News round-up, Tuesday, November 1, 2022.
Beyond Catastrophe
A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
By David Wallace-Wells (NYT)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global energy crisis…
“The world is in the midst of its first global energy crisis – a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity. Pressures in markets predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russia’s actions have turned a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic – which strained all manner of global supply chains, including energy – into full-blown energy turmoil. Russia has been by far the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, but its curtailments of natural gas supply to Europe and European sanctions on imports of oil and coal from Russia are severing one of the main arteries of global energy trade. All fuels are affected, but gas markets are the epicentre as Russia seeks leverage by exposing consumers to higher energy bills and supply shortages. ”
“Governments are issuing more debt to shield households and businesses from pain. There are growing projections that the energy crisis will tilt Europe into a recession next year.”
Conclusion of the day's news:
World Energy Outlook 2022 shows the global energy crisis can be a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure future
27 October 2022
The global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing profound and long-lasting changes that have the potential to hasten the transition to a more sustainable and secure energy system, according to the latest edition of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.
Today’s energy crisis is delivering a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity. The biggest tremors have been felt in the markets for natural gas, coal and electricity – with significant turmoil in oil markets as well, necessitating two oil stock releases of unparalleled scale by IEA member countries to avoid even more severe disruptions. With unrelenting geopolitical and economic concerns, energy markets remain extremely vulnerable, and the crisis is a reminder of the fragility and unsustainability of the current global energy system, the World Energy Outlook 2022 (WEO) warns.
The WEO’s analysis finds scant evidence to support claims from some quarters that climate policies and net zero commitments contributed to the run-up in energy prices. In the most affected regions, higher shares of renewables were correlated with lower electricity prices – and more efficient homes and electrified heat have provided an important buffer for some consumers, albeit far from enough. The heaviest burden is falling on poorer households where a larger share of income is spent on energy.
Alongside short-term measures to try to shield consumers from the impacts of the crisis, many governments are now taking longer-term steps. Some are seeking to increase or diversify oil and gas supplies, and many are looking to accelerate structural changes. The most notable responses include the US Inflation Reduction Act, the EU’s Fit for 55 package and REPowerEU, Japan’s Green Transformation (GX) programme, Korea’s aim to increase the share of nuclear and renewables in its energy mix, and ambitious clean energy targets in China and India.
In the WEO’s Stated Policies Scenario, which is based on the latest policy settings worldwide, these new measures help propel global clean energy investment to more than USD 2 trillion a year by 2030, a rise of more than 50% from today. As markets rebalance in this scenario, the upside for coal from today’s crisis is temporary as renewables, supported by nuclear power, see sustained gains. As a result, a high point for global emissions is reached in 2025. At the same time, international energy markets undergo a profound reorientation in the 2020s as countries adjust to the rupture of Russia-Europe flows.
“Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “Even with today’s policy settings, the energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes. Government responses around the world promise to make this a historic and definitive turning point towards a cleaner, more affordable and more secure energy system.”
For the first time ever, a WEO scenario based on today’s prevailing policy settings – in this case, the Stated Policies Scenario – has global demand for every fossil fuel exhibiting a peak or plateau. In this scenario, coal use falls back within the next few years, natural gas demand reaches a plateau by the end of the decade, and rising sales of electric vehicles (EVs) mean that oil demand levels off in the mid-2030s before ebbing slightly to mid-century. This means that total demand for fossil fuels declines steadily from the mid-2020s to 2050 by an annual average roughly equivalent to the lifetime output of a large oil field. The declines are much faster and more pronounced in the WEO’s more climate-focused scenarios.
Global fossil fuel use has grown alongside GDP since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century: putting this rise into reverse will be a pivotal moment in energy history. The share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix in the Stated Policies Scenario falls from around 80% to just above 60% by 2050. Global CO2 emissions fall back slowly from a high point of 37 billion tonnes per year to 32 billion tonnes by 2050. This would be associated with a rise of around 2.5 °C in global average temperatures by 2100, far from enough to avoid severe climate change impacts. Full achievement of all climate pledges would move the world towards safer ground, but there is still a large gap between today’s pledges and a stabilisation of the rise in global temperatures around 1.5 °C.
Today’s growth rates for deployment of solar PV, wind, EVs and batteries, if maintained, would lead to a much faster transformation than projected in the Stated Policies Scenario, although this would require supportive policies not just in the early leading markets for these technologies but across the world. Supply chains for some key technologies – including batteries, solar PV and electrolysers – are expanding at rates that support greater global ambition. If all announced manufacturing expansion plans for solar PV see the light of day, manufacturing capacity would exceed the deployment levels in the Announced Pledges Scenario in 2030 by around 75%. In the case of electrolysers for hydrogen production, the potential excess of capacity of all announced projects is around 50%.
Stronger policies will be essential to drive the huge increase in energy investment that is needed to reduce the risks of future price spikes and volatility, according to this year’s WEO. Subdued investment due to lower prices in the 2015-2020 period made the energy sector much more vulnerable to the sort of disruptions we have seen in 2022. While clean energy investment rises above USD 2 trillion by 2030 in the States Policies Scenario, it would need to be above USD 4 trillion by the same date in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, highlighting the need to attract new investors to the energy sector. And major international efforts are still urgently required to narrow the worrying divide in clean energy investment levels between advanced economies and emerging and developing economies.
“The environmental case for clean energy needed no reinforcement, but the economic arguments in favour of cost-competitive and affordable clean technologies are now stronger – and so too is the energy security case. Today’s alignment of economic, climate and security priorities has already started to move the dial towards a better outcome for the world’s people and for the planet,” Dr Birol said.
“It is essential to bring everyone on board, especially at a time when geopolitical fractures on energy and climate are all the more visible,” he said. “This means redoubling efforts to ensure that a broad coalition of countries has a stake in the new energy economy. The journey to a more secure and sustainable energy system may not be a smooth one. But today’s crisis makes it crystal clear why we need to press ahead.”
Russia has been by far the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, but its invasion of Ukraine is prompting a wholesale reorientation of global energy trade, leaving it with a much-diminished position. All Russia’s trade ties with Europe based on fossil fuels had ultimately been undercut in previous WEO scenarios by Europe’s net zero ambitions, but Russia’s ability to deliver at relatively low cost meant that it lost ground only gradually. Now the rupture has come with a speed that few imagined possible. Russian fossil fuel exports never return – in any of the scenarios in this year’s WEO – to the levels seen in 2021, with Russia’s reorientation to Asian markets particularly challenging in the case of natural gas. Russia’s share of internationally traded energy, which stood at close to 20% in 2021, falls to 13% in 2030 the Stated Policies Scenario, while the shares of both the United States and the Middle East rise.
For gas consumers, the upcoming Northern Hemisphere winter promises to be a perilous moment and a testing time for EU solidarity – and the winter of 2023-24 could be even tougher. But in the longer term, one of the effects of Russia’s recent actions is that the era of rapid growth in gas demand draws to a close. In the Stated Policies Scenario, the scenario that sees the highest gas use, global demand rises by less than 5% between 2021 and 2030 and then remains flat through to 2050. Momentum behind gas in developing economies has slowed, notably in South and Southeast Asia, putting a dent in the credentials of gas as a transition fuel.
“Amid the major changes taking place, a new energy security paradigm is needed to ensure reliability and affordability while reducing emissions,” Dr Birol said. “That is why this year’s WEO provides 10 principles that can help guide policymakers through the period when declining fossil fuel and expanding clean energy systems co-exist, since both systems are required to function well during energy transitions in order to deliver the energy services needed by consumers. And as the world moves on from today’s energy crisis, it needs to avoid new vulnerabilities arising from high and volatile critical mineral prices or highly concentrated clean energy supplyBeyond CatastropheA New Climate Reality Is Coming Into ViewBy David Wallace-Wells
Oct. 26, 2022You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.
Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)
Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.
For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. More recently, these two stories have been mapped onto climate modeling: Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.
Genetically Modified Mosquitoes As rising temperatures force animals to migrate, vector-borne diseases like those caused by the yellow fever, dengue and Zika viruses will proliferate via mosquitoes. To stop the spread, the biotechnology company Oxitec has engineered a breed of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that produce only viable male offspring, which are nonbiting. These mosquitoes are intended to mate with wild populations and lead, ultimately, to the collapse of those populations. The company led its first pilot project in 2021, releasing approximately four million mosquitoes into the Florida Keys. Here, a scientist transports genetically modified mosquitoes to release them.
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.” Personally, I find myself returning to three sets of guideposts, which help map the landscape of possibility.
First, worst-case temperature scenarios that recently seemed plausible now look much less so, which is inarguably good news and, in a time of climate panic and despair, a truly underappreciated sign of genuine and world-shaping progress.
Second, and just as important, the likeliest futures still lie beyond thresholds long thought disastrous, marking a failure of global efforts to limit warming to “safe” levels. Through decades of only minimal action, we have squandered that opportunity. Perhaps even more concerning, the more we are learning about even relatively moderate levels of warming, the harsher and harder to navigate they seem. In a news release accompanying its report, the United Nations predicted that a world more than two degrees warmer would lead to “endless suffering.”
Third, humanity retains an enormous amount of control — over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through those assaults and disruptions. Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group.
It isn’t easy to process this picture very cleanly, in part because climate action remains an open question, in part because it is so hard to balance the scale of climate transformation against possible human response and in part because we can no longer so casually use those handy narrative anchors of apocalypse and normality. But in narrowing our range of expected climate futures, we’ve traded one set of uncertainties, about temperature rise, for another about politics and other human feedbacks. We know a lot more now about how much warming to expect, which makes it more possible to engineer a response. That response still begins with cutting emissions, but it is no longer reasonable to believe that it can end there. A politics of decarbonization is evolving into a politics beyond decarbonization, incorporating matters of adaptation and finance and justice (among other issues). If the fate of the world and the climate has long appeared to hinge on the project of decarbonization, a clearer path to two or three degrees of warming means that it also now depends on what is built on the other side. Which is to say: It depends on a new and more expansive climate politics.
“We live in a terrible world, and we live in a wonderful world,” Marvel says. “It’s a terrible world that’s more than a degree Celsius warmer. But also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost-effective and easier to deploy than I would’ve ever imagined. People are writing credible papers in scientific journals making the case that switching rapidly to renewable energy isn’t a net cost; it will be a net financial benefit,” she says with a head-shake of near-disbelief. “If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would’ve thought, wow, that’s a miracle.”
How did it happen? To begin with, the world started to shift away from coal.
In 2014, the energy researcher and podcast producer Justin Ritchie was a Ph.D. student wondering why many climate models were predicting that the 21st century would look like a coal boom. Everyone knew about the decades of coal-powered economic growth in China, but those working closely on the future of energy had already grown somewhat skeptical that the same model would be deployed across the developing world — and even more skeptical that the rich nations of the world would ever return to coal in a sustained way.
But that perspective was nowhere to be seen in the huge set of models, mixing economic and demographic and material assumptions about the trajectory of the future, which climate scientists used to project impacts later this century, including for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.). The most conspicuous example was an emissions pathway called RCP8.5, which required at least a fivefold growth of coal use over the course of the 21st century. Because it was the darkest available do-nothing path, RCP8.5 was reflexively called, in the scientific literature and by journalists covering it, “business as usual.” When Ritchie and his doctoral adviser published their research in Energy Economics in 2017, they chose a leading subtitle: “Are Cases of Vastly Expanded Future Coal Combustion Still Plausible?” The world’s current path appears to offer a quite simple answer: no.
Questions about the future course of coal had been circulating for years, often raised by the same people who would point out that projections for renewable energy kept also comically underestimating the growth of wind and solar power. But to a striking degree, broad skepticism about high-end emissions scenarios has come from a small handful of people who read Ritchie’s work and took to Twitter with it: Ritchie’s sometime co-author Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies and frequent Republican witness at congressional climate hearings; the outspoken British investor Michael Liebreich, who founded a clean-energy advisory group bought by Michael Bloomberg, and who spent a good deal of 2019 yelling on social media that “RCP8.5 is bollox”; and the more mild-mannered climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters, who together published a 2020 comment in Nature declaring that “the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading.” (I published a piece the previous year picking up the same bread crumbs.)
Adjustments to the input assumptions of energy models are perhaps not the sexiest signs of climate action, but Hausfather estimates that about half of our perceived progress has come from revising these trajectories downward, with the other half coming from technology, markets and public policy.
Let’s take technology first. Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside that insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been — a story almost as astonishing and perhaps as consequential as the invention within weeks and rollout within months of new mRNA vaccines to combat a global pandemic.
Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium-battery technology has fallen by more than 85 percent, the cost of wind power by more than 55 percent. The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas-station signs today advertising prices of under 50 cents a gallon.
The markets have taken notice. This year, investment in green energy surpassed that in fossil fuels, despite the scramble for gas and the “return to coal” prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a decade of declines, supply-chain issues have nudged up the cost of renewable manufacturing, but overall the trends are clear enough that you can read them without glasses: Globally, there are enough solar-panel factories being built to produce the necessary energy to limit warming to below two degrees, and in the United States, planned solar farms now exceed today’s total worldwide operating capacity. Liebreich has taken to speculating about a “renewable singularity,” beyond which the future of energy is utterly transformed.
The world looks almost as different for politics and policy. Five years ago, almost no one had heard of Greta Thunberg or the Fridays for Future school strikers, Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement. There wasn’t serious debate about the Green New Deal or the European Green Deal, or even whispers of Fit for 55 or the Inflation Reduction Act or the Chinese promise to peak emissions by 2030. There were climate-change skeptics in some very conspicuous positions of global power. Hardly any country in the world was talking seriously about eliminating emissions, only reducing them, and many weren’t even talking all that seriously about that. Today more than 90 percent of the world’s G.D.P. and over 80 percent of global emissions are now governed by net-zero pledges of various kinds, each promising thorough decarbonization at historically unprecedented speeds.
Sustainable ‘Supercrops’ A tropical “supertree” used in reforestation, pongamia grows beans similar to soy, producing protein and oil. It can be cultivated in almost any soil with limited use of pesticides or irrigation, and it sucks nitrogen out of the air. It has grown wild in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands for hundreds of years, but Terviva, a company based in Alameda, Calif., has begun to plant it widely for the first time in the United States. It now grows across 1,500 acres in Hawaii and Florida, including groves in St. Lucie County, Fla., where this photo was taken. The twin goals of cutting agricultural emissions while producing food for more and more people presents a formidable challenge; “supercrops” like pongamia offer promising solutions.
At this point, they are mostly paper pledges, few of them binding enough in the short term to look like real action plans rather than strategies of smiling delay. And yet it still marks a new era for climate action that a vast majority of world leaders have felt pressed to make them — by the force of protest, public anxiety and voter pressure, and increasingly by the powerful logic of national self-interest. What used to look like a moral burden is now viewed increasingly as an opportunity, so much so that it has become a source of geopolitical rivalry. As prime minister, Boris Johnson talked about making the United Kingdom the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” and the Inflation Reduction Act was written to supercharge American competitiveness on green energy. China, which is already installing nearly as much renewable capacity as the rest of the world combined, is also manufacturing 85 percent of the world’s solar panels (and selling about half of all electric vehicles purchased worldwide). According to one recent paper on the energy transition published in Joule, a faster decarbonization path could make the world trillions of dollars richer by 2050.
You can’t take these projections to the bank. But they have already put us on a different path. The Stanford scientist Marshall Burke, who has produced some distressing research about the costs of warming — that global G.D.P. could be cut by as much as a quarter, compared with a world without climate change — says he has had to update the slides he uses to teach undergraduates, revising his expectations from just a few years ago. “The problem is a result of human choices, and our progress on it is also the result of human choices,” he says. “And those should be celebrated. It’s not yet sufficient. But it is amazing.”
Matthew Huber of Purdue University, the climate scientist who helped introduce the idea of a temperature and humidity limit to human survival, likewise describes himself as considerably less worried than he used to be, though he believes, drawing on inferences from the deep history of the planet, that a future of two degrees warming is less likely than a world of three. “Some of my colleagues are looking at three degrees and going, oh, my God, this is the worst thing ever — we’re failing!” he says. “And then someone like me is saying, well, I used to think we were heading to five. So three looks like a win.”
A very bruising win. “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”
“Things are coming through faster and more severely,” agrees the British economist Nicholas Stern, who led a major 2006 review of climate risk. In green technology, he says, “we hold the growth story of the 21st century in our hands.” But he worries about the future of the Amazon, the melting of carbon-rich permafrost in the northern latitudes and the instability of the ice sheets — each a tipping point that “could start running away from us.” “Each time you get an I.P.C.C. report, it’s still worse than you thought, even though you thought it was very bad,” he says. “The human race doesn’t, as it were, collapse at two degrees, but you probably will see a lot of death, a lot of movement of people, a lot of conflict over space and water.”
“I mean, we’re at not even one and a half now, and a third of Pakistan is underwater, right?” says the Nigerian American philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo, who has spent much of the last few years writing about climate justice in the context of reparations for slavery and colonialism. “What we’re seeing now at less than two degrees — there’s nothing optimistic about that.”
All of which suggests an entirely different view of the near future, equally true. The world will keep warming, and the impacts will grow more punishing, even if decarbonization accelerates enough to meet the world’s most ambitious goals: nearly halving global emissions by 2030 and getting to net-zero just two decades later. “These dates — 2030, 2050 — they are meaningless,” says Gail Bradbrook, one of the British founders of Extinction Rebellion. “What matters is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and there is already way too much. The dates can be excuses to kick the problem into the long grass. But the important thing is that we’re doing harm, right now, and that we should stop absolutely as soon as possible with any activities that are making the situation worse.”
A lot, then, depends on perspective: The climate future looks darker than today but brighter than many expected not that long ago. The world is moving faster to decarbonize than it once seemed responsible to imagine, and yet not nearly fast enough to avert real turbulence. Even the straightest path to two degrees looks tumultuous, with disruptions from the natural world sufficient to call into question many of the social and political continuities that have been taken for granted for generations.
Solar Energy Spread across 2,770 acres in West Texas, the Roadrunner Solar and Storage Plant is expected to generate 1.2 terawatt-hours per year, which would displace the emission of over 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Solar capacity in the United States has risen nearly 300-fold since 2008, to 130.9 gigawatts in 2022, enough to power 23 million homes. In a model from the Department of Energy envisioning a fully decarbonized grid by 2050, solar energy could account for as much as 45 percent of the U.S. electricity supply.
For me, the last few years provide arguments for both buoyant optimism and abject despair. They have made me more mindful of the inescapable challenge of uncertainty when it comes to projecting the future, and the necessity of nevertheless operating within it.
In 2017, I wrote a long and bleak magazine article about worst-case scenarios for the climate, focused on a range of possible futures that began at four degrees Celsius of warming and went up from there. In 2019, I published a book about the disruptions and transformations projected by scientists for lower but still “catastrophic” levels of warming — between two degrees and four. I was called an alarmist, and rightly so — like a growing number of people following the news, I was alarmed.
I am still. How could I not be? How could you not be? In Delhi this spring, there were 78 days when temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a monthslong heat event made 30 times more likely by climate change. Drought across the Northern Hemisphere was made 20 times more likely, resulting in dried-up riverbeds from the Yangtze to the Danube to the Colorado, exposing corpses dumped in Lake Mead and dinosaur footprints in Texas and live World War II munitions in Germany and a “Spanish Stonehenge” in Guadalperal, and baking crops in agricultural regions on multiple continents to the point of at least partial failure. Hundreds died of heat just in Phoenix, more than a thousand each in England and Portugal and Spain.
Monsoon flooding in Pakistan covered a third of the country for weeks, displacing tens of millions of people, destroying the country’s cotton and rice yields and producing conditions ripe for migration, conflict and infectious disease within an already struggling state — a state that has generated in its entire industrial history about the same carbon emissions as the United States belched out this year alone. In the Caribbean and the Pacific, tropical storms grew into intense cyclones in under 36 hours.
In China, there were months of intense heat for which, as one meteorologist memorably put it, “there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable.” As it did through the pandemic, China tried to hide most of the disruptions to daily life, but industrial shutdowns meant the rest of the world felt the effects in the supply chains for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, photovoltaic cells, iPhones and Teslas — all pinched briefly closed by warming of just 1.2 degrees.
What will the world look like at two degrees? There will be extreme weather even more intense and much more frequent. Disruption and upheaval, at some scale, at nearly every level, from the microbial to the geopolitical. Suffering and injustice for hundreds of millions of people, because the benefits of industrial activity have accumulated in parts of the world that will also be spared the worst of its consequences. Innovation, too, including down paths hard to imagine today, and some new prosperity, if less than would have been expected in the absence of warming. Normalization of larger and more costly disasters, and perhaps an exhaustion of empathy in the face of devastation in the global south, leading to the kind of sociopathic distance that enables parlor-game conversations like this one.
Carbon Capture When carbon dioxide enters the water through rainfall, it eventually converts into calcium carbonate, or limestone, by a process called rock weathering. Carbon capture and enhanced weathering can drastically speed up the natural process. For example, Vesta, a public-benefit corporation with headquarters in San Francisco, grinds the sometimes green volcanic mineral olivine into sand. When the sand reacts with seawater, the olivine gradually dissolves into bicarbonate, just as any sand or rock does, reducing ocean acidity and storing carbon permanently.
At two degrees, in many parts of the world, floods that used to hit once a century would come every single year, and those that came once a century would be beyond all historical experience. Wildfire risk would grow, and wildfire smoke, too. (The number of people exposed to extreme smoke days in the American West has already grown 27-fold in the last decade.) Extreme heat events could grow more than three times more likely, globally, and the effects would be uneven: In India, by the end of the century, there would be 30 times as many severe heat waves as today, according to one estimate. Ninety-three times as many people would be exposed there to dangerous heat.
This is what now counts as progress. Today, at just 1.2 degrees, the planet is already warmer than it has been in the entire history of human civilization, already beyond the range of temperatures that gave rise to everything we have ever known as a species. Passing 1.5 and then two degrees of warming will plot a course through a truly foreign climate, bringing a level of environmental disruption that scientists have called “dangerous” when they are being restrained. Island nations of the world have called it “genocide,” and African diplomats have called it “certain death.” It is that level that the world’s scientists had in mind when they warned, in the latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, that “any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”
What would we get if that window closes? The temptations of apocalyptic thinking aside, it would nevertheless be a world in which we would still be living — navigating larger and more damaging climate intrusions, and doing so with some yet-to-be-determined mix of success and failure, grief and opportunity.
“The West has always had a problem with millenarianism — the fall, Christianity, all that,” says Tim Sahay, a Mumbai-born climate-policy wonk and co-founder of the new Polycrisis journal. “It’s ineradicable — all we see are the possibilities for doom and gloom.” The challenges are real and large and fall disproportionately on the developing world, he says, but they are not deterministic, or need not be. “We’re riding down the dark mountain,” he says. “That’s scary in ways, of course, but there are also so many possible outcomes. I find it all exciting. What kind of cities will Brazil build? What will Indonesia be?”
In some places, climate rhetoric has begun to soften — or perhaps it is better to say harden, with existential abstractions thickening into something more like high-stakes realism. Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of Maldives who asked, at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, “How can you ask my country to go extinct?” has been lately talking in more practical terms. He has raised the need to secure climate finance — support from development banks and institutions of the global north to enable a green transition and local resilience — and theorized about the possible need for debt strikes to extract meaningful relief. He has also encouraged the work of scientists to genetically modify local coral to make it more resilient in the face of warming water.
Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, is fighting in the weeds with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and trying to get other vulnerable nations to play hardball too. Greta Thunberg, the unyielding face of climate alarm, recently affirmed her support for at least existing nuclear power, and Rupert Read, once the spokesman for Extinction Rebellion, has taken to calling for a “moderate flank” of the climate movement. In the United States, the climate bill that emerged finally into law was not a Green New Deal, a punitive carbon tax or a program of demand reduction but an expansive, incentive-based approach to decarbonizing that included support for nuclear power and even carbon capture, long an anathema to the climate left.
This may look like a growing consensus, which to a certain extent it is. But the world it points to is still a quite unresolved mess. Over the last year, the economic historian Adam Tooze has popularized the word “polycrisis” to describe the cascade of large-scale challenges to the basic stability and continuity of the global order. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who embodies the slim-fit optimism of neoliberalism, has declared the current period of tumult “the end of abundance.” Josep Borrell, the former head of the European Parliament, chose the phrase “radical uncertainty,” later comparing Europe to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a “jungle” and warning that “the jungle could invade the garden.” John Kerry, the American climate envoy, has acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, that the cost of climate damage in the global south is already in the “trillions” — a number he cited not to illustrate the need for support but to explain why nations in the global north wouldn’t pay. (He added that he refused to feel guilty about it.) The author and activist Bill McKibben worries that although the transition is accelerating to once-unimaginable speeds, it still won’t come fast enough. “The danger is that you have a world that runs on sun and wind but is still an essentially broken planet.” Now the most pressing question is whether it can be fixed — whether we can manage those disruptions and protect the many millions of people who might be hurt by them.
Vertical Farming Roughly 11 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come from the agriculture industry. Vertical farms use far less land and water than typical outdoor farms, which enables them to grow greens more efficiently. Since their environment is manufactured, they can also grow food in dense urban areas and otherwise unsuitable climates, as with these sprouts at the Brooklyn-based Upward Farms. The company, which plans to open a 250,000-square-foot vertical farm in Luzerne County, Pa., in 2023, integrates aquaculture into its system, raising hybrid striped bass in tanks, along with its stacks of microgreens. The fish waste goes through a biodigester, where bacteria converts it into fertilizer for the plants; the fish themselves, along with the greens, head to market.
Next month, at the United Nations climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, known as COP27, world leaders will take up that question, which often goes by the name “adaptation.” Having engineered global ecological disruption, can we engineer our way out of its path?
The tools are many — in fact, close to infinite. Given that most of the world’s infrastructure was built for climate conditions we have already left behind, protecting ourselves against new conditions would require something like a global construction project: defenses against flooding — both natural, like mangrove and wetland restoration, and more interventionist, like dikes and levees and sea walls and sea gates. We’ll need stronger housing codes; more resilient building materials and more weather-conscious urban planning; heat-resistant rail lines and asphalt and all other kinds of infrastructure; better forecasting and more universal warning systems; less wasteful water management, including across very large agricultural regions like the American West; cooling centers and drought-resistant crops and much more effective investments in emergency response for what Juliette Kayyem, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, calls our new “age of disasters.”
Damage from storms is increasing, in large part because we keep building and moving right into what is often called the expanding bull’s-eye of extreme weather, with the same distressing pattern observed in boom towns along the Florida coast and in the floodplains of Bangladesh. More and more people are flocking into harm’s way, not all of them out of true ignorance.
Some more sanguine climate observers often point out that even as we put ourselves in the path of extreme weather, deaths from natural disasters are not, in fact, growing — indeed, they have fallen, by an astonishing degree, from as much as an average of 500,000 deaths each year a century ago to about 50,000 deaths each year today (even as climate- and weather-related natural disasters have increased fivefold, according to the World Meteorological Organization).
But whether those mortality trends would continue in a two-degree world is unclear. With Hurricane Ian, for instance, a wealthy and well-prepared corner of the global north just endured its deadliest hurricane since 1935. Most of that drastic drop in disaster mortality happened, in fact, between the 1920s and the 1970s, when such deaths fell to just under 100,000. The declines have been smaller over the last 50 years, as global warming began to destabilize our weather, and even smaller — perhaps even nonexistent, depending on the data set and how you want to look at it — over the last three decades, as temperature rise became more pronounced and warming pushed the world outside the “Goldilocks” climate range that had governed all of human history.
Perhaps this means the world has harvested much of the obvious low-hanging fruit of adaptation. Better meteorology and early warning systems, for instance, which have drastically reduced the death toll of recent monsoons in Bangladesh and hurricanes in Florida, are already in place. The cost of global climate damage has already run into the trillions, and the bill for adaptation in the developing world could reach $300 billion annually by 2030. Galveston, Texas, is undertaking the construction of a $31 billion “Ike Dike” project to protect its harbor; New York City is considering a system of storm-surge gates, priced at $52 billion. In other words, warming is already making adaptation harder and more expensive, and extending the gains achieved last century into the next one may prove difficult or even impossible.
The latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, emphasized that “progress in adaptation planning and implementation” had been made but also warned that “many initiatives prioritize immediate and near-term climate risk reduction which reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation,” meaning that resources devoted to repair and retrofitting aren’t being spent on new infrastructure or resettlement. “Hard limits to adaptation have already been reached in some ecosystems,” the I.P.C.C. wrote, adding that “with increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional natural and human systems will reach adaptation limits.”
“For me, what we are witnessing at the present level of warming, it is already challenging the limits to adaptation for humans,” says Fahad Saeed of Climate Analytics. Over the last six months, Saeed, a Pakistani scientist based in Islamabad, has watched the country endure months of extreme heat, crop failures and monsoon flooding that submerged a third of the nation, destroyed a million homes, displaced 30 million people and inflicted damage estimated at $40 billion or above — 11 percent of Pakistan’s 2021 G.D.P. “One can’t believe what would happen at 1.5 degrees,” he says. “Anything beyond that? It would even be more devastating.”
“Two degrees is a lot better than four degrees,” says the climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, one of those who delivered now-legendary warnings about the risks of warming to the U.S. Senate in 1988. “And one-and-a-half degrees is even better than two degrees. But none of those levels means there’s nothing to do.”
Oppenheimer has spent the last few years increasingly focused on the question of what to do, and how to judge our progress on adaptation. “How good are we today at dealing with the situation where hundred-year floods happen?” he asks. “Not very good.” He argues that we should try to hold ourselves to higher standards than normalizing more than a hundred deaths in a Florida hurricane. Extreme events are arriving now much more quickly, meaning that “the measure of success is no longer just how well you did in preparing for some bad event and then recovering from it. It’s also how quickly you do it.” He mentions the I.P.C.C.’s 2019 report on the oceans, which found that what were once called “hundred-year flood levels” would be reached, in many parts of the world, every single year by 2050. “And so you’ve got to get back in shape before the next one happens, when the next one might happen the same year — in the worst cases, the same month. Eventually, in some places, it happens just with the high tide.”
“You’re not going to just recover the way we think of recovery now,” Oppenheimer says. “You have to either be living in a totally different situation, which accepts something close to perpetual flooding in some places, or you fulfill the dreams some people have about adaptation, where the regularity of life is just totally different. The very structure of infrastructure and manufacturing, it’s all different.”
Geothermal Energy About 70 miles north of San Francisco in the Mayacamas Mountains, the Geysers Geothermal Resource Area is the largest complex of geothermal power plants in the world. At the complex, superheated steam is piped from underground reservoirs to steam turbines, like the one pictured here, to produce electricity; in 2020, that steam produced about 9 percent of California’s renewable energy. Geothermal power plants like the Geysers hold enormous promise as a renewable source: They emit 99 percent less carbon dioxide than similar-size fossil-fuel power plants, and the United States holds more than five terawatts of heat resources, enough to power electricity for the entire world. The U.S. Department of Energy is investing in geothermal research and has set a goal to cut the cost of enhanced geothermal systems by 90 percent by 2035.
Talk enough about adaptation, and you drift into technical-seeming matters: Can new dikes be built, or the most vulnerable communities resettled? Can crop lands be moved, and new drought-resistant seeds developed? Can cooling infrastructure offset the risks of new heat extremes, and early warning systems protect human life from natural disaster? How much help can innovation be expected to provide in dealing with environmental challenges never seen before in human history?
But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”?
“The big thing politically that’s going to happen on a massive scale is movement,” says Taiwo, the philosopher. “The numbers I’ve seen for displacement — both internal displacement and cross-border displacement at two degrees — are at least in the tens if not the hundreds of millions. And I don’t think we have a political context for what that means.”
The range of estimates is huge, and its size is among the best indicators we have that, however much we know about the climate future, an enormous amount of the complex and cascading effects of warming remains shrouded in the inevitable uncertainty of human response. Indeed, the I.P.C.C. says that, in the near term, migration will most likely be driven more by socioeconomic conditions and governance issues. “There will be, let’s say, socioecological pressure on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than the scale of what we’re seeing now,” Taiwo says. “Whether that translates into movement within borders and across borders, whether it translates into large-scale adaptation strategies that we don’t have a political context for, whether it translates into simply mass death we don’t have a context for, either, or some mix of those things — it’s anybody’s guess. And I wouldn’t trust a climate model to tell me which of those things, or which mix of those things, is going to happen.”
Taiwo says his mind drifts intuitively toward one scenario. “If the far right wins,” he says, “I see copycat agencies that are much like ICE operating in much of the global north and in some emerging states. I see a gradual integration of domestic policing and, for lack of a better term, border policing — which I think we’re seeing now anyway, a much more openly authoritarian development of those institutions, increasingly operating autonomously. I expect the militaries of nation states to increasingly be wedded to those operations. And I expect that to become ‘government’ for a substantial percentage of the world’s population. I likewise expect that to be a political shift that we do not have a context for.” Unless you’ve studied colonialism, he laughs.
“But maybe there’s another version of what that mix of pressures looks like at two degrees Celsius,” Taiwo says, one that produces more local resilience and sustainability, along with innovation in energy and politics, agriculture and culture. “And partially because of the success of a few of these measures,” he says, “you get markedly lower than predicted displacement numbers.”
For a generation now, climate-vulnerable countries have issued a series of variations on a simple exhortatory theme: For this damage, the rich world must pay. The call has gone by different names, each describing slightly different forms of support: “climate finance,” “loss and damage,” “reparations” and now “debt relief.” In 2009, in Copenhagen, the rich nations of the world formalized a promise to deliver $100 billion annually in climate funding to the global south, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled, even as climate-vulnerable nations have raised their request to $700 billion or more.
“It’s not only about adapting,” says the Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti, “because you cannot ask people to adapt to losing their homes — their homes are being washed away, their livestock and their children are being carried away. They’re dying — how would they adapt to that? And crop failure — how would you adapt to that? How would you adapt to starvation? If you have not had a meal in two days, you will not adapt to that.”
“For years and years — decades and decades — people have been begging,” Taiwo says. “The deciding thing will be, what is it that global south countries are prepared to do if these demands aren’t met.”
Sahay, of the Polycrisis journal, offers one answer, describing a world in which climate-exacerbated great power rivalry means that alliances of underdeveloped states could play rich nations against one another, in a sort of spiritual extension of the nonalignment movement, led by Indonesia, in the last decades of the Cold War. Sahay calls the emerging nonalignment alliance built around Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) a “new bargaining chip,” floating the possibility that a new group of “electro-states” could succeed the last century’s petro-states and aggressively broker access to their own mineral resources. The scholar Thea Riofrancos has similarly imagined a “Lithium OPEC,” and though she doubts it will come entirely to pass, she believes that a harder and more nationalistic resource geopolitics surely will.
“Westerners take it for granted that people in the global south, if they’re badly hit by some climate-change event, will attack fossil fuels,” says the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, also the author of several piercing meditations on the injustices of warming. “But that’s a complete fantasy. In the global south, everybody understands that energy access is the difference between poverty and not poverty. Nobody sees fossil fuels as the basic problem. They see the West’s profligate use of fossil fuels as the basic problem.”
“Throughout this whole crisis in Pakistan, have you heard of anyone talking about attacking fossil fuels? No — it’s laughable to even ask. Everything I see being mentioned about Pakistan is about reparations, it’s about global inequality, it’s about historic government injustices. It’s not at all about fossil fuels. This is one of the really big divides between the global south and the global north,” Ghosh says. “If people are going to attack anything — let’s say in Pakistan or India after a heat wave or some other catastrophic event — it won’t be the fossil-fuel infrastructure. It will be the consulates of the rich countries, just as it’s been over many other things in the past.”
Fortifying Coral Reefs Two additional degrees of warming would kill virtually all of the world’s living coral reefs, threatening the survival of roughly a quarter of global ocean biodiversity and affecting the protein supply for hundreds of millions of people. Some species of coral are somewhat less susceptible to warming waters, like elkhorn coral, which can be encouraged to grow relatively quickly via a method called microfragmentation. The process involves cutting the coral, which then grows faster while healing. Here, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium are growing elkhorn coral in a lab in the Florida Keys before introducing them into the wild.
“We live in an unimaginable future,” says the writer Rebecca Solnit, who has grown increasingly focused on the political and social challenges of climate change. “Things thought impossible or inconceivable or unlikely not very long ago are accepted norms now.” Today, as a result, “a lot of my hope is just radical uncertainty,” she says. “You see that the world can’t go on as it is — that is true. But it doesn’t mean the world can’t go on. It means that the world will go on, not as it is but in some unimaginably transformed way.”
In 2017, looking back at decades of ineffectual organizing, I didn’t think the political mobilization of the last five years was even possible, and if you had told me then about the radical acceleration of renewable technology to come, I would’ve been more credulous but still surprised. But signs of optimism are not arguments for complacency — quite the opposite, because the new range of expectations is not just a marker of how much has changed over the last five years but of how much might over the next five, the next 25 or the next 50.
Two degrees is not inevitable; both better and worse outcomes are possible. Most recent analyses project paths forward from current policy about half a degree warmer, meaning much more must be done to meet that goal, and even more to keep the world below the two-degree threshold — as was promised under the Paris agreement. (Even the I.P.C.C. scenarios designed to limit warming to that level now predict we’ll trespass it as soon as next decade.) And because decarbonization might stall and the climate may prove more sensitive than expected, temperatures above three degrees, though less likely than they recently seemed, remain possible, too.
Overall emissions have not yet begun to decline, and it’s a long way from peak down to zero, making all these changes to expectations mostly notional, for now — a different set of lines being drawn naïvely on a whiteboard and waiting to be made real. New emissions peaks are expected both this year and next, which means that more damage is being done to the future climate of the planet right now than at any previous point in history. Things will get worse before they even stabilize.
But we are getting a clearer map of climate change, and however intimidating it looks, that new world must be made navigable — through action to limit the damage and adaptation to defend what can’t be stopped. At four degrees, the impacts of warming appeared overwhelming, but at two degrees, the impacts would not be the whole of our human fate, only the landscape on which a new future will be built.
Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, however cruel and unfortunate a form it may appear in theory or ahead of time. Indeed, already we can say a given heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change, or that it was a few degrees hotter than it would have been without climate change, and both would be true. We’ll be able to talk about the contributions of warming to disasters that buckle whole nations, as the recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan has, or about the human contributions to such vulnerability. And as we do today, we will often reach for the past when trying to judge the present, reckoning with how the world got where it is and who was responsible and whether the result of the fight against warming counts as progress or failure or both. History is our handiest counterfactual, however poor a standard it sets for a world that could have been much better still. “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” says Hayhoe, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world’s progress to a long hike. “We’re halfway there. Look at the great view behind you. We actually made it up halfway, and it was a hard slog. So take a breather, pat yourself on the back, but then look up — that’s where we have to go. So let’s keep on going.”
David Wallace-Wells is a columnist for the magazine and an Opinion writer for The New York Times, as well as the author of the international best seller “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” published in 2019. Sign up for his Times newsletter here.
Charley Locke is a writer who often covers youth, including for The New York Times for Kids. She last wrote about the $190 billion in Covid aid that went to American schools.
Devin Oktar Yalkin is a photographer based in Los Angeles who has previously covered Joe Biden, dirt-track racing, live music and falcons for the magazine. He currently has a solo exhibition, Obsidian, at Evin Sanat Gallery in Istanbul.War in Ukraine Likely to Speed, Not Slow, Shift to Clean Energy, I.E.A. Says
While some nations are burning more coal this year in response to natural-gas shortages spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived.
Sheep grazing in front of a coal-fired power plant and wind turbines near Luetzerath, Germany, in October, 2022.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press
By Brad Plumer
Oct. 27, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox.
WASHINGTON — The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to speed up rather than slow down the global transition away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles, the world’s leading energy agency said Thursday.
While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal this year in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050.
Instead, for the first time, the agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.
One major reason is that many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Japan is pursuing a new “green transformation” program that will help fund nuclear power, hydrogen and other low-emissions technologies. China, India and South Korea have all ratcheted up national targets for renewable and nuclear power.
And yet, the shift toward cleaner sources of energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency said, not unless governments take much stronger action to reduce their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions over the next few years.
Based on current policies put in place by national governments, global coal use is expected to start declining in the next few years, natural gas demand is likely to hit a plateau by the end of this decade and oil use is projected to level off by the mid-2030s.
Meanwhile, global investment in clean energy is now expected to rise from $1.3 trillion in 2022 to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030, a significant shift, the agency said.
“It’s notable that many of these new clean energy targets aren’t being put in place solely for climate change reasons,” said Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, in an interview. “Increasingly, the big drivers are energy security as well as industrial policy — a lot of countries want to be at the leading edge of the energy industries of the future.”
A new United Nations report on past emissions commitments indicates that severe disruption would be hard to avoid on the current trajectory.
Current energy policies put the world on track to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2025 and warm roughly 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared with preindustrial levels, the energy agency estimated. That is in line with separate projections released Wednesday by the United Nations, which analyzed nations’ stated promises to tackle emissions.
By contrast, many world leaders hope to limit average global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid some of the most dire and irreversible risks from climate change, such as widespread crop failures or ecosystem collapse. That would require much steeper cuts in greenhouse gases, with emissions not just peaking in the next few years but falling nearly in half by the end of this decade, scientists have said.
“If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Dr. Birol said, or double what the agency currently projects. “In particular, there’s not nearly enough investment going into the developing world.”
This year, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to rise roughly 1 percent and approach record highs, in part because of an uptick in coal use in places like Europe as countries scramble to replace lost Russian gas. (Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels.)
Still, that is a far smaller increase than some analysts had feared when war in Ukraine first broke out. The rise in emissions would have been three times as large had it not been for a rapid deployment of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles worldwide, the agency said. Soaring energy prices and weak economic growth in Europe and China also contributed to keep emissions down.
And the recent rise in coal use may prove fleeting. European nations are currently planning to install roughly 50 gigawatts worth of renewable power next year, which would be more than enough to supplant this year’s increase in coal generation. And globally, the agency does not expect investment in new coal plants to increase beyond what was already expected.
2-Minute Showers and a Flotilla of Gas Shipments: Europe Braces for Winter
Countries across the continent have taken extraordinary steps to decrease energy use and ramp up supply, moving swiftly away from their longtime primary provider, Russia.
By Liz Alderman and Patricia Cohen
Liz Alderman reported from Paris, and Patricia Cohen from London.
Nov. 1, 2022Updated 6:32 a.m. ET
A flotilla of tankers carrying liquefied natural gas have been parked in a maritime traffic jam off the coast of Spain in recent days, waiting to unload their precious cargo for Europe’s power grid. In Finland, where sweltering sauna baths are a national pastime, the government is urging friends and families to take saunas together to save energy.
Both efforts are emblematic of the measures Europe is taking to increase energy supplies and conserve fuel before a winter without Russian gas.
The tactic by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to weaponize energy against countries supporting Ukraine has produced a startling transformation in how Europe generates and saves power. Countries are banding together to buy, borrow and build additional power supplies, while pushing out major conservation programs that recall the response to the 1970s oil crisis.
Underground storage sites around the continent have been fully stocked with emergency gas supplies. Nuclear power plants slated for closure in Germany will stay open. From France to Sweden, thermostats are being lowered to just 19 degrees Celsius, or 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Slovakia is even urging people to limit showers to two minutes.
Tankers at a regasification plant, in Vizcaya, Bilbao, in Spain, earlier this month.Credit...H.Bilbao/Europa Press via Getty Images
As November approaches, the all-hands-on-deck effort has some analysts more hopeful than they’ve been in months that Europe can make it to spring without energy rationing or blackouts, while speeding up its energy independence.
The steps European nations have taken “are remarkable and will more likely than not transform the energy landscape,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank. “Europe will manage to completely decouple from Russia, something that was previously seen as impossible.”
Still, the pivot is coming at a high cost, and Europe’s energy security could be undermined in the coming months.
While Europe has adjusted to Russia’s severe cutbacks in gas exports — Russia now provides less than 10 percent of Europe’s natural gas, from 45 percent of Europe’s supply before the war — prices for gas remain historically high, forcing shutdowns at energy-intensive businesses, including the production of steel, chemical and glass. Companies are furloughing workers. Governments are issuing more debt to shield households and businesses from pain. There are growing projections that the energy crisis will tilt Europe into a recession next year.
För att uppnå —net zero— krävs att man bygger all teknik med låga koldioxidutsläpp, inklusive mycket kärnkraft.
I sin rapport från 2022 om kärnkraftens roll i kampen mot klimatförändringarna, "Nuclear Power and Secure Energy Transitions", skriver Internationella energiorganet (IEA) att "Kärnkraft kan bidra till att göra energisektorns resa bort från oförminskade fossila bränslen snabbare och säkrare". (IEA)
“I sin rapport från 2022 om kärnkraftens roll i kampen mot klimatförändringarna, “Nuclear Power and Secure Energy Transitions”, skriver Internationella energiorganet (IEA) att “Kärnkraft kan bidra till att göra energisektorns resa bort från oförminskade fossila bränslen snabbare och säkrare”.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global energy crisis.
The world is in the midst of its first global energy crisis – a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity. Pressures in markets predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russia’s actions have turned a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic – which strained all manner of global supply chains, including energy – into full-blown energy turmoil. Russia has been by far the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, but its curtailments of natural gas supply to Europe and European sanctions on imports of oil and coal from Russia are severing one of the main arteries of global energy trade. All fuels are affected, but gas markets are the epicentre as Russia seeks leverage by exposing consumers to higher energy bills and supply shortages.
”
Varför är det så viktigt för den geopolitiska, energi- och miljörelaterade säkerheten att snabbt och säkert övergå till en baskraftförsörjning baserad på ny kärnkraftsteknik?
Germán Toro Ghio, har mer än 25 års erfarenhet av energy sektorinom energisektorn, elproduktion och eldistribution med tonvikt på naturgasmarknaden
EnergyCentral medlem sedan 2022 25 poster har lagts till med 6.700 visningar.
“Vissa historiker och politiska analytiker jämför felaktigt den nuvarande geopolitiska krisen med missilkrisen i oktober 1962. Sanningen är att de är två olika historiska händelser, även om båda sidor drev oktoberkrisen till sin spets genom terrorpropaganda utan att nå fram till krig. Nu befinner vi oss i ett verkligt krig och - även om det ännu inte är känt - heter det tredje världskriget, med katastrofala följder, bland annat utrotning, irrationell förstörelse av civil och kritisk infrastruktur och en inflationsprocess som drar in oss i en oförutsägbar ekonomisk trance....”
Milton Caplan har mer än 40 års erfarenhet av kärnkraftsindustrin och ger råd till allmännyttiga företag, regeringar och företag om nya kärnkraftsprojekt och investeringar i uran.
EnergyCentral medlem sedan 2018 98 poster har lagts till med 130 591 visningar.
EnergyCentral
I sin rapport från 2022 om kärnkraftens roll i kampen mot klimatförändringarna, "Nuclear Power and Secure Energy Transitions", skriver Internationella energiorganet (IEA) att "Kärnkraft kan bidra till att göra energisektorns resa bort från oförminskade fossila bränslen snabbare och säkrare".
IEA fortsätter med att tydligt redogöra för varför kärnkraft är så viktig för en ren energiframtid och påpekar att det kommer att bli svårare och dyrare att uppnå nettonoll globalt med mindre kärnkraft.
I rapporten konstateras också att det finns utmaningar för en fortsatt utbyggnad av kärnkraft och att det är viktigt att fortsätta att sänka kostnaderna och se till att projekten byggs i enlighet med kostnaderna och tidsplanen. Detta är verkligen berättigade frågor och det råder ingen tvekan om att branschen måste prestera för att lyckas på lång sikt.
Även om IEA säger att kärnkraft är viktigt för nettonoll, har detta inte lett till prognoser för ett stort nytt kärnkraftsprogram. Som framgår av IEA:s World Energy Outlook 2022 (WEO 2022), som nyligen släppts, är kärnkraftens roll fortfarande blygsam. Ja, kärnkraftskapaciteten fördubblas fram till 2050, men på grund av den fortsatta ökningen av efterfrågan på el sjunker kärnkraftsandelen från 10 % av den globala elförsörjningen till endast 8 % i scenariot Net Zero.
Å andra sidan beräknas förnybara energikällor stå för majoriteten av kapacitetsökningen under prognosperioden (fram till 2050). I STEPS grundscenario sätter vindkraft och solceller tillsammans nya utbyggnadsrekord varje år fram till 2030 och fortsätter sedan med ökad årlig tillväxt fram till 2050. I IEA:s Net Zero-scenario växer vindkraft med en faktor 12 och solkraft ännu snabbare, med 27 gånger mer solkraft 2050 än 2021. När det gäller tillväxten av förnybara energikällor är antagandet att det inte finns några gränser. Ingen oro för markanvändning eller volymen av kritiska material som krävs eller hur lagringstekniken kommer att utvecklas för att stödja en ökning av andelen förnybara energikällor från nuvarande 28 % av elförsörjningen till 88 % av ett större globalt elsystem. Vi vet dock av erfarenhet från Tyskland, Kalifornien och andra länder där varierande förnybara energikällor framgångsrikt har uppnått en relativt stor andel av elförsörjningen att systemets tillförlitlighet blir lidande och att det ofta krävs fossila bränslen för att stödja deras växelverkan.
Anmärkningar: STEPS (Stated Policy Scenario), APS (Announced Policy Scenario), NZE (Net Zero Scenario).
Källa: IEA World Energy Outlook 2022
För att vara rättvis, klandrar vi inte IEA för deras åsikter. Baserat på de senaste erfarenheterna i västländer med lite pågående nybyggnation av kärnkraft och projekt som har överskridit budget och tidsplan kan det vara svårt att se en väg för en snabbare kärnkraftstillväxt. Men det betyder absolut inte att det inte bör finnas ett utmanande mål. Titta bara på Kina som har byggt över 50 GW kärnkraftskapacitet under de senaste 20 åren och har godkänt 10 nya stora reaktorer bara i år. I västvärlden har vi exempel på att USA har byggt omkring 100 enheter och Frankrike har byggt en flotta på 59 enheter på mindre än 30 år. För tjugo år sedan fanns det inte mycket tilltro till de förnybara energikällornas förmåga att skala upp, och nu är vi här i dag, där vi nu antar en nästan obegränsad tillväxt på grund av deras framgång. Precis som för förnybara energikällor är det också möjligt att öka omfattningen och takten i nybyggnationen av kärnkraftverk, vilket vi har uppnått tidigare, om den politiska viljan finns.
Det finns en internationell studie som tar upp en mer balanserad tillväxt för alla rena tekniker. UNECE (Förenta nationernas ekonomiska kommission för Europa) har nyligen släppt sin rapport "Carbon Neutrality in the UNECE Region Technology Interplay under the Carbon Neutrality Concept", som tar en ny titt på hur man kan använda ett brett spektrum av teknik, både befintlig och ny, för att möta utmaningen med nettonoll.
I rapporten konstateras att "det finns uppnåbara vägar för regeringar att utforma och genomföra ett koldioxidneutralt energisystem genom tekniskt samspel". I sitt innovationsscenario för koldioxidneutralitet undersöker UNECE potentialen hos tre innovativa tekniker med låga eller inga koldioxidutsläpp: en ny generation kärnkraft, CCUS och vätgas - för att uppnå koldioxidneutralitet. I detta scenario växer kärnkraften till 3,4 gånger sin nuvarande bas i regionen fram till 2050 (jämfört med 2x enligt IEA*) och når 27 % av energiförsörjningen (jämfört med 8 % enligt IEA*). I rapporten konstateras också att det finns utmaningar med alla tekniker. Till exempel förutspås 4 430 TWh solenergi i regionen 2050 (jämfört med 27 000 TWh globalt i IEA:s nettonollscenario) och det krävs 7 miljoner paneler i stor skala som täcker en yta som motsvarar 2,8 miljoner fotbollsplaner, vilket motsvarar hela Belgiens yta.
Det råder ingen tvekan om att utmaningen att uppnå nettonollutsläpp i våra energisystem till 2050 är enorm. Med tanke på att allt ska elektrifieras kommer elanvändningen att minst fördubblas. För att möta denna tillväxt har det varit allmänt accepterat att kärnkraften har en avgörande roll att spela, men storleken på denna roll är fortfarande oklar. Oro för industrins förmåga att leverera har begränsat dess potential i många studier, t.ex. i IEA:s WEO 2022. UNECE har dock valt ett annat tillvägagångssätt och undersökt en snabbare expansion av all teknik med låga koldioxidutsläpp, snarare än att anta att vind- och solkraft kan göra allt det tunga jobbet. Detta verkar vara en mer genomförbar modell. Få alla tekniker att växa så snabbt som möjligt för att se till att det primära målet om koldioxidneutralitet uppnås. Vi har bara en värld, och vi måste bygga upp all teknik med låga koldioxidutsläpp så snabbt som möjligt om vi verkligen vill nå våra klimatmål.
* Det bör noteras att UNECE:s projekt är begränsade till UNECE-regionen och att IEA:s prognoser är globala.
La megalomanía de Gerhard Schroeder, que le hizo vender su alma al Kremlin por unos pocos rublos más. Nord Stream se convirtió en sinónimo de —Auschwitz—.
A Putin no le bastó con el gas natural como elemento de guerra; ahora, es granos para acelerar aún más el desastre económico.
“El excanciller debería haber tenido que rendir cuentas en la Corte Internacional de Justicia desde hace ya un tiempo.”
“Algunos historiadores y analistas políticos hacen una comparación errónea de la actual crisis geopolítica con la de los —misiles de octubre— de 1962. Lo cierto es que son dos hechos históricos diferentes, aunque ambas partes llevaron a través de la propaganda del terror la crisis de octubre a su punto límite sin alcanzar la confrontación bélica. Ahora nos encontramos en una guerra real y -aunque no se quiera reconocerlo todavía- su nombre es, Tercera Guerra Mundial, con consecuencias desastrosas, incluyendo exterminio, destrucción irracional de infraestructuras civiles y críticas y un proceso inflacionario que nos arrastra a un trance económico impredecible…”
A Putin no le bastó con el gas natural como elemento de guerra; ahora, es granos para acelerar aún más el desastre económico.
(GERMAN & CO)
El economista estrella Nouriel Roubini sobre las crisis globales "La tercera guerra mundial ya ha comenzado efectivamente".
Calentamiento global, guerra e inflación: El mundo parece estar actualmente en un estado perpetuo de crisis. En una entrevista, el profeta del colapso Nouriel Roubini identifica 10 "megamenazas" a las que nos enfrentamos y cómo las está afrontando.
(Spiegel)
Entrevista realizada por Tim Bartz y David Böcking
Spiegel.com
28.10.2022, 13.53 Uhr
Sobre Nouriel Roubini
Nouriel Roubini, nacido en 1958, es uno de los economistas más conocidos del mundo y un notorio pesimista: El profesor emérito de la Escuela de Negocios Stern de la Universidad de Nueva York predijo la crisis financiera de 2008, así como el desplome de la economía mundial justo al comienzo de la crisis coronaria. Creció en Turquía, Irán, Israel e Italia, y ahora es ciudadano estadounidense.
DER SPIEGEL: Profesor Roubini, no le gusta su apodo "Dr. Doom". En su lugar, le gustaría que le llamaran "Dr. Realista". Pero en su nuevo libro, usted describe "diez megamenazas" que ponen en peligro nuestro futuro. No hay nada más sombrío que eso.
Roubini: Las amenazas sobre las que escribo son reales, nadie lo negaría. Crecí en Italia en los años 60 y 70. Por aquel entonces, nunca me preocupó una guerra entre grandes potencias o un invierno nuclear, ya que había distensión entre la Unión Soviética y Occidente. Nunca oí las palabras cambio climático o pandemia mundial. Y a nadie le preocupaba que los robots se hicieran con la mayoría de los puestos de trabajo. Teníamos un comercio más libre y la globalización, vivíamos en democracias estables, aunque no fueran perfectas. La deuda era muy baja, la población no estaba sobreenvejecida, no había pasivos no financiados de los sistemas de pensiones y de salud. Ese es el mundo en el que crecí. Y ahora tengo que preocuparme por todas estas cosas - y también lo hace todo el mundo.
DER SPIEGEL: ¿Pero lo hacen? ¿O se siente usted como una voz que clama en el desierto?
Roubini: Estuve en Washington en la reunión del FMI. El historiador económico Niall Ferguson dijo en un discurso allí que tendríamos suerte si tuviéramos una crisis económica como en la década de 1970, y no una guerra como en la década de 1940. Los asesores de seguridad nacional estaban preocupados por la posibilidad de que la OTAN se involucrara en la guerra entre Rusia y Ucrania y que Irán e Israel estuvieran en curso de colisión. Y esta misma mañana he leído que la administración Biden espera que China ataque a Taiwán más pronto que tarde. Sinceramente, la Tercera Guerra Mundial ya ha comenzado efectivamente, ciertamente en Ucrania y en el ciberespacio.
DER SPIEGEL: Los políticos parecen abrumados por la simultaneidad de muchas crisis importantes. ¿Qué prioridades deberían establecer?
Roubini: Por supuesto, deben ocuparse de Rusia y Ucrania antes de ocuparse de Irán e Israel o China. Pero los responsables políticos también deberían pensar en la inflación y en las recesiones, es decir, en la estanflación. La eurozona ya está en recesión, y creo que será larga y fea. El Reino Unido está aún peor. La pandemia parece contenida, pero pronto podrían surgir nuevas variantes de COVID. Y el cambio climático es un desastre en cámara lenta que se está acelerando. Para cada una de las 10 amenazas que describo en mi libro, puedo darle 10 ejemplos que están ocurriendo mientras hablamos hoy, no en un futuro lejano. ¿Quiere uno sobre el cambio climático?
DER SPIEGEL: Si es necesario.
Roubini: Este verano ha habido sequías en todo el mundo, incluso en Estados Unidos. Cerca de Las Vegas, la sequía es tan grave que los cuerpos de los mafiosos de los años 50 han aparecido en los lagos secos. En California, los agricultores están vendiendo sus derechos de agua porque es más rentable que cultivar cualquier cosa. Y en Florida, ya no se pueden conseguir seguros para las casas de la costa. La mitad de los estadounidenses tendrán que acabar trasladándose al Medio Oeste o a Canadá. Eso es ciencia, no especulación.
DER SPIEGEL: Otra amenaza que usted describe es que Estados Unidos podría presionar a Europa para que limite sus relaciones comerciales con China a fin de no poner en peligro la presencia militar estadounidense en el continente. ¿Qué tan lejos estamos de ese escenario?
Roubini: Ya está ocurriendo. Estados Unidos acaba de aprobar una nueva normativa que prohíbe la exportación de semiconductores a empresas chinas para la IA o la computación cuántica o para uso militar. A los europeos les gustaría seguir haciendo negocios con Estados Unidos y China, pero no será posible por cuestiones de seguridad nacional. Comercio, finanzas, tecnología, internet: Todo se dividirá en dos.
DER SPIEGEL: En Alemania hay ahora mismo una disputa sobre si se deben vender partes del puerto de Hamburgo a la empresa estatal china Cosco. ¿Cuál sería su consejo?
Roubini: Hay que pensar en cuál es el objetivo de ese acuerdo. Alemania ya ha cometido un gran error al depender de la energía de Rusia. China, por supuesto, no va a apoderarse militarmente de los puertos alemanes, como podría hacerlo en Asia y África. Pero el único argumento económico para este tipo de acuerdo sería que podríamos contraatacar una vez que las fábricas europeas sean tomadas en China. Por lo demás, no es una idea muy inteligente.
DER SPIEGEL: Usted advierte que Rusia y China están intentando construir una alternativa al dólar y al sistema SWIFT. Pero los dos países han fracasado hasta ahora.
Roubini: No se trata sólo de los sistemas de pago. China está recorriendo el mundo vendiendo tecnologías 5G subvencionadas que pueden utilizarse para espiar. Le pregunté al presidente de un país africano por qué obtiene la tecnología 5G de China y no de Occidente. Me dijo, somos un país pequeño, así que alguien nos espiará de todos modos. Entonces, mejor tomar la tecnología china, es más barata. China está aumentando su poder económico, financiero y comercial en muchas partes del mundo.
DER SPIEGEL: ¿Pero el renminbi chino sustituirá realmente al dólar a largo plazo?
Roubini: Llevará tiempo, pero los chinos son buenos pensando a largo plazo. Han sugerido a los saudíes que pongan precio y cobren el petróleo que les venden en renminbi. Y tienen sistemas de pago más sofisticados que nadie en el mundo. Alipay y WeChat pay son utilizados por mil millones de chinos cada día para miles de millones de transacciones. En París, ya se puede comprar en Louis Vuitton con WeChat pay.
DER SPIEGEL: En los años 70 también tuvimos una crisis energética, una alta inflación y un crecimiento estancado, la llamada estanflación. ¿Estamos viviendo algo similar ahora?
Roubini: Hoy es peor. Entonces no teníamos tanta deuda pública y privada como hoy. Si los bancos centrales suben ahora los tipos de interés para luchar contra la inflación, esto provocará la quiebra de muchas empresas "zombis", bancos en la sombra e instituciones gubernamentales. Además, la crisis del petróleo fue causada por unos cuantos choques geopolíticos entonces, hoy hay más. Y sólo imagine el impacto de un ataque chino a Taiwán, que produce el 50% de todos los semiconductores del mundo, y el 80% de los de alta gama. Eso sería una conmoción mundial. Hoy dependemos más de los semiconductores que del petróleo.
DER SPIEGEL: Usted es muy crítico con los banqueros centrales y su política monetaria laxa. ¿Hay algún banco central que lo haga bien hoy en día?
Roubini: Están condenados de cualquier manera. O bien combaten la inflación con tipos de interés altos y provocan un duro aterrizaje para la economía real y los mercados financieros. O se acobardan y parpadean, no suben los tipos y la inflación sigue aumentando. Creo que la Fed y el BCE parpadearán, como ya lo ha hecho el Banco de Inglaterra.
Por otro lado, las altas tasas de inflación también pueden ser útiles porque simplemente inflan la deuda.
Roubini: Sí, pero también encarecen la nueva deuda. Porque cuando la inflación aumenta, los prestamistas cobran tipos de interés más altos. Un ejemplo: Si la inflación pasa del 2 al 6 por ciento, los tipos de interés de los bonos del gobierno de EE.UU. tendrán que pasar del 4 al 8 por ciento para seguir ofreciendo el mismo rendimiento; y los costes de los préstamos privados para las hipotecas y los préstamos a las empresas serán aún más altos. Esto hace que sea mucho más caro para muchas empresas, porque tienen que ofrecer tipos de interés mucho más altos que los de los bonos del Estado, que se consideran seguros. Tenemos tanta deuda en este momento que algo así podría conducir a un colapso económico, financiero y monetario total. Y ni siquiera estamos hablando de una hiperinflación como en la República de Weimar, sino de una inflación de un solo dígito.
DER SPIEGEL: El riesgo principal que describe en su libro es el cambio climático. ¿No es secundario el aumento de la deuda ante las posibles consecuencias de una catástrofe climática?
Roubini: Tenemos que preocuparnos por todo al mismo tiempo, ya que todas estas megamenazas están interconectadas. Un ejemplo: En este momento, no hay forma de reducir significativamente las emisiones de CO2 sin contraer la economía. Y aunque en 2020 se produjo la peor recesión de los últimos 60 años, las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero sólo se redujeron en un 9%. Pero sin un fuerte crecimiento económico, no podremos resolver el problema de la deuda. Así que tenemos que encontrar formas de crecer sin emisiones.
DER SPIEGEL: Teniendo en cuenta todas estas crisis paralelas: ¿Cómo valora las posibilidades de que la democracia sobreviva frente a sistemas autoritarios como en China o Rusia?
Roubini: Estoy preocupado. Las democracias son frágiles cuando hay grandes choques. Entonces siempre hay algún machista que dice "yo salvaré el país" y que echa la culpa de todo a los extranjeros. Eso es exactamente lo que hizo Putin con Ucrania. Erdogan podría hacer lo mismo con Grecia el año que viene y tratar de crear una crisis porque, de lo contrario, podría perder las elecciones. Si Donald Trump se presenta de nuevo y pierde las elecciones, podría llamar abiertamente a los supremacistas blancos para que asalten el Capitolio esta vez. Podríamos ver violencia y una verdadera guerra civil en EE.UU. En Alemania, las cosas parecen relativamente buenas por ahora. Pero, ¿qué ocurrirá si las cosas van mal económicamente y la gente vota más a la oposición de derechas?
DER SPIEGEL. Usted se ha dado a conocer no sólo como el profeta del choque, sino también como un animal de la fiesta. ¿Sigue teniendo ganas de fiesta estos días?
Roubini: Siempre he sido anfitrión de salones de arte, cultura y libros, no sólo de eventos sociales. Y durante la pandemia redescubrí mis raíces judías. Hoy prefiero invitar a 20 personas a una cena de Shabat con una bonita ceremonia y música en directo. O hacemos un evento nocturno en el que hago una pregunta seria y todos tienen que responder. Conversaciones profundas sobre la vida y el mundo en general, no charlas. Debemos disfrutar de la vida, pero también aportar nuestro granito de arena para salvar el mundo.
DER SPIEGEL: ¿Qué quiere decir?
Roubini: Todas nuestras huellas de carbono son demasiado grandes. Sólo una parte importante de todas las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero procede de la ganadería. Por eso me hice pescatariano y dejé de comer carne, incluido el pollo.
DER SPIEGEL: Usted era famoso por estar de viaje durante tres cuartas partes del año.
Roubini: Sigo viajando sin parar. Pero le diré una cosa: me encanta Nueva York. Durante la pandemia, no huí a los Hamptons o a Miami como muchos otros. Me quedé aquí, vi las manifestaciones de Black Lives Matter, me ofrecí para ayudar a los sin techo. Vi a diario la desesperación de muchos amigos artistas que perdieron sus trabajos e ingresos y no podían pagar el alquiler. E incluso si hay otro huracán como el de Sandy en Nueva York, que podría llevar a la violencia y al caos, me quedaré. Tenemos que afrontar el mundo tal y como es. Incluso si hay una confrontación nuclear. Porque entonces la primera bomba caería sobre Nueva York y la siguiente sobre Moscú.
The megalomania of Gerhard Schroeder, which made him sell his soul for a few rubles more, should have been brought to account in the International Court of Justice long ago.
It wasn't enough for Putin with natural gas as a war factor; now it's the barley to accelerate the economic disaster even more.
“Some political analysts make the incorrect comparison of the current situation with that of the October missile crisis. In an escalation of threats and propaganda, both sides pushed the 1962 crisis to its breaking point. Now we are in a real war—even if you do not want to recognise it yet— it is called World War III, with disastrous consequences for humanity, including extermination, devastation, and inflationary chaos.”
It was not enough for Putin with natural gas as an element of war; now, it is grains to accelerate the economic disaster even more.
Star Economist Nouriel Roubini on the Global Crises"World War III Has Already Effectively Begun"
Global warming, war and inflation: The world seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis at the moment. In an interview, crash prophet Nouriel Roubini identifies 10 "megathreats" we are facing and how he is dealing with them.
Interview Conducted By Tim Bartz und David Böcking
Spiegel.com
28.10.2022, 13.53 Uhr
About Nouriel Roubini
Nouriel Roubini, born in 1958, is one of the world's most well-known economists and a notorious pessimist: The professor emeritus at New York University's Stern School of Business predicted the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the crash of the global economy right at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. He grew up in Turkey, Iran, Israel and Italy, and is now a U.S. citizen.
DER SPIEGEL: Professor Roubini, you don't like your nickname "Dr. Doom." Instead you would like to be called "Dr. Realist." But in your new book, you describe "ten megathreats" that endanger our future. It doesn’t get much gloomier than that.
Roubini: The threats I write about are real – no one would deny that. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, I never worried about a war between great powers or a nuclear winter, as we had détente between the Soviet Union and the West. I never heard the words climate change or global pandemic. And no one worried about robots taking over most jobs. We had freer trade and globalization, we lived in stable democracies, even if they were not perfect. Debt was very low, the population wasn’t over-aged, there were no unfunded liabilities from the pension and health care systems. That's the world I grew up in. And now I have to worry about all these things – and so does everyone else.
DER SPIEGEL: But do they? Or do you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness?
Roubini: I was in Washington at the IMF meeting. The economic historian Niall Ferguson said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s – and not a war like in the 1940s. National security advisers were worried about NATO getting involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine and Iran and Israel being on a collision course. And just this morning, I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later. Honestly, World War III has already effectively begun, certainly in Ukraine and cyberspace.
DER SPIEGEL: Politicians seem overwhelmed by the simultaneity of many major crises. What priorities should they set?
Roubini: Of course, they must take care of Russia and Ukraine before they take care of Iran and Israel or China. But policymakers should also think about inflation and recessions, i.e. stagflation. The eurozone is already in a recession, and I think it will be long and ugly. The United Kingdom is even worse. The pandemic seems contained, but new COVID variants could emerge soon. And climate change is a slow-motion disaster that is accelerating. For each of the 10 threats I describe in my book, I can give you 10 examples that are happening as we speak today, not in the distant future. Do you want one on climate change?
DER SPIEGEL: If you must.
Roubini: This summer, there have been droughts all over the world, including in the United States. Near Las Vegas, the drought is so bad that bodies of mobsters from the 1950s have surfaced in the dried-up lakes. In California, farmers are now selling their water rights because it's more profitable than growing anything. And in Florida, you can't get insurance for houses on the coast anymore. Half of Americans will have to eventually move to the Midwest or Canada. That's science, not speculation.
DER SPIEGEL: Another threat you describe is that the U.S. could pressure Europe to limit its business relations with China in order to not endanger the U.S. military presence on the continent. How far are we from that scenario?
Roubini: It is already happening. The U.S. has just passed new regulations banning the export of semiconductors to Chinese companies for AI or quantum computing or military use. Europeans would like to continue doing business with the U.S. and China, but it won't be possible because of national security issues. Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two.
DER SPIEGEL: In Germany, there is a dispute right now about whether parts of the Port of Hamburg should be sold to the Chinese state-owned company Cosco. What would your advice be?
Roubini: You have to think about what the purpose of such a deal is. Germany has already made a big mistake by relying on energy from Russia. China, of course, is not going to take over German ports militarily, as it could in Asia and Africa. But the only economic argument for this kind of agreement would be that we could strike back once European factories are seized in China. Otherwise, it's not a very smart idea.
DER SPIEGEL: You warn that Russia and China are trying to build an alternative to the dollar and the SWIFT system. But the two countries have failed so far.
Roubini: It's not just about payment systems. China is going around the world selling subsidized 5G technologies that can be used for spying. I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it's cheaper. China is growing its economic, financial and trading power in many parts of the world.
DER SPIEGEL: But will the Chinese renminbi really replace the dollar in the long run?
Roubini: It will take time, but the Chinese are good at thinking long term. They have suggested to the Saudis that they price and charge for the oil they sell them in renminbi. And they have more sophisticated payment systems than anyone else in the world. Alipay and WeChat pay are used by a billion Chinese every day for billions of transactions. In Paris, you can already shop at Louis Vuitton with WeChat pay.
DER SPIEGEL: In the 1970s, we also had an energy crisis, high inflation and stagnant growth, so-called stagflation. Are we experiencing something similar now?
Roubini: It is worse today. Back then, we didn't have as much public and private debt as we do today. If central banks raise interest rates now to fight inflation, it will lead to the bankruptcy of many »zombie« companies, shadow banks and government institutions. Besides, the oil crisis was caused by a few geopolitical shocks then, there are more today. And just imagine the impact of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, which produces 50 percent of all semiconductors in the world, and 80 percent of the high-end ones. That would be a global shock. We depend more on semiconductors today than on oil.
DER SPIEGEL: You are very critical of central bankers and their lax monetary policy. Is there any central bank that gets it right these days?
Roubini: They are damned either way. Either they fight inflation with high policy rates and cause a hard landing for the real economy and the financial markets. Or they wimp out and blink, don't raise rates and inflation keeps rising. I think the Fed and the ECB will blink – as the Bank of England has already done.
DER SPIEGEL: On the other hand, high inflation rates can also be helpful because they simply inflate the debt away.
Roubini: Yes, but they also make new debt more expensive. Because when inflation rises, lenders charge higher interest rates. One example: If inflation goes from 2 to 6 percent, then U.S. government bond rates will have to go from 4 to 8 percent to keep bringing the same yield; and private borrowing costs for mortgages and business loans will be even higher. This makes it much more expensive for many companies, because they have to offer much higher interest rates than government bonds, which are considered safe. We have so much debt right now that something like this could lead to a total economic, financial and monetary collapse. And we're not even talking about hyperinflation like in the Weimar Republic, just single digit inflation.
DER SPIEGEL: The overriding risk you describe in your book is climate change. Isn't rising debt secondary in light of the possible consequences of a climate catastrophe?
Roubini: We have to worry about everything at the same time, as all these megathreats are interconnected. One example: Right now, there is no way to significantly reduce CO2 emissions without shrinking the economy. And even though 2020 was the worst recession in 60 years, green house gas emissions only fell by 9 percent. But without strong economic growth, we will not be able to solve the debt problem. So, we have to find ways to grow without emissions.
DER SPIEGEL: Given all these parallel crises: How do you assess the chances of democracy surviving against authoritarian systems like in China or Russia?
Roubini: I am worried. Democracies are fragile when there are big shocks. There is always some macho man then who says »I will save the country« and who blames everything on the foreigners. That's exactly what Putin did with Ukraine. Erdogan could do the same thing with Greece next year and try to create a crisis because otherwise he might lose the election. If Donald Trump runs again and loses the election, he could openly call on white supremacists to storm the Capitol this time. We could see violence and a real civil war in the U.S. In Germany, things look comparatively good for now. But what happens if things go wrong economically and people vote more for the right-wing opposition?
DER SPIEGEL. You have become known not only as the crash prophet, but also as a party animal. Do you still feel like partying these days?
Roubini: I always hosted art, culture, and book salons, not just social events. And during the pandemic I rediscovered my Jewish roots. Today, I prefer to invite 20 people to a Shabbat dinner with a nice ceremony and live music. Or we do an evening event where I ask a serious question and everyone has to answer. Deep conversations about life and the world at large, not chitchat. We should enjoy life, but also do our bit to save the world.
DER SPIEGEL: What do you mean?
Roubini: All of our carbon footprints are much too big. A significant part of all greenhouse gas emissions alone come from livestock farming. That's why I became a pescatarian and gave up on meat, including chicken.
DER SPIEGEL: You used to be famous for being on the road for three-quarters of the year.
Roubini: I still do travel nonstop. But I will tell you one thing: I love New York. During the pandemic, I didn't flee to the Hamptons or Miami like many others. I stayed here, I saw the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I volunteered to help the homeless. I saw daily the desperation of many artist friends who lost jobs and incomes and couldn’t afford their rent. And even if there is another hurricane like Sandy in New York that could lead to violence and chaos, I will stay. We have to face the world as it is. Even if there is a nuclear confrontation. Because then the first bomb would fall on New York and the next one on Moscow.
Vad Gerhard Schröders melagonomani gjorde för att sälja sin själ för några rubel mer..., borde ha ställts till svars i Internationella domstolen för länge sedan.
Det räckte inte för Putin med naturgas som en krigsfaktor; nu är det korn för att påskynda den ekonomiska katastrofen ännu mer.
“Vissa gör en felaktig jämförelse med missilkrisen i oktober. Krisen 1962 hotade båda sidor. Vi befinner oss nu i ett tredje världskrig med katastrofala konsekvenser för mänskligheten: —-utrotning, förödelse och inflationärt kaos—-.”
Det räckte inte för Putin med naturgas som krigsämne; nu är det —- spannmål—- som ska påskynda den ekonomiska katastrofen ännu mer…
Star Economist Nouriel Roubini on the Global Crises"World War III Has Already Effectively Begun"
Global warming, war and inflation: The world seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis at the moment. In an interview, crash prophet Nouriel Roubini identifies 10 "megathreats" we are facing and how he is dealing with them.
Interview Conducted By Tim Bartz und David Böcking
28.10.2022, 13.53 Uhr
About Nouriel Roubini
Nouriel Roubini, born in 1958, is one of the world's most well-known economists and a notorious pessimist: The professor emeritus at New York University's Stern School of Business predicted the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the crash of the global economy right at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. He grew up in Turkey, Iran, Israel and Italy, and is now a U.S. citizen.
DER SPIEGEL: Professor Roubini, you don't like your nickname "Dr. Doom." Instead you would like to be called "Dr. Realist." But in your new book, you describe "ten megathreats" that endanger our future. It doesn’t get much gloomier than that.
Roubini: The threats I write about are real – no one would deny that. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, I never worried about a war between great powers or a nuclear winter, as we had détente between the Soviet Union and the West. I never heard the words climate change or global pandemic. And no one worried about robots taking over most jobs. We had freer trade and globalization, we lived in stable democracies, even if they were not perfect. Debt was very low, the population wasn’t over-aged, there were no unfunded liabilities from the pension and health care systems. That's the world I grew up in. And now I have to worry about all these things – and so does everyone else.
DER SPIEGEL: But do they? Or do you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness?
Roubini: I was in Washington at the IMF meeting. The economic historian Niall Ferguson said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s – and not a war like in the 1940s. National security advisers were worried about NATO getting involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine and Iran and Israel being on a collision course. And just this morning, I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later. Honestly, World War III has already effectively begun, certainly in Ukraine and cyberspace.
DER SPIEGEL: Politicians seem overwhelmed by the simultaneity of many major crises. What priorities should they set?
Roubini: Of course, they must take care of Russia and Ukraine before they take care of Iran and Israel or China. But policymakers should also think about inflation and recessions, i.e. stagflation. The eurozone is already in a recession, and I think it will be long and ugly. The United Kingdom is even worse. The pandemic seems contained, but new COVID variants could emerge soon. And climate change is a slow-motion disaster that is accelerating. For each of the 10 threats I describe in my book, I can give you 10 examples that are happening as we speak today, not in the distant future. Do you want one on climate change?
DER SPIEGEL: If you must.
Roubini: This summer, there have been droughts all over the world, including in the United States. Near Las Vegas, the drought is so bad that bodies of mobsters from the 1950s have surfaced in the dried-up lakes. In California, farmers are now selling their water rights because it's more profitable than growing anything. And in Florida, you can't get insurance for houses on the coast anymore. Half of Americans will have to eventually move to the Midwest or Canada. That's science, not speculation.
DER SPIEGEL: Another threat you describe is that the U.S. could pressure Europe to limit its business relations with China in order to not endanger the U.S. military presence on the continent. How far are we from that scenario?
Roubini: It is already happening. The U.S. has just passed new regulations banning the export of semiconductors to Chinese companies for AI or quantum computing or military use. Europeans would like to continue doing business with the U.S. and China, but it won't be possible because of national security issues. Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two.
DER SPIEGEL: In Germany, there is a dispute right now about whether parts of the Port of Hamburg should be sold to the Chinese state-owned company Cosco. What would your advice be?
Roubini: You have to think about what the purpose of such a deal is. Germany has already made a big mistake by relying on energy from Russia. China, of course, is not going to take over German ports militarily, as it could in Asia and Africa. But the only economic argument for this kind of agreement would be that we could strike back once European factories are seized in China. Otherwise, it's not a very smart idea.
DER SPIEGEL: You warn that Russia and China are trying to build an alternative to the dollar and the SWIFT system. But the two countries have failed so far.
Roubini: It's not just about payment systems. China is going around the world selling subsidized 5G technologies that can be used for spying. I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it's cheaper. China is growing its economic, financial and trading power in many parts of the world.
DER SPIEGEL: But will the Chinese renminbi really replace the dollar in the long run?
Roubini: It will take time, but the Chinese are good at thinking long term. They have suggested to the Saudis that they price and charge for the oil they sell them in renminbi. And they have more sophisticated payment systems than anyone else in the world. Alipay and WeChat pay are used by a billion Chinese every day for billions of transactions. In Paris, you can already shop at Louis Vuitton with WeChat pay.
DER SPIEGEL: In the 1970s, we also had an energy crisis, high inflation and stagnant growth, so-called stagflation. Are we experiencing something similar now?
Roubini: It is worse today. Back then, we didn't have as much public and private debt as we do today. If central banks raise interest rates now to fight inflation, it will lead to the bankruptcy of many »zombie« companies, shadow banks and government institutions. Besides, the oil crisis was caused by a few geopolitical shocks then, there are more today. And just imagine the impact of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, which produces 50 percent of all semiconductors in the world, and 80 percent of the high-end ones. That would be a global shock. We depend more on semiconductors today than on oil.
DER SPIEGEL: You are very critical of central bankers and their lax monetary policy. Is there any central bank that gets it right these days?
Roubini: They are damned either way. Either they fight inflation with high policy rates and cause a hard landing for the real economy and the financial markets. Or they wimp out and blink, don't raise rates and inflation keeps rising. I think the Fed and the ECB will blink – as the Bank of England has already done.
DER SPIEGEL: On the other hand, high inflation rates can also be helpful because they simply inflate the debt away.
Roubini: Yes, but they also make new debt more expensive. Because when inflation rises, lenders charge higher interest rates. One example: If inflation goes from 2 to 6 percent, then U.S. government bond rates will have to go from 4 to 8 percent to keep bringing the same yield; and private borrowing costs for mortgages and business loans will be even higher. This makes it much more expensive for many companies, because they have to offer much higher interest rates than government bonds, which are considered safe. We have so much debt right now that something like this could lead to a total economic, financial and monetary collapse. And we're not even talking about hyperinflation like in the Weimar Republic, just single digit inflation.
DER SPIEGEL: The overriding risk you describe in your book is climate change. Isn't rising debt secondary in light of the possible consequences of a climate catastrophe?
Roubini: We have to worry about everything at the same time, as all these megathreats are interconnected. One example: Right now, there is no way to significantly reduce CO2 emissions without shrinking the economy. And even though 2020 was the worst recession in 60 years, green house gas emissions only fell by 9 percent. But without strong economic growth, we will not be able to solve the debt problem. So, we have to find ways to grow without emissions.
DER SPIEGEL: Given all these parallel crises: How do you assess the chances of democracy surviving against authoritarian systems like in China or Russia?
Roubini: I am worried. Democracies are fragile when there are big shocks. There is always some macho man then who says »I will save the country« and who blames everything on the foreigners. That's exactly what Putin did with Ukraine. Erdogan could do the same thing with Greece next year and try to create a crisis because otherwise he might lose the election. If Donald Trump runs again and loses the election, he could openly call on white supremacists to storm the Capitol this time. We could see violence and a real civil war in the U.S. In Germany, things look comparatively good for now. But what happens if things go wrong economically and people vote more for the right-wing opposition?
DER SPIEGEL. You have become known not only as the crash prophet, but also as a party animal. Do you still feel like partying these days?
Roubini: I always hosted art, culture, and book salons, not just social events. And during the pandemic I rediscovered my Jewish roots. Today, I prefer to invite 20 people to a Shabbat dinner with a nice ceremony and live music. Or we do an evening event where I ask a serious question and everyone has to answer. Deep conversations about life and the world at large, not chitchat. We should enjoy life, but also do our bit to save the world.
DER SPIEGEL: What do you mean?
Roubini: All of our carbon footprints are much too big. A significant part of all greenhouse gas emissions alone come from livestock farming. That's why I became a pescatarian and gave up on meat, including chicken.
DER SPIEGEL: You used to be famous for being on the road for three-quarters of the year.
Roubini: I still do travel nonstop. But I will tell you one thing: I love New York. During the pandemic, I didn't flee to the Hamptons or Miami like many others. I stayed here, I saw the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I volunteered to help the homeless. I saw daily the desperation of many artist friends who lost jobs and incomes and couldn’t afford their rent. And even if there is another hurricane like Sandy in New York that could lead to violence and chaos, I will stay. We have to face the world as it is. Even if there is a nuclear confrontation. Because then the first bomb would fall on New York and the next one on Moscow.
Rysslands "smutsiga bomber”
En rysk talkshowvärd stängdes av för att ha föreslagit att ukrainska barn borde dränkas eller brännas i sina hem. (NYT)
“Rysslands ockupationsadministration drar sig tillbaka från Kherson, men Moskvas militära styrkor förbereder sig för att stanna kvar och slåss, säger en högt uppsatt ukrainsk tjänsteman.”
Rysslands "smutsiga bomber”
Västvärlden varnar för att Ryssland kan söka en förevändning för att trappa upp kriget.
Av Carole Landry
New York Times
24 oktober 2022
Brittney Griner, den amerikanska basketstjärnan som sitter fängslad i Ryssland, förväntar sig inte att "några mirakel ska ske" vid en överklagandeförhandling i morgon, sade hennes advokat.
En grupp på 30 demokratiska lagstiftare uppmanar president Biden att drastiskt ändra sin Ukrainastrategi och driva direkta förhandlingar med Ryssland, rapporterar Washington Post.
En rysk talkshowvärd stängdes av för att ha föreslagit att ukrainska barn borde dränkas eller brännas i sina hem.
Rysslands ockupationsadministration drar sig tillbaka från Kherson, men Moskvas militära styrkor förbereder sig för att stanna kvar och slåss, säger en högt uppsatt ukrainsk tjänsteman.
Rysslands gambit med den "smutsiga bomben"
Efter månader av liten kommunikation mellan Ryssland och västvärlden blev det under helgen en uppsjö av telefonsamtal mellan Moskva och västliga huvudstäder, då Ryssland hävdade att Ukraina planerade att utlösa en "smutsig bomb" - en konventionell sprängladdning som är spetsad med radioaktivt material - på sitt eget territorium.
Ukraina förnekade kraftigt anklagelserna, och USA och dess allierade utfärdade ett sällsynt gemensamt uttalande där de sade att påståendena var en förevändning som Ryssland hade hittat på för att trappa upp kriget. En explosion av en smutsig bomb skulle kunna ge Moskva en ursäkt för att använda - eller hota med att använda - ett taktiskt kärnvapen som svar.
Institute for the Study of War, en forskningsgrupp baserad i Washington, drog slutsatsen att Ryssland "sannolikt inte förbereder en överhängande attack med smutsiga bomber under falsk flagg". Istället, sade gruppen, kan Ryssland försöka "bromsa eller avbryta västvärldens militära stöd till Ukraina och möjligen försvaga Nato-alliansen".
Åtta månader in i konflikten förlorar Ryssland stadigt territorium och president Vladimir Putin möter en växande oro på hemmaplan. Ryssland kommer sannolikt att förlora västra Kherson i slutet av året, enligt institutet.
Krigets tillstånd
Rädsla för en upptrappning: Rysslands president Vladimir V. Putin upprepade det ogrundade påståendet att Ukraina förberedde sig på att spränga en så kallad smutsig bomb, samtidigt som oron ökade i väst om att Kreml sökte en förevändning för att trappa upp kriget.
Den hotande kampen om Kherson: Medan de ryska styrkorna plundrar den ockuperade hamnstaden i söder och pressar invånarna att lämna den till Ryssland, har en närliggande vattenkraftsdamm utvecklats till en viktig länk i det som håller på att bli platsen för nästa stora slag i Ukraina.
En koalition under press: President Biden står inför nya utmaningar när det gäller att hålla ihop den multinationella koalition som stöder Ukraina och som har visat tecken på att brista när det amerikanska mellanårsvalet närmar sig och en kall europeisk vinter.
Anti-dronekrigföring: Sedan Ryssland de senaste veckorna började terrorisera ukrainska städer med iranska drönare har Ukraina fokuserat på en intensiv strategi för att bekämpa drönare. Den hastigt sammansatta insatsen har varit överraskande framgångsrik.
I sitt uttalande sade Storbritannien, Frankrike och USA följande: "Världen skulle genomskåda varje försök att använda detta påstående som en förevändning för eskalering. Vi förkastar vidare varje förevändning för upptrappning från Rysslands sida".
I dag verkade Ryssland dubbla sina påståenden, och ryska nyhetsmedier citerade chefen för försvarsministeriets strålnings-, kemiska och biologiska försvarsstyrkor, generallöjtnant Igor Kirillov, för att säga att Ukraina planerade att genomföra en operation under falsk flagg för att ge Ryssland skulden för att ha använt ett massförstörelsevapen.
El gambito de la "bomba sucia" de Rusia
Un presentador de un programa de entrevistas ruso fue suspendido por sugerir que los niños ucranianos deberían ser ahogados o quemados en sus casas.
NYT
“Las autoridades de ocupación rusa se retiran de Jersón, pero las fuerzas militares de Moscú se preparan para quedarse y luchar, dijo un alto funcionario ucraniano.”
Occidente advierte que Rusia puede estar buscando un pretexto para intensificar la guerra.
Por Carole Landry
24 de octubre de 2022
NYT
Las autoridades de ocupación rusa se retiran de Jersón, pero las fuerzas militares de Moscú se preparan para quedarse y luchar, dijo un alto funcionario ucraniano.
Un grupo de 30 legisladores demócratas está instando al presidente Biden a cambiar drásticamente su estrategia en Ucrania y a buscar negociaciones directas con Rusia, informó The Washington Post.
Un presentador de un programa de entrevistas ruso fue suspendido por sugerir que los niños ucranianos deberían ser ahogados o quemados en sus casas.
Brittney Griner, la estrella del baloncesto estadounidense encarcelada en Rusia no espera que ocurra "ningún milagro" en una audiencia de apelación mañana, dijo su abogado.
El gambito de la "bomba sucia" de Rusia
Tras meses de escasa comunicación entre Rusia y Occidente, el fin de semana se produjo un aluvión de llamadas telefónicas entre Moscú y las capitales occidentales, cuando Rusia afirmó que Ucrania planeaba hacer estallar una "bomba sucia" -un artefacto explosivo convencional aderezado con material radiactivo- en su propio territorio.
Ucrania negó con vehemencia la acusación, y Estados Unidos y sus aliados emitieron una rara declaración conjunta en la que decían que las afirmaciones eran un pretexto que Rusia había inventado para intensificar la guerra. La explosión de una bomba sucia podría dar a Moscú una excusa para utilizar -o amenazar con utilizar- un arma nuclear táctica como respuesta.
El Instituto para el Estudio de la Guerra, un grupo de investigación con sede en Washington, concluyó que era "improbable que Rusia estuviera preparando un ataque inminente de falsa bandera con una bomba sucia". En cambio, el grupo dijo que podría estar tratando de "frenar o suspender la ayuda militar occidental a Ucrania y posiblemente debilitar la alianza de la OTAN".
Tras ocho meses de conflicto, Rusia está perdiendo territorio de forma constante y el presidente Vladimir Putin se enfrenta a un creciente malestar en casa. Es probable que Rusia pierda la parte occidental de Kherson para finales de año, según el instituto.
El estado de la guerra
Temor a una escalada: El presidente de Rusia, Vladimir V. Putin, repitió la afirmación infundada de que Ucrania se estaba preparando para hacer estallar una supuesta bomba sucia, mientras aumentaba la preocupación en Occidente de que el Kremlin estuviera buscando un pretexto para intensificar la guerra.
La inminente lucha por Jerson: mientras las fuerzas rusas saquean la ciudad portuaria del sur ocupada y presionan a los residentes para que se marchen a Rusia, una presa hidroeléctrica cercana ha surgido como eje de lo que se perfila como el lugar de la próxima gran batalla en Ucrania.
Una coalición bajo presión: el presidente Biden se enfrenta a nuevos retos para mantener unida la coalición bipartidista y multinacional de apoyo a Ucrania, que ha dado muestras recientes de deshilacharse ante la proximidad de las elecciones de mitad de mandato en Estados Unidos y el frío invierno europeo.
Guerra contra los drones: desde que Rusia comenzó a aterrorizar a las ciudades ucranianas en las últimas semanas con drones de fabricación iraní, Ucrania se ha centrado en una intensa estrategia contra los drones. El esfuerzo apresurado ha tenido un éxito sorprendente.
En su declaración, Gran Bretaña, Francia y Estados Unidos dijeron: "El mundo vería a través de cualquier intento de utilizar esta acusación como pretexto para una escalada. Rechazamos además cualquier pretexto para una escalada por parte de Rusia".
Hoy, Rusia pareció redoblar sus afirmaciones, y los medios de comunicación rusos citaron al jefe de las fuerzas de defensa contra la radiación, la química y la biología del Ministerio de Defensa, el teniente general Igor Kirillov, diciendo que Ucrania estaba planeando llevar a cabo una operación de bandera falsa para culpar a Rusia de utilizar un arma de destrucción masiva.
News round-up Friday, 28 October 2022.
Beyond Catastrophe
A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
By David Wallace-Wells (NYT)
“Beyond Catastrophe
A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
By David Wallace-Wells”
Conclusion of the day's news:
Beyond CatastropheA New Climate Reality Is Coming Into ViewBy David Wallace-Wells
Oct. 26, 2022You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.
Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)
Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.
For decades, visions of possible climate futures have been anchored by, on the one hand, Pollyanna-like faith that normality would endure, and on the other, millenarian intuitions of an ecological end of days, during which perhaps billions of lives would be devastated or destroyed. More recently, these two stories have been mapped onto climate modeling: Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.
Genetically Modified Mosquitoes As rising temperatures force animals to migrate, vector-borne diseases like those caused by the yellow fever, dengue and Zika viruses will proliferate via mosquitoes. To stop the spread, the biotechnology company Oxitec has engineered a breed of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that produce only viable male offspring, which are nonbiting. These mosquitoes are intended to mate with wild populations and lead, ultimately, to the collapse of those populations. The company led its first pilot project in 2021, releasing approximately four million mosquitoes into the Florida Keys. Here, a scientist transports genetically modified mosquitoes to release them.
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.” Personally, I find myself returning to three sets of guideposts, which help map the landscape of possibility.
First, worst-case temperature scenarios that recently seemed plausible now look much less so, which is inarguably good news and, in a time of climate panic and despair, a truly underappreciated sign of genuine and world-shaping progress.
Second, and just as important, the likeliest futures still lie beyond thresholds long thought disastrous, marking a failure of global efforts to limit warming to “safe” levels. Through decades of only minimal action, we have squandered that opportunity. Perhaps even more concerning, the more we are learning about even relatively moderate levels of warming, the harsher and harder to navigate they seem. In a news release accompanying its report, the United Nations predicted that a world more than two degrees warmer would lead to “endless suffering.”
Third, humanity retains an enormous amount of control — over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through those assaults and disruptions. Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group.
The New World Take a visual tour of life after climate change.
It isn’t easy to process this picture very cleanly, in part because climate action remains an open question, in part because it is so hard to balance the scale of climate transformation against possible human response and in part because we can no longer so casually use those handy narrative anchors of apocalypse and normality. But in narrowing our range of expected climate futures, we’ve traded one set of uncertainties, about temperature rise, for another about politics and other human feedbacks. We know a lot more now about how much warming to expect, which makes it more possible to engineer a response. That response still begins with cutting emissions, but it is no longer reasonable to believe that it can end there. A politics of decarbonization is evolving into a politics beyond decarbonization, incorporating matters of adaptation and finance and justice (among other issues). If the fate of the world and the climate has long appeared to hinge on the project of decarbonization, a clearer path to two or three degrees of warming means that it also now depends on what is built on the other side. Which is to say: It depends on a new and more expansive climate politics.
“We live in a terrible world, and we live in a wonderful world,” Marvel says. “It’s a terrible world that’s more than a degree Celsius warmer. But also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost-effective and easier to deploy than I would’ve ever imagined. People are writing credible papers in scientific journals making the case that switching rapidly to renewable energy isn’t a net cost; it will be a net financial benefit,” she says with a head-shake of near-disbelief. “If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would’ve thought, wow, that’s a miracle.”
How did it happen? To begin with, the world started to shift away from coal.
In 2014, the energy researcher and podcast producer Justin Ritchie was a Ph.D. student wondering why many climate models were predicting that the 21st century would look like a coal boom. Everyone knew about the decades of coal-powered economic growth in China, but those working closely on the future of energy had already grown somewhat skeptical that the same model would be deployed across the developing world — and even more skeptical that the rich nations of the world would ever return to coal in a sustained way.
But that perspective was nowhere to be seen in the huge set of models, mixing economic and demographic and material assumptions about the trajectory of the future, which climate scientists used to project impacts later this century, including for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.). The most conspicuous example was an emissions pathway called RCP8.5, which required at least a fivefold growth of coal use over the course of the 21st century. Because it was the darkest available do-nothing path, RCP8.5 was reflexively called, in the scientific literature and by journalists covering it, “business as usual.” When Ritchie and his doctoral adviser published their research in Energy Economics in 2017, they chose a leading subtitle: “Are Cases of Vastly Expanded Future Coal Combustion Still Plausible?” The world’s current path appears to offer a quite simple answer: no.
Questions about the future course of coal had been circulating for years, often raised by the same people who would point out that projections for renewable energy kept also comically underestimating the growth of wind and solar power. But to a striking degree, broad skepticism about high-end emissions scenarios has come from a small handful of people who read Ritchie’s work and took to Twitter with it: Ritchie’s sometime co-author Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies and frequent Republican witness at congressional climate hearings; the outspoken British investor Michael Liebreich, who founded a clean-energy advisory group bought by Michael Bloomberg, and who spent a good deal of 2019 yelling on social media that “RCP8.5 is bollox”; and the more mild-mannered climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters, who together published a 2020 comment in Nature declaring that “the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading.” (I published a piece the previous year picking up the same bread crumbs.)
Adjustments to the input assumptions of energy models are perhaps not the sexiest signs of climate action, but Hausfather estimates that about half of our perceived progress has come from revising these trajectories downward, with the other half coming from technology, markets and public policy.
Let’s take technology first. Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside that insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been — a story almost as astonishing and perhaps as consequential as the invention within weeks and rollout within months of new mRNA vaccines to combat a global pandemic.
Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium-battery technology has fallen by more than 85 percent, the cost of wind power by more than 55 percent. The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas-station signs today advertising prices of under 50 cents a gallon.
The markets have taken notice. This year, investment in green energy surpassed that in fossil fuels, despite the scramble for gas and the “return to coal” prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a decade of declines, supply-chain issues have nudged up the cost of renewable manufacturing, but overall the trends are clear enough that you can read them without glasses: Globally, there are enough solar-panel factories being built to produce the necessary energy to limit warming to below two degrees, and in the United States, planned solar farms now exceed today’s total worldwide operating capacity. Liebreich has taken to speculating about a “renewable singularity,” beyond which the future of energy is utterly transformed.
The world looks almost as different for politics and policy. Five years ago, almost no one had heard of Greta Thunberg or the Fridays for Future school strikers, Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement. There wasn’t serious debate about the Green New Deal or the European Green Deal, or even whispers of Fit for 55 or the Inflation Reduction Act or the Chinese promise to peak emissions by 2030. There were climate-change skeptics in some very conspicuous positions of global power. Hardly any country in the world was talking seriously about eliminating emissions, only reducing them, and many weren’t even talking all that seriously about that. Today more than 90 percent of the world’s G.D.P. and over 80 percent of global emissions are now governed by net-zero pledges of various kinds, each promising thorough decarbonization at historically unprecedented speeds.
Sustainable ‘Supercrops’ A tropical “supertree” used in reforestation, pongamia grows beans similar to soy, producing protein and oil. It can be cultivated in almost any soil with limited use of pesticides or irrigation, and it sucks nitrogen out of the air. It has grown wild in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands for hundreds of years, but Terviva, a company based in Alameda, Calif., has begun to plant it widely for the first time in the United States. It now grows across 1,500 acres in Hawaii and Florida, including groves in St. Lucie County, Fla., where this photo was taken. The twin goals of cutting agricultural emissions while producing food for more and more people presents a formidable challenge; “supercrops” like pongamia offer promising solutions.
At this point, they are mostly paper pledges, few of them binding enough in the short term to look like real action plans rather than strategies of smiling delay. And yet it still marks a new era for climate action that a vast majority of world leaders have felt pressed to make them — by the force of protest, public anxiety and voter pressure, and increasingly by the powerful logic of national self-interest. What used to look like a moral burden is now viewed increasingly as an opportunity, so much so that it has become a source of geopolitical rivalry. As prime minister, Boris Johnson talked about making the United Kingdom the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” and the Inflation Reduction Act was written to supercharge American competitiveness on green energy. China, which is already installing nearly as much renewable capacity as the rest of the world combined, is also manufacturing 85 percent of the world’s solar panels (and selling about half of all electric vehicles purchased worldwide). According to one recent paper on the energy transition published in Joule, a faster decarbonization path could make the world trillions of dollars richer by 2050.
You can’t take these projections to the bank. But they have already put us on a different path. The Stanford scientist Marshall Burke, who has produced some distressing research about the costs of warming — that global G.D.P. could be cut by as much as a quarter, compared with a world without climate change — says he has had to update the slides he uses to teach undergraduates, revising his expectations from just a few years ago. “The problem is a result of human choices, and our progress on it is also the result of human choices,” he says. “And those should be celebrated. It’s not yet sufficient. But it is amazing.”
Matthew Huber of Purdue University, the climate scientist who helped introduce the idea of a temperature and humidity limit to human survival, likewise describes himself as considerably less worried than he used to be, though he believes, drawing on inferences from the deep history of the planet, that a future of two degrees warming is less likely than a world of three. “Some of my colleagues are looking at three degrees and going, oh, my God, this is the worst thing ever — we’re failing!” he says. “And then someone like me is saying, well, I used to think we were heading to five. So three looks like a win.”
A very bruising win. “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”
“Things are coming through faster and more severely,” agrees the British economist Nicholas Stern, who led a major 2006 review of climate risk. In green technology, he says, “we hold the growth story of the 21st century in our hands.” But he worries about the future of the Amazon, the melting of carbon-rich permafrost in the northern latitudes and the instability of the ice sheets — each a tipping point that “could start running away from us.” “Each time you get an I.P.C.C. report, it’s still worse than you thought, even though you thought it was very bad,” he says. “The human race doesn’t, as it were, collapse at two degrees, but you probably will see a lot of death, a lot of movement of people, a lot of conflict over space and water.”
“I mean, we’re at not even one and a half now, and a third of Pakistan is underwater, right?” says the Nigerian American philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo, who has spent much of the last few years writing about climate justice in the context of reparations for slavery and colonialism. “What we’re seeing now at less than two degrees — there’s nothing optimistic about that.”
All of which suggests an entirely different view of the near future, equally true. The world will keep warming, and the impacts will grow more punishing, even if decarbonization accelerates enough to meet the world’s most ambitious goals: nearly halving global emissions by 2030 and getting to net-zero just two decades later. “These dates — 2030, 2050 — they are meaningless,” says Gail Bradbrook, one of the British founders of Extinction Rebellion. “What matters is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and there is already way too much. The dates can be excuses to kick the problem into the long grass. But the important thing is that we’re doing harm, right now, and that we should stop absolutely as soon as possible with any activities that are making the situation worse.”
A lot, then, depends on perspective: The climate future looks darker than today but brighter than many expected not that long ago. The world is moving faster to decarbonize than it once seemed responsible to imagine, and yet not nearly fast enough to avert real turbulence. Even the straightest path to two degrees looks tumultuous, with disruptions from the natural world sufficient to call into question many of the social and political continuities that have been taken for granted for generations.
Solar Energy Spread across 2,770 acres in West Texas, the Roadrunner Solar and Storage Plant is expected to generate 1.2 terawatt-hours per year, which would displace the emission of over 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Solar capacity in the United States has risen nearly 300-fold since 2008, to 130.9 gigawatts in 2022, enough to power 23 million homes. In a model from the Department of Energy envisioning a fully decarbonized grid by 2050, solar energy could account for as much as 45 percent of the U.S. electricity supply.
For me, the last few years provide arguments for both buoyant optimism and abject despair. They have made me more mindful of the inescapable challenge of uncertainty when it comes to projecting the future, and the necessity of nevertheless operating within it.
In 2017, I wrote a long and bleak magazine article about worst-case scenarios for the climate, focused on a range of possible futures that began at four degrees Celsius of warming and went up from there. In 2019, I published a book about the disruptions and transformations projected by scientists for lower but still “catastrophic” levels of warming — between two degrees and four. I was called an alarmist, and rightly so — like a growing number of people following the news, I was alarmed.
I am still. How could I not be? How could you not be? In Delhi this spring, there were 78 days when temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a monthslong heat event made 30 times more likely by climate change. Drought across the Northern Hemisphere was made 20 times more likely, resulting in dried-up riverbeds from the Yangtze to the Danube to the Colorado, exposing corpses dumped in Lake Mead and dinosaur footprints in Texas and live World War II munitions in Germany and a “Spanish Stonehenge” in Guadalperal, and baking crops in agricultural regions on multiple continents to the point of at least partial failure. Hundreds died of heat just in Phoenix, more than a thousand each in England and Portugal and Spain.
Monsoon flooding in Pakistan covered a third of the country for weeks, displacing tens of millions of people, destroying the country’s cotton and rice yields and producing conditions ripe for migration, conflict and infectious disease within an already struggling state — a state that has generated in its entire industrial history about the same carbon emissions as the United States belched out this year alone. In the Caribbean and the Pacific, tropical storms grew into intense cyclones in under 36 hours.
In China, there were months of intense heat for which, as one meteorologist memorably put it, “there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable.” As it did through the pandemic, China tried to hide most of the disruptions to daily life, but industrial shutdowns meant the rest of the world felt the effects in the supply chains for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, photovoltaic cells, iPhones and Teslas — all pinched briefly closed by warming of just 1.2 degrees.
What will the world look like at two degrees? There will be extreme weather even more intense and much more frequent. Disruption and upheaval, at some scale, at nearly every level, from the microbial to the geopolitical. Suffering and injustice for hundreds of millions of people, because the benefits of industrial activity have accumulated in parts of the world that will also be spared the worst of its consequences. Innovation, too, including down paths hard to imagine today, and some new prosperity, if less than would have been expected in the absence of warming. Normalization of larger and more costly disasters, and perhaps an exhaustion of empathy in the face of devastation in the global south, leading to the kind of sociopathic distance that enables parlor-game conversations like this one.
Carbon Capture When carbon dioxide enters the water through rainfall, it eventually converts into calcium carbonate, or limestone, by a process called rock weathering. Carbon capture and enhanced weathering can drastically speed up the natural process. For example, Vesta, a public-benefit corporation with headquarters in San Francisco, grinds the sometimes green volcanic mineral olivine into sand. When the sand reacts with seawater, the olivine gradually dissolves into bicarbonate, just as any sand or rock does, reducing ocean acidity and storing carbon permanently.
At two degrees, in many parts of the world, floods that used to hit once a century would come every single year, and those that came once a century would be beyond all historical experience. Wildfire risk would grow, and wildfire smoke, too. (The number of people exposed to extreme smoke days in the American West has already grown 27-fold in the last decade.) Extreme heat events could grow more than three times more likely, globally, and the effects would be uneven: In India, by the end of the century, there would be 30 times as many severe heat waves as today, according to one estimate. Ninety-three times as many people would be exposed there to dangerous heat.
This is what now counts as progress. Today, at just 1.2 degrees, the planet is already warmer than it has been in the entire history of human civilization, already beyond the range of temperatures that gave rise to everything we have ever known as a species. Passing 1.5 and then two degrees of warming will plot a course through a truly foreign climate, bringing a level of environmental disruption that scientists have called “dangerous” when they are being restrained. Island nations of the world have called it “genocide,” and African diplomats have called it “certain death.” It is that level that the world’s scientists had in mind when they warned, in the latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, that “any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”
What would we get if that window closes? The temptations of apocalyptic thinking aside, it would nevertheless be a world in which we would still be living — navigating larger and more damaging climate intrusions, and doing so with some yet-to-be-determined mix of success and failure, grief and opportunity.
“The West has always had a problem with millenarianism — the fall, Christianity, all that,” says Tim Sahay, a Mumbai-born climate-policy wonk and co-founder of the new Polycrisis journal. “It’s ineradicable — all we see are the possibilities for doom and gloom.” The challenges are real and large and fall disproportionately on the developing world, he says, but they are not deterministic, or need not be. “We’re riding down the dark mountain,” he says. “That’s scary in ways, of course, but there are also so many possible outcomes. I find it all exciting. What kind of cities will Brazil build? What will Indonesia be?”
In some places, climate rhetoric has begun to soften — or perhaps it is better to say harden, with existential abstractions thickening into something more like high-stakes realism. Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of Maldives who asked, at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, “How can you ask my country to go extinct?” has been lately talking in more practical terms. He has raised the need to secure climate finance — support from development banks and institutions of the global north to enable a green transition and local resilience — and theorized about the possible need for debt strikes to extract meaningful relief. He has also encouraged the work of scientists to genetically modify local coral to make it more resilient in the face of warming water.
Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, is fighting in the weeds with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and trying to get other vulnerable nations to play hardball too. Greta Thunberg, the unyielding face of climate alarm, recently affirmed her support for at least existing nuclear power, and Rupert Read, once the spokesman for Extinction Rebellion, has taken to calling for a “moderate flank” of the climate movement. In the United States, the climate bill that emerged finally into law was not a Green New Deal, a punitive carbon tax or a program of demand reduction but an expansive, incentive-based approach to decarbonizing that included support for nuclear power and even carbon capture, long an anathema to the climate left.
This may look like a growing consensus, which to a certain extent it is. But the world it points to is still a quite unresolved mess. Over the last year, the economic historian Adam Tooze has popularized the word “polycrisis” to describe the cascade of large-scale challenges to the basic stability and continuity of the global order. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who embodies the slim-fit optimism of neoliberalism, has declared the current period of tumult “the end of abundance.” Josep Borrell, the former head of the European Parliament, chose the phrase “radical uncertainty,” later comparing Europe to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a “jungle” and warning that “the jungle could invade the garden.” John Kerry, the American climate envoy, has acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, that the cost of climate damage in the global south is already in the “trillions” — a number he cited not to illustrate the need for support but to explain why nations in the global north wouldn’t pay. (He added that he refused to feel guilty about it.) The author and activist Bill McKibben worries that although the transition is accelerating to once-unimaginable speeds, it still won’t come fast enough. “The danger is that you have a world that runs on sun and wind but is still an essentially broken planet.” Now the most pressing question is whether it can be fixed — whether we can manage those disruptions and protect the many millions of people who might be hurt by them.
Vertical Farming Roughly 11 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come from the agriculture industry. Vertical farms use far less land and water than typical outdoor farms, which enables them to grow greens more efficiently. Since their environment is manufactured, they can also grow food in dense urban areas and otherwise unsuitable climates, as with these sprouts at the Brooklyn-based Upward Farms. The company, which plans to open a 250,000-square-foot vertical farm in Luzerne County, Pa., in 2023, integrates aquaculture into its system, raising hybrid striped bass in tanks, along with its stacks of microgreens. The fish waste goes through a biodigester, where bacteria converts it into fertilizer for the plants; the fish themselves, along with the greens, head to market.
Next month, at the United Nations climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, known as COP27, world leaders will take up that question, which often goes by the name “adaptation.” Having engineered global ecological disruption, can we engineer our way out of its path?
The tools are many — in fact, close to infinite. Given that most of the world’s infrastructure was built for climate conditions we have already left behind, protecting ourselves against new conditions would require something like a global construction project: defenses against flooding — both natural, like mangrove and wetland restoration, and more interventionist, like dikes and levees and sea walls and sea gates. We’ll need stronger housing codes; more resilient building materials and more weather-conscious urban planning; heat-resistant rail lines and asphalt and all other kinds of infrastructure; better forecasting and more universal warning systems; less wasteful water management, including across very large agricultural regions like the American West; cooling centers and drought-resistant crops and much more effective investments in emergency response for what Juliette Kayyem, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, calls our new “age of disasters.”
Damage from storms is increasing, in large part because we keep building and moving right into what is often called the expanding bull’s-eye of extreme weather, with the same distressing pattern observed in boom towns along the Florida coast and in the floodplains of Bangladesh. More and more people are flocking into harm’s way, not all of them out of true ignorance.
Some more sanguine climate observers often point out that even as we put ourselves in the path of extreme weather, deaths from natural disasters are not, in fact, growing — indeed, they have fallen, by an astonishing degree, from as much as an average of 500,000 deaths each year a century ago to about 50,000 deaths each year today (even as climate- and weather-related natural disasters have increased fivefold, according to the World Meteorological Organization).
But whether those mortality trends would continue in a two-degree world is unclear. With Hurricane Ian, for instance, a wealthy and well-prepared corner of the global north just endured its deadliest hurricane since 1935. Most of that drastic drop in disaster mortality happened, in fact, between the 1920s and the 1970s, when such deaths fell to just under 100,000. The declines have been smaller over the last 50 years, as global warming began to destabilize our weather, and even smaller — perhaps even nonexistent, depending on the data set and how you want to look at it — over the last three decades, as temperature rise became more pronounced and warming pushed the world outside the “Goldilocks” climate range that had governed all of human history.
Perhaps this means the world has harvested much of the obvious low-hanging fruit of adaptation. Better meteorology and early warning systems, for instance, which have drastically reduced the death toll of recent monsoons in Bangladesh and hurricanes in Florida, are already in place. The cost of global climate damage has already run into the trillions, and the bill for adaptation in the developing world could reach $300 billion annually by 2030. Galveston, Texas, is undertaking the construction of a $31 billion “Ike Dike” project to protect its harbor; New York City is considering a system of storm-surge gates, priced at $52 billion. In other words, warming is already making adaptation harder and more expensive, and extending the gains achieved last century into the next one may prove difficult or even impossible.
The latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, emphasized that “progress in adaptation planning and implementation” had been made but also warned that “many initiatives prioritize immediate and near-term climate risk reduction which reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation,” meaning that resources devoted to repair and retrofitting aren’t being spent on new infrastructure or resettlement. “Hard limits to adaptation have already been reached in some ecosystems,” the I.P.C.C. wrote, adding that “with increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional natural and human systems will reach adaptation limits.”
“For me, what we are witnessing at the present level of warming, it is already challenging the limits to adaptation for humans,” says Fahad Saeed of Climate Analytics. Over the last six months, Saeed, a Pakistani scientist based in Islamabad, has watched the country endure months of extreme heat, crop failures and monsoon flooding that submerged a third of the nation, destroyed a million homes, displaced 30 million people and inflicted damage estimated at $40 billion or above — 11 percent of Pakistan’s 2021 G.D.P. “One can’t believe what would happen at 1.5 degrees,” he says. “Anything beyond that? It would even be more devastating.”
“Two degrees is a lot better than four degrees,” says the climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, one of those who delivered now-legendary warnings about the risks of warming to the U.S. Senate in 1988. “And one-and-a-half degrees is even better than two degrees. But none of those levels means there’s nothing to do.”
Oppenheimer has spent the last few years increasingly focused on the question of what to do, and how to judge our progress on adaptation. “How good are we today at dealing with the situation where hundred-year floods happen?” he asks. “Not very good.” He argues that we should try to hold ourselves to higher standards than normalizing more than a hundred deaths in a Florida hurricane. Extreme events are arriving now much more quickly, meaning that “the measure of success is no longer just how well you did in preparing for some bad event and then recovering from it. It’s also how quickly you do it.” He mentions the I.P.C.C.’s 2019 report on the oceans, which found that what were once called “hundred-year flood levels” would be reached, in many parts of the world, every single year by 2050. “And so you’ve got to get back in shape before the next one happens, when the next one might happen the same year — in the worst cases, the same month. Eventually, in some places, it happens just with the high tide.”
“You’re not going to just recover the way we think of recovery now,” Oppenheimer says. “You have to either be living in a totally different situation, which accepts something close to perpetual flooding in some places, or you fulfill the dreams some people have about adaptation, where the regularity of life is just totally different. The very structure of infrastructure and manufacturing, it’s all different.”
Geothermal Energy About 70 miles north of San Francisco in the Mayacamas Mountains, the Geysers Geothermal Resource Area is the largest complex of geothermal power plants in the world. At the complex, superheated steam is piped from underground reservoirs to steam turbines, like the one pictured here, to produce electricity; in 2020, that steam produced about 9 percent of California’s renewable energy. Geothermal power plants like the Geysers hold enormous promise as a renewable source: They emit 99 percent less carbon dioxide than similar-size fossil-fuel power plants, and the United States holds more than five terawatts of heat resources, enough to power electricity for the entire world. The U.S. Department of Energy is investing in geothermal research and has set a goal to cut the cost of enhanced geothermal systems by 90 percent by 2035.
Talk enough about adaptation, and you drift into technical-seeming matters: Can new dikes be built, or the most vulnerable communities resettled? Can crop lands be moved, and new drought-resistant seeds developed? Can cooling infrastructure offset the risks of new heat extremes, and early warning systems protect human life from natural disaster? How much help can innovation be expected to provide in dealing with environmental challenges never seen before in human history?
But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”?
“The big thing politically that’s going to happen on a massive scale is movement,” says Taiwo, the philosopher. “The numbers I’ve seen for displacement — both internal displacement and cross-border displacement at two degrees — are at least in the tens if not the hundreds of millions. And I don’t think we have a political context for what that means.”
The range of estimates is huge, and its size is among the best indicators we have that, however much we know about the climate future, an enormous amount of the complex and cascading effects of warming remains shrouded in the inevitable uncertainty of human response. Indeed, the I.P.C.C. says that, in the near term, migration will most likely be driven more by socioeconomic conditions and governance issues. “There will be, let’s say, socioecological pressure on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than the scale of what we’re seeing now,” Taiwo says. “Whether that translates into movement within borders and across borders, whether it translates into large-scale adaptation strategies that we don’t have a political context for, whether it translates into simply mass death we don’t have a context for, either, or some mix of those things — it’s anybody’s guess. And I wouldn’t trust a climate model to tell me which of those things, or which mix of those things, is going to happen.”
Taiwo says his mind drifts intuitively toward one scenario. “If the far right wins,” he says, “I see copycat agencies that are much like ICE operating in much of the global north and in some emerging states. I see a gradual integration of domestic policing and, for lack of a better term, border policing — which I think we’re seeing now anyway, a much more openly authoritarian development of those institutions, increasingly operating autonomously. I expect the militaries of nation states to increasingly be wedded to those operations. And I expect that to become ‘government’ for a substantial percentage of the world’s population. I likewise expect that to be a political shift that we do not have a context for.” Unless you’ve studied colonialism, he laughs.
“But maybe there’s another version of what that mix of pressures looks like at two degrees Celsius,” Taiwo says, one that produces more local resilience and sustainability, along with innovation in energy and politics, agriculture and culture. “And partially because of the success of a few of these measures,” he says, “you get markedly lower than predicted displacement numbers.”
For a generation now, climate-vulnerable countries have issued a series of variations on a simple exhortatory theme: For this damage, the rich world must pay. The call has gone by different names, each describing slightly different forms of support: “climate finance,” “loss and damage,” “reparations” and now “debt relief.” In 2009, in Copenhagen, the rich nations of the world formalized a promise to deliver $100 billion annually in climate funding to the global south, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled, even as climate-vulnerable nations have raised their request to $700 billion or more.
“It’s not only about adapting,” says the Kenyan climate activist Elizabeth Wathuti, “because you cannot ask people to adapt to losing their homes — their homes are being washed away, their livestock and their children are being carried away. They’re dying — how would they adapt to that? And crop failure — how would you adapt to that? How would you adapt to starvation? If you have not had a meal in two days, you will not adapt to that.”
“For years and years — decades and decades — people have been begging,” Taiwo says. “The deciding thing will be, what is it that global south countries are prepared to do if these demands aren’t met.”
Sahay, of the Polycrisis journal, offers one answer, describing a world in which climate-exacerbated great power rivalry means that alliances of underdeveloped states could play rich nations against one another, in a sort of spiritual extension of the nonalignment movement, led by Indonesia, in the last decades of the Cold War. Sahay calls the emerging nonalignment alliance built around Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) a “new bargaining chip,” floating the possibility that a new group of “electro-states” could succeed the last century’s petro-states and aggressively broker access to their own mineral resources. The scholar Thea Riofrancos has similarly imagined a “Lithium OPEC,” and though she doubts it will come entirely to pass, she believes that a harder and more nationalistic resource geopolitics surely will.
“Westerners take it for granted that people in the global south, if they’re badly hit by some climate-change event, will attack fossil fuels,” says the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, also the author of several piercing meditations on the injustices of warming. “But that’s a complete fantasy. In the global south, everybody understands that energy access is the difference between poverty and not poverty. Nobody sees fossil fuels as the basic problem. They see the West’s profligate use of fossil fuels as the basic problem.”
“Throughout this whole crisis in Pakistan, have you heard of anyone talking about attacking fossil fuels? No — it’s laughable to even ask. Everything I see being mentioned about Pakistan is about reparations, it’s about global inequality, it’s about historic government injustices. It’s not at all about fossil fuels. This is one of the really big divides between the global south and the global north,” Ghosh says. “If people are going to attack anything — let’s say in Pakistan or India after a heat wave or some other catastrophic event — it won’t be the fossil-fuel infrastructure. It will be the consulates of the rich countries, just as it’s been over many other things in the past.”
Fortifying Coral Reefs Two additional degrees of warming would kill virtually all of the world’s living coral reefs, threatening the survival of roughly a quarter of global ocean biodiversity and affecting the protein supply for hundreds of millions of people. Some species of coral are somewhat less susceptible to warming waters, like elkhorn coral, which can be encouraged to grow relatively quickly via a method called microfragmentation. The process involves cutting the coral, which then grows faster while healing. Here, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium are growing elkhorn coral in a lab in the Florida Keys before introducing them into the wild.
“We live in an unimaginable future,” says the writer Rebecca Solnit, who has grown increasingly focused on the political and social challenges of climate change. “Things thought impossible or inconceivable or unlikely not very long ago are accepted norms now.” Today, as a result, “a lot of my hope is just radical uncertainty,” she says. “You see that the world can’t go on as it is — that is true. But it doesn’t mean the world can’t go on. It means that the world will go on, not as it is but in some unimaginably transformed way.”
In 2017, looking back at decades of ineffectual organizing, I didn’t think the political mobilization of the last five years was even possible, and if you had told me then about the radical acceleration of renewable technology to come, I would’ve been more credulous but still surprised. But signs of optimism are not arguments for complacency — quite the opposite, because the new range of expectations is not just a marker of how much has changed over the last five years but of how much might over the next five, the next 25 or the next 50.
Two degrees is not inevitable; both better and worse outcomes are possible. Most recent analyses project paths forward from current policy about half a degree warmer, meaning much more must be done to meet that goal, and even more to keep the world below the two-degree threshold — as was promised under the Paris agreement. (Even the I.P.C.C. scenarios designed to limit warming to that level now predict we’ll trespass it as soon as next decade.) And because decarbonization might stall and the climate may prove more sensitive than expected, temperatures above three degrees, though less likely than they recently seemed, remain possible, too.
Overall emissions have not yet begun to decline, and it’s a long way from peak down to zero, making all these changes to expectations mostly notional, for now — a different set of lines being drawn naïvely on a whiteboard and waiting to be made real. New emissions peaks are expected both this year and next, which means that more damage is being done to the future climate of the planet right now than at any previous point in history. Things will get worse before they even stabilize.
But we are getting a clearer map of climate change, and however intimidating it looks, that new world must be made navigable — through action to limit the damage and adaptation to defend what can’t be stopped. At four degrees, the impacts of warming appeared overwhelming, but at two degrees, the impacts would not be the whole of our human fate, only the landscape on which a new future will be built.
Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, however cruel and unfortunate a form it may appear in theory or ahead of time. Indeed, already we can say a given heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change, or that it was a few degrees hotter than it would have been without climate change, and both would be true. We’ll be able to talk about the contributions of warming to disasters that buckle whole nations, as the recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan has, or about the human contributions to such vulnerability. And as we do today, we will often reach for the past when trying to judge the present, reckoning with how the world got where it is and who was responsible and whether the result of the fight against warming counts as progress or failure or both. History is our handiest counterfactual, however poor a standard it sets for a world that could have been much better still. “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” says Hayhoe, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world’s progress to a long hike. “We’re halfway there. Look at the great view behind you. We actually made it up halfway, and it was a hard slog. So take a breather, pat yourself on the back, but then look up — that’s where we have to go. So let’s keep on going.”
David Wallace-Wells is a columnist for the magazine and an Opinion writer for The New York Times, as well as the author of the international best seller “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” published in 2019. Sign up for his Times newsletter here.
Charley Locke is a writer who often covers youth, including for The New York Times for Kids. She last wrote about the $190 billion in Covid aid that went to American schools.
Devin Oktar Yalkin is a photographer based in Los Angeles who has previously covered Joe Biden, dirt-track racing, live music and falcons for the magazine. He currently has a solo exhibition, Obsidian, at Evin Sanat Gallery in Istanbul.War in Ukraine Likely to Speed, Not Slow, Shift to Clean Energy, I.E.A. Says
While some nations are burning more coal this year in response to natural-gas shortages spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived.
Sheep grazing in front of a coal-fired power plant and wind turbines near Luetzerath, Germany, in October, 2022.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press
By Brad Plumer
Oct. 27, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox.
WASHINGTON — The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to speed up rather than slow down the global transition away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles, the world’s leading energy agency said Thursday.
While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal this year in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050.
Instead, for the first time, the agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.
One major reason is that many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Japan is pursuing a new “green transformation” program that will help fund nuclear power, hydrogen and other low-emissions technologies. China, India and South Korea have all ratcheted up national targets for renewable and nuclear power.
And yet, the shift toward cleaner sources of energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency said, not unless governments take much stronger action to reduce their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions over the next few years.
Based on current policies put in place by national governments, global coal use is expected to start declining in the next few years, natural gas demand is likely to hit a plateau by the end of this decade and oil use is projected to level off by the mid-2030s.
Meanwhile, global investment in clean energy is now expected to rise from $1.3 trillion in 2022 to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030, a significant shift, the agency said.
“It’s notable that many of these new clean energy targets aren’t being put in place solely for climate change reasons,” said Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, in an interview. “Increasingly, the big drivers are energy security as well as industrial policy — a lot of countries want to be at the leading edge of the energy industries of the future.”
A new United Nations report on past emissions commitments indicates that severe disruption would be hard to avoid on the current trajectory.
Current energy policies put the world on track to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2025 and warm roughly 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared with preindustrial levels, the energy agency estimated. That is in line with separate projections released Wednesday by the United Nations, which analyzed nations’ stated promises to tackle emissions.
By contrast, many world leaders hope to limit average global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid some of the most dire and irreversible risks from climate change, such as widespread crop failures or ecosystem collapse. That would require much steeper cuts in greenhouse gases, with emissions not just peaking in the next few years but falling nearly in half by the end of this decade, scientists have said.
“If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Dr. Birol said, or double what the agency currently projects. “In particular, there’s not nearly enough investment going into the developing world.”
This year, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to rise roughly 1 percent and approach record highs, in part because of an uptick in coal use in places like Europe as countries scramble to replace lost Russian gas. (Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels.)
Still, that is a far smaller increase than some analysts had feared when war in Ukraine first broke out. The rise in emissions would have been three times as large had it not been for a rapid deployment of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles worldwide, the agency said. Soaring energy prices and weak economic growth in Europe and China also contributed to keep emissions down.
And the recent rise in coal use may prove fleeting. European nations are currently planning to install roughly 50 gigawatts worth of renewable power next year, which would be more than enough to supplant this year’s increase in coal generation. And globally, the agency does not expect investment in new coal plants to increase beyond what was already expected.
Brussels agrees to 'Iberian exception' allowing Spain and Portugal to cap electricity prices
By Alice Tidey • Updated: 26/04/2022
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, left, speaks with Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels March 25, 2022. - Copyright AP PhotoAP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert
The European Commission gave its approval on Tuesday for an Iberian exception allowing Spain and Portugal to decouple the price of gas from that of electricity for the next 12 months.
The political agreement enables the creation of a temporary mechanism that will cap the price of gas to an average of €50 per megawatt-hour which should result in electricity bills being halved for about 40% of Spanish and Portuguese consumers with regulated rates.
Spain's Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge that "all consumers will benefit from this agreement" and that "the Commission has committed to working actively to increase the interconnection of the Iberian Peninsula with the rest of Europe."
The Spanish and Portuguese governments — both led by Socialist prime ministers — had been calling on Brussels since last summer to implement measures to reduce electricity prices which have skyrocketed as a result of increased demand for natural gas, supply chain issues and geopolitical tensions including the war in Ukraine.
EU member states trade electricity on a wholesale market based on a system of marginal pricing which in practice means that everybody gets the same price for the electricity they are producing regardless of how that electricity is produced — renewables are produced at near-zero cost. The price is then set by the most expensive way of producing electricity.
The Commission argues that "this model provides efficiency, transparency and incentives to keep costs as low as possible."
Yet Madrid and Lisbon had argued the Iberian peninsula should be allowed to cap prices to a maximum of €30 ($33) per megawatt hour because of their low interconnection with the rest of the bloc, describing themselves as an "energy island". The two countries also have a much lower dependence on Russian gas — they primarily import from Algeria — as well as high renewable generation.
Vladimir Putin says ‘dirty bomb’ claims to Nato were made on his orders
Russian president says he told his defence minister to raise threat of nuclear device despite Kyiv insisting it has no plans to use one
Vladimir Putin at the Valdai discussion club’s 19th annual meeting in Moscow on 27 October. Kyiv has completely rejected the president’s claim it could use a low-yield nuclear device. Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters
Andrew Roth in Moscow
Thu 27 Oct 2022 18.07 BST
Vladimir Putin has said that he directly ordered his defence minister to make a series of calls to top Nato commanders this week over the potential detonation of a “dirty bomb” in Ukraine.
Russia has escalated its rhetoric in recent weeks by claiming without evidence that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a low-yield radioactive device on its own territory, leading Kyiv and other western observers to consider that Putin may be preparing a “false flag” attack of its own.
In a speech near Moscow, Putin claimed once again that Russia knew “about an incident with a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ being prepared”, and that Russia knew “where, generally, it was being prepared”.
Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 246 of the invasion
Once again he gave no evidence of the alleged plot, which included the possibility of the device being loaded on to a Tochka-U or other tactical missile, detonated and then “blamed on Russia”.
Kyiv has strongly denied the accusations and said that Russia is using nuclear blackmail in order to try to block support for its successful counteroffensive against the Russian invasion force.
00:50
Joe Biden: Russia would be making a 'serious mistake' if it used a tactical nuclear weapon – video
The US president, Joe Biden, on Wednesday said that he had spent “a lot of time” discussing whether Russia may be preparing to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
“Let me just say Russia would be making an incredibly serious mistake if it were to use a tactical nuclear weapon,” he told reporters. “I’m not guaranteeing that it’s a false-flag operation yet. We don’t know. It would be a serious, serious mistake.”
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During his speech at the Valdai Club, a Kremlin-aligned foreign policy thinktank, on Thursday, Putin said that assertions about Russia’s possible use of nuclear weapons were meant to scare its supporters by indicating “what a bad country Russia is”.
“We have never said anything about the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia, but only hinted at the statements made by the leaders of western countries,” Putin said in his remarks.
01:46
'The girl is a little out of her mind': Putin criticises Truss on nuclear weapons stance – video
In his remarks he also criticised former UK leader Liz Truss for saying she was “ready to do it” regarding the need for a prime minister to be ready to use nuclear weapons.
The most pivotal stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment
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“Well, let’s say she blurted out there – the girl seems to be a little out of her mind,” said Putin. “How can you say such things in public?” He also blamed Washington for failing to distance itself from Truss’ remarks.
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Putin used the speech as a platform to rail against western countries and their supposed “hegemony”, saying the world faced the “most dangerous” decade since the second world war.
“We are standing at a historical frontier: Ahead is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of World War Two.”
Asked about losses from the war in Ukraine, Putin said: “Of course, we have costs, and first of all it concerns the losses associated with conducting the [war]. I think about it all the time. There are economic losses.”
Putin also claimed that the Russian economy had survived the worst of sanctions levelled against it by the west following the beginning of the war.
News round-up Thursday, 27 October 2022.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is speaking on Thursday at the country's main forum for debate on the end of Western hegemony, which is being held in Moscow. Putin aims to lead with China a changing world that represents the interests of developing countries in the face of the unipolar world led by the United States. (El País.com)
“Russian President Vladimir Putin is speaking on Thursday at the country’s main forum for debate on the end of Western hegemony, which is being held in Moscow. Putin aims to lead with China a changing world that represents the interests of developing countries in the face of the unipolar world led by the United States.”
Conclusion of the day's news:
War in Ukraine Likely to Speed, Not Slow, Shift to Clean Energy, I.E.A. Says
While some nations are burning more coal this year in response to natural-gas shortages spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived.
Sheep grazing in front of a coal-fired power plant and wind turbines near Luetzerath, Germany, in October, 2022.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press
By Brad Plumer
Oct. 27, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox.
WASHINGTON — The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to speed up rather than slow down the global transition away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles, the world’s leading energy agency said Thursday.
While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal this year in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050.
Instead, for the first time, the agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.
One major reason is that many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Japan is pursuing a new “green transformation” program that will help fund nuclear power, hydrogen and other low-emissions technologies. China, India and South Korea have all ratcheted up national targets for renewable and nuclear power.
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Continue reading the main story
And yet, the shift toward cleaner sources of energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency said, not unless governments take much stronger action to reduce their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions over the next few years.
Based on current policies put in place by national governments, global coal use is expected to start declining in the next few years, natural gas demand is likely to hit a plateau by the end of this decade and oil use is projected to level off by the mid-2030s.
Meanwhile, global investment in clean energy is now expected to rise from $1.3 trillion in 2022 to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030, a significant shift, the agency said.
“It’s notable that many of these new clean energy targets aren’t being put in place solely for climate change reasons,” said Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, in an interview. “Increasingly, the big drivers are energy security as well as industrial policy — a lot of countries want to be at the leading edge of the energy industries of the future.”
A new United Nations report on past emissions commitments indicates that severe disruption would be hard to avoid on the current trajectory.
Current energy policies put the world on track to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2025 and warm roughly 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared with preindustrial levels, the energy agency estimated. That is in line with separate projections released Wednesday by the United Nations, which analyzed nations’ stated promises to tackle emissions.
By contrast, many world leaders hope to limit average global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid some of the most dire and irreversible risks from climate change, such as widespread crop failures or ecosystem collapse. That would require much steeper cuts in greenhouse gases, with emissions not just peaking in the next few years but falling nearly in half by the end of this decade, scientists have said.
“If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Dr. Birol said, or double what the agency currently projects. “In particular, there’s not nearly enough investment going into the developing world.”
This year, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to rise roughly 1 percent and approach record highs, in part because of an uptick in coal use in places like Europe as countries scramble to replace lost Russian gas. (Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels.)
Still, that is a far smaller increase than some analysts had feared when war in Ukraine first broke out. The rise in emissions would have been three times as large had it not been for a rapid deployment of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles worldwide, the agency said. Soaring energy prices and weak economic growth in Europe and China also contributed to keep emissions down.
Image
Houses with solar panels in Roeselare, Belgium are part of a larger initiative by The Aster project, which aims to add 395,000 solar panels to homes.Credit...Kurt Desplenter/Sipa, via Associated Press
And the recent rise in coal use may prove fleeting. European nations are currently planning to install roughly 50 gigawatts worth of renewable power next year, which would be more than enough to supplant this year’s increase in coal generation. And globally, the agency does not expect investment in new coal plants to increase beyond what was already expected.
Epidemiologist Jeremy Farrar on the Next Viral Threat“I Fear We Are at the Beginning of an Era of Pandemics”
In an interview, infectious diseases expert Sir Jeremy Farrar discusses recent mutations of the coronavirus and his worries about future pandemics. He says COVID is here to stay and that we haven't reached a "stable phase yet" that would allow us to let down our guard.
A DER SPIEGEL Interview Conducted By Rafaela von Bredow und Veronika Hackenbroch
26.10.2022, 15.48 Uhr
DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Farrar, many people can no longer stand to hear the word COVID, they suppress the pandemic and pretend it's over. Is that a mistake?
Farrar: (laughs) No, I feel the same way, I would also like to move on. But the pandemic will never be over, COVID will be with us forever. In this sense, the phrase "We will have to learn to live with it" is true. I just don't think we're in the stable phase yet – on the contrary.
ANZEIGE
DER SPIEGEL: Where do we stand?
Farrar: You saw what happened here in Germany after the Oktoberfest. In the United Kingdom, too, community transmission is rising rapidly – one in 35 people in England is currently infected with COVID. That’s a staggering level.
ANZEIGE
DER SPIEGEL: Your book on the pandemic, "Spike: The Virus vs. the People," published in the spring, reads like a detective story in places when you describe how you feared for your personal safety when you thought the novel virus might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. At the time, you informed British intelligence, made preparations in case something happened to you and made phone calls in secret to colleagues all over the world using a disposable mobile phone, once making 17 calls in a single night, you write. How are you doing today, after almost three years of the coronavirus storm?
ANZEIGE
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Farrar: I think like most people: Nothing has disrupted all of our lives like COVID. For me personally, on the one hand, it was amazing to deal with it intellectually, to think about what the right advice to give or not give is. On the other hand, I didn’t appreciate how much this crisis would take possession of my personal life. Many of my colleagues in other countries felt the same way. Not only because our families had to deal with COVID like everyone else, but also because we were so exposed in public. You get death threats and things put through the letterbox and social media abuse to you and your family members. That has been difficult to cope with at times.
DER SPIEGEL 43/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 43/2022 (October 22nd, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
DER SPIEGEL: You experienced SARS-1 in Vietnam, later bird flu, and then came Ebola. Did that make you better prepared for a coronavirus pandemic?
Farrar: SARS-1 lasted nine months and, in the end, 800 people died. Ebola in West Africa seemed awful at the time, and it was awful. But in the end, 11,000 people died in total. With COVID, on the other hand, probably somewhere between 15 and 20 million people have died. On top of that, the virus leaves a society totally disrupted, not just health, but economies and school and education and our relationships with each other. People will still be talking about this pandemic in a hundred years' time.
"The Virus Leaves a Society Totally Disrupted."
DER SPIEGEL: What scenario do you expect for autumn and winter?
Farrar: Hmmm. I used to be good at scenarios for COVID …
DER SPIEGEL: … that's right, your pessimistic forecasts in a DER SPIEGEL interview at the beginning of 2020 were unfortunately quite accurate.
Farrar: I've got less good now, though. Back then, at the end of January, it was easier: Every red flag was waving about this virus. It was novel, it was a respiratory infection, there was human to human and asymptomatic transmission. That's an undergraduate 101 of what keeps you awake at night. You didn't have to have very much information to know that you had to take that seriously and you had to act.
DER SPIEGEL: Should it still keep us awake at night?
Farrar: Now we're in a much more complex world. We are actually entering into a new phase of the pandemic. Two things have changed. One is: These viruses are now so transmissible that they are circulating in the community, even in populations like that of the UK, with very high rates of immunity over 90 percent, from natural infection, from vaccination or both. Secondly, we are no longer dealing with one dominant type of virus, but with a whole soup of variants.
DER SPIEGEL: What does that tell us?
Farrar: That we should just try and reduce transmission where we can, at least over the course of the coming Northern Hemisphere winter. Otherwise, we allow this virus to continue to spawn trillions and trillions of copies in millions of people. Each one has the possibility of becoming immune to our vaccines and our immunity. And so, anything we can do to reduce the transmission is a good thing. Like the mask mandate on public transport here in Germany. In the UK, I’m one of the very few people now still wearing a mask on public transport.
Shell doubles its profits to $9.5bn as call for windfall tax grows
Oil giant to boost dividends as firm continues to benefit from energy price spike after Ukraine invasion
Shell is to boost its dividend as it benefits from the energy price surge. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
Thu 27 Oct 2022 08.27 BST
Shell has reported profits of nearly $9.5bn (£8.2bn) between July and September, more than double the amount it made during the same period a year earlier, as it said it would increase its payments to shareholders.
The oil company continued to benefit from soaring energy prices prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it was not able to match the record $11.5bn profit it earned between April and June, because of weaker refining and gas trading.
Despite this, the FTSE 100 company’s third quarter earnings were higher than the $9bn forecasts by analysts, and were more than double the $4.1bn reported in the same quarter in 2021.
Cost of living crisis: Stop the Squeeze calls for wealthiest to ‘pay proper share’ of tax
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Oil companies’ bumper profits have prompted calls for higher taxes on the sector, and are likely to lead to fresh demands from political parties including Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, as well as from environmental campaigners, for the new government led by Rishi Sunak to look again at a higher windfall tax on oil companies.
The results came as the Anglo-Dutch firm announced plans to buy $4bn of stock over the next three months in an extension of its share repurchasing programme. It intends to complete the programme by the start of February 2023.
Shell and other big oil and gas companies have been enjoying soaring profits and booming trade since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February pushed oil and gas prices higher. This has come in stark contrast to households and businesses, who have been struggling with rocketing energy bills.
However, oil prices have fallen from their highs of $120 a barrel of brent crude in June to current levels of about $95 a barrel, while natural gas prices have also dropped and are about 70% lower than their peak in late August.
Surging profits have prompted a cash bonanza for oil producers and their shareholders. Shell said it would pay its investors an interim dividend of $0.25 a share, but announced its intention to increase this by 15% for the final three months of the year.
Shareholders in Shell received $6.8bn over the past three months, related to the second quarter’s record profits, which came on top of the $7.4bn they received in the first quarter of the year.
Ukraine: Ukraine denounces new Russian attacks on energy infrastructure and warns of more power cuts | Kiev reinforces troops in the north to counter a possible attack from Belarus | Zelenski says Kiev is strengthening troops in the north to counter a possible attack from Belarus (El País)
Shelling causes restrictions in several central and northern provinces, including the capital | Kiev reinforces troops in the north to counter a possible attack from Belarus | Zelenski says "extremely fierce fighting" is taking place near Bakhmut in the east | Ukraine's President Zelenski says "extremely fierce fighting" is taking place near Bajmut in the east
HANNIBAL HANSCHKE (EFE)
EL PAÍS
Updated:27 OCT 2022 - 12:39 CEST
22317
KEY MOMENTS
49min ago
Germany deems Nord Stream 2 unusable due to explosions
5h ago
Russian attack causes fire in Kiev, capital's authorities say
6 hours ago
CIA director visited Ukraine this month on secret trip, CNN says
EL PAÍS offers the latest news on the conflict in Ukraine free of charge as a public service. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe.
The public company that manages Ukraine's electricity network, Ukrenergo, has denounced Thursday new Russian attacks against energy infrastructures that have caused damage to facilities in the centre and north of the country and has warned of more supply cuts. The operator said in a statement that the bombings have caused restrictions in the provinces of Kiev, where the country's capital is located, Yitomir (centre-north), Cherkasi (centre) and Chernihiv (north). Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky said during his regular evening address that "extremely fierce fighting" was taking place near Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk province. "The situation on the front has not changed significantly for the moment, but extremely fierce fighting is taking place in Donetsk, near Bajmut and Avdivka," he said. The Ukrainian army has announced that it is also reinforcing troops in the north to counter a possible attack from Belarus, after the country set up a joint military unit with Russia. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is speaking on Thursday at the country's main forum for debate on the end of Western hegemony, which is being held in Moscow. Putin aims to lead with China a changing world that represents the interests of developing countries in the face of the unipolar world led by the United States.
THE COUNTRY
Kremlin summons Uzbek workers for recruitment in Ukraine
Around 20 Uzbek workers at a waste treatment plant in the western Russian city of Oryol claim they have received mobilisation notices to be recruited for the offensive in Ukraine. They have appealed to their president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, to intervene on their behalf, local media reported on Thursday.
Last month, Moscow launched a partial mobilisation campaign in the face of setbacks on the ground in Ukraine that caused deep unease in Russian society. Since then, hundreds of thousands of men have fled the country to avoid being sent to the front lines. Many people who were not eligible for military service have reported receiving mobilisation notices.
Uzbekistan has warned its citizens against enlisting in foreign armies, which is a criminal offence under its law. (Reuters)
News round-up Wednesday, 26 October 2022.
Two French politicians under investigation for Russia-related corruption
Le Monde
“‘Europe has gone from a gas shortage to overflow in less than three months’”
Conclusion of the day's news:
'Europe has gone from a gas shortage to overflow in less than three months'
Philippe Escande
While dozens of LNG tankers are queuing up in Spain and the UK, some people are questioning the need to increase fossil fuel storage and transport capacity in the midst of the fight against climate change.
Published by Le Monde on October 25, 2022 at 15h11, updated at 15h18 on October 25, 2022 Time to 2 min. Lire en français
The "Hellas Poseidon", loaded with liquefied petroleum gas, at the port of Tarragona (Catalonia), on October 20, 2022. PAU BARRENA / AFP
Energy news is so fluid that it regularly provides us with strange scenarios. The European Council for example, which met on Friday, October 21, struggling to find an agreement to cap the price of gas in Europe, while in the background dozens of cargo ships full of the same fuel were queuing in Spain or the United Kingdom to unload their precious cargo.
On October 17 and 18, the Bloomberg and Reuters news agencies counted more than seven LNG tankers anchored in Cadiz Bay, Andalusia, and two in Milford Bay, United Kingdom. More than 35 of them are currently circling in waters off the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. In less than three months, Europe has gone from a shortage to an overflow. As a result, prices on the spot market – i.e. for immediate delivery – have collapsed by 80% from their August peak. They are now lower than they were a year ago, before the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
Read more Subscribers only Faced with soaring energy prices, Europeans ask Commission to explore all avenues 'urgently'
Mild weather has reduced the need for heating, the Chinese slowdown has reduced demand and European industry has reduced its consumption in the face of soaring prices this summer. Consequently, reserves are all full. We no longer know where to put them. Naturally, some significant deviations remain. For a delivery this winter, the price is twice as high, while gas remains two to three times more expensive in the Czech Republic than France or the United Kingdom. This situation is encouraging those who charter ships to wait in the sun for a while until the price rises again with the return of cold weather.
U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought.
After Saudi leaders pushed to slash oil production despite a visit by President Biden, American officials have been left fuming that they were duped.
President Biden arriving in Saudi Arabia in July. The administration thought it had secured a promise from the Saudis to keep oil flowing in a bid to stabilize prices.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong and Adam Entous
Published Oct. 25, 2022Updated Oct. 26, 2022, 1:32 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — As President Biden was planning a politically risky trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his top aides thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year — an arrangement that could have helped justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.
It didn’t work out that way.
Mr. Biden went through with the trip. But earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Russia steered a group of oil-producing countries in voting to slash oil production by two million barrels per day, the opposite of the outcome the administration thought it had secured as the Democratic Party struggles to deal with inflation and high gas prices heading into the November elections.
The move led angry Biden administration officials to reassess America’s relationship with the kingdom and produced a flurry of accusatory statements between the two governments — including a charge by the White House that Saudi Arabia was helping Russia in its war in Ukraine.
Lawmakers who had been told about the trip’s benefits in classified briefings and other conversations that included details of the oil deal — which has not been previously disclosed and was supposed to lead to a surge in production between September and December — have been left fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration.
Global health at mercy of fossil fuel addiction, warn scientists
Reliance on oil and gas worsening climate impacts and compounding food, energy and cost of living crises
Dead Rio Grande silvery minnows on the parched riverbed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stretches of the river went dry for the first time in 40 years in August. Photograph: Brittany Peterson/AP
Damian Carrington Environment editor
Tue 25 Oct 2022 23.30 BST
The health of the world’s people is at the mercy of a global addiction to fossil fuels, according to a study.
The analysis reports an increase in heat deaths, hunger and infectious disease as the climate crisis intensifies, while governments continue to give more in subsidies to fossil fuels than to the poorer countries experiencing the impacts of global heating.
The climate emergency is compounding the food, energy and cost of living crises, the report says. For example, almost half a trillion hours of work were lost in 2021 due to extreme heat. This mostly affected agricultural workers in poorer countries, cutting food supplies and incomes.
However, the report says urgent, health-centred action to tackle global heating could save millions of lives a year and enable people to thrive rather than just survive, with cleaner air and better diets.
The report, by the Lancet Countdown group on health and climate change, is titled Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels. It was produced by almost 100 experts from 51 institutions spanning every continent and published in the run-up the UN Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.
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“The climate crisis is killing us,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, responding to the report. “It is undermining not just the health of our planet, but the health of people everywhere – through toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, higher risks of infectious disease outbreaks, record extreme heat, drought, floods and more.”
Human health, livelihoods, household budgets and national economies were being pummelled, as the fossil fuel addiction continued to spiral out of control, he added. “The science is clear: massive, commonsense investments in renewable energy and climate resilience will secure a healthier, safer life for people in every country.”
Dr Marina Romanello, the head of the Lancet Countdown and at University College London (UCL), said: “We are seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels. Governments and companies continue to favour the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of people’s health.”
The report tracks 43 health and climate indicators, including exposure to extreme heat. It found that heat-related deaths in the most vulnerable populations – babies under a year old and adults over 65 – increased by 68% over the past four years compared with 2000-04.
“Heatwaves are not only very uncomfortable, they are lethal for people that have increased vulnerabilities,” Romanello said.
Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather
Extreme heat also led to people being unable to work, with 470bn labour hours lost globally in 2021. “This is about a 40% increase from the 1990s and we estimate the associated income and economic losses at about $700bn,” she said. About 30% more land is now affected by extreme drought events, compared with the 1950s.
These impacts are leading to growing hunger, the report says. Hot periods in 2020 were associated with 98 million more people unable to get the food they needed, compared with the average from 1981-2010, and the proportion of the global population enduring food insecurity is also rising. “The largest driver of this is the changing climate,” Romanello said.
Pump jacks in New Mexico. The strategies of the 15 biggest oil and gas companies remain sharply at odds with ending the climate emergency, the report says. Photograph: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images
Prof Elizabeth Robinson at the London School of Economics said: “This is particularly concerning given that global food supply chains have this year once again been revealed to be highly vulnerable to shocks [such as the war in Ukraine], manifesting in rapidly increasing food prices.”
The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential
The report also recorded the impact of the climate crisis on infectious diseases, finding that the periods when malaria could be transmitted became 32% longer in upland areas of the Americas and 15% longer in Africa over the past decade, compared with the 1950s. The likelihood of dengue transmission rose by 12% over the same period.
The Lancet report also tracks the fossil fuel system. It found that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidising fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019. These subsidies were bigger than national health spending in five countries, including Iran and Egypt, and more than 20% of health spending in another 16 countries.
“Governments have so far failed to provide the smaller sum of $100bn per year to help support climate action in lower income countries,” the report notes.
The report says the strategies of the 15 biggest oil and gas companies remain sharply at odds with ending the climate emergency, “regardless of their climate claims and commitments”.
Prof Paul Ekins at UCL said: “Current strategies from many governments and companies will lock the world into a fatally warmer future, tying us to the use of fossil fuels that are rapidly closing off prospects for a liveable world.”
Rapidly cutting fossil fuel burning would not only reduce global heating but deliver immediate health benefits, Romanello said, such as preventing a million or more early deaths caused by air pollution a year.
A move to more plant-rich diets in developed countries will halve emissions from red meat and milk production and prevent up to 11.5 million diet-related deaths a year, the report says.
“The world is at a critical juncture. We must change, otherwise our children face a future of accelerated climate change, threatening their very survival,” said Prof Anthony Costello, the co-chair of the Lancet Countdown. “A health-centred response to the current crises would still provide the opportunity to deliver a low-carbon, resilient, healthy future.”
There can be no more hiding, and no more denying. Global heating is supercharging extreme weather at an astonishing speed, and it’s visible in Sweden and beyond. Guardian analysis recently revealed how human-caused climate breakdown is accelerating the toll of extreme weather across the planet. People across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts triggered by the climate crisis.
At the Guardian, we will not stop giving this life-altering issue the urgency and attention it demands. We have a huge global team of climate writers around the world and have recently appointed an extreme weather correspondent.
Our editorial independence means we are free to write and publish journalism which prioritises the crisis. We can highlight the climate policy successes and failings of those who lead us in these challenging times. We have no shareholders and no billionaire owner, just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, free from commercial or political influence.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
ion, a likely recession and exploding energy prices: Germany is expecting tough years ahead with diminishing prosperity, a shrinking middle class and growing inequality. This is uncharted territory for the government and society, and both are facing some difficult choices.
The Long Arm of the MullahsHamburg Mosque Reportedly a Hotbed for Iranian Propaganda
The Hamburg Islamic Center is considered the most important outpost of the Iranian regime in Germany. But since it is also reportedly used to spread the mullahs’ propaganda across Europe, calls are growing for its work to be restricted.
By Maik Baumgärtner, Katrin Elger und Ann-Katrin Müller
25.10.2022, 15.39 Uhr
Christian Charisius / picture alliance / dpa
On a Tuesday morning, there isn’t much going on at the Hamburg Islamic Center (IZH) located at a prime address on Alster Lake. Two elderly men sit on a wooden bench and converse in Farsi. Another man stands in front of the mosque’s small bookstore and peers at the treatises laid out on the table in several languages and featuring titles like "They Will Be Done – The Most Beautiful Islamic Prayers" and "The Family in Islam."
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DER SPIEGEL 43/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 43/2022 (October 22nd, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
In the latter, readers learn that "homosexuality, sodomy and adultery are diseases of modernity." In addition to information about this "swamp of sexual dysfunction," it also contains instructions for husbands. For example, in the chapter titled "Obedience or Slavery?," it says, "According to religious regulations, the wife must ask her husband’s permission if she wishes to leave the house." It also states that, no matter what kind of operation he runs, it is the boss’s job to monitor the comings and goings of his staff and to monitor whether they are fulfilling their duties.
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This kind of misogynistic and homophobic exegesis of the religion alone would be reason enough to be bothered by the Blue Mosque, as the center is also known. But this isn’t the only reason. According to reports, the IZH is also used by Iran’s mullah regime to spread its propaganda and exert influence over Shiite Muslims.
The parliamentary group of the center-right Christian Democrats recently introduced a resolution in Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, to support the Iranian protest movement. Among other things, the resolution calls for closing the IZH and prohibiting the organization from working with German government agencies in any capacity.
A "Significant Center of Propaganda"
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is charged with keeping tabs on all forms of extremism, has been observing the IZH community for many years and describes it, besides the Iranian Embassy, as "Iran’s most important representation in Germany and a significant center of propaganda" in Europe. Officials there claim that, with the help of the IZH, Iran is seeking to "bind Shiites of different nationalities to it and to spread the basic social, political and religious values of the Iranian state in Europe." Behind the center is the Islamic Community of the Shiite Communities in Germany (IGS), an umbrella organization that claims to represent 150 mosque communities.
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For many exiled Iranians who once fled the brutal Islamists, it is intolerable that the German government hasn’t taken action against the Blue Mosque. Many suspect that the government is afraid to make any such move because it might worsen its diplomatic relations with Iran.
On its website, the Iranian Community in Germany, a secular organization, calls for the European Union – and the German government, in particular – to "monitor and legally prosecute the agents and religious institutions acting here on behalf of the regime." At solidarity rallies, "there are often regime informers spying on us and photographing those participating in the demonstrations."
ANZEIGE
Active Agents in Germany
Iranian agents in Germany are thought to be particularly active. Sources in German security circles in Berlin say that the "handling of opposition figures is a prioritized goal of Iranian intelligence services." In some cases, it is done in a highly professional manner. The Quds Brigade, the elite foreign unit of the Revolutionary Guards, "don’t only rely on their own countrymen" for its activities in Germany. According to information obtained by DER SPIEGEL, they also try to recruit Shiites from other countries.
Demonstrations are currently being held in a number of German cities. And demonstrators have also repeatedly protested in front of the Blue Mosque. Last week, dozens of immigrant associations, academics and politicians from various parties jointly wrote an open letter to the parliament of the city-state of Hamburg. In it, they wrote: "Cooperation with an extremist institution is an affront for a democratic urban community and a threat to domestic security." They added that IZH should not remain a partner of the city.
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The organization is still a member of Schura, the council of Islamic communities in Hamburg. Schura works together with the city and helps to shape religious education in the schools. At the moment, an arbitration committee is "deliberating on the further course of the IZH and whether it can remain a member," sources at Schura said.
Umbrella Organization Denies All Allegations
Susanne Schröter, director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam (FFGI) at the University of Frankfurt, also signed the protest letter. "According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, there has been evidence for years that the center is not only anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and misogynistic, but also that it has ties to the terrorist Hezbollah militia," she says. "I have little understanding for the fact that people aren’t setting boundaries here."
The IGS umbrella organization, on the other hand, feels unfairly treated and is denying all accusations. "Our members are mosques and congregations that exclusively deal with religious matters," it stated in a press release. "As we have laid down in our statutes, we are committed to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany." It adds, "For us, as the umbrella organization, Iranian politics are not relevant." The IZH itself also writes: "Our only connections abroad are with the offices of the great scholars of the Islamic world."
"Repression and Disregard for Human Rights"
Despite these denials, authorities at Hamburg’s state Interior Ministry have taken action against one of the IZH’s top officials. The deputy head, whom the security authorities accuse of maintaining contacts with the Islamist Hezbollah organization, has been ordered to leave Germany. If he doesn’t do so on his own accord, he will face deportation.
On Thursday afternoon, the city’s deputy mayor, Katharina Fegebank of the Green Party, also expressed her opposition to the center. "As I see it, the IZH’s participation in the city’s contracts with the Islamic religious communities is no longer imaginable," she told DER SPIEGEL. "The IZH is the antithesis of our free and democratic basic order. In Iran, you can see every day what the mullahs’ regime stands for: repression and disregard for human rights."
News round-up Tuesday, 25 October 2022.
“The entrenched social inequality could be combated, for example with a high inheritance tax on large fortunes or a proposed "basic inheritance," a one-time government gift payment made to young people to give them better chances at the start of their careers. They are both long-term projects that are highly controversial politically. (Spiegel)
“The EU’s failure to find an agreement to contain gas and electricity prices sounds like a disavowal for the French president.”
Conclusion of the day's news:
Macron's thwarted European energy ambitionsNews Elsa Conesa
The EU's failure to find an agreement to contain gas and electricity prices sounds like a disavowal for the French president.
Published on October 25, 2022 at 05h00 Time to 4 min. Lire en français
Emmanuel Macron on the second day of the European Union leaders' summit held to discuss Ukraine, energy, economic issues and external relations, in Brussels, October 21, 2022. PIROSCHKA VAN DE WOUW/REUTERS
Emmanuel Macron's pro-European identity has always been one of his key ideological markers. But five years after the Sorbonne speech laying out his vision for Europe, it seems his influence on Europe is weakened. And the resignation of British Prime Minister Liz Truss on Thursday, October 20, overshadowed an equally worrying, though less visible, reality: the failure of European negotiations on energy and Europe's inability to contain prices that defy all economic logic. This not only brings some member states to their knees, but also threatens European cohesion.
The conclusions of the Council summit from the end of last week are hardly reassuring: the 27 concluded that it was "urgently" necessary to find "concrete solutions" on the issue of gas prices. The sharp rise in these prices over the past year has caused electricity prices to skyrocket in turn. Including in France, where the energy mix, 70% of which comes from cheap nuclear electricity, should protect it from gas prices.
For nearly a year, Paris has been lobbying for an overhaul of European electricity market rules in order to bring down prices. So far, little has been achieved. But the topic is crucial: our economies are ultra-dependent energy, forcing all European states to pay for these price differences, in a new "whatever it takes" approach that is not explicitly called as such, but which has already exceeded a cost of €500 billion, according to the Brussels think tank Bruegel. France spent €50 billion to protect households from increasing energy prices in 2021, and plans to disburse another €50 billion in 2023. What will it do if energy prices do not fall?
Westerrn Officials Warn Russia Could Use a Dirty Bomb as a Pretext
Top officials from the United States, Britain and France cautioned that there was no change in Russia’s nuclear posture and that they believed no decision had been made to use a tactical nuclear weapon.
Members of a Ukrainian drone unit hunting for Russian positions to target. With Ukraine continuing to make gains against Russian forces, there has been little immediate gain for the Kremlin.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
By David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper
Oct. 24, 2022
WASHINGTON — Top officials from the United States, Britain and France sought on Monday to call out what they said was a transparent ploy by Moscow to create a pretext for escalating the war in Ukraine, rejecting claims by the Kremlin that Kyiv was preparing to detonate a dirty bomb on its own territory.
The strikingly public effort to expose the suspected Russian maneuver, which began with a joint statement issued on Sunday by the three allies, reflected a belief in Washington, London and Paris that President Vladimir V. Putin’s commanders may be preparing the ground for a sharp escalation in the war.
While the officials said that there was no change in Russia’s nuclear posture, and they believed no decision had been made to use a tactical nuclear weapon, they made clear that a move in that direction was their central concern.
“We’ve not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture, nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons,” Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said Monday. “But we’ve heard these very concerning statements, and we wanted to send a very clear signal.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other senior officials noted a history of Russia’s accusing others of doing what Moscow is contemplating — and of attempting “false flag” operations that could create a pretext for intervention.
The Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, had claimed over the weekend that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a “dirty bomb,’’ a phrase that describes a conventional explosive, like dynamite, that is wrapped with radiological waste. In a series of phone calls on Monday with NATO nations, Moscow’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, repeated the allegation.
Such a bomb is not a nuclear device; it has none of the explosive power of a nuclear weapon. But it is an effective weapon of terror, and the resulting radiological contamination can make several city blocks uninhabitable for a period of time. And because it involves nuclear material, it can often be confused, in public discussion, with an atomic weapon.
The flurry of phone calls between American, NATO and Russian officials came after more than six months in which communications were sparse. And the sudden frequency of the calls, and resultant warnings, reflected what American officials said was a greater level of concern about possible nuclear use by Russia than at any point during the war.
It came 60 years to the week after the Cuban Missile Crisis, whose lessons have been both studied and debated by President Biden’s aides in recent weeks. They say their concern is that Mr. Putin, frustrated by the failures of his conventional forces, may now reach for unconventional weapons — or bluff that he is willing to use his nuclear arsenal to try to fracture the Western alliance with Ukraine.
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The rare joint statement by the top diplomats in the United States, France and Britain had echoes of the move before the invasion of Ukraine to expose intelligence about Russia’s forthcoming moves, in hopes of complicating the narrative for Mr. Putin. While not all of those actions came to pass, some did — and Mr. Putin was not deterred from the invasion.
In the statement, the three governments confirmed that their defense ministers had each spoken with Mr. Shoigu, and they rejected “Russia’s transparently false allegations” about a dirty bomb.
“The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation,” the statement said.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, issued a carefully worded statement that specifically mentioned the dirty bomb.
“We reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” she said. Later she added: “But obviously, we are concerned about the false allegation being used as a pretext for further escalation. And we’ve made clear, we reject these allegations. And so we have not seen any reason to adjust our own, for example, nuclear posture.”
The decision to go public with the accusations came after two conversations between Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and his Russian counterpart, Mr. Shoigu.
The foreign minister of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba, posted to Twitter that he had invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to come into the country to confirm that Ukraine is not building dirty bombs. He said he spoke with both Mr. Blinken and Rafael Grossi, the director general of the I.A.E.A., who is in Washington this week.
Periodically during the Ukraine war, Mr. Putin and other Russian officials have issued various nuclear threats — an apparent reminder to the United States and its allies that there are limits to Moscow’s tolerance of their support for Kyiv.
Making sure the war does not escalate to the use of nuclear weapons has hung over White House decision making since before Moscow’s invasion. As a result, the United States has not delivered weapons to Ukraine that could reach deep into Russia, even as it has stepped up its supply of arms that have had a devastating impact on the Russian army fighting in Ukraine.
A woman collecting water from a municipal truck after Russian bombardment damaged infrastructure in a residential neighborhood in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
But the phone calls and official statements over the weekend signaled a growing worry across Western capitals. The fears were explained, at least in part, by other moves Mr. Putin has made in recent weeks.
In mid-September, officials noted that even as worries of nuclear escalation lurked in the background, Mr. Putin had various steps to take, short of using such a weapon, to escalate the conflict with Ukraine in more conventional ways. Mr. Putin could conduct a mobilization of his population or launch widespread attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, for example.
Now, a little more than a month later, Mr. Putin has taken those two steps, conducting a partial mobilization and beginning widespread attacks on Ukraine’s power grid. The mobilization is meant to shore up his faltering army. The drone and missile strikes on the electric grid are both meant to hamper Ukrainian military operations and break the will of the Ukrainian people by plunging the country into darkness as winter approaches.
Some officials note that Mr. Putin may want to see how either of those moves play out in the months to come before taking more steps to intensify the war.
Still, using a nuclear weapon could very likely undermine Mr. Putin at home.
Even before the war, U.S. officials began warning about various possible Russian “false flag” operations that Moscow was hoping to use to create a pretext for the invasion. Russia, for example, said Ukraine was planning to use a chemical weapon, and then American intelligence uncovered a plot by Russia to hire crisis actors to create a false pretext for invasion.
Pentagon officials were on edge Monday after three phone calls in four days between the Defense Department’s top civilian official and top uniformed officer. On Friday, Mr. Austin initiated a phone call with Mr. Shoigu, his Russian counterpart, the first time the two men had spoken since May.
The conversation was meant to delineate the red lines that could potentially provoke Russia to launch a nuclear attack on Ukraine and to clarify for the Biden administration why Mr. Putin has been raising the prospect of a nuclear strike in Ukraine, three officials said.
Defense Department officials were surprised when two days later, Mr. Shoigu requested another call, at 7:30 a.m. Sunday, in which he accused Ukraine of preparing to use a dirty bomb, two officials said.
The allegation, which the United States has said was baseless, spooked senior defense and military officials, who expressed concern that Moscow might be using the false flag as a distraction, masking some other more ominous development.
That possibility only heightened concerns among already jittery senior Pentagon officials about Russia’s next possible step up the escalation ladder. One senior U.S. official said there were new, troubling developments involving Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The official asked for anonymity and declined to provide any details, given the sensitivity of the issue.
At a Pentagon briefing on Monday, a senior U.S. military officer said there was no indication that Mr. Putin had made a decision to use unconventional weapons — nuclear, chemical or biological arms — but offered no details.
American officials have said they had seen no movement of any of Russia’s 2,000 or so tactical nuclear weapons. Because the weapons are small, it is unclear whether they would see the weapons — though they may see or hear activity by Russia’s nuclear-trained forces.
Also on Monday, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with his Russian counterpart, General Gerasimov, according to a readout of the call provided by General Milley’s spokesman, Col. Dave Butler.
“The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep the lines of communication open,” Colonel Butler said in the emailed statement.
Rishi Sunak to meet King Charles and give first address to the nation as PM – UK politics live
Ultra rich, young and the first person of colour to become UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak will also make history as the first practising Hindu to lead the country
New Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak will be Britain’s second-youngest prime minister. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images
The Guardian
Tue 25 Oct 2022 04.56 BST
The man who will on Tuesday become the UK’s 57th prime minister is richer than the King and, at 42, younger than every predecessor except William Pitt the Younger.
Rishi Sunak will also be the UK’s first ever person of colour to lead the country, and first Hindu prime minister.
On Saturday, this newspaper asked if he was too rich to become PM. On Monday, 195 Conservative MPs answered. So how did he get here?
Youth
Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had moved to the UK from east Africa. His father was a GP and his mother ran her own pharmacy. The eldest of three children, Sunak was educated at a private boarding school, Winchester College, which costs £43,335 a year to attend. He was head boy, and has in recent years made multiple donations of over £100,000 to the school.
Sunak went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, like so, so, so many before him. He was awarded a first-class degree. He later gained a master’s of business administration (MBA) at Stanford University, where he met Akshata Murty, his future wife, but where few others remember him.
Family
Murty, 42, is the daughter of the Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murthy, often described as the Bill Gates of India, who founded the software company Infosys. According to reports, his daughter has a 0.91% stake in the company, worth about £700m.
The couple married in her home town of Bengaluru in a two-day ceremony in 2009 attended by 1,000 guests. They have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka. In April this year it emerged that Murty was a non-domiciled UK resident, meaning she avoided UK taxes on her international earnings in return for paying an annual charge of £30,000.
Without that non-dom status she could have been liable for more than £20m of UK taxes on these windfalls, it was reported. After a public outcry, her spokesperson announced she would start paying UK taxes on her overseas earnings to relieve political pressure on her husband.
Still, Sunak and Murty’s combined fortune is estimated to be £730m, double the estimated £300m-£350m wealth of King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort. They own four properties spread across the world and valued at more than £15m.
Rise to the top
Sunak has gone from MP to prime minister in just seven years – faster than any other PM in the modern era. David Cameron achieved the same in nine years, but again, Pitt the Younger holds the overall record with just two years.
Sunak’s path to the top wasn’t all smooth. After losing to Liz Truss in a vote of Tory members on 5 September, he was expected to disappear from politics – and quickly did, last speaking in the Commons the day after Truss became PM. But when Truss’s disastrous and unfunded tax cuts brought her down in flames, Sunak was ready with the backing of supporters he had gathered over the summer campaign.
Nearly man to next PM: Rishi Sunak’s rapid change of political fortune
After winning the leadership, Sunak, whose career has been defined by fiscal conservatism, told MPs his ambition was to have a “highly productive UK economy” and that he backed low taxation but that it had to be affordable and deliverable.
Ends and hobbies
Sunak “collects Coca-Cola things”, as he told two school pupils, before saying “I am a Coke addict, I am a total Coke addict,” then, as the pupils sniggered, clarifying “Coca-Cola addict, just for the record”.
He once tried to pay for a Coke at a petrol station, but was confused by the contactless credit card system.
Speaking in Tunbridge Wells, Sunak once boasted that he had changed Labour party policies “which shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas” so that funding could go to wealthy towns instead.
As a student, he told documentary makers that he had friends who are aristocrats, friends who are upper class and friends who are working class before remembering: “Well, not working class”.
Inflation, Bankruptcies and Fears of DeclineGermany on the Brink
Spiegel
Inflation, a likely recession and exploding energy prices: Germany is expecting tough years ahead with diminishing prosperity, a shrinking middle class and growing inequality. This is uncharted territory for the government and society, and both are facing some difficult choices.
By David Böcking, Simon Book, Florian Diekmann, Florian Gathmann, Simon Hage, Martin Knobbe, Timo Lehmann, Peter Maxwill, Ann-Katrin Müller, Christian Reiermann, Jonas Schaible, Michael Sauga, Thomas Schulz, Christian Teevs, Gerald Traufetter und Severin Weiland
22.09.2022, 13.53 Uhr
Nicole Geithner's family ought to be doing well. Really well. And the Geithners know it. Their apartment, in a historical building located near Dresden, is freshly renovated, her job as a paramedic and his as a project manager for an IT company are decently paid and secure. With a gross household income of 90,000 euros, they are firmly anchored in the middle class. They should be living pleasant lives.
ANZEIGE
But it doesn't feel that way for the family of four. They long ago gave up their dream of owning a home, with their plan of buying a second car meeting the same fate. The trip they planned to take to Amsterdam has also been cancelled. Moreover, the Geithners have begun paying closer attention to sales and special offers at the supermarket. "I'm afraid that soon we won't be able to afford the nice life we live," says Nicole Geithner, 35. "We're nervous."
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DER SPIEGEL 38/2022Bild vergrößern
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 38/2022 (September 17th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
They're not alone. Political leaders in Berlin are also growing uncomfortable. When the German middle class starts worrying about decline, things start getting dicey everywhere in the country. Particularly for the government.
One doesn't have to look far for the roots of the problem: high inflation, skyrocketing energy prices and a slowing economy. Not to mention the challenges associated with tackling climate change.
And the situation wouldn't even improve particularly quickly if the war in Ukraine were to come to a sudden, unexpected end. On the contrary. Several different crises are coming together at the moment to form a perfect storm.
That the German economy will slide into recession this winter is no longer really a question. And there is growing evidence that it could become particularly severe – with a tenfold increase in the exchange electricity price, numerous corporate bankruptcies and a permanently damaged economy. The losses in prosperity, says economist Michael Fratzscher, will be permanent. Germany, according to the forecasts, is in decline.
Nicole Geithner's family has increased their grocery budget by 20 percent, and their prepayments on water and general utilities for their apartment have doubled. She suspects that this is by no means the end of the story. "There's always something on top," Geithner says. To Geithner, it feels "like we've completely lost control."
This is uncharted territory for Germany. After nearly two golden decades of rising incomes, steady economic growth and little unemployment, a tough decade is looming. At least for those who aren't happy about paying up to 1,000 euros more a month for gas and electricity, three euros for butter and purchase prices of 1 million euros for a two-bedroom apartment. In other words, everyone but the top 10 percent of the country.
ANZEIGE
At the same time, that which has been glossed over in recent years is now coming to the fore: Growing inequality. Since the 1990s, incomes have been drifting apart, and wealth even more so. The wealthy own more and more, even as the number of low-income earners is growing. The center of society is fraying.
In good years, this could be ignored politically, because it was mainly the bottom 20 percent who suffered. As harsh as it may sound, it is a demographic that traditionally hasn't had much of a say in the country. Today, though, it's also about the center of society, even comparatively well-off people like the Geithners.
Just how dramatic the situation is can be seen from one of the Germans' favorite activities: saving money. The Sparkassenverband savings banks association estimates that 60 percent of households in Germany soon will no longer be able to put money aside. Inflation and energy prices are eating up their disposable income. During the second quarter of this year, real wages fell by 4.4 percent.
A middle class family: Nicole Geithner, her partner Valentin Schulze and son Emilian
Foto: Sven Döring / laif
Among the hardest hit are the up to 14 million people who are just barely clinging to the middle class and don't want to slip any further. Families with two children and a net income of 3,000 euros per month, for example, who have had to stretch their budgets to the limit despite two full-time jobs. People, in other words, who already have their doubts about social justice in the country.
It's a dangerous situation, and not just from an economic point of view. Thousands have taken to the streets in protest in the cities of Leipzig, Magdeburg and Pforzheim in recent weeks, and it's possible this is only the beginning. Politicians in all camps are warning of the possibility of a "hot autumn," some of a winter of rage, referring to possible protests and unrest. Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is tasked with monitoring extremism, has set up a working group to investigate if a movement is materializing.
The fears are justified. People who feel left behind tend to gravitate toward the political fringes. Injustice, even if only a perceived unfairness, fosters populism and extremism.
The federal government is turning to its usual practice of trying to smother the problems with money and is working on its third relief package within just a few months, this time with the aim of calming the lower middle class. The plan calls for things like a flat-rate energy price for pensioners, a flat-rate national public transportation ticket (for somewhere between 49 and 69 euros a month) and increased monthly child benefit payments for parents.
But much of it still seems half-baked. It remains an open question, for example, how exactly an electricity price cap is to be financed by skimming profits from energy utility companies. Despite the "massive" relief package, as the finance minister calls it, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is still failing to come up with a clear plan for combating the downward spiral.
Still, Germany's leaders are at least aware that quickly fabricated cash gifts to calm the masses are not a sustainable solution in the constant fire of crises around the world. There simply isn't enough money available given the large number of problems and increasingly precarious situation.
The prevailing world order is disintegrating, the age of globalization is coming to an end, and the German model of prosperity in particular is under massive threat as a result. The consequence is that there will be less to redistribute in the future.
At the same time, the government and taxpayers will be faced with hundreds of billions of euros in additional costs over the next several years. Industry must be transformed to become climate-neutral, and the country's energy supply must be shored up to ensure independence from Russia. The country must be reformed, digitized and made more competitive for the increasingly tough systemic competition against autocracies like China. Traditional industries are in danger of disappearing – and with them jobs.
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A luxury perfume ad: People at the bottom have fewer opportunities to work their way up. "To exaggerate just a bit: once poor, always poor – once rich, always rich."
Foto: Stefan Boness / DER SPIEGEL
The crisis is also a symptom indicating that a chaotic epoch is dawning. That many things aren't just changing for the foreseeable future. Rather, they are structural changes, and likely for the worse.
As such, it will be necessary to renegotiate how this will affect society – who will have to give up more and who will get how much? What fairness will mean in concrete terms in the future.
Is this the beginning of a decade of redistribution that will primarily burden the upper middle class, a group that benefited the most when times were good? Or will people have to get used to the fact that the state can no longer relieve them of every burden? And how much strength and money will then be left for reforms that have long been agreed upon, so that the coming generations won't be handed an emaciated country, but rather a modern and climate-friendly one?
These are difficult questions that could become a test for society. And even more so for a governing coalition that has highly divergent views on the definition of fairness.
I. Is Chancellor Olaf Scholz Up to the Crisis?
You can tell that nerves are frayed when the chancellor gets loud, when he almost yells. These are "serious times," Scholz shouted in the federal parliament, the Bundestag, last week, actually clenching his fists. The cohesion of society, he said, is "of the utmost importance." The chancellor has cultivated a standard appearance over a long period of time: cool, unemotional and stoic. When he deviates, as he did this time, it is a special moment, one that points to political unrest.
During that plenary debate in the Bundestag last week, Scholz spoke of a "division" in the country, of peace that is endangered. He even recited lyrics from the club anthem of the English football club Liverpool FC, "You'll Never Walk Alone," and proclaimed it to be the "motto of this government."
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Government coalition partners, from left to right: Robert Habeck of the Greens, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats
Kay Nietfeld / dpa
Despite these assurances, though, many people seem convinced that they will have to deal with this crisis largely on their own. They have seen how many billions of euros the government is pumping into relief and also how quickly it has evaporated. How long can the government continue to offset the costs, especially with a finance minister from the junior coalition partners, the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), who has made Germany's balanced-budget law, the "debt brake," his mantra?
Although the German government has now approved around 95 billion euros in aid, 60 percent of Germans feel that the relief packages are not socially just, according to a survey conducted by pollster Civey on behalf of DER SPIEGEL. And almost three-quarters of Germans fear that they will be worse off economically in the long term. There is little sign of solidarity, of any broad sense of fairness.
Some in Berlin are watching this eroding confidence in social cohesion with growing concern. It helps explain why the chancellor expects less from one-off payments like those in the current package to students and pensioners. He has higher hopes for the effects of structural change: the recent reform of the country's system of payments for people on long-term welfare or by raising the income threshold from which people must make contributions to the social welfare system. It was his idea to allow employers to provide a one-time payment of up to 3,000 euros without any payroll taxes to employees to help relieve the burden of higher energy costs, for example.
These times of crisis, in which redistribution, social fairness and solidarity are so important, should actually suit a chancellor with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). One might think he would experience a political boost. But the opposite is the case: For weeks, Scholz's popularity ratings have been falling. According to a poll by Civey, almost 50 percent of respondents said they were "very dissatisfied" with the chancellor's work – even after the passage of the latest 65-billion-euro package.
Scholz won his election campaign based on promoting more societal fairness. Those close to him often relate anecdotes of Scholz addressing stagehands, drivers and security staff at big events. Hard-working people, say his confidants, are a primary focus of his.
This can also be seen in the coalition agreement, in which he pushed through one of his most important promises: an increase in the national minimum wage to 12 euros starting Oct. 1. This is a "political revolution," says the SPD. It's just that few have really noticed it. On the one hand, Economy Minister Robert Habeck's star has been shining a little too brightly compared to the more aloof Scholz – at least until Habeck got tangled up in Germany's approach to the energy crisis, natural gas prices and nuclear energy. The chancellor's bigger problem, though, is that few citizens seem to believe that the current government led by Scholz will really help them, despite all the relief packages.
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Nicole Geithner's family, for example, doesn't expect much from the relief packages. The most vulnerable, Geithner says, are always quickly helped when crisis strikes: The housing benefit is increased, child benefits are boosted, welfare payments will be adjusted for inflation, things like that. They are moves that she fully supports. And on the other side, "the rich" aren't particularly vulnerable anyway. "They don't care about three euros for butter," she says. No one, though, is thinking about families like hers, she says. "We feel forgotten. And yet the middle class is supposedly propping up the country."
At least the coalition tried to improve their approach with the third relief package. Many experts had criticized the first two attempts, arguing that the measures were too costly and, while they would provide a bit of help to everybody, the overall effect would be minimal. The government, they said, became fixated on cash handouts for everyone. Those who drive large, gas-guzzlers, for example, benefited the most from the summer rebate on prices at the pump.
The programs need to be far more targeted, argues Monika Schnitzer, professor of economics at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Assistance needs to be directed at "those people whose income is so low that there is nothing left at the end of the month and who therefore simply cannot pay higher prices." Schnitzer is an economic adviser to the government and has taught at Harvard and Stanford. And she's rather perplexed by the third relief package. "At no point was it clearly spelled out how the 65 billion euros was arrived at," she says.
Presumably because the government expected the enormous sum to have a greater political impact than the individual measures. The pool of recipients is again large, with more child benefits for families, energy allowances for students and pensioners, and housing benefits for a greater number of low-income earners.
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A bottle collector in Hamburg.
Foto: Johannes Arlt / DER SPIEGEL
A family with two children and an income of around 66,000 euros will be provided with around 1,000 euros per year in relief, according to government figures. A pensioner earning 12,000 euros will be given around 850 euros in relief, while students and future recipients of long-term welfare payments are expected to be provided with 750 euros.
As with the first two packages, it is questionable how many of the money will actually end up with those who need them most. "You haven't really reached the lower incomes yet," Schnitzer says. At the same time, the upper incomes benefit the most from certain tax code adjustments. "I think selling that as relief is questionable," says the economist.
At the same time, though, the economist says that expectations of the government should be realistic and that solutions in these extraordinary times don't have to be perfect. They just need to have a clear effect, as this summer's 9-euro monthly national public transportation pass did. Although it also benefited the high-income bracket, those dependent on mass transit due to a lack of their own vehicle. That's why Schnitzer thinks the planned continuation of the offer is a good idea – even if the ticket price is expected to be significantly higher that 9 euros if it is continued. "When people feel insecure and threatened, even measures that contradict pure economic doctrine are sometimes not a bad idea," she says.
It's highly unlikely the third package will be the final crisis measure. No one knows exactly what to expect in the coming months. Even hardened experts are worried.
People like Timo Wollmershäuser, who has been researching the ups and downs of retail and industry for the past 17 years. Chief economist at Munich's Ifo institute, Wollmershäuser has experienced the global slump following the Lehman Brothers insolvency, the euro crisis and the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic. But the barrage of issues seen in recent months is uncharted territory even for him. "It makes it very difficult to forecast what is going to happen next," he says.
Industry is still short of raw materials, supplies and preliminary products because the Chinese government has paralyzed factories and ports for several weeks at a time in the fight against the pandemic. The U.S. Federal Reserve's high interest rates are putting a damper on the global economy, a development that is being felt particularly severely by the export-oriented German economy. The war in Ukraine is making raw materials and energy more expensive and driving inflation to levels not seen in Germany in 50 years. Global trade is teetering, a debt crisis is looming in emerging markets – and China and Taiwan could become the next, even bigger crisis for the world community.
Wollmershäuser expects Russia's energy war to continue to drive up inflation rates, averaging more than 9 percent over the next year. It makes production more expensive and deprives citizens of purchasing power. "The government must be careful that the dramatic rise in energy price doesn't drive entire segments of the population into poverty," says the Ifo researcher.
His institutes's business climate index is forecasting an economic slump across the board, particularly in consumer-related sectors such as retail and catering. Wollmershäuser believes it is a foregone conclusion that the economy will fall into recession from the winter half-year onward. He believes economic output will also contract in the coming year, by 0.3 percent according to the latest forecast.
In the meantime, many companies have the feeling it could be an extremely deep crash, with no immediate return to growth. They fear that energy prices will remain high for years to come and that de-globalization will make many products increasingly expensive.
This is more than just one of the usual economic downturns. The future viability of the German economic and social model is at stake. This may sound overwrought, but a look at the global chaos unfolding helps to explain how dramatic things are becoming.
For almost two decades, Germany has presented itself as a model economy of globalization: strong in exports, cosmopolitan, financially stable and rich. This provided the government with sufficient tax and benefit contributions to maintain the welfare state at a high level despite a stagnating population.
Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has put an end to this era. Can the chemical and steel industries survive if they can no longer rely on cheap energy from Russia? Are the once successful carmakers and engineering companies prepared for hostile trading blocs?
Probably not, as the latest economic data from the eurozone shows. For more than 15 years, Germany had been the economic motor of the continent. In the second quarter of this year, though, Germany was the economic laggard, outpaced by former crisis countries such as Spain and Portugal. The formula is simple: If globalization slows down, Germany struggles.
The consequences are severe. "The middle class is depleting their savings right now to maintain their standard of living," says Wollmershäuser. "The war is making us poorer," says government adviser and economist Schnitzer. It is also making the state poorer.
In the coming weeks and months, the main issue will thus be where the money is to come from to compensate, at least in part, for the costs of the crisis. Who will fund the current relief package, and who will fund packages numbers four and five, which are expected to follow soon? A week ago Tuesday, at an annual event of employers' associations, the chancellor pledged further aid for companies. And where would the money come from to finance it? Unclear. And who will pay for saving a climate, which the Federal Constitutional Court recently ordered it is the government's responsibility to do? In the future, it will be less a question of who will be provided with financial relief and more a question of who should be made to bear a greater burden.
Economist Schnitzer has spent years thinking about this. A member of the German Council of Economic Experts which advises the government, Schnitzer sees two possibilities. "Either more debt or greater redistribution. There are good arguments for both."
Right now, Germany's "debt brake" balanced budget law is impeding an increase in borrowing. But Schnitzer believes it is possible for the government to suspend the borrowing rules in the coming year, just as it did during the coronavirus crisis. "That's quite justified because there is a temporary shock: In one fell swoop, we have much higher prices." However, Finance Minister Christian Lindner wants to reinstate the spending rule, which would make it difficult to finance further relief measures.
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German Finance Minister Christian Lindner has insisted on reapplying the "debt brake," Germany's law requiring a balanced federal budget.
Foto: Stefan Boness / DER SPIEGEL
Schnitzer also has a proposal for the second option. To redistribute costs, the state could employ a solidarity surcharge on income tax – similar to the one introduced to finance the costs of the reunification of East and West Germany. "The advantage of a solidarity surcharge would be the message: There are strong shoulders in this country, and they should carry more," Schnitzer says. With the solidarity charge, almost all workers would have to contribute, with high earners paying the most.
How broad some shoulders actually are is hotly disputed within the coalition government in Berlin, which is comprised of the SPD, the Green Party and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP). The FDP is insisting there can be no tax increases and refers to a pledge in the coalition agreement that taxes would not be raised, even though, from today's perspective, it was drawn up in a totally different era.
Whatever path the government takes to raise more money, it will only work if the whole country does its part If everyone pulls their weight and makes fewer demands. If people voluntarily agree to a bit of privation.
That, though, can be a tough sell in Germany, as seen by the clumsy effort made by Baden-Württemberg Governor Winfried Kretschmann to encourage people to save on gas by opting for a washcloth instead of a full shower. His comments drew widespread disparagement.
Schnitzer can't understand some of the outrage. "These are people who haven't yet recognized the signs of the times," she says. "We won't be going around in sackcloth. But we will be faced with some constraints for a period of time."
II. Is German-Style Redistribution Still a Good Idea?
Heinz Bude has been observing Germans and their customs for 30 years now, and if there is one trait that makes him uncomfortable, it is the tendency toward the "compensation mentality": the expectation that the state will cover every risk and compensate for any financial losses. "Social solidarity is destined for destruction when everyone is always saying: But I also have to get something," says Bude.
A professor of sociology, Bude is one of the country's leading interpreters of society and leans to the left side of the political spectrum. One might think he would be in favor of the SPD's approach to the redistribution of societal wealth.
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A Lamborghini and a man selling a magazine that donates its earnings to the homeless: Societal cohesion has been in decline in Germany since the 1990s.
These days, though, he doesn't care much for the chancellor's polices. It's a "muddle," he says of the many relief measures, adding that more and more money is being redistributed to an increasing number of social groups. Instead, he says, it might be time to openly address the fact that some people are going to take a hit.
In times of crisis, Bude's main concern isn't about who gets how much. It's about how much people are willing to support each other. That's why he doesn't believe in unilaterally placing a financial burden on those who can most afford it. "That would be completely wrong, because it undermines precisely the cohesion we need." Bude does, though, agree that those who have a lot should carry a greater weight.
Ultimately, though, it comes down to the question of what, precisely, is fair.
It is, of course, a discussion that could go on and on against the background of European thought starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ending with Immanuel Kant. If only because the term has many facets, from generational fairness to gender fairness to fairness based on achievement. Is it fairer for the state to support the weaker with direct financial aid – or is it better for the state to create a level playing field for everyone?
So far, almost all political camps in Germany have been able to agree on at least one commitment: that a strong state must ensure social balance, equal opportunities and prosperity. For all. Unlike in Britain or the United States, the understanding of a welfare state has developed that has a strong link to redistribution.
Political philosopher Wolfgang Kersting criticized during the financial crisis back in 2008 that the welfare state was not originally about fair distribution, but about preventing misery or balancing power imbalances between employees and employers. Over time, "expectations of care and redistribution" have developed that "can no longer be met as usual by the all-providing state as economic conditions worsen."
In recent decades, successive governments have continually increased money flows to close the gap between the rich and the poor. But it didn't work well.
At first glance, the past decades appear to be a success story for the entire country. Average household net incomes, for example, rose by a quarter from 1995 to 2019. The unemployment rate fell below the 5-percent mark in the autumn of 2018 for the first time since 1981.
However, incomes have grown unevenly: Whereas the top 10 percent of society had more than 40 percent more disposable income available to it in 2019 than in 1995, the bottom tenth has just under 5 percent more.
The situation is even worse when it comes to assets. According to the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), the top 10 percent of Germans now own more than two-thirds of the country's assets. The approximately 40 million citizens who belong to the bottom half have to make do with 1.3 percent. Those who are right in the middle of society had a net worth of just under 23,000 euros in 2017, including their car, private pension and grandpa's gold watch.
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A man who collects bottles for the deposit money and a couple walking in Hamburg: The center of society is fraying.
Foto: Cornelius Rönz / DER SPIEGEL
"The development since the 1980s has been characterized by two major trends," says Dorothee Spannagel, who heads the department for distribution policy at the Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) of the trade union-aligned Hans Böckler Foundation. She says that the distribution of income has become highly polarized, with both wealth and, especially, poverty widening. In addition, she says that people at the bottom have fewer opportunities to work their way up. "To exaggerate just a bit: once poor, always poor – once rich, always rich," says Spannagel.
She says that these trends were particularly pronounced in the late-1990s to mid-2000s. "During that time, you could literally watch incomes drift apart – more rapidly than in any other core European country."
The result is a dangerous dichotomy in society, as a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Bertelsmann Foundation shows. The lower middle class in particular is under pressure. Although the risk of social decline is lower for the upper half of society than it was in the 1990s, it has increased for the lower half.
The fact that the entire middle class shrank from 59 to 53 percent of the population from 1995 to 2018 is almost entirely due to decline of the lower middle class. "We continue to have a broad and stable middle class," Spannagel says, "but it is fraying at its lower end. The earlier prevailing feeling that with a proper vocational training one had a secure livelihood and could perhaps afford to buy a house one day has gradually dissipated." People in the bottom half, she says, "have come to realize that even though the economy is humming and they are slaving along, they're not getting ahead."
It is a feeling that often manifests itself as a diffuse fear of decline. Rampant inflation is acting as an accelerator.
The entrenched social inequality could be combated, for example with a high inheritance tax on large fortunes or a proposed "basic inheritance," a one-time government gift payment made to young people to give them better chances at the start of their careers. They are both long-term projects that are highly controversial politically.
But how can such fears be allayed in the short term? In ways other than through a constant increase in transfer payments?
"There will be individual losses of wealth. And they will not come anonymously and automatically, they will be dictated politically," says Heinz Bude. "The price question for contemporary society is: Can the threat of individual wealth loss be offset by the promise of collective gain?" For that to happen, he says, it is necessary to develop a sense of the country's public wealth.
Of course, it will be difficult to convey to the citizens that two weeks of vacation in Mallorca are no longer possible, but that good medical care and a functioning legal system also have their merits. Still, Bude says, the government must seek to convey such collective prosperity in a credible way. At least as a kind of temporary diversionary measure, if only out of self-interest.
Bude points to France. He spent time there in the spring for the presidential elections. Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, made the loss of purchasing power and wealth one of her main campaign issues – and by doing so, she gave herself a real shot at winning the election. "I think the decline in purchasing power will become the major issue for populists in Europe," Bude says.
III. Will Germans Take to the Streets this Fall?
Monday demonstrations are nothing new for the people of Leipzig. Demonstrators against the dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were already marching across Augustusplatz square in front of the opera house in 1989, and most recently, it was mainly the "Querdenker" vaccine skeptics who showed up. A march at the beginning of last week, though, was nonetheless an unusual event. The square was divided into two by the tram tracks and the police. On one side, you had around 2,000 supporters of the far-right "Free Saxons" movement; on the other, the far-left politician Gregor Gysi and around 4,000 supporters of Germany's far left. The demonstrators were from broad swaths of life, including schoolchildren, young adults, pensioners and workers.
Those who stumbled unsuspectingly onto Augustusplatz could be forgiven for thinking that the two groups were protesting about the same issue. Their signs had messages like: "Open Nord Stream 2 Immediately!" in reference to the newly built gas pipeline between Russia and Germany that never went into operation after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Both groups also spoke of an autumn full of protests and of mistakes made by the German government. Left-wing politician Gregor Gysi went after an allegedly "overmatched" federal government, while far-right mouthpiece Jürgen Elsässer ranted into the microphone: "If the government wants to freeze the people for its damn war against Russia, then the people must give the government a hot autumn."
But while the right-wing extremists want a common front, and say so clearly, the far-left distance themselves from the often bluntly anti-state slogans on the other side of the tracks, where government politicians are declared "traitors of the people." The distancing was necessary. After all, the left had deliberately chosen a Monday evening for its demonstration, a day that has been marked by extreme right-wing protesters for the last eight years.
Right-wing sympathizers in particular are now hoping for mass protests across the country soon. Like the ones that recently took place in Prague in the Czech Republic, where 70,000 people responded to a joint call by right-wing extremists and communists demanding the government's resignation.
For the past several years, new waves of anger have been rolling through the country, often mixing fear of change and legitimate concerns about social imbalances with hatred against dissenters and the country's political leaders.
Hans Vorländer, the chair of political theory and history of political thought at the Technical University of Dresden, calls this mixture of lies and legitimate demands, of far-right groups and a middle-class crowd, "hybrid protests."
Experts and politicians aren't currently expecting a popular uprising, but they do believe that some radicalization is likely. Protest expert Piotr Kocyba speaks of violent fantasies, and says it's possible that more domestic terrorist groups could emerge – as witnessed during the 2015 refugee crisis, when the "Freital Group" began a series of attacks on asylum-seekers and dissidents in Germany.
How Putin acted in 2009 - the warning that was ignored (DN, Sweden)
U.K. Live Updates: Rishi Sunak is Poised to Become Next Prime Minister
“Instead, the Russian leader emerged stronger from the gas crisis - and celebrated propaganda victories.”
UPDATED YESTERDAY 20:42 PUBLISHED YESTERDAY 17:33
Putin visits the construction of Nord Stream, September 2010.
Vladimir Putin is using energy as a weapon - and it's not the first time.
In the cold winter of 2009, Russia choked off gas to Ukraine, and by extension to other Eastern European countries. All the warning signs pointed ahead to 2022, without the West taking Putin seriously.
Instead, the Russian leader emerged stronger from the gas crisis - and celebrated propaganda victories.
När idén till en bok är mycket lik en annan? Jag är en katt, Natsume Sōseki, Japan, 1905-6 Vs Katten Kerstin, Niklas Strömstedt, Sverige, 2022.
SOY UN GATO (10ª ED.)
NATSUME SOSEKI
IMPEDIMENTA - 9788493760151
“Lik, lika, likadan eller samma?”
Jag är en katt (吾輩は猫である Wagahai wa neko de aru?), även översatt som Jag, katten, är en satirisk roman skriven mellan 1905 och 1906 av den japanska författaren Natsume Sōseki. Romanen anpassades till en animerad film 1982.1 Verket utspelar sig inom ramen för Meiji-erans (1868-1912) borgarklass, ett konservativt samhälle i övergång till västerländsk modernisering, som så småningom skulle blomstra under Taishō-eran (1912-1926) och den tidiga Shōwa-eran (1926-1989). Moderniseringen av japanska seder och tekniker är ett djupt eko i verket, vilket framgår av omnämnanden av konstnärer och personer som Andrea del Sartro, William Thackeray, Lafcadio Hearn, Shigenobu Okuma (den sistnämnde, enligt förlaget Impedimenta, "anses vara en av dem som är mest ansvarig för införandet av västerländsk kultur i Japan "2), bland andra. (Wikipedia)
Noruega detiene al hijo de un confidente de Putin por el vuelo de un dron… (Spiegel)
La infraestructura de Noruega parece estar cada vez más vigilada por Rusia. Ahora la policía ha detenido a Andrei Yakunin, hijo de un poderoso leal a Putin, por una operación con drones.
“La infraestructura de Noruega parece estar cada vez más vigilada por Rusia. Ahora la policía ha detenido a Andrei Yakunin, hijo de un poderoso leal a Putin, por una operación con drones.”
19.10.2022, 20.14 horas
La policía noruega ha detenido a un hijo de Vladimir Yakunin, antiguo jefe de los ferrocarriles rusos y confidente de Putin, por vuelos no autorizados de drones sobre Svalbard. Andrei Yakunin fue detenido en Hammerfest, en el norte de Noruega, según la policía. Anteriormente, los medios noruegos habían informado de la detención de un hombre de 47 años.
Jakunin, ciudadano ruso-británico, admitió haber pilotado ilegalmente un avión no tripulado sobre el archipiélago noruego de Spitsbergen, en el Ártico, dijo un representante de la policía. Yakunin está en prisión preventiva y se han incautado drones y otros equipos electrónicos, dijeron.
Esta es la séptima detención de ciudadanos rusos en pocos días. Se les acusa de utilizar ilegalmente vehículos aéreos no tripulados o de tomar fotografías no autorizadas en Noruega, país fronterizo con Rusia y que es actualmente el mayor proveedor de gas de Europa.
En relación con el aumento de los vuelos de drones cerca de los aeropuertos noruegos, el primer ministro Jonas Gahr Störe declaró a la emisora NRK: "Es inaceptable que los servicios de inteligencia extranjeros permitan que los drones sobrevuelen los aeropuertos noruegos". Añadió que los rusos no tienen derecho a dejar que los drones vuelen sobre Noruega.
¿Su querido amigo de cuatro patas está perdiendo peso pero comiendo más al mismo tiempo? Combinado con un aumento de la sed y la micción, pueden ser signos de que es diabético. Hágase una prueba con su veterinario y lea sobre el manejo simplificado de la diabetes para perros aquí.
Un dron causa trastornos en el aeropuerto de Bergen
Unas horas antes, el vuelo de un dron cerca del aeropuerto de Bergen, al oeste del país, provocó una breve interrupción del tráfico aéreo. Al igual que otros países occidentales, Noruega ha impuesto una prohibición de sobrevuelo a los rusos en respuesta a la guerra de agresión rusa en Ucrania. Los infractores se enfrentan a hasta tres años de prisión.
Norge arresterar sonen till Putins förtrogne för drönarflygning (Spiegel)
Norges infrastruktur tycks i allt högre grad bli utforskad av Ryssland. Nu har polisen gripit Andrej Jakunin, sonen till en mäktig Putintrojalist, för en drönarflygning.
“Norges infrastruktur tycks i allt högre grad bli utforskad av Ryssland. Nu har polisen gripit Andrej Jakunin, sonen till en mäktig Putintrojalist, för en drönarflygning.”
Norsk polis har gripit en son till Vladimir Jakunin, en tidigare rysk järnvägschef och Putin-trogna, för otillåtna drönarflygningar över Svalbard. Andrej Jakunin greps i Hammerfest i Nordnorge, enligt polisen. Tidigare hade norska medier rapporterat att en 47-årig man hade gripits.
Jakunin, en rysk-brittisk medborgare, erkände att han olagligt styrt en drönare över den norska skärgården Spetsbergen i Arktis, sade en polisrepresentant. Jakunin sitter i förundersökningsarrest och drönare och annan elektronisk utrustning har beslagtagits, sade de.
Detta är det sjunde gripandet av ryska medborgare inom loppet av några dagar. De anklagas för att olagligt ha använt obemannade flygfarkoster eller tagit otillåtna fotografier i Norge, som gränsar till Ryssland och som nu är Europas största gasleverantör.
När statsminister Jonas Gahr Störe talade om fler drönarflygningar nära norska flygplatser sa han till radio- och tv-bolaget NRK: "Det är oacceptabelt att utländska underrättelsetjänster låter drönare flyga över norska flygplatser". Ryssarna har inte rätt att låta drönare flyga över Norge, tillade han.
Håller din älskade fyrbenta vän på att gå ner i vikt men äter samtidigt mer? I kombination med ökad törst och urinering kan detta vara tecken på att han är diabetiker. Låt dig testas av din veterinär och läs om förenklad diabeteshantering för hundar här.
Drönare orsakar störningar på flygplatsen i Bergen
Några timmar tidigare orsakade en drönares flygning nära flygplatsen Bergen i västra delen av landet en kort störning i flygtrafiken. Liksom andra västländer har Norge infört ett överflygningsförbud för ryssar som ett svar på det ryska angreppskriget i Ukraina. Överträdare riskerar upp till tre års fängelse.
Tarkovskij (1986)
Hur är det möjligt att vi knappt 36 år efter den ödesdigra olyckan i Tjernobyl genomför en vansinnig invasion med artillerield in i själva inälvorna av helvetet i ett kärnkraftverk?
Rapport från Internationella atomenergiorganet (IAEA),
om det senaste besöket vid kärnkraftverket i Zaporiyia...
Los Angeles Time, Hanna Arhirova från Associeted Press, 6 september 2022.
Hur är det möjligt att vi knappt 36 år efter den ödesdigra olyckan i Tjernobyl genomför en vansinnig invasion med artillerield in i själva inälvorna av helvetet i ett kärnkraftverk?
-Det var en gång, för länge sedan... en gammal munk bodde i ett ortodoxt kloster. Han hette Pamve. En gång planterade han ett torrt träd på en sluttning... Sedan sa han till sin unge lärjunge, en munk som hette Loann Kolov, att han skulle vattna trädet varje dag tills det återfick liv. Så tidigt varje morgon fyllde Loann en hink med vatten och gick ut. Han gick upp på berget och vattnade det torra trädet och på kvällen, när mörkret hade fallit, återvände han till klostret. Han gjorde detta i tre år. En dag gick han upp och såg att hela trädet var fullt av skott. Vad de än säger så har en metod, ett system, sina förtjänster. Vet ni, ibland säger jag till mig själv att om man varje dag, vid samma tidpunkt, skulle utföra samma handling, som en ritual, oföränderlig, systematisk, varje dag vid samma tidpunkt, skulle vi göra samma sak, skulle världen förändras ...
Andrej Tarkovskij inkarnerade högt i karaktären av den store journalisten Alexander i sin spelfilm Offret medan han planterade ett torrt träd vid Östersjöns strand... Ja, samma Alexander, den berömda filmregissören, dramatikern, geologen, manusförfattaren, filosofen, journalisten, målaren, poeten, professorn i estetik, med studier i arabiska språk, utexaminerad från det ryska filmuniversitetet Gerasimov (VGIK), som hyllats fyra gånger vid filmfestivalen i Cannes (Grand Prix Special du Jury, Ecumenical Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize och vinnare av filmfestivalen i Cannes), och som 1983 vann Guldlejonet vid filmfestivalen i Venedig, reflekterar över sökandet efter svar på våra legitima existentiella frågor.
Hans vän, brevbäraren, är den förste som gratulerar honom på födelsedagen, och med sin närvaro driver han de existentiella frågorna vidare till andra okända frågor och fördjupar sig i filosofin om -rotation- om livets kretslopp (Friedrich Nietzsche, Tyskland, 1844-1900). Eller i vår flyktiga genomgång av livet, där vissa, och inte få, tillbringar de sextio sekunderna i en minut, de sextio minuterna i en timme, de tjugofyra timmarna i en soldag, de sju dagarna i en vecka, de tjugoåtta eller tjugonio eller trettio eller trettioen dagar i en månad eller de trehundrasextiofem dagarna i ett kalenderår och så vidare fram till slutet av livet, i väntan på att något "extraordinärt" ska hända med vardagen, det efterlängtade och välsignade "miraklet", som för övrigt nästan aldrig kommer. Brevbärarvännen påminner den store journalisten Alexander om varför han alltid ser saker och ting på ett pessimistiskt sätt.
Så börjar en av de mest anmärkningsvärda spelfilmer som någonsin producerats i den sjunde konstens historia, Offret, skriven och regisserad av Andrej Tarkovskij, född 1932 i Ivanov Oblast i det forna Sovjetunionen, som dog i exil den 29 december 1986 i Paris, Frankrike.
Andrej Tarkovskij har alltid haft en vision, som det inte skulle vara rättvist att kalla pessimistisk när det gäller det sovjetiska samhällets verklighet och framtid, om man tar hänsyn till att dess existens utvecklades i ett system som hade som villkor, princip, att utrota den individuella identiteten genom den grymma exilpolitiken. Det vill säga att invånarna med avsikt flyttade till avlägsna områden som var kulturellt annorlunda än deras födelseort.
Tarkovskijs tankar om livet utifrån en djup filosofisk och poetisk övertygelse, och hans överlevnad i ett alienerande, förtryckande och totalitärt samhälle, fick honom att se fakta gråare än den gemensamma nämnaren för hans landsmän i deras samexistens med det absurda systemet.
Under den store journalisten Alexanders födelsedagsfest, i sällskap med sin familj, sin vän "brevbäraren" och hjälppersonal i hemmet, inträffar det som han fruktade så mycket: en kärnvapenhändelse av enorma proportioner utlöses oväntat.
Och så blev Andrej Tarkovskijs föraning sann: den 24 april 1986 gick reaktor nr 4 i kärnkraftverket Vladimir Iljitj Lenin nära spökstaden Pripjat, cirka 18 kilometer från staden Tjernobyl i norra Ukraina i f.d. Sovjetunionen, paradoxalt nog, mitt under ett säkerhetstest. På grund av ett mänskligt misstag och brist på kvalificerad personal på ett av skiftena överhettades en av reaktorerna, vilket utlöste en serie av två explosioner som ledde till en kärnkraftskatastrof av grad 7. Resten av denna kärnkraftsapokalyps är känd för alla.
Det är därför som den store journalisten Alexanders existentiella reflektioner i filmen Offer om vårt ibland vansinniga mänskliga beteende är så aktuella i dag.
I går, när de första nyheterna från Internationella atomenergiorganet (IAEA) om inspektionsbesöket vid kärnkraftverket Zaporiyia i Ukraina kom in, skrev Los Angeles Times i en rapport av Hanna Arhirova från Associated Press den 6 september:
...-en utförlig rapport om sitt besök, sade IAEA att artillerianfallen runt Europas största kärnkraftverk omedelbart måste upphöra. "Detta kräver att alla berörda parter går med på att upprätta en skyddszon" runt kärnkraftverket, stod det i rapporten. "Vi leker med elden, och något mycket, mycket katastrofalt kan hända", varnade Rafael Grossi, generaldirektör för Internationella atomenergiorganet, FN:s säkerhetsråd, dagarna efter att ha lett ett inspektionsbesök vid anläggningen.
Jag antar att den store journalisten Alexanders sista reflektion skulle vara vid denna tidpunkt:
Hur är det möjligt att vi knappt 36 år efter den ödesdigra olyckan i Tjernobyl fortsätter en vansinnig invasion med artillerield in i själva inälvorna av helvetet av ett kärnkraftverk?
Kort sagt, om vi åberopar livets filosofi om rotation, börjar Tarkovskijs föraning med visningen av hans film Offret, utvecklas med kärnkraftskatastrofen vid Vladimir Iljitj Lenin-anläggningen (Tjernobyl) och avslutas med hans död i exil i december samma år "1986". Det var inte bara George Orwell (1903-1950, Storbritannien) som i sin förutspådda essä "1984" förebådade de faror som våra samhällen kunde stöta på under sin utveckling, utan Tarkovskij förutsåg genom sina unika filosofiska reflektioner apokalyptiska kärnkraftssituationer för vår civilisations framtid.
Fischer vs. Spassky, tablas, partida No 20, Reikiavik, 1972
Vad i hela friden tänkte den förre förbundskanslern Gerhard Schröder när han vågade underteckna samförståndsavtalet om byggandet av Nord Stream-ledningen?
“¿Qué demonios recorrían la mente del excanciller Gerhard Schröder cuando se aventura a firmar el memorando de entendimiento para la construcción del gasoducto Nord Stream? ”
Corría el verano de 1972 en Reikiavik, capital de la lejana Islandia. Escondida en el gélido océano Atlántico, para ser más exactos, en su universo norte, lejos de las pesadillas económicas y geopolíticas de su primo menor, el mar Báltico
Si hay algo fascinante debido a su complejidad e inexplicable inteligencia es la creación de las biosferas en las cuales habitamos y, ¿por qué no decir?, sobre la concepción del hombre. Las mismas incógnitas surgen con relación a la diversidad de los ecosistemas que arropan al planeta y que no nos dejan de sorprender por sus perspicaces y misteriosas composiciones.
En Islandia convergen muchos de estos paradigmas. La luz de la constelación solar alumbra con tal intensidad durante el verano, provocando un extraño fenómeno —para los que no somos de ahí, por supuesto— durante el cual la noche desaparece y la claridad se extiende a lo largo de las veinticuatro horas del día. Luego, ese mismo raudal de luminosidad se va extinguiendo a medida que se avecina el otoño para ausentarse por completo en el invierno, convirtiéndose en oscuridad eterna que complica el alma del ser humano.
Sin embargo, estamos centrados, también, en los enigmas de la biodiversidad de los medios ambientes. La cercanía de Islandia con el Ártico la debería hacer inhabitable; sin embargo, no es así. Ese peñón perdido en las cercanías del Polo Norte cuenta con una increíble fuente casi infinita de energía geotérmica proveniente de la copiosa actividad de sus volcanes. Es tal la cantidad de fuerza en evolución en sus cavernas subterráneas que la presión de esta busca de algún escape fracturando el suelo insular, lo que da como resultado la formación de géiseres. Ellos, con furia, emanan chorros de agua caliente y vapor casi en estado de ebullición a decenas de metros de altura. Estas particulares condiciones hacen a Islandia autosuficiente en su consumo de electricidad, producto de su abundante energía geotérmica.
Es gracias a la simbiosis única de la diversidad biológica de ese delta, inhabitable en otras condiciones, que se convierte en un microcosmos apto para el desarrollo de la vida del ser humano. Esa pequeña población de islandeses, cercana a las cuatrocientas mil personas, se dice que es una de las sociedades más felices sobre la Tierra; sin embargo, la realidad pareciese ser otra: su tasa de suicidio es una de las más altas del mundo.
Contrario a sus países hermanos del viejo continente, esos no cuentan con los beneficios naturales de ese ecosistema generoso en materia de energía, lo que los hace dependientes de variantes exógenas para su producción de electricidad, y para más inri, en estos momentos padecen de la falta de un combustible clave para su subsistencia: el gas natural.
¿Cuál es el porqué de esta desgracia que desde hace meses hace mella en la economía de millones de familias europeas?
Las respuestas pueden ser simples: por una parte, se debe a la estrategia bélica del imperio zarista a contraer el suministro de gas natural al continente. Otra, pudiese ser, la ingenua o, mejor dicho, inexplicable deficiencia en la planificación económica de las autoridades políticas europeas en materia de combustibles fósiles. Grave, grave error el haber entregado la dependencia de su oxígeno para su sostén a manos de una sola e impredecible fuente. Ningún funcionario público puede alegar ahora que no fueron advertidos sobre los escenarios que podrían suceder en el futuro en esta materia.
La historia y sus contrasentidos… Corría el verano de 1972, para ser más exactos, martes 11 de julio. Uno de los ecosistemas más puros y solitarios del orbe, Islandia, había sido elegida sede —quién sabe por qué razón, a lo mejor, para contribuir a depurar la contaminada atmósfera de aquel siniestro mundo bipolar— para convertirse en el anfitrión de uno de los eventos más connotados de la Guerra Fría, la llamada Partida del siglo por el campeonato mundial de ajedrez.
La cobertura mediática del evento deportivo se desarrolló bajo una estrategia de intensa propaganda por parte de ambos sistemas políticos y, la atención del mundo estaba centrada en todos los —globos sonda— que se disparaban desde ese circo montado en la diminuta Reikiavik.
Las idas y venidas, de si participa o no en la partida, del impredecible niño pródigo del ajedrez y aspirante a campeón mundial, Robert (Bobby) James Fisher (Chicago, Illinois, Estados Unidos, 9 de marzo de 1943), en representación de los Estados Unidos. Su rival, conocido como el caballero del deporte de reyes, gran maestro internacional y campeón mundial de ajedrez, Boris Vasilyevich Spassky (San Petersburgo, Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas, URSS, 30 de enero 1937), era la otra estrella de esta puesta en escena.
El aspirante a campeón mundial de ajedrez, Bobby Fisher, quien recién hasta el día anterior, 10 de julio, había decido su participación por el campeonato, —hecho nada extraño en él, debido a su conocida costumbre de sacar el mayor beneficio económico posible de la situación—. Sin embargo, esta vez, fuera de alcanzar las metas materiales, se tuvo que recurrir a una llamada telefónica del secretario de relaciones exteriores de Estados Unidos, Henry Kissinger, para hacer finalmente viable su participación en la Partida del siglo.
El montaje del campeonato se realizó en el Teatro Nacional de Islandia. La disputa se jugaría a veinticinco partidas, y el primero de los dos ajedrecistas que alcanzara la ansiada y necesaria puntuación de 12,5 puntos sería coronado como el nuevo campeón del mundo. En síntesis, uno de los dos bloques políticos ganaría esa guerra mediática de connotación mundial. No obstante, en esa estratagema de eruditos con inteligencias supernaturales, la perdida se circunscribe solo al deshonor de haber sido derrotado ante los ojos del mundo.
-- -La expresión Chicken run se aplica a una escalada ofensiva en que ninguna de las dos partes tiene nada que perder. (The Chicken “Josefina Mesa ... - Blogger”).
Especulando, después de cuarenta y nueve días de desgaste cognitivo y cincuenta y cuatro movimientos, quizá podemos pensar que ese fue el tenor de la penúltima partida (20) por el campeonato mundial de ajedrez entre Spassky y Fisher, el 29 de agosto de 1972 en el Teatro Nacional de Islandia, para premeditadamente forzar tablas.
Ahora, la pregunta es: ¿Rusia y Ucrania se encuentran en «tablas» después de casi ocho meses de ofensivas?
Es una cuestión difícil de responder, dada la cantidad de variables que implica. Si bien es cierto que en estas últimas dos semanas Ucrania había tenido importantes avances militares debido al refuerzo en su arsenal con armas de tecnología sofisticada provenientes de sus aliados en Europa y Estados Unidos. También hay que ser objetivo y entender que, al inicio de esta demencial cruzada, la destrucción de infraestructuras civiles y críticas ocasionadas por las fuerzas invasoras habían sido devastadoras y su reconstrucción tomará décadas.
Todo cambia y a la velocidad de la luz, primero, el 26 de septiembre, sucede el sabotaje terrorista a las tuberías de Nord Stream 1 y 2. Segundo, el sábado 8 de octubre, la explosión de un camión bomba en el estratégico puente que une Crimea con Rusia continental le provoca daños severos. Tercero, el 10 de octubre Rusia lanza un ataque con 75 misiles de largo alcance de alta precisión a diferentes regiones en Ucrania, incluyendo focos de población civil, haciendo más incierto el desenlace de esta guerra.
El papel de China e India en el conflicto…
Hechos concretos versus la dialéctica política. En cuanto, a la cauta posición de China e India en esta guerra. No obstante, ambos países han puesto de manifiesto su oposición al conflicto, tanto en la reunión del 18 de septiembre en el marco de la cumbre de la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghái (OCS), Samarcanda, Uzbekistán y, con su voto de abstención, el 13 de octubre en la votación de la resolución condenatoria de la Organización de Naciones Unidas a Rusia por la anexión ilegal de cuatro territorios ucranianos. Se quiera entender o no, han sido ---gestos políticos fundamentales--- para evitar una escalada en la guerra a un potencial conflicto global. Y, es aquí, precisamente donde hay que hacer hincapié en el papel histórico que jugó China (el aliado olvidado por la historia) para poner fin a la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Las «infraestructuras» que no se reponen, desafortunadamente, son las vidas humanas. En cuanto a las bajas en el contingente militar, se estiman en una cifra aproximada a los cuarenta mil las víctimas, en lo que respecta a la población civil la información es disímil entre dos a cuatro mil muertos, sumado a un éxodo de cientos de miles de refugiados. Tras la forzada retirada de las tropas rusas de los territorios ocupados por los avances de la campaña de las fuerzas militares ucranianas, se ha descubiertos hallazgos comparables a los de los genocidios perpetrados durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial en contra de las minorías por la supuesta supremacía nazi.
En lo que se refiere a la economía global, la situación no es mejor, considerando que miles de familias europeas se encuentran al borde de caer en cesación de pago con sus compromisos financieros, producto del proceso inflacionario. Hay que tener presente que el erario mundial venía saliendo de un proceso recesivo producto de la pandemia. No solo la europea, sino que toda la economía global se ha visto afectada de manera severa producto de esta guerra.
Una de las razones del proceso alcista es el sideral precio de la electricidad, producto del conflicto militar, en donde la oferta del gas natural se ha visto restringida estratégicamente como arsenal bélico.
Se acerca la revolución de los alquileres
Para los 44 millones de hogares que alquilan una casa o apartamento en los Estados Unidos, la inflación sigue empujando los costos cada vez más altos. La ira también está aumentando. Podría ser un punto de quiebre.
(NYT, Connors Dougherty, 15 de octubre 2022)
De continuar este proceso inflacionario al ritmo actual, los peligros para el sistema financiero son de proporciones similares a las del año 2008, ahora no solo sería el origen en la morosidad en el pago de las hipotecas del sector inmobiliario sino que el retraso en los pagos de los compromisos financieros adquiridos es mucho más amplio en la presente coyuntura provocando una toxicidad mayor en la economía.
---Gazprom/Putin - Nord Stream/ Schröder «¿Un negocio ético?».
… Frecuentemente, se ha analizado el caso Gazprom desde el punto de vista de su actividad principal, es decir, del gas. Sin embargo, durante la etapa Putin, está adquiriendo una posición relevante dentro del conjunto de instrumentos de que dispone el gobierno ruso para intervenir en la economía y en las relaciones del país con el exterior. (Gazprom «¿Un instrumento de política económica y exteriores rusas?». Rodrigo Sánchez Andrés, 2055, España).
Geográficamente, Ucrania ha tenido un cometido importante en la comercialización del gas natural para Gazprom. Esta posición le ha significado contar con un precio preferencial en el mercado del gas ruso. Sin embargo, el origen geopolítico es mucho más serio que la complicación de Ucrania. Anotemos, solo para recordar las incursiones extraterritoriales de Rusia en el último siglo: Finlandia (1939), Hungría (1956), Checoslovaquia (1968), Afganistán, (1979), Chechenia (1994-1996, 1999-2009), Osetia del Sur (2008), Crimea (2014), Siria (2015), Kazajistán, (2022) y Ucrania (2022).
La historia nos indica que la política déspota del Kremlin no ha cambiado. Y es por ello por lo que el arsenal de gas natural es, de hecho, un elemento de coerción en su conducta expansionista.
Mucha agua ha corrido bajo el puente Nord Stream. Hemos revisado antecedentes en la política exterior de la Federación Democrática Rusa, y no cabe duda de que la preocupación internacional con relación a enterrar un tubo de esta magnitud en aguas internacionales en el Báltico ha sido un tema de controversia y debates.
Desde un inicio el proyecto contó con la oposición por parte de los países bálticos, es decir, Estonia. Letonia y Lituania, además de la objeción de Polonia y Estados Unidos.
En lo que se refiere a la cuestión medioambiental, el asunto fue debatido a fondo, y se escribieron cientos de documentos que anticipaban los peligros del proyecto. Sería imposible poder entrar en ellos ahora. Pienso que con estos dos antecedentes recientes se resume la situación:
A medida que los costos de energía de Europa se disparan, Rusia está quemando grandes cantidades de gas natural, (BBC News).
Los científicos del clima describieron las impactantes imágenes del gas que salía a la superficie del mar Báltico esta semana como una "liberación imprudente" de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero que, de ser deliberada, "equivale a un crimen medioambiental". (www.worldenergytrade.com, 3 de octubre de 2022).
¿Qué demonios recorrían la mente del excanciller Schröder cuando se aventuró a firmar el memorando de entendimiento para la construcción del gasoducto Nord Stream?
Antes de tratar de contestar a la pregunta, es imprescindible reflexionar sobre el siguiente antecedente, que hace aún más difícil entender la conducta del ser humano. El excanciller Gerhard Schröder nació el 7 de abril de 1944 en la localidad de Mossenmberg, a los trece meses de vida, el 7 de noviembre de 1945, Alemania es dividida. La vida del excanciller evoluciona en un país fracturado, hasta el 9 de noviembre de 1989 con la caída del Muro de Berlín. El político convertido a cabildero de la industria eléctrica fue testigo de facto de esa mezquina segmentación. Ahora, por mucho que su tendencia política coincida con la del otro bloque, el patriotismo, si es que lo hay el alma Schröder, lo debió haber hecho reflexionar sobre la encrucijada en que estaba introduciendo a su país y al continente europeo.
Ahora vamos a tratar de resolver una tesis muy simple…
Alemania, el país europeo más infiltrado por el espionaje ruso Moscú está interesado en la industria energética y la infraestructura crítica
(ABC, Rosalía Sánchez, corresponsal en Berlín, 11 de octubre, España)
No es difícil descifrar la equis en este caso: dos semanas antes de las elecciones federales de 2005, cuando la disputa entre el canciller y su oponente, Angela Merkel, se encuentra en un punto decisivo de la contienda electoral, con una tendencia negativa en las encuestas de opinión para el entonces canciller. Ante este escenario, el promotor de proyectos energético recurre a una acción de pánico, tipo —sálvese quien pueda—, y toma la decisión de arrimarse aún más al frondoso resplandor de las cúpulas doradas de la ciudadela amurallada de Moscú, para lo cual acude al auxilio de su buen amigo.
Y ¿quién es ese camarada?
El gran amigo es el teniente coronel, camarada Vladímir Vladimirich (Platov) Putin, exagente de la KGB, quien desde 1984 a 1990 se desempeña como espía en Dresde, en la extinta República Democrática Alemana, hacia el final de la Guerra Fría. Ahora, convertido en el supremo presidente de la República Federativa Democrática de Rusia, para concretar un sueño que había bautizado a lo mejor con un Nostrovia en algún momento de los años noventa.
El pacto —Putin / Schröder— se transforma en un buen negocio para ambos caballeros: para el canciller se convierte en gloria para su alma y en oro para sus bolsillos al ser nombrado presidente del consejo de administración de la petrolera Rosneft. Para Gazprom, un buen negocio para sus finanzas si se toman en consideración los índices de pago de la factura por el suministro del gas natural de los contratos existentes a la fecha. Y, para Putin, en lo geopolítico, extraordinario. La idea, concebida por primera vez en la década de 1990, fue finalmente sellada el 8 de septiembre de 2005 por una declaración de intenciones conjunta por parte ambas naciones.
El nuevo gasoducto se extendería desde Rusia a través del Báltico hasta Alemania, sin tener que transitar por territorios que habían sido hostiles al proyecto. Con esto, Gazprom, además, ahora se beneficiaría de los costos de peajes por uso de suelo que le correspondía pagar a Bielorrusia, Polonia y los Estados bálticos, por un lado, y por el otro lado, tener que lidiar con la burocracia de cuatro países independientes y contrarios a la idea. Feliz cumpleaños, un gasoducto con una longitud de 1222-4 km enterrado a una profundidad de entre 60 a 80 metros en aguas internacionales del mar Báltico, donde nadie, absolutamente nadie, podría tener alguna intrusión sobre el tubo, propiedad de la riqueza de la ciudadela de Moscú, un jaque mate extraordinario a Occidente.
Si bien es cierto que Alemania, por su dependencia histórica con la producción de energía a base de carbón y por supuesto su condición de gran país exportador, ha tenido como prioridad asegurar una constante en el suministro eléctrico, en la mayoría de los análisis se da a entender que para el gobierno germano prevaleció lo económico ante que lo político, esto pudiera tener algo de credibilidad en la firma del acuerdo de Nord Stream 2, donde el canciller Angela Merkel erró en su cálculo político, debido a su convicción, de que los negocios son negocios y la política es política, sin profundizar en que es muy difícil cambiar la conducta de un lobo siberiano más aún si se tiene en cuenta su pasado.
Los peligros de cruzar la raya…
Bobby Fisher la cruzó en dos sentidos. En el buen sentido, de una manera excepcional al quebrar la hegemonía soviética en el deporte de reyes al derrotar de manera contundente en la partida No 21 el 30 de agosto de 1972 a Spassky. Fisher se convirtió en héroe para su país y para el mundo.
El fantasma de los demonios ya se hacía sentir fuerza al interior de su mente, en un acto imprudente en el año 1992 viola con el embargo impuesto por la Organización de Naciones Unidas a Yugoslavia para jugar una partida de exhibición contra Boris Spassky. Y para colmo, como si esto fuera poco, durante la conferencia de prensa a su llegada a Belgrado, en un arranque de locura, escupe sobre un documento del departamento de Estado de su país. Actos que le llevan a sanciones con pena de cárcel en los Estados Unidos. Por ello emprende una larga peregrinación hasta conseguir asilo político en Islandia, hasta su último día 17 de enero del 2008 a los 65 años en condiciones espirituales deplorables.
Boris Spassky no fue perdonado por el sistema por su derrota en Reikiavik. Toda su gloria anterior de gran maestro internacional y campeón mundial de ajedrez no contó para nada. En 1976 cruza la raya, se asila en Francia, donde adquiere la ciudadanía francesa en el año 1978. En el año 2008 visita a Fisher en su exilio en Islandia. En el año 2012 regresa a Moscú en condiciones poco clara, según su hermana lo atribuye a una crisis emocional debido a los dos derrames cerebrales que lo afectaron en un periodo de 10 años.
El eterno matrimonio —Putin / Schroeder— tuvo frutos para ambos. Putin se convierte en el albacea del excanciller y a su vez Schröder asume la función de secretario privado y vocero del presidente Vladímir Putin. Esta relación abierta y de conocimiento, no es la praxis común en política, menos tratándose de dos naciones con un peso geopolítico de absoluta responsabilidad. Obviamente, que esta amistad cruzó la raya y por lejos… La cuestión aquí es ¿por qué la inteligencia germana, no actuó ante una —sociedad financiera— que implicaba tanta peligrosidad para su propio país como para el mundo?
Las consecuencias de ese amiguismo supuestamente inentendible se transforman en una tragedia global. A raíz de la invasión rusa a Ucrania el precio del gas natural también cruza la raya… El 17 de octubre de 2021 el gas natural se cotizaba a 3,9 y 16,1 US$ por millón de unidades térmicas británicas (MBTU) en los mercados de Estados Unidos y Europa respectivamente. Hoy el gas natural en esas mismas plazas se valoriza en 5,2 y 34 US$ por MBTU individualmente.
Fischer mot Spassky, oavgjort, parti nr 20, Reykjavik 1972
Vad i hela friden tänkte den förre förbundskanslern Gerhard Schröder när han vågade underteckna samförståndsavtalet om byggandet av Nord Stream-ledningen?
“Vad i hela friden tänkte den förre förbundskanslern Gerhard Schröder när han vågade underteckna samförståndsavtalet om byggandet av Nord Stream-ledningen? ”
Det var sommaren 1993 i Reykjavik, huvudstaden på det avlägsna Island. Den ligger gömd i det iskalla Atlanten, närmare bestämt i dess norra universum, långt från de ekonomiska och geopolitiska mardrömmarna i dess mindre kusin, Östersjön.
Om det finns något som fascinerar på grund av sin komplexitet och oförklarliga intelligens så är det skapandet av de biosfärer vi lever i och, varför inte säga det, människans uppkomst. Samma oklarheter uppstår när det gäller mångfalden i de ekosystem som omsluter planeten och som aldrig upphör att förvåna oss med sina insiktsfulla och mystiska sammansättningar.
På Island sammanfaller många av dessa paradigmen. Solkonstellationens ljus lyser med sådan intensitet under sommaren, vilket orsakar ett märkligt fenomen - för oss som inte kommer därifrån, förstås - då natten försvinner och ljuset sprids under dygnets tjugofyra timmar. Sedan bleknar samma ljusflöde när hösten närmar sig och försvinner helt och hållet på vintern och förvandlas till ett evigt mörker som plågar den mänskliga själen.
Men vi fokuserade också på de gåtor som den biologiska mångfalden i miljön ger upphov till. Islands närhet till Arktis borde göra landet obeboeligt, men det är det inte. Denna förlorade klippa nära Nordpolen har en otrolig, nästan oändlig källa till geotermisk energi från den rikliga aktiviteten hos dess vulkaner. Det är en sådan kraft som utvecklas i dess underjordiska grottor att trycket från dem söker ett utlopp genom att bryta sönder öns mark, vilket resulterar i bildandet av gejsrar. Dessa ger ursinnigt ut strålar av hett vatten och nästan kokande ånga dussintals meter upp i luften.
Tack vare den rikliga geotermiska energin är Island självförsörjande när det gäller elförbrukning.
Det är tack vare den unika symbiosen mellan den biologiska mångfalden i detta annars obeboeliga delta som det har blivit ett mikrokosmos som lämpar sig för utvecklingen av mänskligt liv. Denna lilla befolkning av islänningar, cirka 400 000 personer, är ett av de lyckligaste samhällena på jorden, men verkligheten ser annorlunda ut: självmordsfrekvensen är en av de högsta i världen.
Till skillnad från sina systerländer på den gamla kontinenten har de inte de naturliga fördelarna med detta otroliga ekosystem när det gäller energi. Det gör dem beroende av exogena varianter för sin elproduktion. För att göra saken värre lider de för närvarande brist på ett bränsle som är avgörande för deras försörjning: naturgas.
Vad är orsaken till denna olycka, som i flera månader har tagit ut sin rätt på miljontals europeiska familjers ekonomi?
Svaren kan vara enkla: å ena sidan beror det på tsarväldets krigsstrategi för att minska naturgasförsörjningen till kontinenten. Å andra sidan kan det vara naiva eller oförklarliga brister i de europeiska politiska myndigheternas ekonomiska planering i närheten av fossila bränslen. Det var ett allvarligt misstag att överlåta sitt livsuppehållande syre till ett alltför stort beroende av en enda oförutsägbar källa. Ingen offentlig tjänsteman kan hävda att de inte varnade för framtida scenarier på detta område.
Historien och dess motsättningar... Det var sommaren 1972, tisdagen den 11 juli för att vara exakt. Ett av världens renaste och mest solitära ekosystem, Island, hade valt - vem vet av vilken anledning, för att hjälpa till att rena den förorenade atmosfären i den olycksbådande bipolära världen - att vara värd för en av det kalla krigets mest ökända händelser, den så kallade århundradets match om världsmästerskapet i schack.
Medietäckningen av idrottsevenemanget skedde inom ramen för en strategi med intensiv propaganda från båda de politiska systemen. Världens uppmärksamhet riktades mot alla de sondballonger som avfyrades från cirkusen i det lilla Reykjavik.
Den oförutsägbara förlorade schackbarnet och blivande världsmästaren Robert (Bobby) James Fisher (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 9 mars 1943) representerar USA. Hans motståndare, känd som riddare i kungarnas sport, internationell stormästare och världsmästare i schack Boris Vasiljevitj Spasskij (S:t Petersburg, Sovjetunionen, 30 januari 1937), var den andra stjärnan i denna iscensättning.
Den blivande världsmästaren i schack, Bobby Fisher, som bara dagen innan, den 10 juli, hade beslutat att delta i mästerskapet - inte alls ovanligt för honom, med tanke på hans välkända vana att tjäna så mycket pengar som möjligt på situationen - var tvungen att ta till ett telefonsamtal från USA:s utrikesminister Henry Kissinger för att till slut göra sitt deltagande i århundradets match genomförbart.
Mästerskapet spelades på nationalteatern på Island. Matchen spelades under 25 partier, och den första av de två schackspelarna som nådde upp till den eftertraktade och nödvändiga poängen 12,5 poäng skulle kröna den nya världsmästaren. Kort sagt skulle ett av de två politiska blocken vinna detta världsomspännande mediekrig. Men i denna strategi av forskare med övernaturlig intelligens begränsades förlusten endast till vanäran av att ha besegrat, enligt världen.
-Hönslopp är en offensiv upptrappning där ingen av sidorna har något att förlora (Kycklingen "Josefina Mesa ... - Blogger").
Spekulativt, efter fyrtionio dagar av kognitiv utmattning och femtiofyra drag, kan vi tänka oss att detta var tonen i det näst sista partiet (20) för världsmästerskapet i schack mellan Spassky och Fisher den 29 augusti 1972 på Nationalteatern på Island, för att tvinga fram ett oavgjort resultat med förnuft.
Frågan är nu om Ryssland och Ukraina befinner sig i ett "dödläge" efter nästan åtta månaders offensiv.
Det är en svår fråga att besvara med tanke på antalet variabler som är inblandade. Även om det är sant att Ukraina under de senaste två veckorna har gjort betydande militära framsteg tack vare förstärkningen av sin arsenal med sofistikerad vapenteknik från sina allierade i Europa och Förenta staterna, är det också nödvändigt att vara objektiv och förstå att i början av detta vansinniga korståg var förstörelsen av den civila och kritiska infrastrukturen som orsakades av de invaderande styrkorna mycket allvarlig. Man måste också vara objektiv och förstå att i början av detta vansinniga korståg hade förstörelsen av civil och kritisk infrastruktur orsakad av invasionsstyrkorna varit förödande och skulle ta årtionden att återuppbygga.
Den 26 september skedde först och främst terroristsabotaget mot Nord Stream 1 och 2. För det andra, lördagen den 8 oktober, orsakade en lastbilsbombexplosion på den strategiska bro som förbinder Krim med det ryska fastlandet allvarliga skador. För det tredje inledde Ryssland den 10 oktober en attack med sjuttiofem långdistansmissiler med hög precision mot olika regioner i Ukraina, inklusive fickor av civilbefolkningen, vilket gör detta krig mer osäkert.
Kinas och Indiens roll i konflikten...
Fakta kontra politisk dialektik. När det gäller Kinas och Indiens försiktiga inställning till kriget. Båda länderna har dock klargjort sitt motstånd mot konflikten, både vid mötet den 18 september vid Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) toppmöte i Samarkand, Uzbekistan, och med sin nedlagda röst den 13 oktober vid omröstningen om FN-resolutionen som fördömer Ryssland för dess olagliga annektering av fyra ukrainska territorier. Vare sig man vill förstå det eller inte var detta - grundläggande politiska gester - för att undvika en upptrappning av kriget till en potentiell global konflikt. Och det är just här som den historiska roll som Kina (historiens bortglömda allierade) spelade för att avsluta andra världskriget måste betonas.
Tyvärr är de "infrastrukturer" som inte ersätts människoliv - antalet dödsoffer bland militären uppskattas till 40 000. Bland civilbefolkningen däremot varierar antalet dödsfall, från 2 000 till 4 000, förutom en utvandring av hundratusentals flyktingar. Efter att de ryska trupperna tvingats dra sig tillbaka från de ockuperade områdena på grund av de ukrainska militärstyrkornas framfart har man upptäckt resultat som är jämförbara med de folkmord som begicks under andra världskriget mot minoriteter på grund av nazisternas påstådda överlägsenhet.
När det gäller den globala ekonomin är situationen inte bättre, med tanke på att tusentals europeiska familjer står på gränsen till att inte kunna fullgöra sina ekonomiska åtaganden på grund av inflationsprocessen. Man bör komma ihåg att världens statskassa var på väg ut ur en recession på grund av pandemin. Europa och hela världsekonomin har drabbats hårt av detta krig.
En av orsakerna till den uppåtgående processen är det sideriska elpriset, en produkt av den militära konflikten, där tillgången på naturgas har begränsats strategiskt som en arsenal för krigföring.
Hyresrevolutionen är på väg.
För de fyrtiofyra miljoner hushåll som hyr ett hus eller en lägenhet i USA fortsätter inflationen att driva kostnaderna allt högre. Ilskan ökar också. Det kan vara en brytpunkt.
(NYT, Conor Dougherty, 15 oktober 2022)
Om denna inflationsprocess fortsätter i nuvarande takt kommer farorna med det finansiella systemet att vara som 2008. Nu skulle det inte bara vara ursprunget till uteblivna betalningar av hypotekslån i fastighetssektorn, utan förseningen av betalningen av förvärvade finansiella åtaganden är mycket mer betydande i den nuvarande situationen, vilket orsakar större förgiftning i ekonomin.
-Gazprom/Putin - Nord Stream/Schröder "En etisk affärsverksamhet?
... Gazprom har ofta analyserat utifrån sitt kärnverksamhetsperspektiv, dvs. gas. Under Putin-eran får det dock en relevant ställning inom den uppsättning instrument som den ryska regeringen har till sitt förfogande för att ingripa i ekonomin och landets förbindelser med omvärlden. (Gazprom, "Ett instrument för rysk ekonomisk och utrikespolitik". Rodrigo Sánchez Andrés, 2055, Spanien).
Geografiskt sett har Ukraina spelat en viktig roll för Gazproms marknadsföring av naturgas. Denna ställning har inneburit att landet har haft ett förmånligt pris på den ryska gasmarknaden. Det geopolitiska ursprunget är dock mycket allvarligare än den ukrainska komplikationen. Vi kan erinra oss Rysslands extraterritoriella intrång under förra seklet: Finland (1939), Ungern (1956), Tjeckoslovakien (1968), Afghanistan (1979), Tjetjenien (1994-1996, 1999-2009), Sydossetien (2008), Krim (2014), Syrien (2015), Kazakstan (2022) och Ukraina (2022).
Historien visar att Kremls despotiska politik inte har förändrats. Och det är därför som naturgasarsenalen i själva verket är en tvingande faktor i dess expansiva beteende.
Mycket vatten har runnit under Nord Stream-bron. Vi har granskat Rysslands utrikespolitik, och det råder ingen tvekan om att den internationella oron för att gräva ner ett rör av den här storleken i internationellt vatten i Östersjön har varit kontroversiell och debatterad.
Från början motsatte sig projektet de baltiska länderna, dvs. Estland, Lettland och Litauen, samt Polen och USA. Lettland och Litauen, samt invändningar från Polen och Förenta staterna.
När det gäller miljöfrågan har frågan debatterats och hundratals dokument har skrivits om projektets faror. Det skulle vara omöjligt att gå in på dem nu. Dessa två senaste prejudikat sammanfattar situationen:
När Europas energikostnader stiger kraftigt ökar Ryssland stora mängder naturgas (BBC News).
Klimatforskare beskrev de chockerande bilderna av gas som steg upp till ytan i Östersjön i veckan som ett "vårdslöst utsläpp" av växthusgaser som, om det är avsiktligt, "är ett miljöbrott" (www.worldenergytrade.com, 3 oktober 2022).
Vad i hela friden tänkte förre förbundskansler Schröder på när jag visste att han vågade underteckna samförståndsavtalet om byggandet av Nord Stream-ledningen?
Innan vi försöker besvara frågan är det viktigt att reflektera över följande bakgrund, som gör det ännu svårare att förstå mänskliga beteenden. Förre förbundskanslern Gerhard Schröder föddes den 7 april 1944 i Mossenmberg. Vid tretton månaders ålder delades Tyskland den 7 november 1945. Den före detta förbundskanslerns liv utvecklades i ett delat land fram till Berlinmurens fall den 9 november 1989. Den politiker som blev lobbyist för elindustrin var de facto ett vittne till denna småskaliga uppdelning. Hur mycket hans politiska inriktning än sammanfaller med det andra blockets, borde patriotismen i Schröders själ ha fått honom att reflektera över det vägskäl som han ledde sitt land och den europeiska kontinenten till.
Nu ska vi försöka lösa en elementär tes...
Tyskland, Europas mest infiltrerade land av ryskt spionage
Moskva är intresserad av energiindustrin och kritisk infrastruktur.
(ABC, Rosalía Sánchez, korrespondent i Berlin, 11 oktober, Spanien)
Det är inte svårt att tyda "X" i det här fallet: två veckor före det federala valet 2005, när tvisten mellan förbundskanslern och hans motståndare, Angela Merkel, befinner sig i en avgörande punkt i valkampen, med en negativ trend i opinionsundersökningarna för den dåvarande förbundskanslern. Mot denna bakgrund tog energiprojektutvecklaren till en panikhandling enligt principen "var och en för sig själv" och flyttade ännu närmare det frodiga skenet från de gyllene kupolerna i Moskvas muromgärdade citadell och tog hjälp av sin gode vän.
Och vem är denna kamrat?
Den store vännen är överstelöjtnant Vladimir Vladimiritj (Platov) Putin, en före detta KGB-agent som 1984-1990 arbetade som spion i Dresden, i den numera nedlagda Tyska demokratiska republiken, mot slutet av det kalla kriget. Nu har han blivit den ryska demokratiska federala republikens högste president för att förverkliga en dröm som han döpte med en Nostrovia någon gång på 1990-talet.
Putin/Schröder-pakten blir en bra affär för båda herrarna. För kanslern blir det ära för sin själ och guld för sina fickor, eftersom han utsågs till styrelseordförande för oljebolaget Rosneft. För Gazprom är det en bra affär för sina finanser om man beaktar fakturabetalningsnivåerna för naturgasleveranser enligt befintliga avtal. Och för Putin, geopolitiskt sett, extraordinärt. Idén föddes på 1990-talet och beseglades slutligen den 8 september 2005 genom de två nationernas gemensamma avsiktsförklaring.
Den nya rörledningen skulle sträcka sig från Ryssland över Östersjön till Tyskland utan att behöva passera genom områden som varit fientligt inställda till projektet. Dessutom skulle Gazprom nu dra nytta av kostnaderna för de avgifter för markanvändning som å ena sidan betalas av Vitryssland, Polen och de baltiska staterna, och å andra sidan skulle Gazprom behöva hantera byråkratin i fyra oberoende och ovänliga länder. Grattis på födelsedagen, en gasledning med en längd på 1222-4 km som är nedgrävd på ett djup av 60-80 meter i Östersjöns internationella vatten, där ingen, absolut ingen, kan göra intrång på röret, egendom som tillhör rikedomarna i Moskvas citadell, en extraordinär schackmatta för väst.
Även om det är sant att Tyskland, på grund av sitt historiska beroende av kolbaserad energiproduktion och, naturligtvis, sin status som ett stort exportland, har prioriterat att säkerställa en konstant elförsörjning, menar de flesta analytiker att den tyska regeringen har satt ekonomin före politiken, Detta skulle kunna ha en viss trovärdighet i undertecknandet av Nord Stream 2-avtalet, där förbundskansler Angela Merkel gjorde fel i sin politiska beräkning på grund av sin övertygelse att affärer är affärer och politik är politik, utan att fördjupa sig i det faktum att det är svårt att ändra en sibirisk vargs beteende, ännu mer om man beaktar dess förflutna.
Farorna med att gå över gränsen...
Bobby Fisher korsade den på två sätt. På det goda sättet, på ett utmärkt sätt, genom att bryta den sovjetiska hegemonin i kungaspelet genom att besegra Spassky i parti 21 den 30 augusti 1972. Fisher blev en hjälte för sitt land och för världen.
Spöket från demonerna gjorde sig redan starkt påmint i hans sinne. I en vårdslös handling 1992 bröt han mot det embargo som FN infört mot Jugoslavien för att spela ett uppvisningsmatch mot Boris Spassky. Och som om detta inte vore nog, spottade han under presskonferensen vid ankomsten till Belgrad i ett anfall av galenskap på ett dokument från sitt lands utrikesdepartement. Handlingar som leder till fängelsestraff i USA. Han företog därför en lång pilgrimsfärd till politisk asyl på Island fram till sin sista dag, den 17 januari 2008, vid 65 års ålder, i beklagliga andliga förhållanden.
Systemet förlåter inte Boris Spassky för hans nederlag i Reykjavik. All hans tidigare ära som internationell stormästare och världsmästare i schack räknades för ingenting. År 1976 gick han över gränsen och bosatte sig i Frankrike, där han fick franskt medborgarskap 1978. År 2008 besökte han Fisher i exil på Island. År 2012 återvände han till Moskva i ett oklart tillstånd, vilket hans syster tillskriver ett känslomässigt sammanbrott till följd av två slaganfall under tio år.
Det eviga äktenskapet - Putin/Schröder - bar frukt för båda. Putin blev den före detta kanslerns testamentsexekutor, medan Schröder blev privatsekreterare och talesman för president Vladimir Putin. Detta öppna och familjära förhållande är inte typiskt inom politiken, särskilt inte mellan två nationer med en geopolitisk tyngd av absolut ansvar. Denna vänskap gick över gränsen, och den är i särklass... Frågan här är varför den tyska underrättelsetjänsten inte agerade mot ett - finanssamhälle - som var lika farligt för det egna landet som för världen.
Konsekvenserna av denna obegripliga kumpanverksamhet håller på att utvecklas till en global tragedi. Till följd av den ryska invasionen av Ukraina har priset på naturgas också passerat gränsen... Den 17 oktober 2021 låg naturgaspriset på 3,9 och 16,1 US-dollar per miljon brittiska termiska enheter (M BTU) på den amerikanska och europeiska marknaden. I dag kostar naturgasen på samma marknader 5,2 US-dollar och 34 US-dollar per MBTU.
News round-up Monday, 17 October 2022.
Berlin and Washington Play Out Nuclear Scenarios
“Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds”
Conclusion of the day's news:
Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds
With elections next month, independents, especially women, are swinging to the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights. Disapproval of President Biden seems to be hurting his party.
Why Britain's pension funds are at the root of its financial crisis
As the UK's new finance minister scraps nearly all government tax cut plans, the country is still recovering from shockwaves that left its financial markets shaking, caused by exploding pension funds.
Anger and Confidence in the Battle Against Russia"This Is Terrorism, Carried Out by Idiots"
State TV journalist who denounced Ukraine war flees Russia
Marina Ovsyannikova ‘in Europe’ after leaving country with daughter after being placed on wanted list
Links:
Why Britain's pension funds are at the root of its financial crisis (lemonde.fr)
State TV journalist who denounced Ukraine war flees Russia | Russia | The Guardian
News round-up Wednesday, 11 October 2022.
Berlin and Washington Play Out Nuclear Scenarios
“Wall Street Braces for an Earnings Season of Mixed Signals”
Conclusion of the day's news:
Wall Street Braces for an Earnings Season of Mixed Signals
Investors, weary of guessing where the Fed’s battle on inflation will take the economy, hope that third-quarter company earnings will bring clarity. (NYT)
French military strengthens position on Europe's eastern flank
Following the renewed bombardment of cities in Ukraine, armored vehicles, Leclerc tanks, Rafale jets and troops will be deployed to Romania, Estonia and Lithuania. (Le Monde)
What weapons is France sending to Ukraine?Over the past eight months, the French army has supplied 18 Caesar howitzers,'a few dozen' MILAN anti-tank missiles and around 15 TRF1 towed howitzers. (Le Monde)
Fears French fuel crisis could spread amid plans to order strikers to work
Union vows to fight government in court as workers at ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies demand pay rise and share of profits (The Guardian)
Borrell, in a self-criticism of the EU: "Our prosperity was based on cheap energy from Russia and business opportunities with China".
In view of the escalation of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the head of European diplomacy assures that the Union will continue to take measures to support the invaded country.
Links:
Quarterly Earnings Likely to Give Mixed Signals to Investors - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
French military strengthens position on Europe's eastern flank (lemonde.fr)
Fears French fuel crisis could spread amid plans to order strikers to work | France | The Guardian