as too high a risk. The multi-billion-dollar GCF wants to shift that status quo with new test projects mapping out how two coastal countries - Jamaica and Ghana - can strengthen their natural defences against rising seas and storms with measures such as restoring wetlands and adding more trees. The aim is to help them avoid building yet more sea walls and other high-carbon concrete barriers while demonstrating to potential private-sector backers that lending for "green infrastructure" does not carry unacceptable uncertainties. By helping investors assess projects more effectively - and, where needed, using donor funding to cover part of any losses - "you definitely shift money", Glemarec said. Developing nations and those who work with them say such projects, aimed at pulling in finance to limit potential destruction from rising climate impacts, are urgently needed, alongside separate funding to deal with losses that do occur. GDP HIT A study released by charity Christian Aid on Monday highlighted the devastating economic impact climate change could inflict on the most vulnerable countries without sharp cuts to climate-heating emissions and measures to adapt to warming already baked in. Economies in such countries would still grow in the second half of this century, the study predicted. But if global temperatures rose 2.9 degrees Celsius - a hike current climate policies could cause - the poorest nations and small island states could end up with average GDP nearly 20% lower than without climate change by 2050, and 64% lower by 2100. Even if global warming were limited to 1.5C, as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, those countries could still face an average GDP reduction of about 13% by 2050 and 33% by 2100, the study predicted. Africa would take the biggest hit, researchers said. Marina Andrijevic, who coordinated the study, said it only examined the impact of temperature increases, meaning additional damage from wild weather could make the economic outlook for these countries even worse. The findings "imply that the ability of countries in the Global South to sustainably develop is seriously jeopardised and that policy choices we make right now are crucial for preventing further damage," said Andrijevic of Berlin's Humboldt University. Nushrat Chowdhury, Christian Aid’s climate justice advisor from Bangladesh, said she had seen firsthand how climate "loss and damage" has already affected her people, with houses, land, schools, hospitals and roads hit by floods and cyclones. "People are losing everything. Sea levels are rising, and people are desperate to adapt to the changing situation," she said in a statement. "If ever there was a demonstration of the need for a concrete loss and damage mechanism, this is it." A mechanism to handle such losses was established at 2013 UN climate talks in Warsaw but negotiators so far have done little more than research options for real-world action, despite growing calls for those to be put into practice. FUNDING PUSH-BACK Demands are especially strong for new types of finance to help countries build back better after destructive disasters and relocate at-risk communities away from crumbling, flood-prone coastlines. Rich countries, however, have so far mostly refused to move beyond support to expand insurance coverage for extreme weather. Last week, the Scottish government set a precedent by announcing it would provide £1 million ($1.35 million) to help poor communities address loss and damage by repairing and rebuilding after climate-related disasters, such as flooding and wildfires. At the Glasgow talks, groups of least-developed countries and small island states are pressing hard for an official green-light to establish some kind of global loss and damage funding stream, ideally at next year's climate summit. On Sunday, a list of possible points that could be included in a final decision agreed at COP26 was released, in time for discussion by ministers in the talks' second and last week. But on the theme of loss and damage, it mentioned only the "need for increased and additional financial support". That is unlikely to satisfy negotiators from vulnerable countries, though it represents a softening of opposition by wealthy governments. Yamide Dagnet, director of climate negotiations for the World Resources Institute, a U.S.-based think-thank, said the proposal was weak and finance issues broadly were now "the elephant in the room". Rich nations have yet to deliver on a pledge to raise $100 billion a year from 2020 to boost clean energy and help vulnerable communities adjust to climate shifts, a source of deep frustration at the talks. In the Paris Agreement, countries said they would aim for a balance in funding between cutting emissions and measures to adapt to a warmer world - but only about a quarter of finance so far has gone to adaptation efforts. Bhutan's Sonam P. Wangdi, who chairs the group of least developed countries at COP26, told Britain's Observer newspaper on Sunday that adaptation "is extremely important". "We need to adapt now, and for that we need money. But that money is not coming, currently. How it's going to come, I don't know," he added. For GCF head Glemarec, the urgency of helping countries squeezed by climate change impacts and the pandemic is clear. "When you have people in such dire straits, don't make them wait," he said. ($1 = 0.7414 pounds) | 0 |
Bhupesh Baghel, chief minister of the eastern state of
Chhattisgarh, said the government plans to teach local women to produce and
sell clean energy, as the mineral-rich state looks to transition away from
coal. "Globally there is a shift towards green energy,"
Baghel said, adding that coal remains key to meeting the energy needs of his
state but the goal is to find alternative sources. "In deciding to move away slowly (from coal), we have
kept the future of our people in mind, particularly the indigenous population.
We want to create a framework to protect them, our forests and
biodiversity," he said in an interview. India is the world's second-biggest importer, consumer and
producer of coal, and has its fourth largest reserves, with a large share of
them in Chhattisgarh. At the COP26 climate summit last year, India announced plans
to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2070 and to boost the share of renewables
in its energy mix from about 38% last year to 50% by 2030. In keeping with that, and to improve the lives of the more
than 40% of Chhattisgarh residents living below the poverty line, Baghel's
government put in place a circular economy plan in 2020. It aims to generate more jobs, boost incomes and create a
sustainable rural economy by setting up industrial parks and helping women's
groups to produce and sell natural products. Last month, energy from cow dung
was added to the list. Under Baghel's flagship programme, villagers are paid 2
rupees ($0.03) for every kilogramme of dung they collect, which is then
processed into products like organic compost, fuel for fires and herbal colours
used in local festivals. "It (is) about many things - from reducing stray cattle
on the streets to livelihoods and going green," Baghel said, during a
break in proceedings at the legislative assembly in Raipur, the state capital. "We have set up 8,000 gouthans (community spaces) in
villages, where cow dung is collected and processed into products - and the
next thing will be generating power." DOORSTEP POWER While India pushes to expand coal mining to meet its energy
needs, at least until 2024, Baghel - who took office in late 2018 - has
resisted pressure to open new mines in the Hasdeo Arand region, one of central
India's largest intact forests. He admits coal dependency will not end overnight, but the
61-year-old feels the need for a master-plan for the future. The state has signed an agreement with the Bhabha Atomic
Research Centre to install 500 biogas plants in the gouthan spaces, with each
producing enough power to light up more than 2,500 homes every day. Depending on how much cow dung is collected, the plants will
either be permanent or small mobile units. "We will literally generate (power) at their
doorstep," said Baghel. While the state is awaiting approval for proposed solar
power projects, Baghel said energy from cow dung would be produced round-the-clock,
with women being trained to run and maintain the digesters that make biogas
from the animal waste. The gas will be used for cooking and also to produce
electricity, distributed through a micro-grid to the local area. The power will be supplied to rural industries and
households, and used for street lighting, with any surplus fed into the state
electricity grid. Decentralising the generation and distribution of power will
enable easy access for everyone, including indigenous people who normally struggle
to get electricity, while at the same time creating green jobs and improving
lives, Baghel added. "Cash from cow dung is the goal," he said. Drawing on sacred Hindu scriptures and his childhood
memories of growing up in a village, Baghel said "self-reliance" and
"giving back to nature" were central to his plan. G V Ramanjaneyulu, executive director of the Centre for
Sustainable Agriculture, said the approach would both extend energy access to
all and deal with agricultural waste. "Decentralised energy is always a good idea," he
said, adding that using dung as a source "is both practical and
profitable". In line with the Indian government's first plan for a fair
shift away from coal in areas where mines have been shut, Baghel's
administration also wants to help workers acquire new skills so they can run
eco-tourism or fish-farming businesses. "We are showing people how profitable alternate jobs
can be. We give them incentives and they are adapting. Changes will
follow," said Baghel. | 1 |
In recent weeks, a series of near-relentless heat waves and deepening drought linked to climate change have helped to fuel exploding wildfires. In southern Oregon, the Bootleg Fire grew so large and hot that it created its own weather, triggering lightning and releasing enormous amounts of smoke. More than 80 large fires are burning across 13 American states, and many more are active across Canada. Now, the effects are being felt thousands of miles from the flames. As the smoke moved eastward across Toronto, New York and Philadelphia on Tuesday, concentrations of dangerous microscopic air pollution known as PM2.5 (because the particles are less than 2.5 microns in diameter) reached highs in the “unhealthy” range for most of the day. Minnesota was heavily blanketed by smoke from wildfires burning across the Canadian border, with the city of Brainerd and others recording “hazardous” levels of pollution, the highest designation of concern from the Environmental Protection Agency. “What we’re seeing here today is the convergence of several smoke plumes,” said Nancy French, a wildfire scientist at Michigan Technological University, noting that much of the United States was experiencing some amount of haze, even as the highest surface pollution swept across the Midwest and Northeast. On Tuesday, eerie orange sunsets were coupled with scratchy throats and watering eyes for many people across the two regions. Fine particulate matter, which is released during wildfires (and also through the burning of fossil fuels), is dangerous to human health. Breathing high concentrations of PM2.5 can increase the risk of asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes. It’s not unprecedented to see smoke travel such long distances, said Róisín Commane, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, but it doesn’t always descend to the surface. Commane said people should avoid going outdoors in high-pollution conditions, and especially avoid strenuous exercise. She also suggested that wearing filtered masks can provide protection for those who can’t avoid the outdoors. “A lot of the masks people have been wearing for COVID are designed to capture PM2.5,” she said, referring to N95-style masks. “That’s the right size to be very useful for air quality.” ©2021 The New York Times Company | 0 |
Japan will be able to meet its greenhouse gas emissions limits agreed under the Kyoto Protocol through additional, mainly voluntary, agreements with industry, a government panel said. The measures will help Japan cut 37 million tonnes or more of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent a year, a joint panel on climate change under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Ministry of Environment said in a final report approved on Friday. That revised upwards by 1-2 million tonnes a December estimate of what emissions cuts the new measures could deliver. The revised estimate would be just enough to cover 22-36 million tonnes of excess carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that Japan needs to cut in the fiscal year beginning in April 2010 to meet its Kyoto targets, the government said. The 37 million tonnes in annual emissions cuts included 19 million which relied on additional voluntary agreements with various industries. The additional measures are aimed at enhancing government plans in place since April 2005, which were not enough to meet Japan's commitments to cut emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels over the 2008-2012 period. Japan, the world's fifth-biggest greenhouse gas producer, cut its emissions by 1.3 percent in the year ended March 2007 to 1.341 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but the figure still exceeded its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol by some 155 million tonnes a year. The rest of the emissions surplus will be cut, for example, by buying carbon emissions offsets from other countries. | 0 |
Speaking by live video link, Brazil's Environment Minister Joaquim Pereira Leite said on Monday the country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030, compared to a previous commitment to reduce emissions by 43 percent over that period. The reductions are calculated against emissions levels in 2005. That baseline was retroactively revised down last year, making it easier for Brazil's targets to be met. Advocacy group Climate Observatory said that a 50 percent reduction was still weaker than the 43 percent commitment using the pre-Bolsonaro baseline, meaning Brazil had not in reality increased its ambition. In a pre-recorded video shown at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, President Jair Bolsonaro said he had authorized Pereira Leite to submit new climate targets at the summit. "We will act responsibly and search for real solutions for an urgent transition," Bolsonaro said. "I reaffirm my message to all who participate in COP26 and the Brazilian people: Brazil is part of the solution to overcome this global problem." Pereira Leite also said that Brazil would formalise a commitment to become "climate neutral" by 2050 during COP26, a promise first made by Bolsonaro in April. The Glasgow talks aim to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels - a level scientists say would avoid its most destructive consequences. To do that, it needs more ambitious pledges from national governments. Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions rose 9.5% in 2020, a study released last week sponsored by Climate Observatory found. Deforestation, which hit a 12-year high in Brazil's Amazon rainforest in 2020, is the biggest source of Brazil's emissions. | 0 |
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has turned the spotlight on foreign charities since he took office last year, accusing some of trying to hamper projects on social and environmental grounds. Last year, Modi government withdrew permission to Greenpeace to receive foreign funding, saying the money was used to block industrial projects. Under the latest order issued by authorities in Tamil Nadu where Greenpeace is registered, the government said it had found that the organisation had violated the provisions of law by engaging in fraudulent dealings. Greenpeace denied any wrongdoing and said the closure was a "clumsy tactic" to silence dissent. "This is an extension of the deep intolerance for differing viewpoints that sections of this government seem to harbour," Vinuta Gopal, the interim executive director of Greenpeace, said in a statement. A government official confirmed that the closure order had been issued on Wednesday but did not elaborate. Greenpeace India has campaigned against coal mines in forests, genetically modified crops, nuclear power and toxic waste management. In recent months the federal government has toughened rules governing charities and cancelled the registration of nearly 9,000 groups for failing to declare details of overseas donations. | 0 |
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda will seek Moscow's support for a new global initiative to curb greenhouse gases on Saturday when he has his first meeting with Russia's outgoing and incoming presidents. Japanese officials said a territorial dispute over four islands in the Pacific -- a running sore in relations since World War Two -- will be touched on only briefly. Japan will host this year's Group of Eight summit on its northern island of Hokkaido and has placed finding a more effective replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which expires in 2012, at the top of the summit agenda. Fukuda is to have talks on Saturday with president-elect Dmitry Medvedev, who will be sworn in as head of state on May 7, and with President Vladimir Putin, who is stepping down but will stay on as prime minister and remain an influential player. The main aims of Fukuda's visit are to "establish a personal relationship of trust with President Putin and president-elect Medvedev, and second, to prepare for the upcoming G8 summit," said a Japanese foreign ministry official. Tokyo hopes the G8 summit will help draft a climate change agreement that would embrace the biggest polluters such as the United States, China and India. None of these has signed up to the Kyoto Protocol's limits on emissions. Russia, a G8 member, was one of the biggest emerging economies to sign up to Kyoto commitments. Japanese officials hope Moscow will support a successor agreement in Hokkaido. The disputed islands, known in Russia as the Southern Kuriles and in Japan as the Northern Territories, lie just north of the G8 summit venue in Hokkaido.
PERSONAL RELATIONS They were seized by Soviet troops in the last days of World War Two, and since then neither side has recognised the other's sovereignty over them. The issue has prevented Russia and Japan from signing a treaty ending wartime hostilities. Fukuda will urge the Russian leaders to accelerate talks aimed at resolving the territorial row, a senior Japanese government official said. "Prime Minister Fukuda is expected to tell them that it is indispensable for the two countries to advance negotiations in a concrete fashion in order to elevate bilateral ties to a higher dimension," the official said. Russia has said it is ready to talk about the dispute, but has given no sign it is prepared to give up the islands. "There is no change in our position. We do not expect any breakthroughs (in the talks with Fukuda)," said a Kremlin official. Trade between Russia and Japan was worth $20 billion in 2007, fuelled by automakers such as Toyota Motor Corp which has set up a factory to tap into the booming Russian market. But trade is far smaller than the volumes between Russia and its biggest trading partner, the European Union. Japan says it is a natural partner to help Russia achieve its ambition of developing its Far East region, a huge and sparsely-populated area of largely untapped energy resources. Japanese firms have taken stakes in vast oil and gas projects on Russia's Pacific Sakhalin island, and a pipeline is under construction that will eventually deliver oil from eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast. | 1 |
With winds of more than 300 kph (185 mph), Cyclone Pam razed homes, smashed boats and washed away roads and bridges as it struck late on Friday and into Saturday. Aid workers described the situation as catastrophic. The count of confirmed deaths was at eight with 30 people injured. But those numbers were almost certain to rise as rescuers reached the low-lying archipelago's outlying islands. Aid workers were particularly worried about the southern island of Tanna. An official with the Australian Red Cross told Reuters an aircraft had managed to land there and confirmed "widespread destruction". "Virtually every building that is not concrete has been flattened," said the official, adding two deaths had been confirmed on the island which has a population of about 29,000 and is about 200 km (125 miles) south of the capital, Port Vila. Witnesses in Port Vila described sea surges of up to eight meters (26 feet) and widespread flooding as the category 5 cyclone hit. Residents said the storm sounded like a freight train. Port Vila was strewn with debris and looked as if a bomb had gone off. President Baldwin Lonsdale, who happened to be at a disaster risk conference in Japan, likened the storm to a monster. "Most of the houses in Vila ... have been damaged and destroyed. People are finding shelter where they can live for the night," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He said the impact would be "the very, very, very worst" in isolated outer islands but held out hope the number of casualties would be "minor". He said offers of aid had been "very magnanimous". "We are not begging, but we are asking for assistance." Vanuatu's climate change minister, James Bule, said people were used to storms, though not usually such strong ones, and he also hoped loss of life might be limited. "We have people aware of what to do," Bule said. Formerly known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu is sprawling cluster of 83 islands and 260,000 people, 2,000 km (1,250 miles) northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane. It is among the world's poorest countries and highly prone to disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and storms. Aid officials said the storm was comparable in strength to Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013 and killed more than 6,000 people, and looked set to be one of the worst natural disasters the Pacific region has ever experienced. Kris Paraskevas, a consultant in Port Vila, said the situation was catastrophic. "The villages are no good. Many houses were just poles and tin or thatch. There's nothing left, people are just sitting in rubble," Paraskevas said. FIRST FLIGHT Aid flights, including a New Zealand military Hercules aircraft carrying eight tonnes of supplies and an initial team, landed on Sunday as Port Vila's airport partially reopened. Australia sent two military aircraft including one with medical experts, search and rescue teams and emergency supplies, while a U.N. team was also preparing to go in with members drawn from as far away as Europe. Oxfam's country manager Colin Collett van Rooyen said Vanuatu's outlying islands were particularly vulnerable. "We are talking about islands that are remote and really small, with none of what we would call modern infrastructure,” he said. "We anticipate that that will go higher," he said, referring to the confirmed death toll of eight. Australia promised A$5 million in aid, New Zealand NZ$2.5 million while Britain, which jointly ruled Vanuatu with France until independence in 1980, has offered up to two million pounds ($2.95 million) in assistance. The World Bank said it was exploring a swift insurance payout to the government. "We will also be deploying humanitarian supplies to provide support for up to 5,000 people in the form of water, sanitation and shelter," Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told reporters in Perth. Aurelia Balpe, regional head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told Reuters Vanuatu's medical system was poorly equipped to handle such a disaster. "The country mostly relies on first aid posts and the supplies in the clinics are probably just antibiotics and pain relief." Late on Sunday, Pam had weakened as it moved to the southeast, and New Zealand's northern regions were starting to feel its effects. Authorities there were warning the public to prepare for damaging winds, heavy rain and big seas. | 0 |
China will complete a new research station in the interior of Antarctica next year, state media said on Sunday, expanding its presence on the continent. The official Xinhua news agency cited Sun Bo, head of the Chinese Antarctic expedition team, as saying that an expedition to start in November would build the main structure of the new station situated on Dome A, the highest point on the continent at 4,093 metres above sea level. The country's third scientific research station on the continent, it is expected to be finished by next January, Xinhua cited Sun as saying after returning from the country's 24th scientific expedition there. "Scientists will ... search for the ice core dating from 1.2 million years ago on Dome A, and study the geological evolution under the icecap, the global climate changes and astronomy there," Sun said. Several nations claiming a part of Antarctica have been outlining their case before the United Nations in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of territory in history. Some areas of the continent are disputed by Chile, Argentina and Britain. The claims come amid growing interest in the potential for mineral exploitation at both the North and South Poles. For now, though, all such claims are theoretical because Antarctica is protected by a 1959 treaty which prevents mineral exploitation of the continent except for scientific research. | 0 |
Ian Shippen is something of a rural prophet on the arid salt plains 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) west of Sydney. A thoughtful 42-year-old with spiked hair, Shippen believes the drought shrivelling Australia's food bowl will forever change agriculture on the world's driest settled continent. "We are going back to our natural way of farming, we are going back to the way it was 100 years ago, growing good broadacre areas and running sheep," the former rice farmer told Reuters at his property near the rural hamlet of Moulamein. "We will have big areas of country that are pretty bloody useless, running one sheep to 5 or 6 acres. This drought is going to knock it all around." Shippen, like thousands of others, is searching for ways to beat the drought and is gambling everything on a gradual shift from irrigated cropping. Nine years ago he grew rice on 2,000 acres of once-desiccated land opened up by water piped from the eastern Australian alps, a full day's fast drive away. He and wife Camilla, a city doctor's daughter, saw change coming as a decade dry began and water prices began to creep upwards, changing the economics of irrigation. "The price of water is just getting more expensive. Water is a liability, not an asset anymore. Farmers will sell their water and they will just have a big dry block," Shippen says. A local councillor, Shippen has enormous respect from other farmers who are closely watching his strategy of selling precious water licences and using the money to buy ever more land. Starting with a few thousand acres, he now owns more than 180,000 acres, carrying 45,000 sheep and lambs, 8,000 cattle and A$10 million ($8.2 million) in bank debt, demanding A$900,000 a year in interest payments alone as the drought shreds incomes. "Debt focuses the mind. We are going 100 miles an hour just to pay the bankers," he tells Reuters on the verandah of a sprawling home fenced by white flowers. But where others see drought gloom, Shippen also sees opportunity, although like everyone he is nervous of the summer ahead with crops dying and stock sales around the corner. "For those who hang on there are going to be some cheap farms around. That's the thing about farmers. We are so-called united, but if somebody can make a quick buck out of another farmer we will," he quips. The biggest change, Shippen says, is not drought but offshoot water politics as Australian governments become aware of the need to better conserve a precious resource in the face of possible permanent climate shift. Shippen bemoans that the current commodities boom and sale of Australian resources to China means farmers have lost the political clout to argue for national projects like turning coastal rivers westwards to possibly beat future droughts. "We are only 2 percent of the population, we're irrelevant, We're expendable," he says. "We are just going to sell stock down, cut our wheat for hay, any crops that are half good we'll bail for food, get rid of a couple of people who work for us - we'll have to sack people - and hope to God we can just ride this out." | 1 |
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