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.”
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
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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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)