News round-up, May 11, 2023
Quote of the day…
Aristotle says that character virtue is acquired by habituation (1103a14–18), and that virtuous people perform virtuous acts not only from good dispositions of action and passion, but also with the appropriate sort of knowledge, and the appropriate motivation (1105a31–33). Habituation can provide good habits of action and passion. Most commentators supplement Aristotle’s explicit statements by telling a story about how learners gain the relevant knowledge. But how, according to Aristotle, do learners come to be well-motivated? How do they come to choose acts for their own sake, or (equivalently, according to Jimenez) for the love of the noble (kalon)?
Marta Jimenez, Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good, Oxford University Press, 2020What a shame! What a shame!
…”Ex-German chancellor criticised for attending event at Russian embassy
Bild publishes leaked photos showing Gerhard Schröder with his wife and others at Victory Day reception in Berlin
THE GUARDIAN by Kate Connolly in Berlin, Thu 11 May 2023 Most read…
E.P.A. Proposes First Limits on Climate Pollution From Existing Power Plants
It’s the last in a string of major regulations proposed by the Biden administration to sharply cut the greenhouse gases produced by the United States.
NYT By Coral Davenport, Reporting from Washington, May 11, 2023Gazprom mercenary claims turn up heat on EU gas buyers
There are growing reports that the gas giant is financing private militias fighting in Ukraineis , but the EU is unlikely to crack down on the company.
POLITICO BY VICTOR JACK AND GABRIEL GAVIN, MAY 8, 2023Exclusive: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Is Giving a Once Pacifist Japan a More Assertive Role on the Global Stage
When U.S. President George H.W. Bush became ill during a luncheon in 1992, puking onto Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's lap before falling out, the bad energy spread across the Pacific. Despite a supposedly successful exorcism by Shinto priests, a connection with demonic spirits was established. The house remained abandoned for nine years until Prime Minister Fumio Kishida moved in shortly after taking office in October 2021.
TIME BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL / TOKYO, MAY 9, 2023 9:00 PM EDTA Supreme Court Ruling the Fossil-Fuel Industry Doesn’t Like
Communities can now sue in state courts for compensation for the costs of climate change—something oil companies have fought against for years.
THE NEW YORKER By Bill McKibben, May 10, 2023Ex-German chancellor criticised for attending event at Russian embassy
Bild publishes leaked photos showing Gerhard Schröder with his wife and others at Victory Day reception in Berlin
THE GUARDIAN by Kate Connolly in Berlin, Thu 11 May 2023 
Andrés Gluski, CEO of energy and utility AES CorpHow can strategic investment achieve both economic growth and social progress?… What is the role of renewable energy and battery storage in achieving the goals of the low-carbon economy?…
The AES Corporation President Andrés Gluski, Dominican Republic Minister of Industry and Commerce Victor Bisonó, and Rolando González-Bunster, CEO of InterEnergy Group, spoke at the Latin American Cities Conferences panel on "Facilitating Sustainable Investment in Strategic Sectors" on April 12 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Today's events
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Today's events 〰️
Source: Media/Editing by Germán & CoE.P.A. Proposes First Limits on Climate Pollution From Existing Power Plants
It’s the last in a string of major regulations proposed by the Biden administration to sharply cut the greenhouse gases produced by the United States.
NYT By Coral Davenport, Reporting from Washington, May 11, 2023The Biden administration on Thursday will announce the first regulations to limit greenhouse pollution from existing power plants, capping an unparalleled string of climate policies that, taken together, could substantially reduce the nation’s contribution to global warming.
The proposals are designed to effectively eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s electricity sector by 2040.
The regulations governing power plants come on the heels of other Biden administration plans to cut tailpipe emissions by speeding up the country’s transition to electric vehicles, to curb methane leaks from oil and gas wells and to phase down the use of a planet-warming chemical in refrigerants. Together with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is pouring more than $370 billion into clean energy programs, the actions would catapult the United States to the forefront of the fight to constrain global warming.
“We are in the decisive decade for climate action, and the president’s been clear about his goals in this space, and we will meet them,” Mr. Biden’s senior climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, said in a telephone call with reporters on Wednesday.
The government is not mandating the use of equipment to capture carbon emissions before they leave the smokestack, a nascent and expensive technology. Rather, it is setting caps on pollution rates, which power plant operators would have to meet. They could do that by using a different technology or, in the case of gas plants, switching to a fuel source like green hydrogen, which does not emit carbon.
The nation’s 3,400 coal- and gas-fired power plants currently generate about 25 percent of greenhouse gases produced by the United States, pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The plan is sure to face opposition from the fossil fuel industry, power plant operators and their allies in Congress. It is likely to draw an immediate legal challenge from a group of Republican attorneys general that has already sued the Biden administration to stop other climate policies. A future administration could also weaken the regulation.
“This proposal will further strain America’s electric grid and undermine decades of work to reliably keep the lights on across the nation,” said Jim Matheson, president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which operates power plants serving the nation’s least developed communities.
Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat who has long fought any threat to his home state’s coal industry, said Wednesday that he would oppose all of Mr. Biden’s nominees to the E.P.A. unless the administration dropped the regulation — a threat that carries teeth in the narrowly divided Senate.
“This administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal- and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” said Mr. Manchin, who has earned millions from his family’s coal business. Mr. Manchin faces a potentially difficult re-election campaign next year that could pit him against Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican who has announced he will run for the Senate in 2024. West Virginia has increasingly shifted to the right; voters there backed Donald J. Trump over Mr. Biden by 39 points in 2020.
The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
A Toxic Chemical Zone: As the Biden administration moves to curb health threats caused by toxic chemicals, the debate is hitting home for families living near petrochemical plants.
Climate Tax Breaks: President Biden’s signature climate law appears to be encouraging more investment in American manufacturing than initially expected. But all that new economic activity is also driving up costs for taxpayers, who are subsidizing the green technology boom.
Greenhouse Gases: Will the president’s plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants work? Its success could depend on the use of carbon capture technology.
Protecting the Amazon: Biden pledged $500 million to fight deforestation in Brazil and more than $1 billion to help developing countries transition away from fossil fuels.
Michael S. Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which drafted the regulations, plans to announce them in a speech on the campus of the University of Maryland on Thursday. E.P.A. officials chose the university setting to appeal to youth climate activists who they hope will help turn out the vote for Mr. Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign.
Many of those activists have been criticizing Mr. Biden after his decision in March to approve an enormous oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska, known as Willow. They view the president’s actions as a betrayal of his 2020 campaign promise to halt new oil and gas drilling on public land.
The White House argues that the collective impact of Mr. Biden’s climate regulations and legislation, in terms of reduced emissions, outweighs any environmental damage that would be caused by the Willow project.
Burning oil drilled at the Willow site would emit an estimated 280 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide, according to the White House. The new rules on power plants would lower emissions by 617 million tons between 2028 and 2042, according to the E.P.A. Adding the other proposed E.P.A. regulations would bring the total amount of eliminated emissions to 15 billion tons by 2055 — roughly the amount of pollution generated by the entire United States economy over three years. Several analyses have projected that the Inflation Reduction Act will cut emissions by at least another billion tons by 2030.
That could put the nation on track to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge that the United States would cut its greenhouse gases in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by 2050, although analysts point out that more policies will need to be enacted to reach the latter target.
That is the action required of all major industrialized countries, scientists say, to keep average global temperatures from increasing by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failure and species extinction would become significantly harder for humanity to handle. The planet has already warmed by an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.
“Each of these several regulations from the E.P.A. are contributing to the whole picture that is necessary to steer this ocean liner away from the worst climate disaster,” said Dallas Burtraw, an economist with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on energy and environmental policy.
E.P.A. officials say the proposed regulations are designed to offer flexibility to industry and ensure that the lights remain on and that electricity bills will not soar. For example, coal plants that are already scheduled to retire before 2032 may not have to install new pollution controls like carbon capture technology. About a quarter of operating coal-fired power plants are already scheduled to retire by 2029, according to the Energy Information Administration.
While the proposed rules would increase costs for power plant operators, the E.P.A. estimates that limiting pollution from smokestacks would produce a net economic benefit of up to $85 billion by 2042 through improved public health from lower levels of soot and sulfur dioxide, which also spew from coal-fired power plants.
By 2030, the proposed standards would prevent about 1,300 premature deaths, more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits, more than 300,000 cases of asthma attacks, 38,000 school absences and 66,000 lost workdays, according to the E.P.A.
In some ways, the E.P.A. regulation is designed to speed up changes that are already underway in the energy industry.
Coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is in decline — no new coal plants have been built in the United States in the last decade. In the same time frame, the cost of wind and solar power has plummeted, and electricity generation from wind turbines and solar panels has more than tripled. Wind now generates more than 10 percent of the nation’s electricity, and solar power now generates about 3 percent and is growing fast. As a result, planet-warming pollution from power plant smokestacks has dropped by about a 25 percent in the last decade, absent any direct regulation.
In recent years, many large electric utilities have announced targets to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045 or 2050.
“Our emissions continue to go down as a sector, and we predict that will continue to happen regardless of the rule,” said Emily Fisher, executive vice president of clean energy and general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute, an organization that lobbies on behalf of investor-owned electric utilities.
Lawyers and lobbyists with the Edison Electric Institute have met with E.P.A. officials at least two dozen times over the past two years to discuss the climate rule and other power plant regulations.
But some lobbyists say that despite that input, the new rules will push the industry to do more than it can achieve.
“There is a lot of consternation that those targets are as fast as they can go,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer who represents fossil fuel companies and electric utilities with the firm Bracewell L.L.P. “They didn’t just come up with those targets on the back of an envelope. If the idea is to go significantly faster than that, then companies are going to have real concerns.”
Lissa Lynch, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, said that electric utilities had complained about new clean air regulations for decades but had ultimately managed to comply. “The industry always claims they are impossible to meet, cost too much money, threaten reliability and the economy,” she said of the regulations. “Ultimately they go on to innovate and comply, often well in advance of the deadlines that are set.”
Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama, tried to regulate emissions from power plants. His administration wrote broad and ambitious rules that were designed to replace coal-fired plants with wind farms and solar panels.
That policy was never implemented. It was first blocked by the Supreme Court and later rolled back by President Donald J. Trump.
Last summer, the Supreme Court confirmed that the E.P.A. had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, but in a limited way.
Biden administration officials involved with the new power plant rule — many of whom worked on the defunct Obama rule — have sought to ensure that this time, it will stand up to scrutiny.
“In light of what the Supreme Court ruled, they’re not swinging for a home run,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re swinging for a hit.”
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY GERMÁN & CO/POLITICO: A Russian serviceman patrols on the promenade in Berdyansk in June 2022 | Yuri Kadobnov/AFGazprom mercenary claims turn up heat on EU gas buyers
There are growing reports that the gas giant is financing private militias fighting in Ukraineis , but the EU is unlikely to crack down on the company.
POLITICO BY VICTOR JACK AND GABRIEL GAVIN, MAY 8, 2023BRUSSELS — Russian gas exporter Gazprom is set to escape this week's EU 11th sanctions package, despite increasing proof it is financing mercenaries fighting in Ukraine.
“I don't think it's a matter of evidence, but of political will,” said an EU national diplomat, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about internal country dynamics.
The claims Gazprom is directly involved in Russia's invasion of Ukraine have been coming thick and fast.
A series of reports and videos supposedly from fighters on the front lines indicate Gazprom's internal security personnel have formed into volunteer units — the most prominent of which is called Potok, or “stream,” the same name that figures in Gazprom's now-defunct Nord Stream pipelines running under the Baltic Sea.
Potok is reportedly supplied and equipped by Gazprom, although details of how it operates and just how many men it might have are shrouded in secrecy.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, who runs the infamous Wagner mercenary group, claimed on social media last month to have spoken to several recruits from Potok.
Ukrainian intelligence made similar claims in February, alleging a Gazprom subsidiary had set up its own private military unit.
Gazprom didn't respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.
Cutting ties
The Ukrainian government said such reports should prompt Western companies to cut ties with the Russian gas giant.
“This certainly puts Gazprom beyond purely commercial activities and makes it an accomplice to war crimes in Ukraine,” Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko told POLITICO.
“Now they have reached a new level of being an outright participant in criminally punishable acts,” he said, adding that a “company whose money pays for war crimes and murders cannot be a participant in a civilized market.”
Some EU capitals agree.
“Such facts should only stimulate further discussion … on how we can distance ourselves as much as possible from Gazprom,” one Lithuanian diplomat said.
But that's unlikely to mean a change in EU policy toward Gazprom.
While the bloc has introduced a near-total ban on imports of Moscow’s oil, coal and refined products, natural gas and Gazprom have been spared.
Before the war, Gazprom supplied about 45 percent of the EU's gas imports; that dropped to about 7 percent as of the end of April, according to the Bruegel think tank. Much of that is due to Russia limiting flows and the shut-down of the Nord Stream pipeline, but several EU countries — most prominently Hungary, but also including Austria and Slovakia — still receive some pipeline gas from Gazprom.
Greece's DEPA and Italy's Eni also have ongoing contracts with Gazprom, according to Aura Sabadus, a senior analyst at the ICIS market intelligence firm.
Because EU sanctions are decided unanimously, there's not much chance of finding consensus on punishing Gazprom. In contrast, both the U.S. and the U.K. have imposed sanctions against Gazprom chief Alexey Miller.
From the Commission's point of view, “The risk is that unanimity will not be there in Council, because at least one country, but not only one, has not fully diversified away from Russian gas,” said a senior Commission official, who requested anonymity as they were not permitted to speak publicly.
The claims Gazprom is financing mercenaries fighting in Ukraine have been coming thick and fast | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
The reports of Gazprom militias in Ukraine aren't enough to change those views, said diplomats from two EU countries briefed on sanctions discussions.
“While this might increase pressure on some of the holdouts slightly, I don't think it'll convince the real opponents of these sanctions,” said the first national diplomat.
Austria's foreign ministry said there was “no independently verified information” on the existence of Potok but that Vienna was doing “everything possible to further reduce gas dependency.”
A Slovak diplomat said Gazprom sanctions are “not on the table” but “if that happens, we are ready to deal with it seriously.”
That means “the pressure for now is more on [EU countries] taking voluntary commitments,” the senior Commission official said.
Blood and gas
Although details remain scarce on Gazprom’s mercenary unit, the existence of its own armed force is no surprise, experts say.
The company “has for years had its own private security force to guard energy installations and provide security,” said Tracey German, professor of conflict and security at King’s College London. She believes private mercenary groups are being used to fill gaps in the Russian armed forces and also to shroud the true number of casualties incurred in the invasion.
It’s likely Gazprom's forces are well-equipped and have experience in a security service or the military, but "they obviously don’t have the manpower of Wagner," said Konrad Muzyka, a defense analyst at Rochan Consulting.
“These more niche [mercenary groups] are likely to be better trained and the quality of soldiers is likely to be better,” he said, adding they’re probably “tasked with guarding energy infrastructure and their combat operations are better planned … to avoid the kind of losses Wagner has incurred.”
Groups like Potok afford a “very significant source of flexibility” for the Kremlin to achieve its goals in an opaque way outside the law, said Adnan Vatansever, a senior lecturer and Russia energy expert at King's College London.
It’s also a “very desirable scenario” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, who likes to foster competition between elites to stop one group like Wagner becoming dominant and challenging him.
“Gazprom has been a very central player in that power competition,” Vatansever said. “In Russia, there is a saying: ‘Whoever controls Gazprom controls the country.’”
Photograph by Ko Tsuchiya for TIME TIMEExclusive: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Is Giving a Once Pacifist Japan a More Assertive Role on the Global Stage
When U.S. President George H.W. Bush became ill during a luncheon in 1992, puking onto Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's lap before falling out, the bad energy spread across the Pacific. Despite a supposedly successful exorcism by Shinto priests, a connection with demonic spirits was established. The house remained abandoned for nine years until Prime Minister Fumio Kishida moved in shortly after taking office in October 2021.
TIME BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL / TOKYO, MAY 9, 2023 9:00 PM EDTThe official residence of Japan’s Prime Minister is a spooky place. Inspired by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the stone and brick mansion in central Tokyo had been around for only three years when young naval officers charged in and assassinated Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai in 1932. Four years later, Prime Minister Keisuke Okada was forced to hide in a closet during another attempted coup d’état, which killed five and left bullet holes that still pepper the building’s Art Deco facade.
The bad energy became transpacific when, in 1992, U.S. President George H.W. Bush became ill during a banquet here, vomiting onto the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa before passing out. Despite a reported exorcism by Shinto priests, an association with malevolent spirits was sealed, and the residence went unoccupied for nine years until Prime Minister Fumio Kishida moved in soon after taking power in October 2021.
“I have been warned by my predecessors that you will encounter ghosts in this building,” Kishida, 65, tells TIME in an exclusive interview inside the red-carpeted residence, gazing around at the expressionist wall motifs, which include at least one rather menacing concrete gargoyle. “Of course, it is an old building, so I hear sounds from time to time. But fortunately, I have yet to encounter a ghost.”
Kishida is preoccupied by more earthly issues. In Japan, he has launched a “new model of capitalism” to grow the middle class through redistributive policies. Overseas, he has set about revolutionizing the East Asian nation’s foreign relations: soothing historical grievances with South Korea, strengthening security alliances with the U.S. and others, and boosting defense spending by over 50%. Buoyed by a White House eager for influential partners to check China’s growing clout, Kishida has set about turning the world’s No. 3 economy back into a global power with a military presence to match.
But that’s not to say Kishida is untroubled by ghosts. His family hails from Japan’s southern city of Hiroshima, which he still represents as a lawmaker, and he lost several relatives to the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. in 1945. His earliest memories include sitting on his grandmother’s knee in the beleaguered city and hearing horrific tales of local suffering. “The unspeakable devastation experienced by Hiroshima and its people was inscribed vividly in my memory,” he says. “This childhood experience has been a major driver of my pursuit … of a world without nuclear weapons.”
It’s to Hiroshima that Kishida welcomes leaders of the G7 from May 19 to 21, when he’ll hope to leverage the city’s tragic history to convince the world’s most powerful democracies that only collective resolve can face down the authoritarian threat of an increasingly belligerent Russia, China, and North Korea. Tokyo may be 5,000 miles from Kyiv, but the war in Ukraine has alerted Japan to a more perilous world, not least since Japan remains entangled in land and sea territorial disputes with Russia, and regularly sees North Korean ballistic missiles flying overhead. Even more worrisome for Japan has been China’s aggression against Taiwan, the self-ruling island that authoritarian President Xi Jinping has repeatedly vowed to bring to heel. When Beijing launched military drills last summer to protest U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei, five missiles fell into the waters of Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone, through which Chinese naval vessels and aircraft regularly intrude.
Against this backdrop, Kishida in December unveiled Japan’s biggest military buildup since World War II, mirroring upticks in defense spending across Europe, including Germany, which like Japan was humbled by that war. The commitment would raise defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2027, giving Japan the world’s third largest defense budget. And while previous Japanese leaders dithered over imposing international sanctions, Kishida has joined U.S.-led measures with alacrity.
It’s a transformation that had long been touted by Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who belonged to the same right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and was assassinated during a campaign stop in July. But while Abe’s hawkish reputation was divisive, Kishida’s dovish persona has enabled him to enact security reform without significant pushback.
Still, Japan’s martial resurgence isn’t without controversy. The nation has a pacifist constitution, and critics say its military buildup pours fuel on an already combustive regional security picture. And given that China is Japan’s top trading partner, it’s unclear how Kishida can fund an ambitious domestic agenda while turning the screws on America’s superpower rival, which has proved all too willing to mete out economic retribution. More fundamentally, some believe that Japan’s rearmament chafes with Kishida’s longstanding pledges to work toward a nuclear-free world. The Prime Minister, for his part, says his only goal is to prevent tragedies like Hiroshima unfolding once again: “Today’s Ukraine could be tomorrow’s East Asia.”
Kishida’s tenure has already encountered drama that belies his reputation as a bland functionary. On April 15, Kishida narrowly avoided joining the ghosts stalking the Prime Minister’s residence when a homemade pipe bomb was hurled at him during a campaign speech, injuring a policeman. “I am living in the world of politics,” he shrugs when asked about the incident. “All sorts of events and developments could happen.”
When he took office 18 months ago, he was thought of as a steady but uninspiring politician, unscarred by scandal but lacking major accomplishments. His father and grandfather were both lawmakers, and he spent part of his childhood in the U.S., attending a public school in Queens. Classes were filled with children of myriad cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and Kishida says he found communication “very challenging.” But because of this, “I was reminded of the importance of listening carefully to the views of others,” he says. “As a child, I was inspired by what makes America the United States, which is respect for freedom and an abundance of energy.”
Kishida was an average student, failing his law school entrance exam three times. After cutting his teeth in banking, Kishida entered politics in 1993. He rose to various cabinet posts and was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs in 2012, serving in the position for five years, a Japanese record. He forged a reputation as a consensus builder, coordinating policy in back rooms by deliberating with various factions. Aides say Kishida takes advice, but once his mind is made up, he doesn’t waver.
As Prime Minister, he’s proved himself a prodigious worker. Kishida has made a dizzying 16 overseas trips since taking office. The day after he sat down with TIME inside his official residence’s vaulted Great Hall, he departed for a four-nation tour of Africa. Aides say he’s barely managed to take any time for himself. “After the [parliamentary] session is over, if some time remains, I hope I will be able to play some golf,” he says with a grin.
But it has not all been smooth on the domestic front. Kishida’s approval ratings plummeted following a backlash to his decision to hold a state funeral for Abe, over both the expense and Abe’s polarizing character. Late last year, Kishida fired four cabinet ministers in two months over a variety of scandals. In February, he dismissed a close aide for saying “quite a few people would abandon this country” if same-sex marriage were legalized, despite a majority of the population’s supporting it. In response, Kishida tells TIME that he is committed to “realizing a society where diversity is respected.” Kishida’s approval rating has since picked up, and his LDP won key seats in local elections in April.
“He may not be an inspiring leader,” says Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Tokyo’s Temple University. “But he has proven to be fairly effective in terms of promoting his agenda.”
It’s an ambitious one. Japan has the world’s second most educated population and boasts its longest life expectancy, lowest murder rate, little unemployment, and unusually smooth political transitions. But it also has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, stagnated growth, and a severely aging population. In the late 1980s, Japanese people earned more than Americans. Now they earn 40% less on average. Kishida’s mission is to drag Japan back up. He has embarked on a sweeping modernization drive, recently green-lighting the nation’s first casino as well as a dedicated autonomous driving lane for the Shin-Tōmei Expressway, a key logistics artery.
Kishida’s domestic agenda rests on a nebulous “income-doubling plan” to boost household earnings, but his big problem is how to pay for redistribution without alienating the affluent. Japan’s ratio of public debt to GDP stands at 256%—about double that of the U.S.—and Kishida has little wiggle room to keep borrowing. When he floated the idea of raising taxes on stock transfers and dividends, Japan’s bourses tanked. “Mr. Kishida has to be pretty careful to keep key right-wing support,” says Mieko Nakabayashi, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University and a former Japanese lawmaker.
Kishida also wants to get more women and seniors into gainful employment. Japan ranked 116th among 146 countries—the lowest of developed economies—in the World Economic Forum’s 2022 gender-gap report. But while Kishida’s government has set targets to reach 30% female executives at big firms by 2030, “I don’t think it has clearly stated what kind of action plan it will actually take to achieve the goal,” says Makiko Ono, CEO of Suntory Beverages & Food, Japan’s most valuable company with a female boss.
Ultimately, Japan remains over 30% less productive than the U.S. Kishida has charged Japan’s Digital Agency to cut red tape and boost efficiency. Digital Minister Taro Kono tells TIME that he’s discovered 9,000 government regulations that still require handling via antiquated technology, such as faxes, floppy disks, and the hanko—an iconic carved stamp that is obligatory for many official documents.
But Kono has only 800 officials to serve Japan’s population of 125 million, complaining that his agency is “desperately understaffed.” It’s a monumental challenge; embracing the Fourth Industrial Revolution is crucial for developed societies everywhere, though perhaps none more so than Japan, whose shrinking, aging population has “no precedent in the world,” says Kishida. “This is a matter of survival.”
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country
…Armando Rodríguez, vice-president and executive director of the company, talks to us about their projects in the DR, where they have been operating for 32 years.
More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
Photo/ Editing by Germán & Co by ShutterstockA Supreme Court Ruling the Fossil-Fuel Industry Doesn’t Like
Communities can now sue in state courts for compensation for the costs of climate change—something oil companies have fought against for years.
THE NEW YORKER By Bill McKibben, May 10, 2023It was Representative Pat Schroeder, the twelve-term Colorado Democrat, who—while frying eggs one morning—coined the term “Teflon President” for Ronald Reagan. “He sees to it that nothing sticks to him,” she said later, in Congress. Schroeder, who died in March, was the first woman to represent Colorado in the House and an advocate for the environment—she introduced the legislation to establish the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge—and she could have said the same about the fossil-fuel industry. Of all the powerful institutions that we’ve failed to hold to account, none is currently flying higher, despite the fact that the industry’s products have raised the temperature of the Earth to the point where scientists are in near-panic. ExxonMobil, coming off a year of record profits after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, continued to show record earnings in the first quarter of 2023; Chevron, too, reported first-quarter profits that more than doubled its average over the past decade. Asset-management giants such as BlackRock have boosted their stakes in the oil giants, despite the investment firms’ protestations of concern about the climate crisis. ConocoPhillips just won approval from the Biden Administration for a vast new drilling complex in Alaska; Exxon said in late April that it was moving ahead with a giant project off the coast of Guyana. And Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, is threatening to wreck the world economy, by defaulting on America’s debt, unless, among other things, President Biden’s efforts to move us toward clean energy are repealed. The U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, told the industry, earlier this year, that “your core product is our core problem,” but his straight talk hasn’t accomplished much. For now, statements from men such as Exxon’s C.E.O., Darren Woods, hold sway. “We are growing value by increasing production from our advantaged assets to meet global demand,” Woods said, as the news of those robust profits was announced.
Yet last month saw an unexpected development, and it came in the Supreme Court: with only Brett Kavanaugh issuing a public dissent, the Justices declined to review a petition from Exxon and Suncor Energy to move a case from state to federal court. (Simultaneously, the Court denied the same appeal from other major oil companies in four more cases.) Three communities in Pat Schroeder’s state—the City of Boulder, Boulder County, and San Miguel County—had brought suit against the two corporations, seeking compensation for damage wrought there by a warming planet, which, the plaintiffs claim, was caused in part by the companies’ products. That procedural victory may not sound like much, but it could turn out to be a signal moment in the climate fight.
In September, 2015, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site Inside Climate News published the first installment of a nine-part series, “The Road Not Taken,” which drew on document archives and interviews with whistle-blowers to show that, as far back as the late nineteen-seventies, Exxon had known about what was then called the greenhouse effect. Company scientists had outfitted an oil tanker to study atmospheric carbon levels as it sailed the seas, and had used computer models to predict the effects of those levels. A corporate primer prepared in 1982—which, according to the contents, was “given wide circulation to Exxon management”—stated that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Without those reductions, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer states, citing independent experts, and “once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But Exxon didn’t tell the public; instead, as Inside Climate News reported, after the nasa scientist James Hansen had testified before Congress about the dangers of climate change, in 1988—at a hearing called by Senator Timothy Wirth, of Colorado—and public concern began to rise,
Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of some of the world’s largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.
Exxon, we now know, was far from alone—within the energy and utility industries there was widespread understanding that their products were doing damage. For instance, last month a Dutch climate activist released Shell records from the nineteen-seventies and eighties, including a 1989 document in which the company’s experts predicted that, if temperature increases went well beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (which is precisely the path on which we are currently travelling), the results would be dire:
Perhaps those in industrial countries could cope with a rise in sea level (the Dutch example) but for poor countries such defences are not possible. The potential refugee problem . . . could be unprecedented. Africans would push into Europe, Chinese into the Soviet Union, Latins into the United States, Indonesians into Australia. Boundaries would count for little—overwhelmed by the numbers. Conflicts would abound. Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.
(A Shell spokesperson told The New Yorker, in an e-mail, “The Shell Group did not have unique knowledge about climate change. The issue of climate change and how to tackle it has long been part of public discussion and scientific research that has evolved over many decades.” The spokesperson added, “We’ve been advocating for a CO2 trading system for 30 years and, in 1997, publicly supported the Kyoto Protocol.”)
But the impact of Inside Climate News’ 2015 reports and others can hardly be overstated. Worried that the evidence would just disappear into the news cycle, I went to a Mobil station in Burlington, the biggest city in Vermont, where I live, and sat in front of a pump with a sign alerting people to the stories; I blocked business for a few minutes, until I was arrested. A few months later, I paid a fine of a couple hundred dollars, which may have been the only legal repercussion so far of those revelations. After last month’s Supreme Court ruling, however, it likely won’t be the last.
With the new evidence in hand, cities and states around the country began filing lawsuits against oil companies. Some argued simply that the taxpayers in their constituencies should not have to solely bear the cost of damages caused by global warming; others argued that the companies were guilty of consumer fraud or false advertising for insisting that their products were safe; some combined those arguments. The plaintiffs in Colorado are asking that the companies be ordered to compensate them for some of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the communities have spent and will spend trying to mitigate the effects of climate change in the area: Exxon produces a lot of oil and natural gas from Colorado reserves; Suncor, which is headquartered in Canada, operates a large refinery in Commerce City, near Denver. Moreover, the original complaint states that the defendants should help pay because they “knowingly and substantially contributed to the climate crisis by producing, promoting and selling a substantial portion of the fossil fuels that are causing and exacerbating climate change, while concealing and misrepresenting the dangers associated with their intended use.” An Exxon spokesman told The New Yorker, “Those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” and insisted that the corporation’s “understanding of climate science has developed along with that of the broader scientific community.” He added that fighting the state suits will be a “waste of time” and won’t “do anything to meaningfully address climate change.” The plaintiffs note that Suncor may also have conducted independent research but that, in any event, the potential perils of global warming had been known inside the industry for decades. (Suncor did not respond to a request for comment.)
The industry responded to the lawsuits by retaining lawyers who have spent the past half decade arguing that the cases should not be heard in state courts but, instead, should be consigned to the federal judiciary system. Marco Simons, the nonprofit EarthRights International’s general counsel, who is representing the three Colorado communities, said that the companies “argued that any case involving essentially interstate environmental harm or interstate pollution has to be decided under federal law, and that, because climate change is inherently an interstate issue, only federal law can apply. And then they argued that, while only federal law can apply, federal law provides no remedy. Because, they said, federal law in this area is entirely governed by the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Air Act does not directly provide a remedy.” For the industry, a federal process was clearly more attractive—instead of dozens of different venues, they’d have a more manageable process, under one set of rules, that would end in an appeal to the Supreme Court, which lately has been very corporate-friendly.
Six federal appeals courts across the country had heard those arguments over the years, and all six rejected them. (Each appeal required empanelling a three-judge review team, and because one circuit heard multiple appeals before two panels of judges, and because one judge died before he could offer his opinion, the industry lost 20–0 in these forums. One panel consisted of three judges all appointed by President Donald Trump.) But the industry persisted, appealing to the Supreme Court. Cities and states, for their part, argued before the Court that these claims were precisely the kind that state courts are used to adjudicating, and that there was no compelling reason to shift jurisdiction. In October, the Court asked the Biden Administration to weigh in, through its Solicitor General, Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar. Her office reversed the advice given by her predecessor in the previous Administration, and recommended that state courts be allowed to hear the cases. Finally, last month, the Supreme Court agreed. (Though only Justice Kavanaugh publicly dissented, Justice Samuel Alito recused himself; he gave no reason, but reportedly, according to a disclosure filing, either he or his wife has holdings in oil stocks.)
Simons said, “The reason we won in every court is that it was a straightforward application of extremely long-standing rules.” But, he added, “if you take into consideration the fact that it involves some of the most powerful economic actors on claims arising out of climate change, with many of the top corporate law firms begging the Supreme Court to weigh in, you could at least see why the defendants were hoping the Supreme Court would have taken the case. From a strict legal analysis, the decision was not surprising, but from a legal realist power analysis, there were a lot of people who were worried.” As Sam Sankar, the senior vice-president for programs at the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice, told me, “I clerked at the Supreme Court twenty years ago, and it would have been a no-brainer to turn this case down back then. But with this Court you never really know—it does previously unthinkable things surprisingly often.”
So now the cases can proceed in state courts. In at least one instance, the defendants had already filed arguments to dismiss, which were left pending while the Supreme Court made up its mind. But, assuming that cases survive dismissal motions, two things are likely to happen. One is that many more suits may be filed. Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has helped coördinate advocacy groups to hold oil companies accountable (among other things, it has funded 350.org, where I volunteered for many years), said, “The major law firms may have stayed away from these cases to date because they’re so speculative, but one such firm has taken on a big Puerto Rican case, and I think that’s a tell-tale of what we can anticipate in the months ahead.” Sankar told me, “I think there are a lot of plaintiffs’ lawyers who will say, ‘Can’t win if you don’t play.’ They’ll be telling cities, ‘If you don’t bring a suit, you may be missing out on something.’ ” EarthRights International’s Simons added that “there’s no reason injured private parties couldn’t join in. There’s already one case from a Pacific Coast fishermen’s association, arguing that the shellfish harvest has been harmed.” The other thing that is likely to happen is that discovery will begin, in case after case, with lawyers deposing executives and combing through records. “You saw in the Fox case how important that can be,” Sankar said. And, if one team of lawyers finds a significant document, it will quickly become common knowledge: “If Baltimore finds a smoking gun,” he noted, “the information is going to move.”
None of this means that the cases will be simple to prove. For one thing, events that happen in nature have multiple causes. And even when experts can attribute damage to a changed climate—a scientific field that is maturing rapidly—apportioning the blame to particular companies can be difficult. “You can certainly make a determination of how much carbon these companies are responsible for, but in our view that doesn’t completely define their responsibility,” Simons said. “Take Exxon as an example. They’re a participant in the market in many ways—producer, refiner, marketer, and seller. But we also believe that Exxon’s campaign of concealment and deception contributed to the problem. That’s much harder to put a number on, but an essential part of their responsibility and fault.” He added, “We’re not saying they’re a hundred-per-cent responsible, we’re just saying they’re not zero-per-cent responsible. How much is for a jury to decide.”
That’s provided that a jury gets the case. Although the lawsuits in Colorado, and those from other jurisdictions, are now back in state court, this doesn’t mean that federal law doesn’t apply—just as you can use the First Amendment to protect speech in a state court, oil-company lawyers can argue, for example, that the Clean Air Act should take precedence, and someday those arguments may wind up back before the Supreme Court. “This is not a decision that these claims are meritorious or even valid,” Sankar said, of last month’s ruling. “It’s a refusal to say they have to be heard in federal court.”
But assume that such cases do play out. Polling shows that “make polluters pay” is a popular argument that crosses partisan boundaries. And as Wasserman, of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said, “If, as a corporation, you’re found to have deceived the public, there are consequences.” Those consequences could conceivably lead to some kind of general settlement, as happened when a wave of lawsuits forced the tobacco industry not only to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to fund related health-care costs that states had to bear but also to support anti-smoking education programs and even to wind down the corporations’ lobbying front groups. But, Wasserman said, before companies might face that kind of financial peril, they would likely ask Congress to intervene, arguing that “this is the end of being able to pump gas into your car, that Congress has to come up with some kind of release for the industry.” He added that there are models Congress might draw on to wind down the industry, if such negotiations were ever to begin: “In World War Two, the government controlled industries and what they produced. Or think about investor-owned utilities: in the past, the government used to say how much energy they can produce, what their profits will be, what their dividends should be. We can do this—it’s not that complicated.”
Yet, before any pressure like that can build in Congress (or in the stock market), plaintiffs will need to win some cases. “The courts have been the one place where those seeking to right important wrongs and grievances have an equal shot against the most powerful actors in society,” Wasserman said. For example, in the middle of the twentieth century, the civil-rights movement was slowly building a “societal recognition that we needed to change our laws and customs,” and, as it did so, Thurgood Marshall filed case after case, winning most but not all of them. “Then finally, in 1954, came Brown v. Board of Education, and the world was different going forward,” Wasserman said. “The climate movement has suffered from not having a deep and robust litigation strategy, and I think we’re finally overcoming that.”
It’s fitting that the Boulder area is represented in the case the Supreme Court refused to move to federal court. The city’s mayor, Aaron Brockett, told me that the community has worked hard to lower its carbon emissions. (I reached him as he was waiting for a bus to take him thirty miles home from a conference in Denver.) “We’re working on natural climate solutions, our nearby power plant no longer burns coal, our hundred-per-cent renewable-electricity goal by 2030 looks very doable,” he said. And Boulder is home to both the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the noaa Earth System Research Laboratories—there are probably more top-level climate scientists per capita in the area than anywhere else in the world.
The Court’s ruling came almost five years to the day after the Colorado suit was filed. Brett Fleishman—a Boulder resident and longtime climate activist whom I’ve known and worked with for many years, and who now serves as the senior climate strategist for the county government—was at a 2018 rally announcing the suit, with his then three-year-old son, Sequoia, on his shoulders. The Times took a picture of them holding a sign that read “Exxon Suncor = Floods Fires less snow” (The lawsuit states that the E.P.A., among others, has noted that hotter temperatures and droughts, if not Exxon specifically, have increased the risk of forest fires.)
The three largest wildfires in the state’s history occurred in 2020. Then, on December 30, 2021—the day before the latest recorded date in the winter season that the Boulder County area had ever gone without significant snow—the Marshall wildfire, the most destructive fire ever recorded in the state, swept across the region, burning a thousand homes and leaving two people dead. (Different factors play into the spread of winter wildfires, but experts concur that climate change contributes to the conditions for them.) There is footage of people being told by the Boulder County sheriff’s office to immediately evacuate a Costco and “head east,” and video from a Chuck E. Cheese in which parents and kids struggle to open a door against a wind whipping flames across the parking lot. Paul Chinowsky, a professor emeritus at the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, who served as a consultant for the scientific and economic rationale for the lawsuit, was at his home when the Marshall fire hit, and had just minutes to grab his research data and flee. In a video about that day’s events, he recalls sitting in a line of cars, trying to escape the blaze alongside thousands of other people. “I picked up my phone and called one of my research assistants,” he says, and told him, “Everything we thought about climate and fire risk is wrong. It has to be changed.” He adds, “Even with all the modelling we’ve ever done, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Susie Strife, the Boulder County director of climate action, sustainability, and resilience, told me that the region’s costs from climate change are clearly higher now than when the suit was filed—the Marshall fire did more than two billion dollars’ worth of property damage—and that, along with working on reducing carbon emissions, her team now spends much of its time trying to “get people rehomed, deal with insurance claims, all of that.” She added, “What often gets left out are the emotional and social costs—the long time it takes a family to secure new housing, or the time it takes kids to settle into a new school. These wounds are unquantifiable in today’s economic system—the fact that now we have real anxiety when the wind picks up. We’re Coloradans, we chose to live here because we love the outdoors. And that’s getting lost.”
The Colorado lawsuit, she says, is asking players like Exxon to pay their fair share. But it could come to more than that. “I think the outcome could be an awakening that there has been some serious bad acting going on, some misinformation and disinformation from these companies that have led us to chase our tails, to focus on our own carbon footprints, and not on the massive shift we need to see. This could be our moment of system change.”
Image: Germán & CoCooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
Schröder and his wife, So-yeon Schröder-Kim, reportedly rubbed shoulders at the event on Tuesday with Egon Krenz, 86, the last Communist leader of East Germany (GDR). Collage: Editing by Germán & CoEx-German chancellor criticised for attending event at Russian embassy
Bild publishes leaked photos showing Gerhard Schröder with his wife and others at Victory Day reception in Berlin
THE GUARDIAN by Kate Connolly in Berlin, Thu 11 May 2023 Leaked photographs have emerged in the German press of the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has refused to denounce his friendship and business ties with Vladimir Putin, as the guest of honour at a reception hosted by the Russian embassy in Berlin.
Schröder and his wife, So-yeon Schröder-Kim, reportedly rubbed shoulders at the event on Tuesday with Egon Krenz, 86, the last Communist leader of East Germany (GDR). Krenz was forced to resign when the Berlin Wall fell, and was later sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his role in the crimes of the Communist regime, in particular the fatal shootings of people trying to escape the GDR.
Other guests included the leadership of the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) and high-ranking members of the far-left Die Linke. Guests were served champagne and caviar, according to reports.
Schröder, who was chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a strong advocate for the Nord Stream gas pipeline during his time in office. He has since had roles in the companies Rosneft and Gazprom, which he has now officially renounced. After his resignation from the board of Rosneft over EU sanction concerns, he was spotted in Moscow a year ago by a German reporter, to whom he said: “I’m having a few days holiday in Moscow – it’s a beautiful city.”
Pictures of the Schröders and other guests at the embassy – at a reception to mark Victory Day, or the role of the Soviet Red Army in conquering Nazi Germany in 1945 – were leaked to the tabloid Bild.
The guests would have entered the embassy after passing a protest site against Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is a permanent presence outside the building. Protesters have renamed the space in front of the embassy Freedom Square.
A makeshift memorial to war victims outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
Franz Josef Wagner, a veteran columnist for Bild, responded with an angry swipe at Schröder. “Our ex-chancellor eats caviar while Putin is slaughtering people, kidnapping children, letting women be raped. Every sensitive person can smell the sulphur in the embassy – the smell of death. Gerhard Schröder has lost his sense of smell,” he wrote.
Schröder-Kim confirmed to Der Spiegel magazine that the couple had attended the event and said she was “amazed” that this should be viewed with scorn.
Schröder has been isolated by his party, the Social Democrats, for his refusal to denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and over his longstanding gas industry ties with Moscow. He recently failed in an attempt to overturn a ban on his use of taxpayer-funded Bundestag offices and staff amid scathing criticism for his links to Moscow. Attempts to throw him out of the SPD have so far failed.
Tino Chrupalla, the AfD leader, also confirmed his participation, together with Alexander Gauland, who previously held the same role. He told the news agency DPA that he had received an invitation to the reception “as I’m sure all parliamentary faction leaders did”.
Traditionally, he said, 9 May “was until recently a memorial day in which it was taken for granted that German politicians of all parties represented in the Bundestag would take part”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should not change this, he said. “This dialogue should not be broken off in times of crisis.”
The free press is under attack from multiple forces. Media outlets are closing their doors, victims to a broken business model. In much of the world, journalism is morphing into propaganda, as governments dictate what can and can’t be printed. In the last year alone, hundreds of reporters have been killed or imprisoned for doing their jobs. The UN reports that 85% of the world’s population experienced a decline in press freedom in their country in recent years.
Last week marked the 30th annual World Press Freedom Day, a day for everyone to reflect on the importance of free expression as fundamental for all other rights. It is also an opportunity to pledge support for independent media – because without a robust and free press, a healthy democracy is impossible.