body,labels
" This year is so far tied for the hottest year in a temperature record dating back to 1850 in a new sign of a warming trend, the three major institutes which calculate global warming estimates told Reuters. UN climate talks resume next week in Cancun, Mexico, where expectations are no longer for a comprehensive deal to slow warming, but smaller progress for example to curb deforestation, in a bid to agree a pact next year or later. The previous conference in Copenhagen last year fell short of hopes, but about 140 countries have agreed a non-binding deal to try and limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius. Temperatures are now about 0.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and 2010 is about 0.5 degrees above the 1961-1990 average, near the record, with two months data still to collect. Even with a possible cool end to the year, 2010 is expected to be no lower than third in a record where 1998 and 2005 are warmest. The UN panel of climate scientists says higher temperatures mean more floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. ""I think it's too close to call. Based on these numbers it'll be second, but it depends on how warm November and December are,"" said Phil Jones, director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), at the University of East Anglia, which says 1998 was the record year so far. By contrast, scientists at the U.S. space agency NASA say that surface temperatures through October were above the previous record year, which it says was 2005. Differences between years are only a few hundredths of a degree. ""I would not be surprised if most or all groups found that 2010 was tied for the warmest year,"" said NASA's James Hansen. And the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that 2010 was a ""dead-heat"" for the record. ""Our data show 2010 being virtually tied with 1998, through October,"" said Deke Arndt, from NCDC. The three institutes use similar observations, but in slightly different ways. For example, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) takes greater account of Arctic weather staions, where warming has been fastest. SCEPTIC Some sceptics have argued that because the last temperature peak was in 2005 or 1998, that global warming must have stalled. Most scientists reject that view, saying that whether or not 2010 is the hottest year is less important than the long-term trend, which is up, due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. The period 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record. Scientists also point to natural variation, and in particular the El Nino Pacific weather phenomenon associated with warm weather worldwide. 1998 was a strong El Nino year. ""The trend is overwhelming, particularly over the past 50 years,"" said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN panel of climate scientists. ""I wouldn't read these numbers for a particular year as very compelling, we have to take a historical view,"" he told Reuters. In one of the biggest bets on climate change, James Annan, a climate scientist at the Frontier Research Center for Global Change in Japan, has a $10,000 wager made in 2005 with two Russian solar physicists who are sceptical about global warming. He will win if average world temperatures are higher from 2012-17 than they were from 1998-2003. ""Things are progressing smoothly,"" he said. The UN's World Meteorological Organisation will publish an estimate on Dec. 2 of where 2010 ranks. It compiles data from a wider range of sources, both measured temperatures and climate models. It lists 1998 and 2005 as the warmest years. ""We have indications that it would match one of the three warmest years,"" said Omar Baddour, head of climate data management operations at in Geneva.",0
"Russian President Vladimir Putin left the G20 summit in Brisbane early as US President Barack Obama accused Russia of invading Ukraine and Britain warned of a possible ""frozen conflict"" in Europe. Several Western nations warned Russia of further sanctions if it did not withdraw troops and weapons from Ukraine. ""I think President Putin can see he is at a crossroads,"" said British Prime Minister David Cameron. ""If he continues to destabilize Ukraine there will be further sanctions, further measures. ""There is a cost to sanctions, but there would be a far greater cost in allowing a frozen conflict on the continent of Europe to be created and maintained."" Obama said Russia's isolation was unavoidable. ""We would prefer a Russia that is fully integrated with the global economy,"" he told a news conference. ""But we are also very firm on the need to uphold core international principles.... you don't invade other countries or finance proxies and support them in ways that break up a country that has mechanisms for democratic elections."" Before leaving the G20 Summit, Putin said a solution to the Ukraine crisis was possible, but did not elaborate. ""Today the situation (in Ukraine) in my view has good chances for resolution, no matter how strange it may sound,"" Putin said. He skipped a working lunch at the summit to leave early, citing the long flight home and need for sleep. Russia has denied any involvement in the conflict in Ukraine that has killed more than 4,000 people this year. CLIMATE CHANGE Security and climate change overshadowed G20 talks on boosting global economic growth at the summit, although the leaders did sign off on a package of measures to add an extra 2.1 percentage points to global growth over five years. ""This will add more than $2 trillion to the global economy and create millions of jobs,"" said a communique issued at the end of the meeting, which also committed to tackle global tax avoidance denying government's billions of dollars in revenue. The United States and other nations overrode host Australia's attempts to keep climate change off the formal agenda. Australia is one of the world's biggest carbon emitters per capita. The final communique called for strong and effective action to address climate change with the aim of adopting a protocol, with legal force, at a U.N. climate conference in Paris in 2015. ""The most difficult discussion was on climate change,"" an EU official told reporters on condition of anonymity. ""This was really trench warfare, this was really step by step by step. In the end we have references to most of the things we wanted."" Obama put climate change squarely on the G20 agenda with a speech on Saturday calling on all nations to act, and committing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. Japan pledged $1.5 billion to the fund on Sunday. World leaders also agreed to unite in the fight against Ebola, which Britain's Cameron said was not only a humanitarian crisis but also a security threat. ""The best way we can keep out people safe from Ebola is by tackling it at source,"" he said. RUSSIAN SANCTIONS Sanctions against Russia aimed at sectors like oil and banking, as well as individuals close to Putin, are squeezing its economy at a time when falling oil prices are straining the budget and the rouble has plunged on financial markets. ""At this point the sanctions we have in place are biting plenty good,"" Obama said after the summit. ""We retain the capability, and we have our teams constantly looking at mechanisms in which to turn up additional pressure as necessary."" Earlier in the day, Obama, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lined up together against Russia, vowing to oppose what they called Moscow's efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine. European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel also warned of more sanctions unless Russia ends its support for pro-Russian separatist rebels. EU foreign ministers will meet on Monday to consider further steps, including additional possible sanctions on Russia.",0
" UN climate talks have made progress at the half-way mark but many of the toughest issues such as greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2020 are deadlocked, delegates said on Saturday. ""We have made considerable progress over the course of the first week,"" Connie Hedegaard, the Danish cabinet minister who presides over the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen, told delegates trying to work out a new pact to slow climate change. Delegates said negotiators had advanced on texts such as defining how new green technologies such as wind and solar power can be supplied to developing nations and in promoting use of forests to soak up greenhouse gases. ""We see the contours of a technology mechanism emerging, "" said Michael Zammit Cutajar, who chairs negotiations on new goals for all nations. But delegates said there were deep splits on issues such as raising funds for poor nations and sharing out the burden of greenhouse gas emissions curbs before a closing summit of more than 110 world leaders on Dec. 17-18. The Pacific Island of Tuvalu, fearing that rising sea levels could wipe it off the map, stuck to its calls for consideration of a radical new treaty that would force far deeper cuts in greenhouse gases than those under consideration. ""The fate of my country rests in your hands,"" Ian Fry, leading the Tuvalu delegation, told the meeting. ""I make this as a strong and impassioned plea...I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit,"" he said, his voice choking with emotion. 
TUVALU Hedegaard said she wanted more consultations until next week on the Tuvalu proposal, which has been opposed even by some developing nations led by China and India. Fry said that Tuvalu's fears were widely shared by small island states. The European Union offered 7.3 billion euros ($10.8 billion) of climate aid over the next three years on Friday. The United Nations wants to raise $10 billion a year from 2010-12 in quick-start funds to help the poor cope with global warming and move away from fossil fuels. But few other nations have offered quick-start cash. In the longer term, the United Nations estimates the fight against global warming is likely to cost $300 billion a year from 2020, largely to help developing nations adapt to impacts such as droughts, floods and heatwaves. A panel of UN climate experts said in a 2007 scenario that rich nations would have to cut emissions by about 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid the worst of global warming. Offers by rich nations for cutting emissions, mostly from greenhouse gases, so far total about 14-18 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Developing nations such as China, the number one emitter ahead of the United States, are expected to slow the rise of their emissions without absolute cuts. They say they need to burn more energy to help end poverty.",0
"The White House summit, part of US
efforts to step up engagement with a region Washington sees as critical to its
efforts to push back against China's growing power, had been expected earlier
in the year, but scheduling was delayed by COVID-19 concerns. White House press secretary Jen Psaki
said the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian leaders (ASEAN) will
commemorate 45 years of US-ASEAN relations. ""It is a top priority for the
Biden-Harris Administration to serve as a strong, reliable partner and to
strengthen an empowered and unified ASEAN to address the challenges of our
time,"" she said in announcing the summit. On a visit to Malaysia in December, US
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the 10-member ASEAN bloc was
""essential to the architecture of the Indo-Pacific region."" He said the summit was expected to
discuss the crisis caused by last year's military takeover in Myanmar and
issues such as pandemic recovery, climate change, investment and
infrastructure. The Biden administration has declared
the Indo-Pacific and competition with China its principal foreign policy focus,
which it is keen to maintain despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden joined ASEAN leaders in a virtual
summit in October, the first time in four years Washington had engaged at top
level with the bloc. He pledged to stand with ASEAN in defending
freedom of the seas and democracy, and said Washington would start talks on
developing a regional economic framework, something critics say US Asia
strategy has lacked since his predecessor Donald Trump quit a regional trade
pact. The Biden administration announced a
12-page strategy for the Indo-Pacific in early February, in which it vowed to
commit more diplomatic and security resources to the region to counter what its
sees as China's bid to create a regional sphere of influence and become the
world's most influential power. Read full story The document reiterated US plans to
launch a regional economic framework in early 2022, but few details of that
have emerged and the Biden administration has been reluctant to offer the
increased market access Asian countries desire, seeing this as threatening
American jobs.",1
" The Czech government agreed on Friday to sue the European Union's executive body over its demand that the country cut its proposed annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2008-2012, the industry ministry said. The Commission responded that it was confident its decision on the Czech plan would stand up to a challenge in court. The European Commission has cut the annual allocation of carbon emission rights for the Czech Republic to 86.8 million tonnes per year in 2008-2012 from 101.9 million demanded by the Czechs, down from 97.6 million tonnes in 2005-2007. ""I believe that because of a complicated model and bad data, the European Commission damaged the Czech Republic in its allocation of emission rights,"" Czech Industry and Trade Minister Martin Riman said in a statement. The ministry statement added the European Commission did not consult with the Czechs when calculating expected 2008 emissions. The Czechs have said the lower emission rights could harm the economy, which is experiencing strong growth in large part due to the benefits of joining the European Union in May 2004. But European Commission spokeswoman Barbara Helfferich told a news conference in Brussels that the decision would be upheld. ""We are confident the decision of the Commission stands up in court,"" she said. The emissions trading scheme is the 27-nation EU's key tool to fight climate change and meet commitments to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neighbouring Slovakia filed a lawsuit against the EU's executive in February as the first EU member country to go to court over the Commission's demands to cut emissions. Poland and Hungary are also said to be considering legal action against the Commission over their allocations.",0
" Key developing states rallied to an EU roadmap for a binding pact to fight global warming on Friday, but draft agreements emerging at UN climate talks showed deep divisions remained and Europe said the negotiations could yet collapse. The EU plan sets a 2015 target date for a new deal that would impose binding cuts on the world's biggest emitters of heat-trapping gases, a pact that would come into force up to five years later. EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said Brazil and South Africa, whose growing economies are heavy polluters, now supported binding cuts to emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause rising sea-levels and increasingly extreme weather. But speaking to reporters in the South African port of Durban she said an agreement was far from certain before the talks' scheduled end on Friday. ""The success or failure of Durban hangs on a small number of countries who have not yet committed to the (EU) roadmap and the meaningful content it must have,"" Hedegaard said. ""If there is no further movement from what I have seen until 4 o'clock this morning, I don't think there will be a deal in Durban. That's what we are faced with."" A draft text emerged that could legally bind more than 30 industrialised countries to cut emissions under a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol -- the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts. However, it would likely only be adopted if all emitters agreed to take on legal targets in a separate, broader agreement that would bind China, India and the United States. Climate experts doubted the wording of the second text would be acceptable, as it merely referred to a ""legal framework,"" stopping short of a legally binding treaty that the European Union and many developing countries are demanding. ""In the next years we will not have a legal regime, nothing will control the big emitters, the developed countries. without that framework everyone can do what they want,"" said Rene Orellana, chief negotiator for Bolivia and part of the ALBA group of Latin American nations, said if the proposed texts went through. ""This is not just the death of Kyoto, it's the death of the planet. We need a regime to control emissions, to enforce compliance,"" he said. Critics also complain the texts are unclear about when emissions cuts must come into force and how deep the reductions will go. UNDER PRESSURE The EU strategy at the conference has been to forge a coalition of the willing designed to heap pressure on the world's top three carbon emitters -- China, the United States and India -- to sign up to binding cuts. None are bound by the Kyoto Protocol. Washington says it will only pledge binding cuts if all major polluters make comparable commitments. China and India say it would be unfair to demand they make the same level of cuts as the developed world, which caused most of the pollution responsible for global warming. Many envoys believe two weeks of climate talks in Durban will at best produce a weak political agreement, with states promising to start talks on a new regime of binding cuts in greenhouse gases. Anything less would be disastrous, they say. U.N. reports released in the last month show time is running out to achieve change. They show a warming planet will amplify droughts and floods, increase crop failures and raise sea levels to the point where several island states are threatened with extinction. The Durban talks are scheduled to wrap up on Friday but are widely expected to extend long into the night and even Saturday. The dragging talks frustrated delegates from small islands and African states, who joined a protest by green groups outside as they tried to enter the main negotiating room. ""You need to save us, the islands can't sink. We have a right to live, you can't decide our destiny. We will have to be saved,"" Maldives' climate negotiator Mohamed Aslam said. Karl Hood, Grenada's foreign minister and chairman of the 43-nation Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) whose members are in the frontline of climate change, said the talks were going around in circles. ""We are dealing with peripheral issues and not the real climate ones which is a big problem, like focusing on adaptation instead of mitigation,"" he said. ""I feel Durban might end up being the undertaker of UN climate talks.""",0
" Climate change is already causing friction and international instability in some parts of the world but looms as an even greater threat to peace in the future, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. In an interview with Reuters before Monday's start of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Steinmeier said those talks need to move the issue of global warming beyond the melting glaciers to more immediate, if less photogenic, perils. He said it was time to look at tensions already being caused by the dwindling of natural resources, diminishing access to fresh water, shifts in vegetation and mass migration as well as the future conflicts that loom because of climate change. Steinmeier also said it was vital that none of the world's leading nations opt out of any agreement reached in the talks to be launched in Bali, designed to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a pact to curb global warming that runs to 2012. ""Bali is only the start of a long process yet I truly hope the delegates will be able to agree on medium- and long-term goals to slow global warming,"" said Steinmeier, who often speaks out on the foreign policy implications of climate change. ""I hope no one will leave Bali having distanced themselves from the process. If ... a timetable for realistic negotiations can be set up, then I'd say the aims and purpose of Bali will have been accomplished."" Delegates from nearly 190 countries meet on the Indonesian island from Dec. 3 to 14. The aim is to launch a concentrated effort to agree on a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol by 2009. The United States and developing nations such as China and India have no limits on emissions under Kyoto. Washington wants a new deal agreed at a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009. BEYOND MELTING ICEBERGS ""What we don't need from Bali is another ringing of the catastrophe alarms,"" said Steinmeier, who helped Chancellor Angela Merkel prod the United States and other key industrial allies to agree at Germany's G8 summit in Heiligendamm on the need for ""substantial"" cuts in emissions and a 2009 U.N. deal. ""We need to move beyond the reports of melting icebergs -- everyone's aware of that by now. People know the problem is serious. The delegates can now get to work on the problem. There's no need for a media showcase to convince anyone."" Steinmeier said climate change is reducing access to water and changing vegetation patterns, causing tension in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. ""I run into the same problems in a lot of places,"" he said. Steinmeier said the planting of a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole was a harbinger of potential troubles. ""The struggle for natural resources in the wake of climate change has become visible even at the North Pole,"" he said, noting a few years ago no one thought it would be possible to exploit the previously inaccessible seabed below Arctic ice. Denmark also claims part of the Arctic through its Greenland province. International law states five nations with a coastline in the Arctic -- including Canada, the United States, Norway -- have a 320 km (200 mile) economic zone north of their shore. ""From a technological standpoint it's still a challenging prospect but climate change has fired the imagination of engineers and that's had a political impact. It woke people up. ""You see a growing nervousness. For me that proves there must be some truth to the thesis that access to resources, especially energy, could upset international relations. ""I'm not talking about war but ruptures. There is a risk divergent interests can lead to conflict. That's why we must help now to prevent future disputes. There's still time.""",0
"But over the weekend, a bushfire destroyed the beloved getaway, one of Australia’s oldest nature resorts — drawing tears from neighbours and alarm from officials who warned that climate change and drought threatened to bring Australia its worst fire season on record. “This is an omen, if you will,” said Andrew Sturgess, who is in charge of fire prediction for the state of Queensland, where the lodge had stood in Lamington National Park. What is happening now “is a historic event,” he said at a news conference. “Fire weather has never been as severe this early in spring.” Experts and some state officials, agreeing with that assessment, have been quick to identify climate change as a major cause — a controversial argument for some people here in a country that is heavily reliant on the coal industry, with a conservative government that has resisted making climate policy a priority. But the recent flames spreading not just through the country’s dry middle but also into its rainforests are one of many data points that make the patterns and problems undeniable. Fire season itself has become nearly a year-round trial, according to fire officials. Independent studies have also shown that the number of hot days in Australia has doubled in the past 50 years, while heat waves have become hotter and longer. Extreme weather events, such as flooding and cyclones, have intensified in frequency and strength, as well. “We’re seeing records breaking left and right,” said Robert Glasser, a visiting fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the former head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. “This isn’t the new normal,” he added. “We’re going to see much worse — the pace of the change is going to accelerate.” Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University, warned that Australia’s experience “is a sign of things to come.” She said she was especially alarmed by the losses near the Binna Burra in the Gold Coast hinterland. “It is devastating to see these usually cool and wet rainforests burn,” she said. “Although these remarkable rainforests have clung on since the age of the dinosaurs, searing heat and lower rainfall is starting to see these wet areas dry out for longer periods of the year, increasing bushfire risk in these precious ecosystems.” Some experts believe an especially horrific fire season could be enough to push Australia to make climate policy more of a priority, at least in terms of planning for climate disasters. In a radio interview Saturday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised continuing support for the affected areas and said the federal government had been adding resources to help. But already, the current fire season is straining firefighters and raising questions about whether Australia has the equipment and capacity to handle such extreme events. On Monday, fire officials in Queensland and New South Wales identified dozens of bushfires still burning across both states. Hundreds of firefighters are combating the blazes, and at least 20 structures have been destroyed over the past three days, including the Binna Burra Lodge. A volunteer firefighter was critically injured Friday with burns to his hands, arms, legs, back and face. And conditions do not seem likely to improve: Roughly 65 percent of Queensland and 98 percent of New South Wales is currently affected by drought, Gergis said, and meteorologists are predicting dry windy weather for the next few days, which threatens to spread the fires far and wide. “It hurts many people of different generations. We all feel the pain,” said Steven Noakes, the chairman of the Binna Burra Lodge. Although his house was intact, he said, many of his neighbours had lost their homes to the blaze and more destruction was expected. “It’s a devastating impact and it generates a range of emotions,” he said. “It’s difficult.” © 2019 New York Times News Service",0
"SYDNEY, Oct. 9 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia's leading scientists. Tim Flannery, a world recognized climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a UN international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level. Flannery said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in mid-2005 had reached about 455 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent -- a level not expected for another 10 years. ""We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade,"" Flannery told Australian television late on Monday. ""We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold,"" he said. ""What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change."" Flannery, from Macquarie University and author of the climate change book ""The Weather Makers"", said he had seen the raw data which will be in the IPCC Synthesis Report. He said the measurement of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere included not just carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). All these gases were measured and then equated into potentially one gas to reach a general level. ""They're all having an impact. Probably 75 percent is carbon dioxide but the rest is that mixed bag of other gases,"" he said. COLLISION COURSE Flannery said global economic expansion, particularly in China and India, was a major factor behind the unexpected acceleration in greenhouse gas levels. ""We're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels. You know, the metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course, clearly, with the metabolism of our planet,"" he said. The report adds an urgency to international climate change talks on the Indonesian island of Bali in December, as reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, he said. UN environment ministers meet in December in Bali to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change that expires in 2012. ""We can reduce emissions as strongly as we like -- unless we can draw some of the standing stock of pollutant out of the air and into the tropical forests, we'll still face unacceptable levels of risk in 40 years time,"" he said. Flannery suggested the developed world could buy ""climate security"" by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests. ""That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that's in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution, and we're the beneficiaries of that and most of the world missed out,"" he said. ""So I see that as a historic debt that we owe the world. And I can't imagine a better way of paying it back than trying to help the poorest people on the planet.""",0
"China will 'eat our lunch', Biden warns While Xi has called for “win-win” cooperation, Biden has called China America’s “most serious competitor” and vowed to “out compete” Beijing. On Thursday, Biden told a bipartisan group of US senators at a meeting on the need to upgrade US infrastructure the United States must raise its game in the face of the Chinese challenge. Biden said he spoke to Xi for two hours on Wednesday night and warned the senators: “If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.” “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.” The White House said Biden emphasised to Xi it was a US priority to preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific, a region where the United States and China are major strategic rivals. He also voiced “fundamental” concerns about Beijing’s “coercive and unfair” trade practices, as well as about human rights issues, including China’s crackdown in Hong Kong and treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, and its increasingly assertive actions in Asia, including toward Taiwan. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Biden also expressed concern about China’s lack of transparency over the coronavirus. All the rights issues Biden mentioned were ones Beijing has explicitly told his administration it should stay out of. Xi told Biden confrontation would be a “disaster” and the two sides should re-establish the means to avoid misjudgments, China’s foreign ministry said. Xi maintained a hardline tone on Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, calling them matters of “sovereignty and territorial integrity” he hoped Washington would approach cautiously. The call was the first between Chinese and US leaders since Xi spoke with former President Donald Trump last March 27, nearly 11 months ago. Since then, relations between the world’s two biggest economies have plunged. Trump blamed China for starting the COVID-19 pandemic and launched a series of actions against China, including a trade war and sanctions against Chinese officials and firms considered security threats. Xi congratulated Biden on his election in a message in November, even though Biden had called him a “thug” during the campaign and vowed to lead an international effort to “pressure, isolate and punish China.” OPEN LINE OF COMMUNICATION The Biden administration has signalled it will maintain pressure on Beijing, and has endorsed a Trump administration determination that China has committed genocide in Xinjiang. At the same time, it has pledged to take a more multilateral approach and is keen to cooperate with Beijing on issues like climate change and persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. Biden has stressed the relationship he established with Xi when vice president under Barack Obama, through more than 24 hours of private meetings and 17,000 miles of travel together. On Thursday, he said he had a good conversation with Xi and knew him well. However, a senior administration official told reporters ahead of the call Biden would be “practical, hard-headed, clear-eyed” in dealings with Xi. At the same time, the official said, Biden wanted to ensure they had the opportunity to have an open line of communication. Chinese officials have expressed some optimism bilateral relations will improve under Biden and have urged Washington to meet Beijing halfway. Readouts of the call from both sides mentioned areas for potential cooperation, honing in on climate change and fighting COVID-19. China’s foreign ministry said Xi had quoted back to Biden the US president’s saying that “America can be defined in one word: Possibilities.” “We hope the possibilities will now point toward an improvement of China-US relations,” it quoted Xi as saying. The editor-in-chief of the Chinese Communist Party-backed tabloid, the Global Times, said in a tweet the fact that the call lasted two hours was “a very positive message” that showed “in-depth communication.” Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said there was room for cooperation, but differences were wide. “The concerns highlighted by President Biden are in essence all Chinese core interests. So narrowing differences is going to be very challenging,” she said. “Xi did not suggest that there are preconditions for bilateral cooperation on issues such as climate change, so that is one positive takeaway.” Another CSIS expert, Scott Kennedy, said that while Xi had proposed extensive bilateral exchanges, things would take time, given Biden’s plans for a thorough review of strategy. “We may end up not far from where things are now, in terms of overall tone, but it’s also possible the two sides will find a pathway to stabilise their relationship, both the extent and manner of competition as well as areas of cooperation,” he said. A US official said Washington was in a position of strength after consultations with allies and partners to lay out concerns about China’s “aggressive activities and abuses.” He said the administration would look in coming months at adding “new targeted restrictions” on sensitive technology exports to China and also that there would be no quick moves to lift Trump administration tariffs on Chinese imports.",0
"Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who will preside at the Nov 6-17 talks of almost 200 nations in Bonn, says he wants more urgent action to cut greenhouse gases as part of the 195-nation Paris Agreement. ""The human suffering caused by intensifying hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods and threats to food security caused by climate change means there is no time to waste,"" he said in a statement on Sunday outlining his goals. Delegates will work on a detailed ""rule book"" to help guide the 2015 Paris climate accord, which set a goal of ending the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But Trump doubts that human activities are the main cause of climate change - a finding endorsed most recently by US scientists in a report on Friday - and said in June that he will quit the Paris pact. A formal pullout will take until November 2020 and delegates say there are wide uncertainties about how far Washington will balance Trump's pro-coal agenda with the conference's goals. 
 
 People march during a demonstration under the banner ""Protect the climate - stop coal"" two days before the start of the COP 23 UN Climate Change Conference hosted by Fiji but held in Bonn, Germany Nov 4, 2017. Reuters 

Thomas Shannon, a career diplomat who once called climate change ""one of the world's biggest challenges"", will head the US delegation. A US official said Shannon currently planned to give no interviews.  People march during a demonstration under the banner ""Protect the climate - stop coal"" two days before the start of the COP 23 UN Climate Change Conference hosted by Fiji but held in Bonn, Germany Nov 4, 2017. Reuters  Thousands of people demonstrated against coal in Bonn on Saturday with banners saying ""Protect the climate: stop coal"". Organisers estimated that 25,000 took part, while police put the number at 10,000. In Germany, the issue of whether to end coal production has been one of the sticking points in coalition talks between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her would-be allies in government: the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. Worldwide, coal still plays a big role in the economy, especially in emerging economies such as China and India. The International Energy Agency says coal supplies a third of all energy used worldwide. On Monday, the UN's World Meteorological Organization will issue a report about where 2017 ranks on a list of the hottest years. NASA data show it is on track to be second warmest, behind 2016, in records dating back to the 19th century.",0
" The White House is optimistic about climate change legislation in Congress and hopes an announcement to jumpstart the nuclear power industry will appeal to Republican skeptics, a top adviser to President Barack Obama said. The Obama administration will announce on Tuesday an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help Southern Co. build two reactors, helping to invigorate the nuclear power industry after nearly three decades in which no new plants have been built. Carol Browner, Obama's top energy and climate adviser, said she was hopeful about progress on energy and climate legislation that is currently stalled in the US Senate. ""I'm always optimistic, as is the president,"" Browner told Reuters Insider in an interview. ""We're working hard, and we're encouraged by the conversations that are going on. Obviously this is very important legislation and we're going to do everything we can to make it happen,"" she said. Browner noted that Republicans, many of whom oppose the climate bill, would take note of Obama's efforts to reach out on the issue of nuclear energy. ""We also hope that Republicans and others, supporters of nuclear (power), will take note that the administration is prepared to provide leadership on issues that are important to solving our energy future and creating a different energy future,"" she said.",0
"The talks aim to spur bigger commitments to start reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in the global average temperature since pre-industrial times to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), to stave off the worst effects of climate change. ""Delegates from the LDC Group remain concerned about the logistics of getting to Glasgow,"" Sonam Phuntsho Wangdi of Bhutan, chair of the group of the 46 Least Developed Countries, said in a statement. ""Our countries and our people are among the worst affected by climate change – we must not be excluded from talks deciding how the world will deal with this crisis, determining the fate of our lives and livelihoods."" Some 20 LDCs such as Ethiopia, Haiti and Bangladesh are on Britain’s coronavirus ""red list"", which means their delegates will have to quarantine in a hotel for up to 10 days before attending the ""COP 26"" talks, which run from Oct 31 to Nov 12. Britain has said it will pay the quarantine costs of delegates from red list countries, and has cut the time to five days from 10 for those who are vaccinated. It has also said it is distributing COVID-19 vaccines to delegates struggling to get them. On Tuesday, Climate Action Network (CAN), a coalition of more than 1,500 environmental groups, called for the talks to be postponed because of delegates' difficulties in obtaining vaccines. CAN said Britain had been slow to provide the vaccines it has promised and many countries were likely to miss out.",1
" Southeast Asia is one of the world's most vulnerable regions to climate change and could face conflict over failing rice yields, lack of water and high economic costs, a major Asian Development Bank report shows. The region's economies could lose as much as 6.7 percent of combined gross domestic product yearly by 2100, more than twice the global average loss, according to the ADB's report on the economics of climate change in Southeast Asia. ""By the end of this century, the economy-wide cost each year on average could reach 2.2 percent of GDP, if only market impact is considered...(to) 6.7 percent of GDP when catastrophic risks are also taken into account,"" the British-government funded report said. This compared with an estimated global loss of just under 1 percent of GDP in market impact terms, the Manila-based ADB said. The global economic downturn could delay funding for climate change mitigation measures by regional governments. Yet this was the time to offer incentives for green investment schemes in the energy and water sectors, said the study focusing on Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. These schemes could involve the shift to renewable and clean energy options for the power and transport sectors across Southeast Asia, home to nearly 600 million people. In particular, cutting carbon emissions from forest fires and deforestation was crucial since these were major contributors to the region's total emissions, it said. Renewable energy such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal also offered great potential in slashing emissions. VULNERABLE But if nothing was done globally to fight climate change, Southeast Asia could suffer a decline in rice output potential of about 50 percent on average by 2100 against 1990 levels. The yield drop ranged from 34 percent in Indonesia to 75 percent in the Philippines, with the fall forecast to start in 2020 for the four nations. Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change because of the high economic activity along its long coastlines, and its heavy dependence on agriculture, forestry and other natural resources. Unless the pace of climate change was checked, millions of people in the region would be left unable to produce or purchase sufficient food. ""More people will be at risk of hunger and malnutrition, which will cause more deaths. The possibility of local conflicts may increase,"" said the report. Annual mean temperature in the four countries could also rise by an average 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100 from 1990 levels if global emissions keep growing. This would intensify water shortages in the dry season and raise flooding risks during wet periods. The report says an increase in extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and storms, and forest fires arising from climate change would also jeopardize export industries. It said the region, which contributed 12 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions in 2000, had made significant efforts to counter climate change, but most steps were reactive and offered short-term benefits with implementation patchy. Raising public awareness of climate change and its impact, increased funding and enhancing policy coordination, were crucial, it added. Stepping up measures to adapt were also needed. These included scaling up water conservation and management, developing heat-resistant crop varieties, more efficient irrigation systems and enhanced awareness-raising programs to prepare for more forest fires.",3
" Indian and Pakistani officials began their first formal peace talks since the 2008 Mumbai attacks on Monday in a meeting pushed by the decision of their leaders to meet during a World Cup cricket match between the two countries. The two home secretaries, the top civil servants in charge of security issues, met in New Delhi to repair relations between nuclear rivals broken off after the Mumbai attacks when Pakistani militants killed 166 people in a three-day shooting spree. The talks are due to end on Tuesday, but the focus has already turned to Wednesday's World Cup cricket semi-final between the two old rivals after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited Pakistani Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani to the game. Progress in Monday's talks was anyway expected to be small. They are about preparing the groundwork for a ministerial meeting in July that would put issues like Kashmir, terrorism and trade on the negotiating table in what is known as the ""composite dialogue."" The two countries, which have fought three wars since their independence from British rule in 1947, agreed in February to resume formal peace talks. In a goodwill gesture ahead of the cricket match, President Asif Ali Zardari will also free an Indian national, Gopal Das, who has been languishing in a Pakistani prison for 27 years as an alleged spy. Wednesday's match has been heralded as ""cricket diplomacy,"" something of a tradition between the two countries that has at least helped ease tensions in the past. Former Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq visited India in 1987 to watch a one-day match when the two countries' armies were eyeball-to-eyeball on the border. In 2005, Pakistan's then military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, travelled to India to watch a match but the trip effectively turned into a summit and the two leaders agreed to open up the militarised frontier dividing the disputed Kashmir region. ""Going by past experience, however, cricket diplomacy has sadly been about short-lived atmospherics,"" The Times of India said in an editorial. The match has turned the northern city of Chandigarh into a fortress. There will be a ""no fly zone"" around the stadium and commandos will patrol the city. Anti-aircraft guns will be placed near the stadium, the Times of India reported. Touted as ""the mother of all cricket contests,"" the game between the two cricket-mad nations has reportedly seen requests from business tycoons, including India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to allow them to park their private jets in Chandigarh. Tickets sell on the black market for as much as $2,000 (1,250 pounds) in a country where 450 million live on less than $1.25 a day. SCEPTICISM ON ALL SIDES Pakistanis will be sceptical that Singh is simply playing to his domestic audience and trying to distract from a string of corruption scandals that have effectively paralysed the Congress-led government for months. ""If the Indians have invited the prime minister and the president, there is no harm in going there, because this is a gesture,"" said Ejaz Haider, a Pakistani political analyst and contributing editor for Friday Times, ""But this gesture in itself is not going to result in any breakthrough in substantial terms."" Many Pakistanis also see little chance the ruling Congress party and its powerful, ruler-behind-the scenes Sonia Gandhi are really interested in making peace overtures. It is a risky issue for any Indian leader, one that wins few votes and would quickly backfire if there was another attack in India blamed on Pakistan. India, for its part, has always been sceptical about peace talks with civilian leaders in Pakistan, who play second fiddle to a more hawkish military intelligence service and army. TIME FOR A CHANGE But there may be new political winds blowing. The 78-year Singh was born in Pakistan before moving to India after Partition in 1947. Peace with Pakistan would secure his political legacy, threatened by months of corruption scams that have led the opposition to call for his resignation. Pakistan is also facing an increasingly difficult regional environment. India's new economic clout has seen it grow in influence with Pakistan's traditional ally, the United States. New Delhi has also been increasingly involved in aid to Afghanistan, see as Islamabad's backyard. In one sign that India may be taking these talks more seriously, the Times of India reported on Sunday that New Delhi wanted to open channels of communications with the Pakistan army chief and the head of its intelligence service, seen as the real powerbrokers in any talks. Singh's perceived determination may win similar commitment from the other side. ""This kind of reputation that the PM has, in my view it helps,"" said Naresh Chandra, a former Indian ambassador to the United States. ""It creates a climate that you can do business with this prime minister. It encourages the Pakistani side to do so.""",0
" Delta Air Lines said on Tuesday it has added a $3 surcharge each way on fares purchased in the United States for flights between the United States and Europe, a move that would help offset the cost of the EU's new Emissions Trading Scheme. Delta is the first major US airline to raise the price of US-to-Europe flights since the European Union's carbon law kicked in on Sunday. Europe's highest court last month backed the controversial EU law to charge airlines for carbon emissions on flights to and from Europe. A spokesman for Delta, the second-largest US carrier, said the surcharge was added on January 2, but he declined to say whether its purpose was to shift the burden of the EU requirements to its customers. It remains to be seen whether other carriers will match the Delta surcharge. Unmatched surcharges and fare increases can fail if rivals do not launch similar price increases. ""When airlines raise prices they're testing two things: the appetite of their competition and the appetite of consumers,"" said Rick Seaney, chief executive of Farecompare.com, which tracks air fares. ""If either one of these two balk, they typically have to roll back those increases."" Airline experts have said US carriers must add the cost to ticket prices or risk eroding their margins on trans-Atlantic flights. Some industry watchers predict airfares between the United States and Europe could rise $50 to $90 as airlines attempt to pass along the expense. Seaney said he was not aware of other carriers that have matched the Delta surcharge. Antitrust laws prevent US airlines from publicly discussing their future pricing. Germany's Lufthansa, however, told passengers on Monday to brace for higher ticket prices because of the EU scheme to tackle climate change. Under the EU plans, airlines touching down or taking off in the 27-nation European Union and three neighboring nations must account for their CO2 emissions. The United States, China, India and others have attacked the scheme, saying it infringes their sovereignty. They argue that the EU should not act alone. Some have warned of counter-measures. Airlines for America, the US airline industry group that challenged the EU law, said it was reviewing its legal options. The group has estimated that the emission law could cost the U.S. airline industry $3.1 billion from 2012 through 2020. Other industry experts say it will be difficult to gauge the overall impact of the scheme. ""There's not a question that our airlines are doing things to prepare for the obligation,"" said Nancy Young, vice president of environmental affairs for Airlines For America, in an interview on Friday. ""Our airlines have shown by their actions that they are respecting the rule of law,"" Young said. She said carriers have invested money in measuring their carbon emissions on flights to and from Europe. Young declined to speculate on whether carriers were likely to pass the new cost along to passengers immediately. She said some global airlines are considering whether it is feasible to avoid landing in Europe during some of their connecting flights to dodge the EU charge. ""You're seeing airlines are looking into that,"" she said. The US airline industry is struggling to maintain its financial footing after a years-long downturn that has been exacerbated by volatile oil prices. Airline capacity cuts in recent years have enabled them to charge more for tickets, but at least five recent attempts to raise fares have failed since October, according to data from Farecompare.",0
" Chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed leaves for New York on Sept 22 to attend the 62nd United Nations general assembly. Fakhruddin will present a country paper at the general assembly on Sept 27. He will also speak at a climate change conference and highlight the impacts on Bangladesh on Sept 24. Foreign Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury will also accompany the interim government head. ""The chief adviser will present in his country paper the background of assuming the office by the caretaker government and the ongoing reform measures carried by his government,"" Chowdhury told journalists Thursday at a press briefing at the foreign ministry. The foreign adviser said the Fakhruddin would co-chair the afternoon session on climate change with the prime minister of the Netherlands on September 24. On the sideline of the assembly, the chief adviser would hold talks with Italian prime minister Romano Prodi and Afghan president Hamid Karzai on bilateral issues. ""The chief adviser will also join a reception hosted by the US President George W Bush,"" the foreign adviser said, adding that president Bush would not
attend the function. The chief adviser will fly home on Sept 30. ""I will hold talks with foreign ministers of a number of countries on the sideline of the UN general assembly,"" said Chowdhury, who was scheduled to return on Oct 8.",1
"The business observers pointed to several steps by world leaders they said could boost sustainable business and investing efforts to mobilise the vast sums of money needed to wean the world off fossil fuels. These include a pledge by financial firms with a combined $130 trillion in assets to focus on climate change, the creation of a global standards body to scrutinise corporate climate claims, and pledges to cut methane emissions and to save forests. Jefferies managing director Aniket Shah said although many of the steps lacked specific promises, they showed a global consensus forming to tackle climate change that will make it easier to for private investors and governments to put in money and effort. ""There's a certain power of signalling of intentions that can't be dismissed here,"" Shah said. He pointed to the goal set by India's prime minister, Narenda Modi, on Nov 1 for his country to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. Although two decades later than what scientists say is needed to avert catastrophic climate impacts, the pledge was still more than India had offered in the past and could be accelerated with financial help from developed nations, Shah said. Peter Lacy, Accenture’s global sustainability services lead, said that for investors and companies, the most significant step at the conference was the creation on Nov 3 of the International Sustainability Standards Board, meant to create a baseline for companies to describe their climate impact. Lacy called it a seismic moment for business and in line with the hopes of CEOs Accenture surveyed ahead of the conference. The new board, Lacy said, ""will give investors and stakeholders a much better understanding of related risks and opportunities and help guide the allocation of the huge amount of capital needed as the world transitions to net zero,"" he said via email. LACK OF DETAIL Critics say many of the conference's key announcements lack specifics and give companies wiggle room. For instance, banks, insurers and investors pledged to work to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, but each entity has made its own net zero commitments ""with potential overlap across initiatives, institutions and assets,"" according to the group's press statement. Leslie Samuelrich, media of Green Century Capital Management in Boston, which does not invest in fossil fuel stocks, said she worries bigger investment firms signed on so quickly to carbon-reduction pledges advertised at Glasgow because their terms might be too easy to meet. ""The speed with which some have adopted this makes me cautious,"" Samuelrich said. But other finance executives say it is inevitable businesses will move to cut emissions under pressure from customers and to chase profits. Mark Haefele, chief investment officer for UBS Global Wealth Management, said promising areas include renewable energy, transport and batteries. Diplomats now must hash out rules on areas like constructing markets to help businesses price carbon and how much developed nations will help poorer ones. On a call with journalists on Friday, David Waskow, a director of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said he was more optimistic than a week ago that the attendees would strike meaningful agreements. ""I think the beginning of the week actually did lay good groundwork. Not to say everything is all rosy,"" he said.",0
" An Iranian opposition group urged European Union leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday to take its armed wing off the bloc's terrorism list, saying its inclusion was in breach of a European court ruling. The European Court of First Instance last year annulled an EU move to freeze the funds of the People's Mujahideen, the armed wing of France-based National Council of Resistance of Iran which says it renounced military activity in 2001. But the 27 nation-bloc has kept the group on its blacklist, saying the court, Europe's second highest, only annulled an old list and not its most recent version, where the group also appears. ""This makes a mockery of the rule of law,"" Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said in Brussels. ""The resistance of a nation against religious fascism has been unjustly labelled as terrorist for economic interests,"" she said of accusations the European Union did not want to upset the Tehran leadership for fear of damaging major trade ties. ""This is the moment of choice for leaders of Europe, the choice between respecting the rule of law and arbitrary behaviour,"" she told a news conference where the group produced a list of around 50 EU lawmakers it said supported their assertion. The court had annulled the bloc's decision to blacklist the group for failing to give a fair hearing or adequate reasons. An EU official said the bloc has meanwhile sent the group a letter informing it of the reasons behind its inclusion on the list. The EU's terrorism list is not on the agenda of the talks on Thursday and Friday of the bloc's leaders, which are to focus on fighting climate change.",0
" Indian art might be just the solution for investors seeking a safe haven at a turbulent time. Take a vivid landscape by avant-garde artist Francis Newton Souza hanging on a wall in Indian art dealer Ashish Anand's New Delhi gallery. With a price tag of $400,000, the painting might not seem like a bargain but Abnand says it will probably be worth $2 million within the next two years. Art dealers and experts say the Indian art market is still undervalued and there is money to be made for those with the means to pay the six figure prices that works by some of India's leading artists fetch at auctions. ""I think Indian art is a one-way bet in the long term. That's why I will allocate money to it,"" said Philip Hoffman who runs the Fine Art Fund based in London. ""If you look 50 years down the line, what you pay now is peanuts compared to what you will have to pay for the great Indian artists,"" he told Reuters at an Indian art summit in New Delhi in August. The prices of Indian art have gone up considerably but not at the levels of Chinese art, which has seen prices soar due to enormous interest at home and abroad. Dealers believe Indian works have plenty of room to appreciate, especially as South Asian art begins to draw a Western audience. ""The growth potential is huge,"" said Hugo Weihe, Christie's international director of Asian Art. ""The Indian art market is particularly strong within India and that's different from the Chinese contemporary. You have that component plus we are now reaching out to an international component every season."" Often depicting vivid and colourful scenes of Indian life and culture, Indian art has long been popular among wealthy Indians, whose ranks are growing rapidly in a booming economy. Yet until recently Western collectors had not taken much interest in classical and contemporary Indian artists. That is starting to change. Weihe predicts that sales of Indian art at Christie's auctions might reach $30 million this year, compared with $680,000 in 2000. SKYROCKETING VALUATIONS Asia's art scene has blossomed in the past five years driven by the continent's rapid economic growth. Valuations have skyrocketed as Asian art has become an investment for speculators and a symbol of affluence for a growing pool of local collectors. The record for a contemporary Indian art work was set in June when Francis Newton Souza's piece 'Birth' was sold for $1.3 million pounds ($2.3 million). The figure was, nevertheless, significantly lower than the $9.7 million record price for Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi's piece 'Mask Series 1996 No. 6' sold at an auction in Hong Kong in May. Works by famous Indian artists such as Maqbool Fida Husain and Syed Haider Raza currently go under the hammer for anywhere from $200,000 to $1 million. Yet industry players expect prices to shoot up to between $5 million to $10 million in the next few years. Neville Tuli, a manager of a $400 million art fund in India, believes that Indian art will appreciate by between 18 to 25 percent per year in a climate in which art is increasingly seen as a secure investment. ""Financial institutions and their HNIs (high net worth individuals) are recognisrecognizinging the inherent stability in the art object as a capital asset,"" said Neville Tuli, a manager of a $400 million art fund in India. ""Hence given its low correlation to economic circumstances and other related factors, the proportion of art within the alternative asset allocation is increasing significantly,"" he added. HOT MONEY CANVASES ART But as with all investments, there are risks. The Indian market is vastly different from the Western art markets because in India, art is viewed more as a financial investment rather than a collectors item, art fund managers said. ""It has gone up 200 times in five years,"" said Hoffman, of the London-based Fine Art Fund, adding that the Indian market consisted of 70 percent speculators and 30 percent collectors. This trend of rapid buying and selling, makes it difficult to predict long term value. ""Let's say you've got a Gupta,"" Hoffman said, referring to Subodh Gupta, one of India's hot new artists whose pieces sell for between $800,000 to $1 million. ""It's a financial commodity like a stock,"" Hoffman said. ""You need the Bill Gates of this world to say I want a Gupta and I don't give a damn how much it cost. It's going into my collection and it's not for sale,"" he added, saying a growing pool of collectors will give the market stability. Art experts would like to see more people like Kusam Sani, a wealthy fashion consultant based in Delhi, who is one of the few art collectors who keeps the art they buy. ""I have a 40 foot dining room and it's covered with work, but I can't buy anymore because I've got no more space,"" said Sani, who has been collecting paintings since she was a teenager. Greater government investment in art infrastructure and museums will give the market stability in the long term, experts said, although they noted that so far the Indian government has shown little political will to support such projects. There are also bureaucratic hurdles such as permits to export works of art and requirements to register antiques with government bodies that turn acquisitions of Indian art into a headache for dealers and collectors abroad. But despite the market's shortcomings, art dealers, Weihe and Hoffman are bullish on Indian art. ""The Indian market will mature when the real collector base is grown up and put the money is put to one side,"" Hoffman said. ""In the long run, all these artists are going to be global, they just happen to be local at the moment.""",1
"TOKYO, July 01 (Reuters/bdnews24.com)- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Group of Eight rich nations on Tuesday to stick with a three-year old pledge to raise African aid levels to $25 billion a year, after a report the leaders may be about to backtrack. ""I would like to urge and emphasize that leaders of G8 should implement their commitment which was made at the Gleneagles summit meeting,"" Ban said at a news conference in Tokyo, referring to the G8's 2005 summit meeting in Scotland.
""When it comes to climate change ... and the global food crisis, these campaigns should be led by the industrialized countries -- they have the capacity, they have the resources, and I hope the leadership demonstrates their political will,"" he said. Ban's comments come less than a week ahead of the G8 summit in northern Japan on July 7-9.
They follow a report by the Financial Times newspaper on Sunday that said a draft communique for the summit failed to cite a specific aid target to Africa as set at Gleneagles.
At that summit in 2005, G8 nations pledged to raise annual aid levels by $50 billion by 2010, $25 billion of which was for Africa. This was reiterated at last year's summit in Germany.
Experts have expressed concerns about the pledge, saying donor countries may fail to meet their promises, which are not legally binding and are hard to track in actual spending.
African development, as well as the food crisis and climate change, will be on the agenda for next week's G8 summit.
Eight other major economies, including China and India, will also meet on July 9 on the sidelines of the G8 summit to discuss climate change.
Eager to show leadership ahead of the summit, Japan hosted an African development conference in May at which it vowed to double development assistance to Africa over the next five years.
Ban, who will take part in the summit, also called for the G8 nations to reach an agreement on long-term cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases at the meeting.
""I hope that at the Hokkaido summit meeting the leaders will be able to agree on a shared vision, how the future agreement will look and also commit themselves to expand and build on the existing agreement,"" he said.
In Japan, the G8 nations are expected to formalize a goal of halving the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, after agreeing last year in Germany to seriously consider the target.
But doubts persist about whether and how far the leaders will be able to go beyond last year's agreement.
Britain's climate envoy said last week that a breakthrough is unlikely in talks on global warming at the summit.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in June that the G8 nations would not be setting a medium-term target for cutting CO2 emissions by 2020 or 2030, seen as necessary by environmentalists as a way to achieving the long-term goal.",0
"CHICAGO, Tue Dec 16, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Insisting on the need to develop new forms of energy, US President-elect Barack Obama on Monday chose as his energy secretary a Nobel physics laureate who is a major promoter of alternative fuels. Obama named Steven Chu, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics who was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, to head the Energy Department. Chu will work closely with former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner, whom Obama named to a new post that will coordinate White House policy on energy and climate change. ""In the 21st century, we know that the future of our economy and national security is inextricably linked with one challenge: energy,"" Obama told a news conference. ""All of us know the problems that are rooted in our addiction to foreign oil. It constrains our economy, shifts wealth to hostile regimes and leaves us dependent on unstable regions."" ""To control our own destiny, America must develop new forms of energy and new ways of using it. And this is not a challenge for government alone -- it's a challenge for all of us."" Obama also named Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to run the Environmental Protection Agency. He named Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles, to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. To round out his energy and environment team, Obama will name Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar, a former environmental lawyer, as secretary of the interior, transition aides and Democratic sources said. The Department of the Interior leases public lands for oil and gas drilling. Obama said he would officially announce his choice for the Interior department later this week. The president-elect will hold a meeting of his key economic team on Tuesday. Transition officials would give no details but said the meeting would include nominees for all the top financial posts including the Treasury Department, National Economic Council and the Office of Management and Budget. Obama's energy and environmental team will play a major role in his quest to revive the U.S. economy by boosting renewable energy use and creating millions of ""green"" jobs that will ease America's reliance to foreign oil. The president-elect, who takes office on Jan. 20, pointed out that other U.S. presidents over the past three decades had pledged to make America less dependent on foreign energy supplies. 
'THIS TIME WE CANNOT FAIL' ""This time has to be different. This time we cannot fail, nor can we be lulled into complacency simply because the price at the pump has for now gone down from $4 a gallon,"" he said. Obama's choices were applauded by environmentalists who said they showed he was serious about combating global warming and about moving toward more ""green"" jobs. Obama's energy and environment team will also be charged with developing policies to reduce carbon emissions blamed for global warming. He said his nomination of Chu should send a signal his administration will ""value science."" ""We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action,"" Obama added. The Bush administration has had a rocky relationship with the scientific community and was at times accused by critics of ignoring scientific evidence in its efforts to make political points on issues such as global warming. Obama, who has begun to lay out plans for a massive recovery plan to stimulate the economy and create about 2.5 million jobs, said many of them should be ""green"" jobs. ""We can create millions of jobs, starting with a 21st century economic recovery plan that puts Americans to work building wind farms, solar panels, and fuel-efficient cars."" Obama has set a goal of making public buildings more efficient, modernizing the electricity grid and reducing greenhouse gas emissions while preserving national resources. He refused to answer directly a reporter's question on whether he would reinstate the presidential ban on offshore drilling, which President George W. Bush recently revoked. Also on Monday, Obama had a 5 1/2 hour meeting with his national security team, discussing a range of international challenges for the Obama administration, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama will hold another news conference on Tuesday to announce he has chosen Chicago superintendent of schools Arne Duncan to be his nominee for secretary of education, a senior Democrat said on Monday. Duncan has seven years experience as chief executive of Chicago's public school system, the third largest in the country, and has earned a reputation for addressing issues such as how to raise teacher quality and transform weak schools. Tuesday's news conference will be held at 11:45 a.m. EST (1645 GMT) at an elementary school he and Duncan visited together in October 2005.",0
"Dzekyid's well-built house in Jangdam village has a hall filled with Buddhist scriptures and Thangka paintings, and a row of prayer wheels for his religious 76-year-old father, Tenzin, to spin twice a day. As a member of China's ruling Communist Party, Dzekyid is an atheist. ""This house is possible because of good government policies. My heart is wholly with the party, not even one bit with religion,"" said Dzekyid, whose family was showcased to a group of reporters on a government-organised tour of Tibet, an area where access to foreign journalists is normally barred. Government officials in both Beijing and Tibet vetted the reporters from media organisations who were invited to join the trip. On the closely supervised tour, there was little opportunity to interact with ordinary Tibetans without government officials in attendance. China is pushing to transform the mindsets and values of Tibetans to bring them into the country's modern mainstream, which includes urging the region's devout Buddhists to focus less on religion and more on material prosperity. ""Tibet has some bad old habits, mainly due to the negative influence of religion that emphasises the afterlife and weakens the urge to pursue happiness in the current life,"" said Che Dhala, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region. On the trip to Tibet, officials showcased poverty-relief programmes that include relocation of families to better homes, schooling, vocational training, and business development efforts such as a climate-controlled mushroom farm. The efforts are part of China's push to eradicate rural poverty nationwide by the end of this year. Officials also described efforts to ""manage the minds"" of Tibetans, who for centuries lived in a deeply religious society with a belief in reincarnation and a devotion to their spiritual leader. The head of Caiqutang village, Dekyi Paldron, described how poor households who receive free new government housing ""should not"" set up a family room for worshipping Buddha, a common feature in traditional Tibetan houses, because they ""shouldn't be two-faced"" after benefiting from the atheist Communist Party. ""If space is taken up by the Buddha room, the boy and girl may have to squeeze into one bedroom - this is not ideal for the healthy development of either child,"" another official told the visiting journalists. China seized Tibet after troops entered the region in 1950, in what Beijing calls a ""peaceful liberation."" In 1959, spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fled China after a failed uprising, and the long-impoverished region has been one of the most politically sensitive and restricted parts of China. PRAY LESS, WORK MORE Recipients of poverty relief are told to curb their spending on religion and to instead invest in increasing their earning power and in their children. At a vocational school in Nyingchi, a signboard stated that the school uses ideological and political education to fight against ""separatism"", denounce the Dalai Lama and to prevent religion from making people ""passive"". 
 
 People buy food at a street stall in a market alley in the old city of Lhasa, during a government-organised tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, Oct 14, 2020. REUTERS 

""Ten years ago, villagers competed among themselves to see who donates more to temples. Now they compete to see whose son or daughter has a stable government job, or who owns a car,"" Karma Tenpa, deputy propaganda minister for the Tibet Autonomous Region, told Reuters.  People buy food at a street stall in a market alley in the old city of Lhasa, during a government-organised tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, Oct 14, 2020. REUTERS  Pictures of the Dalai Lama, once commonly displayed in Tibetans' houses, are banned, but framed posters of President Xi Jinping were visible inside all the homes the journalists were shown. Propaganda slogans urging allegiance to China and the Communist Party are conspicuous along roadsides and billboards in Tibet. Critics say China's efforts linking poverty eradication to an embrace of a secular life and the Communist Party infringe on human rights. ""The Chinese government's efforts to force Tibetans to change their way of life to the one the government approves is a violation of their fundamental human rights, including their freedoms of thought and religion,"" Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch told Reuters. A recent Reuters report based on official documents described how growing numbers of rural Tibetans were being pushed into recently built training centres, where they are trained to be factory workers in a programme that some critics have called coercive - a characterisation China rejects. ""At first we have to go around explaining to the nomads and herders why they should go for skills training to earn higher wages. Now that they see the benefit of doing so, they come to us automatically,"" Lin Bei, a poverty alleviation official, told Reuters. FAME OR SHAME Families who practise good hygiene or have other desirable attributes receive credits for goods such as washing powder or towels, Lin said. The best are listed as ""Five Star Families"" on the village notice board. Those deemed to show undesirable behaviour are named and shamed. ""If someone has been lazy, drunk alcohol, hung out at the teahouse or played games instead of taking care of his family, we will call him out at the village meeting,"" said Lin, who is a member of China's ethnic Han majority. Dzekyid, who like many Tibetans uses only one name, encourages his neighbours to support the party and its programmes. His house was built with a government grant of nearly $20,000. ""Praying to the gods and Buddha can't get me this,"" he told Reuters.",2
" President George W Bush prepared for an Asia-Pacific summit in Australia, saying on Friday the United States would consider a peace treaty with North Korea if it gave up nuclear arms. Washington has been accused of ignoring Asia as it focuses on Iraq, but on the eve of this weekend's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Bush weighed into major regional issues. ""We must press the regime in Burma (Myanmar) to stop arresting, harassing, and assaulting pro-democracy activists for organising or participating in peaceful demonstrations,"" Bush said in a speech to Asia-Pacific business executives in Sydney. The comments come a day after hundreds of Buddhist monks held a group of government officials for several hours and torched their cars in anger against the military that rules impoverished Myanmar, formerly called Burma. Bush also said China should allow more freedoms ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games and later after meeting South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun offered the possibility of a treaty with Pyongyang. ""We're looking forward to the day when we can end the Korean War. That will happen when Kim Jong-il verifiably dismantles his weapons programme,"" said Bush. ""If you could be a little clearer..."" Roh urged the president. Bush then said more directly that he was referring to a formal peace agreement. Fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an inconclusive truce. Bush's comments follow several weeks of apparent progress in ending a crisis over the weapons programme of a country he had once bracketed with pre-war Iraq and Iran in an ""axis of evil"". A Foreign Ministry spokesman for China, which fought along side the North in the Korean War and was a party to the original ceasefire, said Roh had raised the issue in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao earlier in the day and Beijing had a ""positive attitude"" toward the prospect of a truce. Next week, nuclear experts from the United States, China and Russia will visit North Korea to conduct a survey of nuclear facilities to be disabled, U.S. envoy Chris Hill said on Friday. The inspections ""would mark another important step toward denuclearization of the Korean peninsula"", said Hill in Sydney. Myanmar's crackdown on protests against huge fuel price rises also drew expressions of dismay from other Asia-Pacific nations. China, Myanmar's closest ally which is usually reticent when it comes to the affairs of others, also sounded frustrated with its southeast Asian neighbour. ""We hope to see reconciliation and improvement in the situation in Burma,"" said a foreign ministry spokesman. But while Bush was reinforcing his Asian credentials, Russian President Vladimir Putin was seeking to forge new links. ""Closer ties with APEC naturally complements our own plans of economic development of Siberia and the Far East,"" Putin said. Putin signed a major deal on Friday to buy Australian uranium to fuel civilian nuclear plants -- a day after snaring a $1 billion arms sale deal with Indonesia. Australia holds 40 percent of the world's reserves, but only agreed to sell uranium to Moscow after guarantees it would not be resold to Iran or Syria. Russia has close ties with both states. Putin is vying with the United States and China for a leading role in the region and wants Russia to host 2012 APEC summit. Putin and Bush met in Sydney but did not delve deeply into any sensitive subjects, instead the men reminisced about fishing. Bush on Friday offered to host a meeting of Southeast Asian leaders at his Texas ranch, as he sought to counter perceptions that he was not paying enough attention to the region. He also said he planned to name an ambassador to the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN. On the issue of trade, Bush said he was ready to show flexibility to jump-start the moribund Doha round of world trade talks, which he called a ""once-in-a-generation"" opportunity. But he said intransigence by just a handful of countries could bring negotiations to a standstill. Host Australia has placed climate change at the top of the APEC leaders' agenda and Bush says he will support a strong statement on global warming. But there is a split in APEC over climate change, with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer conceding there were ""very difficult negotiations"" underway. ""If we can get a good declaration out of this, that will be a very great achievement. But I make no predictions about how those negotiations will go,"" Downer told reporters.",0
"BONN, Germany, 8 April (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Climate negotiators meet in Bonn on Friday for the first time since the fractious Copenhagen summit but with scant hopes of patching together a new legally binding UN deal in 2010. Delegates from 170 nations gathered on Thursday for the April 9-11 meeting that will seek to rebuild trust after the December summit disappointed many by failing to agree a binding UN deal at the climax of two years of talks. Bonn will decide a programme for meetings in 2010 and air ideas about the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, backed by more than 110 nations including major emitters China, the United States, Russia and India but opposed by some developing states. The Accord seeks to limit world temperature rises to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), but without saying how. ""We need to reassess the situation after Copenhagen,"" said Bruno Sekoli of Lesotho, who speaks on behalf of the least developed nations who want far tougher cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit temperature rises to less than 1.5 C. Many nations favour progress on practical steps in 2010, such as aid to developing nations to combat climate change that is meant to total about $10 billion a year from 2010-12 under the Copenhagen Accord, rising to $100 billion (65.7 billion pounds) a year from 2020. Delegates said perhaps two extra sessions of talks were likely to be added before the next annual ministerial talks in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10. That would mean a less hectic pace than last year's run-up to Copenhagen. ""There has been a constructive attitude"" in informal preparatory talks in Tokyo and Mexico, said Harald Dovland, a Norwegian official who is the vice-chair of UN talks on a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol. COPENHAGEN But it is unclear what will happen to the Copenhagen Accord. The United States is among the strongest backers of the Copenhagen Accord, but many developing nations do not want it to supplant the 1992 Climate Convention which they reckon stresses that the rich have to lead the way. ""I don't believe that the Copenhagen Accord will become the new legal framework,"" Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told reporters in a briefing about Bonn last week. He also doubted a legally binding deal would be reached in 2010, saying he hoped Cancun would agree the basic architecture ""so that a year later, you can decide or not decide to turn that into a treaty."" The 2011 meeting is in South Africa. Wendel Trio, of environmental group Greenpeace, said many nations had to toughen their targets for curbing greenhouse gas emissions if they wanted to stay below a 2 degrees Celsius rise. ""The pledges so far will probably take us to somewhere between 3.5 and 4 degrees Celsius,"" he said. That would spur dangerous changes such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, more extinctions and rising sea levels. In other signs of a revival of talks, the United States will host a meeting of major economies in Washington on April 18-19, top US climate negotiator Todd Stern said on Wednesday. He said he did not know if a legal UN treaty could be reached in 2010. One hurdle to a pact is that US legislation to cap emissions is stalled in the US Senate.",0
"“I think we will see a significant pivot in the tourism industry in 2021,” said Gregory Miller, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Responsible Travel, noting that the focus is “not on who is benefiting the travel business, but who’s benefiting the community.” The following are some of the many sustainable initiatives that have been started during the pandemic, awaiting the return of travelers. — A marine heritage site From Dana Point, California, whale-watching operations take visitors on boat trips to see gray whales, blue whales and, on occasion, racing megapods of dolphins. They also pick up discarded, deflated balloons — which might be mistaken for food by sea creatures. “We tell people, don’t celebrate with balloons, because this is where they end up,” said Donna Kalez, the co-president of Dana Wharf Sportfishing & Whale Watching, a recreational guide service. She and Gisele Anderson, a co-president of another whale-watching operation, Captain Dave’s Dolphin & Whale Watching Safari, wanted a way to signal to the world that their region is not just a great place to see whales, but to learn about and protect them. They found it in the Whale Heritage Site programme from the nonprofit conservation association World Cetacean Alliance to which they applied. In late January, Dana Point received the designation a Whale Heritage Site, the first in the United States. The Whale Heritage Site designation is meant to identify to travelers not only whale-rich areas, but those that are engaged in conservation, education and cultural celebrations of whales. An initial pair of sites, The Bluff, South Africa, and Hervey Bay, Australia, were designated in 2019. In addition to Dana Point, a region off Tenerife, Spain, was also named a Whale Heritage Site this year. “It’s a new program but we think it could be what National Parks are to the US,” said Ben Williamson, the programs director for World Animal Protection, US, a global animal welfare nonprofit which is a partner on the heritage site project. “We think rolling out these landmarks for sustainable and responsible tourism gives tourists and the travel industry a marker to show how the wildlife experience should be done.” World Animal Protection promotes viewing animals in the wild rather than in captivity, such as at SeaWorld San Diego, about an hour south of Dana Point. Seven more candidate sites globally are currently under review for certification. A deep coastal canyon below Dana Point draws whales and dolphins close to shore, and the town is home to a whale festival that has been running for 50 years. Its sustainable whale-watching operations will be audited every three years to maintain heritage site status. “This isn’t a designation for life. You need to work to keep it,” Anderson said of plans for future beach cleanups and citizen science initiatives and continuing work to instruct recreational boaters on keeping safe distances from whales. — Colorado electrifies its byways A key component of Colorado Gov Jared Polis’ climate action plan — which calls for the state to obtain 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2040 — is electrifying transportation. More than 30 fast-charging stations for electric vehicles are planned or available on Colorado’s interstates and highways, or highly trafficked “corridors.” Greatly expanding the range of electric cars, charging facilities about 50 miles apart are coming in June to six of the state’s 26 Scenic & Historic Byways, which traverse rural areas and are popular with road trippers. By encouraging drivers to spend time in towns with charging stations while their car is being replenished, the initiative combines economic development and sustainable transportation. Andrew Grossmann, the director of Destination Development for the Colorado Tourism Office, calls the first electrified byways an “initial skeletal installation,” with capacities for a minimum of two cars at each station. While many newer model electric vehicles can go more than 200 miles on a charge, “having them in place more closely helps reduce range anxiety,” he said. To use the new system, travelers would have to arrive by electric vehicle, as few are available from rental car companies. However, the Dollar and Thrifty rental car franchises at the Eagle County Regional Airport near Vail have agreed with the state to add 10 electric vehicles before the end of the year. And Vail has 28 public charging ports and nearly 20 stations at hotels, including Sonnenalp Vail. For local drivers, electrifying remote byways is a passport to travel. “We want to go not just to Vail, but Clear Creek, South Park and places that are less discovered by tourists because we’re the locals, so that’s a game changer for us,” said Don Dulchinos, 64, a technology consultant based in Boulder, who owns a 2012 Chevy Volt and runs a Facebook page for electric vehicle owners in the state. — Biking adventures that start in the city Since 1976, when it organised a cross-country bike ride in celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, the nonprofit Adventure Cycling Association has specialized in mapping long-distance cycling routes across the United States. But this year, the organisation, which encourages bicycle transportation, aims to take travel-by-bike to urban areas in an effort to bridge environmental and social sustainability. Its new Short-Trips Initiative, which will kick off in June, will create maps and suggested itineraries for trips from one to three nights from eight cities — Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boston; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; San Francisco; Seattle; and Washington, DC — with plans for 30 cities by 2023. “We wanted to focus on letting people know they can have a great adventure even if they’re going for one night,” said Eva Dunn-Froebig, the project director of the initiative. A major programme focus is to diversify the cycling scene, which the association describes as predominantly male and white. In addition to reaching urbanites, the initiative includes recruiting ambassadors from each city, especially among Black, Indigenous and other people of colour to lead occasional short trips and share their bike camping expertise. “I think the ACA is trying to catch up with the social environment,” said Jess Kim, 30, a transportation engineer in Seattle and avid bike camper who is Asian American and plans to apply to become an ambassador for the initiative. She calls it a “step in the right direction” in offering flexible rides to those with constrained schedules, targeting racially diverse communities and partnering with organizers like herself who are working on making cycling more inclusive. As a practical matter, the ACA says anyone can bike camp, which might include having a family member drive a support vehicle with camping gear or fashioning bike carriers from kitty litter containers. “The best bike for your first tour is the bike you already have,” said Dan Meyer, the deputy editor of the association’s Adventure Cyclist Magazine. — Saving pangolins The only fully scale-covered mammal, pangolins curl up in an armoured ball when threatened. It’s those scales, used in traditional Asian medicine practices, that largely make them the quarry of poachers. According to the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, more than 1 million of the small, ant-eating animals have been illegally traded in the last 10 years. Eight species of pangolins, native to Asia and Africa, range from vulnerable to critically endangered. “What we’re looking at here is yet another man-made extinction. And because of the silent and elusive nature of the pangolin, it could be a very silent extinction,” said Les Carlisle, the director of conservation at andBeyond, which runs safari camps and game preserves in Africa, and has started a program to rehabilitate pangolins rescued from illegal trading. The goal is to establish a breeding programme. Last year, a captive pangolin was recovered by authorities, rehabilitated at the Johannesburg Wildlife Veterinary Hospital and eventually relocated to the 70,560-acre andBeyond Phinda Private Game Reserve, a private preserve and safari camp, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where it gave birth to a pup, the first in the area for an estimated 40 years. While the preserve is heavily guarded and the pangolin rehabilitation program is ongoing, its managers won’t say how many pangolins are living on the property for fear of drawing the attention of poachers. Guests at one of the Phinda lodges, which have reopened, can join a researcher from the conservation team during a general health check of a pangolin. But don’t expect to see one of the shy, nocturnal creatures on a game drive. “Rangers who have worked on reserves with pangolins have gone years without seeing one,” Carlisle said. — Carbon capture for the people Travel has a chronic carbon problem. The emissions associated with travel, by car, ship or by air, make sustainable travel a stumbling block right from departure. Carbon offsets have long been a balancing alternative, though most experts agree offsetting isn’t enough to slow or reverse climate change. Tomorrow’s Air, a new climate action group incubated by the Adventure Travel Trade Association, is taking a different tack, both technologically and socially. It champions carbon removal and storage, as done by the Swiss company Climateworks — an expensive process that filters carbon dioxide from the air, sometimes injecting it underground in basalt rock, where it mineralises over time. While the process seems sound, “the question is, is it scalable?” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied carbon capture for more than 30 years, noting the high cost of running the technology relative to the amount of carbon removed. “It’s a lot cheaper to not emit than to try to capture it later.” Though the emerging technology is indeed costly — one Peruvian tour operator estimated that mitigating a flight between London and Lima with carbon capture technology would cost $5,040 — Tomorrow’s Air aims to excite people about the future of carbon removal, invest in it and create a community of travelers and travel companies around it that will eventually be large enough to sway companies and governments to engage. “We’re providing ways for travellers and travel companies to support the scale-up of carbon removal technology,” said Christina Beckmann, the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Air. “We thought, what if we got travel, which is 10% of global GDP, or some portion of it, united around carbon removal with permanent storage? We could really do something.” Tomorrow’s Air is pursuing that goal by planning online Airbnb Experiences tours of a carbon capture plant. And it has partnered with artists who focus on the climate, showcasing their work on its website. It also sells subscriptions starting at $30, of which 80% is invested in a carbon removal company; 20% funds further educational efforts. The group is holding its first convention (virtual, of course) Friday, bringing together what it calls “climate clever travelers and brands” to talk not just about carbon capture, but where to go and how to be a more sustainable traveler, a step in harnessing consumer demand to climate change action. “It’s practical, it’s affordable and it’s a way to be a part of what will hopefully be a growing traveler’s collective where by eventual size maybe we can take some things to scale,” said Ann Becker, 68, a business and travel consultant living in Chicago and a member of Tomorrow’s Air. c.2021 The New York Times Company",2
"Shehabuddin Kislu from New York New York, Sep 26 (bdnews24.com)—Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), has highly appreciated prime minister Sheikh Hasina's leadership during the global economic downturn. Ihsanoglu, on Friday, also greeted Bangladesh's standpoint in the international forum of climate change and environmental movement. Hasina met with him at a reception hosted by the OIC chief, said her press secretary Abul Kalam Azad to bdnews24.com. ""Nothing can be accomplished by a single country,"" she said in the meeting and sought assistance from the OIC. Ihsanoglu assured her of providing assistance. Earlier, Hasina met with the Commonwealth secretary general Kamalesh Sharma and discussed matters that concern Bangladesh, Azad added. Hasina will give her speech in the general assembly in Bangla later on Saturday.",1
"But square off a Nobel laureate and a former US Treasury chief against a firebrand professor from a state university in New York, and an otherwise obscure debate over “modern monetary theory,” or MMT, becomes a centre ring battle over how the Democratic Party should shape economic policy ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Over the past three weeks, New York Times columnist and Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman, along with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, have used social media, television appearances and news columns to rebut the ideas of Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kelton, who advised democratic socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a staunch advocate of MMT, which promotes the idea that government spending, and deficits as needed, should be used to meet the full employment and inflation mandates currently tasked to the US Federal Reserve. The intense back-and-forth exchanges have ranged from wonky money and savings demand charts to flat-out insults, with Krugman calling Shelton’s thinking “a mess” and Summers panning MMT as “the voodoo economics of our time” in a Washington Post column. Kelton responded to Summers’ jibe with a Twitter video clip from the US TV sitcom “Happy Days” famous “jumping the shark” episode in 1977, which has come to connote the moment when an established phenomenon crosses into absurdity or irrelevance. “This isn’t a fight I intend to lose,” she said on Twitter on Tuesday, shortly before Summers appeared on CNBC to say, in reference to Kelton’s theories, that “one thing that every American ought to support are the laws of arithmetic.” The war of words could be dismissed as social media fun and games, except it represents a fundamental debate, gaining intensity ahead of the Democratic presidential nominating contests, over how to finance a “Medicare for All” healthcare restructuring, a “Green New Deal” environmental program, and other initiatives. Those sweeping ideas are now at the centre of several of the emergent 2020 campaigns. They have already become a talking point for Republican President Donald Trump, who has said it shows the Democratic Party has embraced “socialism.” With $22 trillion in outstanding US government debt and chronic annual deficits driven by entitlement and other legal commitments like interest payments, economists across the political spectrum and at the Fed argue the country is already on an unsustainable fiscal path and needs to tread carefully. To support those and other ideas being debated by the Democratic presidential contenders, Kelton’s approach would involve a full-on reengineering of how the United States uses debt and deficits, and how its central bank works. That would likely be a non-starter in more normal times. But a decade after the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession, even the most mainstream of thinkers, including Summers and influential figures like the International Monetary Fund’s former chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, are rethinking how governments should manage their fiscal affairs. The general notion: In an era when trillions of dollars of central bank purchases of bonds, also known as quantitative easing, and massive cuts in US taxes have failed to spark either inflation or significantly higher interest rates, it is probably safe to borrow much more, and invest it toward productive public projects. Jason Furman, who was chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers for most of former President Barack Obama’s second term, said on Tuesday the Obama administration, even as it crafted ambitious programs, was sensitive to how extra spending effected the ratio of total government debt to gross domestic product, and assumed it was good to keep that ratio stable or declining. Today, “I have a lot of people pushing me, why? Why does it need to be 80 (percent) as opposed to 120, or 40? What’s the evidence?” Furman, now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington. “I have just lost my ability to have any economic conviction around that as an anchor. Definitely it should not go to infinity.” Short of that, Furman, Blanchard and others say the United States should not shy away from spending on projects that offer benefits for the cost involved. Blanchard, in particular, said running higher deficits to save the planet was a “good idea.” They still see a limit out there somewhere, but as long as the US economy grows faster than the interest rate paid on government debt, it’s likely safe to keep borrowing. The current ratio of US publicly-held debt to GDP is around 76 percent. Kelton takes a more expansive view of what the government can and should do, even in the face of possible blowback from bond and currency traders. “‘Bond markets and foreign exchange markets won’t let us’ is a pretty terrible way to build a case against a political and economic program to save the planet,” she tweeted. She has not yet aligned herself with a 2020 presidential candidate publicly, but some of her ideas, such as a guaranteed government-funded job for anyone who wants to work, have found a home among Democratic contenders like US Senator Kamala Harris of California. And Kelton has been intent in her response to the recent attention, matching Krugman and others tweet by tweet in maintaining that the US government’s monopoly over dollar issuance - the printing press - could be used to set whatever level of demand is needed to maintain full employment and finance climate change and other programs. It’s an idea Fed Chairman Jerome Powell dismissed in a congressional hearing last week, and which Summers and others say has backfired in other countries through higher inflation or a currency crash. But it’s gained enough traction that opponents have felt compelled to respond. “There is no left and right here. There is only magical thinking with regular folks paying the price when the spell breaks,” Betsey Stevenson, who was on the staff of the CEA during the Obama administration, said of MMT on Twitter. “MMT didn’t deregulate the banks. MMT didn’t bail out Wall St and let millions lose their homes. MMT didn’t push a too-small stimulus over price tag fears,” Kelton responded.",0
" A reported confidential Iranian technical document describing Tehran's efforts to design an atomic bomb trigger was forged by Washington, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a US news program on Monday. Ahmadinejad was asked by ABC News about a Times of London report last week on what it called a confidential Iranian technical document describing a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the part of a nuclear warhead that sets off an explosion. ""They are all fabricated bunch of papers continuously being forged and disseminated by the American government,"" he told the US network in an interview in Copenhagen, Denmark, after he attended the United Nations conference on climate change. Reports that Iran is working on a bomb trigger are ""fundamentally not true,"" said Ahmadinejad. The Times of London published on December 14 what it said was the Farsi-language document, along with an English translation, entitled, ""Outlook for Special Neutron-Related Activities Over the Next Four Years"". The document describes steps to develop and test parts for a neutron initiator, a device that floods the core of highly enriched uranium with subatomic particles to touch off the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion. Last week Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast called the report ""baseless ... not worthy of attention, intended to put political and psychological pressure on Iran."" Iran, the world's No. 5 crude oil exporter, says its uranium enrichment program is aimed at generating electricity so that it can export more gas and oil. The West believes Iran wants bombs from enrichment because of its record of nuclear secrecy.",0
"BEIJING Oct 22, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A top Chinese official and senior US politicians warned on Thursday that the world must deal with climate change urgently, but said if the two top emitting nations work more closely together they could spur rapid improvements. Vice Premier Li Keqiang, widely touted as the country's prime minister in-waiting, said China was keen to smooth the path to a new global deal on warming and willing to step up consultation ahead of a major summit to be held in Copenhagen in December. ""We should be aware of the severity and urgency of coping with climate change, and we should also seize this precious development opportunity,"" Li told a summit of academics, businessmen and officials from the two countries. Mutual distrust has sometimes hobbled discussions between the two nations about curbing emissions, although there has been plenty of investment and trade in green technology. Beijing says it is still a developing nation and should not be asked to make promises that will hinder its efforts to lift it out of poverty, while many in Washington are wary of making commitments they fear could give China an economic edge. But Li said that the US and China were well positioned to work together on climate change, reinforcing a message President Hu Jintao's gave his US counterpart Barack Obama on Wednesday. ""China and the US have different national situations and we are at different development stages, but we face similar challenges in terms of responding to climate change,"" he added. Hu said closer cooperation on fighting climate change could help improve overall ties between the two, and added that he was optimistic Copenhagen would be successful, even though the latest round of negotiations has run into trouble. Officials have touted climate change as an area where both sides have much to gain from working together, and much to lose if they cannot reach a deal to limit greenhouse gas production. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Beijing meeting that the countries, which often face friction over issues including trade and human rights issues, should take advantage of their combined economic might to push for change. ""As the world's two largest emitters of carbon, the United States and China have a responsibility to lead the world in developing and adopting clean technologies, and as two of the world's largest economies our nations have the power to build a thriving global marketplace for these technologies. ""As always, we are more likely to succeed when we work together,"" she said in a video address. White House Science Adviser John Holdren said that though Obama was facing bruising battles over other major policy issues like health care reform, climate change was still a top priority. ""The President's focus and his administration's efforts on completing energy climate legislation as rapidly as possible have not faded in the slightest,"" Holdren said in a video address. China on Wednesday also signed a deal with India, which it said would improve ties between two developing nations and boost the chances of success in Copenhagen. ""The agreement will certainly benefit international efforts to fight climate change, and will help ensure we reach a positive result in the Copenhagen negotiations,"" Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told a regular news briefing.",1
"The WEF had in December postponed the event for the business and
political elite a month before it was due to take place, citing the
difficulties of holding such an in-person conference amid the spread of the
Omicron coronavirus variant. ""After all the virtual meetings taking place in the last two
years, leaders from politics, business and civil society have to convene
finally in person again,"" WEF founder and Chairman Klaus Schwab said in a
statement. ""We need to establish the atmosphere of trust that is truly
needed to accelerate collaborative action and to address the multiple
challenges we face."" Topics on the agenda will include the pandemic recovery, tackling
climate change, building a better future for work, accelerating stakeholder
capitalism, and harnessing the technologies of the fourth industrial
revolution, it said. The WEF will coordinate closely with the Swiss government on the
public health situation, it said, adding the meeting would take place as long
as conditions were in place to guarantee the health and safety of participants
and the host community.",0
" Climate change will hurt Indonesia's orangutan population, already under threat from the rapid rate of deforestation, by reducing their food stock, a leading conservation group said on Wednesday. Dubbed as the last of Asia's great apes, orangutans once ranged the region but a recent UN environment programme estimate said only between 45,000 and 69,000 orangutans remained in Borneo and 7,300 in Sumatra. The WWF said climate change would add to the pressure already caused by human-induced activities such as rampant illegal logging and massive conversion of forests into plantations. ""A longer dry season will reduce the abundance of fruits and will negatively impact orangutan populations because females are more likely to conceive during periods when food resources are not limited,"" the WWF report said. ""Climate-change induced fire will also negatively impact orangutan populations by fragmenting their habitat and reducing the number of fruit bearing trees, which can take many years to mature and fruit."" Environmentalists say rampant illegal logging, lethal annual forest fires and the massive conversion of forests into plantations for palm oil and pulp wood have helped place orangutans on the world's list of endangered species. ""We have seen an example in East Kalimantan, where there was once an abundance of fruits at the beginning of the year followed by a long period of massive shortage,"" WWF conservationist Chairul Saleh told Reuters at the launch of the report. ""This affected migration patterns and reproduction,"" he said, ""It has hurt the population of orangutans there."" A United Nations report in 2002, which raised alarm about the plight of the apes, had projected that most of the habitat suitable for orangutans would be lost by 2032. In February, UNEP had put the date at 2022. Saleh warned that a combination of rising temperature and deforestation would drive thousands of orangutans out of the forests into villages and plantations to look for food. ""It's happening. Already orangutans are invading plantations to eat palm oil seedlings and get killed for it,"" Saleh said. ""But what should they do? Their living space is shrinking and there is simply no food.""",0
" Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left Dhaka Tuesday night for the Swedish capital Stockholm to participate in the 'European Development Days 2009' from Oct 22 to 24. ""Global climate changes are affecting Bangladesh. I will speak of how Bangladesh can be saved from these adverse effects at the European programme,"" Hasina said of her trip just before her departure, during a visit to the Hajj camp. The annual programme, hosted by the European Commission and EU presidency, aims to make the EU members' development aid and activities more effective. This year's European Development Days is expected to bring together some 4,000 people and 1,500 organisations from the development community. Delegates from 125 countries will be represented, including heads of state, leading world figures and Nobel prize winners among them. The three-day program will address issues of citizenship, responses to the global economic downturn, democracy and its relation to development and climate change. Hasina will visit Qatar on her way home. She is to reach Doha on Oct 26 and meet with Qatar's Ameer on that day. She will fly home the next day. The prime minister left the country on a regular Qatar Airways flight at 9:45pm. Finance minister AMA Muhith, foreign minister Dipu Moni, agriculture minister Matia Choudhury saw her off at the airport.",1
"Speaking at a
pre-election town hall event on RTL television on Sunday, Merkel called on
German carmakers, all of which have been caught using workarounds to cheat
nitrogen emissions tests, to work to re-establish public trust in diesel. ""We need diesel if
we are to achieve our climate protection goals,"" she said. Diesel cars emit less
of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide but emit more of the nitrogen dioxide that
can cause breathing problems in high concentrations. She told one car owner
that the more modest compensation received by German car owners compared with
their US counterparts was the result of very different legal systems in the two
countries. Nonetheless, Germany's
carmakers needed to compensate owners whose cars were less valuable as a result
of the scandal as best as possible, she said, otherwise ""the German car
industry, which is admired the world over, could suffer substantial harm"". The future of the auto
sector, Germany's biggest exporter and provider of 800,000 jobs, has become a
hot election issue as politicians blame executives and each other for the
sector's battered reputation after Volkswagen's admission almost two years ago
that it had cheated US emissions tests.",0
" President Barack Obama pledged to pursue greater U.S. engagement in Asia, pragmatic cooperation with China and a push for deeper trade ties with the region in a major speech in the Japanese capital on Saturday. Tokyo is the first stop in Obama's nine-day Asian tour, which also takes him to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific economic summit, to China for talks likely to feature climate change and trade imbalances, and to South Korea, where North Korea's nuclear ambitions will be in focus. Obama, on his first trip to Asia since becoming leader, reaffirmed Washington's alliance with Japan, strained of late by a row over a U.S. military base and questions about the future of the relationship as both countries adapt to a rising China. ""But while our commitment to this region begins in Japan, it does not end here,"" Obama, who met new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama for a summit on Friday, said in his prepared speech. ""So I want every American to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct affect on our lives at home,"" Obama told an audience of about 1,500 people at Tokyo's Suntory Hall. ""This is where we engage in much of our commerce and buy many of our goods. And this is where we can export more of our own products and create jobs back home in the process."" Obama, who will be spending three of his nine days in Asia in China, said Washington would approach the rising regional power ""with a focus on our interests."" ""And it is precisely for this reason that it is important to pursue pragmatic cooperation with China on issues of mutual concern -- because no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century alone, and the United States and China will both be better off when we are able to meet them together."" APPEAL TO NORTH KOREA Obama also urged an unpredictable North Korea to return to stalled multilateral talks on its nuclear programme. ""We will not be cowed by threats, and we will continue to send a clear message through our actions, and not just our words: North Korea's refusal to meet its international obligations will lead only to less security, not more,"" he said. Fresh government figures on the U.S. trade deficit could add urgency to Obama's efforts to seek greater export opportunities in China and other Asian countries. America's trade gap ballooned in September by 18.2 percent to $36.5 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures released in Washington on Friday. It was the largest monthly increase in more than 10 years and was driven both by higher oil prices and a surge in imports from China. The import growth may reinforce U.S. concerns that China's currency is undervalued against the dollar, which U.S. manufacturers say gives Chinese companies an unfair trade advantage. Obama also reiterated his call for balanced global and regional growth. ""First, we must strengthen our economic recovery, and pursue growth that is both balanced and sustained,"" he said. ""Now that we are on the brink of economic recovery, we must also ensure that it can be sustained. We simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led us into a global recession. We cannot follow the same policies that led to such imbalanced growth.""",0
"Fuelled by searing temperatures and high winds, more than 200 fires are now burning across the southeastern states of New South Wales and Victoria, threatening several towns. Long queues formed outside supermarkets and petrol stations near high-danger areas and shelves were emptied of staples like bread and milk, as residents and tourists sought supplies to either bunker down or escape. More than 50,000 people were without power and some towns had no access to drinking water, after catastrophic fires ripped through the region over the past few days, sending the sky blood red and destroying towns. Authorities urged a mass exodus from several towns on Australia's southeast coast, an area hugely popular in the current summer peak holiday season, warning that extreme heat forecast for the weekend will further stoke raging fires. ""The priority today is fighting fires and evacuating, getting people to safety,"" Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Sydney. ""There are parts of both Victoria and New South Wales which have been completely devastated, with a loss of power and communications."" -- Eight people have been killed by wildfires in the eastern states of New South Wales and Victoria since Monday, and 18 are still missing, officials said on Thursday. -- A naval ship arrived on Thursday at the southeastern coastal town of Mallacoota, where 4,000 residents and visitors have been stranded on the beach since Monday night. Up to 800 people are expected to be evacuated on the first trip, state Premier Daniel Andrews said. The HMAS Choules is expected to make two or three voyages over coming days, state authorities said. -- ""It is hell on earth. It is the worst anybody's ever seen,"" said Michelle Roberts, owner of the Croajingolong Cafe in Mallacoota, told Reuters by telephone from her cafe in Mallacoota. Roberts hoped to get her 18-year-old daughter out on the ship to get away from the spot fires and thick smoke that continue to engulf the town. -- Five military helicopters were en-route to the south coast to back up firefighters and bring in supplies like water and diesel, the Australian Defence Force said on Thursday. The aircraft will also be used to evacuate injured, elderly and young people. -- Traffic on the main highway out of Batemans Bay on the NSW coast was bumper to bumper after authorities called for the town to be evacuated. Residents of the town reported was no fuel, power or phone service, while supermarket shelves were stripped bare of staples. ""Everyone's just on edge,"" local resident Shane Flanagan told Reuters. -- The New South Wales state government declared a state of emergency, beginning on Friday, giving authorities the power to forcibly evacuate people and take control of services. The state's Kosciuszko National Park, home to the Snowy Mountains, was closed with visitors ordered to leave due to extreme fire danger. -- Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged those waiting for help and those stuck in traffic jams ""to be patient ... help will arrive."" -- Dairies in New South Wales that had lost power were being forced to dump milk. ""That is the tragedy of what is occurring as a result of these disasters,"" Morrison said. -- Temperatures are forecast to soar above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) along the south coast on Saturday, bringing the prospect of renewed firefronts to add to the around 200 current blazes. ""It is going to be a very dangerous day. It's going to be a very difficult day,"" NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said -- PM Morrison said the fires will burn for ""many, many months ... unlike a flood, where the water will recede, in a fire like this, it goes on and it will continue to go on ... until we can get some decent rain."" -- PM Morrison, forced to defend his government's limited action on climate change, blamed a three-year drought and lack of hazard reduction for the unprecedented extent and duration of this year's bushfires. -- Bushfires so far this season have razed more than 4 million hectares of bushland and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, including 381 homes destroyed on the south coast just this week.  ",1
" India's prime minister and US President Barack Obama meet next week to strengthen ties, with the emerging Asian power increasingly playing a bigger role on global issues such as climate change and trade. Manmohan Singh's three-day state visit starting on November 23 is seen by New Delhi as a touchstone of Obama's intention of sustaining a relationship that deepened under his predecessor George W. Bush. India is also widely seen as a key geopolitical player in helping bring stability to a South Asian region overshadowed by violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as militant attacks like last year's raids on Mumbai. Singh and Obama will hold talks on issues ranging from curbing carbon emissions - where the two sides are poles apart - to multi-billion dollar defense contracts and speeding up the completion of a landmark civilian nuclear deal signed last year. Singh's trip will be the first state visit of the Obama administration, highlighting the prime minister's personal push for broadening ties with Western economies and moving India away from decades of mistrust with Washington. The success of the trip may be measured by whether the two leaders manage to dispel any doubts of Washington's commitment to New Delhi in a region where it rivals China and Pakistan -- both seen as U.S. foreign policy priorities. ""The relationship is good, but lacks a central defining issue, such as the civilian nuclear deal, that defined the relationship during the presidency of George Bush,"" said Walter Andersen of Johns Hopkins University's South Asia Studies center. ""(The visit) provides an opportunity for India and the U.S. to introduce new ideas for regaining the bilateral relationship's strategic momentum."" President Bill Clinton started U.S. efforts to build ties with modern India when the Cold War ended nearly two decades ago and India began to liberalize its economy in the 1990s. FOCUS ON CHINA, PAKISTAN His successor Bush elevated relations with a 2008 civilian nuclear deal that ended an embargo imposed in 1974 after New Delhi tested a nuclear bomb. Bilateral trade went from $5.6 billion in 1990 to about 43 billion in 2008, a 675 percent rise. But Obama's early focus on Pakistan to fight the Taliban and emphasis on relations with China irked some in India, which had hoped to build on Bush's legacy. ""In terms of important but second-tier issues -- trade, climate change, even defense sales and counter-terrorism -- relations are good, and may get better,"" said Stephen Cohen, a South Asia specialist at the Brookings Institution think tank. ""However, there seems to be a parting of the ways at the strategic level."" U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, focused partly on Pakistan which Washington sees as a necessary ally, has been criticized as ignoring the concerns of regional countries such as India, which competes with Islamabad for influence in Kabul. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947. India, whose long-running border dispute with China has sharpened in recent months, sees the Asian giant's huge influence over the U.S. economy as leverage Beijing enjoys over Washington. India also worries about Chinese support for Pakistan. Beijing is concerned about the Dalai Lama's presence in India. ""So when India sees Obama preoccupied with China and Pakistan it gets worried,"" Chintamani Mahapatra, foreign policy professor at the New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University. ""It will look for a statement that will acknowledge a greater role for India in the region and assuage the fact that the Obama administration has so far marginalized New Delhi."" But Washington values India's importance as an economic power, its huge market, a booming IT industry, its military might and potential as a counterweight to China. Among the nettlesome issues Singh will discuss is the nuclear deal held up now for want of liability protection for American firms and nuclear fuel reprocessing rights for India. India will also hope Obama declares his support for a permanent seat for Indian on the U.N. Security Council. ""We can talk strategy, we can talk economics, we can talk the great global issues of the day,"" said consultant Frank Wisner, former U.S. ambassador to India. ""We need India's cooperation if we are to achieve any of our objectives.""",0
" The British government will provide 1 billion pound sterling in aid to Bangladesh for the next four years (2011-15). ""Climate change, poverty and governance are the key areas where the aid will flow in,"" said visiting British state minister for international development Alan Duncan on Wednesday. He was talking to reporters after a meeting with finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith at the planning ministry. The aid is double than the amount Bangladesh is currently receiving, he said. Bangladesh is a wet country and it is vulnerable to climate change, he said adding, ""It's [Bangladesh] playing a leading role in this regard."" DFID country head Chris Austin said social service, economic growth, improved governance and climate change are the four areas where the aid will come in. ""We're working with the government on allocation for each of the sectors,"" he said. Muhtih said the British minister gave him some important suggestions about social security as it is declining. ""We may do something about it,"" The finance minister said the UK minister suggested identifying the problems in exploration of mineral resources. ""They wanted to know why foreign companies are not interested in exploration in the country."" The finance minister said even the UK was facing economic problem and even then they did not reduce the assistance for Bangladesh. Duncan arrived in Dhaka on Monday on a three-day visit. (1 pound sterling = 120.319 Tk)",1
" Britain could have new nuclear power plants built and running as soon as 2016 if the government confirms its backing for nuclear as a possible cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, British Energy said on Tuesday. The nuclear power firm, Britain's biggest energy producer, said it was inviting potential partners to submit proposals to build new nuclear plants in anticipation the government will give the firm go ahead in the next few months. ""We have today launched a process to invite potential partners for new nuclear generation projects in the UK,"" Chief Executive Bill Coley said in a statement. ""Construction of new nuclear power stations is critical to meeting the UK's security of supply and climate change objectives."" Coley told reporters on a conference call that Britain could see the first of the new plants completed as soon as 2016. ""It is not unrealistic to expect you could have new nuclear on line in 2018 or you could perhaps go ahead of that depending on how the (planning) process works."" ""There's a lot of uncertainty in this. 2016 may be an optimistic number and 2018 might be a pessimistic number,"" added finance director Stephen Billingham. The UK government said in July it believed nuclear power had a role to play in future electricity generation, in part because it produces less carbon than fossil fuels and so would help it meet targets to reduce gases responsible for global warming. Following consultation, the government is expected to confirm its policy on new nuclear power stations in the spring and if given the green light it would pave the way for the first nuclear plants to be built in Britain since Sizewell B in eastern England opened in 1995. British Energy hopes a new generation of plants will be built on its land. Coley said he favoured the firm's Hinkley site in western England and Sizewell as locations. ""I could actually envisage a scenario where initially there may well be two nuclear plants under construction at the same time in parallel."" ""At quite a few sites we do have land adjacent. At Sizewell and Hinkley for example."" French power company EDF has said it would like to build new nuclear reactors in Britain, while analysts believe Germany's RWE and E.ON could also be interested. British gas group Centrica might also be interested in investing to take the power from the new plants, they add. A decision to back a new fleet of nuclear power plants would boost the global nuclear industry as it starts to recover from the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. But a nuclear renaissance would also be politically divisive, with environmentalists saying it is too dangerous to consider. British Energy, which is capable of providing a fifth of the country's electricity needs, said it expected to complete repair work at its Hunterston and Hinkley power stations by the end of March or early April, broadly in line with expectations. It said adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in the nine months to Dec. 31 rose to 775 million pounds ($1.5 billion) from 462 million a year ago, as higher electricity prices helped to offset a dip in output. The firm also said it had fixed price contracts in place for about 46 terawatt hours (TWh) for its 2007-8 financial year at an average price of about 44 pounds per megawatt hour (MWh). Analysts said this was good news given the recent fall in energy prices, but warned that the decline in prices would eventually have an impact. ""The big hit on British Energy is likely to happen in 2008-9, where is we mark to market against current forward electricity prices (28 pounds per MWh) our EBITDA forecast would come down by some 55 percent,"" Citigroup analysts wrote in a research note. At 0845 GMT, British Energy shares were down 2 percent at 415-1/2 pence, reversing an early rise to as high as 437-1/2 pence.",0
"As government and business leaders prepare to meet at the forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, the world's nations are divided over who should pay for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for a growing number of extreme weather events.Recessions in Western economies since the global financial crisis have slowed carbon emission growth but also left governments with scarcer state funds to channel into green technologies.The Green Growth Action Alliance, which compiled the study on behalf of the WEF, said the extra spending was needed to promote other forms of energy generation and greater efficiency in sectors including building, industry and transport.The $700 billion, part of which would promote cleaner energies such as wind, solar or hydro-power, would be on top of about $5 trillion projected to be spent each year on infrastructure under a scenario of business as usual until 2020.""Shaping a global economy fit for the 21st century is our greatest challenge,"" former Mexican President Felipe Calderon and chair of the Alliance wrote in the report.The Alliance is a public and private group tied to the WEF that was launched at a Group of 20 meeting in Mexico last year.The study said a $36 billion annual rise in global public spending to slow climate change - less than the estimated $50 billion cost of damage by Superstorm Sandy in the United States in October - could unlock far greater private investment.It suggested a $36 billion jump in state spending to $126 billion a year, from a current $90 billion, might trigger $570 billion from private investors if properly managed.It noted that the world population was set to rise to about 9 billion by 2050 from 7 billion now.""Greening the economy is the only way to accommodate 9 billion people by 2050,"" said Thomas Kerr, Director of Climate Change Initiatives at the WEF.COMBINED EFFORTGovernments and the private sector have often failed to work in tandem to mobilise funds to combat climate change.""There is still private sector money going to climate destruction,"" said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the National Resources Defense Council in Washington. ""To deal with climate change, everyone has to be moving in the right direction.""""And the key to all of this is how do you unlock big sources of private finance... Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds have a lot of capital. Mobilizing them would be the holy grail.""The WEF-commissioned report pointed to some hopeful signs -- global investment in renewable energy in 2011 rose to a new record $257 billion, up 17 percent from 2010.But UN climate negotiations in Qatar in December ended with little progress on a global framework for emissions cuts.Instead, governments agreed to devise a new United Nations pact to limit climate change that would enter into force from 2020.A study published in the science journal Nature this month said it would be far cheaper to act now to keep global warming within an agreed UN limit of 2 degrees Celsius than to wait until 2020.",3
"Dhaka, Aug 6 (bdnews24.com)— The government on Monday signed a $12.5 million grant agreement with the World Bank 'to build climate change resilient communities' in coastal areas. The grant will be provided from the Multi-Donor Trust Fund titled Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund (BCCRF) built with the development partners' contribution. Additional Secretary of the External Relations Division Arastoo Khan and Christine E Kimes, Acting Head, the World Bank's Dhaka Office signed the agreement. Khan said as per the agreement, of the total US$125 million trust fund, 90 percent will be implemented by the government and 10 percent by the NGOs. ""So this US$12.5 million will be channelled to the NGOs,"" he said and added that Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF) will be the implementing agency for the NGOs as had been decided by the governing council of the fund. Highlighting Bangladesh's climate vulnerabilities, Kimes said two-thirds of its land area were less than 5 metres above sea level and 'highly susceptible to flooding.' She said crops and livelihoods of the rural poor in low-lying coastal areas were 'adversely affected by saline water intrusion into aquifers and groundwater.' Kimes said the goal of the project was to increase the resilience of communities to flood, drought and saline water intrusion risks through 'the implementation of community-based climate change adaptation activities.' PKSF's Deputy Managing Director Fazlul Khader said they would detail their activities 'as per the need of the coastal people.' Additional Secretary Khan said apart from the Trust Fund, there were other two climate change resilience funds in Bangladesh. The government has its own funds where it is injecting $ 100million every year while there is Climate Change Investment Fund of the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, he said.",3
" US President Barack Obama is unlikely to sign climate legislation ahead of a UN global warming meeting in Copenhagen that starts in early December, the White House's top climate and energy coordinator said on Friday. ""We'd like to be (finished with) the process. That's not going to happen,"" Carol Browner said at a conference called the First Draft of History. She said the administration is committed to passing comprehensive energy and climate legislation ""on the most aggressive timeline possible."" Democratic Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer unveiled a climate bill this week but it remained unclear whether it would win the required 60 Senate votes for passage. Even if the bill does pass, the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives would have to reconcile their versions of the bill in committee. That would leave little time for Obama, who has made climate one of his top issues, to sign the bill before 190 nations are due to meet in Copenhagen from early December in hopes of hammering out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The U.S. Congress has been focused on health care legislation, delaying work on the Kerry-Boxer bill. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters later on Friday that Obama would consider attending the climate talks in the Danish capital if heads of state were invited. Browner said she did not know if a global agreement on binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions could be made in Copenhagen. But she had hope for progress saying the world's top leaders recognize global warming is a problem. ""Copenhagen isn't the end of a process, it is the beginning of a process,"" she said. The administration has been pleased with recent talks with China, the world's top greenhouse gas polluter, on tackling climate change, she added. STATES Browner expressed optimism Congress would pass the bill in due time but said the administration has options if that did not happen. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could work with states that already have formed carbon markets to extend those programs, said Browner, former head of that agency. ""That may be a way in which you could form a regime using these models that are already out there,"" she said. Ten eastern U.S. states have formed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. In addition, California and several other states in the West plan to regulate six greenhouse gases from smokestacks and tailpipes beginning in 2012.",0
" Eating less meat and dairy could help tackle climate change by reducing the amount of methane gas emitted by cows and sheep, a British government agency says. In an email leaked to vegetarian campaign group Viva, an official of Britain's Environment Agency expressed sympathy for the green benefits of a vegan diet, which bans all animal product foods. The official said the government may in future recommend eating less meat as one of the 'key environmental behavior changes' needed to combat climate change brought on by the production of greenhouse gases. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has already announced it is looking into the benefits of low environmental impact diets, including reducing the amount of animal protein eaten. The email was written by an agency official to a member of the public who had written to support a vegan diet. ""Whilst potential benefit of a vegan diet in terms of climate impact could be very significant, encouraging the public to take a lifestyle decision as substantial as becoming vegan would be a request few are likely to take up,"" it said. ""You will be interested to hear that Defra is working on a set of key environmental behavior changes to mitigate climate change. Consumption of animal protein has been highlighted within that work. ""As a result, the issue may start to figure in climate change communications in the future. It will be a case of introducing this gently as there is a risk of alienating the public majority."" Cattle and sheep release millions of metric tons of methane gas a year into the environment through flatulence. In New Zealand, for example the 55 million farm animals produce some 90 percent of the country's methane emissions. Several European nations, including Germany and the Netherlands, have promoted policies that make methane capture a money-spinner for farmers. In the UK, the National Farmers' Union, said it was working on similar projects, and rejected government moves to encourage less meat intake. In a statement it said: ""To suggest that people eating less meat and diary products will have a significant impact on the fight against global warming seems rather dubious."" Defra denied that it was telling people to give up meat. ""It isn't the role of government to enforce a dietary or lifestyle change on any individual,"" it said. The Environment Agency said it believed a vegan diet was a matter of personal choice.",0
" Greenland's ice losses are accelerating and nudging up sea levels, according to a study showing that icebergs breaking away and meltwater runoff are equally to blame for the shrinking ice sheet. The report, using computer models to confirm satellite readings, indicated that ice losses quickened in 2006-08 to the equivalent of 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) of world sea level rise per year from an average 0.46 mm a year for 2000-08. ""Mass loss has accelerated,"" said Michiel van den Broeke, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who led the study, in Friday's edition of the journal Science. ""The years 2006-08, with their warm summers, have seen a huge melting,"" he told Reuters of the study with colleagues in the United States, the Netherlands and Britain. ""The underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future,"" Jonathan Bamber, a co-author at the University of Bristol, said in a statement. The computer models matched satellite data for ice losses -- raising confidence in the findings -- and showed that losses were due equally to meltwater, caused by rising temperatures, and icebergs breaking off from glaciers. ""This helps us to understand the processes that affect Greenland. This will also help us predict what will happen,"" van den Broeke said. Until now, the relative roles of snowfall, icebergs and thawing ice have been poorly understood. Greenland locks up enough ice to raise world sea levels by 7 meters (23 ft) if it ever all thawed. At the other end of the globe, far-colder Antarctica contains ice equivalent to 58 meters of sea level rise, according to U.N. estimates. COPENHAGEN About 190 governments will meet in Copenhagen from December 7-18 to try to agree a UN pact to slow global warming, fearing that rising temperatures will bring more powerful storms, heatwaves, mudslides and species extinctions as well as rising sea levels. The study said losses of ice from Greenland would have been roughly double recent rates but were masked by more snowfall and a re-freezing of some meltwater before it reached the sea. In total, Greenland lost about 1,500 billion tons of ice from 2000-08, split between icebergs cracking into the sea from glaciers and water runoff. ""The mass loss would have been twice as great,"" without offsetting effects, Van den Broeke said. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated in 2007 that world sea levels could rise by 18-59 cms by 2100. A natural expansion of water as it warms would account for most of the rise, rather than melting ice. Greenland's current rate, of 0.75 mm a year, would be 7.5 cms if continued for 100 years. ""This is...much more that previous estimates of the Greenland contribution,"" van den Broeke said.",0
"Data from the US space agency NASA and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration showed that in 2015 the average temperature
across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.90 degree Celsius (1.62 degrees
Fahrenheit) above the 20th century average, surpassing 2014’s previous record
by 0.16 C (0.29 F). Scientists at the United Kingdom's Met Office and East
Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit also published data on Wednesday confirming the
US agencies findings. This was the fourth time a global temperature record has
been set this century, the agencies said in a summary of their annual report. “2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger,
long-term warming trend,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. The sharp increase in 2015 was driven in part by El Niño, a
natural weather cycle in the Pacific that warms the ocean surface every two to
seven years. But scientists say human activities – notably burning fossil fuels
- were the main driver behind the rise. ""The 2015 data continues the pattern we’ve seen over
the last four to five decades,"" said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s
National Centers for Environmental Information. The latest El Niño started in late 2015 and will last until
spring 2016. It is among the strongest ever recorded but Schmidt and others say
the weather phenomenon played just a supporting role in the earth's temperature
rise. More than halfway to UN
target The 2015 data underscores the urgency of cutting greenhouse
gas emissions if the world is to hold temperature increases to well below 2
degrees Celsius, the target agreed to by more than 190 countries at climate
talks in Paris last December, scientists said. With the global mean surface temperature in 2015 more than 1
degree Celsius above late-19th century levels, the world is now halfway to the
UN target, which would require stronger greenhouse gas emissions cuts. ""This announcement should put pressure on governments
to urgently implement their commitments to act against climate change, and to
increase the strength of their planned cuts in annual emissions of greenhouse
gases,"" said Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change and the Environment in London. In the United States, some Republican lawmaker and those sceptical
of human-caused climate change have pointed to a slowdown in temperature rise
after the last powerful El Niño in 1998 as a sign that climate change is not a
serious problem. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said in December
at a hearing on climate change science that there had been no significant
global warming for the past 18 years. NOAA's Karl said that with two back-to-back years of record
warming, likely to be followed with a third next year, any doubts that have
been raised by sceptical lawmakers about a pause in global warming can be put
to rest. 
""There is no
sign of a pause and slowing,"" Karl told reporters Wednesday, adding that
it is a safe bet that 2016 will break the 2015 record given the long-term trend
and the impact of El Niño in the first quarter of the year.",0
"“All our 45 workers are jobless now. The men are driving taxis and women are back to being housewives,” said CEO Farzad Rashidi. Reuters interviews with dozens of business owners across Iran show hundreds of companies have suspended production and thousands of workers are being laid off because of a hostile business climate mainly caused by new US sanctions. The Iranian rial has fallen to record lows and economic activity has slowed dramatically since US President Donald Trump withdrew from the big powers’ nuclear deal with Tehran in May. He imposed sanctions directed at purchases of US dollars, gold trading, and the automotive industry in August. Iran’s vital oil and banking sectors were hit in November. “We have lost around five billion rials ($120,000 at the official rate) in the last few months, so the board decided to suspend all activities for as long as the fluctuations in the currency market continue. It is stupid to keep driving when you see it’s a dead end,” Rashidi said. The country has already experienced unrest this year, when young protesters angered by unemployment and high prices clashed with security forces. Official projections indicate unrest could flare up again as sanctions make the economic crisis worse. Four days before parliament fired him August for failing to do enough to protect the jobs market from sanctions, labor minister Ali Rabiei said Iran would lose a million jobs by the end of year as a direct result of the US measures. Unemployment is already running at 12.1 percent, with three million Iranians unable to find jobs. A parliamentary report in September warned that rising unemployment could threaten the stability of the Islamic Republic. “If we believe that the country’s economic situation was the main driver for the recent protests, and that an inflation rate of 10 percent and an unemployment rate of 12 percent caused the protests, we cannot imagine the intensity of reactions caused by the sharp rise of inflation rate and unemployment.” The report said if Iran’s economic growth remains below 5 percent in coming years, unemployment could hit 26 percent. The International Monetary Fund has forecast that Iran’s economy will contract by 1.5 percent this year and by 3.6 percent in 2019 due to dwindling oil revenues. Iran’s vice president has warned that under sanctions Iran faces two main dangers: unemployment and a reduction in purchasing power. “Job creation should be the top priority ... We should not allow productive firms to fall into stagnation because of sanctions,” Eshaq Jahangiri said, according to state media. But business owners told Reuters that the government’s sometimes contradictory monetary policies, alongside fluctuations in the foreign exchange market, price increases for raw materials, and high interest loans from banks have made it impossible for them to stay in business. Many have not been able to pay wages for months or had to shed significant numbers of workers. A manager at the Jolfakaran Aras Company, one of the biggest textile factories in Iran, told Reuters that the firm was considering halting its operations and hundreds of workers might lose their jobs. “Around 200 workers were laid off in August, and the situation has become worse since. There is a high possibility that the factory will shut down,” the manager said, asking not to be named. Ahmad Roosta, CEO of Takplast Nour, was hopeful that a drought in Iran would provide a boost for his newly launched factory, which produces plastic pipes used in agriculture. “I will wait one or two months, but I will have to shut down if the situation remains the same ... The farmers, who are the main consumers of our products, cannot afford them,” Roosta told Reuters. The sanctions have affected the Iranian car industry, which had experienced a boom after sanctions were lifted two years ago and it signed big contracts with French and German firms. French carmaker PSA Group (PEUP.PA) suspended its joint venture in Iran in June to avoid US sanctions, and German car and truck manufacturer Daimler has dropped plans to expand its Iran business. Maziar Beiglou, a board member of the Iran Auto Parts Makers Association, said in August that more than 300 auto parts makers have been forced to stop production, threatening tens of thousands of jobs in the sector. A spokesperson for Iran’s Tire Producers Association blamed the government’s “changing monetary policies over the last six months” for problems in the sector. “Fortunately tire factories have not slowed down, but the production growth that we had planned for was not achieved,” Mostafa Tanha said in a phone interview from Tehran. YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT Washington says economic pressures on Tehran are directed at the government and its malign proxies in the region, not at the Iranian people. But Iran’s young people, bearing the brunt of unemployment, stand to lose the most. Maryam, a public relations manager in a food import company, lost her job last month.  “The prices went so high that we lost many customers ... In the end the CEO decided to lay off people and started with our department.” She said the company had stopped importing, and people who still worked there were worried that it might shut down after selling off its inventory. Youth unemployment is already 25 percent in a country where 60 percent of the 80 million population is under 30. The unemployment rate among young people with higher education in some parts of the country is above 50 percent, according to official data. Armin, 29, has a mechanical engineering degree but lost his job in the housebuilding industry when the sector was hit by recession following the fall of rial. “The property market is slowing because high prices have made houses unaffordable ... It is getting worse day by day,” he told Reuters from the city of Rasht in northern Iran. Nima, a legal adviser for startups and computer firms, believes sanctions have already affected many companies in the sector that depended on an export-oriented model and hoped to expand in the region. He said even the gaming industry in Iran has felt the sanctions pinch: “The situation has become so severe that many of these teams decided to suspend development of their games and are waiting to see what will happen next. Without access to international markets, they see very little chance of making a profit.” Saeed Laylaz, a Tehran-based economist, was more sanguine. He said youth unemployment was a product of Iran’s demographics and government policies, and sanctions were only adding to an existing problem. “The sanctions, the uncertainty in the market and Rouhani’s zigzag policies have put pressures on the economy and the job market, but I predict that the market will find a balance soon,” Laylaz told Reuters. “We will defeat this round of sanctions as we have done in the past,” said Laylaz who met Rouhani last month with other economists to offer advice on economic policies.",5
"There is little hope the 193-nation UN General Assembly will achieve much in the annual five-day marathon of speeches. But on the sidelines,US officials plan to lobby allies for pledges of concrete military assistance to help defeat Islamic State, whose hardline Sunni Islamist fighters have taken over swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory.UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said more than 140 heads of state or government will attend the assembly's annual ""general debate"", which begins on Wednesday and ends Sept. 30. He noted an unusually large number of serious conflicts: in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine.""The world is facing multiple crises,"" Ban told reporters.""All have featured atrocious attacks on civilians, including children,"" he said. ""All have dangerous sectarian, ethnic or tribal dimensions. And many have seen sharp divisions within the international community itself over the response.""UN officials and delegates say the top issue for Western and Arab leaders is the rampage of Islamic State militants, who are blamed for a wave of sectarian violence, beheadings and massacres of civilians.""Together, we will address the horrendous violence in Syria and Iraq, where conflict and governance failures have provided a breeding ground for extremist groups,"" Ban said.US President Barack Obama is expected to use the UN podium on Wednesday to call for more countries to join his coalition of more than 40 nations to prevent IS from expanding its territory. The United States has been bombing IS targets in Iraq for the past month but has yet to bomb Syria.The White House said it was unlikely that Obama would meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani while both are in New York this week.But Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at which they are expected to discuss Iran's atomic program and IS.On Friday, Kerry told a special meeting of the Security Council that Iran could play a role in helping tackle IS, an apparent shift in the US position. Both Iran and the United States have ruled out military cooperation.Ebola outbreakIn addition to speeches by Obama, Rouhani and other high-profile leaders, other important attendees making their UN General Assembly debut this week include Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.On Wednesday, Obama will chair a rare summit meeting of the UN Security Council on the problem of foreign fighters. He last chaired a council summit in 2009 on eradicating nuclear weapons.At Wednesday's meeting, the council plans to adopt a resolution demanding countries ""prevent and suppress"" recruitment and travel of foreign fighters to join extremist militant groups like IS by ensuring it is a serious criminal offence under domestic laws. Foreign fighters in ISare believed to be the group's cruellest.UN member states will also tackle the Ebola crisis in West Africa.Obama and other leaders will also attend a high-level meeting on the exponentially worsening hemorrhagic fever outbreak that has devastated Liberia, Sierra Leone and other countries in the region.The meeting comes just after the Security Council declared Ebola a ""threat to international peace and security"" and established the first-ever UN mission dedicated to tackling a public-health threat.Since the current outbreak was first detected in March, Ebola has infected at least 5,357 people, according to the World Health Organization, mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It has also spread to Senegal and Nigeria. The virus has killed an estimated 2,630 people.Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had been due to speak at the General Assembly this week but cancelled her trip to New York because of the Ebola crisis.While the General Assembly speeches are going on, senior foreign ministry officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are meeting in New York with Iranian officials. They will try to break a deadlock in talks aimed at ending sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear program. Foreign ministers from the six powers may join the talks in the course of the week.Even though a Nov. 24 deadline for a long-term deal is a mere two months away, diplomats close to the talks say a deal in New York is unlikely.Just ahead of the General Assembly on Tuesday, UN chief Ban will convene a global summit meeting on climate change that aims to set the stage for a major environmental conference in Paris next year. Obama is expected to use the session to highlight strides the United States has made on climate change.There will also be high-level side meetings on conflicts in Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Ukraine, the Central African Republic, Mali, the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and the UN war on poverty.",0
" Negotiations to revive the Doha Round must restart ""very quickly"" for a global trade deal to be salvaged after July's failed ministerial meeting, mediators of the seven-year-old talks said on Friday. ""I have the sense that politically there is a readiness to have another go,"" New Zealand ambassador Crawford Falconer told lawmakers at an Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Geneva. Falconer, who chairs the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations on agriculture, said the seven economies whose ministers sparred in July over an emergency tool for farmers had worked hard this week to resolve that dispute. If those seven -- the United States, European Union, Brazil, India, Japan, China, and Australia -- are able in meetings next week to narrow their gaps, Falconer said Doha Round talks involving the WTO's 153 members could then resume. ""In my view, that process needs to happen very quickly,"" the farm chairman said. ""The longer you are away from an implicit deal, the more difficulties you have putting Humpty Dumpty back together again."" Economists believe a deal in the Doha Round could inject billions of dollars into the global economy, potentially creating jobs and raising incomes in the developing world. But many countries are reluctant to expose their key markets to more competition, and the talks have missed deadline after deadline since they began in Qatar in 2001. WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy convened the July summit in order to clinch a basic deal spanning farming and manufactured goods, with the intention of wrapping up Doha negotiations on cross-border services and other trade rules by the end of 2008. The July talks became ensnared on the question of when and how countries could invoke a ""special safeguard measure"" to protect poor farmers when import volumes spike or prices fall. Other issues, including cuts to the huge subsidies paid to U.S. cotton farmers, were not addressed in the talks, which collapsed after nine days. FRESH OFFERS Mexico's WTO ambassador Fernando de Mateo y Venturini told the Inter-Parliamentary Union session that he expected fresh offers soon in the Doha services talks he mediates. ""Next year we should be able to conclude this Round,"" said de Mateo, whose name has circulated as a potential new chairman of the WTO's industrial goods talks following Canadian ambassador Don Stephenson's return to Ottawa this summer. WTO chief Lamy said this week that a core deal in farming and manufacturing could be completed by the end of this year, with a full deal formalised in 2009. But many diplomats have voiced concerns about ramping up negotiations before a new U.S. administration takes office in January, given Washington's stance may change as a result. Elections expected next year in India and the installation of a new European Commission at the end of 2009 also loom large. Still, Falconer said it was critically important to complete the Doha Round as soon as possible, both to reinforce the world economy and to clear the decks for another overhaul of world trade rules in light of climate change and other pressures. ""The multilateral system as it relates to trade needs to tackle an agenda that is broader,"" he said. ""Your chances of tackling a broader agenda are less likely if you are still trying to deal with the inherited agenda from Doha.""",0
" On the shores of lake Nahuel Huapi, in the wild mountains of Argentina's Patagonia, live some of the world's most ancient trees. Known in Spanish as the alerce, the Patagonian cypress grows extremely slowly, but can reach heights over 50 metres (165 feet) and live for 2,000 years or more, putting some of them among the oldest living things on earth. For scientists who come from around the world to study them, the alerces give an exciting snapshot of years past. Argentine geoscientist Ricardo Villalba, a contributor to the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations report on climate change last year, studies what the ancient trees say about changing weather patterns. Like other trees, alerces form a new layer of wood under their bark every year. So samples taken straight through the trunk can help gauge what the weather was like in each year of the tree's life. ""This has allowed us to see that in some sectors of Patagonia, the year 1998 was the hottest in the last 400 years,"" Villalba said during a recent expedition. ""The marked tendencies that have occurred over the last few decades have no precedent in the last 400 or 500 years, which is as far as the registers in Patagonia have permitted us to analyze up until now."" The tree rings show that temperatures in the 20th Century were ""anomalously warm"" across the southern Andes. At their worst, mean temperatures over the last century went up 0.86 degree Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) when compared to temperatures in the previous 260 years. REACHING INTO THE PAST At the nearby Puerto Blest Biological Research Station, Villalba has been able to compare his results with those of other leading scientists. Evidence from tree rings is what scientists call proxy data, meaning they know the data is not exact but if it corroborates other proxy data -- like evidence of glacier retreat -- it can be used to draw real conclusions. The scientists have also been able to use their proxy data to test computer models used for predicting climate changes in the future. ""In this part of the world there is a decrease in precipitation in the last decade and a very marked increase in temperature, which is entirely what the computer models predict for global change,"" said researcher Brian Luckman of the University of Western Ontario and the InterAmerican Research Institute. ""So we can use some of the results that we have to verify and to test some of the computer models and to see if they really give realistic pictures of what has happened in the past or what will happen in the future."" Tree rings also provide a long-term perspective in the climate change debate, such as in the question of whether global warming is a result of human activity or is part of a natural earth cycle. The more scientists learn about those natural cycles and about weather patterns in the past, the more they are able to answer that question. And the alerces still have a lot more information to provide. ""The Alerce has the peculiarity of longevity and of being very resistant to wood decay,"" Villalba said. ""So you can find buried material or subfossil material that can be used to extend these chronologies further back into the past."" When these chronologies are fully compiled, they could provide a new source of data currently only available from ice core samples, ocean sediments and ancient pollen. And that would help scientists reach further into the past, far beyond human records, which began in 1856 -- when the British Meteorological Society began collecting data around the world.",6
"The talks aim to spur bigger commitments to start reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in the global average temperature since pre-industrial times to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), to stave off the worst effects of climate change. ""Delegates from the LDC Group remain concerned about the logistics of getting to Glasgow,"" Sonam Phuntsho Wangdi of Bhutan, chair of the group of the 46 Least Developed Countries, said in a statement. ""Our countries and our people are among the worst affected by climate change – we must not be excluded from talks deciding how the world will deal with this crisis, determining the fate of our lives and livelihoods."" Some 20 LDCs such as Ethiopia, Haiti and Bangladesh are on Britain’s coronavirus ""red list"", which means their delegates will have to quarantine in a hotel for up to 10 days before attending the ""COP 26"" talks, which run from Oct 31 to Nov 12. Britain has said it will pay the quarantine costs of delegates from red list countries, and has cut the time to five days from 10 for those who are vaccinated. It has also said it is distributing COVID-19 vaccines to delegates struggling to get them. On Tuesday, Climate Action Network (CAN), a coalition of more than 1,500 environmental groups, called for the talks to be postponed because of delegates' difficulties in obtaining vaccines. CAN said Britain had been slow to provide the vaccines it has promised and many countries were likely to miss out.",0
"NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Sun Dec 16, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A ""historic"" Bali deal. A ""Berlin Wall"" dividing rich and poor nations on global warming policy falls. A ""new chapter"" for Washington after six years of climate disputes with many of its allies. And now comes the hard part. After all the praise for the agreement hammered out at the 190-nation Bali meeting to work out a long-term climate treaty involving all nations by late 2009, governments will have to work out the details. ""We will have two tremendously demanding years, starting right in January,"" said Humberto Rosa, head of the European Union delegation, after a dramatic US U-turn on Saturday paved the way for a deal to start negotiations on a global pact. The world has a lot to do to slow soaring emissions and time is running short, even though the UN Climate Panel says warming can be beaten at a cost below 0.1 percent of world gross domestic product annually until 2030. Negotiators left Bali speaking of a historic breakthrough and promising urgent action to fight climate change that could bring more floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves and rising seas. But in the marathon talks on the Indonesian resort island they spent more than 7 hours one night, for instance, arguing over whether the final text should urge poor countries to take ""action"" or make a ""contribution"" to combating climate change. The phrase ""cut emissions"" was not used. Working out a fair share of the burden between the United States, China, Russia and India, the top four greenhouse gas emitters, and the rest of the world will be one of the most complex diplomatic puzzles in history. U.S. PRESIDENT The talks will test relations between rich and poor and may be partly in limbo until a new president takes office in the White House after George W. Bush steps down in January 2009. Few want to make promises until new U.S. policies are clear. ""If there's a major change in the (U.S.) government policy I expect that there will be a greater acceleration in the execution of commitments,"" said Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar. A first meeting on the ""Bali roadmap"" is likely to be held in Ghana in early 2008, with four sessions around the world each year and culminating with a deal in late 2009 in Copenhagen. While poor nations ended up promising only vague ""action"", developed nations dropped a clear references, favoured by the European Union but opposed by the United States, to a need for rich nations to axe greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst of climate change. Both the United States and many nations which accepted the 1997 Kyoto Protocol are well above 1990 levels. ""Cuts that deep, that fast, are simply impossible,"" said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said of the 2020 goal. Still, he said, the deal was a ""new chapter"" in climate diplomacy after Bush rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying emissions caps would harm the U.S. economy and that Kyoto wrongly excluded targets for developing nations. Kyoto binds 37 rich nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The U.N. says a new deal is needed by 2009 to give parliaments time to ratify and to guide investors, in everything from solar power to coal. De Boer said Bali tore down ""the Berlin Wall of climate change"" between rich and poor under Kyoto, which only sets commitments for rich nations. In future, all will take part. Among incentives for poor nations, Bali laid out schemes to slow deforestation, sharing ""clean"" technologies and a new fund to help vulnerable people adapt to droughts or rising seas. Angus Friday of Grenada, who represents small island states, said the ""Bali roadmap"" was disappointing and could have been agreed by e-mail instead of sending more than 10,000 delegates on carbon-spewing jets for two weeks to Bali. The talks marked a much more assertive tone by developing nations such as China and India, which won the last-minute showdown that forced the United States to give ground and promise to do more to share clean technology in a final deal. ""This was China's coming-out party,"" said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Many said the roadmap would help. ""Everybody is in his car and everybody has petrol for the road,"" said German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel. ""Without carbon dioxide, I hope.""",0
"China's 2021-2030 policy plans are under close scrutiny as the United Nations climate change conference gets under way in Madrid, especially after a new UN report said the world needs to cut carbon dioxide by 7.6% a year over the decade in order to limit temperature rises. But with the country's economic growth at its slowest in nearly 30 years, industry data as well as speeches from leaders and industry officials suggest a willingness to lean on coal for power, especially in old mining regions. ""We continue to work hard to advance the fight against climate change, but on the other hand, we are indeed facing multiple challenges such as developing the economy, improving the people's livelihoods, eliminating poverty and controlling pollution,"" said Zhao Yingmin, China's vice environment minister, at a briefing last week. Beijing promised this year to show the ""highest possible ambition"" when revising its emissions pledges next year, although it did not commit to more stringent binding targets. But it has built 42.9 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity since the start of last year, with another 121 GW under construction. That compares with 35 GW of coal-fired power added in 2017 and 38 GW in 2016. Although no net figures are available, regulators also approved 40 new mines with nearly 200 million tonnes of annual capacity in the first three quarters of 2019, compared with 25 million tonnes in all of 2018. Major state-owned utilities want to shed as much of a third of their older and less-efficient coal-fired capacity in an effort to reduce debt, according to a government document seen by Reuters and confirmed by four sources. But even if they go ahead, the cuts will be offset by newer capacity added elsewhere. In October, Premier Li Keqiang urged energy officials to promote clean mining and coal-fired power. Ambitious proposals to cap CO2 and fossil fuel use are no longer expected to be included in the 2021-2025 five-year plan, researchers said. As it looks to stimulate the economy, Beijing may face less internal pressure to accelerate carbon cuts after hitting previous targets with relative ease. China brought down carbon intensity - CO2 generated per unit of economic growth - by 45.8% from 2015-2018, beating its target by two years. Some forecasts say it could bring CO2 emissions to a peak by 2022, eight years ahead of schedule. ""About this CO2 peak by 2030, I think we will be earlier than 2030,"" Fu Chengyu, former chairman of oil giant Sinopec, said during a recent panel discussion. ""That's a good thing, but I see a slowdown in efforts at the government level that is dragging us down."" SHORTAGES? A major concern remains the economic fortunes of coal regions like Shanxi, which still relies on the fuel for half its jobs and 80% of its energy. ""The fact that Shanxi's economy relies heavily on coal is unlikely to change in the coming years,"" said a scholar at a provincial government think tank, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Much of the debate centres on how well renewables can supply reliable ""baseload"" power to China in the future and support major initiatives like vehicle electrification. According to a research institute run by the State Grid Corporation, China will need 1,250 gigawatts to 1,400 gigawatts of coal-fired power over the long term to guarantee stable electricity supplies, up from around 1,000 GW now. Yang Fuqiang, senior adviser with the US-based Natural Resources Defence Council, said the debate depended on electricity demand forecasts: annual growth of less than 4.5% would require no new coal plants. Though some policymakers have argued capacity is sufficient, with existing plants capable of providing more power, the amount of new approvals suggests the government will err on the side of caution. ""Since coal is still a major resource, we will continue to rely on coal when we need it - and right now for instance, the economy is slowing and renewables are still relatively weak,"" said Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Institute for Energy Policy Studies.",0
"Parliamentary elections were supposed to happen first under the roadmap unveiled after the army deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July after mass protests against his rule.But critics have campaigned for a change, saying the country needs an elected leader to direct government at a time of economic and political crisis and to forge a political alliance before a potentially divisive parliamentary election.Opponents say it risks creating a president with unchecked power. Were that Sisi, who is widely tipped to win the vote, it would restore the army's sway over a post controlled by military men until Mursi was propelled to office last year by the Muslim Brotherhood.Sisi's Islamist opponents view him as the mastermind of a military coup and a crackdown that has killed hundreds of Mursi's supporters and jailed thousands more.In further unrest, one person was killed and five others were wounded on Monday in the Mediterranean town of Damietta in clashes between opponents and supporters of Mursi. Such incidents have taken place almost daily since Mursi was removed.In Cairo, a court sentenced 139 Brotherhood members to two years in jail and a fine of 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($720) each for engaging in violent actions, protesting and rioting.The Interior Ministry said it arrested 15 pro-Brotherhood female students in Al-Azhar University for Islamic Learning for causing chaos and inciting violence.The university has been a main stage of violent protests since the start of its fall semester in September. Nine Azhar students have been killed in clashes with the police since then, of whom three died on Friday and Saturday after the government designated the Brotherhood group a terrorist organization.That announcement came after 16 people were killed in a suicide attack on a police station in the Nile Delta last Tuesday, an attack the Brotherhood condemned and blamed on a radical faction based in the Sinai Peninsula.SISI YET TO DECLARE PRESIDENTIAL BIDA draft constitution concluded on December 1 opened the way for a change in the order of the elections by leaving open the question of which should come first.Secular-leaning politicians who want the presidential election before the parliamentary polls lobbied interim head of state Adly Mansour during four recent meetings, according to officials familiar with what was discussed.""The forces that attended the four meetings agreed, with a large percentage, to have the presidential elections first and that means that most likely the presidential elections will be first,"" said one of the officials.An army official added: ""Presidential elections are most likely to be held first, as it seems to be the demand of most parties so far.""Holding the presidential election first would ""accelerate the process of bringing Sisi as head of state"", said Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayid, a professor of political science at Cairo University.""The people who are pushing for a change are doing so because they would like to have him as head of state.""Sisi, 59, has yet to announce his candidacy. An army official familiar with his thinking said last week he was still undecided as he weighs up the manifold problems facing a country in deep economic crisis.But he may have no choice. His supporters see Sisi as the only man able to restore stability after three years of turmoil.And analysts say the powerful security apparatus will be putting pressure on him to run as it presses a crackdown on the Brotherhood and combats militant attacks that have spiraled since Mursi's overthrow.There have been three bombings in the last week, the bloodiest of them an attack on a police station that killed 16 people in the city of Mansoura, north of Cairo. The state blamed the Brotherhood, which condemned the attack. A radical Islamist group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, claimed responsibility.The Brotherhood won five elections after Mubarak's downfall in 2011. It is boycotting the army's political roadmap.In an interview broadcast late on Sunday, interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi sidestepped a question on whether the presidential election would be held ahead of the parliamentary vote, saying the focus should be on the forthcoming referendum.The referendum has been set for January 14-15.The draft says steps towards holding the first of the elections should be begin no later than 90 days from the ratification of the constitution. Mansour said on Sunday the government was committed to holding both presidential and parliamentary elections within six months of its approval.The Islamist Nour Party, which came second to the Brotherhood in the last parliamentary elections, had said secular parties wanted to push back the parliamentary election because they were worried about losing to Islamists again.The Nour, an ultraorthodox Salafi party, supported the removal of Mursi. Sherif Taha, the party spokesman, said the Nour would not object to holding the presidential election first if that was the result of ""consensus"".He also said the government must offer clear guarantees that the parliamentary election would follow.In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel voiced concern about developments in Egypt in a call to Sisi. He stressed the need for political inclusiveness, a Pentagon spokesman said.""Secretary Hagel also expressed concerns about the political climate in advance of the constitutional referendum, including the continued enforcement of a restrictive demonstrations law,"" he said.($1 = 6.9386 Egyptian pounds)",4
"From the outset, one of the biggest issues has been moving money from those rich nations that have produced most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution to developing nations that want funds to help shift their growing economies to a lower-carbon future. But the breakdown stems from 1992 when countries agreed on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change -- and much has changed over the past two and a bit decades, including the rapid rise of Asian economies. Back then, China was one-third its current economic size and it has seen its greenhouse gas emissions grow almost three-fold between 1990 and today, according to the International Energy Agency. And until the past year or so, a prolonged energy boom bolstered exporting nations in the Gulf. As a result, a re-reckoning is in order, richer nations argue. They want a new climate agreement in Paris to recognise a more diverse pool of climate finance ""donor countries"" who will contribute to the goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020 and more in the years beyond to help developing nations grow and cope with the effects of climate change. ""The whole notion of what defines developing countries is hamhanded and artificial,"" said Paul Bledsoe, a former energy and climate aide to former US president Bill Clinton. Romania vs Saudi One European Union source said it was unfair that a nation like Romania, ranked 52 in per capita wealth this year and with a GDP 8 times its size in 1992, has to pay when Saudi Arabia, ranked ninth, one notch below the United States, does not. Not a chance, say many of those who have climbed up the rich list since 1992. ""Let me be very clear about it: Climate finance is a pure role for the annex one countries,” said Energy Minister Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, referring to the countries on the rich list. The UAE is now ranked as the world’s fifth-richest nation on a per capita basis by the World Bank. ""We would like to see developed countries fulfil their pledges to provide funds and to support the various mechanisms for tech transfer, adaptation and capacity building. All of this has been agreed over the past few years."" Seven of the 10 richest countries measured in GDP per capita identified by the World Bank are considered developing countries in the United Nations climate negotiations and would not have an obligation to provide climate aid to poorer countries. Negotiators from 195 countries are trying to agree an accord in Paris to slow climate change by steering the global economy away from its ever-growing reliance on fossil fuels. They have until Friday to come up with an accord. The negotiators are wrestling with how to revise the issue of ""differentiation"" between rich and poor countries, which not only hampers discussions around climate finance but other aspects of a potential deal. While the UAE and China, among others, have made voluntary contributions toward financing cleaner energy in some of the world's poorer nations, they reject the idea of being required to contribute toward the $100 billion goal. The UAE through its renewable energy assistance program has financed renewable energy projects from solar in Fiji and Afghanistan to a mini hydroelectric project in Argentina, Al Jaber says.",0
" Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore said on Sunday he was optimistic that a growing ""people-power"" movement would push the world's leaders to take action to stop global warming. The former US vice president likened the campaign to the ban-the-bomb movement of past decades, and urged leaders at a UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to issue a mandate for a strong treaty to curb greenhouse gases. Gore, who shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for raising awareness and advancing climate science, will receive the prize in Oslo on Monday with the IPCC's chairman Rajendra Pachauri. The prize was announced in October. ""I have one reason for being optimistic, and that is that I see throughout my own country, the United States of America, and throughout the world the rising of the world's first people-power movement on a global basis,"" he said. Gore pointed to an international grassroots nuclear-freeze movement which helped push US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign arms controls deals in the late 1980s, and said the climate campaign was even broader. Gore and Pachauri will travel from Oslo to Bali where governments are meeting to try to launch negotiations towards an environmental treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012. ""It is my great hope that the meeting in Bali will result in a strong mandate empowering the world to move forward quickly to a meaningful treaty,"" Gore said. CIVILISATION THREAT Gore, whose Oscar-winning documentary ""An Inconvenient Truth"" called for immediate action on the environment, urged for curbs on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for global warming. ""The engines of our great global civilisation are now pouring 70 million tonnes of global warming pollution into (the atmosphere) every single day. It is having the consequences long predicted by the scientific community,"" he said. ""It is now abundantly clear that we cannot continue this process,"" he said. Pachauri, seated next to Gore at Oslo's Nobel Institute under ceilings adorned with white peace doves, urged world leaders to consider tough steps to tackle global warming. ""If we were to carry out this stringent mitigation, one of the scenarios that we have assessed clearly shows that we have a window of nearly seven years,"" Pachauri said. ""That means by 2015 we will have to see that emissions of greenhouse gases peak no later than that year and start declining thereafter."" ""The time for doubting the science is over. What we need now is action,"" said Pachauri, an Indian who is head of a body of around 2,500 climate scientists from more than 130 nations. Referring to US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and said ""Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,"" Gore said: ""In the same way, CO2 increases anywhere are a threat to the future of civilisation everywhere.""",0
"“Iraq is between friends who are 5,000 miles away from us and a neighbour we’ve had for 5,000 years,” Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said in a New Year’s Day telephone call with Trump, according to a close adviser, Abdul Hussain al-Hunain. “We cannot change geography and we cannot change history, and this is the reality in Iraq.” Iraq is caught in a vise. Many Iraqis were furious that the United States violated their country's sovereignty by carrying out airstrikes on Iraqi soil. A spate of strikes in December killed at least two dozen members of a pro-Iranian Iraqi military unit, provoking the assault on the US Embassy. A separate strike last week killed Iran’s top military commander, the deputy chief of a coalition of Iraqi militias and eight other people, leading to a vote by Iraq’s Parliament to expel US forces from the country and a counterstrike by Iran on two US military posts in Iraq early Wednesday. But acceding to the political pressure to rid the country of US troops would be a “disaster” for Iraq, militarily and economically, a senior Iraqi official said. The main mission of the roughly 5,200 US troops stationed at a handful of bases around Iraq is to help the country fight the Islamic State group. If they leave, the official said, it would not only hamper that battle but also have a host of knock-on effects, from the departure of troops from other coalition countries to dire financial hardship if, as Trump has threatened, the United States imposed economic sanctions. 
 
 Mourners, some standing on the flags of Israel and the United States, gather for the funeral of the funeral ceremony of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a commander in the Popular Mobilization Forces, at a mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020. He appears on the banner in the background together with Iranian Maj Qasem Soleimani, top. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times) 

“Yes, there is big pressure from our people to have the troops leave,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. “But we can bear this big pressure much better than we can bear the departure of the Americans.”  Mourners, some standing on the flags of Israel and the United States, gather for the funeral of the funeral ceremony of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a commander in the Popular Mobilization Forces, at a mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020. He appears on the banner in the background together with Iranian Maj Qasem Soleimani, top. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)  For now, however, Abdul-Mahdi seems to be moving ahead with plans to implement Parliament’s will. On Friday, he said that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to send a delegation from the United States to discuss steps for withdrawal. Pompeo fired back that the United States would do no such thing, despite the military’s frequent refrain that it is a guest of the Iraqi government and will comply with its host’s demands. “We are happy to continue the conversation with the Iraqis about what the right structure is,” he said at a news conference Friday. But the US mission in Iraq is to train Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State, he said, and “we’re going to continue that mission.” After the Iraqi Parliament vote Sunday, Trump threatened to impose “very big sanctions” on Iraq if it ousted US forces — “sanctions like they’ve never seen before.” He also said that Iraq would have to reimburse the United States for billions of dollars it had invested in a major air base there. But for many Iraqis, booting out the Americans was long overdue. Although many remain grateful that the United States ousted longtime dictator Saddam Hussein and fought alongside Iraqi forces to drive out the Islamic State, they are still pained by US military mistakes and decisions, including massive civilian casualties during the war that followed the US invasion and the humiliating abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The recent US airstrikes killed Iranian proxy fighters who were also members of the Iraqi security forces — and considered heroes by many Iraqis for their role in helping fight the Islamic State. The final straw appears to have been the US drone strike last week that killed the Iranian military leader, Gen Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, the armed groups that have fought against the Islamic State. 
 
 Graffiti on the walls surrounding the US Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, Jan 9, 2020. As US-Iran tensions flare, Iraq is caught in the middle. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times) 

“We are in a state of enthusiasm in Iraq,” al-Hunain said. “The process of the US withdrawal reclaims a part of Iraq’s dignity after the airstrikes and violations of Iraqi sovereignty.”  Graffiti on the walls surrounding the US Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, Jan 9, 2020. As US-Iran tensions flare, Iraq is caught in the middle. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)  The feeling is especially strong among Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority in Iraq; many have ties to Iran’s Shiite theocracy. Iran has long sought the ouster of US troops, which it views as a threat on its border. But the unanimous vote in Parliament — taken in the heat of the moment, with no consideration of the potential consequences and costs to the country — suggests more unity than may be the case. Only 170 out of 328 members voted, with most Sunni Muslim and Kurdish members refusing to attend. One of the few Sunni members who did attend the session, Ahmed al-Jarba, raised a red flag, saying that the departure of US troops might benefit Iran. After the Americans leave, he asked, “Are our neighbors our friends or our masters?” referring to Iran. “Are we going to hand the country’s wealth and decisions into the hands of neighboring countries?” Al-Hunain, the senior adviser to the prime minister, said that Abdul-Mahdi’s hope was that if the US forces left, Iran would no longer have security concerns about them and would leave Iraq alone. Senior Iraqi government officials, diplomats and scholars laid out the opposite scenario: Iraq, they said, could be forced into the arms of Iran, deprived of US dollars, and isolated from the West. As worrying — even for Iran — is the risk that the Islamic State might return if there are no Americans to help fight it. The Sunni extremist group no longer controls territory in Iraq and is much diminished, but it still launches near-daily attacks. A second senior Iraqi official and a senior Western diplomat said that if the Americans left, so would European and other coalition forces because they depend on US logistical and technical support. The US hospital at the Baghdad International Airport, for instance, treats the personnel of all 30 countries in the international coalition. The economic sanctions that Trump threatened would be intended not only to punish Iraq but also to effectively extend the administration’s pressure campaign against Iran. The two countries’ economies are closely entwined. Iraq would risk being cut off from its main source of dollars because its account at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York could be frozen. Iraq deposits the proceeds of its oil sales there, withdrawing them to pay government salaries and contracts. The United States could also end the waivers that allow Iraq to buy Iranian gas to fuel its electricity generators in the south, which supply at least 35% of the country’s power. Iraq could seek another source, but it could be difficult to find one on short notice. The other option — making do with less electricity — could spawn unrest in the south as soon as the weather heats up, as electrical shortages did in 2018. American and other foreign companies might reduce or suspend operations if they become concerned about safety. A number of American contractors left in the days after Soleimani’s death because they wanted to stay out of the line of fire. So far, Abdul-Mahdi appears willing to face those potential consequences. If he harbors any thoughts of compromise, he has kept them to himself, perhaps wary of the anti-American political climate. “It looks like the decision making and opinion in the prime minister’s office is turning eastward,” a senior Iraqi official said. “They are almost in denial about what a drastic path they are going down.” The problem, said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group, is that no one in the government is seriously considering possible compromises. “The Iraqis don’t want either the United States or Iran, but if they have to have one, they would rather have both because they balance each other out,” he said. “The US is a counterweight to Iran.” There are a few glimmers of potential ways out. Abdul-Mahdi’s adviser, al-Hunain, said that while the US forces are not welcome now, the government does want other international forces to stay. Talks with other coalition countries could open the door to keeping at least some Americans, those arguably needed to sustain the coalition and help fight the Islamic State. The Europeans, for their part, would like to preserve the ability to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, fearing that any relaxing of pressure would allow the group to reconstitute. A senior Western diplomat said the British and French were working to outline an alternative mission for the international forces relying on a smaller number of troops focused on ensuring that “the gains made against ISIS are not lost.” Perhaps the most promising sign that Abdul-Mahdi might be open to compromise was his request for a briefing paper from Iraq’s National Security Council on the options for proceeding with the parliamentary mandate. Abdul-Mahdi is an economist and has served as finance minister, a background that gives him an understanding of the price of economic isolation even if he now seems more swayed by political concerns. The council provided three options, according to a senior official who works closely with the council: The first was to require US troops to leave as quickly as possible, an approach that could at least deter Iranian-backed armed groups from attacking them. The second option was a negotiated withdrawal, which would slow the drawdown and potentially allow the fight against the Islamic State to go on in some places even as troops were withdrawing from others. The third was a renegotiation of the agreement with the US-led coalition that might allow for some troops to stay, which would open the door to having other international forces stay as well. The National Security Council recommended Option 3. © 2020 The New York Times Company",1
"In an interview with CNBC, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the Trump administration will make an announcement on fuel efficiency standards for cars ""very soon,"" stressing that he and President Donald Trump believe current standards were rushed through. Pruitt, 48, is a climate change denier who sued the agency he now leads more than a dozen times as Oklahoma's attorney general. He said he was not convinced that carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal is the main cause of climate change, a conclusion widely embraced by scientists. ""I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact,"" he told CNBC. ""So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,"" Pruitt said. ""But we don’t know that yet, we need to continue to debate, continue the review and analysis.” Trump campaigned on a promise to roll back environmental regulations ushered in by former President Barack Obama, including those aimed at combating climate change. He framed his stand as aimed at boosting U.S. businesses, including the oil and gas drilling and coal mining industries. ""We can be pro-growth, pro-jobs and pro-environment,"" Pruitt said Wednesday afternoon in a Houston speech at CERAWeek, the world's largest gathering of energy executives. Scientists immediately criticized Pruitt's statement, saying it ignores a large body of evidence collected over decades that shows fossil fuel burning as the main factor in climate change. ""We can’t afford to reject this clear and compelling scientific evidence when we make public policy. Embracing ignorance is not an option,"" Ben Santer, climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a statement. The Supreme Court unleashed a fury of regulation and litigation when it ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are an air pollutant that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Two years later, the EPA declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants. Pruitt said the Supreme Court's decision should not have been viewed as permission for the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. ""Decisions were made at the executive branch level that didn't respect the rule of law,"" Pruitt said in his Houston speech. Regulating CO2 Pruitt has previously said the EPA should not regulate CO2 without a law passed by Congress authorizing it to do so. The Republican-controlled Congress could potentially issue a strong signal to the EPA that carbon dioxide should not be regulated by the agency, a move that would undermine many Obama-era rules aimed at curbing emissions. ""Administrator Pruitt is correct, the Congress has never explicitly given the EPA the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the committee has no plans to do so,"" said Mike Danylak, spokesman for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the panel that oversees the EPA. When asked at his confirmation hearing in January whether he would uphold the EPA endangerment finding, Pruitt said it was the ""law of the land"" and he was obliged to uphold it for now. Pruitt declined to respond to a question from a reporter after his Houston speech on whether he would now seek to overturn the endangerment finding. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt and another dozen attorney generals unsuccessfully challenged the endangerment finding in a federal appeals court. ""The mask is off. After obscuring his true views during his Senate confirmation hearings, Scott Pruitt has outed himself as a pure climate denier,"" said David Doniger, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The new EPA chief said he was committed to ensuring thorough processes for environmental rules and regulations to reduce ""regulatory uncertainty."" Pruitt added that he shared Trump's view that the global climate accord agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015 was a ""bad deal."" Trump promised during his campaign for the White House to pull the United States out of the accord, but has since been mostly quiet on the issue.",0
"The decline underscores the catastrophic consequences of climate change while also offering some hope that some coral reefs can be saved if humans move quickly to rein in greenhouse gases. “Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong,” said David Obura, one of the report’s editors and chair of the coral specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The 14 percent decline, he said, was cause for deep concern. “In finance, we worry about half-percent declines and half-percent changes in employment and interest rates.” Especially alarming, the report’s editors said, is the trajectory. The first global bleaching event occurred in 1998, but many reefs bounced back. That no longer appears to be the case. “Since 2009, it’s a constant decline at the global level,” said Serge Planes, a research scientist at the Center for Island Research and Observatory of the Environment in Moorea, French Polynesia, who also edited the report. Although coral reefs cover a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, they provide outsized benefits to people. Their fish supply a critical protein source to 1 billion people. Their limestone branches protect coasts from storms. Their beauty supports billions of dollars in tourism. Collectively, they support an estimated $2.7 trillion per year in goods and services, according to the report, which was issued by the International Coral Reef Initiative, a partnership of countries and organisations that works to protect the world’s coral reefs. Perhaps 900 species of coral exist, and the researchers noted that some appear more resilient to the heat and acidification that accompany climate change. Unfortunately, those tend to be slower-growing and not the more familiar, reef-building varieties that support the richest biodiversity. Terry Hughes, who directs a centre for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and who was not involved with the analysis, also cautioned that the vast data underlying it, collected by more than 300 scientists in 73 countries, may skew toward healthier reefs. “Researchers and monitoring programs often abandon sites that become degraded, or don’t establish new studies there, because nobody wants to study a reef that is covered in silt and algae instead of corals,” Hughes said. Still, he and the report both emphasised that corals could recover or regenerate if the world limited global warming. “Many of the world’s coral reefs remain resilient and can recover if conditions permit,” the report said. Although tackling climate change is the most important factor in saving coral reefs, scientists said, reducing pollution is also critical. Corals need to be as healthy as possible to survive the warming temperatures that have already been locked in. Harmful pollution often includes human sewage and agricultural runoff that can cause algae blooms, as well as heavy metals or other chemicals from manufacturing. Destructive fishing practices also harm reefs. The report comes just before world leaders convene next week to discuss a new global agreement on biodiversity. While some are pushing to protect the most pristine reefs, Obura said this approach would not suffice. “People are so dependent on reefs around the world, we need to focus a lot of effort on the mediocre reefs, or all the other reefs, as well,” Obura said. “We need to keep them functioning so that people’s livelihoods can continue.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",0
"It strongly criticised Blair on a range of issues, saying the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction had been over-hyped and the planning for the aftermath of war had been inadequate. Blair responded that he had taken the decision to go to war ""in good faith"", that he still believed it was better to remove Saddam, and that he did not see that action as the cause of terrorism today, in the Middle East or elsewhere. 
 
 

 
 

""The intelligence assessments made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong. The aftermath turned out to be more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined,"" the former prime minister, looking gaunt and strained, told reporters. ""For all of this, I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you will ever know."" The only Labour prime minister to win three general elections, Blair was in office for 10 years until 2007 and was hugely popular in his heyday, but Iraq has severely tarnished his reputation and legacy. The inquiry report, about three times the length of the Bible, stopped short of saying the war was illegal, a stance that is certain to disappoint Blair's many critics. ""We have, however, concluded that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for military action were far from satisfactory,"" said John Chilcot, the inquiry's chairman, in a speech presenting his findings. 
 
 

 
 

Blair said the report should exonerate him from accusations of lying, which have been made by relatives of some of the 179 British soldiers who died in the conflict. ""The report should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit,"" he said in a statement. ""Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein; I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country."" 'Shambolic episode' Relatives of some of the British soldiers who died in Iraq said they would study the report to examine if there was a legal case to pursue against those responsible. ""We all know who the key players are ... who took part in this most shambolic episode in British politics. We would like to see all those key players face some form of accountability,"" said Reg Keys, whose son, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, was one of those killed. ""If that's through the legal channels, then we will look at that and see what's viable and appropriate. It has been passed over to lawyers."" 
 
 

 
 

The report shed light on what happened between Blair and Bush in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, an interaction that has long been the subject of speculation about secret deals and pledges. In a memo dated Jul 28, 2002, eight months before the invasion, Blair told Bush: ""I will be with you, whatever. But this is the moment to assess bluntly the difficulties."" ""The planning on this and the strategy are the toughest yet. This is not Kosovo. This is not Afghanistan. It is not even the Gulf War."" Chilcot said Blair had sought to influence Bush's decisions, offering Britain's support while suggesting possible adjustments to the US position. But the inquiry chairman added that Blair had over-estimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq. His report also said there was no imminent threat from Saddam at the time of the invasion in March 2003, and the chaos in Iraq and the region which followed should have been foreseen. 
 
 

 
 

By 2009 at least 150,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, had died, and more than a million had been displaced. The report said Britain had joined the invasion without exhausting peaceful options and that it had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council by doing so. Flawed intelligence ""It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged and they should have been,"" Chilcot said. He also said that Blair's government's judgments about the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were ""presented with unjustified certainty"". No such weapons were discovered after the war. Chilcot said Blair changed his case for war from focusing on Iraq's alleged ""vast stocks"" of illegal weapons to Saddam having the intent to obtain such weapons and being in breach of UN resolutions. ""That was not, however, the explanation for military action he had given before the conflict,"" Chilcot said.                 Iraq remains in chaos to this day. Islamic State controls large areas of the country and 250 people died on Saturday in Baghdad's worst car bombing since the US-led coalition toppled Saddam. The inquiry's purpose was for the British government to learn lessons from the invasion and occupation that followed. ""We cannot turn the clock back but we can ensure that lessons are learned and acted on,"" Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament in a statement on the inquiry. 
 
 

""It is crucial to good decision-making that a prime minister establishes a climate in which it's safe for officials and other experts to challenge existing policy and question the views of ministers and the prime minister without fear or favour."" Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the Labour Party and a fervent pacifist, told parliament that the war was an act of aggression based on a false pretext that had fuelled and spread terrorism across the Middle East.​      ",1
"PHOENIX (Reuters) - The Obama administration faced mounting pressure on Sunday to overhaul immigration policy, as prominent Hispanic politicians and street protesters decried a new Arizona law as a violation of civil rights. Immigration reform is a bitterly contested political issue in the United States but a top priority for Hispanics, who are the largest minority in the nation and an important power base for President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party. Their anger flared on Friday when Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill requiring police to determine whether people are in the country legally and to question them if there is suspicion they're not. It also forces immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times US Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Immigration Task Force, was among those who planned to attend a protest rally at the state capitol buildings in Phoenix on Sunday. ""I am going there to let the people of Arizona know that they are not alone in fighting against bigotry and hatred,"" the Illinois Democrat said in a statement, adding that the new law was a ""serious civil rights catastrophe that Republicans in Arizona are unleashing on immigrants."" The law has raised fears that Hispanics will be racially profiled and police will actively hunt down illegal immigrants, who are estimated to number about 10.8 million in the nation and are the backbone of the shadow economy. It is also expected to spark a legal challenge and has become a hot issue in the run-up to the mid-term congressional elections in November, when Democrats will defend their majorities in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Republicans, who made some gains with Hispanic voters under former President George W. Bush, are seen as particularly vulnerable on the immigration issue, which had until recently been eclipsed by the fight over healthcare and climate change. Obama, who easily carried the Hispanic vote in the 2008 presidential election, called the law a ""misguided"" effort that showed the need for an immigration overhaul at the federal level. Democratic leaders signaled last week they want to pass an immigration bill this year that would provide a path for some 11 million people in the United States illegally -- many of them Hispanics -- to gain citizenship. The move angered Republicans, including US Senator Lindsey Graham who withdrew from an effort to fashion a compromise climate change bill, one of Obama's main domestic priorities. Hispanics and other groups have pushed for the immigration legislation, which would also increase border security and reform rules for temporary workers in the United States, which is important to the business community. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey told CNN's ""State of the Nation"" program on Sunday that Hispanics might stay away from the polls in November without a serious effort by Obama to deal with immigration this year. ""They see it as a civil rights issue of their time,"" he said, referring to the Latino community. BORDER SECURITY The protest in Phoenix drew a few thousand people, some toting US flags and passing out T-shirts emblazoned with ""Legalize Arizona."" Ramon Garcia, an activist who traveled from Tucson to take part in the rally said, ""I feel very strongly that the law is extremely unconstitutional and racist, and it violates both human and civil rights."" Republicans in Arizona, which has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants, pushed for the new law amid growing worries over border security. The state shares a busy border with Mexico, where violence linked to drug cartels has soared. Concerns spiked last month after a prominent cattleman was shot dead on his ranch in southeast Arizona. Police followed tracks from the scene of the shooting to the Mexico border but made no arrests. Arizona's US Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain have announced a ten-point plan to boost border security, including sending the National Guard to help secure it, erecting fences and increasing funds for policing. McCain, who lost the 2008 election to Obama, faces a tough primary challenge in his re-election bid from conservative J D Hayworth this year. Hayworth has called for tough enforcement of illegal immigration and tight security of the border. Meanwhile at the state level, immigrant rights groups are promising to boost voter registration among Arizonans opposed to the law in a bid to defeat Brewer in November. ""Governor Brewer has to be held responsible for signing what is now an international shame on the state of Arizona,"" said Jennifer Allen, executive-director of Border Action Network, an immigrant rights group. Brewer's office said it had no comment on Sunday.",0
" European Union leaders on Friday named former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a past critic of Turkey's EU membership bid, to head a ""reflection group"" to study the long-term future of the 27-nation bloc. The panel was the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a vehement opponent of Turkish accession, who called in August for the EU to create a group of ""wise people"" to consider Europe's final borders. The mandate has since been changed to look at the future of the region in 2020-2030, focusing mostly on the economic challenges of globalisation. Sarkozy said on Friday the group would study the issue of EU borders, not specifically Turkey. But Sarkozy appeared to have scored a point by stealth with the choice of Gonzalez, a socialist who governed Spain from 1982 to 1996. Spanish newspapers quoted the ex-premier in May 2004 as telling a Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona there were limits to the enlargement of Europe, which should ""stop at the borders of Turkey"" because of social and cultural differences. Asked about those comments, Gonzalez's spokesman Joaquin Tagar told Reuters in Madrid on Friday: ""He was just expressing a theoretical opinion, not taking a definite position on the matter. He was just pointing out the difference between European and Turkish culture."" Pressed to say what Gonzalez's position on Turkey's candidacy was now, he said: ""What he has been saying in recent times is that if the European Union has a commitment to Turkey, it should honour it."" WHERE DOES EUROPE END? The reflection group, which will number no more than nine people, is mandated to look at ""the stability and prosperity of the Union and of the wider region,"" touching on the sensitive issue of EU enlargement. The formulation deliberately left open whether Turkey would be part of the Union or the wider region in 2020-2030. ""We cannot talk about the European project without raising the question of its territory,"" a French diplomat said. The panel will also look at issues such as energy, climate change and justice matters. It is due to report its findings to EU leaders in June 2010. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Jorma Ollila, the chairman of mobile phone giant Nokia , were named as the two vice-chairs of the panel. Some politicians were critical of the choice of a leader from the 1980s to study the EU's future. ""If you ever wanted to see Jurassic Park in reality, then this appointment (of Gonzalez) is just that,"" said Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrat political group in the European Parliament. ""It's not about age, but all three of the panel so far represent old Europe."" But Spain voiced delight at the choice of Gonzalez, who has been canvassed for top European jobs but never received one. ""It's a very happy day for the Spanish people, for Spain, and for Europe,"" Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters.",0
" TATA Steel's European unit Corus said it will cut about 1,500 jobs in Britain as part of a restructuring of its loss-making long products unit, as it faces steep rises in energy and environmental costs. Like others in the industry, Tata Steel has faced a margin squeeze since last year as the price of raw materials increases while demand from sectors like construction, key clients for long products like beams, remains muted. Tata Steel said refocusing towards high-value markets would involve closing or mothballing parts of its Scunthorpe plant, reducing capacity there by a quarter. ""No company can sustain this level of losses,"" Karl-Ulrich Koehler, Chief Executive of Tata Steel's European operations, said, adding the unit had made ""significant losses"" over the last 12 months. Tata Steel reports full year results next week. He said the start to 2010 had been encouraging, prompting the company to bring back mothballed capacity at Scunthorpe, but demand failed to recover as fast as expected. ""The continuing weakness in market conditions is one of the main reasons why we are setting out on this difficult course of action. Another is the regulatory outlook,"" he added. ""EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry."" Though not due until 2013, planned changes to the European Union's emissions trading system are already unsettling the sector, with trade body Eurofer planning a legal challenge to EU rules and some in the sector warning heavy industry could be forced out of Europe. Koehler added there was also uncertainty over further carbon cost increases from the government. In March, Britain announced the introduction of a fixed carbon price from April 1, 2013 of 16 pounds per tonne, rising to 30 pounds per tonne by 2020. ENERGY PRICES HIT CORUS Rising energy prices, driven by a 20 percent rise in oil prices since the start of the year, were another reason for Friday's cutbacks. Industrial companies such as Corus make up a large share of energy consumers and their exposure to rising bills is a major concern, according to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME). ""Manufacturers are worried, and the government needs to make sure it doesn't force energy intensive industries out of the UK and into countries with more lax climate change targets,"" said IME President John Wood. The government has pledged to help energy intensive industries to deal with rising costs. Tata Steel's European operations account for two thirds of its global capacity of about 30 million tonnes, while the booming Indian operations contribute a quarter. Tata Steel also has units in Thailand and Singapore. Worldwide, Tata Steel employs 80,000 people.",0
"The frustrations span the spectrum from those of the party’s
liberal wing, which feels deflated by the failure to enact a bold agenda, to
the concerns of moderates, who are worried about losing suburban swing voters
and had believed Democratic victories would usher a return to normalcy after
last year’s upheaval. Democrats already anticipated a difficult midterm climate,
given that the party in power historically loses seats during a president’s
first term. But the party’s struggle to act on its biggest legislative
priorities has rattled lawmakers and strategists, who fear their candidates
will be left combating the perception that Democrats failed to deliver on
President Joe Biden’s central campaign promise of rebooting a broken
Washington. “I think millions of Americans have become very demoralised
— they’re asking, what do the Democrats stand for?” said Sen. Bernie Sanders,
the Vermont independent in charge of the Senate Budget Committee. In a lengthy
interview, he added, “Clearly, the current strategy is failing, and we need a
major course correction.” Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from a blue-collar Ohio district
who is running for the state’s open Senate seat, said his party isn’t
addressing voter anxieties about school closures, the pandemic and economic
security. He faulted the Biden administration, not just for failing to pass its
domestic agenda but also for a lack of clear public health guidance around
issues such as masking and testing. “It seems like the Democrats can’t get out of their own
way,” he said. “The Democrats have got to do a better job of being clear on what
they’re trying to do.” The complaints capped one of the worst weeks of the Biden
presidency, with the White House facing the looming failure of voting rights
legislation, the defeat of their vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers
at the Supreme Court, inflation rising to a 40-year high and friction with
Russia over aggression toward Ukraine. Meanwhile, Biden’s top domestic priority
— a sprawling $2.2 trillion spending, climate and tax policy plan — remains
stalled, not just because of Republicans but also opposition from a centrist
Democrat. “I’m sure they’re frustrated — I am,” said Sen. Dick Durbin
of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, when asked this week about the
chamber’s inability to act on Biden’s agenda. Discussing the impact on voters
before the midterm elections, he added, “It depends on who they blame for it.” The end of the week provided another painful marker for
Democrats: Friday was the first time since July that millions of US families
with children did not receive a monthly child benefit, a payment established as
part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan that Democrats muscled through
in March without any Republican support. Plans to extend the expiration date for the payments, which
helped keep millions of children out of poverty, were stymied with the collapse
of negotiations over the sprawling domestic policy plan. And additional
pandemic-related provisions will expire before the end of the year without
congressional action. “That’s just about as straightforward as it gets,” said
Ryan. “If the Democrats can’t get on with a tax cut for working families, what
are we for?” In recent days, Biden has faced a wave of rising anger from
traditional party supporters. Members of some civil rights groups boycotted his
voting rights speech in Atlanta to express their disappointment with his push
on the issue, while others, including Stacey Abrams, who is running for
governor in Georgia, were noticeably absent. Biden vowed to make a new forceful
push for voting right protections, only to see it fizzle the next day. And last week, six of Biden’s former public health advisers
went public with their criticisms of his handling of the pandemic, calling on
the White House to adopt a strategy geared to the “new normal” of living with
the virus indefinitely. Others have called for the firing of Jeffrey Zients,
who leads the White House pandemic response team. “There does not seem to be an appreciation for the urgency
of the moment,” said Tré Easton, a senior adviser for Battle Born Collective, a
progressive group that is pushing for overturning the filibuster to enable
Democrats to pass a series of their priorities. “It’s sort of, ‘OK, what comes
next?’ Is there something that’s going to happen where voters can say, yes, my
life is appreciatively more stable than it was two years ago.”White House
officials and Democrats insist that their agenda is far from dead and that
discussions continue with key lawmakers to pass the bulk of Biden’s domestic plans.
Talks over an omnibus package to keep the government open beyond Feb. 18 have
quietly resumed, and states are beginning to receive funds from the $1 trillion
infrastructure law. “I guess the truth is an agenda doesn’t wrap up in one
year,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. While there’s widespread agreement around the electoral
peril that the party faces, there’s little consensus over who, exactly, is to
blame. Liberals have been particularly scathing in their critique of two
centrist senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,
and their long-standing objections to undermining the Senate filibuster, as
well as Manchin’s decision to abruptly reject the $2.2 trillion spending plan
last month. For months, Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials have been
raising concerns about sinking support among crucial segments of the party’s
coalition — Black, female, young and Latino voters — ratings many worries could
drop further without action on issues like voting rights, climate change,
abortion rights and paid family leave. “In my view, we are not going to win the elections in 2022
unless our base is energised and ordinary people understand what we are
fighting for, and how we are different than the Republicans,” Sanders said.
“That’s not the case now.” But many in the party concede that the realities of their
narrow congressional majorities and united Republican opposition have blocked
their ability to pass much of their agenda. Some have faulted party leaders for
catering to progressives’ ambitions, without the votes to execute. “Leadership set out with a failed strategy, and while I
guess, maybe they can message that they tried, it actually isn’t going to yield
real laws,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Florida centrist, who is retiring but
has signalled aspirations for a future Senate run. Rep Cheri Bustos, a Democrat from rural Illinois, said
Democrats should consider less ambitious bills that could draw some Republican
support to give the party accomplishments it can claim in the midterm
elections. “We really kind of need to reset at this point,” said
Bustos, who is retiring from a district that swung to Donald Trump in 2020. “I
hope we focus on what we can get done and then focus like crazy on selling it.” Biden effectively staked his presidency on the belief that
voters would reward his party for steering the country out of a deadly pandemic
and into economic prosperity. But even after a year that produced record job
growth, widely available vaccines and stock market highs, Biden has not begun
to deliver a message of success nor focused on promoting his legislative
victories. Many Democrats say they need to do more to sell their
accomplishments or risk watching the midterms go the way of the off-year
elections, when many in the party were surprised by the intensity of the
backlash against them in races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York. “We need to get into the business of promotion and selling
and out of the business of moaning and groaning,” said Bradley Beychok,
president of American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic group. Others say that as president, Biden has fallen out of step
with many voters by focusing on issues like climate change and voting rights.
While crucial for the country, those topics aren’t topping the list of concerns
for many voters still trying to navigate the uncertainties of a pandemic
stretching into a third year. “The administration is focused on things that are important
but not particularly salient to voters and sometimes as president you have to
do that,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic
think tank. “Now, we need to begin to move back to talking about the things
that people do care about."" © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"At least 62 people have died and more than 70,000 have become homeless as Peru's rainy season has delivered 10 times as much rainfall than usual, authorities said Friday. About half of Peru has been declared in emergency to expedite resources to the hardest hit areas, mostly in the north where rainfall has broken records in several districts, said Prime Minister Fernando Zavala. Peru is bracing itself for another month of flooding. A local El Nino phenomenon, the warming of surface sea temperatures in the Pacific, will likely continue along Peru's northern coast at least through April, said Dimitri Gutierrez, a scientist with Peru's El Nino committee. Local El Ninos in Peru tend to be followed by the global El Nino phenomenon, which can trigger flooding and droughts in different countries, said Gutierrez. The U.S. weather agency has put the chances of an El Nino developing in the second half of 2017 at 50-55 percent. While precipitation in Peru has not exceeded the powerful El Nino of 1998, more rain is falling in shorter periods of time - rapidly filling streets and rivers, said Jorge Chavez, a general tasked with coordinating the government's response. ""We've never seen anything like this before,"" said Chavez. ""From one moment to the next, sea temperatures rose and winds that keep precipitation from reaching land subsided."" Some scientists have said climate change will make El Ninos more frequent and intense. In Peru, apocalyptic scenes recorded on cellphones and shared on social media have broadened the sense of chaos. A woman caked in mud pulled herself from under a debris-filled river earlier this week after a mudslide rushed through a valley where she was tending to crops. Bridges have collapsed as rivers have breached their banks, and cows and pigs have turned up on beaches after being carried away by rivers. ""There's no need to panic, the government knows what it's doing,"" President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said in a televised event, urging people to stay clear of rivers. In Lima, the capital, classes have been suspended and running water has been restricted after treatment systems were clogged - prompting a rush on bottled water that produced shortages at some supermarkets. The vast majority of people affected by the extreme weather are poor, including many who built makeshift homes on floodplains that had been dry for 20 years, said Chavez. ""There's no electricity, no drinking water...no transit because streets are flooded,"" said Valentin Fernandez, mayor of the town Nuevo Chimbote. Chavez said Peru must rethink its infrastructure to prepare for the potential ""tropicalization"" of the northern desert coast, which some climate models have forecast as temperatures rise. ""We need more and better bridges, we need highways and cities with drainage systems,"" said Chavez. ""We can't count on nature being predictable.""",0
" About 110 nations including all major greenhouse gas emitters led by China and the United States back the non-binding Copenhagen Accord for combating climate change, according to a first formal UN list on Wednesday. The list, helping end weeks of uncertainty about support for the deal, was issued by the UN Climate Change Secretariat three months after the pact was agreed at an acrimonious summit in the Danish capital. The accord, falling short of a binding treaty sought by many nations, sets a goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) but does not spell out what each nation has to do.",0
" Nearly 200 nations agreed on Saturday to a sweeping plan to stem the loss of species by setting new 2020 targets to ensure greater protection of nature and enshrine the benefits it gives mankind. Environment ministers from around the globe also agreed on rules for sharing the benefits from genetic resources from nature between governments and companies, a trade and intellectual property issue that could be worth billions of dollars in new funds for developing nations. Agreement on parts of the deal has taken years of at times heated negotiations, and talks in the Japanese city of Nagoya were deadlocked until the early hours of Saturday after two weeks of talks. Delegates agreed goals to protect oceans, forests and rivers as the world faces the worst extinction rate since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago. They also agreed to take steps to put a price on the value of benefits such as clean water from watersheds and coastal protection by mangroves by including such ""natural capital"" into national accounts. Services provided by nature to economies were worth trillions of dollars a year, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said in a statement, adding businesses from banks to miners were key in halting rapid loss of ecosystems. ""These goals recognize and value the irreplaceable benefits that nature provides to people in the form of food, fuel, fiber, fodder and freshwater that everyone depends on,"" Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations for US-based The Nature Conservancy, told Reuters. Delegates and greens said the outcome would send a positive signal to troubled UN climate negotiations that have been become bogged down by a split between rich and poor nations over how to share the burden in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. UN climate talks resume in Mexico in a month. ""TORTUOUS NEGOTIATIONS"" ""We're delighted there's been a successful outcome to these long and tortuous negotiations and I think it shows that these multilateral negotiations can deliver a good result,"" said Peter Cochrane, head of Australia's delegation in Nagoya. Delegates agreed to a 20-point strategic plan to protect fish stocks, fight the loss and degradation of natural habitats and to conserve larger land and marine areas. They also set a broader 2020 ""mission"" to take urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity. Nations agreed to protect 17 percent of land and inland waters and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2020. Currently, 13 percent of land and 1 percent of oceans are protected for conservation. The third part of the deal, the Nagoya Protocol on genetic resources, has taken nearly 20 years to agree and sets rules governing how nations manage and share benefits derived from forests and seas to create new drugs, crops or cosmetics. The protocol could unlock billions of dollars for developing countries, where much of the world's natural riches remain. ""The protocol is really, really a victory,"" Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira told reporters. It will also mean changes for businesses. ""This isn't a boring protocol. It will regulate billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry,"" said Tove Ryding, policy adviser for biodiversity and climate change for Greenpeace. Karl Falkenberg, head of the European Commission's environment department, said it would also fight poverty. ""We finally have something that is going to give great results for the environment, for the poor people,"" who will be able to earn money in exchange for access to genetic materials, he said after the talks ended. Delegates and greens had feared the ill-feeling that pervaded climate negotiations after last December's acrimonious meeting in Copenhagen would derail the talks in Nagoya. ""There's been a mood of change. I think the failure of the Copenhagen meeting last year perhaps has meant a new realisation that we need to more flexible in negotiations,"" said Jane Smart, director of conservation policy for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.",0
"BEIJING, Sep 15, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - China's President Hu Jintao will present China's new plans for tackling global warming at a United Nations summit on climate change later this month, the country's senior negotiator said on Tuesday. ""He will make an important speech,"" Xie Zhenhua told reporters ahead of Hu's trip next week to the United Nations and the G20 summit of major rich and developing economies in Pittsburgh. Hu ""will announce the next policies, measures and actions that China is going to take,"" added Xie, who steers China's climate policy as vice director of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission. Xie said China will strengthen its policies and take on responsibilities in keeping with its level of development and practical capacities, but declined to give further details. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will host a special summit on September 22, to discuss climate change. The head of the UN's Environment Programme has warned that if world leaders do not spur on negotiations, talks to agree a new climate pact in Copenhagen in December risk failure. Xie reprised China's position that it is the responsibility of developed nations to lead the way in making big cuts to their own emissions and providing funding and technical support to developing nations to cope with climate change. But he said the world's top greenhouse gas polluter -- measured on a yearly basis -- was aware of the need for rapid action. Rich countries have urged China to offer a firm timetable for controlling and eventually reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. ""China has a deep appreciation of the importance and urgency of climate change,"" Xie told a briefing in the Chinese capital.",0
"The period of January to October 2014 is already among the warmest ever recorded, and a warm ending to the year could easily make it top, according to US and British data.Skeptics who doubt the necessity of a shift away from fossil fuels to stop the Earth's climate from heating up point out that world average temperatures have not risen much since 1998, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.
 
 

But the final ranking for 2014, due next year, may influence public and business perceptions about the severity of climate change. Almost 200 governments are due to agree a UN deal to combat global warming in Paris in December next year.""2014 is more likely than not to be the warmest year,"" Tim Osborn, a professor at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, told Reuters, saying manmade greenhouse gas emissions are tending to push up temperatures.He said there were many uncertainties about where 2014 would rank because of natural variations in temperatures late in the year. Also, a big volcanic eruption might spew out ash that dims sunshine, cooling the planet.The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) will publish a preliminary ranking for 2014 on Dec 3, during annual UN talks in Peru which will prepare the Paris accord.
 
 

Promises for action by China, the United States and the European Union have made a global deal more likely, but any agreement will probably be too weak to halt rising temperatures despite new scientific warnings of powerful storms, floods, desertification and rising sea levels.Of the WMO's three main data sources, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ranks January-October 2014 as the warmest such period on record, NASA as the second-warmest and the British Met Office and University of East Anglia as the third-warmest.
 
 

NOAA says 2014 is on track to be the warmest on record. The rankings differ partly because scientists use different estimates for places with few thermometers, such as the Arctic.""It probably is a bit premature to say 2014 will be the warmest year on record,"" said Michael Cabbage, spokesman for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.The British data place 2014 third, fractionally behind 2010 and 1998, which both cooled toward the end of the year.Despite a slowdown in the pace of warming since 1998, the WMO says 13 of the 14 warmest years on record have been in this century.      ",0
"As the UN food aid agency was rewarded for its efforts to fight hunger and improve conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, Gernot Laganda said the coronavirus shock had made clear aid cannot keep pace with multiplying threats. ""You won't get to zero hunger with humanitarian aid alone,"" said Laganda, head of climate and disaster risk reduction for the World Food Programme (WFP). ""You need two parallel lanes of work: responding to extreme events and helping governments build systems that can manage risks,"" he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. As COVID-19 has tested countries' ability to deal with stresses ""like never before"", growing knowledge of the gaps ""is equally relevant in managing the climate emergency"", he noted. Today, as hunger grows despite a global goal to eliminate it by 2030, WFP spends about 80% of its money responding to urgent crises in places from Afghanistan to East Africa, Laganda said. But as worsening extreme weather linked to climate change - and threats like the pandemic and conflict - push more people into hunger, the gap between what the agency can raise in donations and what it needs to spend is widening, he added. That is a problem likely to worsen as an economic downturn provoked by the pandemic tightens aid budgets around the globe. ""Even with the prize now, whether we can fill this gap is a question,"" Laganda said in a telephone interview. At the award announcement, Berit Reiss-Andersen, chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, called on the international community to adequately fund the food aid agency. ""This is an obligation, in our minds, of all states of the world, to ensure that people are not starving,"" she said. PREPARING FOR DISASTER To help close the funding gap, reduce suffering and get help to people quicker, WFP has invested in efforts to curb risks, through measures ranging from better early warning systems to insurance policies and social safety nets. In Bangladesh, hit this year by floods that covered a quarter of the country, early warning systems provided four-day notice of the coming deluge, WFP's Laganda said. That triggered ""anticipatory"" payouts - cash delivered via mobile phones through a social safety net programme - that gave 20,000 families resources to move their valuables out of harm's way. WFP, which helped set up the government systems through which it delivered the support, said experts had documented that each dollar of such spending can save $3 in humanitarian aid, as well as disruption and losses for families, Laganda said. Similarly, in drought-hit countries such as Zimbabwe and Mauritania, WFP is supporting insurance policies that provide quick payouts - four to six months faster than humanitarian aid usually arrives - when rains and crops fail, he said. Early assistance helps cash-short farmers avoid selling the oxen they need to replant fields next year or cutting down rain-regulating trees to sell as firewood - measures that can push them into a downward spiral, Laganda said. Reiss-Andersen of the Nobel Committee said tackling hunger means ""not only providing food - it's about creating sustainable communities where the food production ... can support (their) people"". ""If (lack of) food is the reason for war and conflict, creating food-secure communities also creates safer communities who are less prone to conflict,"" she said, as the global prize was announced on Friday. BREAKING HUNGER CYCLE Laganda noted one big problem is that people who become reliant on humanitarian aid - often after crops fail, jobs and remittances dry up and all their assets are sold - usually struggle to survive again without it. Programmes like providing food vouchers or cash for people who work planting trees, digging ponds or restoring degraded farmland often last only through the disaster period, he noted. To help break the cycle, humanitarian spending should be combined with development aid to tackle poverty and build resilience longer-term, he said. Laganda also warned that while wealthier countries have so far avoided the worst of the hunger, conflict and climate crises affecting the rest of the world, they are not immune from shocks, as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear. From US wildfires and unprecedented heat to a string of destructive hurricanes, climate pressures ""are knocking on everyone's door"", he said. Sara Pantuliano, head of the London-based Overseas Development Institute, said the Nobel award to WFP should reinforce ""the importance of looking at the longer-term impact of a number of crises - the pandemic being one, but also... climate change and other global pressures"". Giving the prize to a UN agency could be seen as a push-back against nationalistic responses to international threats, she said. ""Hopefully this is a moment that will focus minds to think how we need to reshape global cooperation,"" with an emphasis on broader alliances with business and civil society, she added. ""We cannot address global crises in isolation.""",0
" Rich nations sought to persuade China and India on Tuesday to agree to a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at a summit of major economies in Italy later this week. Environment ministers or senior officials from the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF) met in Rome, trying to end deadlock over a declaration that could be a step toward a new UN climate pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. ""Positions have not shifted,"" a delegate said of the talks, called at the last minute to help leaders agree a united front on climate change on Thursday in L'Aquila, Italy, during a Group of Eight summit. China and India have been opposed to a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 as part of a declaration by MEF nations, which account for 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. The G8 countries -- the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada -- adopted a ""vision"" of a 50 percent cut in global emissions by 2050 last year and want major developing nations to sign up too. But developing nations say the rich are to blame for most emissions from burning greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution and must set deep 2020 goals for cutting their own emissions before asking for help with 2050 goals. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also told a news conference that China was resisting progress on the climate. VANGUARD ""Europe wants to be in the vanguard, the Obama administration is in the same position, but there is strong resistance that I have encountered with the Chinese presidency,"" said Berlusconi, referring to a meeting on Monday. A June 30 MEF draft drawn up by the United States and Mexico said that: ""We support an aspirational global goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050, with developed countries reducing emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050."" China and Indian officials have said that poor nations need to be allowed to use more energy to end poverty. China has recently overtaken the United States as top world emitter and India is fourth behind Russia. If the deadlock persists, US President Barack Obama, who sees the MEF as a step toward a UN deal, would end the July 9 meeting with just a ""chair's summary"" rather than a statement agreed by all 17 MEF leaders. ""Only ambitious action by the G8 could break the deadlock in the negotiations,"" said Tobias Muenchmeyer of environmental group Greenpeace. He noted that China and India want rich nations to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 below 1990 levels and far higher climate investments. A separate climate draft for the G8, dated June 24, indicated progress toward setting a target of limiting a rise in world temperatures to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. The European Union views 2C as a threshold for ""dangerous"" climate changes such as ever more heatwaves, floods, droughts and extinctions. The United States, Russia, Canada and Japan have not signed up for such a target at the G8. The G8 draft said ""global emissions should peak by 2020 and then be substantially reduced to limit the average increases in global temperature to 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels."" ",0
"The inaugural Bangabandhu chair professor at Bangkok’s Asian Institute of Technology talked on multidimensionality of challenges for a fast developing country like Bangladesh in sustainable energy transition at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) in Dhaka on Wednesday. Senior and mid-level faculty members from all departments and centres of the university joined the interactive session presided over by ULAB Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Shamsad Mortuza, the university said in a media release. Prof Roy, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize 2007-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the coordinating lead author of its WGIII (mitigation), set the tone by explaining the “dire need” for a sustainable energy shift from a fossil-fuel-based one to a renewable-energy one, especially under the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era. She explained why much focused renewable sources, like solar, wind or bioenergy, would not be sufficient for Bangladesh in the coming decades for such transition. We need a ""just, sustainable, peaceful transition"", and we need it fast, she emphasised. Drawing examples from Nordic countries, she argued how transforming the natural gas and coal-exploitation-centred expertise and infrastructure of Bangladesh could be capitalised on building geothermal and hydrogen fuel capacity, and it has to be started with pilot demonstrations. The talk by Prof Roy was followed by a discussion on pertinent technological, social, economic, and cultural issues. The conversations also explored the opportunities for Bangladeshi academics, researchers, and students to collaborate on joint research, to undertake academic activities, and to join capacity development with the AIT and other institutions and programmes in the region on energy, climate change, SDGs, blue economy, and evidence-informed policy influencing.",2
" Leaders of the world's top companies are set to meet Wednesday in Davos in buoyant mood. With the global economy enjoying one of its longest periods of growth since World War Two, confidence about corporate revenues is running at record levels, according to a survey by consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers released Wednesday. Over 90 percent of 1,100 chief executives surveyed expected revenues to grow over the next 12 months and a similar number see sales continuing to expand during the next three years. In all, 52 percent were ""very confident"" and 40 percent ""somewhat confident"" about their business in the year ahead -- a marked turnaround from five years ago when levels were half that. The upbeat mood reflects a corporate world basking in the benefits of four consecutive years of strong economic growth. That benign backdrop has also helped lift stock markets to new peaks this month. According to the International Monetary Fund, global growth will remain solid in 2007 at close to 5 percent, despite an expected slowdown in the U.S. economy. Dynamic growth in China, India and other emerging markets is the economic highlight for many business leaders. ""CEOs around the world are increasingly positive about their ability to grow their companies and take advantage of the opportunities globalisation offers for new markets, new products and new customers,"" PwC Chief Executive Samuel DiPiazza said. Still, Gene Donnelly, head of the global advisory practice, says top executives remain level-headed. ""When you take it down a level and look at the emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, for example, their intention -- at least as told to us -- is to finance nearly all of that with internal free cashflow rather than going to the debt markets,"" he said. ""So, it seems to be a rational optimism."" The upbeat mood was echoed by others monitoring the corporate pulse around the world. ""Across our client base there is a high level of optimism, both in North America and across Europe,"" said David Thomlinson of rival consultancy Accenture. CLIMATE THREAT Nonetheless, there are clear risks. In addition to worries about terrorism and international security, the environment is moving decisively up the corporate agenda. Forty percent of CEOs in the PwC survey expressed concern about the threat posed by climate change. This figure dropped significantly, however, to only 18 percent among North American executives. Although the world has yet to devise a coherent strategy for fighting climate change, a growing number of CEOs appear to believe carbon emissions could become a serious cost for their business and failing to act also risks alienating environment-conscious customers. A separate Gallup survey of participants at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos found one in five now ranked the effects of climate change as an issue that leaders should concentrate on -- double the level recorded in 2006.",0
" European Union leaders agreed on Friday to send administrators and police to Kosovo ahead of an expected declaration of independence from Serbia. In a bid to soothe Balkan tensions over Kosovo's push for independence, they also offered Serbia a fast-track route to joining the bloc once it met conditions for signing a first-level agreement on closer ties. But Belgrade bristled at suggestions that the move was designed to compensate it for the looming loss of Kosovo, the majority Albanian province. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said any such trade-off would be ""an indecent proposal"". EU leaders declared after a one-day summit that negotiations on Kosovo's future were exhausted, the status quo was untenable and there was a need to move towards a Kosovo settlement. They stopped short of endorsing independence. ""We took a political decision to send an ESDP mission to Kosovo. This is the clearest signal the EU could possibly give that Europe intends to lead on Kosovo and the future of the region,"" Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, the summit chairman, told a news conference. ESDP is the European Security and Defence Policy. The 1,800-strong mission involves police, justice officials and civilian administrators. But when asked whether and when the EU would recognise Kosovo's independence, Socrates said talks on that issue were taking place at the United Nations. ""The EU is not forgetting its responsibilities in this area. We are talking in terms of action and not inaction,"" he said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters the EU had ""a difficulty with Kosovo, which everybody can see will be independent"". Diplomats said Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia and Romania all object to recognising Kosovo's sovereignty without a UN Security Council resolution. ""ON A PLANE""? A day after signing a treaty to end a long institutional stalemate, EU leaders switched focus to challenges posed by the Balkans -- a test of the EU's hopes of strengthening its foreign policy clout -- and by globalisation and immigration. On Serbia's bid to join the 27-nation bloc, the final summit communique said: ""(The European Council) reiterated its confidence that progress on the road towards the EU, including candidate status, can be accelerated."" Pro-EU moderates in Belgrade want EU candidate status by the end of next year, a timeframe EU Enlargement Commission Olli Rehn said last month was ambitious but feasible. Normally, it takes up to two years for Brussels to grant candidate status to an aspirant after signing a Stabilisation and Accession Agreement (SAA), the first rung on the EU ladder. The signing of an SAA with Belgrade has been held up by its failure to transfer Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic to a UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague on genocide charges. Outgoing chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte urged EU leaders in Belgium's Le Soir not to be lenient on Belgrade and to maintain firm pressure on it to deliver indictees. ""I am stupefied by the attitude of France, Germany and Italy who want to soften their position. As decisions must be taken by unanimity, I am counting on Belgium and the Netherlands to remain tough,"" she told the newspaper. Signing the agreement requires unanimity in the EU and Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen told reporters: ""I want Mladic on a plane to the Hague before I will sign the SAA."" Separately, EU leaders named former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez to head a new ""reflection group"" to discuss the long-term future of the EU on issues ranging from enlargement to climate change and regional stability, diplomats said. Ex-Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and the chairman of mobile phone company Nokia Jorma Ollila were named as two vice-chairs of the panel due to report in June 2010, they said. In addition to foreign policy issues, the leaders addressed public concern over the strain on European job markets from immigration and cheap imports, issues on which the EU hopes to focus now that the new Lisbon Treaty has been inked. Replacing the more ambitious constitution abandoned after French and Dutch voters rejected it in 2005, the Lisbon Treaty preserves most of the key institutional reforms but drops contentious symbols of statehood such as a flag and anthem. EU leaders hope the treaty will streamline the bloc's structures to cope with enlargement after it opened its doors to 12 mostly ex-communist states in 2004 and 2007. Critics say it will curb national sovereignty and put more power in Brussels.",0
" Australia's ruling Labor party is set for a narrow victory in upcoming elections, two new opinion polls showed on Monday, as speculation grew that Prime Minister Julia Gillard could call an election as soon as this week. While the robust economy, in its 17th year of growth, should be a winning ticket for Gillard, voters believe the opposition is the better economic manager, according to the polls. Gillard has also been seeking to reframe government policy in key areas such as climate and asylum seekers. Opinion polls published in Fairfax and News Ltd newspapers put Labor ahead of the conservative opposition at 52 percent versus 48 percent. ""They're in front and they've got a primary vote that can deliver victory,"" John Stirton, research director with pollster Nielsen, told local radio. Gillard, 48, is Australia's first woman prime minister. She replaced Kevin Rudd on June 24, in a move that has resurrected Labor's electoral standing and reshaped Australian politics. Speculation Gillard may be set to call an election grew after Governor-General Quentin Bryce delayed leaving for a trip to Europe by a day until Saturday, sparking talk that Gillard could ask the representative of Australia's head of state, Queen Elizabeth, to dissolve parliament as early as this week. Gillard declined to comment on the timing when questioned by reporters on a trip to Adelaide, but said in a speech ""in the days to come I will be putting forward more detailed arguments about some of the biggest challenges facing our nation. ""I will be explaining the steps I think we need to take and asking for people's consideration of those steps. I will ask for the Australian people's trust to move Australia forward,"" she said. Political commentators said Gillard's words meant she may seek to call an election on Thursday or Friday this week. But commentators warned that Labor still risked losing an election expected in late August. ""The coming of Julia Gillard to the Labor Party leadership appears to have stopped the decay in her party's fortunes,"" said The Age newspaper's national editor Tony Wright. ""She has stopped the Rudd rot, though she hasn't been able to make any serious inroads into Labor's loss of the disaffected to the Greens."" Labor took power in 2007 promising to tackle climate change, but under Rudd failed to implement a carbon trading scheme, a disappointment that saw Green voters desert Rudd. Labor needs to woo them back to ensure victory over the Liberal-National opposition. Gillard has acted quickly on key policies, ending a three-month row with mining companies over a new tax that was hurting the government in the polls, and proposing a regional asylum processing center, possibly in East Timor, to curb boatpeople arrivals. The tax deal has been generally accepted by voters, but her asylum policy has received criticism for being in its infancy. The cabinet will meet on Tuesday and was expected to discuss a new climate policy, but it is not clear whether Gillard will go as far as announcing a carbon tax as an interim measure before a full blown carbon trading scheme can be created. She has said a carbon price is inevitable, probably via a market-based scheme, but that any decision on such a scheme would not be until 2012 and not without community consensus. But voters want quick action on climate change, according to opinion polls and public comments in local media. Until now the political risk of announcing a carbon price ahead of an election has been the threat of rising power bills. But two new surveys suggest power bills will rise and energy investment will fall because of a lack of a carbon price. The lack of an emissions trading scheme and price on carbon would cost the Australian economy and consumers an extra A$2 billion by 2020 due to investment in less energy efficient coal-fired power plants, The Climate Institute estimates.",0
" ""I was born in 1992. You have been negotiating all my life. You cannot tell us that you need more time,"" Christina Ora of the Solomon Islands complained to delegates at UN talks on fixing global warming. Her line from a brief, riveting speech to a 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen was emblazoned on activists' T-shirts at the latest UN talks in Mexico, expressing exasperation at small steps meant to slow floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels. The two-week 190-nation conference in Cancun, a Caribbean resort, agreed on Saturday to step up action against climate change, including a goal of $100 billion a year to help the poor from 2020 and action to protect carbon-absorbing rain forests. Almost all admit it fell woefully short of action needed. Cancun underscored that a treaty, as urged by Ora, is out of reach because of disparate economic interests among China, the United States, OPEC oil exporters and Pacific islands. ""Signs that climate change is happening and with catastrophic consequences are there -- flooding in Pakistan, heat waves in Russia, China,"" Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim said. ""This is a huge step forward but of course not sufficient based on science,"" he said of the Cancun agreements that at least restore some faith in the United Nations after Copenhagen fell short of the widespread goal of reaching a treaty. The U.N. panel of climate scientists in 2007 said greenhouse gas emissions would have to peak by 2015 to give a chance of limiting a rise in average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times -- a ceiling agreed to in Cancun. But based on current projections, that will not happen. Existing government policies for combating global warming will lead to a rise in world temperatures of about 3.6 C (6.5 F) above pre-industrial times, according to Niklas Hoehne, director of energy and climate policy at consultancy Ecofys. 'MATTER OF OUR SURVIVAL' Surging economic growth in emerging nations led by China and India are helping to ease poverty but are driving up world emissions even as rich nations' economies flounder. Such changes do not sound like much, but the difference between an Ice Age and now is only about 5 degrees C (9 F). A new treaty has eluded the world since a U.N. Climate Convention was agreed to in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The convention's 1997 Kyoto Protocol only binds about 40 rich nations to curb emissions during an initial period ending in 2012. Outside the conference hall, youth delegates wearing blue T-shirts with Ora's quote waved banners saying, ""1.5 to stay alive."" They say a temperature rise ceiling of 1.5 C (2.7 F) is needed to avoid the worst impacts. Even to some delegates, especially from vulnerable African nations and low-lying islands at risk of sea level rise, the talks seem like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. ""This is a matter of our survival,"" said Colin Beck, who like Ora is from the Solomon Islands and a vice-chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. Average world temperatures have already risen about 0.8 degree C (1.4 F) since the Industrial Revolution and 2010 is set to be among the top three years on record, vying with 1998 and 2005, since records began in the 19th century. 'THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW' Despite the gloom, others say a response is happening away from the glacial U.N. talks, with investment shifts from coal, gas and oil toward renewable energies. China is investing heavily in projects ranging from solar power to high-speed rail links. ""We've been trying to emphasize that the focus shouldn't solely be on the struggles with the treaty negotiations -- this word and that word -- because there are things you can do now,"" World Bank President Robert Zoellick said. ""Business is not sitting back and waiting for this process to come to a result. ... The world is moving ahead anyway,"" said Yvo de Boer, climate adviser at audit, tax and advisory group KPMG and a former UN climate chief. He listed concerns over climate, energy prices, energy security, materials scarcity, consumer preferences and a realization that things had to change with the world population set to reach 9 billion by 2050 from 6.8 billion now. The UN panel of climate scientists says it is at least 90 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of most of the global warming in the past half-century. Natural causes cannot be completely ruled out. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the panel, warned delegates in Cancun that one underestimated effect of climate change was that water expands as it warms, raising the oceans at the same time as more flows in from melting glaciers. The world is destined to experience a rise in sea levels of 0.4 to 1.4 metres (1-4 feet) simply because heat in the atmosphere will gradually reach ever greater ocean depths.",0
"CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts Aug 7(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The fate of a US climate change bill will send signals to the rest of the world as to whether upcoming global climate talks will be ""serious or not,"" one of the bill's co-authors said on Thursday. The bill, which aims to cut US emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, passed the House of Representatives and Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey said he hopes to see it make its way through Senate by the year's end. ""This bill is a bill the world is waiting for to make a determination as to whether or not the negotiations that we will be undertaking in Copenhagen will be serious or not,"" Markey said in a speech at Harvard University in Cambridge. ""The Chinese are looking at it, the Europeans, the rest of the world ... The bill is now pending in the Senate and my great hope is that we will see passage of that before the end of this year."" Negotiators from about 190 countries are scheduled to meet in the Danish capital of Copenhagen in December for a round of talks aimed at getting rich nations to agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions sharply and to help emerging economies -- which are rapidly becoming major emitters as they consumer more energy -- do the same. The climate bill, written by Markey and Representative Henry Waxman, to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. One of the challenges facing the climate bill is the crowded legislative agenda. US President Barack Obama has also made health care reform a top priority -- leaving Congress to take on a thorny and emotional issue that Americans have been debating for decades. ""These are the top two priorities of the President and the Congress and so they're going to be moving along simultaneously this fall within the legislative process,"" Markey told reporters after his speech. ""Each of them will require, to some extent, success on the other. It's important for us to move forward on these together because the opponents of them are using both bills as reasons why President Obama is taking us in the wrong direction and we have to make the counter-argument that it's why he's taking us in the right direction."" The climate bill, which uses a cap-and-trade system to lower emissions, made it narrowly through the House, carrying by just seven votes. The Senate is expected to try to produce its own version of the bill, which if passed would need to be harmonized with the House version.",1
"BRUSSELS, Fri Jun 19, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Europe will next week start moves to help China and India develop technology to trap and bury carbon dioxide underground in the fight against global warming, according to a draft European Commission document. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a process of burying harmful gases, is seen by some as a potential silver bullet to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, which are multiplying rapidly worldwide and threaten to heat the atmosphere to dangerous levels. The European Union will start a consultation process on how finance and technology should be delivered to China and later India. This could be critical in securing their commitment to a new global deal on climate change at talks in Copenhagen in December. ""China builds, every year, as much coal-fired power plant as the entire UK generating capacity,"" said a report prepared for consultations with industry and seen by Reuters on Friday. ""Unless a way can be found of making this climate-compatible, we can never meet our climate objectives, regardless of what action we take in Europe,"" it added. While the technologies exist, utilities are reluctant to build CCS power stations without public funding because the CCS component adds over $1 billion to the cost of each plant. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ""A project of this size has never been done before,"" said Eric Drosin, a spokesman for ZEP, a European coalition of industry, scientists and those environmentalists that back CCS. ""Knowledge sharing is crucial to the rapid deployment of CCS in China,"" he added. ""We are willing to share all information except that which is covered by intellectual property rights."" Many environmentalists oppose spending public money on the technology, saying it is untested and utilities already make massive profits while driving the planet towards irreversible climate damage. ""Rather than trying to persuade China to bet on a technology that might not even work...the EU should help China invest in renewables and efficiency and leapfrog the fossil fuel-based energy model of the West,"" said Greenpeace campaigner Frauke Thies. The Commission's EU-China Near Zero Emissions Coal (NZEC) proposal will initially tap into about 60 million euros ($84 million) of existing EU development funding, but will also seek support from industry and taxpayers. ""It is likely that the CCS component of the Chinese NZEC demonstration project alone will cost in total around 300 million euros,"" said the report. ""We will seek to garner financial support from member states for this initiative, which in the first instance will affect China, then India, South Africa, OPEC and other emerging economies and developing countries,"" it added. In 2050, almost 60 percent of CO2 emissions from the power sector are projected to be captured, compared to virtually none today and almost 30 percent in 2030, said the report.",0
"London,Sep 18 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The number of people living ""on the edge of emergency"" in Africa has nearly doubled to 220 million in just two years, a leading charity said on Thursday. CARE International said emergency aid to the impoverished and strife-ridden continent continued to arrive too late, was short-term and policies were targeted too heavily on saving lives rather than building resilience in the population. ""The world's inaction on food emergencies has proved costly and it is the world's poorest people -- stripped of enough to eat -- who are paying the price,"" said Geoffrey Dennis, the charity's chief executive. ""Governments, the UN, donors and aid agencies must take this opportunity to deliver the long-term structural reforms to the aid system that will protect the most vulnerable from emergency and build their resilience to food price rises, drought and other shocks."" CARE's report ""Living on the Edge of Emergency -- Paying the Price of Inaction"" is timed to coincide with a summit in New York next week dedicated to the fight against poverty -- one of the key Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for 2015. It called for donors to fulfill existing aid commitments and then add some, focus on disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, food production and support for the poorest and make emergency aid and long-term development better coordinated. It also highlighted the more recently emerged threats to security and welfare that have added to older woes. Prices of staple foods have surged by an average of 83 percent in the past three years, climate change has already hit some of the poorest -- and therefore less resilient -- countries, biofuels have replaced food crops and increasing urbanization has compounded the problems. ""It is a disgrace that, despite warnings, money is still being spent in the wrong ways,"" said Dennis. ""Leaders at the MDG meeting must ensure that the aid system can rise to the challenge of the global food crisis or they will measure the cost in billions of wasted emergency funds and the suffering of millions of people pushed to and beyond the edge of yet more needless emergencies.""",0
" China's foreign minister gave a spirited defence on Thursday of his country's right to host the 2008 Olympics in the face of criticism over human rights following talks with his British counterpart. As the Aug. 8 opening of the Games draws near, China's Communist rulers are deflecting a barrage of criticism over issues from its policies in Sudan to its use of the death penalty, but Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi came out swinging. ""People in China enjoy extensive freedom of speech,"" he told reporters, following talks with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. ""No one will get arrested because he said that human rights are more important than the Olympics. This is impossible. ""Ask 10 people from the street to face public security officers and ask them to say 'human rights are more important the the Olympics' 10 times or even 100 times, and I will see which security officer would put him in jail,"" Yang said. China pledged to improve its human rights record ahead of the Games, but experts and lawmakers told a U.S. government panel on Wednesday that such promises were not being kept. Last week, Chinese state prosecutors tried dissident Yang Chunlin, an unemployed factory worker, who faces charges of ""inciting subversion of state power"" after he called for human rights to take precedence over the Games. China also issued a white paper on Thursday which outlined many laws and principles which rights groups say are routinely ignored or violated. They include the right to freedom from unlawful detention, freedom of belief and speech, the outlawing of torture, and the freedom of ethnic minorities to practice and protect their customs and way of life. But that came with a caveat, which China has in past years repeated like a mantra: that China has a fundamentally different concept of human rights from the West, where the rights of the individual come first. Miliband said he raised the issue of rights in his talks with Chinese leaders, including individual cases, though he did not say which cases he mentioned. ""We do not believe that issues of human rights should be restricted to the Olympic year. Those universal values ... are an issue for every year, not just for one particular year,"" he said. ""We believe that the Olympics are an opportunity to celebrate the progress that has been achieved in China, China's commitment to work in a peaceful way with the whole international community, and does not require any sort of disavowal of values that we hold dear."" NO BOYCOTT Miliband's six-day trip to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chongqing and Beijing follows a visit by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to China last month, during which leaders agreed to expand bilateral trade to $60 billion by 2010 from $40 billion last year. In talks with Miliband that touched on the Iran nuclear issue, climate change and China-EU relations, Yang said they agreed to raise the share of financial services in their trade. They also discussed Africa, where China has growing trade and strategic links, and where Miliband said London and Beijing ""should be indispensable allies of each other in supporting development and freedom from conflict"". Among China's African allies is Sudan, where Beijing is a major investor in the oil sector, a relationship which prompted movie director Steven Spielberg to quit as artistic adviser to the Olympics, saying it was doing too little to halt bloodshed in the western Sudanese region of Darfur. Yang defended China's role in Sudan, highlighting its development aid, the engineering corps it deployed to join a force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers, and its appointment of a special envoy on Darfur. He said that despite Spielberg's move, there was no widespread support for censuring the Beijing Games. ""Don't tell me that there is international support for boycotting the Olympic Games on the grounds of China's human rights,"" he said. ""This is not true."" Speaking in Singapore, Sebastian Coe, who heads the London 2012 Olympics, said sport should be protected from politics. ""We have to be very, very careful when we use international sport as the first line of foreign policy,"" Coe told Reuters.",0
"Each of those events would be daunting enough
on its own. Together, they pose a uniquely difficult challenge to Johnson as he
struggles to navigate his nation through the latest treacherous phase of the
pandemic. The electoral defeat exposed the vulnerability
of a prime minister who built his career on his vote-getting skills. Normally
reliable Conservative voters turned on the party in striking numbers, disgusted
by a steady drip of unsavoury ethics disclosures and a growing sense that the
government is lurching from crisis to crisis. The defeat came on top of a mutiny in the
ranks of Conservative lawmakers, around 100 of whom voted against Johnson’s
plan to introduce a form of COVID pass in England earlier in the week. Having
been politically rebuked, he now has less flexibility to impose new
restrictions to curb a virus that is spreading explosively. Johnson is betting he can avert a full-blown
crisis by massively accelerating Britain’s vaccine booster program. But so far,
the rate of infections is outrunning the percentage of people getting their
third shots. With cases of the omicron variant doubling every 2.5 days, public
health researchers warn that some type of lockdown might ultimately be the only
way to prevent an untenable strain on hospitals. “What on earth is the prime minister going to
do if the rising COVID numbers means he is getting strong scientific advice to
take further restrictive measures?” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow
at UK in a Changing Europe, a research institute. Johnson was able to pass his recent measures
thanks to votes from the opposition Labour Party. But that dramatised his
political weakness, Rutter noted, and resorting to it again would further
antagonise his own rank and file. “That’s politically a terrible place for the
prime minister to be,” she added. Indeed, Johnson needs to worry about fending
off a leadership challenge — a once-remote scenario now suddenly plausible as
Conservative lawmakers worry that the calamitous result in North Shropshire, a
district near England’s border with Wales, could translate into defeat in the
next general election. The victorious Liberal Democrat candidate,
Helen Morgan, overturned a majority of almost 23,000 won by former Conservative
lawmaker Owen Paterson at the last general election, in 2019. Paterson, a
former Cabinet minister who had held the seat since 1997, resigned last month
after breaking lobbying rules, despite an unsuccessful effort by Johnson to
save him. About the only reprieve for Johnson is that
Parliament recessed for the Christmas holiday Thursday. That will temper the
momentum behind any possible leadership challenge, at least until Conservative
lawmakers return to Westminster after the New Year and assess the state of
their party and the country. A prime minister who just a week ago was
promising to save Christmas may now need Christmas to save him. “I totally understand people’s frustrations,”
Johnson said Friday. “In all humility, I’ve got to accept that verdict.” But he
also blamed the news media, telling Sky News, “some things have been going very
well, but what the people have been hearing is just a constant litany of stuff
about politics and politicians.” Johnson’s standing has been weakened by
claims, widely reported in the papers, that his staff held Christmas parties in
Downing Street last year at a time when they were forbidden under coronavirus
restrictions. Cabinet Secretary Simon Case had been
investigating those allegations; but Friday evening, he abruptly withdrew after
a report surfaced that he was aware of a separate party held in his own office
last year. Although another civil servant, Sue Gray, will take over the
investigation, the latest disclosure is only likely deepen to public suspicion
about the government’s behaviour. Even before the election loss in North
Shropshire, there was speculation that Johnson could face a formal challenge to
his leadership, little more than two years after he won a landslide election
victory in December 2019. To initiate a no-confidence vote, 54 lawmakers
would have to write to the chair of the committee that represents Conservative
backbenchers, Graham Brady. Such letters are confidential, but analysts do not
believe that prospect is close. Even so, Friday’s result will increase jitters
in Downing Street. North Shropshire was one of the Conservative Party’s safest
seats, in a part of Britain that supported Brexit, Johnson’s defining political
project. Many Labour Party voters and others hostile to the Conservatives
coalesced around the Liberal Democrats, the party deemed most likely to defeat
the Tories in that region — a practice known as tactical voting. Were this to be repeated nationally in the
next general election, it could deprive the Conservatives of perhaps 30 seats
and, in a close contest, affect the outcome, said Peter Kellner, a former
president of the polling firm YouGov. “Tactical voting has a chance to make a
material difference to the politics of Britain after the next general election,”
he said. In recent weeks, Labour has moved ahead of the
Conservatives in several opinion surveys, which also recorded a steep drop in
Johnson’s approval ratings. Political analysts said that could also put the
prime minister in a vulnerable position, given the transactional nature of his
party. “The Tory Party is a ruthless machine for
winning elections,” said Jonathan Powell, a former chief of staff to Prime
Minister Tony Blair. “If that is continuing into an election cycle, the party
will get rid of him quickly.” But while the political climate remains
volatile, most voters are more preoccupied by the effect of the omicron variant
as they prepare for the holiday season. Scientists said it was too soon to say
whether the variant was less severe than previous ones, but they warned that
even if it was, that would not necessarily prevent a swift rise in hospital
admissions, given the enormous number of infections. “If you have enough cases per day, the number
of hospitalisations could pose potentially great challenges for any hospital
system,” said Neil Ferguson, a public health researcher at Imperial College
London, whose frightening projections about the virus prompted Johnson to
impose his first lockdown, in March 2020. Rutter said Johnson could yet emerge unscathed
if the variant is milder than feared, hospitals are not overwhelmed, and the
booster program is effective. Earlier this year, his fortunes revived when
Britain’s vaccination rollout was fast and effective, allowing him to remove
all restrictions in July. By weakening Johnson’s position, however, the
defeat in North Shropshire is also likely to embolden his rivals, among them
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Any
resulting tensions within the Cabinet are likely to erode Johnson’s authority
further. All of that is a dangerous recipe for a prime
minister who may find himself forced to return to Parliament to approve further
restrictions. “In March 2020, he had massive political
capital coming off the back of that fantastic election victory,” Rutter said.
“He’s managed in that time to pretty much squander that political capital,
certainly within his party.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",4
"A Newspoll survey conducted for The Australian newspaper
showed Morrison gaining a point to 44%, while opposition leader Anthony
Albanese falling 3 points to 39%, the largest lead the prime minister has held
over his rival since February. But the poll said Morrison's conservative Liberal-National
Party coalition, with a one-seat majority in the lower house of parliament,
could lose 10 seats to Albanese's centre-left Labour in a campaign set to focus
on cost-of-living pressures, climate change and questions over the major
parties' competence. A separate survey for the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on
Monday predicted the ruling coalition could lose at least 14 seats, including
some previously deemed safe in resource-rich Queensland and Western Australia
states. A win for Labor would see it back in power for the first time since
2013. All 151 seats in the lower house will be up for election.
Morrison's Liberal-National coalition holds 76, Labour 68 and seven are held by
minor parties and independents. Morrison kicked off his election campaign from the marginal
seat of Gilmore in New South Wales - a narrow Labour gain from the Liberal
Party in the last election in 2019 - as he prepares to spend six weeks on the
road before the vote. ""This election ... is about a choice,"" Morrison
said during a media briefing on Monday, describing Albanese's leadership as
""untested and unknown"". ""It's a choice between strong economic management and
strong financial management ... that contrasts to a Labor opposition who
Australians know can't be trusted to manage money."" Albanese dismissed Morrison's attacks on his experience as a
leader saying he was ""ready to govern"", but fumbled answers to
questions from reporters about Australia's interest rates and jobless numbers. ""The national unemployment rate at the moment is, I
think it's 5.4% ... sorry, I'm not sure what it is,"" Albanese said,
speaking during a media conference in Tasmania. Australia's unemployment rate dipped to 4.0% in February,
several months ahead of central bank forecasts as the economy rebounds, and
looks certain to fall into the 3% range for the first time since the early
1970s. Morrison has been touting his government's handling of the
economy after the emergence of the coronavirus and a faster rebound helped by
the lifting of most COVID-19 restrictions despite the threat from the omicron
variant. Recovery has also been boosted by surging prices for natural
resource commodities, of which Australia is a major exporter.",0
"HARARE, Thu Jun 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on Thursday there could be no negotiations with President Robert Mugabe if he went ahead with a one-man election on Friday. Tsvangirai said if Mugabe declared himself president and extended his 28 years of uninterrupted rule he would be shunned as an illegitimate leader who killed his own people. Africa's most iconic figure, Nelson Mandela, added his voice to a storm of African and international condemnation of the violence and chaos in Zimbabwe, in a rare political statement that showed the level of concern around the continent. Mugabe and his officials have remained defiant, however, saying the vote is a legal obligation. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga told al Jazeera television: ""People are going to vote tomorrow. There is no going back."" He said Tsvangirai should be out campaigning instead of trying to set conditions for Mugabe. The opposition leader, who withdrew from Friday's run-off last Sunday and took refuge in the Dutch embassy, tried to step up the pressure by telling Mugabe that his chances of negotiating an end to Zimbabwe's catastrophic collapse would end on Friday. ""Negotiations will be over if Mr Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?"" Tsvangirai told London's Times newspaper. Mugabe, president since independence from Britain, has presided over Zimbabwe's slide from one of the region's most prosperous nations to a basket case with inflation estimated to have hit at least 2 million percent. He blames the crisis on sanctions by Britain and other Western countries. INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN Mugabe is facing a concerted international campaign to push him into calling off the vote by threatening he will be shunned by the world, including African allies once over-awed by his liberation hero status. Mandela said in a speech at a dinner for his 90th birthday in London that there had been a ""tragic failure of leadership in our neighboring Zimbabwe."" Tsvangirai told Mugabe that if he came to him after the vote he would tell the veteran leader: ""I made these offers, I made these overtures, I told you I would negotiate before the elections and not after -- because it's not about elections, it's about transition. ""You disregarded that, you undertook violence against my supporters, you killed and maimed ...How can you call yourself an elected president? You are illegitimate and I will not speak to an illegitimate president."" On Wednesday, a security committee of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) -- urged postponement of the vote, saying Mugabe's re-election could lack legitimacy in the current violent climate. Regional power South Africa added to the pressure, saying a top negotiator was in Harare mediating talks on options including calling off the election. The ruling African National Congress, which has been severely critical of Mugabe, in contrast to President Thabo Mbeki, said it was not too late to call off the vote. ""The ANC is convinced that it is not too late for President Mugabe to cancel the election, the run-off, and lead the country in a dialogue that will be for the good of all Zimbabweans,"" spokeswoman Jesse Duarte told BBC television. The United States said Mugabe's government should talk to Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change. ""That offer obviously ought to be taken up. But it can't be taken up from a position in which the Zimbabwean authorities declare themselves the victors and then believe they can divide the spoils. That's not going to work,"" US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Japan. The SADC security troika, comprising African Union chairman Tanzania, Swaziland and Angola, called at its meeting near the Swazi capital Mbabane for talks between Mugabe's government and the opposition before a new run-off date was set. Zimbabwe's state media on Thursday quoted the SADC poll monitors -- the only large group in the country -- as saying they would stay for the vote despite Tsvangirai's withdrawal. Some 300 opposition supporters who sought refuge at the South African embassy on Wednesday were still in the grounds on Thursday, some wrapped in blankets. Police set up roadblocks on roads leading to the mission.",2
" Australian Prime Minister John Howard faces a crushing electoral defeat which could see him lose his own Sydney-based seat, a poll showed on Sunday. Howard, 11 years in power and facing re-election in a national vote tipped for November 10, trailed high-profile former television presenter Maxine McKew, 46 percent to 53 when votes were distributed to the two major parties, a Galaxy poll for The Sunday Telegraph newspaper and SBS television showed. McKew, recruited to the rival Labor Party to take on the conservative Howard, was also level with the veteran prime minister when voters were asked who would do the best job for the seat of Bennelong, held by Howard since 1974. The poll was conducted after Australia's central bank lifted interest rates last week to a decade high of 6.50 percent to head off inflation fuelled by strong domestic demand, unemployment at a 32-year low and rapid global growth. Interest rates have been hurting Howard, who secured his fourth election victory in 2004 on the slogan ""Keeping interest rates low"". The central bank has since lifted rates five times. Rates are also biting into support for Howard's Liberal-National coalition in key fringe suburbs where voters are struggling with large mortgages and a credit binge fuelled in part by the low-interest climate, successive polls show. Also hurting Howard is a charge of boundaries in his own seat, which now has a large Asian community and is in the top 20 electorates for residents who speak a language other than English at home, according to census figures. Howard has angered some immigrant families with policies making it harder for new arrivals, requiring them to adopt vague Australian values of ""mateship"" and ""fair go"" equality, while learning English to speed their assimilation into society. Senior Labor lawmaker Bob McMullan cautioned it would be hard to unseat Howard regardless of poll indications. ""We're very near the end of this three-year term and people are open to the idea of change. But I think their voting intention isn't set in concrete at all, it's quite fluid,"" he told Australian television. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Howard's wisdom and experience would carry him over the line and youthful opposition leader Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, lacked a plan for Australia's future. ""There's always controversy about the record of the incumbent and so on, it happens everywhere,"" Downer said. ""I don't always want to seem Pollyanna-ish. I'm a person though who's pretty relaxed about the struggle that lies ahead.""",2
"But the abbot, the Venerable Ambalangoda Sumedhananda Thero, barely registered the blast. Waving away the mosquitoes swarming the night air in the southern Sri Lankan town of Gintota, he continued his tirade: Muslims were violent, he said, Muslims were rapacious. “The aim of Muslims is to take over all our land and everything we value,” he said. “Think of what used to be Buddhist lands: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Indonesia. They have all been destroyed by Islam.” Minutes later, a monastic aide rushed in and confirmed that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a nearby mosque. The abbot flicked his fingers in the air and shrugged. His responsibility was to his flock, the Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka. Muslims, who make up less than 10% of Sri Lanka’s population, were not his concern. 
 
 File Photo: The Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero at a temple in Gintota, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times 

Incited by a politically powerful network of charismatic monks like Sumedhananda Thero, Buddhists have entered the era of militant tribalism, casting themselves as spiritual warriors who must defend their faith against an outside force.  File Photo: The Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero at a temple in Gintota, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times  Their sense of grievance might seem unlikely: In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, two countries that are on the forefront of a radical religious-nationalist movement, Buddhists constitute overwhelming majorities of the population. Yet some Buddhists, especially those who subscribe to the purist Theravada strain of the faith, are increasingly convinced that they are under existential threat, particularly from an Islam struggling with its own violent fringe. As the tectonic plates of Buddhism and Islam collide, a portion of Buddhists are abandoning the peaceful tenets of their religion. During the past few years, Buddhist mobs have waged deadly attacks against minority Muslim populations. Buddhist nationalist ideologues are using the spiritual authority of extremist monks to bolster their support. “The Buddhists never used to hate us so much,” said Mohammed Naseer, the imam of the Hillur Mosque in Gintota, Sri Lanka, which was attacked by Buddhist mobs in 2017. “Now their monks spread a message that we don’t belong in this country and should leave. But where will we go? This is our home.” Last month in Sri Lanka, a powerful Buddhist monk went on a hunger strike that resulted in the resignation of all nine Muslim ministers in the Cabinet. The monk had suggested that Muslim politicians were complicit in the Easter Sunday attacks by Islamic State-linked militants on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed more than 250 people. 
 
 File Photo: A demonstration organised by a Buddhist monk in support of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the Rohingya crisis in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 14, 2017. The New York Times 

In Myanmar, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing has forced an exodus of most of the country’s Muslims, Buddhist monks still warn of an Islamic invasion, even though less than 5% of the national population is Muslim. During Ramadan celebrations in May, Buddhist mobs besieged Islamic prayer halls, causing Muslim worshippers to flee.  File Photo: A demonstration organised by a Buddhist monk in support of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the Rohingya crisis in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 14, 2017. The New York Times  Because of Buddhism’s pacifist image — swirls of calming incense and beatific smiles — the faith is not often associated with sectarian aggression. Yet no religion holds a monopoly on peace. Buddhists go to war, too. “Buddhist monks will say that they would never condone violence,” said Mikael Gravers, an anthropologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who has studied the intersection of Buddhism and nationalism. “But at the same time, they will also say that Buddhism or Buddhist states have to be defended by any means.” The Military-Monastic Complex Thousands of people gathered in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, in May as Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk who was once jailed for his hate speech, praised the nation’s army. Since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. Behind it all was a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the army and its allies, with Buddhist mobs and the country’s security forces subjecting Rohingya Muslims to slaughter, rape and the complete erasure of hundreds of their villages. Ashin Wirathu has rejected the nonviolent teachings of his faith. Military-linked lawmakers deserved to be glorified like Buddha, he said at the rally. “Only the military,” he continued, “protects both our country and our religion.” At another protest last October, Ashin Wirathu slammed the decision by the International Criminal Court, or ICC, to pursue a case against Myanmar’s military for its persecution of the Rohingya. Then the monk made a startling call to arms. “The day that the ICC comes here is the day I hold a gun,” Ashin Wirathu said in an interview with The New York Times. 
 
 File Photo: Monks pray in the Bengala monastery in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 4, 2017. The New York Times 

Monks like Ashin Wirathu inhabit the extremist fringe of Buddhist nationalism. But more respected clerics are involved as well.  File Photo: Monks pray in the Bengala monastery in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 4, 2017. The New York Times  At 82 years old, the Venerable Ashin Nyanissara, known more commonly as Sitagu Sayadaw, is Myanmar’s most influential monk. As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were fleeing their burned villages, Sitagu Sayadaw sat in front of an audience of army officers and said that “Muslims have almost bought the United Nations.” The army and monkhood, he continued, “could not be separated.” Sitagu Sayadaw was pictured in May on a Facebook page linked to the Myanmar military, grinning among soldiers. He has offered up his faith’s greatest sacrifice: an army of spiritual soldiers for the national cause. “There are over 400,000 monks in Myanmar,” he told the commander of Myanmar’s armed forces. “If you need them, I will tell them to begin. It’s easy.” “When someone as respected as Sitagu Sayadaw says something, even if it is strongly dismissive of a certain group, people listen,” said Khin Mar Mar Kyi, a Myanmar-born social anthropologist at the University of Oxford. “His words justify hatred.” The Buddhist Right Returns When suicide bombers linked to the Islamic State blew up churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, Buddhist nationalists felt vindicated. “We have been warning for years that Muslim extremists are a danger to national security,” said Dilanthe Withanage, a senior administrator for Bodu Bala Sena, the largest of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalist groups. “Blood is on the government’s hands for ignoring the radicalisation of Islam,” Withanage said. After a few years of moderate coalition governance, a fusion of faith and tribalism is again on the ascendant in Sri Lanka. The movement’s champion is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former defence chief who is the leading candidate for president in elections due this year. Rajapaksa has pledged to protect religion in the country with the longest continuous Buddhist lineage. He is determined to reconstruct Sri Lanka’s security state, which was built during a nearly three-decade-long civil war with an ethnic Tamil minority. From 2005 to 2015, Sri Lanka was led by Rajapaksa’s brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, an unabashed nationalist who justified the brutal end to the civil war by portraying himself as the nation’s spiritual saviour. 
 
 File Photo: A Sri Lankan Buddhist bows in front of Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist leaders, in Delgoda, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times 

Temples decorated their walls with pictures of the Rajapaksa brothers. Money flowed for radical Buddhist groups that cheered on sectarian rioting in which Muslims died. One of the founders of Bodu Bala Sena, or the Buddhist Power Army, was given prime land in Colombo, the capital, for a high-rise Buddhist cultural centre.  File Photo: A Sri Lankan Buddhist bows in front of Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist leaders, in Delgoda, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times  Last year, Bodu Bala Sena’s leader, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, was sentenced to six years in prison. But in late May, amid a changing political climate, he received a presidential pardon. On Sunday, he presided over a meeting of thousands of monks intent on making their political presence felt in the upcoming elections. Before his imprisonment last year, Gnanasara Thero placed his campaign in a historical context. “We have been the guardians of Buddhism for 2,500 years,” he said in an interview with The Times. “Now, it is our duty, just as it is the duty of monks in Myanmar to fight to protect our peaceful island from Islam.”   © 2019 New York Times News Service",2
" With four times the population of the United States, an economy growing 8-9 percent a year and surging energy demand, India's race to become an economic power has propelled it to No. 3 in the list of top carbon polluters. India's greenhouse gas emissions will keep rising as it tries to lift millions out of poverty and connect nearly half a billion people to electricity grids. But it is also trying to curb emissions growth in a unique way, fearing the impacts of climate change and spiralling energy costs. The government is betting big on two market-based trading schemes to encourage energy efficiency and green power across the country of 1.2 billion people, sidestepping emissions trading schemes that have poisoned political debate in the United States and Australia. ""The policy roadmap India is adopting to curb emissions is innovative -- something that will make industries look at making efficiency the centre-piece rather than some step that follows an ineffective carrot and stick policy,"" said Srinivas Krishnaswamy, CEO of green policy consultants Vasudha India. In the world's first such national market-based mechanism, called Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT), India is starting a mandatory scheme that sets benchmark efficiency levels for 563 big polluting from power plants to steel mills and cement plants, that account for 54 percent of the country's energy consumption. The scheme allows businesses using more energy than stipulated to buy tradeable energy saving certificates, or Escerts, from those using less energy, creating a market estimated by the government to be worth about $16 billion in 2014 when trading starts. The number of Escerts depends on the amount of energy saved in a target year. LEARNING CURVE A three-year rollout phase is set to start in September and will help India curb about 100 million tonnes of carbon emissions, the government estimates. The rollout is aimed at working out hiccups in the process for companies to measure and report their energy use. India has already rolled out a renewable energy certificate (REC) trading scheme for wind, solar and biomass power plants. Green power comprises about 8 percent of energy production in India, while coal generates more than 60 percent, leading to a hefty coal import bill. Trading for the REC scheme, which currently occurs once a month, has picked up as more projects participate, underpinning a government plan to ramp up solar power from near zero to 20 gigawatts by 2022, about one eighth of power generation now. On May 25, a total of 14,002 RECs were traded during the REC trading session on the Indian Energy Exchange valued at $4.6 million, compared with 260 units at the previous session in April. But concerns remain about how both initiatives will evolve because of a lack of data and trained manpower as well as weak penalties for firms that refuse to comply. ""India has an issue of manpower and data. You look at incomes, industrial activities are growing, the share market might boom but hiring manpower, (building up) capacity and institutions is a long-term game,"" said Girish Sant, energy analyst at non-profit think tank Prayas. Some analysts also point to technical gaps in the PAT scheme, including how various units of one company would be graded. There were also limitations that allow REC certificates to be traded only once, limiting the early entry of intermediaries or market makers. ""In order to have an effective cap-and-trade or market mechanism that aids desired reduction in energy use, it is necessary to have targets that are neither too easy nor too difficult to achieve,"" said leading Indian clean energy project developer and advisory Emergent Ventures in a report on PAT. But industry observers said it still makes sense for India to opt for a national energy efficiency scheme rather than carbon emissions trading. ""Because the target is intensity, so you are basically asking people to reduce their intensity and that matches the overall target,"" said Sant of Prayas. The government has pledged to cut carbon intensity -- the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic output -- by between 20 and 25 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels. Emissions trading would need an absolute emissions cap, something India does not want to do, saying it needs to keep its economy growing and competitive. Adapting to the national policy and creating a unique market are a function of time and communication, said Vishwajit Dahanukar, managing director of Managing Emissions, a clean energy project developer, advisory and asset manager. ""That's basically it. It's just early days,"" he told Reuters from Mumbai. Rival China is also looking at promoting energy efficiency but most of the government's planned efforts focus more on carbon emissions trading to achieve national climate and pollution goals. In April, a senior Chinese official said the government would launch pilot emissions trading schemes in six provinces before 2013 and set up a nationwide trading platform by 2015, Thomson Reuters Point Carbon reported. The programme would be based on provincial-level energy consumption targets. The Chinese government is also considering a cap-and-trade scheme for energy savings in its buildings sector, which accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the country's overall emissions. According to a government directive, the mechanism would create energy saving credits but the programme was still in the early planning stages, with trading some years away. ""As Chinese industry is much more organised and the political system allows stringent monitoring, it becomes a little easier for them to use emissions trading,"" said Siddharth Pathak, Greenpeace India's policy officer for climate and energy, told Reuters. ""Also the push back from Indian industry would be much more than China.""",2
"NEW DELHI, Dec 8, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - China, Brazil, South Africa and India want a global climate treaty wrapped up by June 2010, according to a joint draft document prepared for the Copenhagen climate summit which opened on Monday. Some 192 countries gathered in the Danish capital for the world's biggest climate conference, meant to agree the outline of a new climate treaty. World leaders will attend the closing on Dec 18. Decisions by leaders to join the Copenhagen talks have buoyed the Dec. 7-18 meeting but time has run out to agree a full legal treaty, intended for next year. Copenhagen will instead merely agree a ""politically binding"" text. The four major emerging economies responsible for 30 percent of global carbon emissions targeted June to end talks on a legal text. Some other countries have suggested an end-2010 deadline. ""The (negotiating) group shall complete its work by June 2010 and present the outcome of its work to the conference ... at the resumed session"" of the Copenhagen meeting, the draft obtained by Reuters said. The draft recognised a scientific target to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius and rejected the notion of border tariffs which added a surcharge on imports from high-polluting nations. ""Parties shall not resort to any form of unilateral measures, including fiscal and non-fiscal border measures, against goods and services,"" it said. The draft did not specify how far rich countries should cut greenhouse gases by 2020, a key target year, nor how much money the four wanted from the industrialised world to help them prepare for climate change and cut their own greenhouse gas emissions. China and India have called on rich countries to cut their emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. When asked whether developing nations had dropped that demand, India's special envoy on climate change Shyam Saran in Copenhagen told Reuters: ""The reason is that there are some countries in the G77 and China (the larger group of developing nations) who want a higher percentage. ""You have the Alliance of Small Island States who say that the minimum should be 45 percent, not just 40 percent. So this is a matter for further discussion."" The draft text called for a global climate fund to help developing countries prepare for and mitigate against climate change, to be administered by the Global Environment Facility.",0
"Or a chicken, or a salmon fillet, or any of a few hundred items that are hours from their midnight expiration date. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60percent off at exactly 9pm. It’s part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste that company executives in this famously bibulous country decided to call “happy hour” in the hopes of drawing in regulars, like any decent bar. “I’ve gotten quite hooked on this,” said Kasimir Karkkainen, 27, who works in a hardware store, as he browsed the meat section in the Vallila S-market. It was 9:15 and he had grabbed a container of pork miniribs and 2 pounds of shrink-wrapped pork tenderloin. Total cost after the price drop: the equivalent of $4.63. About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion. The figures represent more than just a disastrous misallocation of need and want, given that 10 percent of people in the world are chronically undernourished. All that excess food, scientists say, contributes to climate change. From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found. Landfills of rotting food emit methane, a gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And to harvest and transport all that wasted food requires billions of acres of arable land, trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels. For consumers, cutting back on food waste is one of the few personal habits that can help the planet. But for some reason, a lot of people who fret about their carbon footprint aren’t sweating the vegetables and rump steak they toss into the garbage. “There’s been a lot of focus on energy,” said Paul Behrens, a professor in energy and environmental change at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “But climate change is as much a land issue and a food issue as anything else.” Reducing waste is a challenge because selling as much food as possible is a tried, tested and ingrained part of all-you-can-eat cultures. Persuading merchants to promote and profit from “food rescue,” as it is known, is not so obvious. 
 
 Shoppers can choose from a variety of marked-down food items at the S-market in the Vallila neighbourhood in Helsinki, Aug. 22, 2019. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60 percent off at exactly 9pm as part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste. 

“Consumers are paying for the food, and who wants to reduce that?” said Toine Timmermans, director of the United Against Food Waste Foundation, a nonprofit in the Netherlands composed of companies and research institutes. “Who profits from reducing food waste?”  Shoppers can choose from a variety of marked-down food items at the S-market in the Vallila neighbourhood in Helsinki, Aug. 22, 2019. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60 percent off at exactly 9pm as part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste.  A growing number of supermarkets, restaurants and startups — many based in Europe — are trying to answer that question. The United States is another matter. “Food waste might be a uniquely American challenge because many people in this country equate quantity with a bargain,” said Meredith Niles, an assistant professor in food systems and policy at the University of Vermont. “Look at the number of restaurants that advertise their supersised portions.” Nine of the 10 USsupermarket chains that were assessed by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity last year were given a C grade or lower on food waste issues. Only Wal-Mart did better, largely for its efforts to standardise date labels and to educate staffers and customers. Some of the most promising food waste efforts are apps that connect food sellers to food buyers. Think Tinder, except one party in this hookup is a person and the other is an aging loaf of bread. Among the most popular is Too Good to Go, a company based in Copenhagen, with 13 million users and contracts with 25,000 restaurants and bakeries in 11 countries. Consumers pay about one-third of the sticker price for items, most of which goes to the retailer, with a small percentage paid to the app. In Denmark, food rescue has attained the scale and momentum of a cultural movement, one with its own intellectual godmother: Selina Juul, a graphic designer who immigrated from Russia at the age of 13. “I came from a country where there was a fear that we wouldn’t have food on the table tomorrow, where there were food shortages,” she said in a phone interview. “When we emigrated, I had never seen so much food. I was shocked. Then I was shocked again when I saw how much food people wasted.” In 2008, at the age of 28, she started a Facebook group called Stop Wasting Food. Within weeks, she was being interviewed on the radio. Soon after that, she came to the attention of Anders Jensen, buying director at REMA 1000, the largest supermarket chain in Denmark. “I was on a business trip to Scotland and I read about Selina in a newspaper,” Jensen recalled. “Around that time, we learned that every Dane was throwing out 63 kilos of food per year” — about 139 pounds — “and I was sitting in this airport thinking, ‘she’s right.’” After the two met in a Copenhagen cafe, REMA 1000 eliminated in-store bulk discounts. As of 2008, there would be no more three hams for the price of two, or any variations on that theme. “It exploded in the media because it was the first time a retailer said, ‘It’s OK if we sell less,’” Jensen said. REMA 1000 and Juul recognise that there is a limit to how much one company can do to reduce waste. Consciousness-raising was necessary. So Juul has enlisted famous Danes to join her cause. She’s co-writing a book on cooking with leftovers with Princess Marie, who worked in advertising and marketing before marrying into the Danish royal family. Celebrity chefs, like Rene Redzepi, have spread the word. Mette Frederiksen, the current prime minister, even made it a campaign issue this year. In Finland, reducing food waste has yet to become a political issue, but it is a selling point for at least one restaurant. Every dish on the menu of Loop, which is housed in a former mental hospital in Helsinki, is made from past-due ingredients donated by grocery stores and bakeries. Donations vary, so Loop’s chefs have no idea what they’ll be making until they walk into the restaurant’s kitchen. “It’s like an episode of ‘Master Chef’ every day,” said Johanna Kohvakka, founder of the nonprofit From Waste to Taste, which operates Loop. “But we try to make every dish look great so that people can share images online and say, ‘This was about to be wasted.’” Kohvakka says Loop turns a profit and could serve as a model for similar ventures. Executives at S-market in Finland make no such claims about their happy hour. Mika Lyytikainen, an S-market vice president, explained that the program simply reduces its losses. “When we sell at 60 percent off, we don’t earn any money, but we earn more than if the food was given to charity,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s now possible for every Finn to buy very cheap food in our stores.” It’s not unusual to find groups of S-market shoppers milling around with soon-to-be-discounted items from the shelves and waiting for the clock to strike at 9. “I’ve done that,” Karkkainen said, as he headed for the exits with his pork miniribs. Other Finns, it seems, haven’t fully embraced S-market’s anti-waste ethos. Harri Hartikainen, 71, was shopping one evening in Vallila and considered a 60percent  off box of Kansas City-style grilled chicken wings. “I’ve never tried these before,” he said, dropping them into his shopping basket. “But it’s so cheap, if I don’t like it, I can just throw it out.” ©2019 The New York Times Company",2
" India hopes to wrap up a free trade agreement with ASEAN by March next year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Wednesday in Singapore, and he vowed to show flexibility in negotiations. The Association of South East Asian Nations, which signed a landmark charter on Tuesday aiming for economic integration, is meeting leaders from Japan, China, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand in the annual ""ASEAN+6"" meeting. ""I have no doubt that we all share a common political will to reach an agreement at the earliest,"" Singh said in his speech in the city state, a copy of which was released in New Delhi. ""I want to assure you that on its part India has shown and will continue to show, the necessary flexibility and determination to achieve this objective. ""We will work together with you to conclude the negotiations, as agreed, by March next year."" The free trade agreement with India had stalled over agricultural tariffs. India is also negotiating a similar deal with the European Union and hopes to finalise it by end-2008. Singh said India and the ASEAN bloc should set a bilateral trade target of $50 billion by 2010, and also proposed setting up an India-ASEAN green fund with an initial investment of $5 million for pilot projects to promote clean technologies. New Delhi has also suggested an India-ASEAN network on climate change to pool and share expertise and exchange best practices to tackling global warming. ""Once the fund is established I invite other countries to make contributions as well,"" Singh said. He said the Indian economy was now on a new growth trajectory and it was possible to sustain 9.0-10.0 percent economic growth annually for several years. The Indian economy, Asia's third largest, has grown at an average 8.6 percent for the past four years and is poised to grow at similar levels in the year to March 2008.",0
"Jiming at an event in Dhaka on Monday termed Quad “anti-China” and warned Bangladesh against any form of participation in the group, saying that it would “substantially damage” bilateral relations. Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen responded to Jiming’s remarks on Tuesday, saying that Bangladesh will take a decision based on ""neutral and balanced"" foreign policy. Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department, was asked by a journalist about the matter during a daily press conference in Washington DC on Tuesday.  “Well, we have taken note of that statement from the PRC ambassador to Bangladesh. What we would say is that we respect Bangladesh’s sovereignty, and we respect Bangladesh’s right to make foreign policy decisions for itself,” Price said. First established in 2007, Quad is an informal strategic dialogue established between the US, Japan, Australia and India. The initiative is widely regarded as a response to the growing economic and military power of China. 
 
 

“We have an incredibly strong relationship with Bangladesh. We work closely with our partners there on a range of issues, from economic growth to climate change to humanitarian issues,” said Price.   “And when it comes to the Quad, we’ve said this before, but the Quad, it’s an informal, essential, multilateral mechanism that right now conveys – convenes likeminded democracies – the United States, India, Australia, and Japan – to coordinate in the Indo-Pacific, and fundamentally, to push forward our goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific region.” Then US deputy secretary of state, Stephen Biegun, had discussed the Indo-Pacific Strategy with Bangladesh officials during his Dhaka visit in October last year. An open Indo-Pacific region will be “enormously” beneficial to Bangladesh as well as to its neighbours to work towards peaceful outcomes in the region, and to the US, he had said. “Unfortunately we are facing other challenges in the Indo-Pacific. I would not deny there are security concerns that affect and concern many of us who are Pacific nations or in the Indo-Pacific,” Biegun had said, in a clear reference to China. Before the Dhaka trip, he had visited India. New Delhi, wary of further antagonising China, has been careful to avoid being drawn into US-led alliances. But Biegun had said the United States had no plans to impinge on India's strategic autonomy, but to forge a relationship based on shared interests. ",1
"“It was like walking through a nightmare,” he recalled. Shea Stadium in Queens, then the home of the New York Mets, had been transformed into a staging area. Valentine, then the Mets’ manager, assisted there. On Sept 21, 2001, the Mets hosted the Atlanta Braves in their first game in New York since the attacks. Mike Piazza smacked a home run in the eighth inning that lifted the Mets to a 3-2 victory, providing a level of catharsis for many in a reeling city and country. “It was a spontaneous moment of people coming together,” said Valentine, now 71. “Can that happen again in a nation that is so divisive now that it feels that we’re at war within our boundaries?” Twenty years after 9/11, the United States is at another moment of crisis, but the ties between sports and patriotism have severed for some and tightened for others. The jingoism at sporting events that temporarily surged in 1991 during the Gulf War and roared back after 9/11 now often drives wedges, after the largest social protests in history against systemic racism during a politicised pandemic. The playing of the national anthem and “God Bless America,” giant American flags, military flyovers and patriotic ceremonies are as ubiquitous at sporting events today as first downs, home runs and slam dunks. But the end of the war in Afghanistan, against a backdrop of social change and reflection on the dynamic between this country and its people, stokes debate on how or even whether such displays should continue. “I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with patriotism in sport,” said Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American to win an Olympic medal, at the 2016 Olympic Games. “Sport bridges so many different people and in cultures and identities.” But, Muhammad said, it may be time to change how the patriotism is displayed a generation after 9/11. When she sees a military flyover, she wonders how it impacts the climate or whether the money can be better used in underserved communities. “And that’s a better way to celebrate our patriotism and our commitment to this idea of our nationality,” Muhammad said. “Why not try to elevate those who don’t have?” Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, said friendly ribbing between fans, like he saw at a recent baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, is a “very indirect” show of patriotism because of the spirit and energy. “But I also think that during the last two decades, we have all been subject to patriotic manipulation in many ways,” said Kerr, whose father, Malcolm, was the president of the American University of Beirut when he was shot and killed in Lebanon in 1984. “And because it’s directly related to the military and to the wars that we have been engaged in for two decades, it’s a strange dynamic at games, and I’m always conflicted by that dynamic.” In the 1960s, Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner at the time, dispatched players to Vietnam for goodwill tours and mandated that players stand at attention during the national anthem. In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the Olympics in Mexico City. Nearly three decades later, the NBA suspended Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a guard for the Denver Nuggets, for declining to stand during the anthem. In 2015, then-US Sens John McCain and Jeff Flake, both of Arizona, released a report disclosing that the Pentagon had paid the NFL and other sports leagues $6.8 million to host what they described as “paid patriotism.” “Unsuspecting audience members became the subjects of paid marketing campaigns rather than simply bearing witness to teams’ authentic, voluntary shows of support for the brave men and women who wear our nation’s uniform,” the report said. The back-and-forth of protest and compulsory patriotism at sporting events has come to a head over the past five years. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem as a member of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, jump-starting the current wave of peaceful protests of social injustice and police brutality against Black people and other people of colour. At first, Kaepernick sat during the anthem. He decided to kneel after talking to Nate Boyer, a retired Army Green Beret who walked onto the University of Texas football team as a long snapper and signed to the Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted free agent. In this fraught political climate, many Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, have accused Kaepernick and other athletes who kneel during the anthem of disrespecting the military, even though Boyer recommended the gesture and Kaepernick has said repeatedly that that is not his intent. Boyer, on a recent telephone call, said he understood that some people saw it as disrespectful. “But what I don’t understand,” he said, “what really frustrates me, is why people can’t have a different perspective on that, and still respect each other.” He added: “Everything seems so one way or the other, all or nothing, right now. That’s just not what that flag represents to me. I don’t think it represents that to a lot of people.” The NFL did not respond to requests for comment from Commissioner Roger Goodell about shows of patriotism in the sport. Few athletes joined Kaepernick’s initial protest. Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for the Oakland Athletics whose father served in the military, became in 2017 the first MLB player to kneel during the anthem. “I did it because it was what was right,” Maxwell said, adding, “I was standing up for myself. I was standing up for my family. I was standing up for the people who couldn’t be heard and/or haven’t been heard.” By the summer of 2020, when waves of athletes protested after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, kneeling was common in sports and almost universal in the NBA and the WNBA. In a whiplash reversal, athletes such as former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who called kneeling “disrespecting the flag,” received criticism for their support of the patriotic exhibitions. The protests forced organisations such as US Soccer, FIFA and the NFL to reconfigure policies that required athletes to respectfully stand during the national anthem. But although the NBA embraced kneeling in the final months of its 2019-20 season, it pushed back when the Dallas Mavericks, at the direction of team owner, Mark Cuban, did not play the national anthem for several games at the start of the 2020-21 season. “We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country,” Cuban said in a statement through the team at the time. “But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard, because they have not been.” The league required the team to start playing the anthem again. “The ritual of playing the national anthem prior to sporting events reinforces our sense of belonging,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in an interview this week. “For generations in the US, people have turned to sports in difficult times in search of unity and togetherness. We saw that in the days and weeks following the events of 9/11, and we’re seeing it now during this pandemic. People crave that physical coming together because it provides a sense of stability and comfort. With sports, there is a real community aspect to them that is hard to find anywhere else.” But the anthem doesn’t resonate with everyone in the same way, said Charles Ross, chair of the African American Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. Francis Scott Key, the national anthem’s songwriter, owned enslaved people. “When you start talking about the millions of African Americans, their history and what their families have had to probably go through to get the opportunity to sit in that seat at that professional venue and get ready to see this game being played, they’ve got a very different kind of experience than the average white American and looking at America as this kind of holistic monolithic country,” Ross said. The vast majority of players in the NFL, NBA and WNBA are Black. States such Texas and Wisconsin are considering bills that would require that the national anthem be played before any sporting event held at sites financed in part by taxpayer money. Wisconsin state Rep Tony Kurtz, a military veteran, is one of the assembly members who proposed the bill in his state after Cuban did not play the anthem in Dallas. In May, the bill passed the state Assembly with a bipartisan vote, 74-22. “I was called a fascist, a Nazi, just a whole bunch of things,” said Kurtz, a Republican. “I just believe in our country. We are one nation. At the end of the day, we all still got to get along. I think that’s why it resonates so much with sports and why it resonates so much after 9/11. We needed unity in this country.” Wisconsin state Rep Don Vruwink, a Democrat, voted in the bill’s favour. But Vruwink, a longtime high school and youth sports coach, questioned the bill’s practicality, saying that it could not be enforced and that he worried it diluted the spirit of the anthem. “This bill wasn’t about the logistics,” Vruwink said. “It was about a culture war, in my mind. Forcing people to say, is it good or bad, or whatever, which is unfortunate.” Although this tension plays out at arenas, and causes fiery debates from the court to the halls of Congress, several sports commissioners, like Silver, still see a role for patriotic displays at sporting events. “Crisis brings out the best and worst in people and companies,” said MLS Commissioner Don Garber, adding: “I really believe that even during the most polarising times, sports seems to cut through all of that when it needs to most, and I continue to believe that our industry will continue to do so.” Among the major sports, Garber and Gary Bettman of the NHL were the only current commissioners in their roles on 9/11. That morning, Garber was about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel when he looked up and saw the first tower on fire. He spent the night in the office of his brother, Mitch, a longtime attorney for a law firm that represented police officers out of an office near ground zero. Cathy Engelbert, a longtime corporate executive and now the commissioner of the WNBA, worked across the street from the World Trade Center. In a statement, she said she remembered “vividly how sports played such a vital role in bringing our country together.” She added: “Two decades later, I still believe that sports continues to be unifying.” Bud Selig, MLB’s commissioner at the time, described baseball as an institution with important social responsibilities. The two most important instances, Selig said, were when Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier and when baseball returned after 9/11. Then-President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium that year. “The reaction of the crowd showed that our country was on its way back,” Selig said in a statement. “It is inherent in every level of our game that the welfare of our country comes first.” Muhammad, who won a bronze medal with the US women’s sabre team at the 2016 Games, also became the first US Olympian in any sport to compete while wearing a hijab. After 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims escalated. Muhammad said “being a visible Muslim woman comes with its difficulties.” “I don’t think that my experience as an American and having lived through 9/11 is any different from anyone else’s, other than the Muslim community became, like, literal targets afterward,” Muhammad said. “And I remember just that change in which people saw me, in the way that I was treated even sometimes by teachers, because I was young when it happened.” And being Black, she said, is “10 times harder in this country.” But that, in part, fuels her willingness to show her patriotism, including in sports. “My parents made a very intentional effort to make sure that me and my siblings understood our own history as descendants of an enslaved community,” she said. “And so I am very proud of the country that my ancestors had built for free, and I don’t allow other people to dictate that connection to patriotism. I never have.” ©The New York Times Company",2
" Thirty meters from the kiln the heat is palpable. It is converting crushed stone to 'clinker' for cement at temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius. It was designed to burn pulverized coal. But rising coal prices have prompted Castle Cement, a unit of Germany's Heidelberg Cement HBCB.DH, to replace over half the coal with alternatives -- tires, bone meal, paper. Across Europe, companies are suffering under high energy costs. Oil hit a record high above $140 per barrel on June 26. ""We've had to increase our use of secondary fuels such as whole tires, meat and bone meal, paper and plastics and recycled solvents,"" said Gareth Price, General Manager of the Ketton works. ""This keeps our costs down and also reduces the amount of waste going to landfill."" Beyond the 68 meter-long steel tube of the furnace, an enormous cylindrical mill grinds 130 tonnes of clinker an hour to a fine powder with a deafening rumble. It runs on electricity, which cannot be replaced with other fuels, and power prices have more than doubled in the past year. With a collapse in British house building following the credit crunch, the company's ability to pass costs onto customers is limited, putting pressure on the bottom line. Castle Cement is not alone in feeling the pressure. Shares in the world's top paper and packaging firms Stora Enso Oyj, UPM-Kymmene and Huhtamaki fell sharply earlier this month when the Finnish firms were forced to issue profit warnings on the back of higher energy costs. Companies in all sectors, from food makers such as Cadbury in the UK to Austria's RHI, the world's largest fire proof material maker, have warned that higher oil, gas, coal and power prices are pushing up the costs of manufacturing products and moving them to customers. FEELING THE PAIN Industry says the situation has reached a tipping point and urgent action is needed from the European Union and governments to avoid business closures and job losses. ""The real pain is kicking in,"" David Gilett, director of IFIEC Europe, a lobby group for energy intensive industries across Europe, said. ""If the forward prices for winter power and gas apply when it comes around to actually buying the power and gas, then there will be real difficulties."" Crude, coal and gas prices have risen globally in recent years but businesses in Europe feel they have suffered more than other regions. Gilett noted that many countries subsidize energy prices, especially in Asia and the Middle East. In the United States, power and gas prices are often lower than those in liberalized western European markets. In the past nine months benchmark UK gas prices have been 20-30 percent above U.S. Henry Hub prices, according to data from oil giant BP Plc. Current baseload UK electricity prices of around 90 pounds per megawatt hour are also much higher than levels recorded at U.S. power hubs in recent weeks. European businesses blame a failure to implement proper competition in continental power and gas markets. They are now pressing the EU to push ahead with more vigour in implementing a planned directive that aims to foster competition by separating ownership of power and gas production activities from transportation infrastructure. ""Europe needs to make sure its energy position is competitive with America and elsewhere,"" said Chris Tane, Chief Executive of Ineos ChlorVinyls, whose Runcorn plant for making chlorine uses as much electricity as nearby Liverpool, England's sixth-largest city. Industry says Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme is also boosting power prices and the impact on industry is likely to worsen if the EU presses ahead with its plans to make more sectors subject to CO2 emissions caps. Big energy users would also like to see changes in the tax system to ease their burden, such as cuts in taxes on fuel and power, accelerated depreciation for equipment and a variable corporate tax rate that fall when energy costs rise, Gilett said. GOVERNMENTS NOT LISTENING Loathe to give up tax revenues and more concerned with alleviating the impact of high fuel prices on the old and unemployed, governments have not taken heed of industry's case, Gilett said. ""There seems to be no recognition at all of the pressures this is placing on the industrial core,"" Gilett said. With a weak economic climate often making it hard to pass higher energy costs on to customers, businesses are forced to make ever-greater efforts to use energy more efficiently. Castle Cement now mills as much cement as it can at night and the weekends, when electricity prices are lower. In future, it will try to schedule big maintenance projects that require plant shutdowns for the winter, when power prices are higher. Old machines have been replaced with more efficient versions. High energy costs require Price to run a tighter ship than in the past as operations must run smoothly and reliably to optimize energy use. Breakdowns caused by poor maintenance of machinery can shift activity to times when power costs are higher and lead to idling equipment elsewhere in the production chain. ""Energy management is now a topic of everyday conversation. We are completely changing the way we work,"" he said.",0
"LAS VEGAS/LOS ANGELES,Wed Mar 11, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Desert golf course superintendent Bill Rohret is doing something that 20 years ago would have seemed unthinkable -- ripping up bright, green turf by the acre and replacing it with rocks. Back then ""they came in with bulldozers and dynamite, and they took the desert and turned it into a green oasis,"" Rohret said, surveying a rock-lined fairway within sight of the Las Vegas strip. ""Now ... it's just the reverse."" The Angel Park Golf Club has torn out 65 acres of off-course grass in the last five years, and 15 more will be removed by 2011, to help conserve local supplies of one of the most precious commodities in the parched American West -- fresh water. But Rohret's efforts have their limits. His and many other golf courses still pride themselves on their pristine greens and fairways and sparkling fountains, requiring huge daily expenditures of water. Aiming to cut per capita use by about a third in the face of withering drought expected to worsen with global warming, water authorities in the United States' driest major city are paying customers $1.50 per square foot to replace grass lawns with desert landscaping. Built in the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas leads Western U.S. cities scrambling to slash water consumption, increase recycling and squeeze more from underground aquifers as long-reliable surface water sources dry up. From handing out fines for leaky sprinklers to charging homeowners high rates for high use, water officials in the U.S. West are chasing down squandered water one gallon at a time. Nowhere is the sense of crisis more visible than on the outskirts of Las Vegas at Lake Mead, the nation's largest manmade reservoir, fed by the once-mighty Colorado River. A principal source of water for Nevada and Southern California, the lake has dipped to below half its capacity, leaving an ominous, white ""bathtub ring"" that grows thicker each year. ""We are in the eye of the storm,"" said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. ""As the realities of climate change began to manifest themselves at the beginning of this century, we had to get serious about it."" For now, policymakers have emphasized the need to curb water use rather than urban growth, though the U.S. recession has put the brakes on commercial and housing development that otherwise would be at odds with the West's water scarcity. GETTING TOUGH Warm, dry weather has long made the American West attractive to visitors, but piped-in water has created artificial oases, luring millions to settle in the region. Las Vegas has ranked as one of the fastest-growing major cities. But scientists say climate change is shriveling the snow pack in California's Sierra Nevada, the state's main source of fresh surface water, and in the Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River, whose waters sustain seven states. Further pressure from farming and urban sprawl is straining underground aquifers, placing a question mark over the future growth of cities from Los Angeles to Tucson, Arizona. ""There is going to have to be a big adjustment in the American Southwest and in California as we come to grips with limits in this century -- not just limited water, but also limited water supply,"" said James Powell, author of the book ""Dead Pool,"" exploring challenges facing planners in the West. Reactions among local water authorities differ. In Phoenix, the United States' fifth-largest city, authorities say sustainable groundwater and ample surface water allocations from the Colorado and Salt rivers meet the city's needs, even factoring in growth through a moderate drought. The city is also recycling waste water and plans to pump some back into the aquifer as a cushion. Tucson will require new businesses to start collecting rainwater for irrigation in 2010. California requires developers of large housing projects to prove they have sufficient water. In Las Vegas, where rain is so infrequent that some residents can remember the days it fell in a given year, front-yard turf has been banned for new homes. The Southern Nevada Water Authority also has hired ""water cops"" to fan out into the suburbs to identify violations of mandatory lawn irrigation schedules and wasteful run-off. Repeat offenders get $80 fines. Major hotel-casinos such as the MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment have adopted ""green"" building codes, including modifications designed to slash water use by 40 percent. Those measures are starting to pay off, with daily water use down 15 percent per person in the greater Las Vegas area. BUYING TIME In a wake-up call to California, water officials there recently announced that prolonged drought was forcing them to cut Sierra-fed supplies pumped to cities and irrigation districts by 85 percent. That has led many California cities, topped by Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest, to plan for rationing, including price-enforced household conservation and tough new lawn watering restrictions. ""The level of severity of this drought is something we haven't seen since the early 1970s,"" Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in unveiling his city's drought plan, which also would put more water cops on the beat. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month called on the state's urban users to cut water consumption 20 percent or face mandatory conservation measures. The California drought, now in its third year, is the state's costliest ever. Complicating matters are sharp restrictions on how much water can be pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in northern California, which furnishes much of the state's irrigation and drinking supplies, to protect endangered fish species. Moreover, the severe dry spell is leaving the state more vulnerable to wildfires, which last year consumed some several Los Angeles suburbs. The previous year, fires forced a record 500,000 Southern Californians to flee their homes. PLANNING FOR THE WORST Conservation will buy time, experts say. But bolder steps are needed in anticipation of longer droughts and renewed urban expansion once the recession ends. Cities like Los Angeles and San Diego are revisiting an idea once abandoned in the face of staunch political opposition -- recycling purified sewer water for drinking supplies. Disparaged by critics as ""toilet-to-tap,"" such recycling plans have gained new currency from the success of the year-old Groundwater Replenishing System in Orange County near Los Angeles. That system distills wastewater through advanced treatment and pumps it into the ground to recharge the area's aquifer, providing drinking supplies for 500,000 people, including residents of Anaheim, home of Disneyland. Water specialists also see a need to capture more rainfall runoff that otherwise flows out to sea and to change the operation of dams originally built for flood control to maximize their storage capacity. The situation in Las Vegas has grown so dire that water authorities plan to build a $3 billion pipeline to tap aquifers lying beneath a remote part of Nevada, a project critics call the greatest urban water grab in decades. Southern Nevada water czar Mulroy says a broader national conversation about water is needed -- but not happening. ""We are talking about investing in public infrastructure, we are looking at building projects, but I get frustrated because we are doing it in complete denial of the climate change conditions that we are facing,"" she said. ""We are not looking at where the oceans are rising, where the floods are going to occur, where things are going to go from that normal state to something extraordinary.""",0
" It could produce the ultimate ""hot chick flick"", or it may erupt as a boiling international rant against the threat of global warming. But whichever way it goes, producers of an all-women directed interactive mobile phone film say it will be a ""cinematic symphony of women's voices from around the world"". The project -- entitled ""Overheated Symphony -- is part of the Birds Eye View film festival taking place in London next month which showcases the work of female film-makers. Women across the world are being asked to make a short film -- a ""quick flick"" -- between 40 seconds and four minutes long on a mobile phone and then send it via the internet to a London-based film director who will pull them all together. Apart from the the overall theme ""Overheated"", there is no restriction on content or subject matter. ""If it's hot, we'd like to see it,"" the project's Web site declares: ""Ladies, wherever you are, whoever you are, we want you to join in.""
According to Sarah Turner, the British film director whose task it will be to create a final edit from the mobile phone contributions, the inspiration for ""Overheated Symphony"" was the 1927 film by German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann called ""Berlin - Symphony of a Great City"", which used a montage of still pictures from many sources to document city life. Like that work, Overheated Symphony will be ""very abstract"", says Turner. It will give those who contribute the chance to engage in a ""dialogue of ideas"" with women across the world. ""Because they are films made by women, women's themes and issues are bound to be an integral part of the finished piece,"" she told Reuters. ""I expect some of them to be quite intense, because this is quite an intense thing to respond to. We all have overheated moments, when we are angry about something, or upset, or when we are sexually hot. We might even end up having some menopause films, you never know."" Turner is gathering the mobile films ahead of the March 2 deadline and will then produce a live edit of the symphony to be aired on March 9 at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Rachel Millward, director of the Birds Eye View festival, which is now in its third year, says the film is as much about new technology as it is about women and heat. ""The way film and media are going is very much towards interactivity and multi-platform projects,"" she said. ""We wanted to develop a project along those lines, and also one that had a kind of gamey feel to it -- the sense that everyone can join in and have a play."" ""Making a film from all these female voices around the world is quite a beautiful thing, but also it's about shooting down the idea that women are not up to date with technology."" Contributors are being asked on www.birds-eye-view.co.uk to upload their cinematic efforts onto the festival's own youtube channel to be edited. And while Millward admits the end result is as yet unknown, she is confident it will be far more than the sum of its parts. ""The great thing about this film is that you can't predict what it will be,"" she says. ""It could be about climate change, or it could be about passion. I imagine it will be all of those things and more.""",0
"The death toll continued to rise on Wednesday as landslides and flooding damaged homes and stranded thousands of tourists flocking to vacation spots and pilgrimage sites during Hinduism’s festive season, which coincides with the fall harvest. “Historically October is the start of post-monsoon,” said RK Jenamani, a senior scientist from India’s meteorological department. “But this time what happened was that western disturbances were very, very intense.” Cyclonic conditions in the Bay of Bengal off India’s east coast sent heavy winds and rainfall across the subcontinent, reaching the Himalayas in Nepal and spreading all the way down to the coastal ravines of India’s southwestern peninsula. In the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, days of heavy rainfall — in one place, the most since 1897 — killed at least 46 people and left hundreds more stranded in hillside resorts, with flooded lakes swamping roads. South Asia’s monsoons have always arrived with fury. But the scenes of death and destruction playing out in the region are yet another reminder of the urgency of climate change, experts say. A warming climate will mean more frequent extreme rainfall in many parts of the world, scientists have said. India and its neighbours have struggled to square development projects intended to lift millions of people out of poverty with the risks of a changing climate. Highways and bridges have been built in remote districts increasingly prone to landslides and floods. And countries, particularly India, are relying heavily on coal to fuel growth, something that is likely to come under the spotlight at the United Nations’ COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, this month. Governments in South Asia are expected to push wealthy countries for financial aid to help them shift away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner sources of energy.  
Floods, landslides kill at least 43 people in Nepal
   That switch — if it happens — could take years, stalling not only international pledges to reduce global carbon emissions, but also projects to mitigate the effects of a less predictable and more dangerous climate. Meteorologists were not expecting the catastrophic rainfall that has deluged India and Nepal in recent days. About 100 people were evacuated from a Lemon Tree resort in Nainital, a former British colonial hill station in Uttarakhand. Hotel management staff remained to care for older adults, after rescue workers decided that an evacuation could be too risky for them given the hairpin turns and steep drops on the district’s narrow mountain road. “The water is receding now, but the vehicles are still stranded,” said Akriti Arora, a company spokesman. Uttarakhand officials feared the death toll could rise further as the receding waters exposed people trapped under the debris. Torrential rains also soaked southern India, triggering flash floods and landslides in the state of Kerala. A couple sailed through the flooded streets of their village in an aluminium cooking pot to get to their wedding. More than 40 people in Kerala drowned or were killed in the recent landslides and floods, said Neethu V. Thomas, a hazard analyst at Kerala’s disaster management agency. “All the forces are on the ground,” she said. Still, the forecast of another bout of heavy rainfall in the days ahead complicated a full assessment. “It’s difficult to get all of the details,” she said. This week, officials in Kerala opened overflowing dams, the first time state officials had made such a move since catastrophic flooding killed more than 400 people in 2018.  
At least 34 dead after floods in north India
   India deployed navy and air force personnel to assist with rescue efforts, and to force people living in the path downstream from the dam to evacuate. Landslides and floods also struck Nepal this week, with at least 50 people killed in inundated far-flung villages. Hundreds of houses in hilly areas were swept away. Highways were blocked, and a regional airport, its tarmac submerged, was forced to cancel flights. There, too, the cloudbursts surprised scientists, who had forecast that the Himalayan nation’s period of heavy rains had ended more than a week ago. Rice paddy that was ready for harvest was damaged in the rain, causing Nepal’s farmers to despair and prompting fears of a food crisis in one of the world’s poorest countries. “Rainfalls in October were reported in the past, too, but not to this intensity,” said Ajaya Dixit, an expert on climate change vulnerability in Nepal. “Climate change is real, and it is happening.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",0
" Brazil, China, India and South Africa have urged wealthy nations to hand over $10 billion to poor nations this year to help fight climate change. The funds were pledged in a non-binding deal agreed at last December's Copenhagen climate conference. The group - known as BASIC - said the money must be available at once ""as proof of their commitment"" to address the global challenge. The plea was issued after a meeting of the four nations in Delhi on Sunday. The four nations, led by China, also pledged to meet an end-month deadline to submit action plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Environment ministers and envoys from the four nations met in New Delhi in a show of unity by countries whose greenhouse gas emissions are among the fastest rising in the world. The bloc was key to brokering a political agreement at the Copenhagen talks in December and its meeting in India was designed in part to put pressure on richer nations to make good on funding commitments. ""We have sent a very powerful symbol to the world of our intentions,"" the Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said at a joint press conference after seven hours of talks. The group discussed setting up a climate fund to help nations most vulnerable to the impact of global warming, which it said would act as a wakeup call for wealthier countries to meet their pledges on financial assistance and give $10 billion in 2010. Rich countries have pledged $30 billion in climate change funding for the 2010-12 period and set a goal of $100 billion by 2020, far less than what developing countries had wanted. The group in New Delhi said releasing $10 billion this year would send a signal of the rich countries' commitment. The four said they were in talks to set up an independent fund for the same purpose, but gave no timeline or figure. ""When we say we will be reinforcing technical support as well as funds to the most vulnerable countries, we are giving a slap in the face to the rich countries,"" Brazil's Environment Minister Carlos Minc said through a translator. The non-binding accord worked out at the Copenhagen climate summit was described by many as a failure because it fell short of the conference's original goal of a more ambitious commitment to prevent more heatwaves, droughts and crop failures. China is the world's top CO2 emitter, while India is number four. China was blamed by many countries at Copenhagen for obstructing a tougher deal and has refused to submit to outside scrutiny of its plans to brake greenhouse gas emissions. China has pledged to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each unit of economic growth by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. For India, that figure is up to 25 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said the world needed to take immediate action to fight climate change. But in the wake of a controversial exaggeration by the U.N. climate panel on the threat of global warming to the Himalayan glaciers, he called for an ""open attitude"" to climate science. ""(There is a) point of view that the climate change or climate warming issue is caused by the cyclical element of the nature itself. I think we need to adopt an open attitude to the scientific research,"" he said through a translator. ""We want our views to be more scientific and more consistent.""",4
"Truck makers are divided into two camps. One faction, which includes Traton, Volkswagen’s truck unit, is betting on batteries because they are widely regarded as the most efficient option. The other camp, which includes Daimler Truck and Volvo, the two largest truck manufacturers, argues that fuel cells that convert hydrogen into electricity — emitting only water vapor — make more sense because they would allow long-haul trucks to be refueled quickly. The choice companies make could be hugely consequential, helping to determine who dominates trucking in the electric vehicle age and who ends up wasting billions of dollars on the Betamax equivalent of electric truck technology, committing a potentially fatal error. It takes years to design and produce new trucks, so companies will be locked into the decisions they make now for a decade or more. “It’s obviously one of the most important technology decisions we have to make,” said Andreas Gorbach, a member of the management board of Daimler Truck, which owns Freightliner in the United States and is the largest truck maker in the world. The stakes for the environment and for public health are also high. If many truck makers wager incorrectly, it could take much longer to clean up trucking than scientists say we have to limit the worst effects of climate change. In the United States, medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for 7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Trucks tend to spend much more time on the road than passenger cars. The war in Ukraine has added urgency to the debate, underlining the financial and geopolitical risks of fossil fuel dependence. Although sales of electric cars are exploding, large truck makers have only begun to mass-produce emission-free vehicles. Daimler Truck, for example, began producing an electric version of its heavy-duty Actros truck, with a maximum range of 240 miles, late last year. Tesla unveiled a design for a battery-powered semitruck in 2017 but has not set a firm production date. Cost will be a decisive factor. Unlike car buyers, who might splurge on a vehicle because they like the way it looks or the status it conveys, truck buyers carefully calculate how much a rig is going to cost them to buy, maintain and refuel. Battery-powered trucks sell for about three times as much as equivalent diesel models, although owners may recoup much of the cost in fuel savings. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will probably be even more expensive, perhaps one-third more than battery-powered models, according to auto experts. But the savings in fuel and maintenance could make them cheaper to own than diesel trucks as early as 2027, according to Daimler Truck. “The environmental side is hugely important, but if it doesn’t make financial sense, nobody’s going to do it,” said Paul Gioupis, CEO of Zeem, a company that is building one of the largest electric vehicle charging depots in the country about 1 1/2 miles from Los Angeles International Airport. Zeem will recharge trucks and service and clean them for clients such as hotels, tour operators and delivery companies. Proponents of hydrogen trucks argue that their preferred semis will refuel as fast as conventional diesel rigs and will also weigh less. Fuel-cell systems are lighter than batteries, an important consideration for trucking companies seeking to maximize payload. Fuel cells tend to require fewer raw materials such as lithium, nickel or cobalt that have been rising in price. (They do, however, require platinum, which soared in price after Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is a major supplier.) A new truck costs $140,000 or more. Owners eager to clock as many cargo-hauling miles as possible won’t want their drivers to spend hours recharging batteries, said Daimler's Gorbach. “The longer the range, the higher the load, the better it is for hydrogen,” he said. But other truck makers argue that batteries are much more efficient, and getting better all the time. They point out that it takes prodigious amounts of energy to extract hydrogen from water. Instead of using electricity to make hydrogen, battery proponents say, why not just let the energy directly power the truck’s motors? That argument will become stronger as technical advances allow manufacturers to produce batteries that can store more energy per pound and that can recharge in minutes, rather than hours. A long-haul truck that can recharge in a half-hour is a few years away, said Andreas Kammel, who is in charge of electrification strategy at Traton, whose truck brands include Scania, MAN and Navistar. “The cost advantage is here to stay, and it’s significant,” Kammel said. The hydrogen camp acknowledges that batteries are more efficient. All the major truck manufacturers plan to use batteries in smaller trucks, or trucks that travel shorter distances. The debate is about what makes the most sense for long-haul trucks traveling more than 200 miles a day, the kind that carry heavy loads across the breadth of the United States, Europe or China. Most countries will struggle to produce enough electricity to drive fleets of battery-powered trucks, Daimler and Volvo executives say, arguing that hydrogen is a potentially unlimited source of energy. They envision a world in which countries that have a lot of sunlight, such as Morocco or Australia, use solar energy to produce hydrogen that they send by ship or pipeline to the rest of the world. Gerrit Marx, CEO of IVECO, a truck maker based in Italy, noted that Milan suffers power outages in summer when people run their air conditioners. Just imagine, he said, what will happen when people start plugging in electric vehicles. “If you have heavy-duty trucks also on the grid for charging, it’s not going to work,” he said. IVECO is manufacturing trucks for Nikola, the troubled American startup that plans to offer battery-powered and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Hydrogen is also the only practical form of emission-free power for energy-hungry construction equipment or municipal vehicles such as firetrucks, Marx said. Much of the hydrogen produced today is extracted from natural gas, a process that generates more greenhouse gases than burning diesel. So-called green hydrogen produced with solar or water power is scarce and expensive. Hydrogen enthusiasts say the supply will expand quickly, and the price will come down, because of demand from steel, chemical and fertilizer producers that are also under pressure to reduce emissions. They will use hydrogen to run smelters and other industrial operations. “Less than 10 percent of green hydrogen will be directed to road transport,” said Lars Stenqvist, a member of the executive board of Volvo who is responsible for technology. “We will sort of piggyback on the demand and infrastructure from other industries.” Hydrogen has support from a formidable alliance of large corporations called H2Accelerate that includes truck makers Daimler, Volvo and IVECO; energy companies Royal Dutch Shell, OMV of Austria and TotalEnergies of France; and Linde, a German producer of industrial gas. Daimler and Volvo, normally intense rivals, have teamed up to develop fuel cells that convert hydrogen to electricity. Hydrogen boosters have been wrong before. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Daimler and Toyota invested heavily to develop passenger cars that would run on hydrogen fuel cells. But the price of batteries fell and their performance improved faster than that of hydrogen cars. (Daimler Truck and the Mercedes-Benz car division have since split into separate companies. The car division is no longer selling hydrogen vehicles.) To be sure, battery-powered trucks will also require major investment in high-voltage charging stations and other infrastructure. But building a charging network is likely to be much less expensive than establishing a green hydrogen industry along with the pipelines and tankers needed to transport the gas. Fears that the electrical grid can’t handle a fleet of battery-powered trucks are overblown, said Traton's Kammel. Long-haul trucks will tend to charge at night when demand from other energy users is low, he said. In the United States, he said, big trucks spend a lot of time in Midwestern and Western states with plenty of wind and solar energy. Whoever is right, battery-powered trucks will hit the road first. Daimler doesn’t plan to begin mass-producing a hydrogen fuel cell truck until after 2025, and in the meantime, it is planning to offer battery power as an option for smaller trucks, or large trucks that travel limited distances. Volvo and IVECO are pursuing similar strategies. The big risk for those companies is that the affordability and performance of batteries, which have already exceeded expectations, could make hydrogen trucks obsolete before they get to market. “The convenience disadvantages keep melting away,” Kammel said of battery power, “and the cost advantages keep growing.” © 2022 The New York Times Company ",0
"Ukraine has accused Russia of sending soldiers and weapons to help separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine launch a new offensive in a conflict that has killed more than 4,000 people.British Prime Minister David Cameron blasted Russia's actions as unacceptable on Friday, warning that they could draw greater sanctions from the United States and the European Union.""I would still hope that the Russians will see sense and recognize that they should allow Ukraine to develop as an independent and free country, free to make its choices,"" Cameron told reporters in Canberra.""If Russia takes a positive approach towards Ukraine's freedom and responsibility, we could see those sanctions removed, if Russia continues to make matters worse then we could see those sanctions increased, it's as simple as that.""Russia denies sending troops and tanks into Ukraine.But increasing violence, truce violations and reports of unmarked armed convoys traveling from the direction of the Russian border have aroused fears that a shaky Sept. 5 truce could collapse.The G20 leaders summit in Brisbane is focused on boosting world growth, fireproofing the global banking system and closing tax loopholes for giant multinationals.But with much of the economic agenda agreed and a climate change deal signed last week in Beijing between the United States and China, security concerns are moving to center-stage.Ukraine has not been a top focus during a pair of summits in Asia this past week, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said, although President Barack Obama did raise it briefly with Putin when both attended the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in China.Obama arrives in Brisbane on Saturday and will be discussing his frustration over Ukraine with a key bloc including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Cameron.""They've been key towards sending a shared message to the Russians and the Ukrainian government,"" Rhodes told reporters. ""So it will be an opportunity for him to check in with them.""CONSENSUS TO ALLOW PUTINThere had been calls from some in Australia to block Putin from attending the summit given Russia's actions in Ukraine and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by Russian-backed rebels, but the overwhelming consensus was against it.News reports that a convoy of Russian warships had arrived earlier this week in international waters north of Brisbane, the venue of the summit, also created a flutter.Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was unusual but not unprecedented for the Russian navy to be so far south.""Let’s not forget that Russia has been much more militarily assertive in recent times,"" he said on Thursday. ""We're seeing, regrettably, a great deal of Russian assertiveness right now in Ukraine.""Merkel, speaking to reporters in Auckland, played down any threat posed by the warships but joined the leaders speaking out against Putin ahead of his arrival in Brisbane on Friday evening.""What is concerning me quite more is that the territorial integrity of Ukraine is being violated and that the agreement of Minsk is not followed,"" she said, referring to the truce accord.In addition to Ukraine, the crises in the Middle East are threatening to overshadow the economic agenda.British nationals who become foreign fighters abroad could be prevented from returning home under new laws to deal with jihadists fighting in conflicts like Iraq and Syria, Cameron said in an address to the Australian parliament on Friday.As host, Australia will continue pushing its growth agenda despite growing security tensions.""The focus of this G20 will be on growth and jobs,"" Abbott said at a press conference with Cameron. ""You can't have prosperity without security.""Canberra is pushing for an increase in global growth targets of 2 percent by 2018 to create millions of jobs and that goal appears on track. Over 1,000 policy initiatives proposed by G20 nations should add around 2.1 percent, the head of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said.Taxation arrangements of global companies such as Google Inc (GOOG.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) have become a hot political topic following media and parliamentary investigations into how many companies reduce their tax bills.The OECD has unveiled a series of measures that could stop companies from employing many commonly used practices to shift profits into low-tax centers.Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey said Australia had won U.S. cooperation to launch an ""aggressive crackdown"" on tax avoidance.",0
"But the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in a public report sent to the White House, has said, in effect: Don’t get your hopes up. After reviewing a variety of research reports, a panel concluded that the studies, of varying quality of evidence, do not offer a basis to believe that summer weather will interfere with the spread of the coronavirus. The pandemic may lessen because of social distancing and other measures, but the evidence so far does not inspire confidence in the benefits of sun and humidity. The report, sent to Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and acting director of the National Science Foundation, was a brief nine-page communication known as a rapid expert consultation. Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California and a member of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies, said: “Given current data, we believe that the pandemic likely will not diminish because of summer, and we should be careful not to base policies and strategies around the hope that it will.” “We might very well see a reduction in spread in the beginning of the summer,” he added, “but we have to be careful not to put that down to a changing climate — it is plausible that such a reduction could be due to other measures put in place.” Human behaviour will be most important. Dr. David Relman, who studies host-microbe interactions at Stanford, said if a human coughs or sneezes enough virus “close enough to the next susceptible person, then temperature and humidity just won’t matter that much.” The report from the National Academies, independent agencies that advise the government and the public, cited a small number of well-controlled laboratory studies that show that high temperature and humidity can diminish the ability of the novel coronavirus to survive in the environment. But the report noted the studies had limitations that made them less than conclusive. It also noted that although some reports showed pandemic growth rates peaking in colder conditions, those studies were short and limited. A preliminary finding in one such study, by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found fewer cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in warmer climates, but arrived at no definitive conclusion. “Specially in the US, any effect, even in the summer months, may not be highly visible, so our real chance to stop this virus is indeed through taking quarantine measures,” said Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at MIT who is a co-author of the study. The report sent to the White House also struck a cautionary note: “Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed,” it said. Pandemics do not behave the same way seasonal outbreaks do. For the National Academies’ report, researchers looked at the history of flu pandemics as an example. “There have been 10 influenza pandemics in the past 250-plus years — two started in the Northern Hemisphere winter, three in the spring, two in the summer and three in the fall,” the report said. “All had a peak second wave approximately six months after emergence of the virus in the human population, regardless of when the initial introduction occurred.” On March 16, Trump said the virus might “wash” through in warmer weather. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, has expressed different opinions about the effect of summer on the virus, some more optimistic than others. In a livestreamed interview on Wednesday, Dr. Howard Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, asked him about the fall, which Fauci said would be very challenging, after a period this summer when “it’s almost certainly going to go down a bit.” On March 26, however, in a conversation on Instagram with Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, Fauci said that although it wasn’t unreasonable to assume the summer weather could diminish the spread, “you don’t want to count on it.” c.2020 The New York Times Company",5
"WASHINGTON, Fri Feb 13,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Hillary Clinton hopes to reassure allies jittery about US policy on North Korea and to set the tone for a productive relationship with China when she visits Asia next week on her first trip as secretary of state. Breaking with tradition, Clinton's inaugural journey will take her to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China rather than the United States' historic allies in Europe and the perennial trouble spots of the Middle East. Clinton leaves Washington on Sunday and plans to spend two nights in Tokyo, one each in Jakarta and Seoul, and then two in Beijing before returning to Washington on Feb. 22. While US President Barack Obama has not detailed his Asia policies, analysts said the visit itself was a powerful signal he wants to keep his campaign promise to consult allies such as Japan and South Korea after their perceived neglect by former President George W Bush. Clinton also hopes to lay the ground to work with China to curb the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran and to cope with the global financial crisis and climate change -- priorities that may mute any critique of the Chinese human rights record, which she famously criticized in a 1995 speech in Beijing. ""This, in many ways, should be a listening tour,"" said Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign relations. ""We need to hear from the Chinese what ... their priorities are in the relationship with the United States because ... that is how we are going to get any leverage,"" she added. LONG LAUNDRY LIST Analysts advised Clinton not to confront the Chinese with a series of demands on her first visit as secretary of state. That said, the laundry list is long. The United States would like China to do more to support internal consumer demand and reduce its reliance on exports to generate its growth. It would also like to see the Chinese currency appreciate, making US exports more competitive and helping to narrow the vast US trade deficit with China. In announcing her trip, the State Department put ""financial markets turmoil"" as the first item on her Asia agenda on a list that included humanitarian issues, security and climate change but omitted North Korea -- a key issue in Tokyo and Seoul. In recent months, the North has repeatedly warned of war and threatened to destroy the conservative government in Seoul that has ended a decade of free-flowing aid to Pyongyang after taking office a year ago. There are also reports Pyongyang may be preparing to test its longest-range Taepodong-2 missile, designed to hit Alaska. Talks to end North Korea's nuclear arms program have been stalled for months with Pyongyang complaining that aid given in return for crippling its nuclear plant at Yongbyon is not being delivered as promised in a ""six-party"" deal it struck with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The secretive North has balked at a demand by the other powers that it commit to a system to check claims it made about its nuclear program, leaving the talks in limbo. While Clinton has said she is committed to the talks, and is expected to name retired diplomat Stephen Bosworth to lead the US delegation, there remains lingering anxiety in both Seoul and Tokyo that the Obama administration could cut them out should it pursue closer bilateral talks with North Korea. There are also fears the United States could accept a nuclear North Korea, a possibility analysts dismissed. ""In Tokyo, she will reassure them of the primacy of the US-Japan alliance ... and in South Korea, she will remind them that Obama's commitment to talk with adversaries doesn't mean that we are going to allow North Korea to play Washington off against Seoul,"" said a US congressional aide. SUBTLE ON HUMAN RIGHTS Spliced between her stops in Japan and South Korea, Clinton plans to spend a night in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country where Obama lived during part of his childhood. The visit appeared in sync with Obama's desire to forge a better US relationship with the Muslim world, where many of Bush's policies, including the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, were deeply unpopular. Clinton ends her trip in Beijing, which an aide said she last visited when her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was in the White House. As US first lady in 1995, Clinton critiqued Chinese policy at a UN conference in Beijing without citing China by name. ""Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with the views of their governments,"" she said. ""It means not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them their freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions."" Human rights groups including Amnesty International, Freedom House and the International Campaign for Tibet urged Clinton to speak out about suspected torture in police custody, censorship and abuses of human rights defenders. But analysts said Clinton could not afford to jeopardize Chinese cooperation on North Korea and other issues. ""She is quite capable, in a diplomatic and subtle way, of bringing the issue up so that she has put a marker down without throwing it in their face,"" said Jack Pritchard of the Korea Economic Institute, a former White House Asia specialist.",0
" Africa must be bold and follow the examples of Brazil and Germany to plan an energy future around renewable and alternative sources, the head of the UN environment agency said on Thursday. Many of the plans being considered by African governments, including huge hydropower dams and fossil fuel plants, were simply ""more of the same"", UN Environment Programme executive director Achim Steiner told a development conference in Kenya. Many would be able to supply the huge appetite of industry and city dwellers on the world's poorest continent, he said, but they would ""lock in"" the rural majority to decades without power. ""We should not live with the dream of a trickle-down of energy supply (to villages) in 20 to 30 years time ... Africa should not follow the technological path the rest of the world is willing to give it access to,"" Steiner said. ""More imagination, honesty and boldness to set an African agenda ... is what the continent is screaming for today."" Africa was rich in renewable energy resources like wind, solar and geothermal power, he said, which could be harnessed relatively cheaply to power small communities. African governments should be encouraged by a new focus in the West on fighting climate change through promoting clean energy generation and carbon financing, he said. And they should look to countries like Brazil and Germany, which he said took ""strategic decisions"" years ago to become leaders in biofuels and wind power respectively. ""Everyone laughed at Brazil at the time ... The theory was they could not afford to invest in alternative energy,"" he said. ""They spent $25 billion on public funds for the ethanol sector, but have saved $50 billion now on avoided oil imports."" Steiner was speaking in Nairobi at the start of a major two-day meeting on sustainable development jointly organised by Japan, the United Nations and the World Bank.",0
" Judging small, rich island nations purely on their wealth and emissions is unfair in climate change negotiations, Singapore's climate envoy said on Saturday, as pressure builds on more countries to curb carbon pollution. Under the Kyoto Protocol, the UN's main weapon to fight climate change, only 37 industrialized nations are committed to curbs on greenhouse gas pollution between 2008-2012. But the UN list in Kyoto's parent pact that defines rich and developing nations dates from 1992 and wealthy nations such as Argentina, Singapore, South Korea and Malta are still deemed to be developing states under the UN's climate treaties. Under Kyoto, developing nations are exempt from any binding emissions curbs but recent studies show poorer states now contribute more than half of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions. Australia and the European Union say the 1992 list doesn't reflect economic reality and should be updated. They say rich nations outside of Kyoto must commit to binding curbs as part of a broader climate pact likely to be agreed in December in Copenhagen. Singapore's chief climate change negotiator, Chew Tai Soo, said Singapore was responsible for 0.3 percent of global greenhouse emissions but faced pressure to curb its emissions because it was rich and had high per-capita carbon pollution. ""This approach is flawed as it does not take into account the unique considerations and capabilities of different countries. ""It penalizes small countries with small populations without taking into account their limitations,"" he told a sustainability conference in Singapore. The city state is one of the world's wealthiest nations with 2007 per-capita GDP of S$52,994 (US$35,163), according to government figures. Its greenhouse gas emissions are the same as many European countries at about 11 tonnes per person, compared with 20 tonnes for the United States and 4 for China. In a submission to the United Nations last November, Australia said the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto's parent pact, let many advanced economies off the hook on carbon reduction obligations. ""Since the Convention was adopted in 1992 no work has been done to better differentiate the responsibilities of Parties,"" the submission said, adding the two annex lists of countries in the Kyoto Protocol were now out of date. Chew said Singapore covered an area a fifth the size of Long Island in New York, was densely populated, lacked natural resources and its agricultural sector was virtually non-existent. ""With such economic restraints, we have no food security and are heavily dependent on trade and commerce for survival."" He also said the country was investing in research and development of solar and other clean-energy areas and that a decision to use natural gas in its power stations had slashed carbon emissions. CRITICS But critics point to booming sales of cars, rapid population growth, a vast petro-chemical industry and large shipping and aviation sectors as off-setting some of the benefits. Government figures show 98 percent of the country's energy needs come from fossil fuels and that carbon emissions are rising 2.8 percent a year, despite energy efficiency programs. The country's climate change strategy doesn't mention a government role in bringing down the city-state's absolute emissions, professor Natasha Hamilton-Hart of the National University of Singapore told the conference. She said Singapore had to stop the fantasy of presenting itself as a developing nation and risked damaging its credibility in UN climate talks by asking others to make emissions cuts it was unwilling to make itself. ",0
"WASHINGTON Sep 7, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Environmentalists hope the push in Congress for climate change legislation is not overwhelmed by the debate dominating Capitol Hill over changing the US healthcare system. But it might be. Already two months behind schedule and unsure whether enough Democrats will play along, Senate leaders still aim to pass a bill by December when a United Nations summit convenes in Copenhagen to set worldwide goals for reducing carbon dioxide and other pollutants. But as the debate over healthcare legislation rages and with President Barack Obama due to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to try to rescue the faltering plan, it was unclear whether rattled lawmakers will have the time -- or the inclination -- to take on climate change. ""It's not an impossibility, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk and never has been,"" said Frank O'Donnell, president of the activist group Clean Air Watch. The healthcare debate, O'Donnell added, ""has basically sucked all the oxygen out of the room."" With many moderate Democrats facing a tough vote on healthcare, O'Donnell wondered whether they also would be willing to do so on an environmental bill that could increase consumers' energy costs. ""How many salvos in one year can they take?"" O'Donnell asked. Staffers at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have been working behind the scenes on language intended to reel in enough of those moderates. Senator Barbara Boxer, who heads the committee, has been working off of a bill passed by the House of Representatives intended to cut utility and factory emissions of greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels. It could be late September or beyond before Boxer is ready to unveil her bill. Beyond healthcare, the climate bill might have to compete for time with some other major debates, such as new financial industry controls, annual spending bills, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan and some must-do tax measures. AVERTING THE ""ABYSS"" U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday said the world was ""heading toward an abyss"" without swift action to reduce carbon emissions. Without it, he told a 155-nation climate conference in Geneva, melting polar ice and rising sea levels will threaten cities from Tokyo to New Orleans. Environmentalists hope that such high-profile attention will help jolt Congress toward action. While public support for healthcare legislation has eroded in recent weeks, environmentalists are heartened by polls indicating that voters want Congress to fix global warming by expanding alternative energy sources such as biofuels and solar and wind power. ""Support for energy and climate legislation held firm and ticked up a bit"" lately, said Joseph Mendelson, the National Wildlife Federation's director of global warming policy. But if the legislation sputters in the Senate, that would not halt Obama's drive to reduce carbon dioxide pollution. The US Environmental Protection Agency is considering regulations that would force large polluters -- those spewing at least 25,000 tons annually -- to reduce their emissions. ""EPA can do some important things to start to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in our country,"" EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said. Interviewed on Thursday on National Public Radio, Jackson noted that her agency has authority under the existing Clean Air Act, but like Obama, she prefers Congress pass comprehensive legislation.",0
" Australia will create the largest network of marine parks in the world, protecting waters covering an area as large as India while banning oil and gas exploration and limiting commercial fishing in some of the most sensitive areas. Australia's marine reserves will increase from 27 to 60 under the new scheme, covering more than 3 million sq km, or one third of the island nation's waters. The announcement of the network was made a week before more than 130 heads of state and government will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations' sustainable development conference as part of global efforts to curb climate change, one of the biggest conferences in UN history. New reserves will be established from the Perth Canyon in the southwest to Kangaroo Island off the southern coast, but the ""jewel in the crown"" will be the protection of the Coral Sea area which surrounds the Great Barrier Reef in the northeast, Environment Minister Tony Burke said on Thursday. ""The Coral Sea marine national park ... combined with the Great Barrier Reef area, becomes the largest marine protected area in the world,"" Burke said. The protection plan will ban oil and gas exploration in all marine national parks, including across the Coral Sea and off Margaret River, a popular tourist and wine-growing area in the southwest. Burke acknowledged the plan would also have an impact on the fishing industry. The plan attracted immediate criticism from some environmental groups, as well as independent and opposition politicians and lobby groups. ""This is devastating and those that will suffer most will be coastal communities,"" Dean Logan, chief executive of the Australian Marine Alliance, which represents commercial and recreational fishers, told Australian television. Burke said the government would talk to the fishing industry about compensation during a 60-day consultation period. ""NOT FAR ENOUGH"" A lawmaker from the minority Greens party said the government had been bowing to oil and gas interests in drawing up the boundaries for non-exploration areas. ""The boundaries the minister has determined have been very strongly determined on oil and gas prospectivity, and clearly determined by lobbying from the oil and gas sector,"" Rachel Siewert, the Greens' marine spokeswoman, told reporters. Conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott said the plan would ""damage the rights of commercial fishers and commercial tourist operators"". Wildlife and environmental groups also said the steps did not go far enough to protect marine mammals from the impact of oil and gas exploration in many areas. ""Offshore petroleum exploration hasn't been addressed properly by this process,"" said Matthew Collis, a campaigner for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. ""This is bad news for whales and dolphins because many of the areas where industry operates or wants to operate are also important habitats for whales and dolphins,"" he said. Earlier this month, a United Nations report said Australia's world-famous Great Barrier Reef was under threat from industrial development and may be considered for listing as a world heritage site “""in danger"" within the next year. Last week, Australia delayed environmental approval for a A$10 billion coal project proposed by India's GVK Power & Infrastructure in Queensland state that would increase shipping traffic through the Great Barrier Reef.",0
"All those events will take place at the Prime Minister’s Office. He arrived at 10:08am on his first ever Bangladesh visit. Exchange of documents Instrument of ratification of Land Boundary Agreement will be exchanged along with the letters of modalities for implementation of LBA signed in 1974 and its protocol in 2011. Unveiling foundation plaque Khulna-Mongla railway line Rabindra Bhavan at Kuthibarri, Shiliguri Bangladesh-India Friendship Bridge-1 over the Feni River Kulaurha-Shahjadpur railway link Bangladesh-India Friendship Building at Sardah Police Academy Inauguration Upgraded BSTI laboratory Brahmanbarhia-Tripura border haat Exchange of agreements, protocols Agreement on bilateral trade Coastal shipping Protocol on inland waterways Agreement and protocol on two bus services namely Agartala-Kolkata via Bangladesh and Dhaka-Guwahati via Meghalaya’s capital Shillong and Sylhet. Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) MoU signing between Bangladesh and Indian coastguards MoU on prevention of smuggling of fake currency notes MoU on Indian endowment on climate change for SAARC MoU on prevention of human trafficking MoU on cultural exchanges Semi-government MoU MoU between Rajshahi University and New Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia MoU between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research India and Dhaka University’s Department of Oceanography for joint research in the Bay of Bengal MoU for bandwidth leasing between BSNL and BSCCL Document exchanges between the two PMs Modi will hand over a CD containing record of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s speech at Kolkata in 1972, his first official visit after Bangladesh’s independence. He will also hand over the transcripts of the Indian Parliament’s sessions regarding amendment of constitution related to settlement of the Land Boundary Agreement. Hasina will hand him a photograph of “signing instrument of surrender of 1971” that shows Pakistan army surrendering to the joint forces of Bangladesh and India. Private companies of the two countries may sign several agreements between them.",1
"With as much as 475 millimetres (18.7 inches) of rain in the previous 24 hours, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a ""severe weather warning"" for the border area between New South Wales and Queensland states, a heavily populated area that includes the Queensland state capital Brisbane. A week earlier, nearby Fraser Island was evacuated due to bushfires, dashing hopes that wetter weather would make seasonal fires less catastrophic than last year. Scientists attribute the erratic weather in the early Australian summer to a La Nina pattern - which typically features strong rain - combined with climate change. Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island, is now under the flood warning, which includes urging drivers to avoid roads where waters were already rising. ""These are dynamic weather systems and you should always expect the unexpected,"" bureau senior flood hydrologist Justin Robinson told a news conference. The warning comes soon after Queensland opened its border to the neighbouring state after months of closure due to COVID-19. The authorities urged people travelling for end-of-year holidays to exercise caution since they may not be familiar with flood-prone areas. ""It isn't a time to take a chance and drive through those floodwaters,"" said New South Wales emergency services commissioner Carlene York. ""Be aware of your surroundings and where you might be parking your caravan or you may be driving."" Emergency services had rescued four people, including some from cars trapped on flooded roads, and received about 700 calls for help, she said. At the heavily populated Gold Coast, south of Brisbane, the authorities closed beaches due to dangerous surf, while the emergency services set up several locations where people could stock up on sandbags.",0
" Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hopes to find ways in which the United States can cooperate on a post-Kyoto Protocol framework when he meets US President George W. Bush later this week, the Japanese leader said on Monday. A Japanese official said earlier that climate change and nuclear energy would be on the agenda when the two leaders meet during Abe's two-day visit to the United States from Thursday. ""An alliance is a relationship of trust and to show at home and abroad that this trust has been strengthened is in Japan's national interests,"" Abe said in a televised interview. ""In that context, I think it would be a great result if some way emerges for the United States to cooperate on the environment, on a new framework,"" Abe added. The United States has been criticised for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2001 and Japanese officials have said Washington should take part in whatever framework replaces the pact when it expires in 2012. The Yomiuri newspaper reported on Saturday that Japan and the United States would agree at the summit on developing non-weapons use of nuclear energy and on steps to fight global warming. Under the agreement, the two countries would work together on developing an advanced technology which would recycle nuclear fuel into a form difficult to use in weapons, the paper said. The two sides will also eventually try to set up an international framework under which countries without means to reprocess their spent nuclear fuel would outsource the task to those with the advanced technology, it added. ""One of the key factors for addressing post-Kyoto will be involving China, India, developing countries, of course the US as well,"" a Japanese foreign ministry official said last week. ""We have world class technology together with the United States, which would be key to overcoming some of the difficult problems as we go into the post-Kyoto phase,"" he added. The United States is now the world's top carbon emitter, but it may be overtaken by fast-growing China within the year. ",0
" The European Union's executive adopted plans on Wednesday to slash greenhouse gas emissions, seeking to push the world into tough climate action, but delayed key decisions on how to soften the impact on industry. The plans will transform Europe's energy supply by 2020, with a 10-fold increase in renewable energy production in Britain for example, and raise power bills by 10 to 15 percent. The European Commission said the measures were a vital step in the fight against global warming and other countries must now join the effort. ""Europe and the rest of the world have to act fast, and act boldly, if we are to prevent this catastrophe,"" said EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas. The measures would also curb the bloc's rising dependency on imports of fossil fuels. ""We do not want to be dependent on regimes that are not our friends and want to protect ourselves from them,"" Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the European Parliament in presenting the plan. The renewables targets would wean the 27-nation bloc off coal and oil, as would a decision that power generators must pay from 2013 for all permits to emit carbon dioxide, most of which they now get for free, likely to slash coal plant profits. German utility RWE said it called into question the future of coal -- ""Coal is threatened in its economic viability,"" RWE's head of power generation, Ulrich Jobs, told Reuters. The measures implement an EU-wide target which EU leaders agreed last March to get a fifth of energy from renewable sources and curb greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. They still need approval by EU leaders and the EU Parliament. Environmentalists urged the EU to cut emissions unilaterally by 30 percent by 2020. The head of the Nobel Prize-winning UN climate change panel said the EU plans may prove too lax. ""I see no reason why some of these targets may not become stronger, may not become more stringent,"" Rajendra Pachauri told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 
COST The UN panel last year warned that tough climate action required global greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2015 and detailed looming global warming threats including higher sea levels and more floods and droughts. The Commission's proposals included a major overhaul from 2013 of the EU's flagship Emissions Trading Scheme, which allocates a fixed quota of emissions permits to heavy industry. Airlines and oil refineries will have to pay for one-fifth of emissions permits in 2013, rising to 100 percent in 2020. But Brussels delayed until 2010 a key decision on which industries most vulnerable to global competition, such as steel, aluminium and cement, can get all their quota for free. ""The conditions for companies to have access to free allowances ... are left uncertain until 2010,"" Europe's main industry lobby, BusinessEurope, complained in a statement. ""Significant electricity price increases will result from this package,"" it warned. Industry leaders are worried higher energy costs will tilt competitiveness further in favour of China and India, which have no emissions limits, at a time of record oil prices. If there were no global deal to curb emissions, succeeding the Kyoto Protocol on climate change after 2012, the EU said it would also consider forcing importers to buy permits. Power bills for industry and households will rise as the bloc gets more energy from expensive clean technologies, and as the supply of CO2 permits to power generators shrinks from 2013 on. Utilities will pass the extra costs on to consumers. But Barroso dismissed cost concerns, telling parliament: ""The additional effort needed to realise the proposals would be less than 0.5 percent of GDP by 2020. That amounts to about 3 euros ($4.39) a week for everyone."" Resistance is expected over targets for each country to cut greenhouse gases and install renewable energy, but the EU executive talked up potential business benefits. ""(It) gives Europe a head start in the race to create a low-carbon global economy that will unleash a wave of innovations and create new jobs,"" said Dimas. Brussels tried to shore up the environmental credibility of a target to get one-tenth of transport fuels by 2020 from biofuels made from plants, setting detailed criteria to avoid unwanted side effects such as tropical deforestation. EU carbon prices fell nearly 10 percent earlier this week, mostly on falling oil prices, and slid further by 3 percent on Wednesday, closing at 19.70 euros.",0
" Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has called for a meeting of her Awami League party's highest decision-making body ahead of her 10-day trip abroad. The Awami League presidium meeting is due to start at 7pm on Friday at Ganabhaban, her official residence, the party's deputy office secretary Mrinal Kanti Das told bdnews24.com. Awami League general secretary Syed Ashraful Islam urged the presidium members to attend the meeting on time, he said. It will be the third presidium meeting since the new Awami League Central Working Committee was formed on Jul 26, 2009. Hasina is due to set off for New York on Saturday to attend the United Nations General Assembly. She will attend a number of sessions including the special session on Millennium Development Goals, a high-profile meeting of developing countries, UNICEF child affair's session and a session on climate change.",1
" Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd resigned on Wednesday, saying he could no longer work with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, igniting a new and bitter leadership crisis for the struggling minority government. Gillard's government has sunk in popularity as Gillard and Rudd, whom she ousted in 2010, have waged a personal feud that has split their Labor Party and alienated voters. Labor insiders said that while Rudd was more popular with voters, Gillard had stronger support within the party and would easily win a leadership vote, which could come as early as next week. They differ little on policy, but the battle -- described by Rudd as a ""soap opera"" -- threatens to trigger an early election and a defeat for Labor's economic reform agenda, including major mining and climate change legislation. Senior ministers had in the past week urged Gillard to sack Rudd due to the leadership speculation and increasing animosity between the two camps. ""The simple truth is I cannot continue to serve as foreign minister if I do not have Prime Minister Gillard's support,"" Rudd told a news conference in Washington. ""The only honourable course of action is for me to resign."" Rudd's supporters believe only he can stem haemorrhaging voter support to opposition leader Tony Abbott and his conservative coalition, which holds a strong lead in opinion polls. But a move back to Rudd risks losing the backing of independents who give the minority Labor government a one-seat majority. ""I am disappointed that the concerns Mr Rudd has publicly expressed this evening were never personally raised with me, nor did he contact me to discuss his resignation prior to his decision,"" Gillard said in a brief statement. Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer Wayne Swan was more critical, issuing a scathing attack on Rudd, accusing him of disloyalty and of undermining the government. ""The party has given Kevin Rudd all the opportunities in the world and he wasted them with his dysfunctional decision making and his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people, including our caucus colleagues,"" Swan said. Analysts said a change of leader would cause upheaval in the caucus, including likely changes in key positions such as treasurer and defence minister, but have little impact on policy or the outcome of the election. ""If Rudd were to wrest the leadership, I think we'd be headed certainly to a 2012 election,"" Australian National University Political analyst Norman Abjorensen told Reuters. ""A Rudd government would look very different from a Gillard government, and would presumably be fairly short lived."" Rudd, who will return at least temporarily to the backbenches after quitting cabinet, told the news conference he would return to Australia this week before deciding his future. ""There is one overriding question for my caucus colleagues and that is who is best placed to defeat Tony Abbott at the next election,"" said Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat. ""FACELESS MEN"" Opposition to a 40 percent tax on mining profits introduced by Rudd contributed to his demise as prime minister. Gillard overthrew him in a party room coup and immediately cut the tax rate to 30 percent while excluding all but the country's most profitable iron ore and coal miners. Abbott has said that if he wins the next election, he will dump both the planned mining tax and plans to introduce a carbon price to combat climate change, both due to come into force on July 1. The instability was damaging the country and the government was unworthy of staying in power, he said on Wednesday. ""Kevin Rudd has confirmed two things - that the faceless men are running the Labor Party and that the instability at the top of this government is damaging our country,"" Abbott said in a statement. Rudd's backers saying he remains more popular with voters and would help revive party support ahead of the next election, due in late 2013. But he is not as well liked within the Labor Party and he alienated may colleagues with his imperious style when he was prime minister. ""The overwhelming support within the parliamentary party is for the prime minister, is for the government. It is overwhelming, it always has been,"" Environment Minister Tony Burke told Australian television. Weeks of leadership instability has undermined Labor's chances of holding power in the state of Queensland at a March 24 poll -- the resource-rich state is also crucial for the national government's re-election. ""I think the dislike of the current government is quite deep. It goes beyond the leaders, which is part of their problem,"" said John Stirton from pollster AC Nielsen. ""They would get a short-term boost from Rudd, but I don't think it is going to solve their problems.""",0
"Dramatic improvements in air and water quality as coronavirus lockdowns have cut pollution have prompted calls for a low-carbon future, but the need to get millions back to work is clouding the environmental picture. With economies round the world shut down, wildlife has returned to city streets, with wolves, deer and kangaroos spotted on thoroughfares usually teeming with traffic. Fish have been seen in Venice canals no longer polluted by motor boats, while residents of some Indian cities have reported seeing the Himalayas for the first time in decades. Satellite imagery has shown significant air quality improvements across Europe and Asia, including China, where the coronavirus pandemic emerged. But residents in some of China's most smog-prone cities said they feared that blue skies would not last as the world's second biggest economy got back to work. ""In the second half of the year, when the epidemic eases, the weather will slowly be worse after factories reopen,"" said Tang Zhiwei, 27, a resident of Shanghai. ""Try your best to enjoy the blue sky now."" TOGETHER Thunberg said action to tackle coronavirus did not mean the climate crisis had gone away. ""Today is Earth Day and that reminds us that climate and the environmental emergency is still ongoing and we need to tackle both the corona pandemic ... at the same time as we tackle climate and environmental emergency, because we need to tackle two crises at once,"" she said. UN chief Antonio Guterres urged governments in an Earth Day message to use their economic responses to the pandemic to tackle the ""even deeper emergency"" of climate change. With global battle lines emerging between investors backing ""green stimulus"" measures and industry lobbyists aiming to weaken climate regulations, Guterres cautioned governments against bailing out heavily polluting industries. ""On this Earth Day, all eyes are on the COVID-19 pandemic,"" Guterres said. ""But there is another, even deeper emergency, the planet's unfolding environmental crisis."" Peter Betts, a former lead climate negotiator for Britain and the European Union, said there was now pressure for coronavirus economic stimulus packages to be ""low-carbon, climate-smart"". ""A risk, clearly, is that for some governments around the world there will be a huge premium on getting the economy moving, getting people back into jobs,"" Betts, now with the Chatham House think-tank in London, told Reuters Television. That is a priority for US President Donald Trump, who wants to get America, and in particular its oil and gas industry, back to work. ""We will never let the great US Oil & Gas Industry down,"" Trump tweeted, calling for ""a plan which will make funds available so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the future!"" HOTTEST ON RECORD The environmental stakes were rising even before the pandemic's economic shutdown raised hopes in some quarters of a low-carbon future. Last year was the hottest on record in Europe, extending a run of exceptionally warm years driven by unprecedented levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to a study released on Earth Day. Of Europe's 12 warmest years on record, 11 have occurred since 2000, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said. ""This warming trend is now unequivocal anywhere on the planet. And as a consequence of that, the frequency of these record breaking events is going up,"" C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters. The coronavirus pandemic is expected to drive carbon dioxide emissions down 6% this year, the head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said, in what would be the biggest yearly drop since World War Two. But that will not stop climate change, the WMO said. ""COVID-19 may result in a temporary reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not a substitute for sustained climate action,"" the WMO said in an Earth Day statement. With millions staying home, air quality has improved in China. Shanghai saw emissions fall by nearly 20% in the first quarter, while in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated, monthly averages dropped more than a third. But experts worry the decline could give China leeway to turn a blind eye to pollution in order to stimulate the economy, which declined for the first time on record in the first quarter.",0
" A last-ditch attempt at passing a climate change bill begins in the US Senate this week with lawmakers mindful that time is running short and that approaches to the legislation still vary widely, according to sources. ""We will present senators with a number of options when they get back from recess,"" said one Senate aide knowledgeable of the compromise legislation that is being developed. The goal is to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say threaten Earth. The options will be presented to three senators -- Democrat John Kerry, independent Joseph Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham -- who are leading the fight for a bill to battle global warming domestically. The aide said the Senate's drive for a bill got a boost last week with President Barack Obama's announcement of an $8.3 billion government loan guarantee to help start expanding the US nuclear power industry, a top Republican priority. ""The administration is really putting their money where their mouth is,"" the aide said. The Senate trio's success or failure likely will have a profound impact on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and prevent Earth's temperature from exceeding a possibly dangerous 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) increase from pre-industrial times. For Wall Street, the Senate has the power to make or break the start-up of what eventually could be a $1 trillion market for power plant, oil refinery and factory pollution permits traded on a regulated exchange. U.S. congressional elections will be held on Nov. 2 and there is wide agreement that if the Senate cannot pass a climate bill by mid-year, already hard-edged political partisanship will become hyperactive, making it nearly impossible for Congress to move on much of anything. ""We're getting to the point where I think we need to start seeing senators coalesce around an approach,"" said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which wants comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions control. SKEPTICISM ABOUNDS There is plenty of skepticism about whether Kerry, who is spearheading the effort, can pull off passage of such a difficult bill in an election year since the bill would increase future energy prices. But supporters are not giving up as they draw parallels to the last major environmental fight. ""In 1990, we had a midterm president, a Mideast war, a banking crisis following a real estate bubble and a recession, yet Congress still passed updates to the Clean Air Act by overwhelming margins,"" said Representative Edward Markey, the co-author of the Waxman-Markey climate bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last June. Tested over 20 years, those Clean Air Act updates are credited with effectively cutting ""acid rain"" air pollution through a cap-and-trade system that some now want to employ to reduce the carbon emissions blamed for global warming. Under cap and trade, companies need government permits to emit an ever-dwindling amount of pollution. Fuel-efficient firms that end up holding more permits than they need can sell them to companies that are bigger polluters. For carbon dioxide, cap and trade would eventually make the cost of using coal and other dirty-burning fossil fuels so high that cleaner, more expensive energy sources such as wind and solar power would emerge. In recent months, many conservatives who do not want the federal government to mandate pollution reductions, have seized upon newly discovered errors in scientific reports underpinning the link between human activity and climate problems such as drought, flooding and rising sea levels. Republican Senator James Inhofe, a leading critic, said the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fallen victim to ""outright fraud"" and deceit. It is further evidence Congress should not rush legislation, he has argued. SIDE ISSUES Meanwhile, ""so much political juice"" is now being expended by US environmental groups on a side-issue to the climate bill, said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. He was referring to green groups' attempts to stop Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from advancing her bill blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, starting with vehicles. The Obama administration would prefer to let Congress set climate change policy. But if it is unable to, the White House wants the EPA as a fallback. Graham has talked about cobbling together a ""hybrid system"" for reducing carbon emissions. Claussen said, ""If I was going to guess, it's probably cap and trade for electricity,"" which accounts for about 40 percent of carbon emissions, and maybe a separate oil industry tax or fee, with consumers being protected from price increases. Tackling carbon emissions from factories making steel, cement, paper, glass and other large manufacturers either could be put off ""for much later"" or they could be given options for participating, she said. Such an approach could gain the support of Midwestern senators who fear US factories could be put at a competitive disadvantage against foreign manufacturers under a cap-and-trade program. But it also has risks, others say, underscoring splits among Washington interest groups, politicians and others who want a climate change bill. Robert Shapiro, chairman of the Climate Task Force and an advocate of a carbon tax, said a dual system would not make economic sense and could make for more volatile energy prices.",1
"As of Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro had authorised military operations in seven states to combat raging fires in the Amazon, responding to requests for assistance from their local governments, a spokeswoman for his office said. Reuters accompanied a firefighting brigade near the state capital of Porto Velho, where there were areas larger than football fields that had been charred, but active fires were contained to small areas of individual trees. The dozen or so yellow clad firefighters from environmental enforcement agency Ibama easily cleared brush from around a burning stump with a leaf blower, doused it with jets connected to water packs mounted on their backs and covered it in earth. A video posted by the Defence Ministry on Saturday evening showed a military plane pumping thousands of litres of water out of two giant jets as it passed through clouds of smoke close to the forest canopy. The response comes as leaders of countries in the Group of Seven (G7) nations currently meeting in France expressed grave concerns over the fires. French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday said the G7 was nearing a deal to provide ""technical and financial help"" to countries affected by the Amazon fires. Nearly 80,000 fires have been registered across Brazil through Aug. 24, the highest since at least 2013, according to space research agency INPE. Bolsonaro announced the military would be sent in on Friday after several days of criticism from the public and world leaders that Brazil's government was not doing anything to fight the fires. He also said on Twitter he had accepted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's offer of a plane and specialised support for the firefighting operations, following a call between the two leaders. But outside of Rondonia, the government had yet to provide any operational details for other states. The Defence Ministry said in a briefing on Saturday that 44,000 troops were available in Brazil's northern Amazon region but did not say how many would be used where and what they would do. Military personnel around Porto Velho appeared to be largely coordinating firefighting efforts, according to a Reuters witness. Asked for additional details, the Defence Ministry told Reuters in a statement that in all seven states that have asked for help, the military is planning operations to support firefighting initiatives already underway. Justice Minister Sergio Moro had also authorised a force of military police to assist in fighting the fires, with 30 set to be sent from Brasilia to Porto Velho. The president's office posted to Twitter a photo of police officers on a plane bound for Rondonia set to arrive at noon. Environment Minister Ricardo Salles posted a video showing a caravan of yellow fire prevention trucks and other government vehicles, saying they were on the ground responding in Rondonia.  Colombian President Ivan Duque said on Sunday he would seek a conservation pact with other Amazonian countries - first in bi-lateral meetings in Peru this week and then at the United Nations General Assembly. ""Colombia wants to lead a pact, a conservation pact, between the countries that have Amazon territory,"" Duque said after meeting with an indigenous community in the Amazonian city of Leticia in southern Colombia. ""We must understand the protection of our Mother Earth and our Amazon is a duty, a moral duty."" The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rain forest and is seen as vital to the fight against climate change because of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide that it absorbs. The Amazon, which provides 20% of the planet's oxygen, is home to an estimated one million indigenous people from up to 500 tribes as well some three million species of plants and animals, including jaguars, sloths, giant otters, river dolphins, howler monkeys, toucans, reptiles, frogs and insects. Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre said he worries if 20-25% of the ecosystem is destroyed that the Amazon could reach a tipping point, after which it would enter a self-sustaining period of dieback as the forest converts to savannah. Nobre warned that it is not far off with already 15-17% of the rain forest having been destroyed.",0
"That’s where the melting face emoji comes in. The face, fixed with a content half-smile even as it dissolves into a puddle, is one of 37 new emojis approved this year by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that maintains the standards for digital text. Other emojis that made the cut include saluting face, dotted line face and a disco ball. These new emojis will roll out over the course of the next year. But already the melting face has found fans on social media, who see it as a clear representation of the coronavirus pandemic’s vast psychological toll. “This melting smiley face is quite the pandemic mood,” one Twitter user said. Others viewed the new emoji as a visual proxy for climate anxiety. “Something tells me that in this climate change apocalypse era, we’re going to be using the new melting face emoji a lot,” another user wrote. The melting face was conceived in 2019 by Jennifer Daniel and Neil Cohn, who connected over their mutual appreciation for visual language. Daniel, who uses the pronouns they and them, is an emoji subcommittee chair for Unicode and a creative director at Google; Cohn, an associate professor of cognition and communication at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Cohn had published some work on representations of emotion in Japanese Visual Language that caught the eye of Daniel. In Cohn’s research was “paperification,” which, according to him, is “what happens in a manga sometimes when people become embarrassed, they will turn into a piece of paper and flutter away.” He and Daniel realised there wasn’t an existing emoji that evoked that visual convention, so they decided to pursue one and eventually landed on the melting face, which Daniel described as “more visceral” than turning into paper. The same idea is also sometimes depicted as a solid becoming liquid, they added. Many of the best face emojis “rely on conventions that already exist in other places in visual culture, and one of the main drivers of this is comics or manga,” said Cohn. He also noted that many of the face emojis from the original emoji set use expressions from manga. In 1999, the first emojis were created by a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita, who found inspiration in manga. They were designed to facilitate text-based communication; NTT Docomo, a Japanese mobile phone company, had a 250-character limit on messages sent through its mobile internet service, so shorthand was key to getting one’s point across. The original set of 176 emojis designed by Kurita is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, even without character restrictions, emojis can still communicate emotions with greater ease, speed and flexibility than words can. The melting face is no exception. On the more literal side, it can be a way of expressing, say, the sensation caused by a broken air conditioner. Figuratively, it can be used to convey how one feels after an embarrassing interaction with a crush, the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and, of course, sarcasm. “It evokes a metaphoric frame or metaphoric knowledge base that should be relatively accessible to people — the notion of melting,” Cohn said. That concept can then be applied to all kinds of emotions. All emojis “are usually designed with the intention that they can be used in flexible, multifaceted ways, in the same way that many words can be flexibly used,” Cohn added. And visual language, of course, can be even more elastic than words. “Illustration can do things that reality can’t,” Daniel said. Case in point: “melting face” and its myriad interpretations, many of them quite affecting. “Emojis aren’t inherently deep,” said Erik Carter, a graphic designer who created the sample image for the melting face. “It’s how people use them that makes them profound.” He offered a reading of his own. Many of us, Carter said, may feel hopeless because of things like climate change or “our government’s inaction.” “Sometimes,” he said, “it does feel as though the best we can do is smile as we melt away.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",0
"The US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after receiving Obama's veto message, immediately countered by announcing the Republican-led chamber would attempt to override it by March 3. That is unlikely. Despite their majority, Republicans are four votes short of being able to overturn Obama's veto. They have vowed to attach language approving the pipeline to a spending bill or other legislation later in the year that the president would find difficult to veto. The TransCanada Corp pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels a day of mostly Canadian oil sands crude to Nebraska en route to refineries and ports along the US Gulf. It has been pending for more than six years. Obama, who rejected the bill hours after it was sent to the White House, said the measure unwisely bypassed a State Department process that will determine whether the project would be beneficial to the United States. ""Through this bill, the United States Congress attempts to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest,"" he wrote in his veto message. Republicans, who support the project because of its job-creation potential, made passing a bill a top priority after the November election, when they gained control of the US Senate and strengthened their majority in the House of Representatives. The bill passed by 270-152 in the House earlier this month and cleared the Senate in January. Obama has played down Keystone XL's ability to create jobs and raised questions about its effects on climate change. Environmentalists, who made up part of the coalition that elected the president in 2008 and 2012, oppose the project because of carbon emissions involved in getting the oil it would carry out of Canadian tar sands. TransCanada Chief Executive Russ Girling said in a statement the company was “fully committed” to Keystone XL despite Obama’s veto and would work with the State Department to answer any questions it has about the project. Opponents of the pipeline praised Obama's move. ""This veto, along with the president’s increasing public skepticism about Keystone XL ... makes us more confident than ever that (the) president will reject the permit itself once and for all,"" said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, another pipeline opponent. Republicans lambasted Obama. “The president’s veto of the Keystone jobs bill is a national embarrassment,"" said Republican House Speaker John Boehner. ""The president is just too close to environmental extremists to stand up for America’s workers. He’s too invested in left-fringe politics to do what presidents are called on to do, and that’s put the national interest first."" Obama will make a final decision on the project once the State Department finishes its review, expected in the coming weeks. But the issue is likely to remain central in Washington's political back-and-forth for some time. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday asking for all reports and documents received by the State Department from other government agencies about the project, according to an aide.",0
"Kuczynski, a 79-year-old former Wall Street banker who once held US citizenship, is guaranteed presidential immunity from prosecution until Congress formally accepts his resignation and Vice President Martin Vizcarra is sworn in to replace him. Luis Galarreta, the president of Congress, said that would probably happen on Friday. Kuczynski denies wrongdoing and has promised to cooperate with a graft probe into his connections to Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that has acknowledged bribing officials across Latin America. The rightwing opposition party that controls Congress, Popular Force, first sought to force Kuczynski from office in December after revealing he failed to disclose payments Odebrecht made to his Flordia-based consulting firm while he held public office in a previous government. Kuczynski had vowed not to resign for months, blaming the rightwing opposition for constant scandals that he said had made it impossible for him to govern Peru, one of Latin America’s most stable markets and the world’s No. 2 producer of copper. But secret audio and video recordings released this week ensnared Kuczynski in vote-buying allegations that prompted even his staunchest supporters to demand he step down. Kuczynski said the material, in which his allies are heard offering access to lucrative public work contracts in exchange for political support, had been edited as part of a relentless campaign to malign him. But the hostile political climate had become untenable, he added. “I think what’s best for the country is for me to resign...I don’t want to be an obstacle for the nation’s search for a path to unity and harmony,” Kuczynski said in a pre-recorded video televised as he was driven from the presidential palace to his home in Lima’s financial district. MARKETS RALLY Kuczynski’s announcement marked a spectacular downfall for a man elected less than two years ago amid hopes he would turbocharge growth while cleaning up government corruption and modernizing the Andean nation of about 30 million people. Markets that had cheered Kuczynski’s rise to power in 2016 rallied on news of his departure on Wednesday, amid expectations it would end the political uncertainty that had loomed over the nearly $200-billion economy, just as higher copper prices were reviving investor interest. Peru’s sol currency gained 0.5 percent against the dollar on Wednesday, and stocks closed up 1 percent. But Kuczynski’s future looked less bright. Prosecutors in a special anti-corruption unit in the attorney general’s office told a judge Kuczynski should not be allowed to leave the country, the judiciary source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Kuczynski said as a candidate in 2016 that he had renounced his US citizenship in order to launch his bid. Last month, US Ambassador to Peru Krishna Urs declined to confirm that Kuczynski no longer had citizenship. Kuczynski’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. TRUMP TO HEAD TO PERU Peru has a history of jailing former presidents, and of presidents fleeing. Former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori fled Peru for his parents’ native Japan as his decade in power ended in a corruption scandal and protests. Last year, former president Ollanta Humala, Kuczynski’s predecessor, was ordered up to 18 months in pre-trial detention while prosecutors prepare charges related to Odebrecht. Kuczynski had been scheduled to welcome Donald Trump on the US president’s first visit to Latin America next month, when many regional leaders plan to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to pursue democratic reforms. Kuczynski, who called Maduro a “dictator” in an interview with Reuters last year, had led regional criticism of his government while opening the door to Venezuelan migrants fleeing the country’s economic crisis. A White House official, speaking on background, said Trump still plans to attend the summit and declined to comment on Peru’s domestic political situation. Instead of Kuczynski, Trump will meet Vizcarra at the Summit of the Americas that Peru will host on April 13 and 14. A former governor of a mining region, Vizcarra once helped broker Anglo American Plc secure community support for its copper project, Quellaveco, and has served as Peru’s ambassador to Canada since September. But Vizcarra will take office amid widespread demands for change after constant political crises and corruption scandals have eroded trust in institutions and political leaders. Vizcarra took to Twitter from Canada to call for unity. “I’m outraged by the current situation, like the majority of Peruvians,” Vizcarra said in his first public comments since Kuczynski announced his resignation. “But I’m convinced that together we can show that we can once more push forward.” In recent days, Vizcarra has received public assurances from opposition lawmakers that they will let him govern, something Kuczynski said he had been denied. “I’ve worked for nearly 60 years of my life with complete honesty,” Kuczynski added. “The opposition has tried to depict me as a corrupt person.”",2
" India hailed as ""momentous"" a global atomic cartel's decision on Saturday to lift a 34-year-old ban on nuclear trade with New Delhi, a crucial step to sealing a controversial U.S.-India civilian nuclear accord. ""This is a forward-looking and momentous decision,"" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke to U.S. President George W. Bush after the decision, said in a statement. ""It marks the end of India's decades-long isolation from the nuclear mainstream and of the technology denial regime."" The 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), meeting in Vienna, adopted a one-off waiver proposed by the United States, allowing atomic business with India even though it has not signed the non-proliferation treaty and has tested nuclear devices. This followed tough negotiations in which several small NSG states agreed under heavy U.S. pressure to weaker language than they had sought to ensure India does not test atom bombs again. ""I thank the United States and other member countries of the Nuclear Suppliers Group for the role they have played in ensuring this outcome,"" Singh said. ""The opening of full civil nuclear cooperation between India and the international community will be good for India and for the world."" The U.S.-India deal still has one hurdle to clear. The U.S. Congress must ratify it before adjourning later this month for elections, or it will be left to an uncertain fate under a new U.S. administration. The fuel and technology deal would help India meet exploding energy demand in an environmentally sound way and open a nuclear market worth billions of dollars. A top Indian industry lobby welcomed the approval as ""a resounding victory"" for India. ""It would enable India chase its dream of putting up a series of nuclear power plants, said Sajjan Jindal, head of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. Singh said the NSG approval recognised India's impeccable non-proliferation record and its status as a state with advanced nuclear technology. ""We look forward to establishing a mutually beneficial partnership with friendly countries in an area which is important both for global energy security and to meet the challenge of climate change."" NSG critics and disarmament campaigners fear Indian access to nuclear material markets will let it tap into more of its limited indigenous resources, such as uranium fuel, to boost its nuclear arsenal, and spark an arms race in the region. The deal has also been criticised by Indian opposition parties as compromising the country's sovereignty and its right to carry out more nuclear tests. But a beaming foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters that the NSG waiver was a ""unique development"" that was in India's interests. ""The final outcome fully meets our expectation and is consistent with government policy and the national consensus on disarmament and nonproliferation,"" he said.",1
"While African nations contribute less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the report by the World Meteorological Organisation and other agencies underscored the outsize impact that changes in the climate are having on the continent’s 1.3 billion people as floods grow worse, droughts last longer and temperatures continue to rise. “The rapid shrinking of the last remaining glaciers in eastern Africa, which are expected to melt entirely in the near future, signals the threat of imminent and irreversible change to the Earth system,” the World Meteorological Organisation’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said in a foreword to the report. The climate in Africa in 2020 was characterised by “continued warming temperatures, accelerating sea-level rise, extreme weather and climate events, such as floods, landslides and droughts, and associated devastating impacts,” he added in the report presented in advance of the U.N. climate conference in Scotland starting on Oct. 31. The loss of the glaciers — icy holdouts high above the steamy tropics that have long been objects of wonder and fascination — is a physical manifestation of the change in Earth’s climate. Found on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Kenya in Kenya, and the Rwenzori Mountains bordering Uganda and Congo, the glaciers have been in retreat for years. The report paints a chilling picture of both the impacts to date and the consequences to come if urgent action is not taken. By 2030, up to 118 million people living on less than $1.90 a day “will be exposed to drought, floods and extreme heat in Africa if adequate response measures are not put in place,” it said. It warned that the daily struggle of families to find food would grow more difficult as the effects of protracted conflicts, political instability, climate variability, pest outbreaks and economic crises — exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic — were to converge. As David Beasley, head of the UN World Food Programme, said recently: “This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now, they’re the ones paying the highest price.” In the East African island nation of Madagascar, for example, the United Nations has already warned that the world is witnessing its first “climate famine.” Thousands are currently experiencing catastrophic food shortages and more than 500,000 people are one step away from starvation, according to the global organisation. About 800,000 more are at risk of joining them. Around the world, climate-related disasters now force more than twice as many people from their homes as war and armed conflict do. In the first six months of 2020, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nongovernmental data service, recorded 14.6 million new displacements across 127 countries and territories. Conflict and violence accounted for approximately 4.8 million, with disasters causing 9.8 million. East Africa, according to the report, accounted for some 12% of those displacements — with conflict forcing some 500,000 people from their homes and climate disasters affecting another 1.2 million. The melting of the African glaciers has echoed similar trends on ice-capped peaks in places as distant as Peru and Tibet, and it provides one of the clearest signs that a global warming trend in the last 50 years has exceeded typical climate shift. As the ice has melted, temperatures have continued to rise. “The 30-year warming trend for 1991-2020 was higher than for the 1961-1990 period in all African subregions and significantly higher than the trend for 1931-1960,” according to the report. “If this continues, it will lead to total deglaciation by the 2040s,” it warned. The glacier on Mount Kenya — where snow once blanketed the peak, some 17,000 feet above sea level — is expected to be gone a decade sooner, which would make it, the report said, “one of the first entire mountain ranges to lose glaciers due to human-induced climate change.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"The group, which includes Pimco, the world's biggest bond investor, and Britain's biggest asset manager, Legal & General Investment Management, said they wanted lenders to set 'enhanced' pledges to decarbonise their lending books. While a number of the world's biggest banks have already said they have an 'ambition' to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, many have yet to specify how they plan to do so and continue to fund heavy emitting activities. ""The problem we face today is that too many banks are failing to consider climate harm when they make financing decisions, and too much money is being ploughed into carbon-intensive activities that we so desperately need to move away from,"" said Natasha Landell-Mills, Head of Stewardship at Sarasin & Partners. As the United States gears up to host the April 22-23 Leaders Summit on Climate, the investor group said it wanted banks to speed up their efforts, including by setting interim targets to get to net-zero emissions by mid-century or sooner. Bank remuneration committees should also ensure that variable pay is tied to hitting the targets, they added, while material climate risks should be included in the lenders' published accounts. A number of banks have already said they plan to increase investment in green energy and other activities that will help in the transition to a low-carbon economy, but the investor group said more was needed and the spend should not be considered as offsetting lending to dirtier projects. Crucially, the investors said banks also needed to set ""explicit criteria"" for the withdrawal of financing to ""misaligned"" activities that run counter to the net zero pathway of sectors and industries. The group of 35 investors, operating through the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said it had opened talks with 27 of the world's largest banks and expected to expand the list over time.",0
" Even those Britons who are sceptical about the effects of climate change and efforts to fight it are happy to pay more for their energy to help cut carbon emissions, according to a study published on Monday. The research, for British energy regulator Ofgem, shows that even those who do not think climate change is a big problem are willing to pay up to 15 pounds ($29.52) a year more on their bills to support carbon abatement programmes. Those worried about global warming and supportive of current programmes to reduce emissions are prepared to pay up to 100 pounds a year to do something about it. Although they said government and individuals had to do their bit in the climate change battle, both groups felt businesses and energy suppliers should still bear most of the costs involved in reducing the impact of carbon emissions on the environment. ""Our research shows that there is a willingness from most consumers to help tackle carbon emissions, but there is confusion and pessimism about how effectively industry and government can fight climate change,"" Ofgem Chief Executive Alistair Buchanan said. ""So the challenge is to convince consumers that the bill for reducing emissions is a fair reflection of the real cost of making those reductions and to communicate effectively how government and business are tackling the problem."" Most of the 60 customers interviewed by an independent company for Ofgem's study, conducted in London, Bristol and Glasgow, were aware of simple things they can do to cut energy consumption but felt it was difficult to be energy efficient. The customers were given 10 days to study an information pack about climate change and programmes to cut emissions, followed by day-long sessions to further discuss their views.",0
" Big emerging countries urged rich nations on Sunday to set ambitious mid-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases, as both sides stressed the need for funds to help developing countries limit their emissions. Ministers and representatives from the Group of Eight advanced nations and major emerging countries are gathered in western Japan to try to build momentum for U.N.-led climate change talks, a key topic for a July leaders' summit. At least one delegate, though, was pessimistic over prospects for any breakthroughs in time for the July 7-9 summit in Hokkaido, northern Japan, where G8 leaders will be joined by big emerging economies such as China for climate change talks. ""I think it is difficult. We have not enough time,"" Mexican Environment Minister Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada told reporters. ""But climate change is not waiting for any of us."" G8 leaders agreed last year in Germany to consider seriously a goal to halve emissions by 2050, a proposal favored by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada. About 190 nations have agreed to negotiate by the end of 2009 a successor treaty to the Kyoto pact, which binds 37 advanced nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. But wide gaps exist within the G8 and between rich and poorer nations over how to share the burden for fighting climate change, blamed for droughts, rising seas and more intense storms. TARGETS, FUNDS, TECHNOLOGY Developing countries are putting priority on growth and balking at targets, while complaining that the United States, which together with China is a top emitter, is not doing enough. Indonesia's deputy environment minister told reporters that G8 countries needed to set their own mid-term targets before asking developing countries make commitments. ""First, they should do a mid-term target,"" said Masnellyarti Hilman. ""Developed countries should take the lead and give their commitment to give transfer of technology, finances and capacity building to developing countries,"" she added. South Africa wants the G8 to set ambitious mid-term targets to cut emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and provide more funds to help developing nations adapt to climate change and limit emissions, Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a prepared statement. ""As developing countries, we are looking at the G8 for leadership. This is a key ingredient towards building trust,"" he said. The European Union has said the bloc aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, but the United States says only that it will halt the growth of its emissions by 2025 and expectations are low for bold moves until a new president takes office in January 2009. Japan, seeking to show leadership as G8 summit host, urged its rich country colleagues to set bold national targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by well over 50 percent by 2050. ""It is also important for global emissions to peak out in the next 10 to 20 years to reach the long-term target, and I hope that a shared view will be come out of the (G8) summit,"" Japanese Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita added. Japan is currently debating its own national target, and domestic media have said it would announce in June a goal of reducing emissions by 60-80 percent by mid-century. Big emerging economies also want rich countries to help finance the clean energy technologies they need to cut emissions. Japan has pledged to pay $10 billion over five years to support developing countries' fight against climate change and intends to create a new multilateral fund with the United States and Britain. Now Washington and Tokyo want other donors to take part too. Mexico is pitching its own proposal for a ""Green Fund"", while the World Bank on Friday said that 40 developing and industrial nations would create two new investment funds to provide financing for developing countries to fight climate change. But the Bank specified no amounts and did not clarify the relationship to existing funding mechanisms. ",4
"In the the first global analysis of genome variation in honeybees, new findings show a surprisingly high level of genetic diversity in them.Researchers found that honeybees seem to be derived from an ancient lineage of cavity-nesting bees that arrived from Asia around 300,000 years ago and rapidly spread across Europe and Africa.“The findings indicate that high levels of inbreeding are not a major cause of global colony losses”, explained Matthew Webster, a researcher from Uppsala University, Sweden.The researchers also identified specific mutations in genes important in adaptation to factors such as climate and pathogens, including those involved in morphology, behaviour and innate immunity.Hidden in the patterns of genome variation are signals that indicate large cyclical fluctuations in population size that mirror historical patterns of glaciation.“The evolutionary tree we constructed from genome sequences does not support an origin in Africa. This gives us new insight into how honeybees spread and became adapted to habitats across the world,"" Webster noted.This clearly indicates that climate change has strongly impacted honeybee populations historically, said the study that appeared in the journal Nature Genetics.",0
"Britain - which hosted the COP26 UN climate conference and will lead work through to the 2022 gathering in Egypt - must now team up with activists and green-minded businesses to shift plans and maintain pressure on laggard countries, they said. That could include everything from expanding a pioneering funding programme to help South Africa break its coal dependency to other nations, to dialling up political pressure on less-climate-ambitious countries from Australia to Russia and Brazil. For now, efforts to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius - a level scientists say gives the best chance of keeping people and nature safe - are ""hanging by a thread"", said Richard Black of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. ""We don't need more pledges... That's not really credible anymore. We need actions, policies,"" Black, a senior associate with the UK nonprofit, said at a briefing on the COP26 outcome. The summit, which ended on Saturday, achieved some notable commitments, including to double financing for adaptation to climate impacts, ""phase down"" coal power, cut ""inefficient"" fossil fuel subsidies and end deforestation by 2030. But campaign groups lamented it was far from enough to keep the world on a safe path, with Asad Rehman of the COP26 Coalition, a UK-based group of climate justice organisations, saying it showed ""utter disregard of science and justice"". Nations' emissions-cutting pledges for 2030 put the world on track for 2.4C of temperature rise, with projected emissions double what is needed to hold onto 1.5C, according to Climate Action Tracker researchers. David King, a former British chief scientist, said in his view ""there was no real understanding in the (Glasgow) agreement of the extreme nature of the crisis"". But the government of Bangladesh, current head of the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 55 countries, said the talks had nonetheless delivered ""substantial progress"". ""The world has recognised the urgency of the situation here in Glasgow - now the hard work begins back home,"" it said in a statement after the meeting ended. Mark Watts, executive director of the C40 Cities network of large metropolises pushing climate action, said the top priority should be ""big breakthroughs"" in action on the ground. ""As world leaders depart Glasgow, it is now up to others to pick up the torch,"" he said in a statement. RATCHETING UP ACTION The Glasgow Climate Pact asks countries to come back by the end of 2022 with more ambitious plans to cut their emissions by 2030 in a bid to hold onto the fast-fading 1.5C goal. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations were required to update their carbon-reducing plans only every five years. The new request for faster ratcheting - alongside pressure from climate activists and businesses eager for clearer market signals on how to drive green shifts - mean more leaders now feel ""squeezed from both sides"" to take action, said Chris Stark, head of Britain's independent Climate Change Committee. Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of Energy UK, an industry trade association, said the Glasgow deal's first-ever references to phasing down coal and fossil fuel subsidies amounted to ""a really strong market signal"" for business. That could drive shifts in private investment that will ultimately have a bigger influence on emissions than smaller amounts of government climate finance, the analysts said. But long-overdue rules governing carbon markets, finally agreed in Glasgow, leave open the possibility that companies and countries making net-zero pledges could rely too heavily on offsetting emissions rather than cutting them, Pinchbeck said. Whether carbon trading systems actually reduce global emissions is ""a wait and see"", she said during the online discussion. One significant shift at the COP26 talks, she noted, is that more leaders have grasped not just that climate change presents a genuine risk in their own countries but that demands for action are coming from a broader spectrum of society. ""Countries understand the threat of climate change now physically but also in terms of social pressure and the pressure from businesses,"" she said. Amber Rudd, a former UK secretary of state for energy and climate change, said that with politicians weighing up what swifter emissions cuts might mean for their re-election chances, keeping up public pressure for climate action was crucial. Leaders are too often interested only in future climate action that is NIMTOO, or ""not in my term of office"", she added. ""Politicians know what they need to do. They just don't know how to get re-elected after they've done it,"" she said - a worry that clear public support for climate action could alleviate.",0
" Climate experts agreed on a UN report on Friday that said fighting global warming is affordable and the technology available to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and stave off climate chaos, a senior delegate said. ""It's done,"" he told Reuters after five days of intense wrangling about how much the battle against climate change would cost and how to go about it. The talks in Bangkok ran into the early hours as scientists and government officials from more than 100 countries tried to resolve complex issues in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report deals with ways to curb rapid growth in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and forests, that scientists say are causing global warming. It also says current policies are inadequate. ""With current climate-change-mitigation policies and related sustainable-development practices, global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades,"" a revised draft of the report says. The formal report, yet to be published, does not set out policies. It reviews the latest science on the costs and ways to curb emissions growth and is designed to be a blueprint for governments. But it says there is a wide variety of technology already available to fight climate change at costs bearable by much of the developing world responsible for a lot of the current growth. They include as nuclear, solar and wind power, more energy-efficient buildings and lighting. Capturing and storing carbon dioxide spewed from coal-fired power stations and oil and gas rigs is also feasible. In some cases, such technologies could lead to substantial benefits, such as cutting health costs by tackling pollution. Even changing planting times for rice paddies or managing cattle and sheep flocks better could cut emissions of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, it says. The report is the third to be released this year by the UN panel, which draws on the work of 2,500 scientists. The previous two painted a grim future of human-induced global warming causing more hunger, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels which would drown low-lying islands. In Bangkok, China and Europe sparred about the costs and levels of greenhouse gas emissions which ought to be allowed. Delegates also debated the role of nuclear power. China, the world's number two emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States, wanted the IPCC report to exclude language which would promote stabilising emissions near current levels in part because of the limited economic studies available. The report says the steeper the emissions cuts, the more costly to the global economy. The amended draft says that in 2030 the costs for mitigating greenhouse gases at stabilisation levels of 445 and 710 ppm CO2-equivalent are estimated at between a 3 percent decrease of global GDP and a small increase. But it says regional costs might differ significantly from global averages. The senior delegate said focusing on 445 ppm (parts per million) was unrealistic given the rapid growth in emissions, particularly from the developing world. The European Union wants the lowest level possible to achieve its goal of a maximum two degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures, a level it says is a threshold for ""dangerous"" changes to the climate system. Greenhouse gas concentrations are now at about 430 ppm CO2-equivalent.",0
" Bill Clinton will take his philanthropic summit to Hong Kong next year, hoping that Asians will keep issues such as poverty, health and climate change on the agenda as economies from India to China grow rapidly. On Wednesday, the former US president kicks off his third annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York, rubbing shoulders with everyone from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie. And at a meeting that rates action over talk, he will push those attending to commit to do good, hoping to build on $10 billion of pledges made in the first two years of his summit. Ben Yarrow, a spokesman for Clinton, said next year's Hong Kong summit is ""to spark the same spirit of philanthropy and engagement in the business community in Asia."" ""The idea is to have a truly global initiative,"" Yarrow told Reuters. ""Given the explosion of growth in several Asian economies and the rapid pace of development in the region it made perfect sense to host a separate event in Asia."" At this year's New York meeting, Yarrow said Clinton will unveil www.mycommitment.org, a database of about one million volunteer groups globally to help people find a way to do good in their own communities. Clinton will also target US university students in a discussion with rock star and activist Bono, comedian Chris Rock and singers Alicia Keys and Shakira, to be aired by MTV. This year's three-day brainstorming session is set to attract more than 1,200 people from 72 countries -- including 52 current and former heads of state, celebrities, aid workers and company chiefs. Born out of his frustration while president from 1993 to 2001 at attending conferences that were more talk than action, Clinton has described the initiative as matching ""people with ideas and those who have the means to see them through."" Last year British billionaire Richard Branson pledged to spend about $3 billion over 10 years fighting global warming. But a commitment unveiled by Clinton in 2006 to create a green fund to raise up to $1 billion that would be managed by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn to support renewable energy investments ""did not get off the ground due to complications,"" Yarrow said. RESTORING AMERICA'S 'SOFT POWER' Despite leaving office six years ago, Clinton's successful humanitarian work, which has also included a role as the UN special envoy for the tsunami, saw him come in at No. 6 on Vanity Fair magazine's 2007 top 100 power rankings. Devin Stewart, director of Global Policy Innovations at the New York-based Carnegie Council, said the Clinton Global Initiative was helping restore America's ""inspirational power,"" which he said was damaged by an overreaction from Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ""It captures the America that people around the world respect, instead of the America that exports its own fear and paranoia after 9/11,"" Stewart said. ""America will be admired if it tackles global issues and works for the greater good."" Elliot Schrage, a senior fellow for Business and Foreign Policy, agreed that the initiative had highlighted the value of ""soft power"" and demonstrated the ""engagement of America's civil society in solving global problems."" ""While government leaders will be bemoaning problems at the United Nations this week, representatives from governments, civil society, the private sector and policy experts will be working on creative new forms of collaboration to solve those same problems,"" he said. In his new book ""Giving,"" Clinton said he hopes to continue the Global Initiative meetings for at least a decade.",0
" Spain plans to give people grants to make their homes more environmentally-friendly, the prime minister said on Monday, a sign the government wants to push the green issue ahead of March's general election. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Monday said the Socialist government would hand out 1 billion euros ($1.47 billion) in direct subsidies to renovate old, energy-inefficient homes in 2008-2012, 200 million euros more than previously announced. It will also offer another 2 billion euros in credit every year to help Spaniards make their homes between 35 and 60 percent more energy efficient. Homeowners will receive an energy certificate to show that would boost the property's value because energy bills would be cut, he said. Zapatero has vowed to make the environment a priority in the next legislature if the Socialists win what is expected to be a tight election early next year. ""All the lights are flashing red. We are at the point of no return. I ask all citizens to act with urgency and to put this country at the forefront of the challenge to fight climate change,"" Zapatero told a news conference in Madrid. Zapatero said the cash injection would be enough to renovate 500,000 homes and mirrored an initiative by former U.S. President Bill Clinton to make old buildings more efficient. Despite being a world leader in wind and solar power, Spain's rapid economic expansion over the last 15 years has pushed it well wide of a Kyoto protocol target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The country's carbon dioxide output in 2006 was 48 percent higher than in 1990. Its target was to check the rise to no more than 15 percent. In July, Spain approved urgent measures to save the equivalent of 88 million tonnes of oil from 2008-2012 -- 60 percent of Spain's total primary energy consumption last year. Zapatero also said the government would release 200 million euros to improve energy efficiency in schools and public buildings in towns and cities of more than 50,000 people.",0
"China's State Councillor and Foreign Minister told US climate envoy John Kerry via video link on Wednesday that the two sides' joint efforts to combat global warming were an ""oasis"", according to a foreign ministry statement published late on Wednesday. ""But surrounding the oasis is a desert, and the oasis could be desertified very soon,"" he said. ""China-US climate cooperation cannot be separated from the wider environment of China-US relations."" ""We have shown our sincerity,"" Wang was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying. ""Everyone who met with you will have to spend two weeks in quarantine, but we're willing to pay that price, to discuss cooperation with the US on affairs of mutual concerns."" Kerry told Wang that Washington remained committed to working with other nations to tackle the climate crisis, and encouraged China to do more to reduce emissions during the meeting, a State Department spokesperson said. ""Secretary Kerry affirmed that the United States remains committed to cooperating with the world to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands, and encouraged the PRC to take additional steps to reduce emissions,"" the spokesperson said. The United States, which has resumed its role in global climate diplomacy after a four-year hiatus under President Donald Trump, has long hoped to keep climate issues separate from its wider disputes with China on issues such as trade, human rights and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerry is in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin to hold face-to-face talks with Xie Zhenhua, China's special climate envoy, on the countries' joint response to the climate crisis. Climate watchers are hoping that the talks will lead to more ambitious pledges by both countries to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. ""The G2 (China and the United States) need to realise that beyond their bilateral oasis and desert, the whole planet is at stake,"" said Li Shuo, senior climate adviser with the environmental group Greenpeace. ""If they don't make joint climate progress fast enough, it is soon all going to be desert,"" he added. The meeting in Tianjin is the second to be held between Kerry and Xie, with the first taking place in Shanghai in April. Kerry has no remit to discuss anything apart from climate change issues. Though Wang warned that climate change could now be tied to other diplomatic issues, China has insisted that its efforts to curb its emissions and switch to cleaner forms of energy are a vital part of its own ambitious domestic policy agenda. ""Chinese leaders have long said they are engaged in climate action not because of outside pressure, but because it benefits China and the world at large,"" said Alex Wang, climate expert and professor at UCLA. ""If that is so, then US-China tensions should not slow Chinese climate action.""",1
" More than half the countries at 192-nation UN climate talks in Copenhagen back far tougher goals for limiting global warming than those favored by rich nations, a group of small island states said on Monday. The group, which says rising sea levels could wipe them off the map, complained that a 5-meter (15ft) globe hanging in the Copenhagen conference center omits many island states such as in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Dessima Williams, head of the 43-member alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), said more than 100 nations had signed up for a goal of limiting rises in temperatures to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, up from 86 in August. ""Half of the United Nations is calling for ambitious and specific targets,"" Williams, of Grenada, told a news conference at the December 7-18 meeting among 192 nations trying to work out a new treaty to succeed the U.N.s Kyoto Protocol. The least developed nations, mostly in Africa, and small island states all support the 1.5 Celsius goal that would require cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations of at least 45 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Any deal in Copenhagen will have to be agreed by unanimity. The depth of greenhouse gas cuts by the rich and the amount of funds on offer to help the poor are among major obstacles to a deal in Copenhagen. Most developed nations and leading emerging economies, led by China and India, back a goal of limiting warming to a maximum 2 Celsius over pre-industrial times. Temperatures have already risen by 0.7 Celsius and are set to rise further. ""We are living on the front lines of climate change,"" Williams said, adding that AOSIS wanted a legally binding treaty from Copenhagen rather than a mere political declaration favored by many developed nations. Even with current warming, she said many islands were suffering ""significant damage, some are going under the sea, some are losing their fresh water supply."" Some coral reefs were getting damaged by rising temperatures.
She dismissed suggestions of splits between the developing nations' group amid a dispute over a proposal by the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu for strong, legally binding pacts from Copenhagen for all nations. She said AOSIS members supported Tuvalu in principle but were still working out a common front. China and India favor legally binding cuts in greenhouse gases for rich nations in the Kyoto Protocol but less stringent obligations on the poor. ""A fine sounding political declaration from Copenhagen without a legally binding outcome is like a shark without teeth,"" said Barry Coates, a spokesman for Oxfam.
Antonio Lima, of Cape Verde, the vice chair of AOSIS, said climate change was a looming disaster for the poor -- like the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago that buried the Roman city of Pompeii. ""They did not know what they were facing. Now we know what is going to happen. It will be the planet Pompeii,"" he said.",0
"Brazil is the world's biggest producer of arabica, yet its production has stayed largely flat over the last five years. Meanwhile its output of cheaper robusta - generally grown at lower altitudes and viewed as of inferior quality - has leapt and is attracting more and more international buyers, new data shows. The expansion is challenging Vietnam's longstanding robusta dominance, while squeezing smaller players, increasingly leaving output concentrated in fewer regions and more vulnerable to price spikes if extreme weather occurs. It also promises to gradually alter the flavour of the world's coffee over the coming years as more of the harsher and more caffeine-charged robusta variety, widely used to make instant coffee, makes its way into the pricier ground blends currently dominated by arabica. Whatever your taste, Enrique Alves, a scientist specialising in coffee seed cultivation at Brazilian state agritech research centre Embrapa, said that it might ultimately be thanks to robusta that ""our daily coffee will never be missing"" as the globe warms. ""It is much more robust and productive than arabica,"" he added. ""For equivalent levels of technology, it produces almost twice as much."" The two dominant varieties are contrasting. Arabica, which accounts for about 60 percent of the world's coffee, is generally sweeter with more variation in flavour, and can be worth more than twice as much as robusta coffee. Robusta might be less refined, but it offers much higher yields and more resistance to rising temperatures and is becoming an increasingly attractive option for farmers in Brazil, which overall produces 40 percent of the world's coffee. ""The world will in the near future use a lot of Brazilian robusta, I'm sure of that,"" said Carlos Santana, Brazil-based head coffee trader for Eisa Interagricola, a unit of ECOM, one of the world's largest agricultural commodity traders. Roasters around the world are increasingly experimenting with adding more Brazilian robusta, known as conillon, to both their ground and instant coffee blends, he added. ""It is gaining ground in the world blend."" ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER ROASTER Brazil has raised its robusta production by 20 percent to 20.2 million 60-kg bags over the past three seasons, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows. Meanwhile output of robusta in Vietnam has fallen 5 percent to 28 million bags. The Southeast Asian nation's position as the world's top robusta exporter is secure for now; it exported 23.6 million bags last season versus No. 2 robusta producer Brazil's 4.9 million. Yet things are changing on the international front for Brazil. The bulk of its robusta crop has traditionally been gulped down by strong domestic consumption of more than 13 million bags a year, but the country has now built up a healthy surplus for export. Up until this year, a lot of Brazilian beans ended up in warehouses certified by the ICE Futures Europe exchange, the market of last resort for excess coffee without international buyers. Data from Cecafe, Brazil's coffee export association, shows that in 2018, 2019, 2020, between 20-50% of Brazil's conillon exports went to the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain - home of nearly all of the exchange's robusta coffee stocks. By contrast, in the year to May, only 2 percent went there, with Mexico and South Africa among the countries which have been importing a lot more Brazilian robusta, bound for roasters who turn green beans into retail coffee blends. ""Every day another roaster says I'm going to go for conillons,"" said a senior coffee trader at a Swiss-based global trade house. ARABICA HIT BY FREAK WEATHER Vietnam's robusta dominance has been based on much higher average yields than rivals, of around 2.5 tonnes a hectare. India, for example, has an average robusta yield of around 1.1 tonnes. But with Brazil having worked for some two decades on improving the quality, taste and resilience of its conillon while raising productivity levels by up to 300 percent, the country is competing aggressively. It has now a similar average yield to Vietnam, and farmers believe there is potential for further growth. Luiz Carlos Bastianello, a conillon farmer from Espirito Santo state, told Reuters that modern, mechanised farms in his state have achieved record yields as high as 12 tonnes per hectare. Espirito Santo also holds annual competitions to determine the best conillon quality. ""We've been working on quality for 18 years,"" said Bastianello, who is also head of one of Espirito Santo's largest co-operatives, Cooabriel. There are several different varieties of conillon seedlings in Brazil, he added, all of which have been specially bred to increase their genetic resilience and efficiency and are particularly well suited to withstand warm, dry weather. In terms of arabica output, Brazilian farmers are being increasingly held back by extreme weather like the recent freak frost that devastated an estimated 11 percent of the country's arabica growing areas. Over the past four years, arabica output in Brazil, which has a biennial crop cycle, has risen just 6 percent in its two ""off season"" crops, while remaining flat in its two ""on seasons"", USDA data shows. VIETNAM'S DURIAN AND MACADAMIA Vicofa, Vietnam's coffee and cocoa producers' association told Reuters the country's robusta output could continue falling in coming seasons as farmers ramp up inter-cropping with fruits, nuts and vegetables. ""There's no more land and durian and macadamia are more profitable,"" said Tran Dinh Trong, head farmer at Cong Bang Coffee Cooperative in Vietnam's Dak Lak province. Nguyen Quang Binh, an independent Vietnam-based industry analyst, said roasters, including Nestle, had replaced some Vietnamese robusta with conillon this season. Nestle, one of the world's leading coffee buyers, is spending $700 million in Mexico, an instant coffee export hub, to modernise and expand its coffee factories. Cecafe data shows Mexico has almost quadrupled its conillon imports from Brazil in the past three years. Nestle declined to comment about whether it is using the Brazilian crop at its Mexican plants.",0
" Biotechnology in agricultural will be key to feeding a growing world population and overcoming climate challenges like crop-killing droughts, according to a group of leading industry players. ""It is critical we keep moving forward,"" said Thomas West, a director of biotechnology affairs at DuPont, interviewed on the sidelines of a biotechnology conference in San Diego. ""We have to yield and produce our way out of this."" DuPont believes it can increase corn and soybean yields by 40 percent over the next decade. Corn seeds that now average about 150 bushels per acre could be at well over 200 bushels an acre, for example, DuPont officials said. Crop shortages this year have sparked riots in some countries and steep price hikes in markets around the globe, and questions about how to address those issues were the subject of several meetings at the BIO International Convention being held this week. Despite persistent reluctance in many nations and from some consumer and environmental groups, genetically modified crops, -- and the fortunes of the companies that make them -- have been on the rise. Growing food and biofuel demands have been helping push growth. By using conventional and biotech genetic modification, crops can be made to yield more in optimum as well as harsh weather conditions, can be made healthier, and can be developed in ways that create more energy for use in ethanol production, according to the biotech proponents. ""You can bring a number to tools to bear with biotechnology to solve problems,"" said Syngenta seeds executive industry relations head director Jack Bernens. ""As food prices increase ... it certainly brings a more practical perspective to the debate."" Syngenta is focusing on drought-resistant corn that it hopes to bring to market as early as 2014, as well as other traits to increase yields and protect plants from insect damage. Disease-resistant biotech wheat is also being developed. Syngenta and other industry players are also developing biotech crops that need less fertilizer, and corn that more efficiently can be turned into ethanol. Bayer CropScience, a unit of Germany's Bayer AG, has ongoing field trials with biotech canola that performs well even in drought conditions, said Bayer crop productivity group leader Michael Metzlaff. Water scarcity is a problem seen doubling in severity over the next three decades even as the world population explodes, and will only be exacerbated by global warming climate change, he said. With some 9 billion people expected to populate the planet by 2040 and 85 percent of the population seen in lesser developed countries, decreased land for agriculture and multiple demands on water use will come hand in hand with an expected doubling in food demand, said David Dennis CEO of Kingston, Ontario-based Performance Plants. Performance Plants is working with the Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International to develop and field test drought-tolerant white maize. ""The biggest problem we have in crops is environmental stresses and the biggest stress is drought,"" said Dennis. Biotech crop opponents rebuke the idea that biotechnology is the answer, and say industry leaders continue to focus much of their efforts on plants that tolerate more chemicals even as they push up seed prices and make more farmers reliant on patented seed products that must be repurchased year after year. ""I know they love to talk about drought tolerance but that is not what they are really focusing on,"" said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. Freese said conventional breeding had the ability to address climate change and food needs, but funding cuts to public-sector crop breeders had reduced the ability of non-biotech groups to advance crop improvements. ""The facts on the ground clearly show that biotech companies have developed mainly chemical-dependent GM crops that have increased pesticide use, reduced yields and have nothing to do with feeding the world,"" Freese said. ""The world cannot wait for GM crops when so many existing solutions are being neglected.""",0
" The government will distribute Al Gore's dramatic global warming film to all secondary schools in England in its fight to tackle the climate crisis, Environment Minister David Miliband said on Friday. The announcement came as a panel of the world's top scientists issued a new report blaming mankind for the crisis and predicting that average temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century as a result. ""The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of today's report,"" Miliband said. ""I was struck by the visual evidence the film provides, making clear that the changing climate is already having an impact on our world today, from Mount Kilimanjaro to the Himalayan mountains,"" he added. 'An Inconvenient Truth', a film of the former US vice president's lecture tour illustrating the dramatic change to the environment due to human activities, has already been a box office hit. The film will be part of a global warming information pack distributed to schools as the government strongly pushes the message that everyone has a role to play. Gore, a dedicated climate crusader, has begun a programme of training what he calls climate ambassadors to travel the world. ""As the film shows, there's no reason to feel helpless in the face of this challenge. Everyone can play a part along with government and business in making a positive contribution in helping to prevent climate change,"" Miliband said. The government is drafting a Climate Change Bill to set in law its own self-imposed target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2050. But environmentalists have called for a far tougher target and on Friday the head of a cross-party parliamentary environment committee urged Miliband to raise the figure. ""I will be asking David Miliband to scrap that target and instead introduce a formula which works towards a safe and sustainable concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which minimises the danger of catastrophic climate change,"" said Colin Challen.",2
"India and
neighbouring Pakistan have been suffering from extreme heat waves this year,
melting pavements, forcing school closures and triggering health and fire
alerts. Northwest
and central India recorded average maximum temperatures of 35.9 and 37.78
Celsius (96.6 and 100 Fahrenheit) respectively in April, the Director General
of the Indian Meteorological Department told reporters. Those were
the highest since it began keeping records 122 years ago, Mrutyunjay Mohapatra
added. More than a
billion people are at risk of heat-related impacts in the region, scientists
have warned, linking the early onset of an intense summer to climate change. For the
first time in decades, Pakistan went from winter to summer without the spring
season, Pakistan's Federal Minister for Climate Change, Sherry Rehman, said on
Saturday.",0
" President George W. Bush will treat French President Nicolas Sarkozy to a casual lunch of hamburgers and hot dogs at his family home in Maine on Saturday, signaling warmer US ties with France after strains over the Iraq war. It was a rare invitation. Only one other foreign leader has been invited by Bush to his family's seaside compound along the northeastern state's rocky coast -- Russian President Vladimir Putin in July to try and soothe escalating tensions over US missile defense plans in Europe. The lunch for Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia will be ""traditional American picnic fare"" that included hot dogs and hamburgers, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Described by the White House as a casual, social, event, the lunch will also give Sarkozy an opportunity to meet the Bush family. Bush's parents, twin daughters Jenna and Barbara, brother Jeb and sister Doro were expected to attend. The United States hopes for improved ties with France under Sarkozy after relations chilled with his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who voiced opposition to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Bush usually invites foreign allies to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to show a special relationship. The last head of state to visit the ranch was Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in August 2005. Perino said ""geography"" played a role in the Kennebunkport venue for the two leader meetings this summer -- Sarkozy has been on vacation in nearby New Hampshire and Putin was heading to Latin America. Sarkozy, who took office in May, was criticized in France for choosing the United States for his first vacation as president. He briefly interrupted his American holiday to fly back to France to attend the funeral of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger on Friday, but returned to visit Bush in Maine. Bush started a working vacation in this resort town to attend the wedding of a family friend. He has gone biking, and out on a boat with his father, former President George Bush, and brother Jeb, to do some fishing. The Bush invitation to Sarkozy was extended during the Group of Eight meeting in Germany in June. ""It's a casual lunch,"" Perino said. ""As when any world leader gets together with another, there's a possibility that they could discuss business,"" she said. ""Obviously we're working very closely with France right now on a range of issues,"" Perino said, noting efforts at the U.N. Security Council on Lebanon, Sudan and Iran. A US climate change summit in September may also come up in conversation during the lunch, expected to last about 90 minutes, Perino said. A Portland Press Herald newspaper editorial on Friday exclaimed: ""Bienvenue, President Nicolas Sarkozy!"" and said the French leader should consider vacationing in Maine instead of New Hampshire. The editorial ended: ""After all, a number of us speak French, and this is Vacationland. See you next summer?"" ",0
"Around 2009, multiple glaciers along a vast coastal expanse, measuring some 750 km in length, suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean. ""To date, the glaciers added roughly 300 cubic km of water to the ocean. That's the equivalent of the volume of nearly 350,000 Empire State buildings combined,"" said lead study author Bert Wouters at the University of Bristol. The changes were observed using the CryoSat-2 satellite, a mission of the European Space Agency dedicated to remote-sensing of ice. The ice loss in the region is so large that it is causing small changes in the gravity field of the Earth. Such a change can be detected by another satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). Ice shelves in the region have lost almost one-fifth of their thickness in the last two decades, thereby reducing the resisting force on the glaciers. ""To pinpoint the cause of the changes, more data need to be collected. A detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial to tell how much longer the thinning will continue,"" Wouters concluded. The research was published in the journal Science.",6
"The anti-graft watchdog brought the accusations without mentioning names of the alleged offenders and the projects at a news conference on Wednesday. “We do not reveal names. We only highlight the irregularities to encourage the offenders to correct themselves,” said Dr Iftekharuzzaman, the Executive Director of TIB. TIB picked six ongoing projects of the BWDB for the research. All of them aim to combat effects of climate change. Out of the six, irregularities were found in four, said TIB executives at the conference titled 'United against Corruption'. A secretary has illegally made recommendations in one of the projects while another project has been manipulated by a central leader of the ruling Awami League, a relative of a former minister and a local MP, the TIB said. The two other projects were influenced by two local lawmakers, according to the organisation. 
 
 

“Bangladesh Water Development Board approved these four projects because they were recommended by the influential figures,” said Golam Mohiuddin, Programme Manager, TIB.   The research aims at finding out the challenges of funds management and recommending ways to overcome them. It was conducted to review the rules and regulations related to the management of projects that are being implemented with funds for climate change. “Developed countries question us while lending funds. If we follow the fair path, they will not question our integrity anymore,” said Dr Iftekharuzzaman. TIB selected 600 people—all residents of areas where the projects are on—through sampling for the survey. “The respondents said illegal recommendations were made for four projects. One secretary, one Awami League leader, relative of a former minister, and local MPs made these recommendations.” Substandard work has been reported from two projects, said Mohiuddin. “The contractors even engaged in clashes with locals when the low quality work was noticed.” Substandard materials were used in building a dam under one project. The dam has already caved in at some points, he said. “One contractor has dredged canal but used the mud at a brick kiln that he owns instead for strengthening the dam. He has cut 10-15 trees for a project but sold them at Tk 28,000 per piece and embezzled the money,” Mohiuddin said. The schedules of none of the projects have been made public, according to TIB. Mohiuddin further said: “Eighty-nine percent of the participants said they had no clue from where they could get information over the projects. Eight percent said BWDB refused to provide them any.” Among the participants, 92 percent said they did not know anything about the projects. “There is no information officer at the local offices of BWDB. No information boards are there for three projects. Two boards contain information about two projects but they were taken down before completion of the project,” Mohiuddin said citing responses gathered through the survey. “One project includes multiple areas but information board is available in only one office. That also has insufficient data.” The website of the BWDB contains a list of more than 700 ongoing and finished projects but lacks any separate list of projects related to climate change. To date, the BWDB has implemented 141 projects worth 40 percent of government’s fund to deal with climate change, he said while presenting the keynote paper.",1
"The thick ground, once frozen solid, is thawing. The village preschool, its blue paint peeling, sits precariously on wooden stilts in spongy marsh between a river and a creek. Storms are growing stronger. At high tide these days, water rises under the building, sometimes keeping out the children, ages 3 to 5. The shifting ground has warped the floor, making it hard to close the doors. Mould grows. “I love our building,” said Eliza Tunuchuk, one of the teachers. “At the same time, I want to move.” The village, where the median income is about $11,000 a year, sought help from the federal government to build a new school on dry land — one of dozens of buildings in Chefornak that must be relocated. But agency after agency offered variations on the same response: no. From Alaska to Florida, Native Americans are facing severe climate challenges, the newest threat in a history marked by centuries of distress and dislocation. While other communities struggle on a warming planet, Native tribes are experiencing an environmental peril exacerbated by policies — first imposed by white settlers and later the US government — that forced them onto the country’s least desirable lands. And now, climate change is quickly making that marginal land uninhabitable. The first Americans face the loss of home once again. In the Pacific Northwest, coastal erosion and storms are eating away at tribal land, forcing native communities to try to move inland. In the Southwest, severe drought means the Navajo Nation is running out of drinking water. At the edge of the Ozarks, heirloom crops are becoming harder to grow, threatening to disconnect the Cherokee from their heritage. Compounding the damage from its past decisions, the federal government has continued to neglect Native American communities, where substandard housing and infrastructure make it harder to cope with climate shocks. The federal government is also less likely to help Native communities recover from extreme weather or help protect them against future calamities, a New York Times review of government data shows. Interviews with officials, members and advisers at 15 federally recognised tribes portray a gathering climate crisis and a test of the country’s renewed focus on racial equity and environmental justice. Many tribes have been working to meet the challenges posed by the changing climate. And they have expressed hope that their concerns would be addressed by President Joe Biden, who has committed to repairing the relationship with tribal nations and appointed Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Cabinet secretary, to run the Interior Department. But Biden has announced few specific policies or actions to directly reduce the climate risk facing Native communities, and Haaland’s office declined repeated requests for an interview. “The stakes are very, very high,” said Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “We’re running out of time.” Forced Off Their Land, Again The Quileute Nation is a collection of about 135 homes on a narrow slice of land at the edge of the Olympic Peninsula that juts into the Pacific, about 90 miles west of Seattle. As temperatures rise, the atmosphere holds more water, producing more frequent and intense storms. High winds now regularly knock out the electricity, while homes along the main street are vulnerable to flooding. The single road that connects the community to the outside world is often rendered impassable by water. “The village is 10 to 15 feet above sea level,” said Susan Devine, a project manager who is working with the Quileute. During major storms “those waves are bigger than you,” she said. Hundreds of years ago, the reservation was a fishing village, among many locations used by the Quileute as they moved according to the demands of the weather. That changed in 1855 when a treaty stripped the tribe of most of its land; President Grover Cleveland later issued an executive order confining the Quileute to a single square mile — all of it exposed to flooding. “No one chose to be in a seasonal fishing area year-round,” Devine said. The resulting vulnerability has pushed the tribe to pursue a solution that few nonnative towns in the United States have seriously considered: Retreating to higher ground. “Climate change has forced us to make the heart-wrenching decision to leave the village,” Doug Woodruff, chair of the Quileute Tribal Council, said in a December statement. “Without a cohesive national and international strategy to address climate change, there is little we can do to combat these impacts.” Through a spokesperson, Woodruff and other members of the council declined repeated requests to be interviewed. In 2012, Congress gave the tribe permission to relocate inside the adjacent Olympic National Park. But without a tax base to pay for its move, the tribe sought federal money. Progress has been slow: The Quileute received about $50 million in grants to build a new school farther from the coast, but the total cost to relocate homes and other facilities could be two or three times that much, according to Larry Burtness, who manages federal grant applications for the Quileute. Forty miles south, the Quinault tribe has been working on its own plan to retreat from Taholah, the reservation’s main town, for almost a decade. Tucked between a driftwood-strewn beach and a coastal rainforest, Taholah is exposed to storms, flooding and frequent power outages. That tribe has also struggled to get federal help. “There’s no single source of revenue, at a state level or congressionally, to undertake these kinds of projects,” said Sharp, who was president of Quinault Nation until March. A Struggle for Federal Aid The federal government offers help to communities coping with the effects of climate change. But Native Americans have often been less able to access that help than other Americans. “We’re the most disproportionately impacted by climate, but we’re the very least funded,” said Ann Marie Chischilly, executive director of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals at Northern Arizona University. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is less likely to grant requests for aid from Native tribes recovering from disaster, compared to non-Native communities, according to FEMA data. Native Americans are also less likely to have flood insurance, making it harder to rebuild. Of 574 federally recognised tribes, fewer than 50 participate in the National Flood Insurance Program, according to a review of FEMA data. That is partly because the federal government has completed flood maps for just one-third of federally recognised tribes, compared with the vast majority of counties. Flood maps can help tribal leaders more precisely understand their flood risks and prompt residents to purchase flood insurance. But insurance premiums can be prohibitively expensive for Native Americans. Individual households on Native lands are also less likely to get federal help girding for disasters. Of the 59,303 properties that have received FEMA grants since 1998 to prepare for disasters, just 48 were on tribal lands, according to Carlos Martín, a researcher at the Urban Institute. FEMA said it is committed to improving tribal access to its programs. Chefornak’s efforts to relocate its preschool illustrate the current difficulties of dealing with the federal government. While FEMA offers grants to cope with climate hazards, replacing the school was not an eligible expense, according to Max Neale, a senior program manager at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, who helped Chefornak search for federal aid. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has a program to pay for infrastructure on tribal lands, but the maximum amount available was not enough for a new school, and the agency would not grant money until the village had found other ways to make up the difference, Neale said. HUD declined to comment on the record. Replacing the preschool would only begin to address Chefornak’s troubles. Some two dozen homes need to be relocated, potentially costing more than $10 million, according to Sean Baginski, an engineer working with the village. And Chefornak is just one of more than 100 Native villages in Alaska alone that are exposed to significant climate risks. “If the intent is for the government to find a way to fund this stuff,” Baginski said, “now would be a good time.” Living Without Water Twice a week, Vivienne Beyal climbs into her GMC Sierra in Window Rock, a northern Arizona town that is the capital of the Navajo Nation, and drives 45 minutes across the border into New Mexico. When she reaches the outskirts of Gallup, she joins something most Americans have never seen: a line for water. Beyal’s destination is a squat concrete building that looks like a utility shed, save for the hoses that extend from either side. Once there, she waits as much as half an hour for her turn at the pump, then fills the four 55-gallon plastic barrels in the back of her truck. The facility, which is run by the city of Gallup, works like an air pump at a gas station: Each quarter fed into the coin slot buys 17 gallons of water. Most of the people in line with Beyal are also Navajo residents, crossing into New Mexico for drinking water. “You can show up whenever you want,” she said. “As long as you can pay for it.” Beyal has lived in Window Rock for more than 30 years and once relied on the community well near her home. But after years of drought, the water steadily turned brown. Then last year, it ran dry. “It’s on us to get water now,” she said. Like much of the American West, the Navajo Nation, the largest tribe in the country, has been in a prolonged drought since the 1990s, according to Margaret Hiza Redsteer, a professor at the University of Washington. “As snowfall and rain levels have dropped, so have the sources of drinking water,” Redsteer said. “Surface streams have disappeared, and underground aquifers that feed wells are drying up. Conditions are just continuing to deteriorate.” But unlike nearby communities like Gallup and Flagstaff, the Navajo Nation lacks an adequate municipal water supply. About one-third of the tribe lives without running water. The federal government says the groundwater in the eastern section of the Navajo Nation that feeds its communal wells is “rapidly depleting.” “This is really textbook structural racism,” said George McGraw, CEO of DigDeep, a nonprofit group that delivers drinking water to homes that need it. The Navajo Nation has the greatest concentration of those households in the lower 48 states, he said. The federal government is working on a billion-dollar project to direct more water from the San Juan River to a portion of the reservation, but that work will not be finished until 2028. The drought is also changing the landscape. Reptiles and other animals are disappearing with the water, migrating to higher ground. And as vegetation dies, cattle and sheep have less to eat. Sand dunes once anchored by the plants become unmoored — cutting off roads, smothering junipers and even threatening to bury houses. “We’ve got to adapt to these conditions,” said Roland Tso, an official in the Many Farms area of the Navajo Nation, where high temperatures hovered near 100 degrees for much of June. “We’re seeing the weather going crazy.” New Administration, New Promises As a presidential candidate last year, Biden highlighted the connection between global warming and Native Americans, saying that climate change poses a particular threat to Indigenous people. But Biden’s most ambitious climate proposal, written into his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, included just two references to tribal lands: unspecified money for water projects and relocation of the most vulnerable tribes. A White House spokesperson, Vedant Patel, declined to comment on the record. Haaland’s role as interior secretary gives her vast authority over tribal nations. But the department declined to talk about plans to protect tribal nations from climate change. Instead, her agency provided a list of programs that already exist, including grants that started during the Obama administration. “At interior, we are already hard at work to address the climate crisis, restore balance on public lands, and waters, advance environmental justice, and invest in a clean energy future,” Haaland said in a statement. Heritage at Risk Beyond the threats to drinking water and other basic necessities, a warming planet is forcing changes in the ancient traditions. In Northern California, wildfires threaten burial sites and other sacred places. In Alaska, rising temperatures make it harder to engage in traditions like subsistence hunting and fishing. And on the Cherokee Nation land, at the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, changing precipitation and temperature patterns threaten the crops and medicinal plants that connect the tribe with its past. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the forced relocation of five tribes, including the notorious march of the Cherokee, from the Southeastern United States to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears. Despite losing their land, the Cherokee retained part of their culture: Heirloom beans, corn, and squash, as well as a range of medicinal plants such as ginseng, which they continued to grow in the temperate highlands at the eastern tip of their reservation. “There was certainly a lot lost, but there was also a lot that was able to be maintained,” said Clint Carroll, a professor at the University of Colorado and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Now, drought and heat make it harder to grow the plants and crops of their ancestors. “It can be seen as another removal,” Carroll said. But this time, he said, “Cherokee people aren’t moving anywhere — it’s the environment that’s shifting.” In March, Pat Gwin, senior director for the Cherokee Nation’s environmental resources group, showed a visiting journalist the tribe’s heirloom garden in Tahlequah, an enclosed plot the size of a tennis court where traditional squash, tobacco, corn, beans and gourds grow. Seeds from the plants are distributed to Cherokee citizens once a year, a link to centuries of culture and existence that is dimming. “Our access to and use of the land is so tied up with identity,” said Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University in Minnesota. “It’s who we are as a people.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" Coping with the ravages of global warming will cost $50 billion a year, and the rich nations who caused most of the pollution must pay most of the bill, aid agency Oxfam said on Tuesday. The call, barely 10 days before a crucial Group of Eight (G8) summit in Germany which has climate change at its core, is likely to make already tense negotiations even tougher. The United States, which Oxfam says must foot 44 percent of the annual $50 billion bill, is rejecting attempts by German G8 presidency Germany to set stiff targets and timetables for cutting carbon gas emissions and raising energy efficiency. ""G8 countries face two obligations as they prepare for this year's summit in Germany -- to stop harming by cutting their emissions to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius and to start helping poor countries to cope,"" said Oxfam researcher Kate Raworth. ""Developing countries cannot and should not be expected to foot the bill for the impact of rich countries' emissions,"" she said, echoing the position of the developing world. Scientists say average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, causing floods and famine and putting millions of lives at risk. The United States is the world's biggest producer of carbon emissions -- although experts predict that boom economy China will probably overtake it within a year as it builds a coal-fired power station every four days to feed demand. Oxfam has created a global warming adaptation financing index based on the responsibility, equity and capability of each nation. It said after the United States, Japan owed 13 percent of the bill, followed by Germany on seven percent, Britain just over five percent, Italy, France and Canada between four and five percent and Spain, Australia and Korea three percent. Germany wants the leaders of the G8 along with India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa at their summit from June 6-8 to agree to limit the temperature rise to two degrees this century and to cut emissions by 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. But in a draft of the final communique to be presented to the leaders at the summit, Washington rejected these goals in decidedly undiplomatic terms. ""We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position,"" the United States said in red ink comments at the start of a copy of the draft seen by Reuters on Friday. ""The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to."" The blunt language of the rejection sets the scene for a showdown at the summit. A source close to the negotiations described them as ""very tense"".",0
" Low-lying Bangladesh risks devastating impacts from rising world sea levels caused by climate change with risks that millions will be forced from their homes this century, foreign minister Dipu Moni said. She told Reuters that rich nations would have to help the densely populated country of 150 million people, possibly by opening their borders to environmental refugees. Bangladesh faces threats from cyclones from the Bay of Bengal and floods inland along the vast mouth of the Ganges River. ""Bangladesh is going to be one of the worst affected countries as it is a low-lying delta,"" she said on the sidelines of a two-day conference on melting ice and the Arctic Council in Tromsoe, north Norway. ""As one of the most densely populated in the world, (climate change) is going to be unbearable almost for the country, for the people. It's going to be devastating,"" she said. The government was working on a plan targeting better food security, social protection and health, disaster management, better infrastructure, research and a shift to greener technologies. But there were limits to Bangladesh's ability to cope with global warming stoked by emissions of greenhouse gases in other countries from factories, power plants and cars. ""It's already a very densely populated country so moving people inland -- how many can you do? So...the world will have to come together and decide how should we accommodate these people who will be environmental refugees,"" she said. ""Our people are known to be very hard working...they are already working as migrant workers all over the world and contributing to many economies of the world. Maybe the world will have to think about taking some of these people and relocating them?"" she said. ""This is not an official plan, but we have to be open in our thinking about how to accommodate these people. We are talking about huge numbers,"" she said. She added that the problem of climate refugees was also an issue for many other low-lying states and not the focus of government work. River deltas are hard to shore up against rising seas. The U.N. Climate Panel projected in 2007 world sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-23 inches) this century, but omitted risks of an accelerating melt of Greenland or Antarctica. The Panel listed Bangladesh among the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Millions of people live less than a metre above sea level. And from 1980 to 2000, 60 percent of 250,000 deaths worldwide from cyclones occurred in Bangladesh. Moni said that rising seas and storms would bring more salinity to farmland, affecting crops and changing the types of fish able to survive. ""Climate change will give rise to more flooding, more cyclones, not just the frequency but the severity will be more. Bangladesh is already prone to natural calamities,"" she said. She said that Bangladesh had a fund for adapting to climate change worth $45 million and an international donor trust fund totalling $100 million.",0
"Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of around 60,000 euros (about $70,000), eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway. All of that is why Djordjevic polishes the star on his car. “The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said. But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler — or people making combustion engines. “I’m proud of what I do,” Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.” Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety. As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater. To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed. There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents. There is the coal worker in the former communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone. “She has known about the danger of climate change for longer than we’ve been alive,” one of the brothers told me while standing on the grassy dike that protects the small island, Pellworm, from flooding. “Why hasn’t she done anything about it?” As Merkel steered her country through successive crises and left others unattended, there was change that she led and change that she allowed. She decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany. She ended compulsory military service. She was the first chancellor to assert that Islam “belongs” to Germany. When it came to breaking down her country’s and party’s conservative family values, she was more timid but ultimately did not stand in the way. “She saw where the country was going and allowed it to go there,” said Roland Mittermayer, an architect who married his husband shortly after Merkel invited conservative lawmakers to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, even though she herself voted against it. No other democratic leader in Europe has lasted longer. And Merkel is walking out of office as the most popular politician in Germany. Many of her postwar predecessors had strongly defined legacies. Konrad Adenauer anchored Germany in the West. Willy Brandt reached across the Iron Curtain. Helmut Kohl, her onetime mentor, became synonymous with German unity. Gerhard Schröder paved the way for the country’s economic success. Merkel’s legacy is less tangible but equally transformative. She changed Germany into a modern society — and a country less defined by its history. She may be remembered most for her decision to welcome more than 1 million refugees in 2015-16 when most other Western nations rejected them. It was a brief redemptive moment for the country that had committed the Holocaust and turned her into an icon of liberal democracy. “It was a sort of healing,” said Karin Marré-Harrak, headmaster of a high school in the multicultural city of Offenbach. “In a way we’ve become a more normal country.” Being called a normal country might seem underwhelming elsewhere. But for Germany, a nation haunted by its Nazi past and four decades of division between East and West, normal was what all postwar generations had aspired to. Almost everywhere, however, there was also a nagging sense that the new normal was being threatened by epic challenges, that things cannot go on as they are. THE GERMAN DREAM Djordjevic lives near Stuttgart, the capital of Germany’s powerful car industry. In 1886, Gottlieb Daimler invented one of the first cars in his garden here. These days the city is home to Daimler, Porsche and Bosch, the world’s biggest car-part maker. Arriving home after his shift one recent afternoon, Djordjevic was still wearing his factory uniform — and, beside the Mercedes logo, the hallmark red pin of the metal worker union. Most Daimler employees are unionized. Worker representatives take half of the seats on the company’s supervisory board. “The success story of German industry is also the story of strong worker representation,” he said. The security, the benefits, the opportunities to build skills — all of that underpins “the loyalty workers feel to the product and the company.” If the American dream is to get rich, the German dream is job security for life. Djordjevic, 38, always knew he wanted to work for Daimler. His father worked there until he died. “It was like an inheritance,” he said. When he got his first job at age 16, he thought he had arrived. “I thought, ‘That’s it,’” he recalled. “‘I’ll retire from here.’” Now he is less sure. Like other German carmakers, Daimler was late to start its transition to electric cars. Its first pure electric model was launched only this year. Daimler’s target is to phase out combustion engines by 2030. No one knows what exactly that means for jobs, but Djordjevic was doing the math. “There are 1,200 parts in a combustion engine,” he said. “There are only 200 in an electric car.” “Sustainable cars are great, but we also need sustainable jobs,” he said. Daimler is still growing. But much of the job growth is in China, said Michael Häberle, one of the worker representatives on the company board. Häberle, too, has been at the company all 35 years of his working life. He started as a mechanic and worked his way up to a business degree and eventually a seat on the board. Standing in one of the factories now churning out batteries for the new EQS line of electric cars, Häberle said he hoped company would not only survive this transformation but come out stronger on the other side. The main question, he said, is: Will Germany? There was a time when he took his country’s export prowess for granted. But now, he said, “Germany is in a defensive crouch.” A GERMAN HIJAB Germany’s car industry helped fuel the country’s postwar economic miracle. And immigrants fuelled the car industry. But they don’t really feature in that story. They were known as “guest workers” and were expected to come, work and leave. Until two decades ago, they had no regular path to citizenship. Among them were the grandparents of Ikbal Soysal, a young high school teacher in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt, whose father worked in a factory making parts for Mercedes. Soysal’s generation of immigrant Germans do feature in the story of Germany today. Not only do they have German passports, many have university degrees. They are doctors, entrepreneurs, journalists and teachers. Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. When Merkel came into office in 2005, 18% of Germans had at least one parent who was born outside the country. By now it is 1 in 4. In Soysal’s school in Offenbach, 9 in 10 children have at least one parent who emigrated to Germany. Many of the teachers do, too. “When I started teaching here, all teachers were Germans with German roots,” the head teacher, Karin Marré-Harrak, said. “Now, nearly half of them have diverse roots.” Soysal, a Muslim, always wanted to be a teacher, but she knew it was a risk. There had never been a high school teacher with a headscarf in her state. So when she was invited for her first job interview, she called ahead to warn the school. It was 2018. The secretary consulted with the headmaster, who promptly reassured her, “What matters is what’s in your head, not what’s on your head.” She got that job and others since. It wasn’t always easy. “The students forget about the headscarf very quickly,” Soysal said. But some parents complained to the head teacher. Once, a student asked Soysal’s advice. The girl was wearing a headscarf but was unsure about it. “If it doesn’t feel right, you need to take it off,” Soysal told her. For her, that is what freedom of religion, enshrined in the German constitution, is all about. “The thing is, I am German,” she said, “so my headscarf is German, too.” THE ALTERNATIVE TO MERKEL Leaving Offenbach, the next stop is Hanau. It was here, in February last year, that a far-right gunman went into several bars and shot nine mostly young people who had migrant backgrounds. The backlash against the diversification and modernization that Merkel has overseen has turned increasingly violent. Germany suffered three far-right terrorist attacks in less than three years. The ideological breeding ground for that violence is in many ways embodied by a party that chose its name in opposition to the chancellor. Merkel often justified unpopular policies by calling them “alternativlos” — without alternative. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was founded in 2013 in opposition to the bailout of Greece that Merkel’s government engineered during Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. When she welcomed more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016, the party adopted a noisy anti-immigrant stance that catapulted it into Germany’s parliament. The AfD is marginalised in the country’s West. But it has become the second-strongest party in the former communist East, the place where Merkel grew up. Politically at least, Merkel’s Germany is more divided between East and West than at any other point since reunification. In Forst, a once-prosperous textile hub on the Polish border that lost thousands of jobs and one-third of its population after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD came first in the last election. Downtown, shuttered factories and smoke stacks still dot the skyline. The lingering inequality between East and West three decades after reunification is still evident, even though taxpayers’ money has flowed east and things have gradually improved. With the government planning to phase out coal production by 2038, billions more in funding are promised to help compensate for the job losses. But as Mike Balzke, a worker at the nearby coal plant in Jänschwalde, put it: “We don’t want money — we want a future.” Balzke recalled his optimism when Merkel first became chancellor. Because she was an easterner and a scientist, he expected her to be an ambassador for the East — and for coal. Instead, his village lost one-quarter of its population during her chancellorship. A promised train line from Forst to Berlin was never built. The post office shut down. Balzke, 41, worries that the region will turn into a wasteland. That anxiety runs deep. And it deepened again with the arrival of refugees in 2015. TWO FATHERS AND TWO SONS Merkel’s decision to welcome the refugees was one reason Balzke stopped voting for her. But for plenty of other people, the opposite was true. Mathis Winkler, a development aid worker in Berlin, had never voted for Merkel’s party. As a gay man, he was appalled by its narrow conservative definition of family that until only a few years ago excluded him, his long-term partner and their two foster sons. But after Merkel became the target of far-right anger during the refugee crisis, he joined her party in solidarity. Merkel pushed her own base on several fronts. On her watch, legislation was passed that allows mothers and fathers to share 14 months of paid parental leave. The conservative wing of her party was up in arms, but only a decade later, it has become the new normal. Merkel never backed same-sex marriage outright, but she allowed lawmakers to vote for it, knowing that it would go through. Winkler left the party again in 2019 after Merkel’s successor as conservative leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, disparaged same-sex marriage. But he acknowledged his debt to the chancellor. On June 30, 2017, the day of the vote, he wrote her a letter. “It is a pity that you could not support opening marriage to same-sex couples,” he wrote. “Still, thank you that you ultimately made today’s decision possible.” Then he invited her to visit his family, “to see for yourself.” She never replied. But he and his family used to live just around the corner from Merkel, who never gave up her apartment in central Berlin. They would see her occasionally in the supermarket checkout line. “There she was with toilet paper in her basket, going shopping like everyone else,” Winkler’s partner, Roland Mittermayer, recalled. Even after 16 years, they are still trying to figure the chancellor out. “She is an enigma,” Winkler said. “She’s a bit like the queen — someone who has been around for a long time, but you never feel you really know her.” THE POST-MERKEL GENERATION Six hours northwest of Berlin, past endless green fields dotted with wind farms and a 40-minute ferry ride off the North Sea coast, lies Pellworm, a sleepy island where the Backsen family has been farming since 1703. Two years ago, they took Merkel’s government to court for abandoning its carbon-dioxide emission targets under the Paris climate accord. They lost, but then tried again, filing a complaint at the constitutional court. This time they won. “It’s about freedom,” said Sophie Backsen, 23, who would like to take over her father’s farm one day. Sophie’s younger brothers, Hannes, 19, and Paul, 21, will vote for the first time on Sunday. Like 42% of first-time voters, they will vote for the Greens. “If you look at how our generation votes, it’s the opposite of what you see in the polls,” Paul said. “The Greens would be running the country.” Pellworm is flush with the sea level and in parts even below it. Without a dike ringing the coastline, it would flood regularly. “When you have permanent rain for three weeks, the island fills up like a bath tub inside the dikes,” Hannes said. The prospect of rising sea levels is an existential threat here. “This is one of the most important elections,” Hannes said. “It’s the last chance really to get it right.” “If not even a country like Germany can manage this,” he added, “what chance do we stand?” ©2021 The New York Times Company",1
"This is what happens when the International Olympic Committee decides to bring the Winter Games to a place almost completely lacking in one of the main ingredients for winter sports: snow. What’s more, Beijing and its nearby mountains did not have that much water to make the artificial kind, either. Machine-made snow has played a major role in winter sports for decades, even in snowier places like Norway, Switzerland and Colorado. In Beijing’s version of the Winter Games, the competitions that began this weekend are for the first time taking place almost entirely on artificial snow, necessitating an Olympic snow-making and water-management operation of enormous scale, and foreshadowing the reality of snow sports everywhere as the planet warms. On the mountains where the Alpine competitions are taking place, which do not have any recreational skiing, narrow strips of white, visible from miles away, now cut through the brown. Beijing officials insist that snow production for the Games will not strain local water supplies, which have struggled to keep pace with the city’s demands. But China’s herculean investments in snow making are part of larger efforts to turn the arid mountains near Beijing into a permanent ski and snowboard hub, a project that could face challenges as climate change upends patterns of rainfall and drought. Worldwide, the environmentally unfriendly secret of skiing and snowboarding competitions is that, as natural snow becomes less reliable, they almost always take place on the artificial kind. As the planet continues to heat up, machine-made snow will play an ever-larger role in guaranteeing a consistent, high-caliber field of play. “You could not have winter sports now without man-made snow,” said Michael Mayr, the Asia manager of TechnoAlpin, the Italian company in charge of snow-making for the Beijing Games and at six previous Winter Olympics. What sets Beijing apart from many of those past venues are its tight supplies of water, whether for snow making or for anything else. Over the past few decades, rapid development has sapped Beijing’s groundwater. July and August often bring heavy rains, but the city and nearby mountains get only sprinkles of precipitation in the winter: less than 2.5 inches per season on average in recent decades, according to data from a weather station near the Olympic venues. In 2017, the last year for which international figures are available, Beijing had only about as much freshwater resources per resident — 36,000 gallons — as the western African nation of Niger, at the edge of the Sahara. Zhangjiakou, the city 100 miles northwest of the capital that is hosting some skiing and snowboarding events, had 83,000 gallons per resident, comparable to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. The United States, by contrast, had 2.3 million gallons per person. Countries with less than 260,000 gallons of freshwater resources per person are considered water-scarce. Florian Hajzeri, who has been in China for four years overseeing the snow-making project for TechnoAlpin, said he realised the magnitude of his task as soon as he saw the landscape of the Olympic competition areas. “There are trees and vegetation, but it is not like an Alpine forest: It is vegetation for a drier climate,” he said. “It snows, but it is not enough for the competitions.” Before TechnoAlpin could install pumps and build more than 40 miles of pipe, at a cost of nearly $60 million, Chinese officials first had to figure out how to deliver enough water to the mountains. How much water? Roughly 1 million cubic meters, according to TechnoAlpin, enough to fill 400 Olympic-size swimming pools. And that was just to start the Games. More snow, and more water, will likely be needed as the competitions take place. To gather it all, Chinese authorities have built pumping stations to carry water from reservoirs miles away. According to a state-run newspaper, Beijing has diverted water from the city’s Baihebao Reservoir to the Guishui River, which flows near the Olympic zone but had long been mostly dried up in winter. Previously, Baihebao had primarily supplied the Miyun Reservoir, one of the largest stores of clean water for Beijing households. Officials in Zhangjiakou — which is pronounced sort of like “jong jah coe” — have turned off irrigation across tens of thousands of acres to conserve groundwater, and resettled farmers who were living in what is now the Olympic competition area in high-rise apartments. Modern China is no stranger to monumental water projects. Its biggest effort to ease Beijing’s water troubles began well before the Olympics: a colossal series of waterways that is transferring trillions of gallons of water a year from the nation’s humid south to its thirsty north. Hundreds of thousands of villagers were relocated to make way for the canals. Water from the project accounted for a sixth of Beijing’s water supply in 2020. While the Chinese government has made progress on water issues in recent years, scientists and environmentalists say the capital cannot afford to rest on its laurels. “They still have to do more on water conservation, increasing water-use efficiency and ensuring social equity in water allocation,” said Ximing Cai, a professor of water resources engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. If the Olympics spur a burst of economic development in the hills near Beijing, he said, “the water use associated with that should be planned with caution.” But climate change could both deepen northern China’s need for water and affect southern China’s ability to provide it. Scientists have found that recent severe heat waves and floods in China were much more likely to occur because of human-caused climate change. “Under the backdrop of global warming, the risks to major infrastructure projects in China are increasing,” Zheng Guoguang, then the country’s top weather official, told a Communist Party journal in 2015, citing the South-North transfer project among others. Chinese officials say they are limiting the impact of snow-making, particularly because the snow that is made will be collected after it melts so it can be reused. But scientists who study snow-making have found that a portion of the water evaporates after it is blasted out of a cannon but before it can crystallise into a flake. Some of the flakes are blown away by wind. Some droplets do not fully freeze and end up draining into the ground. Two researchers in Switzerland, Thomas Grünewald and Fabian Wolfsperger, conducted experiments at a ski resort near Davos and found that as much as 35% of the water used for snow making was lost in these ways. (Water that seeps into the ground is not gone completely, of course. It helps replenish groundwater.) Still, Wolfsperger said, “It’s definitely not environmentally friendly” to build a ski hub near a water-scarce place like Beijing. “But winter sports have never been that in general.” Other research has found that artificial ski runs can erode the soil and degrade vegetation, regardless of the kind of snow they use. For skiers and snowboarders, competing entirely on machine-made snow changes everything about how they prepare for the Olympics, the biggest event of most of their lives, from the wax they use to increase speed, to training for the heightened risk of a slicker surface. In warmer weather, man-made snow surfaces tend to break down more quickly than those made of natural snow, athletes said. “This is not the first time we have been racing on artificial snow, and unfortunately it does not seem like it’s going to be the last,” said Jessie Diggins, a gold medalist in cross-country in 2018 who has become a climate change activist in recent years. “It’s harder and icier and transforms differently with different weather,” she said. “And because it is faster, some of the downhills ski much faster when you are rolling in. It can make the course — I don’t want to say dangerous — but more tricky in terms of figuring out how you are going to navigate corners.” Under certain conditions, though, such as the very cold temperatures expected in China, Alpine skiers sometimes prefer artificial snow, because technicians can produce wet flakes that freeze into the kind of smooth, rock-hard surface they prefer. “It is more dense,” said Travis Ganong, an American who specialises in speed events. “It doesn’t really form flakes, and when it is groomed it gets more packed. It just sits really well, and it becomes very uniform. It’s actually how we like it.” ©2022 The New York Times Company",0
"Biden, who has not announced whether he is running in the 2020 election, is the first choice for president of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers with 27 percent in the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll. Sanders, 77, got 25 percent. “If I’m Joe Biden sitting on the fence and I see this poll, this might make me want to jump in,” J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, which conducted the poll, told the Des Moines Register. The newspaper’s Iowa poll has a long track record of relative accuracy in the state that kicks off the presidential nominating process. In this cycle, Iowa will hold the first contest in the Democratic race in February 2020. Nearly 65 percent of the voters said Biden, 76, who was also a US senator first elected in 1972, has more experience than any other candidate and should enter the race, while 31 percent said his time as a candidate has passed. Sanders, a progressive populist who held a rally in Iowa as the poll was being conducted last week, gained 6 percentage points from 19 percent in the group’s previous poll released in December. Biden fell 5 percentage points from 32 percent in the last poll. At least a dozen major candidates already have jumped into the Democratic contest to pick a nominee to challenge Republican President Donald Trump, and Democrats are still waiting for decisions in coming weeks from other big names such as Biden and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas. In most national polls of Democrats, Biden has a solid lead while Sanders, who lost the 2016 Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, typically is in second. In those polls, Senator Kamala Harris of California has vaulted into third ahead of other senators including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey. In the Iowa poll, Warren was third with 9 percent of voters, and Harris was fourth with 7 percent. O’Rourke got 5 percent of voters, down 6 percentage points from December. It was the Register’s first Iowa poll since candidates began jumping into the race at the beginning of the year. The poll also surveyed support of likely Iowa caucus-goers on issues that have dominated the early discussion and drawn support from most of the Democratic presidential contenders. The Green New Deal, a proposal by Democrats in Congress to tackle climate change, was supported in full by 65 percent of the Democratic voters, partially by 26 percent, with 4 percent not supporting. The deal would fund government programs on clean energy and make buildings energy efficient while helping to address poverty. Support was also measured for Medicare-for-all, a plan first proposed by Sanders in 2017, to replace the current mix of private and government financed healthcare coverage with a universal coverage plan funded solely by the government. It was supported by 49 percent of the likely caucus-goers, partially by 35 percent, with 11 percent not supporting.",0
"His visit to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay - three of the region's poorest and smallest countries - is Francis' first abroad since his landmark encyclical urging an end to man's degradation of the global environment. ""I thank God for having allowed me to return to Latin America and to be here with you today in this beautiful land of Ecuador,"" the Argentine-born pontiff said in a speech on the runway after his 13-hour flight from Rome. When he emerged from the plane, a breeze whipped off his white zucchetto cap and swirled his robes, but the affable 78-year-old took it in his stride, smiling and laughing as he walked down steps to an embrace from President Rafael Correa. He was then greeted by a group of people dressed in indigenous clothing, including a white blouse with sharp red and orange colours and a large red skirt. One, 16-year-old Elizabeth Maldonado, said afterward that she had never dreamed she would hug the pope. ""It was something so beautiful, marvellous, a positive energy, a huge blessing for us,"" she said. Tens of thousands lined the streets as Francis' motorcade drove into Quito, some pushing through a police line. Well-wishers threw gifts at the popemobile, including two live white doves. Francis stopped briefly to kiss the head of an elderly lady and a man who carried a baby in his arms. The pope visited Brazil for a youth festival in 2013 but that was to substitute for predecessor Benedict after his sudden resignation. Because he chose the three nations himself, Vatican aides say this is the real ""homecoming"" to his native continent. Moratorium on protests His first host, Ecuador, has for weeks been hit by anti-government demonstrations, with thousands on the streets to protest against tax changes and alleged state authoritarianism. Protest leaders have called a moratorium during the pope's visit out of respect for him, and in his arrival speech Francis stressed the need for dialogue and respecting differences. Celebrated by supporters as a champion of the poor but cast by critics as an autocrat, leftist leader Correa was elected in 2006 vowing to spread wealth more fairly and protect the country's natural riches. ""Ecuador is the eco-centre of the world,"" Correa said in a welcome speech, noting the extraordinary biodiversity of his nation, which is thought to be home to more than one million species, or more than one-tenth of the world's total. Quito, a highland capital mixing colonial cobbled streets with modern high-rises, was plastered with posters and billboards welcoming Francis. A million extra people are expected in Quito and the coastal city of Guayaquil for masses. ""He's a person who transmits love and peace for all humanity,"" said Andrea Ramirez, 25, a nun who took an eight-hour bus from Loja in the country's south to Quito last night. ""He'll teach Ecuadoreans that Christ lives and is present here, despite all the conflicts and social problems. He'll bring peace and love to Ecuador,"" she added, outside a huge neo-gothic basilica overlooking Quito. Boasting some of the world's most extraordinary habitats - from the Amazon jungle to the Galapagos islands, yet heavily reliant on oil and mining, Ecuador in many ways illustrates the issues at the heart of Francis' recent exhortations on the environment. In his encyclical, the pope demanded swift action to save the planet from ruin and urged leaders to hear ""the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,"" whom he said were most affected by climate change. ‘Protect what is small and simple’ Francis cited Ecuador's natural beauty in his arrival words. ""From the peak of Chimborazo (volcano) to the Pacific coast, from the Amazon rainforest to the Galapagos Islands, may you never lose the ability to thank God for what he has done and is doing for you,"" he said. ""May you never lose the ability to protect what is small and simple, to care for your children and your elderly, to have confidence in the young, and to be constantly struck by the nobility of your people and the singular beauty of your country."" On Monday, Francis will fly south to the coastal city of Guayaquil to deliver a mass before heading back to Quito to meet with Correa. On Tuesday he is to deliver a mass at Quito's Bicentenario Park, where some were already camped out to see him. On Wednesday, Francis moves on to Bolivia, where he is expected to defend the rights of indigenous people. In Bolivia, he will also visit the notoriously violent Palmasola prison. Landlocked Paraguay, the last stop, is notorious for contraband smuggling and illicit financing. Francis will meet several groups of social activists while he is there. While all three countries are between 82 percent and 93 percent Catholic, the Church in other parts of Latin America is losing followers to Protestant evangelical groups. Identification with Catholicism is declining throughout the region, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Centre. The pope, however, has felt more comfortable holding dialogues with these groups than his two immediate predecessors did. ​​He had good relations with Protestant evangelical groups when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires.",0
"Hours after the military council sought to calm public anger by promising a new civilian government, Defence Minister Awad Ibn Auf said in a televised speech he was quitting as head of the council. Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abdelrahman will be the new head of the council, Ibn Auf said. He also said Chief of Staff Kamal Abdelmarouf al-Mahi was relieved of his position as deputy head of the transitional military council. “In order to ensure the cohesion of the security system, and the armed forces in particular, from cracks and strife, and relying on God, let us begin this path of change,” Ibn Auf said. News of the change sparked joyful celebrations by many thousands in the streets of Khartoum as people chanted, “The second has fallen!” in reference to Bashir, witnesses said. “What happened is a step in the right direction and is a bow to the will of the masses, and we have become closer to victory,” Rashid Saeed, a spokesman for the main protest group, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), told Reuters. “We are committed to our demands that we submitted to the army,” he said. “We call on the masses to stay on the streets until all the demands are met.” The military council said earlier that it expected a pre-election transition to last two years at most or much less if chaos can be avoided. The head of the military council’s political committee, Omar Zain al-Abideen, said the council would hold a dialogue with political entities. The announcement of a future civilian government appeared aimed at reassuring demonstrators who had pressed for months for Bashir’s departure and quickly resumed protests against army rule after his ouster on Thursday, calling for quicker and more substantial change. In a clear challenge to Ibn Auf’s military council, several thousand protesters remained in front of the defence ministry compound, and in other parts of the capital, as a night time curfew Ibn Auf had announced went into effect. The SPA said the military council was “not capable of creating change.” In a statement, the group restated its demand for power to be handed immediately to “a transitional civilian government.” Bashir, 75, himself seized power in a 1989 military coup. He had faced 16 weeks of demonstrations sparked by rising food costs, high unemployment and increasing repression during his three decades of autocratic rule. Worshippers packed the streets around the Defence Ministry for Friday prayers, heeding a call by the SPA to challenge the military council. The numbers swelled in the afternoon, and a Reuters witness estimated hundreds of thousands of protesters thronged areas around the ministry, which was guarded by soldiers. At least 16 people were killed and 20 injured by stray bullets at protests and sit-ins on Thursday and Friday, a Sudanese police spokesman said in a statement on Saturday. Government buildings and private property were also attacked, spokesman Hashem Ali added. He asked citizens to help ensure safety and public order. “We do not reject a military council in principle, but we reject these people because they are from Bashir’s regime,” said Abdelhamid Ahmed, a 24-year-old doctor. Ibn Auf was Bashir’s vice president and defence minister and is among a handful of Sudanese commanders whom Washington imposed sanctions on over their alleged role during atrocities committed in the Darfur conflict that began in 2003. Announcing Bashir’s ouster on Thursday and the creation of the military council, Ibn Auf also announced a state of emergency, a nationwide ceasefire and the suspension of the constitution, as well as the night time curfew from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Those steps were criticised as heavy-handed by rights groups. Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman was the third most senior general in the Sudanese armed forces and is not known in public life. He was the head of Sudan’s ground forces, a role in which he oversaw Sudanese troops that fought in the Saudi-led Yemen war. INCLUSIVE POLITICAL PROCESS Sudan’s deputy UN ambassador, Yasir Abdalla Abdelsalam Ahmed, told the UN Security Council on Friday that any democratic process in the country required time, and he urged the international community to support a peaceful transition. “No party will be excluded from the political process, including armed groups,” he told the council during a meeting on Abyei, a contested border region claimed by Sudan and South Sudan. The 15-member council convened later on Friday behind closed doors to be briefed on the latest developments in Sudan. “Moreover, the suspension of the constitution could be lifted at any point and the transitional period could be shortened depending on developments on the ground and agreements reached between stakeholders,” the Sudanese envoy said. World powers, including the United States and Britain, said they supported a peaceful and democratic transition sooner than two years. China said it would continue to seek cooperation with Sudan regardless of the political situation. Zain al-Abideen said the military council would not interfere with a civilian government. However, he said the defence and interior ministries would be under its control. Burhan, the new head of the transitional military council, was the inspector general of the Sudanese armed forces and its third most senior general. He is little known in public life. He was the head of Sudan’s ground forces, a role in which he oversaw Sudanese troops who fought in the Saudi-led Yemen war. He has close ties to senior Gulf military officials as he was responsible for coordinating Sudan’s military involvement in the war. “NOT GREEDY FOR POWER” Zain al-Abideen said the military council itself had no solutions to Sudan’s crisis and these would come from the protesters. “We are not greedy for power,” he said. “We will not dictate anything to the people. We want to create an atmosphere to manage a peaceful dialogue”. He said the council was to meet on Friday with political entities to prepare a “climate for dialogue,” but that was later postponed. The council said it did not invite Bashir’s National Congress Party to join the dialogue because “it is responsible for what happened.” It warned protesters that the army would not tolerate unrest. Ibn Auf said on Thursday that Bashir was being detained in a “safe place.” Sudanese sources told Reuters he was at the presidential residence under heavy guard. The council said on Friday it would not extradite Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Bashir is facing an arrest warrant over accusations of genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region during an insurgency that began in 2003 and led to the death of an estimated 300,000 people. He denies the allegations.",5
" Former Cuban President Fidel Castro addressed the island's parliament for the first time in four years on Saturday and appealed to world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, to avoid a nuclear war. The return of the veteran 83-year-old Cuban revolutionary to the National Assembly, transmitted live by Cuban state television, crowned a spate of recent public appearances after a long period of seclusion due to illness. Castro, dressed in a long-sleeved green military shirt without rank insignias, used it to expound again his recent warnings that U.S. pressure against Iran could trigger a nuclear conflagration that would destroy the world. It was the first time that the historic leader of Cuba's revolution had participated in a public government meeting since 2006, when he fell ill and underwent intestinal surgery. In 2008, he formally handed over the presidency of communist-ruled Cuba to his younger brother Raul Castro. Helped to walk in by aides, the bearded leader was greeted in the parliament by a standing ovation and shouts of ""Viva Fidel."" Castro opened the special assembly session, which had been requested by him, by delivering a 12-minute prepared speech in a firm, clear, but sometimes halting voice. He urged world leaders to persuade Obama not to unleash a nuclear strike against Iran, which he said could occur if Tehran resisted U.S. and Israeli efforts to enforce international sanctions against it for its nuclear activities. ""Obama wouldn't give the order if we persuade him ... we're making a contribution to this positive effort,"" he said. He said he was sure that China and ""the Soviets"" -- an apparent reference to Russia, the former Soviet Union -- did not want a world nuclear war and would work to avoid it. Castro also referred to the case of one of five convicted Cuban spies jailed in the United States, Gerardo Hernandez, saying he hoped his wife would be allowed to visit him or that he could even be released. President Raul Castro also attended the assembly session, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. Deputies made observations on Castro's speech, congratulating him and agreeing with him. But Castro later appeared to tire after exchanging views with the deputies, and Cuban parliament head Ricardo Alarcon suggested ending the session after 1-1/2 hours. ""That's what I have to say, comrades, nothing more, I hope we can meet again at another time,"" Castro said in brief closing remarks in which he asked whether the parliamentarians had obtained copies of his new book, ""The Strategic Victory,"" on the guerrilla war that brought him to power in 1959. The session finished with applause. INTENSE SPECULATION ""He's been relatively absent. Having him here with us today is something surprising ... it's a rebirth. It'll give us strength to continue the struggle,"" Graciela Biscet, 43, an assembly deputy from Santiago de Cuba, told reporters. Following his 2006 illness, Fidel Castro disappeared from public view and was only seen occasionally in photographs and videos. But since July 7, he has emerged from four years of seclusion and has made several public appearances. This has ignited widespread speculation that Castro wants to be more active again in the day-to-day life of Cuba. Analysts and Cuba-watchers have given varied interpretations of what the recent spate of Fidel Castro appearances might mean. Some say the legendary comandante's influence has remained strong on the Cuban leadership, and that this has put a brake on more liberalizing reforms of Cuba's socialist system, or on any attempts to improve relations with the United States, which maintains a trade embargo against the island. But others argue his appearances are intended to show support for his younger brother Raul as the latter tries to revive the stagnated economy with cautious reforms and steer Cuba out of a severe economic crisis. Others say the veteran statesman may just want to get back into the limelight. Fidel Castro, who has also predicted a U.S. clash with North Korea, urged Obama on Wednesday to avoid a nuclear confrontation, which he described as ""now virtually inevitable."" The former president has met Cuban diplomats, economists and intellectuals over the last month, as well as visiting the national aquarium and launching his new book. But Fidel Castro has remained mute, at least in public, on the cautious domestic reform policies of his younger brother, which included a recent announcement that more self-employed workers would be allowed in the state-dominated economy. He has, however, kept up regular commentaries since 2007 on international affairs, published by state media. These focus especially on his favorite subjects, such as his views on the threat to humanity posed by U.S.-led capitalism and by global warming and climate change.",0
"The strike began to unfold Wednesday evening as workers at the national railway SNCF walked off the job. The walkout threatens to paralyse France for several days or more, with teachers, students, hospital staff, police officers, garbage collectors, truck drivers and airline workers all expected to join. By Wednesday night, the streets of Paris were uncharacteristically quiet, with people wary of being caught without transportation options home. Parts of the Paris subway system had come to a halt, and buses had signs in their windows that they were returning to their depots. The fresh round of social unrest is once again calling into question Macron’s top-down management style, a big factor in last year’s protest over stagnating wages and dwindling living standards. He promised then to bring more voices into his decision-making but has wound up dictating another overhaul that has created deep unease in France. There is also now concern at the top at the reaction from the street, with one senior official at the Élysée Palace, the French presidency, acknowledging that the pension overhaul had the potential to galvanise disparate parts of the opposition. “Pension reforms create anxiety. It’s not an easy sell,” said the official, who could only be quoted anonymously under French rules. The Yellow Vests say they will join the new protest — unlike the unions, they have been successful at extracting concessions from the government — as will Macron’s opponents, right and left, and a wide spectrum of unions, though not the centrist French Democratic Confederation of Labor. Publicly, government officials have been busy assuring journalists and others that they are not afraid of the strike action, which has come to be called “the Dec. 5 wall.” But the walkout and the underlying social discontent call into question Macron’s apparent triumph over the Yellow Vest movement, seen up until now as a crucial moment of his reformist presidency. Unions are predicting a huge turnout on Thursday. Jean Garrigues, a political historian at the University of Orléans, said, “The victory doesn’t seem to have rehabilitated Macron.” This week’s protest is “the reflection of a crisis in French society, one that can explode at any moment,” he added. “There’s real anxiety over the future.” Macron’s hasty $19 billion check to bolster purchasing power in the form of tax cuts and income supplements for low earners did help tamp down the Yellow Vest demonstrations. But some analysts, like economist Daniel Cohen of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, have pointed out that the cash did not settle underlying French social dislocation linked to globalisation. The senior Élysée official acknowledged that citizens were in effect saying that they had not seen enough improvement to their daily lives. The strike has been called to protest Macron’s proposed overhaul of the Byzantine French pension system, one of the world’s most complicated and generous, which is currently headed for a deficit of about $19 billion. Some railway workers, for instance, can retire at 52, and average retirement ages are among the lowest in the industrialised world. The official retirement age is 62, but many retire before. Pensions as a percentage of working-age salaries are among the world’s highest, hovering at around 70%, and often even higher for state workers. Retirements tend to be long in France, and public leisure facilities — concerts, museums, theatres — are often full of vigorous retirees with lots of time on their hands. The results of this complex system of 42 different pension plans are remarkable: France has among the world’s lowest old-age poverty rates, and average incomes of those over 65 are slightly higher than incomes under that age, a global rarity. The train workers have their own retirement plan, as do the opera workers, the workers at the Comédie-Française — the national theatre company — and the workers at the Port of Bordeaux, among others. Most workers are under the private-sector pension plan, in which the state is also heavily involved. The French are fiercely protective of their world-beating pension arrangements, and indeed, the government does not dare tinker with the basics: It is not proposing to spend less on pensions or to make people retire later. Instead, Macron’s idea is to merge all these disparate systems, public and private, into one state-managed system in which workers accumulate points over the course of a working life and then cash them in. His instinct is always to rationalise and he says his system will be fairer, though there are concerns that his changes will mean less for some. Hervé Boulhol, a pensions specialist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that, as things stand, “We’ve got a panorama that’s extremely disparate, with lots of different rules.” Macron is proposing “a very ambitious reform,” Boulhol said. “We’re changing the way of calculating pension rights.” But although many in France worship the rational, it is also a country that loves street protest and hates change, particularly in a moment full of fear over globalisation and climate change. Previous governments have foundered on the third rail of French politics, the pensions system. “It’s not right that you do the same work, and your neighbour retires earlier, the calculation is different,” Macron said at a public meeting in Rodez in central France this fall. “So this has created suspicion in regard to our pension system, so today people find that it is more or less unfair, and more and more, people have doubts about it.” But they appear to have even more doubts about Macron’s changes. “The amount of pension, for everybody, is going to go down,” said Benoît Martin, a senior official with the General Confederation of Labor, a left-leaning union that is leading the charge on Thursday. He added, “The number of retirees is going to go up, but they’re not talking about spending more on pensions.”   © 2019 The New York Times Company",0
"This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water. Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle this summer. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents. 
 
 File Photo: A woman cleans debris around a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, in Mexico Beach, Fla., Oct. 13, 2018. By the end of this century, some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers have concluded. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times) 

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet could be hit by as many as six such crises at a time.  File Photo: A woman cleans debris around a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, in Mexico Beach, Fla., Oct. 13, 2018. By the end of this century, some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers have concluded. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)  That prospect is “like a terror movie that is real,” Mora said. The authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; also, the authors cite the ongoing margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate change from natural variability. The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,” the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms.   © 2018 New York Times News Service ",0
"Durban, Dec 10 (bdnews24.com/Reuters)- UN climate talks stalled after a rebellion by developing states most at risk from global warming, forcing host South Africa to push the conference into extra time on Saturday in an effort to prevent the negotiations collapsing. Deliberations were due to resume around midday after haggling in the South African port city of Durban continued into the early hours. South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane suspended the meeting late on Friday after a coalition of island nations, developing states and the European Union objected to a text they said lacked ambition. Island states risk being swept away by the rising sea levels and extreme weather systems linked to global warming, which scientists say is the result of heat-trapping greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activity. Frustration has grown with hosts South Africa, which holds the annual presidency of the UN process, with many delegates complaining it has failed to do enough to broker a deal that better protects the poor countries it pledged to help. Delegates accused South Africa of leaving too many contentious issues unresolved until the final hours and failed to show the leadership needed to push through settlements. ""They have let agreements slip through their fingers. If we do reach any outcome that advances the process, it will not be because of South Africa's leadership. It will be despite South Africa,"" said one envoy. The European Union has been rallying support for its plan to set a date of 2015 at the latest for a new climate deal that would impose binding cuts on the world's biggest emitters of heat-trapping gases. Any deal could then come into force up to five years later. The crux of the dispute is how binding the legal wording in the final document will be. The initial draft spoke of a ""legal framework"", which critics said committed parties to nothing. A new draft changed the language to ""legal instrument"", which implies a more binding commitment, and says a working group should draw up a regime of emissions curbs by 2015. It also turns up pressure on countries to act more quickly to come up with plans for reducing domestic emissions. Another issue is how deep emission cuts would be under a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the globe's only legally binding emissions treaty. The changes should appeal to poor states, small island nations and the European Union, but may be hard to swallow for major emitters, including the United States and India, to swallow, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. ""One of the crunch issues that has been left out is the date by which the new agreement will enter into force, which could still be as late as 2020 and making it no better than the previous text on this issue,"" said Tim Gore, climate change policy advisor for Oxfam. The delegates are also expected to debate text on a raft of other measures, including one to protect forests and another to bring to life the Green Climate Fund, designed to help poor nations tackle global warming. UNDER PRESSURE The EU strategy has been to forge a coalition of the willing to try to pressure the world's top carbon emitters -- China, the United States and India -- to sign up to binding cuts. None of the big three is bound by the Kyoto Protocol. EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said a ""small number of states"" had yet to sign up to the EU plan and there was little time remaining for a deal in Durban. Washington says it will only pledge binding cuts if all major polluters make comparable commitments. China and India say it would be unfair to demand they make the same level of cuts as the developed world, which caused most of the pollution responsible for global warming. Many envoys believe two weeks of highly complex climate talks, bringing together nearly 200 nations, will at best produce a weak political agreement, with states promising to start debate on a new regime of binding cuts in greenhouse gases. At worst, the talks could collapse, putting off agreement on the core issues until May next year. Failure in Durban would be a repeat of the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, which fell short of delivering a meaningful global deal to follow on after a first set of Kyoto carbon cuts. UN negotiators regrouped in 2010 in Cancun, where a more modest programme of action and a set of voluntary pledges to curb carbon emissions were drawn up. Scientists say those promises are not yet enough to limit global warming to the two degrees Celsius judged necessary to stave off the most devastating effects of climate change. UN reports released in the last month show time is running out. A warming planet has already intensified droughts and floods, increased crop failures and sea levels could rise to levels that would submerge several small island nations. The protracted talks have angered delegates from small islands and African states, who joined a protest by green groups on Friday as they tried to enter the main negotiating room. ""You need to save us, the islands can't sink. We have a right to live, you can't decide our destiny. We will have to be saved,"" Maldives climate negotiator Mohamed Aslam said.",0
" Environment ministers began meeting in Kenya on Monday to study whether booming global trade can be modified to help save the planet, days after the toughest warning yet that mankind is to blame for global warming. Governments are under pressure to act on the findings of the IPCC, the UN body assessing climate change, which forecast more storms, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels ""most likely"" caused by burning fossil fuels and other activities. Achim Steiner -- head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) which hosts the week-long talks attended by nearly 100 nations -- said globalisation was running down the world's resources while not delivering the benefits expected of it. But there are many examples of sustainable management, from the certification of resources like timber and fish to avoid illegal exploitation to ""creative"" financial mechanisms such as the rapidly expanding carbon market, Steiner added. ""We need to harness the power of the consumer, match calls for international regulation from the private sector and set realistic standards and norms for the globalised markets,"" he said in a statement before the meeting. Ringing in delegates' ears was the warning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said there was a more than 90 percent chance humans were behind most of the warming in the past 50 years. UN officials hope the report will spur governments --particularly the United States, the biggest emitter -- and companies to do more to cut greenhouse gases, released mainly by power plants, factories and cars fuelling modern lifestyles. As well as globalisation, this week's UNEP Governing Council talks in Nairobi will focus on the growing threat from mercury pollution, the rising demand for biofuels and UN reforms. For the first time, they draw top officials from other agencies, including World Trade Organisation boss Pascal Lamy. ""I believe (his) presence shows there is no longer one-way traffic in respect to trade and the environment,"" Steiner said.",0
" African cotton farmers battling Washington over trade policies they say keep them poor have a new enemy: the shrinking rainy season. Known as ""white gold"" to peasant farmers whose living depends on it, cotton has long been one of the few cash crops they can cultivate without irrigation across West Africa's arid Sahel, bringing much-needed funds into poor villages. But these days farmers complain the rains don't last long enough to grow a full crop. ""We will have to adapt to these climatic conditions if they stay like this with time,"" Messan Ewovor, director general of Togo's cotton company Sotoco, told Reuters during an industry workshop convened in Togo last week to address the problem. It isn't so much the volume of rain -- torrential downpours have caused flash flooding across much of West Africa in recent weeks, sweeping away villages and transforming hitherto dry river beds into raging torrents. The real problem is the rainy season, during which crops are traditionally grown, is getting shorter. Fears among some industry players at last week's conference that the growing season is shrinking from six months to as little as three may well prove alarmist, but experts are increasingly accepting climate change in the region as a fact. ""In the Sahelian region of Africa, warmer and drier conditions have led to a reduced length of growing season with detrimental effects on crops,"" experts said in an April report to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ""The area suitable for agriculture, the length of growing seasons and yield potential, particularly along the margins of semi-arid and arid areas, are expected to decrease,"" they said. ""This would further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition in the continent. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020."" 
That could spell disaster for millions of farmers across West Africa who already blame Washington's subsidies to US farmers for depressing world market prices. Many farmers in places like Mali, West Africa's second biggest producer, already run at a technical loss, and things could get worse if they find they have less cotton to sell. ""It's in the interests of researchers and cotton farmers to select seeds that would withstand a shorter growing season,"" said Yves Mado Nagou, Togo's farms minister. Such solutions may help, but could take time and more investment in research capacity and technical back-up than the industry has on the ground in Africa. Another option may be to turn to organic production, said Celestin Tiendrebeogo, president of the Association Cotton Association (ACA) which convened last week's workshop. Appealing to such premium market segments could even help turn some competitive disadvantages -- African farmers tend to do everything by hand, unlike their highly mechanised counterparts in the southern United States -- into advantages. However, given the industry's heavy reliance on chemical nitrate-based fertiliser and pest control, organic production could be a tall order for many farmers in the region. ""We have been thinking about organic cotton for some time, but the technology is expensive and requires training for researchers and farmers,"" Sotoco's Ewovor said. In any case, upgrading to premium quality can only work if there are customers prepared to pay a premium price. Senegal's national cotton company SODEFITEX, which is operated by French company Dagris, registered as a Fair Trade producer several years ago, but as Commercial Director Moustapha Diop said earlier this year, ""We've got to find someone to buy it"". He said a tiny fraction of the company's projected 2006/07 output would be sold as Fair Trade cotton. ""You see the whole thing is problematic,"" Ewover said.",0
"By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent - Analysis L'AQUILA, Italy July 12 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A G8 summit made scant progress toward a new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in December with some nations back-pedaling on promises of new action even before the end of a meeting in Italy. ""This hasn't given me a huge rush of adrenalin,"" said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate change official, of climate decisions by the G8 summit and a 17-member climate forum of major emitters including China and India. ""Generally this is careful but useful step forward toward Copenhagen...I'm still confident that the deal can be done,"" he said of the U.N. pact due to be agreed in mid-December. Among disappointments, the G8 failed to persuade China and India and other developing nations to sign up for a goal of halving world emissions by 2050. Among progress, rich and poor nations acknowledged that temperature rises should be limited to 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) -- a goal that would force deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions if followed through. And G8 nations set a new goal of cutting their overall emissions by 80 percent by 2050. ""Enough was not achieved...but a new guidance post was inserted,"" said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based E3G think-tank, referring to the 2 Celsius target. She said the 2 Celsius goal implied a need for a shift to ""action rather than just dithering and avoiding decisions."" But the focus of talks on a new U.N. deal is on 2020 cuts in emissions by developed nations and ways to raise tens of billions of dollars in new funds to help poor nations combat droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. De Boer said he understood a refusal by developing nations to sign up for the G8 goal to halve world emissions by 2050. Asking for action before the rich came up with funding plans and set goals for their own 2020 emissions cuts ""was like jumping out of a plane and being assured that you are going to get a parachute on the way down,"" he said. And cracks appeared even in the G8 deal to seek cuts of 80 percent by developed nations by 2050. A Russian official said the 80 percent goal was unachievable for Russia. And Canada's Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the goal was aspirational and fit Canada's target of cutting emissions by 60 to 70 percent below 2006 levels by 2080. GOOD START The arrival of President Barack Obama at the White House, promising more action than President George W. Bush, has helped the atmosphere. ""We made a good start, but I am the first one to acknowledge that progress on this issue will not be easy,"" Obama said, adding that recession was a complicating factor. ""And I think that one of the things we're going to have to do is fight the temptation toward cynicism, to feel that the problem is so immense that somehow we cannot make significant strides,"" he said. ""This is an important step,"" German Chancellor Angela Merkel said of the 2 Celsius goal. She added: ""We still have a lot to do."" In Washington, Obama's push for quick action by Congress on climate change legislation suffered a setback on Thursday when the U.S. Senate committee leading the drive delayed work on the bill until September. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer said, however, that the delay from a previous self-imposed deadline of early August for finishing writing a bill did not mean that legislation would not be possible in 2009. Environmentalists expressed concern that time was running out for a Copenhagen deal. ""I'm worried that we have negotiations that are very complex -- it will be difficult to reach the final agreement before Copenhagen. But I think we do have time,"" said Kim Carstensen of WWF International. The biggest events planned are two summits in September -- one at U.N. headquarters in New York and a G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Obama said that finance ministers would look into climate financing and report back to Pittsburgh. ""Obama's announcement (of a report by finance ministers)....is quite significant,"" said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. And apart from summits, there are three rounds of U.N. negotiations among senior officials before Copenhagen -- in Bonn in August, Bangkok in late September and Barcelona in November.",0
"The mantle below the earth's crust in Antarctica is flowing much faster than expected owing to ice melting at a greater speed on the surface, research has shown.“Seeing this sort of deformation of the earth at such a rate is unprecedented in Antarctica. What is particularly interesting here is that we can actually see the impact that glacier thinning is having on the rocks 400 km down,” explained Peter Clarke, a professor of geophysical geodesy at Newcastle University.At the surface, Antarctica appears to be a motionless and frozen landscape.The new study explains for the first time why the upward motion of the earth's crust in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula is currently taking place so quickly.The GPS data collected by an international research team has revealed that the land in this region is actually rising at a phenomenal rate of 15mm a year - much greater than can be accounted for by the present-day elastic response alone.This means it can flow more easily and so responds much more quickly to the lightening load hundreds of miles above it, changing the shape of the land.“You would expect this rebound to happen over thousands of years and instead we have been able to measure it in just over a decade. You can almost see it happening which is just incredible,” informed lead researcher Grace Nield from Newcastle University.“At the moment we have only studied the vertical deformation so the next step is to look at horizontal motion caused by the ice unloading to get more of a 3D picture of how the earth is deforming,” Nield added.Since 1995, several ice shelves in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed and triggered ice-mass unloading, causing the solid earth to 'bounce back'.Because the mantle is 'runnier' below the Northern Antarctic Peninsula, it responds much more quickly to what is happening on the surface.So as the glaciers thin and the load in that localised area reduces, the mantle pushes up the crust, said the research published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.",0
" Israel's security cabinet met on Wednesday to consider easing the Gaza blockade, officials said, in the face of world pressure for change since a deadly raid on an aid flotilla to the territory last month. Ministers may approve a plan to expand a list of more than 100 goods Israel permits the Hamas-ruled territory to import across its border, in coordination with Tony Blair, an official said. The former British prime minister is the envoy for the Quartet of international powers -- the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia -- seeking peace in the region. Blair, who held talks last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Monday that Israel had agreed in principle to begin easing the blockade ""in days"". Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog, who has called for the lifting of the blockade, told Army Radio on Wednesday: ""We must understand that the blockade implemented until this time is outdated, and no longer applicable in the current international and diplomatic climate."" Herzog said on Tuesday that Israel had informed Blair, who briefed EU foreign ministers on Monday, that it intends to ""permit an easier passage of goods"" to the Gaza Strip. Israel imposed the blockade soon after Hamas, which has rejected Western calls to recognise the Jewish state's right to exist, won legislative elections in 2006. Restrictions were tightened after Hamas seized power in Gaza the following year. The EU wants Israel to move from a policy of banning the entry of many commercial goods into Gaza, except a few designated items, to accepting all products and prohibiting only those proscribed on a list. Israel has said it wants to prevent the Iranian-backed Hamas from smuggling in any weapons, and officials say Israel would continue to ban the import of building materials to Gaza it says may be used to support military infrastructure. Pressure had built on Israel to end the blockade since its troops shot and killed nine people on board a Turkish-backed vessel of an aid flotilla on May 31, while enforcing its naval blockade on Gaza.",1
"ZURICH, Mon Jan 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Political leaders and central bankers will dominate this week's annual Davos forum as a chastened business elite is sidelined in the drive to reboot the world economy, improve global security and slow climate change. More than 40 heads of state and government -- almost double the number last year -- will be joined by 36 finance ministers and central bankers, including the central bank chiefs of all the G8 group of rich countries except the United States. About 1,400 business executives will also be in Davos but fewer top bankers and captains of industry are expected as they struggle to keep their businesses afloat -- and themselves in a job, mindful of the event's glitzy image in more austere times. ""The pendulum is swinging back to governments now we're grappling with recession,"" said Thomas Mayer, Deutsche Bank economist. ""We're going into a period where more government involvement will mean lower growth and higher inflation."" Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will open the four-day meeting on Wednesday in the Swiss Alpine resort that is being organized under the title ""Shaping the Post-Crisis world."" Also present will be Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to new U.S. President Barack Obama. It is the first time world leaders will get together to discuss the deepening crisis since a meeting of the G20 group of big and emerging countries in Washington in November. The G20 meets again in April ahead of a G8 summit in July and before that, finance ministers from the Group of Seven nations gather in Rome in mid-February. The World Economic Forum was set up in 1971 as a business and academic think tank whose motto is ""entrepreneurship in the global public interest."" Its annual Davos meeting has grown into a huge event that has become a focus of anti-capitalist anger. The Financial Times newspaper predicted this year's meeting would be characterized by ""sobriety and self-recrimination"" with fewer glitzy cocktail parties and corporate skiing jaunts. Instead, participants are invited to an event that simulates life in a refugee camp and asks them to navigate a mine field, while non-profit groups will hand out awards ""for outstanding achievements in social and environmental irresponsibility."" GLOBAL RISKS ON AGENDA A WEF report ahead of the meeting said the main risks facing the world included deteriorating government finances, a slowing Chinese economy and threats to food and health from climate change, along with a lack of global coordination to tackle them. Worries about protectionism as a response to the downturn are also growing. Around 20 trade ministers meet on Saturday on the sidelines in Davos to discuss long-running Doha trade round talks to open up commerce. ""We have not yet seen the same protectionism in trade with beggar thy neighbor policies of the '30s. And I will fight hard to ensure we do not,"" Britain's Brown, who will chair the April G20 summit, said on Monday. ""But we also need to ensure we do not exercise a new form of financial mercantilism of retreat into domestic lending and domestic financial markets,"" he said. G20 leaders called in November for an outline trade deal by the end of 2008 to help counter the economic crisis. But late last year, World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy decided political differences were still too wide to invite ministers to Geneva to seek a breakthrough. While the focus will clearly be on the world economy, security challenges like ongoing tensions the Middle East will also be on the agenda, as will climate change, with about 30 energy and environment ministers in attendance. Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder and chairman, said the meeting would be a chance for leaders to think about the kind of world they wanted to see emerge when the crisis is over. ""What we are experiencing is the birth of a new era, a wake-up call to overhaul our institutions, our systems and, above all, our way of thinking,"" he said. While this year's meeting illustrates a shift in the balance of power toward governments, political leaders in Davos are likely to get a reminder that the crisis also threatens their own positions after recent civil unrest in several countries. While activists have been kept away from Davos itself after a demonstration turned violent in 2000, protestors have warned of trouble in Geneva after an anti-capitalist march planned for Saturday to coincide with Davos was banned. ""The WEF is a symbol of the neoliberal policies of the last 20 years that have caused this crisis. We have no confidence that the same people who caused the crisis can solve it,"" said Laurent Tettamenti, an organizer of the Geneva protest.",0
" When Italian political rivals start being polite to each other, something is up -- especially when one of them is Silvio Berlusconi, who in the last election campaign did not shy from talking of communists eating babies. With only a month to go to the vote and the gloves still on, speculation grows that the twice former prime minister and his centre-left rival Walter Veltroni may form a ""Grand Coalition"" if April's result is too close, despite Veltroni's denials. Suspicious smaller rivals fear a right-left collaboration that would last just long enough to push through electoral reforms to create a two-party system, freezing them out. ""I fear that round the corner is some shady deal, rather than a 'Grand Coalition',"" said Christian Democrat leader Pier Ferdinando Casini, a centrist who, like the far left, has been spurned by allies who used to rely on him to stay in power. ""After April 13 Berlusconi and Veltroni will divide up power for their own convenience,"" said Casini, complaining that former ally Berlusconi was now reserving his ""venomous"" jibes for him. Berlusconi, a 71-year-old media tycoon who finds outrageous quips irresistible, has promised he ""won't attack any rival"" in this campaign. Probably the rudest he has been about Veltroni is to accuse him of ""scrounging meals"" as he tours Italy, accepting invitations to try ""Grandma Gina's lasagna"" in photo calls. While dismissing a post-electoral coalition with Berlusconi as ""impossible"", Veltroni says that if he wins with a ""slender majority in the Senate"" he will ask the opposition to ""create a civil climate"" to discuss political reforms before a new vote. He and Berlusconi had just begun talks when Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition collapsed in January, forcing him to quit as prime minister after 20 months and call an early election. Berlusconi, sensing an opportunity for a third term as prime minister, pulled out of the reform talks and vetoed bids for an interim government to overhaul voting rules. Introduced by his last government, these rules make it impossible to get a strong majority in the upper house or Senate, as Prodi discovered. ""The same people who didn't want this now say the election is likely to produce a tie and the Senate will be ungovernable,"" said Veltroni, referring to Berlusconi without naming him. 
PHOTO FINISH? As Italy stumbles towards yet another vote, after seeing its 61st government since World War Two crumble, Berlusconi has made no secret of his concern that although he leads the polls, there is a serious risk of a dead heat in the Senate. Most polls see Berlusconi's People of Freedom party beating the Democratic Party by about 7 points in the lower house. Polls on voting intentions for the Senate are done rarely since the house is elected on a regional basis, not a national basis like the lower house. So polling has to be done in each of Italy's 20 regions, making it a much more difficult exercise. ""What we are probably going to see is a rather unstable Senate which will create, once again, the kind of difficulty ruling that Prodi's government faced,"" said politics professor Franco Pavoncello at John Cabot University in Rome. ""If the Senate is unmanageable again I think we might have a couple of years of Grand Coalition,"" he told Reuters. His colleague James Walston at the American University in Rome, on the other hand, believes a German-style cross-party alliance is unlikely in Italy, telling Reuters that Berlusconi and Veltroni's ""own supporters would skin them alive"". But he does expect narrower coalition building after the vote -- ""that's one reason why they are being rather polite"". The tone could change if Berlusconi's lead narrows further and there is much scope for movement either way, with a quarter to a third of voters still undecided, according to polls. Berlusconi, greeted around Italy by the song ""Thank goodness for Silvio!"" which even a showman like him calls ""embarrassing"", is targeting such voters and has fielded an unabashed fascist in Lazio region to steal votes from a splinter right-wing group. While Berlusconi's former centrist allies accuse him of moving to the right, Prodi's old leftist allies, spurned by his dauphin Veltroni, accuse the Democratic Party of abandoning the centre-left by fielding a Venetian industrialist as candidate.",1
" Forty nations held unprecedented talks about ways to slow global warming without derailing world economic growth on the margins of UN climate talks in Bali on Monday. Deputy finance ministers met on the margins of Dec. 3-14 UN climate talks where more than 10,000 delegates are trying to lay the groundwork for a broader treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol global warming pact beyond to 2012. ""Having this meeting...having the finance ministers meeting..itself is a breakthrough,"" Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The meeting will prepare for talks by about 20 finance ministers in Bali on Tuesday. Trade ministers also met at the weekend, the first time the annual UN climate talks have expanded beyond environment ministers. The trade ministers failed to ease splits between Brazil and the United States over green exports.
""The role of the finance ministers is to lead this discussion so that we have wider policy options,"" Indrawati said, referring to taxes or incentives for green technologies such as wind, solar power or ""clean coal"". The UN Climate Panel, which will collect the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday in Oslo along former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, has said that the strictest measures to offset warming will slow annual world growth by 0.12 percentage point at most.
The panel says the impacts of climate change, such as more storms, droughts, mudslides and rising seas, could be far more damaging unless nations make deep emissions cuts to stabilise the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air. ""We'll talk about the theoretical basis but I don't think we will decide on measures during this finance ministers' meeting,"" Gabriel Kuehne, deputy director of the German Finance Ministry, said of the two-day talks ending on Tuesday. BILLIONS
A UN study projected that net annual investments of $200-$210 billion by 2030 were needed in cleaner areas, such as renewable energies, in a gigantic shift from dirtier fossil fuels.
The 190-nation climate talks are seeking to agree on the ground rules for launching two years of negotiations on a broader climate change pact involving all nations to succeed or replace the Kyoto Protocol from Jan. 1, 2013. Kyoto only binds 36 industrialised countries to emissions curbs between 2008-2012. But outsider the United States has no binding goals under Kyoto nor do developing nations led by China and India. The talks will also try to set a timetable for an accord by the end of 2009. ""This is the week the world has been waiting for,"" said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based climate E3G think-tank. In return for committing to slowing the growth of emissions, developing nations want aid to help them adapt to the rising impacts of climate change. Building protective barriers against sea level rise around 50 of the coral islands making up the Maldives in the Indian Ocean alone could cost $1.5 billion, according to Angus Friday, head of a group representing small island states. In one promise of help, Norway said it would provide up to 3 billion crowns ($540 million) a year to slow deforestation in tropical nations. The economist shaping climate policy for Australia's new Labor government said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would not be expected to commit to any interim 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target in Bali. Rudd arrives on Tuesday. ""That's there for consideration, but no-one expects this meeting in Bali to reach agreement on anything like that,"" Professor Ross Garnaut said, describing a UN draft demand for emissions cuts of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 as a guide.",0
"BONN, Germany Aug 14, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - UN talks on a new climate treaty due to be agreed in December risk failure unless negotiations accelerate, a senior UN official said on Friday after a sluggish week-long session among 180 nations. Negotiators made scant progress at the Aug 10-14 talks towards breaking deadlock on a shareout of curbs on greenhouse gases among rich and poor, or raising funds to help developing nations adapt to climate changes. ""If we continue at this rate we're not going to make it,"" Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference of the Aug. 10-14 meeting in Bonn. He said that only ""selective progress"" has been made in Bonn, one of a series of talks meant to end with agreement on a new UN treaty in Copenhagen in December. De Boer said that there were 15 days of negotiations left before Copenhagen, at meetings in Bangkok in September-October and in Barcelona in November. ""It is clear that there is quite a significant uphill battle if we are going to get there,"" said Jonathan Pershing, head of the US delegation. But he said there were some signs of movement. CHINA FOCUSED ON POVERTY ""You absolutely can get there,"" he said. Developing nations accused the rich of failing to take the lead in making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and of trying to get poor to take on too much of the burden. China and India want the rich, for instance, to make cuts in greenhouse gases of at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst of climate change such as floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels. They say they need billions of dollars in aid and clean technology to help cope. ""We still have the same problems that have been hindering us,"" China's climate ambassador Yu Qingtai told Reuters of the rich-poor deadlock. He said that China was keen to see it emissions peak but that fighting poverty had to remain an overriding priority. Many delegates said that a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations in New York and a meeting of leaders of the Group of 20 in Pittsburgh, both in September, could help give guidance and break the deadlock. The European Union also said that offers on the table by developed nations fell far short of a goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. ""When we sum them up we find they are gravely insufficient,"" said Anders Turesson, the chief negotiator of Sweden which holds the EU presidency. ""They would lead us into a three degree world,"" he said. The EU has promised cuts of 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, or 30 percent if other rich nations also make similar cuts. He also said that developing nations had to show ""more engagement"".",0
"On Friday, Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou flew home to China from Canada after reaching an agreement with US prosecutors to end the bank fraud case against her, a point of tension between China and the United States. Within hours of the news of the deal, the two Canadians who were arrested shortly after Meng was taken into custody were released from Chinese jails and were on their way back to Canada. Beijing had denied that their arrests were linked. When asked if the White House was involved in brokering a ""prisoner swap,"" White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected the premise. The deferred prosecution agreement with Meng was ""an action by the Department of Justice, which is an independent Department of Justice. This is a law enforcement matter,"" she said, adding, ""There is no link."" But Psaki also confirmed that in a call on Sept 9, two weeks before the announcements, China's leader Xi Jinping brought up Meng's case and US President Joe Biden pressed for the release of the two Canadians, businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig, who had been held in China for more than 1,000 days. ""These two leaders raised the cases of these individuals but there was no negotiation about it,"" Psaki said. Psaki said she had no information on whether Biden knew about the status of the negotiations between Meng's lawyers and the Justice Department. Meng had been arrested at Vancouver International Airport in Canada on a US warrant, and was indicted on bank and wire fraud charges for allegedly misleading HSBC in 2013 about the telecommunications equipment giant's business dealings in Iran. The years-long extradition drama had been a central source of discord in increasingly rocky ties between Beijing and Washington, with Chinese officials signalling that the case needed to be dropped to help end a diplomatic stalemate. Psaki emphasised the deal announced on Friday did not indicate a softening of US concerns about Chinese behaviour. ""Our policy has not changed, our policy toward China,"" Psaki said. ""We are not seeking conflict. It is a relationship of competition and we are going to continue to hold the PRC to account for its unfair economic practices, its coercive actions around the world and its human rights abuses,"" she said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China. BALL IN THE US COURT Earlier in September, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Biden's climate envoy John Kerry in a virtual meeting that Washington needed to take practical steps to improve relations by responding to a list of demands, which included dropping the case against Meng. ""Right now, the ball is in the United States' court,"" Wang told Kerry, according to a Chinese statement. But US officials have rebutted any suggestion that Kerry or other administration officials had negotiated Meng's release with China for other concessions. Earlier in the week, Xi announced at the United Nations that China would not build new coal-fired power projects abroad, a pledge Kerry had been pressuring Beijing to make to help the world stay on course to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. ""We were not involved in their internal decision-making on it in any way, shape, or form,"" a White House official told Reuters of the Justice Department's process. ""The movement on coal, number one, is, frankly, China acting in its own interest,"" the official said. ""I think they realised that they weren't going to get anything for it. They weren't going to be able to use it as leverage."" Meng arrived to a hero's welcomed in China, and official media there suggested that her release could be a chance to reboot fraught US-China ties. While some Republican senators criticised the Biden administration for giving in to Beijing's demands, analysts said that didn't add up. ""I believe that the deal that the PRC made to get Meng released was on the table during the Trump administration. She had to acknowledge wrongdoing and ultimately that is what she did. I don't see capitulation,"" said Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank. The Justice Department says it is still preparing for trial against Huawei.",2
"Now the government is preparing to double down on the pain with a belt-tightening budget of tax hikes and spending cuts required to release a $1 billion tranche of International Monetary Fund bailout cash. ""I never thought it would become so difficult to survive,"" said Sibte Hasan, a 43-year-old construction supervisor from Pakistan's second-biggest city Lahore. As consumer price inflation has accelerated into double digits, with staples like flour, sugar, oil and rice doubling in price over recent months, the Pakistani rupee has fallen around 14 percent since May to reach a historic low. Government officials are expected to release official figures this week when it presents a special supplementary budget to cabinet. But already it is clear that a raft of sales tax exemptions will be scrapped and new levies will be raised on fuel as well as some imported goods. The IMF agreed last month to revive a stalled $6 billion funding programme launched in 2019 but demanded further fiscal measures as part of a broader structural reforms package covering areas from the power sector debt to corporate governance, climate change and trade policy. Last month the central bank also tightened the screws, raising its key interest rate by 150 basis points to 8.75 percent to try to stem surging inflation, a slide in the Pakistani rupee and a current account deficit that has widened to $5.2 billion (July-Oct), and trade deficit to $20.59 billion (July-Nov). Government officials have put a brave face on the situation, saying that the impact on the poorest will be softened by welfare cushions and pointing to progress in addressing Pakistan's chronic tax collection problem. ""Prudent fiscal reforms have helped in improving the tax-to-GDP ratio and improving revenue generation,"" Finance Adviser Shaukat Tarin told a conference last week. The government has also had some relief from the immediate pressure on public finances with a $3 billion loan from Saudi Arabia that arrived this month. FALLING PRODUCTION However, whether the fiscal measures will be enough to stabilise public finances sufficiently to allow the government to address Pakistan's underlying economic problems remains unclear. While consumers have faced higher household bills, the impact has also been felt in the business sector through high energy prices and raw materials costs as well as the recent sharp rise in interest rates. ""Our production is falling rapidly,"" said textile mill owner Sheikh Muhammad Akbar. ""My unit is not generating its targeted production because of expensive raw materials and high production costs,"" he told Reuters. Pakistan's debt-bound economy has long been hobbled by problems ranging from a wasteful and inefficient power sector to weak tax collection, poor productivity and minimal value added exports. But loose monetary policy and an over valued exchange rate papered over some of the problems, helping the economy rebound from the coronavirus slowdown to grow 3.9 percent last year, even while the fiscal and current account deficits widened, threatening the stability of public finances.",0
"""China will continue to increase investment in the least developed countries, aiming to increase its total to $12 billion by 2030,"" Xi told a sustainable development summit of world leaders at the United Nations in New York. ""China will exempt the debt of outstanding intergovernmental interest-free loans due by the end of 2015 owed by the relevant least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing countries,"" he added. The 193-member United Nations General Assembly on Friday adopted the most far-reaching agenda ever of global goals to combat poverty, inequality and climate change, capping years of debate. Described by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as ""a to-do list for people and planet,"" the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are to be implemented over the next 15 years with a big global push to win public and political support. ""Looking to the future, China will continue to take a right approach to justice and interests by putting justice before interests and join the other countries in the concerted efforts to realize the post-2015 development agenda,"" Xi said. During Xi's first state visit to the United States, he and US President Barack Obama also unveiled on Friday new steps they will take to deliver on pledges they made then to slash their greenhouse gas emissions.  One of the steps announce by Xi was that China would channel 20 billion RMB ($3.1 billion) to help developing countries combat and adapt to climate change, a significant financial pledge from an emerging economy. On Saturday at the United Nations, Xi also said China would establish a development knowledge center to allow countries to share best practices. ""China will propose discussion on establishing a global energy internet to facilitate efforts to meet the global power demand with clean and green alternatives,"" Xi said.",0
"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the symbolic Clock forward by 30 seconds, to two minutes to midnight, reflecting the scientists’ view of the main global dangers. They say much of the blame rests with the administration of President Donald Trump. The only other time the clock, revised annually, has been set so close to catastrophe was 65 years ago, in 1953, after the US and the Soviet Union exploded their first thermonuclear bombs. Rachel Bronson, the bulletin’s president and CEO, said in a statement: “Major nuclear actors are on the cusp of a new arms race, one that will be very expensive and will increase the likelihood of accidents and misperceptions. Weapons more usable “Across the globe, nuclear weapons are poised to become more rather than less usable because of nations’ investments in their nuclear arsenals.” The Center for Climate & Security (CCS) is a US non-partisan policy institute of security and military experts. In November 2017 it said climate change and nuclear threats are closely linked and must be tackled together. The bulletin’s authors, from its science and security board, say they are disturbed by the rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, the increasing emphasis and expenditure on nuclear weapons by major powers, the absence of arms control negotiations around the world, and the wavering political will to combat climate change. They repeatedly single out the Trump administration as a major factor behind the increased risks, citing what they describe as the president’s volatility; the inconsistency of the administration’s foreign policy; and its apparent disdain for science, including senior appointments of climate change deniers. One board member, Sharon Squassoni, of George Washington University’s Institute for International Science and Technology Policy, said Russia was also responsible for raising tensions, for example by deploying ground-launched cruise missiles in 2017 in breach of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Some experts argue that a comparison with the height of the cold war exaggerates the current dangers, and not all agree that the global risks of nuclear weapons are as severe now as they were then. Vipin Narang, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tweeted: “Today, the risk of single use may be higher, but it’s unlikely to threaten global destruction.” On climate change, the bulletin scientists say it is worsening: after flattening out for some years, global greenhouse gas emissions have resumed their rise, and the levels of the polar ice caps are at new lows. They say the administration is making “an insufficient response” to climate change and is turning its back on reality: “In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, the administration has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses. Heartening response “Here in the US, the incoming President Trump promptly appointed a cadre of avowed climate denialists and quickly started reversing existing climate measures,” said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute. But he was encouraged by the global response to Mr Trump’s actions. Thankfully, Dr Kartha said, the White House had met “a reassuring and affirming resistance…Other countries reaffirmed their commitment to climate action. And within the United States, there’s been this huge We Are Still In movement of states, cities, business, faith-based communities, reaffirming their commitment to climate action and global cooperation.” President Trump was also criticised for downgrading the science in his administration. Lawrence Krauss, the chair of the bulletin’s board of sponsors, said that 2017 was the first year since the position was created more than half a century ago with no presidential science adviser. “The White House office of science and technology policy is essentially not staffed,” Krauss said. “The official mechanisms to tie public policy to reality are currently absent.”",0
"The standing committee
of China's National People's Congress voted to adopt ""the proposal to
review and ratify the Paris Agreement"" at the closing meeting of a
week-long session, the news agency said. The announcement came
as leaders from the world's 20 biggest economies, the Group of 20 (G20), began
to arrive in the Chinese city of Hangzhou for a summit on Sunday and Monday. The G20 nations are
responsible for about 80 percent of global carbon emissions. The United States, the
second biggest emitter, is also set to ratify the agreement in a bid to put the
deal into legal force before the end of the year. Nearly 200 countries
agreed in Paris in December on a binding global compact to slash greenhouse gas
emissions and keep global temperature increases to ""well below"" 2
degrees Celsius. Experts have said the
temperature target is already in danger of being breached, with the U.N.
weather agency saying that 2016 is on course to be the warmest since records
began, overtaking last year. While 180 countries have
now signed the agreement, 55 nations - covering at least 55 percent of global
emissions - need to formally ratify the treaty to put it into legal effect. Before China, 23
nations had ratified it - including North Korea - but they collectively accounted
for just 1.08 percent of global emissions, according to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change. China is responsible
for just over 20 percent of global emissions while the United States covers
another 17.9 percent. Russia accounts for 7.5 percent, with India pushing out
4.1 percent. 
Countries that ratify the deal will have to wait
for three years after it has gone into legal force before they can begin the
process of withdrawing from it, according to the agreement signed in Paris last
year.",0
"By Stephen Brown ROME July 7 (bdnews24/Reuters) - China, Russia and Brazil will use this week's G8 summit in Italy to push their view that the world needs to start seeking a new global reserve currency as an alternative to the dollar, officials said on Tuesday. As leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations and the major developing powers travelled to Italy for a three-day summit starting on Wednesday, it seemed unlikely the currency debate would get a specific mention in summit documents. But both G8 member Russia and emerging power Brazil -- which like China and India is a member of the ""G5"" that joins the second day of the summit on Thursday -- echoed China's calls for the currency debate to be taken up by world leaders. Top Kremlin economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich said China and Russia would ""state their stance that the global currency system needs smooth evolutionary development. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio ""Lula"" da Silva said he was keen to explore ""the possibility of new trade relations not dependent on the dollar"" and India has also said it is open to the debate. But G8 members Germany, France and Canada played down talk of the summit including a detailed currency discussion. A source at President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said the G8 was ""generally not the forum ... for discussing currency exchange rates."" German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said on Monday the dollar was likely to remain the global reserve currency but the Chinese yuan and the euro would slowly gain in significance. The debate is highly sensitive in financial markets, which are wary of risks to U.S. asset values. China and other nations promoting the debate take care to avoid undermining the dollar, with Lula saying it would be vital ""for decades"" to come. China, which has up to 70 percent of its $1.95 trillion in official currency reserves in the dollar, underlines that the dollar is still the most important reserve currency. But it believes over-reliance on the dollar has exacerbated the financial crisis and sees the International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights (SDRs), based on a basket of currencies, as a viable alternative for the future. G8 URGED TO ACT ON POVERTY With Italy keen to avoid a repeat of the riots and police brutality that marred the 2001 G8 in Genoa, security was tight around the earthquake-stricken mountain town of L'Aquila, where world leaders will sleep in an austere police training school. But police in L'Aquila arrested five French citizens found with clubs and sticks in their vehicle and small groups of student protesters clashed with police in nearby Rome. ""We want to once again demonstrate against what the G8 represents,"" said a student giving her name as Maria Teresa. Pope Benedict issued a document to coincide with the G8, urging leaders to impose tough rules on the financial system. In the encylical, he called for ""a true world political authority ... to manage the global economy"" and avoid more ""abuse"" of the free market. With nine African leaders attending the summit, the United States could pledge $3-4 billion for agricultural development in poor nations, which it wants matched by its partners for a total commitment of $15 billion, according to a G8 draft declaration. PROGRESS ON CLIMATE, TRADE The G8 talks open with discussion of the economic crisis. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is eager to transmit optimism, though his credibility as host is undermined by a prostitution scandal, a poor record on aid and his reputation for diplomatic gaffes. However, it did look possible that the L'Aquila summit could produce breakthroughs on climate change and trade. A draft communique suggested the G8 and G5 would agree to conclude the stalled Doha round of trade talks in 2010. Launched in 2001 to help poor countries prosper through trade, Doha has stumbled on proposals to cut tariffs and subsidies. With an eye on December's U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen seeing a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto pact, leaders will also try to narrow differences over cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and funding for low carbon technology. They are likely to agree to a goal to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times and strengthen last year's vague ""vision"" of halving global carbon emissions by 2050. If also adopted by the 17-member Major Economies Forum talks chaired on Thursday by U.S. President Barack Obama at his first G8 summit, this would be major progress as India and China have so far refused to accept the 2050 target.",0
" India is likely to suffer more than most countries as a result of climate change, with poor agricultural output, more natural disasters and increased deaths due to higher occurance of diseases, the author of an acclaimed report on global warning said on Wednesday. Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern's report on the economic impact of climate change said unchecked greenhouse gas emissions would see global temperatures rise by 2-3 degrees centrigrade in the next 50 years. Speaking to Indian businessmen, Stern said the annual June-September monsoon rains, which India is heavily dependent on for its crop production, would impact the economy. ""There could be more variable starting dates (for the monsoon). There could be periods of much greater intensity and there could be quite extended periods of no rain. But it is likely to be disrupted,"" he said. ""It's clear India will suffer like the rest of the world, perhaps more that the rest of the world."" Experts estimate a temperature rise of between 2 and 3.5 degrees centigrade, would cost India a loss of between nine and 25 percent of total agricultural revenue. Agriculture makes up around 22 percent of India's gross domestic product. Stern said temperature rises would also mean vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever spreading to higher altitude regions known for being free of mosquitoes. As a result, there was a likelihood of more deaths that would result in lower productivity, he said. The head of Britain's Economic Service said the melting of Himalayan glaciers would mean neighbouring Bangladesh could experience serious floods as a result of rising sea levels, sparking mass migration across the border into India. He said the flow of water from the glaciers would be curtailed during India's dry season and would have ""serious consequences"". Experts say melting glaciers will affect one-sixth of the world's population residing mainly in the Indian subcontinent. India's Ganga river receives 70 percent of its summer water flow from the Himalayan glaciers and sustains over 500 million people. Stern said India was making progress in adapting to the challenges faced in curbing emissions and investing in clean development mechanisms. But climate change was an inequitable process in which rich nations had to take the burden of responsibility, he said. ""This is a doubly inequitable process as it's the rich countries who are responsible for 75 percent of the greenhouse gases that are up there and it's the poor countries that will be hit earliest and hardest,"" he said. ""All countries must be involved, but equity demands that the rich countries bear the big majority of the cost.""",0
"In an address near his home in Wilmington, Biden made the argument that racial justice is central to his overall policy vision in areas like housing, infrastructure and support for small businesses, while aiming to draw a stark contrast with a president who has regularly inflamed racial tensions. “This election is not just about voting against Donald Trump,” Biden said, standing before four American flags in a community center gym. “It’s about rising to this moment of crisis, understanding people’s struggles and building a future worthy of their courage and their ambition to overcome.” Biden’s plan is the fourth piece of his “Build Back Better” proposal, an economic agenda that also encompasses manufacturing, climate and infrastructure, and caregiving plans, and takes aim at Trump’s stewardship of the economy and his effect on working families, a potential vulnerability that has emerged during the coronavirus crisis. The speech Tuesday came with just under 100 days until Election Day, amid a searing national debate over racism in American society. Biden continues to hold a substantial lead over Trump in national polls, and with each successive economic rollout, he has been trying to counter one of Trump’s enduring sources of voter support. The plan fell short of some of the most ambitious proposals promoted by the left wing of the Democratic Party. Biden, for instance, did not embrace reparations for slavery or endorse “baby bonds,” a government-run savings program for children championed during the primary by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Campaign officials said Biden had not ruled out eventually accepting such a plan, and that he was not opposed to a study of reparations. But the proposal he released on Tuesday did emphasise the importance of closing the racial wealth gap, and outlined multiple prescriptions for doing so. Biden laid out plans for a small-business opportunity fund to help make capital available to minority business owners, and he proposed to triple the goal for awarding federal contracts to small disadvantaged businesses, to at least 15% of the money doled out from 5%. The plan also seeks to improve the opportunity zone program that was created as part of the 2017 tax overhaul. “In good times, communities of color still lag,” Biden said. “In bad times, they get hit first, and the hardest. And in recovery, they take the longest to bounce back. This is about justice.” In recent months, as the country has grappled with devastating public health and economic problems and a growing outcry over racial injustice, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has increasingly called for ambitious measures to address the nation’s challenges. He has sometimes gone far beyond the instincts toward relatively incremental change that guided him in the primary campaign, at least compared with many of his Democratic opponents. As he seeks to unite and energize his party around his candidacy, he has sought input from a broad range of experts and officials, including from a series of task forces assembled with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, his liberal primary rival. But Biden, the former vice president, continues to confront a lack of enthusiasm from some progressive voters, and while he won the primary with strong support from African American voters — in particular, older ones — he faces challenges generating excitement among some younger voters of color. In the primary campaign, he was not the choice of many liberal activists of color, and he still faces skepticism from some of them about whether he can sufficiently address their concerns. Trump has sought to portray Biden as hostage to an extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, whose extravagant spending would wreck the nation’s economy. The plan Biden unveiled touched on a wide range of economic issues. It emphasises support for small-business owners of color, promising that he will “leverage more than $150 billion in new capital and opportunities for small businesses that have been structurally excluded for generations,” including by increasing access to venture capital and low-interest business loans. Biden, who has long faced anger from some voters over his leading role in the 1994 crime bill, which many experts link to mass incarceration, also addressed some criminal justice matters in the plan. He would aim to help states improve their criminal justice data infrastructure so they can automatically seal criminal records for certain nonviolent offenders. The plan also said that he would try to amend the Federal Reserve Act “to require the Fed to regularly report on current data and trends in racial economic gaps — and what actions the Fed is taking through its monetary and regulatory policies to close these gaps.” The Fed, which influences the speed of economic growth and the unemployment rate with its interest rate policies, already regularly discusses racial and ethnic economic outcomes in its reports and testimonies. It has shied away from targeting any specific group’s unemployment rate when setting monetary policy, despite a growing chorus suggesting that it ought to consider targeting the Black jobless rate, which has historically remained higher for longer. The Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, called Biden’s overarching proposal promising, but said he wanted to see Biden call for more far-reaching proposals to ensure that Black Americans frequently do business with the government. “It’s the right direction,” he said. “I just want to see more, and I intend to push for more.” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a political advocacy group focused on women of color, said that the Biden campaign was taking encouraging steps on issues of economic, racial and gender “justice,” as she put it. “Progressives, we had other candidates in the primary that we would look at as carrying some of these messages,” said Allison, who was often a Biden critic in the primary and said there are still issues he must address. “Now, the Biden campaign has showed an openness and willingness.” A number of the policies highlighted in Biden’s proposal were already announced as part of other plans, like a housing proposal that would provide a tax credit of up to $15,000 for first-time homebuyers, and a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of the benefits of spending on clean energy infrastructure. In contrast to the previous economic plans Biden outlined, which focused on major, transformational changes to certain sectors of the American economy, the proposal he unveiled on Tuesday was a broader effort seeking to emphasise the idea that racial justice is integral to his policy vision. He began his address by invoking two icons of the civil rights era who recently died, Rep John Lewis, D-Ga, and the Rev CT Vivian. Biden recounted the time he walked over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with Lewis, and a conversation the two men had before Lewis died. “He asked that we stay focused on the work left undone to heal this nation,” Biden said. “To remain undaunted by the public health crisis and the economic crisis that’s taken the blinders off in this crisis and showed the systemic racism for what it is that plagues this nation.” In his speech and in a subsequent question-and-answer session with reporters, Biden repeatedly lashed out at his opponent’s stewardship of the crises facing the country. He also forcefully rebuffed Trump’s attempts to cast him as soft on law enforcement, as protesters clash with federal agents in Portland, Oregon. Peaceful protesters, Biden said, “should be protected and arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted, and local law enforcement can do that.” And Biden accused Trump of “trying to scare the hell out of the suburbs” by suggesting that Obama-era policies were “causing you to end up, by implication, having those Black neighbors next to you.” “That’s supposed to scare people,” Biden said. Asked about his vice-presidential selection process, Biden revealed little, saying he would have a choice in the first week in August. But handwritten notes that Biden held at the event — which were captured by an Associated Press photographer — touched on the subject in more detail. They included talking points about Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who is considered a top-tier vice-presidential contender. “Do not hold grudges,” the notes said. A few lines down, they read, “Great respect for her.”   © 2020 New York Times News Service",2
" Australia's prime minister, facing a tough re-election fight and under pressure over his climate credentials, has pledged new ""clean energy"" targets in a move environment groups said would not sway green-leaning voters. By 2020, John Howard said, 15 percent of Australia's energy would come from ""clean"" sources including solar, wind, nuclear or clean coal, reversing his coalition government's previous reluctance to lift its renewable energy target from 2 percent. The promise also dropped ""renewable"" from the government's agenda, paving the way for a controversial switch to nuclear energy, backed by Howard as a greenhouse-friendly alternative. ""It will drive additional investment in renewable energy and other low-emissions electricity generation. This will reduce costs for business, and ultimately for households,"" Howard said, promising to roll state and national schemes into one. But environment group Greenpeace said the target only streamlined existing state-based schemes, leaving sunny Australia lagging behind renewable energy leaders such as Germany and Spain, which are harnessing solar and wind power. ""The coalition's clean energy target is a missed opportunity to drive the growth of Australia's renewable energy industry and cut greenhouse pollution,"" Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham said. Howard, 68, is expected to call a national election within weeks and is polling well behind the opposition Labor Party, whose leader Kevin Rudd has pledged to sign the Kyoto Protocol capping greenhouse gas emissions in 35 developed nations. A long-running drought in much of Australia and warnings by international scientists about the impact of global warming have spooked voters and elevated climate change to an election-turning issue. A Galaxy poll on Monday had Labor 12 points in front of the government, 56 to 44, which would hand a landslide election victory to the youthful Rudd. Rudd, who is this week tipped to unveil a renewable energy target of 20 percent, also won backing at the weekend from former US vice-president and climate change campaigner Al Gore. To win over voters Howard has promised a carbon emissions trading system, banned incandescent light bulbs and pledged A$200 million ($173 million) to combat forest clearing in Asia. Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne said Howard's clean target of 30,000 gigawatt hours each year did not add up and was just 9 percent of demand projected by the government's official commodities forecaster to reach 342,000 GWh in 2019. ""Around the world, the renewable energy industry is booming. In Australia, where we have tremendous resources and world-leading researchers, our industry is stalling,"" Milne said. ($1=A$1.15)",0
"Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide were now far above pre-industrial levels, with no sign of a reversal of the upward trend, the Guardian quoted the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report as saying. ""The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,"" WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas SAID. ""The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed."" Levels of CO2 rose to a global average of 405.5 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2017 - two-and-a-half times higher than before the industrial revolution. Levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for about 17 per cent of global warming are now 3.5 times higher than pre-industrial times owing to emissions from cattle, rice paddies and leaks from oil and gas wells. Nitrous oxide, which also warms the planet and destroys the Earth's protective ozone layer, was now at more than double pre-industrial levels, according to the WMO report. About 40 per cent of N2O comes from human activities including soil degradation, fertiliser use and industry. Efforts to cut emissions were increasing and on Wednesday the UN's climate change body published a report on the commitments made in 2018. It found 9,000 cities in 128 countries were taking action, along with 240 states and regions in 40 countries and more than 6,000 businesses in 120 countries.",0
"The report lists the population explosion along the coast lines, overfishing, the pollution of coastal areas, global warming and invasive species among the main reasons that have put Caribbean coral reefs in danger of extinction.The report was prepared in cooperation between the UNEP, Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).It is the result of the work of 90 experts who studied corals, seaweeds, grazing sea urchins and fish.The experts agreed that 50 percent of the Caribbean sea coral cover has disappeared since the 1960's.""The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,"" said Carl Gustaf Lundin, Director of IUCN's Global Marine and Polar Programme.""But this study brings some very encouraging news: The fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover,"" he added.According to the report published in the UNEP website, ""restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies such as protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution could help the reefs recover and make them more resilient to future climate change impacts.""Parrotfish were brought to the brink of extinction due to overfishing throughout the 20th century, something which the experts find as a reason which led to coral decline in the region.The disappearance of parrotfish broke the natural balance of coral reefs when algae, the species' food, were allowed to smother the reefs.It is necessary to take action to address overfishing and pollution, with the aim of contributing to the restoration of these reefs and making them more able to adapt to climate change caused by the high temperature of the sea water, said the report.Climate change is the most prominent threat to coral reefs, as it raises the level of acidic ocean waters that cause coral bleaching.The report is based on an analysis of 35,000 surveys taken from 90 different locations in the Caribbean.The study concluded that the corals which have suffered the most tragic declines are those in Jamaica, along the shores of the US state of Florida, as well as the US Virgin Islands.The Caribbean region is home to nine percent of the world's coral reefs, which can be found in the waters of 38 countries, generating vital revenues for local economies.",0
"LONDON,Fri Jul 13,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied on Friday a shift in foreign policy away from the United States after one of his ministers told an audience there that a country's strength depended on alliances not military might. International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, in a speech in Washington on Thursday, said while Britain stood beside the United States in fighting terrorism, isolationism did not work in an interdependent world. ""In the 20th century a country's might was too often measured in what they could destroy. In the 21st, strength should be measured by what we can build together,"" Alexander said, in comments interpreted by British media as signaling a change in the British government's relationship with Washington. A spokesman for Brown denied the speech marked any turnaround in policy and said the interpretation put on Alexander's words by the media was ""quite extraordinary"". Brown told BBC radio he would continue to work closely with the US administration. ""We'll not allow people to separate us from the United States of America in dealing with the common challenges we face around the world,"" he said, when asked about Alexander's words. Washington has been watching Brown's new government for signs of any policy change after years of close ties under his predecessor Tony Blair. Brown took over last month with promises of change to woo back voters after 10 years of his Labour Party's rule and in particular to draw a line under the unpopular Iraq war. Blair's closeness to Washington was unpopular with many Britons. NEW ALLIANCES Alexander said in the speech at the Council of Foreign Relations that nations must form new alliances ""not just to protect us from the world but ones which reach out to the world."" He later told BBC radio Britain's relationship with Washington was important, as part of a wider framework. ""Gordon Brown has made very clear that he regards a strong relationship with the U.S. as being one of the fundamental bases of his foreign policy,"" he said. ""But he also wants to see strong relationships with our partners within the European Union, and indeed growing and strong relationships with China and India, emerging powers in Asia,"" Alexander said. Brown will visit Berlin on Monday and plans to visit Paris and Washington in the coming weeks, his spokesman said. While few analysts expect Brown to announce an immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, there is speculation the withdrawal may accelerate. Britain has been reducing troop numbers in Iraq and now has about 5,500 in the south. Additional impetus is coming from the United States, where the House of Representatives voted for the third time on Thursday to bring combat troops out of Iraq. Two previous efforts to set a timetable either died in the Senate or were vetoed by President George W Bush. Alexander said in his speech while there were few global challenges that did not require Washington's engagement, countries should work together through organizations like the United Nations to seek shared solutions to the world's problems. ""We need to demonstrate by our word and our actions that we are internationalist not isolationist; multilateralist not unilateralist,"" he said. ""There is no security or prosperity at home unless we deal with the global challenges of security, globalization, climate change, disease and poverty. We must recognize these challenges and champion an internationalist approach.""",0
"Floods, storms and drought also killed and displaced
millions of people across some of the world's poorest regions, highlighting the
rising injustice of impacts as the planet warms, humanitarian charity Christian
Aid said in a report. ""The costs of climate change have been grave this
year,"" said Kat Kramer, climate policy lead at Christian Aid and author of
""Counting the cost 2021: a year of climate breakdown"". ""While it was good to see some progress made at the
(UN) COP26 summit, it is clear (we are) not on track to ensure a safe and
prosperous world,"" she added. The report identified 15 of the most destructive climate
disasters of the year, including 10 that each caused $1.5bn or more in losses,
with damage wrought by wild weather felt everywhere from Australia to India,
South Sudan and Canada. The financial and human costs of climate change are expected
to keep soaring unless governments step up efforts to cut emissions and rein in
global warming, the report said. Growing calls from at-risk nations to establish a new fund
to help cover climate-linked ""loss and damage"" in a hotter world must
be a ""global priority"" in 2022, said Nushrat Chowdhury, Christian
Aid's climate justice advisor in Bangladesh. Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a
Nairobi-based think-tank, noted Africa had borne the brunt of some of the most
devastating - if not the most expensive - impacts this year, from flooding to
drought. ""(2022) needs to be the year we provide real financial
support for those on the frontline of the crisis,"" he added. Here are some facts about the most costly disasters of 2021: Source: Christian Aid, ""Counting the cost 2021: a year
of climate breakdown""",0
" British leader Tony Blair flew to Libya for talks with Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday as BP sealed a big energy deal with Tripoli in a further boost to the West's ties with the once-isolated north African state. Blair, making the second trip of his prime ministership to Libya, arrived in Gaddafi's home town of Sirte and was due to meet the Libyan leader in a tent in the desert, officials said. Blair was also due to meet representatives of families of hundreds of HIV-infected children at the centre of a case in which five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death by a Libyan court. In a sign of a developing economic relationship between Britain and Libya that Blair's spokesman called ""hugely important"", BP negotiated an agreement to explore for natural gas in Libya, according to a Libyan official. ""There is a natural gas exploration deal worth $900 million,"" Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of state owned National Oil Corporation (NOC), told reporters. The Libya visit marks the start of Blair's last tour of Africa before he resigns as prime minister on June 27 after a decade in power, handing over to finance minister Gordon Brown. Blair will also travel to Sierra Leone and South Africa in preparation for a summit of the Group of Eight industrialised countries in Germany next week, when Africa and climate change will top the agenda, and to push for a global free trade deal. Blair first visited Libya in 2004, sealing Tripoli's return to the international fold after it abandoned efforts to acquire banned weapons and agreed to pay damages for a 1988 airliner bombing over Scotland. Gaddafi complained in a BBC interview in March that Libya had not been properly compensated for renouncing nuclear weapons and said that as a result countries like Iran and North Korea would not follow his lead. 
Blair's spokesman said the prime minister would discuss the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region with Libyan officials. ""Libya has played a useful role in the African Union and has been playing a useful role in regard to Sudan,"" the spokesman said. ""We will want to hear their assessment of where we are."" The U.N. Security Council endorsed plans last Friday for an African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force for Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million made homeless since 2003. Blair has pushed for tough action over Darfur and his spokesman welcomed President George W. Bush's decision to impose new U.S. sanctions on Sudan over Darfur. In Sierra Leone, Blair is expected to win praise for sending British troops to the country in 2000 to help shore up the United Nations peacekeeping operation there and hasten the end of a civil war marked by atrocities against civilians. Sierra Leone has scheduled presidential and legislative elections for July 28, although the poll may be delayed. In South Africa later this week, Blair is expected to discuss Zimbabwe with President Thabo Mbeki, his spokesman said. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, 83, has vowed to seek another presidential term in 2008, dismissing calls to step down despite his country's economic crisis, which critics blame on his policies. Mugabe blames former colonial power Britain.",1
"The major obstacle to a three-way deal was immigration, according to Merkel, who was forced into negotiations after bleeding support in the Sept 24 election to the far right in a backlash at her 2015 decision to let in over 1 million migrants. The failure of exploratory coalition talks involving her conservative bloc, the liberal pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and environmentalist Greens raises the prospect of a new election and casts doubt about her future after 12 years in power. Merkel, 63, said she was sceptical about ruling in a minority government, telling ARD television: ""My point of view is that new elections would be the better path."" Her plans did not include being chancellor in a minority government, she said after meeting President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Steinmeier said Germany was facing the worst governing crisis in the 68-year history of its post-World War Two democracy and pressed all parties in parliament ""to serve our country"" and try to form a government. His remarks appeared aimed at the FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), who on Monday ruled out renewing their ""grand coalition"" with the conservatives. ""Inside our country, but also outside, in particular in our European neighbourhood, there would be concern and a lack of understanding if politicians in the biggest and economically strongest country (in Europe) did not live up to their responsibilities,"" read a statement from Steinmeier, a former foreign minister who has been thrust centre-stage after taking on the usually largely ceremonial head of state role in March. Steinmeier's intervention suggests he regards a new election - desired by half of Germany's voters according to a poll - as a last resort. The SPD has so far stuck to a pledge after heavy losses in the September election not to go back into a Merkel-led broad coalition of centre-left and centre-right. Merkel urged the SPD to reconsider. ""I would hope that they consider very intensively if they should take on the responsibility"" of governing, she told broadcaster ZDF, adding she saw no reason to resign and her conservative bloc would enter any new election more unified than before. ""If new elections happened, then ... we have to accept that. I'm afraid of nothing,"" she said. Business leaders also called for a swift return to talks. With German leadership seen as crucial for a European Union grappling with governance reform and Britain's impending exit, FDP leader Christian Lindner's announcement that he was pulling out spooked investors and sent the euro falling in the morning. Both the euro and European shares later recovered from early selling, while German bond yields steadied near 1-1/2 week lows, as confidence about the outlook for the euro zone economy helped investors brush off worries about the risk of Germany going to the polls again soon. Fear of far-right gains Earlier, Merkel got the strong backing of her CDU leadership. Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of Germany weekly Die Zeit said she could rely on CDU support for now, but added: ""I will not bet on her serving out her entire four-year term."" The main parties fear another election so soon would let the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party add to the 13 percent of votes it secured in September, when it entered parliament for the first time. Polls suggest a repeat election would return a similarly fragmented parliament. A poll published on Monday showed a new election would bring roughly the same result as the September election, with the Greens set to see the biggest gains. If Germans voted next Sunday, Merkel's conservatives would get 31 percent, the SPD 21 percent, the Greens and the AfD both 12 percent, the FDP 10 percent and the Left party 9 percent, the Forsa survey for RTL television showed. This compares with the election result of 32.9 percent for the conservatives, 20.5 percent for the SPD, 12.6 percent for AfD, 10.7 percent for FDP, 9.2 percent for the Left party and 8.9 percent for the Greens. The failure of coalition talks is unprecedented in Germany's post-war history, and was likened by newsmagazine Der Spiegel to the shock election of U.S. President Donald Trump or Britain's referendum vote to leave the EU - moments when countries cast aside reputations for stability built up over decades. Any outcome in Germany is, however, likely to be more consensus driven. ""The problem is stagnation and immobility, not instability as in Italy,"" said Joffe. The unravelling of the German talks came as a surprise since the main sticking points - immigration and climate policy - were not seen as FDP signature issues. Responding to criticism from the Greens, FDP vice chairman Wolfgang Kubicki said a tie-up would have been short-lived. ""Nothing would be worse than to get into a relationship about which we know that it will end in a dirty divorce,"" he said. Even if the SPD or the FDP revisit their decisions, the price for either party to change its mind could be the departure of Merkel, who since 2005 has been a symbol of German stability, leading Europe through the euro zone crisis. The inability to form a government caused disquiet elsewhere in Europe, not least because of the implications for the euro zone reforms championed by French President Emmanuel Macron. Germany's political impasse could also complicate and potentially delay the Brexit negotiations - Britain has just over a year to strike a divorce deal with the EU ahead of an exit planned for March 29, 2019. ""It's not in our interests that the process freezes up,"" Macron told reporters in Paris, adding he had spoken with Merkel shortly after the failure of talks.",0
"NEW DELHI, Dec 29, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - India and Japan agreed on Tuesday to ease visa rules within a year to boost trade between two of Asia's biggest economies that are also trying to broaden cooperation in defence and nuclear energy. Japan is among India's biggest aid donors and bilateral trade has only begun picking up in recent years with Tokyo easing sanctions it imposed after India tested a nuclear device in 1998. Both countries are working on a comprehensive trade agreement but procedural issues such as restrictive visa rules have slowed progress, officials said. As Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama wrapped up his three-day visit on Tuesday, the issue of visas came up in his meeting with Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh. ""I requested Prime Minister Hatoyama to ensure that Japanese visa system becomes more liberal to enable faster growth of trade, investment and people to people contact,"" Singh told a joint press conference in New Delhi. Singh said the Japanese prime minister had mentioned ""restrictive features"" in the Indian visa system and that he had promised to look into it. Growing trade has added a new dimension to the India-Japan relationship, which traditionally many in New Delhi have viewed as only a counterweight against common rival China. The two sides have targeted $20 billion in trade by next year from more than $12 billion in 2008-09. But that is only a small slice of Japan's overseas trade. Japan's two-way trade with China was worth $266.8 billion in 2008. The two prime ministers also discussed cooperation in renewable energy, including nuclear energy, infrastructure projects, security and climate change. Japan and India already hold regular joint military exercises.",0
"(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - How do carbon trading schemes work, and why do some critics object to them? WHAT'S THE AIM OF CARBON TRADING? Carbon dioxide, produced mainly by burning fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum or through deforestation, is the main greenhouse gas that scientists say is heating up the atmosphere, causing seas to rise and greater extremes of weather. Putting a price on every tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by industry and transport or saved from being emitted by being more efficient or locking away carbon by growing trees provides a cash incentive to curb carbon pollution. HOW DOES IT WORK? Under cap-and-trade schemes, companies must have a permit for every tonne of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, they emit. The more they emit, the more permits they must have. A government issues a set quantity of emission permits for polluting companies, and has an overall cap on the number of permits they will allow to be sold. At the end of each year, firms surrender permits equivalent to their emissions. Companies can buy or trade emissions by buying allowances from other polluters, or from a government auction. Over time the cap is tightened by decreasing the number of permits or decreasing the number of free permits to big emitters. As the carbon permit price rises, companies are forced to become more efficient and invest in cleaner technology. Under the only current global climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialised nations already face greenhouse gas limits, creating a multi-billion dollar market in offsets from clean-energy projects in developing countries. For a FACTBOX on existing carbon schemes, click [ID:nLC685579] HOW MUCH MONEY MIGHT THE NEW CARBON MARKETS ATTRACT? Globally, carbon trading could be worth $2 trillion by 2020, from $125 billion last year, some market players say. Europe's scheme is the largest, and only domestic, cap-and-trade system operating. Launched in 2005, its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is mandatory for all 27 member states, and covers nearly half all EU carbon emissions. HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH A separate Kyoto scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), is currently worth about $6.5 billion. Some companies have opted for an unregulated voluntary market, which operates outside the CDM and the EU's ETS. About 123 million tonnes of carbon credits, valued at $705 million, were transacted in the global voluntary carbon market in 2008, according to industry estimates. This is a fraction of the $125 billion global carbon market. HOW WOULD AUSTRALIA'S SCHEME WORK A fixed carbon price of about $9.25 (A$10)/tonne would be set from July 2011. A fully open market would operate from mid-2012. The scheme aims to cover 1,000 of Australia's biggest polluters and 75 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions. AND WHY IS EMISSIONS TRADING CONTROVERSIAL? Carbon market mechanisms such as cap-and-trade are often seen as more politically acceptable and attractive to industry than carbon taxes. Opinion polls show most Australians support action on climate change, but are wary of the electricity and fuel cost hikes emissions trading would bring. Critics of the schemes range from climate change sceptics, who do not believe carbon emissions are human-created or warrant controls, to green groups who dislike the market-led approach. Some environmentalists say turning carbon dioxide into a commodity by pricing it, and giving compensation to companies who participate in carbon markets, amounts to an undeserved subsidy for polluters, and sends the wrong signal about the kind of action needed to the challenge. The extent to which the schemes will actually reduce emissions is also hotly debated.",0
"She mocked the toxic masculinity of users imagining themselves as Dong Cunrui, a textbook war hero who, according to Chinese Communist Party lore, died valiantly during the civil war that brought the party to power in 1949. For that passing reference, the woman, 27 and identified in court only by her last name, Xu, was sentenced last month to seven months in prison. Her crime: violating a newly amended criminal code that punishes the slander of China’s martyrs and heroes. Since it went into effect in March, the statute has been enforced with a revolutionary zeal, part of an intensified campaign under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to sanctify the Communist Party’s version of history — and his vision for the country’s future. The Cyberspace Administration of China, which polices the country’s internet, has created telephone and online hotlines to encourage citizens to report violations. It has even published a list of 10 “rumours” that are forbidden to discuss. Was Mao Zedong’s Long March really not so long? Did the Red Army skirt heavy fighting against the Japanese during World War II to save its strength for the civil war against the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek? Was Mao’s son, Mao Anying, killed by a US airstrike during the Korean War because he lit a stove to make fried rice? Asking those very questions risks arrest and, now, prosecution. “It is a sign of the establishment of an absolute political totalitarianism,” said Wu Qiang, an outspoken political analyst in Beijing. China’s Communist Party has long policed dissent, severely restricting public discussion of topics it deems to be politically incorrect, from Tibet to the Tiananmen Square protests. The new law goes further. It has criminalised as slander topics that were once subjects of historical debate and research, including Mao’s rule itself up to a point. Since March, the law has been used at least 15 times to punish slights to party history. The campaign reflects an ambition by Xi to solidify a moral foundation for the Communist Party’s supremacy, a theme the Chinese leader often evokes in speeches and articles. The party once could rely on the financial inducements of a booming economy and coercive control of the security state to cement its rule, but now appears to be using political and historical orthodoxy as a foundation, said Adam Ni, a director of the China Policy Centre in Australia and editor of China Story. “There are limits to these tools,” he said of the economy and security state. “They need the moral — the moral legitimacy to maintain their rule.” A version of the slander law was first adopted in 2018, but an amendment to the country’s criminal code that took effect March 1 allowed prosecutors to seek criminal punishment, including prison sentences of up to three years. In April, a 19-year-old man in Nanjing was charged for disparaging the victims of the Japanese massacre there in 1937. A 63-year-old man in Beijing was charged for mocking a Navy fighter pilot, Lt Cmdr Wang Wei, who crashed in the South China Sea after colliding with a US surveillance aircraft in 2001. At least three people were detained in May for derisive comments after the death of Yuan Longping, a scientist who developed high-yield hybrid strains of rice. Last month, authorities arrested a man in Nanchang after he posted an irreverent comment about the legend surrounding the death of Mao’s son in 1950. “That fried rice was the best thing to come out of the whole Korean War,” he wrote. Officials have defended the law as a necessary tool to fight what one director with the Cyberspace Administration of China, Wen Youhua, called “historical nihilism,” which officials often use to describe deviant views. “These people may be trying to gain clicks or eyeballs, but these behaviours obviously touch moral and legal bottom lines,” Li Liang, a law professor in Beijing, told The People’s Daily in April. Xi, preparing for what is likely to be a third term as Communist Party leader beginning next year, will use a gathering of the party elite in Beijing next week to adopt a new resolution on the party’s history — an official summation of the past and its lessons. Among Chinese leaders, only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have enacted such decisions, underscoring the ambition of Xi’s campaign. “We need to educate and guide the whole party to vigorously carry forward the red tradition,” Xi said this year. The tougher slander law took effect shortly after the disclosure by the government in February that four Chinese soldiers had died during a clash with Indian troops along the disputed border in June 2020. Within days, at least seven people were charged for questioning the official version of the death toll, which was reportedly much higher. They included Qiu Ziming, a prominent blogger with 2.5 million followers on Weibo, the country’s Twitter-like social media platform. Although he and the others were arrested under a long-standing article in the criminal code called “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” Qiu, 38, was prosecuted under the new law, even though the changes went into effect 10 days after he made his comments. In May, after being shown confessing on state television, he was sentenced to eight months in prison. The campaign has inspired vigilantism, with internet users calling out potential violations. The Jiangsu branch of China Unicom, a state-owned telecommunications company, came under investigation after a public uproar started when its Weibo account posted a recipe for fried rice on what was Mao Anying’s birthday. It is not clear whether the company faces criminal charges, but its account was suspended. Some of the cases involved historical events that historians in China have previously debated and studied, at least until now. Last month, a former journalist, Luo Changping, was detained in Hainan after he wrote a blog questioning the rationale for China’s intervention in the Korean War — and the catastrophic cost for those “volunteers” sent to fight and die in it. He was responding to a new movie blockbuster that depicts a major Chinese attack known as “The Battle at Lake Changjin.” The movie, which runs 2 hours and 56 minutes, brims with maudlin patriotism for the selfless sacrifice of soldiers who defeated the US-led forces. “Half a century later, few Chinese people have reflected on the justifiability of the war,” Luo wrote on Weibo, before referring specifically to a doomed Chinese military unit “that did not doubt the ‘wise decision’ of the top.” Made with government backing and heavily promoted in state media, it has become the second-highest grossing film in the country’s history, earning the equivalent of $855 million in the month it has been showing, according to Maoyan, the ticketing service. When the film opened, Ni, the researcher, noted on Twitter that the battle it depicts had not previously been a focus of the Communist Party’s propaganda before because it had been seen as a costly strategic blunder, not the resounding victory portrayed on the screen. Now it has become part of a new and unassailable version of history. John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul and author of a forthcoming book about the war, said that even within the limits of political censorship, Chinese scholars have done “a lot of great work” on the war and other historical events since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. With the shifting political climate, that may no longer be safe. “With this, obviously, everyone is going to have to stop what they’re doing,” he said. © 2021 The New York Times Company",2
" As the silver waters of the Kishanganga rush through this north Kashmir valley, Indian labourers are hard at work on a hydropower project that will dam the river just before it flows across one of the world's most heavily militarised borders into Pakistan. The hum of excavators echoes through the pine-covered valley, clearing masses of soil and boulders, while army trucks crawl through the steep Himalayan mountain passes. The 330-MW dam is a symbol of India's growing focus on hydropower but also highlights how water is a growing source of tension with downstream Pakistan, which depends on the snow-fed Himalayan rivers for everything from drinking water to agriculture. Islamabad has complained to an international court that the dam in the Gurez valley, one of dozens planned by India, will affect river flows and is illegal. The court has halted any permanent work on the river for the moment, although India can still continue tunnelling and other associated projects. In the years since their partition from British India in 1947, land disputes have led the two nuclear-armed neighbours to two of their three wars. Water could well be the next flashpoint. ""There is definitely potential for conflict based on water, particularly if we are looking to the year 2050, when there could be considerable water scarcity in India and Pakistan,"" says Michael Kugelman, South Asia Associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. ""Populations will continue to grow. There will be more pressure on supply. Factor in climate change and faster glacial melt ... That means much more will be at stake. So you could have a perfect storm which conceivably could be some sort of trigger."" It's not just South Asia -- water disputes are a global phenomenon, sparked by growing populations, rapid urbanisation, increased irrigation and a rising demand for alternative power such as hydroelectricity. Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq quarrel over the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Jordan river divides Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank. Ten African countries begrudgingly share the Nile. In Southeast Asia, China and Laos are building dams over the mighty Mekong, raising tensions with downstream nations. A US intelligence report in February warned fresh water supplies are unlikely to keep up with global demand by 2040, increasing political instability, hobbling economic growth and endangering world food markets. A ""water war"" is unlikely in the next decade, it said, but beyond that rising demand and scarcities due to climate change and poor management will increase the risk of conflict. Major Threat That threat is possibly nowhere more apparent than in South Asia, home to a fifth of humanity and rife with historical tensions, mistrust and regional rivalries. The region's three major river systems - the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra - sustain India and Pakistan's breadbasket states and many of their major cities including New Delhi and Islamabad, as well as Bangladesh. ""South Asia is symbolic of what we are seeing in terms of water stress and tensions across the world,"" says B G Verghese, author and analyst at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. The region is one of the world's most water-stressed, yet the population is adding an extra 25 million people a year - South Asia's per capita water availability has dropped by 70 percent since 1950, says the Asian Development Bank. The effect of climate change on glaciers and rainfall patterns may be crucial. ""Most of the water that is used in Pakistan comes from glacial melt or the monsoon,"" says Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer and coordinator of the water programme at Lahore University of Management Sciences. The dry months of June-July offer a snapshot of the extreme water crisis in the region. Hospitals in New Delhi this year cancelled surgeries because they had no water to sterilise instruments, clean operating theatres or even wash hands. Swanky malls selling luxury brands were forced to switch off air conditioners and shut toilets. In Pakistan, the port town of Gwadar ran out of water entirely, forcing the government to send two naval water tankers. Some government flats in the garrison city of Rawalpindi have not had water for weeks, said the local press. India, as both an upper and lower riparian nation, finds itself at the centre of water disputes with its eastern and western downstream neighbours – Bangladesh and Pakistan – which accuse New Delhi of monopolising water flows. To the north and northeast, India fears the same of upstream China, with which it fought a brief border war in 1962. Beijing plans a series of dams over the Tsangpo river, called the Brahmaputra as it flows into eastern India. Dam Disputes For India, damming its Himalayan rivers is key to generating electricity, as well as managing irrigation and flood control. Hydropower is a critical part of India's energy security strategy and New Delhi plans to use part of it to reach about 40 percent of people who are currently off the grid. A severe power shortage is hitting factory output and rolling outages are routine, further stifling an economy which is growing at its slowest in years. India's plans have riled Bangladesh, which it helped gain freedom from Pakistan in 1971. Relations cooled partly over the construction of the Farakka Barrage (dam) on the Ganges River which Dhaka complained to the United Nations about in 1976. The issue remains a sore point even now. More recently, Bangladesh has opposed India's plans to dam the Teesta and Barak rivers in its remote northeast. But India's hydropower plans are most worrying for Pakistan. Water has long been a source of stress between the two countries. The line that divided them in 1947 also cleaved the province of Punjab, literally the land of five rivers - the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum, all tributaries of the Indus - breaking up millenniums-old irrigation systems. India's latest hydro plans have fanned new tensions. ""Pakistan is extremely worried that India is planning to build a whole sequence of projects on both the Chenab and Jhelum rivers ... and the extent to which India then becomes capable of controlling water flows,"" says Feisal Naqvi, a lawyer who works on water issues. In recent years, political rhetoric over water has been on the rise in Islamabad, and militant groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba have sought to use the issue to whip up anti-India sentiments - accusing New Delhi of ""stealing water"". India brushes off such fears as paranoia and argues the dams won't consume or store water but just delay flows, in line with a 1960 treaty that governs the sharing of Indus waters between the two countries. Sink or Swim South Asia's water woes may have little to do with cross-border disputes, however. Shortages appear to be rooted in wasteful and inefficient water management practices, with India and Pakistan the worst culprits, experts say. ""All these countries are badly managing their water resources, yet they are experts in blaming other countries outside,"" says Sundeep Waslekar, president of Strategic Foresight Group, a Mumbai-based think-tank. ""It would be more constructive if they looked at what they are doing at home, than across their borders."" Their water infrastructure systems, such as canals and pipes used to irrigate farm lands, are falling apart from neglect. Millions of gallons of water are lost to leakages every day. The strain on groundwater is the most disturbing. In India, more than 60 percent of irrigated agriculture and 85 percent of drinking water depend on it, says the World Bank. Yet in 20 years, most of its aquifers will be in a critical condition. Countries must improve water management, say experts, and share information such as river flows as well as joint ventures on dam projects such as those India is doing with Bhutan. ""Populations are growing, demand is increasing, climate change is taking its toll and we are getting into deeper and deeper waters,"" says Verghese, author of 'Waters of Hope: Himalayan-Ganga cooperation for a billion people'. ""You can't wait and watch. You have to get savvy and do something about it. Why get locked into rhetoric? We need to cooperate. Unless you learn to swim, you are dead."" This report is part of a special multimedia report on water produced by AlertNet, a global humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation. For more information visit water.trust.org",0
" The world's top greenhouse polluter hosts week-long UN climate talks from Monday aimed at sealing a broader pact to fight global warming and helping poorer nations with money and clean-energy technology. The meeting in the northern port city of Tianjin will be the first time China has hosted the tortuous UN talks over what succeeds the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the key treaty on climate change, which expires in late 2012. The United Nations says rich and poor countries need to agree on a tougher pact that curbs fossil fuel emissions blamed for heating up the planet. Scientists say the world is on track for temperatures to rise well beyond 2 degrees Celsius, risking greater weather extremes like this year's floods in Pakistan and drought in Russia. ""There is much at stake going into next week's Tianjin meeting and later in the year,"" wrote Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute, a US environmental group. ""Many people are wondering how governments are going to overcome their differences and ensure that progress is made in 2010,"" Morgan wrote in a commentary on Tianjin. Negotiators from nearly 200 governments failed to agree last year on a new legally binding treaty. A meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009 ended in rancor between rich and developing countries, especially China, and produced a non-binding political accord with many gaps. Officials in Tianjin hope to foster stronger agreement on specifics. These include pledges to curb emissions and how to measure such actions internationally, transfers of adaptation funds and green technology to poorer countries, and over support for carbon-absorbing forests in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. More broadly, they hope to dispel some of the distrust that hobbled talks in 2009 and festered after Copenhagen. TRUST If governments fail to score even modest advances, that will cloud chances of solid progress at the next big U.N. climate meeting, in Cancun, Mexico, late this year, and that would make reaching a legally binding treaty in 2011 all the more difficult. That would leave less time for the world to figure out how to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and would add to uncertainties weighing on companies unsure where climate policy and carbon markets are headed after 2012. ""The expectations going into Tianjin are to lay a foundation for Cancun, to create an atmosphere of trust,"" Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based group, said in a conference call with reporters this week. A key worry is the United States, which never ratified Kyoto, will not follow through on the Obama administration's emissions cut pledge after Congress failed to pass a climate bill. ""We hope that Tianjin will further advance some consensus on these issues so that the Cancun meeting can reach a preliminary summary that is settled on,"" said Yang Fuqiang, WWF director of Global Climate Solutions. ""If we have such long negotiations and can't advance even one small step, I fear that the gulf of distrust between developed and developing countries will be even bigger,"" Yang, a former energy official, told Reuters. Although China will be hosting the conference, it does not set the agenda in Tianjin, where negotiators will be focused on a draft treaty put together by the UN climate change body. But China is a crucial presence at the negotiating table, as both the biggest developing economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activity. Its emissions have more than doubled since 2000 and have outstripped the United States'. China's emissions grew to 7. But China maintains that it and other poorer countries must be given more space to grow their economies and, inevitably, their total emissions for years to come. Beijing has instead vowed to reduce ""carbon intensity"" -- the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each dollar of economic activity -- by 40-45 percent by 2020 compared to 2005. The United States, European Union and other governments want China, India and other big emerging economies to take on firmer commitments to control and eventually cut emissions, and to subject them to more international monitoring. China and like-minded governments say wealthy economies need to give firmer commitments for economic and technological help against global warming, and to commit to bigger emissions cuts.",0
"To answer that question, a team of Princeton researchers, working with a large network of local collaborators, spent three years driving around sub-Saharan Africa collecting the eggs of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are responsible for Zika, yellow fever and dengue. There are two subspecies of Aedes aegypti: one that prefers humans and one that prefers animals; most populations are a genetic mix. After sending the eggs to New Jersey to grow new colonies, and then tempting the insects with the sweet smells of human and of rodent, the researchers found that the more human-loving mosquitoes tended to come from areas with a dry climate and dense human population. That, in turn, is because humans provide the water mosquitoes need to breed. “There had been quite a bit of speculation in the literature that the original reason this species evolved to be a human specialist had to do with its use of human water,” said Lindy McBride, a Princeton neuroscientist and an author on the study. “It’s easy to come up with hypotheses, but what was incredibly surprising was that you could actually see evidence for that.” Like all mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti lays its eggs on water, so the project began by setting out thousands of ovitraps, little plastic cups lined with seed paper and filled with water and dirty leaves to simulate the ideal breeding environment. (For cups, the team employed the kind that casinos give out to hold poker chips.) The ovitraps were placed in big cities and in rural areas, in an effort to span environmentally diverse locations, said Noah Rose, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and co-author of the study published Thursday in Current Biology. A few days later, someone came back and checked for eggs. Not all of the expeditions were successful. “Sometimes you’d spend weeks in a place and just didn’t get any eggs,” Rose said. But in all, the team collected eggs from 27 locations. Once dried, the eggs were akin to seeds; they could lie dormant for six months or a year before being hatched, and so were brought back from all across Africa to the Princeton lab to be bred. After new colonies were established, the next step was figuring out why some populations evolved to become generalists and some to become so-called human specialists. This required deploying an olfactometer: a big plastic box full of mosquitoes, with two removable tubes in it, one containing a guinea pig (or, occasionally, a quail ordered from a farm) and the other holding part of a human. “I was just sitting with my arm in the tube doing this trial over and over again,” Rose said. He spent “a couple months of my life” as mosquito bait, repeating the experiment hundreds of times while listening to audiobooks. (A favourite was Anna Burns’ “Milkman,” about The Troubles in Ireland. Screens kept him and the guinea pig from being bitten.) Within minutes, mosquitoes, attracted to either the human or the nonhuman scent, would pick a tube and enter it. Later, the tubes were removed to count the mosquitoes and figure out how many preferred Rose. The resulting data revealed that mosquitoes that originally came from very dense areas — more than 5,000 people per square mile — liked humans more. (They also had more ancestry from the human-preferring subspecies.) A bigger factor, however, was the climate. Specifically, mosquitoes that came from places that had a rainy season followed by a long, hot, dry season greatly preferred humans. Why? The scientists proposed an explanation that Brian Lazzaro, a professor of entomology at Cornell University who was not involved with the study, called “pretty convincing.” Mosquitoes flourish during the rainy season but then must find a way to survive the dry season. Standing water, critical for mosquitoes to breed, is hard to come by in extremely arid environments. But it can be found around humans, who store water to live, and so mosquito populations from arid regions evolved to take advantage of the situation. Lazzaro also praised the team for sequencing the mosquitoes. That procedure revealed that the human-loving mosquitoes were genetically distinct from the animal-loving ones and found that the preference for humans developed at one location and then spread across Africa. “They really see a single origin of these human-feeding mosquitoes,” he said. “That is a little surprising to me,” he added, because there plausibly could have been multiple instances of genetic adaptation. The Current Biology paper focused on evolutionary history, but its findings might have implications for public health. The results, combined with climate and population data from the United Nations, suggest that there will be more human-biting mosquitoes in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050, caused mostly by urbanization. “I think it’s counterintuitive, because people know the climate is changing rapidly, so that should be the driving force,” McBride said. “But the features of the climate that we found to be important for this mosquito aren’t predicted to change in strong and clear ways that would affect the mosquito.” Urbanisation, in contrast, is occurring very quickly. “You could easily imagine that having an effect on disease transmission in big cities,” McBride said. The new paper is a “major achievement,” said Niels Verhulst, an entomologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who was not involved in the study. In 2003, Verhulst gathered for review many different papers on mosquito host preference; he quickly found that they all used different methodologies that made them hard to compare. That the current study investigated so many different sites was therefore impressive, he said. And it underscored how important it is for cities to proactively remove possible mosquito breeding sites. Rose said that the team planned to conduct follow-ups in other sites in Africa and to study the brains of the human-specialist mosquitoes to figure out the specific mechanisms that make them love our odour so much. When it comes to mosquitoes, there’s much more to learn. “Their history is intertwined with our history,” he said. “And mosquitoes are one of the most interesting ways to understand how human and nature are linked together in the contemporary world.”   c.2020 The New York Times Company",0
"To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city. Let’s unpack all of this. Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did. That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen George B McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile. If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the GOP should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question: How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again? Its members have sat mute while Trump, rather than using the federal bureaucracy to launch a war against our surging pandemic, has launched a war against his perceived enemies inside that federal bureaucracy — including the defense secretary, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and, on Tuesday, the most senior cybersecurity official responsible for protecting the presidential election — weakening it when we need it most. Engineering Trump’s internal purge is 30-year-old Johnny McEntee, “a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling,” but Trump later welcomed him back and installed him as personnel director for the entire US government, The Washington Post reported. A political party that will not speak up against such a reckless leader is not a party any longer. It is some kind of populist cult of personality. That’s been obvious ever since this GOP was the first party to conclude its presidential nominating convention without offering any platform. It declared that its platform was whatever its Dear Leader said it was. That is cultlike. Are we just supposed to forget this GOP’s behaviour as soon as Trump leaves and let its leaders say: “Hey fellow Americans, Trump tried to overturn the election with baseless claims — and we went along for the ride — but he’s gone now, so you can trust us to do the right things again.” That is why we are so very lucky that this election broke for Joe Biden. If this is how this Republican Party behaves when Trump loses, imagine how willing to tolerate his excesses it would have been had he won? Trump wouldn’t have stopped at any red lights ever again. And the people who understood that best were democrats all over the world — particularly in Europe. Because they’ve watched Trump-like, right-wing populists in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Belarus, as well as the Philippines, get themselves elected and then take control of their courts, media, internet and security institutions and use them to try to cripple their opponents and lock themselves into office indefinitely. Democrats abroad feared that this same political virus would overtake America if Trump were reelected and have a devastating effect. They feared that the core democratic concept that America gifted to the world in 1800 — when John Adams lost his election to Thomas Jefferson and peacefully handed over the reins of power — was going to wither, undermining democracy movements across the globe. Every autocrat would have been emboldened to ignore red lights. Seeing an American president actually try to undermine the results of a free and fair election “is a warning to democrats all over the world: Don’t play lightly with populists, they will not leave power easily the way Adams did when he lost to Jefferson,” the French foreign policy expert Dominique Moïsi remarked to me. That is why Biden’s mission — and the mission of all decent conservatives — is not just to repair America. It is to marginalise this Trumpian version of the GOP and help to nurture a healthy conservative party — one that brings conservative approaches to economic growth, infrastructure, social policy, education, regulation and climate change, but also cares about governing and therefore accepts compromises. Democrats can’t summon a principled conservative party. That requires courageous conservatives. But Democrats do need to ask themselves why Trump remains so strong among white working-class voters without college degrees, and, in this last election, drew greater support from Black, Latino and white women voters. There is a warning light flashing for Democrats from this election: They can’t rely on demographics. They need to make sure that every voter believes that the Democratic Party is a “both/and” party, not an “either/or” party. And they need to do it before a smarter, less crude Trump comes along to advance Trumpism. They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them. And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it. We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy centre. Weak countries don’t have one.   c.2020 The New York Times Company",0
"The national opinion poll of 4,423 adults from April 12-16 found that 55% approved of Biden’s performance in office, while 40% disapproved and the rest were not sure. Biden received the highest marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with 65% supporting his response. In January, 38% approved of Trump's handling of the health crisis. Ninety-percent of Democrats, 61% of independents and 39% of Republicans said they approved of Biden's response, the poll showed. Fifty-two percent of Americans also said they liked Biden’s handling of the economy and 53% said the same about his impact on US jobs, which in both cases were a few percentage points higher than Trump’s marks on jobs and the economy during his final month in office. But Biden received his strongest criticism on immigration, as his administration continues to grapple with a surge of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border: 42% approved of the president’s border policy, while 49% disapproved. More than half gave Biden strong marks for bipartisanship, though Democrats were much more likely than others to credit Biden for unifying the deeply divided electorate. Fifty-six percent approved of Biden’s efforts, including 88% of Democrats, 23% of Republicans and 48% of independents. Americans were also generally supportive of Biden’s stance on the environment and racial inequality, with 54% and 51% approving of his record so far, respectively. Biden is benefiting somewhat from circumstances that are beyond his control. He had months to prepare his pandemic response before becoming president, and some coronavirus vaccines were already in use before his Jan. 20 inauguration. Biden’s economy also has the advantage of being compared against the 2020 pandemic recession, when employers shed millions of jobs as COVID-19 shuttered businesses and schools. Still, Biden’s approval numbers reflect popular support for his ambitious agenda, including a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package and should help him pursue other initiatives, said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University. Biden is now pushing for a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that many Republicans oppose, and he is expected to propose tax hikes on the wealthy to raise money for childcare and other programs for American workers. His popularity will help Biden keep his party together, Zelizer said, blunting malcontents on both the progressive and moderate wings of the party, and possibly tempering opposition from some Republicans, especially those in politically competitive states. Lyna Sandau, a 75-year-old Republican from New York City, said she admires how Biden has aggressively supplied the United States with vaccines. Sandau voted for Trump last year, but if the election were held again, she would probably back Biden. “What can I say, he seems to be trying,” she said. BROAD SUPPORT IN SPLIT AMERICA Republicans largely oppose Biden, with only about 20% supporting the president, but those numbers have not changed much over the past year. Biden so far has been able to counter that with near-unanimous approval among Democrats and strong support among independents. About 90% of Democrats approve of Biden, while 8% disapprove. Among independents, 51% approve and 39% disapprove. Most presidents enjoy at least a brief period of elevated popularity, and Trump’s favourability numbers also rose when he entered office four years ago. But they declined a few weeks later as he pushed to ban travel from Muslim countries. Biden’s popularity, meanwhile, has grown over the past year among a broad cross-section of the American population, not only among the white college graduates who helped put him in the White House, but also among the traditionally conservative non-college whites who still dominate the electorate in many places. According to the April poll, 61% of white college graduates and 46% of whites who did not get a degree said they have a favourable view of the president, which is up 7 points and 6 points, respectively, from a year ago. Biden also has become more popular over the past year among racial minorities, with 68% of Hispanics expressing a favourable view of Biden, up 12 points from last April. The latest poll also shows more Americans – 40% - think the country is headed in the right direction than at any other time in the last decade. That is about as good as a Democrat should expect in such a hyper-partisan political environment, said Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist and political scientist at the University of Southern California. Republicans will likely continue to oppose Biden en masse, Shrum said. But Democrats could counter by pushing for policy initiatives that are popular among conservatives too, such as rebuilding roads and expanding internet access. “It is very useful to have Republicans who may not give you a high job rating out in the country agree with some of or many of the steps that you want to take,” Shrum said.",0
" President Robert Mugabe's party said Zimbabwe would go ahead with a general election next year with or without constitutional reforms seen by many as critical to a free and fair vote. Mugabe, who was forced into a unity government with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) after a disputed 2008 poll, sees no need to extend the life of the coalition. He wants a referendum on a new constitution early next year and a general election by mid-2011, even if the referendum is not held. The election would normally be held in 2013. The next election will be the eighth major vote in Zimbabwe since 2000 and critics say a rushed election without political reforms, including a new constitution guaranteeing basic rights, would only favour Mugabe and ZANU-PF, who have held power since independence from Britain in 1980. ZANU-PF chief spokesman Rugare Gumbo told state media that a Wednesday meeting of the party's politburo (inner cabinet) chaired by Mugabe had endorsed his drive for early elections, and received a report suggesting that international donors were withholding cash to delay the last stages of the constitutional reforms. ""However, that is neither here nor there. As a party we will find ways around it, but we are very clear that elections will be held,"" Gumbo said. ""If they cannot help us write a new constitution we will find ways, but elections will be held before June next year,"" he added. Tsvangirai's MDC is trying to mobilise regional pressure on Mugabe to deliver on outstanding reforms under the power-sharing agreement, while a small MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara says Zimbabwe must continue with a coalition government for at least another two years to complete reforms and to allow economic recovery. On Tuesday, the British ambassador in Harare, Mark Canning, said the political climate in Zimbabwe was not yet conducive to a free and fair general election. The southern African country needed time to work on political reforms, including repealing repressive legislation, opening up the media, introducing new electoral laws, and updating the voter register, Canning said. Gumbo said ZANU-PF was happy that its supporters had turned up in large numbers to give their views on a new constitution, and the party was now discussing ways to overcome what it calls illegal sanctions imposed on the party by Western powers. ZANU-PF is set to officially endorse Mugabe, 86, as its presidential candidate at an annual party conference set for mid December.",2
" US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday Tibet was a challenge to the world's conscience and called for an international probe to clear the Dalai Lama's name in the violent protests this month. Pelosi said the free world will have lost its moral authority to speak about human rights if it did not speak up against Chinese oppression in Tibet. ""The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world,"" Pelosi told a gathering of about 2000 Tibetans after meeting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the seat of his government-in-exile. China's crackdown on anti-government protests in Tibet -- which it says were orchestrated by the Dalai Lama -- has drawn sharp international criticism and clouded preparations for the Beijing Olympics. The Tibetan spiritual leader has denied encouraging the violent protests in Tibet, the largest in almost 20 years, and has even offered to resign as Tibetan leader if violence worsens. Pelosi described the Tibetan leader as the ""embodiment of non-violence"" and said China's allegation that he was behind the violent protests did not make sense. Nonetheless, she called for ""an independent, outside investigation"" to clear the Dalai Lama's name. The Tibetan government-in-exile, based in the north Indian town of Dharamsala, says at least 99 protesters had been killed since the demonstrations started in Tibet on March 10. Pelosi said she was not surprised ""about the use of violence on the part of the Chinese government"". ""If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against Chinese oppression and China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,"" Pelosi said. ""Perhaps it is our karma, perhaps it is our fate that we be with you at the time,"" she said to a huge round of applause from the crowd. Pelosi, in India leading a US delegation on climate change talks, walked hand-in-hand with the Dalai Lama after their meeting. The Tibetan leader presented her with an orange ceremonial scarf. The Dalai Lama espouses a middle path of greater autonomy for Tibet rather than independence, a stance that many Tibetans, particularly the younger generation hungry for complete freedom, do not endorse. He has said he was willing to speak to Chinese leaders for a solution once the protests died down.",0
" Prime Minister Gordon Brown will face the leaders of the two biggest opposition parties in Britain's first live televised election debates in the run-up to polls next year, the government said on Monday. While such debates have been a familiar feature in the United States and many other countries for years, they have yet to play a part in any British general election campaign. Critics say live TV debates turn elections into ""beauty contests"" that promote personalities at the expense of policies. Brown, trailing the centre-right Conservatives in opinion polls before an election that must be held by June 2010, said he looked forward to debating issues such as the economy. ""The country needs to debate whether we lock in the recovery or whether we choke it off,"" he said in a statement. Most polls have given Conservative leader David Cameron, regarded as more media-friendly than Brown, enough of a lead to win a workable majority in parliament next year, ending 13 years of continuous centre-left Labour rule. However, some surveys in the last few weeks suggest Brown has chipped away at Cameron's lead and the result could be a lot closer than previously expected. THREE DEBATES Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the three debates would expose Cameron, a former public relations executive, as a ""relatively shallow"" politician. ""He (Cameron) may have the good lines, but his plans will amount to something quite dangerous for Britain, for our economy and for our public services,"" Miliband told Channel 4 News. Cameron said the debates would be a ""step forward for our democracy"" after a year marred by a scandal over politicians' expenses claims. ""It is something that, in such a bad year for politics and parliament, we can proudly celebrate,"" he said. ""We have joined the 21st century."" Although Brown is often seen as a weaker media performer than Cameron, analysts say the Labour leader has tended to fare better during recent, weekly question and answer sessions in parliament. Aides hope he can translate that into convincing on-screen performances. The peak-time election debates, to be shown on the BBC, ITV and Sky television networks, will last for up to 90 minutes and will also give voters a chance to scrutinise the third main party, the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg.",0
" Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at UN talks in Bali on Monday as part of a ""roadmap"" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009. ""It's prejudging what the outcome should be,"" chief negotiator Harlan Watson said of a draft suggesting that rich nations should aim to axe emissions of heat-trapping gases by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. He said that Washington wanted the Dec. 3-14 talks, of 190 nations with more than 10,000 delegates, to end on Friday with an accord to start two years of negotiations on a new global climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. A draft final text by Indonesia, South Africa and Australia says evidence by the UN climate panel demands cuts of 25-40 percent by rich nations to avoid the worst impacts of climate change such as more droughts, floods and rising seas. ""We don't want to start out with numbers,"" Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on ""many uncertainties"" and a small number of scientific studies by the UN Climate Panel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Other countries such as Japan are also opposed, fearing such stiff goals would choke economic growth. The Bali talks are trying to agree the principles for a successor to Kyoto, which binds 36 industrial nations to cut emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by five percent below 1990 by 2008-12. ""Our opinion about Kyoto has not changed,"" Watson said. President George W Bush opposes Kyoto, saying it would damage the US economy and wrongly excludes 2012 goals for developed nations, such as China, India and Brazil. Bush says he will join a new global pact. Yvo de Boer, head of the UN climate secretariat said that the 25-40 percent range would be ""critical issue"" at the talks. He said he considered the figure an important signpost to show where the world should be heading in curbing warming. De Boer also said that all industrialised nations agreed on the need to agree a Kyoto successor at UN talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. Developing nations, wary of any commitments that might hit their drive to fight poverty, are undecided. Environmentalists urged action. ""This is the week the world has been waiting for,"" said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based climate E3G think-tank. On the margins of the main talks, about 40 deputy finance ministers held unprecedented talks about ways to ensure that efforts to slow climate change do not derail the world economy. ""Having the finance ministers meeting...itself is a breakthrough,"" Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The meeting will prepare for talks by about 20 finance ministers in Bali on Tuesday. ""The role of the finance ministers is to lead this discussion so that we have wider policy options,"" Indrawati said, referring to taxes or incentives for green technologies such as wind, solar power or ""clean coal"". Trade ministers also met at the weekend, the first time the annual UN climate talks have expanded beyond environment ministers. The trade ministers failed to ease splits between Brazil and the United States over green exports. The UN Climate Panel, which will collect the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday in Oslo with former US Vice President Al Gore, has said that the strictest measures to offset warming will slow annual world growth by 0.12 percentage point at most. -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/",0
"Democrats on Wednesday completed a sweep of the two US Senate seats up for grabs in runoff elections in Georgia, giving the party control of the chamber and boosting the prospects for President-elect Joe Biden's legislative agenda. Raphael Warnock, a Baptist preacher from Martin Luther King Jr.'s former church, beat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black senator in the deep South state's history while Democrat Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmaker who at 33 will be the Senate's youngest member, beat Republican David Perdue. The Georgia results are a last-minute repudiation of outgoing President Donald Trump, who stands to be the first US president since 1932 to lose the White House and both chambers of Congress in a single term. Democrats now have narrow control of both chambers of Congress, making it easier to appoint liberal-leaning judges and advance legislative priorities from coronavirus relief to climate change when Biden takes office on Jan. 20. ""Georgia's voters delivered a resounding message yesterday: they want action on the crises we face and they want it right now,"" Biden said in a statement. He said he would work with both parties to confirm key administration officials quickly. 


  US President-elect Joe Biden points to Democratic US Senate candidates from Georgia Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, as he campaigns on their behalf ahead of their January 5 run-off elections, during a drive-in campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 4, 2021. Reuters  




 
Trump held rallies for both Republican candidates, but overshadowed the campaign with false accusations that his own loss in the November presidential election in Georgia was tainted by fraud, repeatedly attacking Republican officials in the state.   US President-elect Joe Biden points to Democratic US Senate candidates from Georgia Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, as he campaigns on their behalf ahead of their January 5 run-off elections, during a drive-in campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 4, 2021. Reuters   Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington on Wednesday in a dramatic attempt to force Congress to undo Trump's election loss. With 98% of the vote counted, Warnock led Loeffler by 1.5 percentage points and Ossoff led Perdue by 0.6 percentage points, according to Edison Research. Both are expected to win beyond the margin that would require a recount. Winning both contests hands Democrats narrow control of the Senate by creating a 50-50 split and giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote from Jan. 20. The party already has a thin majority in the US House of Representatives. The campaign's final days were overshadowed by Trump's attempts to pressure Republican Georgia officials to ""find"" enough votes to overturn Biden's win in the state, as well as his unfounded fraud accusations. He has yet to admit defeat. ""We will never give up, we will never concede,"" Trump told thousands of supporters at a rally. 'NOT A GREAT WAY TO TURN OUT YOUR VOTERS' Some Republicans blamed Trump for the Georgia losses. ""It turns out that telling the voters that the election is rigged is not a great way to turn out your voters,"" Senator Mitt Romney, one of Trump's few Republican critics in Congress, told reporters. 


  Democratic US Senate candidates Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are seen in a combination of file photographs as they campaign on election day in Georgia's US Senate runoff election, in Marietta and Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Pictures taken January 5, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Segar, Brian Snyder  




 
The election signaled a shift in the politics of Georgia. At least 4.5 million voters participated, smashing earlier turnout figures for runoff races. Democrats have worked hard to increase turnout among Black voters, their most reliable supporters in the region.   Democratic US Senate candidates Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are seen in a combination of file photographs as they campaign on election day in Georgia's US Senate runoff election, in Marietta and Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Pictures taken January 5, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Segar, Brian Snyder   More than 129,000 voters in the runoffs did not vote in November, according to state data. Most of them were Democrats, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican state election official, told a news conference: “While Republicans were busy attacking the governor and my boss, Democrats were knocking on doors and getting out the vote.” In a video message, Warnock, whose Ebenezer Baptist Church is legendary in Georgia because of its role in the civil rights movement under King, recalled his humble upbringing as one of 12 children of a woman who worked in cotton fields. ""Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,"" he said. Declaring victory, Ossoff said he looked forward ""to serving you in the United States Senate with integrity, with humility, with honor"". Both Republican senators, following Trump's lead, vowed to fight on. ""We will mobilize every available resource and exhaust every legal recourse to ensure all legally cast ballots are counted,"" Perdue said in a statement. During the campaign, Republicans had painted Ossoff and Warnock as radicals who would pursue a hard-left agenda. That message failed to resonate with many white suburbanites who have increasingly abandoned the Republican party under Trump. Trump pressed Vice President Mike Pence to throw out election results in states he narrowly lost when he presides over the counting of electoral votes to certify Biden's victory. Pence has no authority to do so. The joint session of Congress was disrupted by Trump supporters and it is unclear when it will be completed.",0
" The Canadian government is not very interested in implementing a national a carbon tax, despite a decision by its third largest province to adopt one, federal Environment Minister John Baird said on Wednesday. British Columbia's plan, unveiled on Tuesday, is the first of its kind in North America and its supporters say is among the world's most comprehensive tax programs aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases, blamed for climate change. Baird said British Columbia had the right to pursue its own strategy, but the federal government has a different approach. He added he will not criticize the Western Canadian province's plan to impose a tax based on carbon content that will cover nearly all fossil fuels used by industry and individuals. ""We have a different focus, our approach is on industrial regulation,"" Baird said told Reuters. ""There are a lot of different approaches. The good news is that they are taking action on climate change."" The federal Conservative government, which has abandoned Canada's commitments under the Kyoto climate change protocol, announced last year that it planned to cut emissions by up to 65 percent from 2006 levels by 2050. But a panel appointed by the government warned in January that Ottawa would not be able to meet its targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases without enacting a carbon tax quickly. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been cool to the idea of carbon taxes and hard caps on industrial carbon emissions on the grounds they would hurt the economy. British Columbia said global warming was too important to wait around for the federal government and other provinces to to reach consensus on what to do. The province of Quebec adopted a limited carbon tax last year. The Liberal government of British Columbia also broke with Ottawa last year when it said it would work with U.S. states and the province of Manitoba to develop a carbon trading system as part of a pledge to cut emissions by 33 percent by 2020. The province said the key to its new plan is that it will be ""revenue neutral"", with the carbon tax offset by other tax reductions, allowing companies and individuals to save money if they reduce emissions and cut energy use. The tax plan will be phased in over five years, starting at C$10 per tonne and increasing by C$5 a tonne in each of the next four years. Environmentalists have widely praised the plan, and said Ottawa should follow suit. Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said his industry's greatest concern is that provincial plans should be harmonized with any federal efforts. ""The ship is sailing. How do we keep the fleet kind of in order,"" Alvarez said.",0
" The United States will help Libya develop a civilian nuclear power programme under an accord to be signed shortly, Libya's official news agency Jana said on Monday. The agreement will include building a nuclear power plant, helping develop Libya's water desalination capacity, setting up joint research and technical projects and training Libyan technicians in the United States, the agency said. ""The General People's Committee authorized on Sunday the General People's Committee for Liaison and International Cooperation to sign the agreement related to Libyan-American cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy,"" Jana said, referring to Libya's equivalent of a cabinet and foreign ministry respectively. In 2003 Libya promised to give up nuclear, chemical and biological arms, but Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi said at the time that he still hoped to develop a nuclear programme for peaceful means. In the same year, Libya cast off more than a decade of international ostracism by accepting responsibility and starting to pay compensation for the bombing of airliners over Scotland and Niger in 1988 and 1989. Fears over finite oil and gas supplies and climate change have also pushed nuclear power into the limelight as a way of producing energy and cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming. Washington has voiced hopes that Iran and North Korea will follow Libya's example. Libya announced in February it would work with French nuclear giant Areva to explore for and mine uranium, but did not say if it would be used at home or exported. Libya has proven oil reserves of 39 billion barrels, enough for 60 years at current production rates. Its largely unexploited gas reserves are estimated at 53 trillion cubic feet.",0
"Kompasu, with maximum sustained winds of 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour, had absorbed remnants of an earlier cyclone before making landfall in the Philippines on Monday evening. Nearly 1,600 people were evacuated. The disaster agency said it was verifying information from its regional units that reported four people killed in landslides in northern Benguet province and five killed in flash floods in Palawan, an island province in the country's southwest. Authorities were conducting search and rescue operations for 11 people missing mostly after landslides. The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands is hit by about 20 storms or typhoons annually, bringing heavy rains that trigger deadly landslides. President Rodrigo Duterte was monitoring the government's disaster response, his spokesperson, Harry Roque said on Tuesday. Rescue personnel were at the scene, while power and water restoration and road clearing was ongoing, he added. Kompasu, the 13th tropical storm to enter the Philippines, is expected to leave its territory on Tuesday, the state weather agency said.",1
" A stalagmite which occurs annually in a cave shrine deep in the Himalayas is melting fast, officials said on Friday, disappointing Hindu pilgrims who worship it as a symbol of Lord Shiva. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims trek through treacherous mountains in revolt-torn Kashmir, along icy streams, glacier-fed lakes and frozen passes, to reach the Amarnath cave, located at an altitude of 3,800 metres (12,700 feet). The phallus-shaped stalagmite is believed to be a symbol of Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and regeneration. The pilgrimage, one of Hinduism's holiest, is due to begin officially this year on Saturday, although thousands have already visited the shrine. ""It is melting very fast,"" N K Raina, director of the Amarnath Shrine Board, told reporters, adding that when the stalagmite was last measured on May 25 it was 12 feet (3.5 metres) tall and its circumference was 8 feet (2.5 metres). ""Now, it has reduced to almost one-tenth of its original size,"" he said, without elaborating on the reasons. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a glaciologist at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research, blamed it on a combination of factors. ""One is, the number of pilgrims have increased dramatically, generating more heat. Also, atmospheric temperatures attributable to climate change have also gone up in recent years,"" he said. BAD OMEN The size of the stalagmite has varied in previous years depending on the weather. Last year, pilgrims were outraged when authorities reportedly used snow to create a stalagmite as the natural ice formation failed to show up at the start of the pilgrimage. Many Hindus consider the melting as a bad omen. ""Last year, it did not appear, and this year there are reports it is melting fast. I think Lord Shiva is angry with us,"" said Rajni Goswami, a 55-year-old housewife, who is due to start for Amarnath on Saturday. ""I will still travel to the holy cave and pray for peace in Kashmir."" Shiv Kumar, a pilgrim from the northern Indian city of Lucknow who visited the cave this week, said he was ""deeply saddened"" by the ""very small size"" of the stalagmite. The pilgrimage has been targeted several times by Islamist separatist militants fighting against New Delhi's rule in India's only Muslim-majority state. Last year, over a dozen pilgrims were wounded in attacks. Security, as a result, has been stepped up over the years and thousands of troops guard the 330-km (200-mile) route taken by pilgrims. Officials say more than 42,000 people have been killed in Kashmir in the insurgency since it first erupted in 1989. Human rights groups put the toll at about 60,000.",0
"While some in Western capitals argue that
Russia's actions should mean it is excluded from global meetings altogether,
that is not a view shared by others in the Group of 20 big economies, including
notably China and Indonesia, which is chairing the group this year. Moscow confirmed on Tuesday Finance Minister
Anton Siluanov would lead Russia's delegation at the talks despite repeated
protestations by Western diplomats that they could not go ahead as usual during
a war in which thousands of civilians have died in bombardments by Russian
troops. ""During and after the meeting we will be
certain to send a strong message and we will not be alone in doing so,"" a
German government source said, accusing Russia of starting a conflict that has
also sent world food and energy prices spiraling. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to
avoid G20 sessions joined by Russian officials on the sidelines of International
Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. But Yellen will attend an opening
session on the Ukraine war regardless of Russian participation, a US Treasury
official said. British finance minister Rishi Sunak also will
not attend certain G20 sessions, a British government source told Reuters. And a French finance ministry official
meanwhile expected some ministers from Group of Seven nations to leave their
seats when their Russian peer was due to speak. 'UNRAVELING' RISK The divisions widened by the Ukraine war raise
questions over the G20's future as the world's premier economic policy forum. Conceived as a platform for the biggest
wealthy and developing economies to cooperate on recovery efforts during the
2008-2009 global financial crisis, the G20 has since broached everything from
global tax reform to pandemic debt relief and the fight against climate change,
with a patchy record of success. ""The G20 is at risk of unraveling and
this week is incredibly important,"" said Josh Lipsky, director of the
Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center and a former IMF adviser. Should Western democracies allow the group to
wither in favor of the G7 or other groupings, it would cede significant
economic influence to China, Lipsky said. ""Russia can align with China and I think
that's a good outcome from Russia's perspective and actually gives them more
influence than they have in a body like the G20,"" he said. Both the French and the German official said
there would be no agreed communique at the end of a meeting which had been
originally due to discuss the state of the global economy and coordinating
vaccine and other pandemic efforts. Apart from the G7 nations - the United States,
Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy - the G20 also incorporates
emerging economies including China, India and Brazil that have starkly
different views on how the global economy should work. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the fact
that some G20 nations have chosen not to follow Western sanctions on Russia is
only the latest challenge to efforts to construct a global set of rules for
trade and finance. The United States and China have long traded
accusations of protectionism, while the fact that world trade is growing more
slowly than the global economy as a whole has prompted questions about the
future of globalisation. Ahead of the G20 meeting, a top IMF official
warned of the risk of a fragmenting global economy. ""One scenario is one where we have
divided blocs that are not trading much with each other, that are on different
standards, and that would be a disaster for the global economy,"" IMF chief
economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told reporters. Separately, the Fund slashed its forecast for
global economic growth by nearly a full percentage point, citing Russia's war
in Ukraine, and warning inflation was a ""clear and present danger""
for many countries.",0
"“At the moment we would like to ask them to end their strike,” said Quader, also general secretary of Awami League. “There is no point in causing suffering to the people.” Quader made the statement in response to a question from the media after meeting with the EU ambassador to Bangladesh at the Setu Bhaban in Dhaka on Sunday. “There’s no scope to change the law at the moment,” he said. “It’s not possible. They must wait until the next parliament.” The road transport minister called on the transport workers to be patient. “If there are any legitimate concerns they can be addressed through dialogue.” The Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation has declared a 48-hour strike since Sunday morning to press for eight demands and changes to the recently revised road transport law. The strike has halted long-haul bus and freight services nationwide. Commuters are also facing great difficulties due to halts to metropolitan bus service in large cities like Dhaka and Chattogram. The demands include making all accidents under the Road Transport Act ‘bailable’, the cancellation of the provision that allows a worker to be fined Tk 500,000 for involvement in a road crash, lowering minimum educational qualification required for obtaining driving licences from class VIII to class V, for transport worker representation on investigation committees on cases under section 302, an end to harassment by police, to set fines according to the wage scale and to require certification from a Workers Federation representative when vehicles are registered and penalties are overturned. Transport leaders have threatened to go on indefinite strike from Oct 30 if their demands are not met. Quader also discussed the current political climate after his discussion with the EU ambassador. He said that the demands put forward by the Jatiya Oikya Front composed of Kamal Hossain and the BNP leaders were also impossible to meet at the moment. “The Oikya Front is complaining. It is typical for the opposition to be a bit critical. After all, the purpose of the opposition is to criticise. They have made a list of seven demands. Even if we wanted to meet these demands we would have to change the constitution. It is impossible.” “If they strike over the issue, if they are not prepared to be flexible, it could cause some unrest.” The Jatiya Oikya Front has called for the reformation of the Election Commission, the dissolution of parliament, the freeing of jailed BNP leader Khaleda Zia and for elections to be held under an ‘impartial’ government. Oikya Front leader Kamal Hossain has threatened to bring the government to justice if it does not meet these demands.",5
"LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's central government will cut its emissions of climate-warming carbon by 10 percent in the next 12 months, while speeding up the wider move to a low-carbon economy, the new UK Prime Minister David Cameron said on Friday. ""I don't want to hear warm words about the environment. I want to see real action. I want this to be the greenest government ever,"" the Conservative leader of Britain's first coalition government since 1945 told staff at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). ""If we do this, we'll cut the government's energy bills by hundreds of millions of pounds ... In fact, we've made a good start. Someone pointed out when you mix blue with yellow - you get green."" The environment was a key part of the yellow-flagged Liberal Democrat election campaign, and the Conservative-led government announced several carbon cutting plans on Wednesday. The new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne, said on Thursday his party had agreed not to vote against new nuclear power stations as part of its compromise to do a deal with the blue flag waving Tories. ""The benefits of the low carbon economy are agreed between both parties, this is a priority agenda common to both manifestos,"" Huhne said. ""I intend to make decisions put off for too long to fundamentally change how we supply and use energy in Britain ... To give the power industry the confidence it needs to invest in low carbon energy projects."" UK energy regulator Ofgem said in February Britain's energy markets needed to be radically redesigned to spur hundreds of billions of pounds of investment in low-carbon technologies, from wind and solar to nuclear, a view shared by utilities. Most of Britain's ageing nuclear power plants are scheduled to shut over the next decade and the previous Labour government has been pushing private companies to build new ones as part of a low carbon power generation mix -- a policy supported by the Conservatives but not the Lib Dems. Europe's biggest utilities have been lining up to build the plants, paying hundreds of millions of pounds for farmland to build them on, but want higher long-term charges on rival gas and coal fired power plants to support their multi-billion pound investments. The coalition said on Wednesday it would introduce a minimum charge for emitting carbon but it remains unclear whether it will be high enough to have a significant impact on the economics of building a nuclear power plant.",0
" India resumes defence contacts with China frozen for a year when an Indian military delegation visits on Sunday, though few expect any breakthrough with Beijing pursuing its ""all-weather friendship"" with arch-rival Pakistan. But analysts say the visit, which ends a suspension of such contacts following a visa row last year, is a step forward in keeping a balance in ties between the emerging rivals for global influence and resources. New Delhi feels Beijing is trying to encircle and pin India down to South Asia with a string of military bases on the Indian Ocean rim. China is Pakistan's biggest arms supplier and the only major power not to have publicly criticised Islamabad over the discovery of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in that country. While trade and diplomatic ties between the Asian powers are booming, the lack of defence exchanges is an aberration analysts say must be remedied for the world's fastest growing economies to achieve lasting peace. ""It is symbolic and I cautiously welcome it. It does not represent any breakthrough in solving the disputes,"" said Uday Bhaskar, director of New-Delhi based think-tank National Maritime Foundation. ""The mistrust is (over) the deep anxiety over military cooperation (between Pakistan and China) and how Pakistan is using that for furthering its agenda of terrorism."" While a war between India and China is highly unlikely, any flare up will only add to tensions in a dangerous neighbourhood, complicating efforts by Washington to stabilise a region filled with nuclear weapons and Islamic militants. ""(Not having) talks on the defence level is a symbol of mistrust. It breeds more suspicions if they are not talking,"" said Srikanth Kondapalli, professor of Chinese studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. TWISTED BORDERS, TORTURED HISTORY Military meetings were suspended last year after China refused a visa to a general based in Kashmir. New Delhi bristles at any hint that the disputed region, where a separatist movement has raged for two decades, is not part of India. An eight-member team headed by a two-star general heads on Sunday to Beijing and the western city of Urumqi for five days. India and China have been at peace with each other since a brief war in 1962, where the Indian army's weaknesses were exposed. The humiliation still rankles in India, which has beefed up its military to take on any threat from the north. The conflict began as a disagreement over the unmarked 3,500-km (2,200-mile) Himalayan frontier between the countries. It intensified when New Delhi in 1959 welcomed the Dalai Lama, who had fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. ""India has had its experience of 1962. We haven't got over it and we are the subaltern in the relationship,"" Bhaskar said. The long shadow of the war manifests itself vividly in commerce. Chinese firms are seen as entering India to put out of business Indian manufacturers with their cheap wares. Telecoms gear makers like Huawei face an uphill task in selling products on fears the equipment could be used to spy on India. The Reserve Bank of India has spoken out against the yuan's undervaluation and officials complain of the huge trade deficit India runs with China as it sells raw materials and buys finished goods. Despite those suspicions, China is India's largest trade partner and the two nations have cooperated on issues ranging from global financial reform to climate change. Most recently, India and China, along with Brazil, Russia and South Africa, protested against Europe's lock on the top job at the International Monetary Fund. Sunday's visit will lay the ground for the annual scheduled defence secretary talks between India and China. ""Major generals in India do not decide policy,"" Bhaskar said. ""That can happen only at the political level. But with this engagement you create space for political rapprochement.""",0
"""Every year we say that time is running out. We have to act NOW to slash greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a chance to keep the increase in temperatures to manageable levels,"" WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. His annual plea for the world to do whatever it can to cut greenhouse gas emissions - which come mainly from burning fossil fuels and from agriculture, cement production and deforestation - comes weeks before negotiators from over 190 states convene in Paris to try to agree a new UN climate deal. Graphs issued by the WMO, a UN agency, showed levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, climbing steadily towards the 400-parts-per-million (ppm) level, having hit a new record every year since reliable records began in 1984. Carbon dioxide levels averaged 397.7 ppm in 2014 but briefly breached the 400-ppm threshold in the northern hemisphere in early 2014, and again globally in early 2015. ""Next year we will be reporting much higher concentrations because of El Nino,"" WMO atmospheric research chief Oksana Tarasova told Reuters, referring to the Pacific Ocean warming phenomenon. Soon 400 ppm will be a permanent reality, Jarraud said. ""It means hotter global temperatures, more extreme weather events like heat waves and floods, melting ice, rising sea levels and increased acidity of the oceans. This is happening now and we are moving into uncharted territory at a frightening speed."" The rise in carbon dioxide levels is being amplified by higher levels of water vapor, which are in turn rising because of carbon dioxide emissions, the WMO said. Levels of the other two major man-made greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also continued a unrelenting annual rise in 2014, reaching 1,833 parts per billion (ppb) and 327.1 ppb, respectively. Both rose at the fastest rate for a decade. For the Paris conference later this month, more than 150 countries, led by top greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States, have issued plans to limit emissions beyond 2020. But the plans revealed so far will not curb emissions enough to meet a target agreed in 2010 to limit global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) of pre-industrial levels. ""Two degrees will be bad enough but it will be better than three degrees,"" said Jarraud. ""Of course it would have been better to have 1 degree... But 1 degree is not possible any longer. It's just not feasible. Too late.""",0
" Global warming has made ice a hot topic, and one sizzling center of inquiry is in a warehouse-like complex in New England, where melting polar shores and shrinking glaciers are issues of urgent study. In vast deep-freeze rooms at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, parka-clad scientists examine samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica, some of them icy, some made up of old, close-packed snow known as firn. Another building creates cold-weather road surfaces and lets vehicles drive across them. Elsewhere on the base, researchers set up supermarket-size models of rivers and seashores to check the impact of ice and cold. Recently, it has become a practical laboratory to monitor the effects of climate change in the Arctic, notably a way to keep ice and newly open water from eroding seaside communities. ""We've never had a shore protection system for the Arctic,"" said Leonard Zabilansky, a research civil engineer at the lab. ""We've never had to."" Now this protection is needed. Because the lab is part of the US Army Corps of Engineers, it focuses on both military and civilian consequences from climate change. ""Military tactical plans will need to reflect changes in seasonal extents of snow, ice and navigable weather and ground conditions,"" Jacqueline Richter-Menge, project manager at the lab, wrote in a statement at http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/. ""Civilian agencies planning new infrastructure need to know how these changes affect their projects, and whether extreme events will have greater impacts over time."" Less Arctic ice could mean big changes in shipping, trade, ecosystems and security, and it has already prompted lab tests to keep marauding ocean ice from eroding Barrow, Alaska. ""The ice used to hold everything in place,"" said Zabilansky. Now much of the ice that used to shield coastal settlements year-round is seasonal and it is up to Zabilansky and other experts to try to solve the practical problems caused when polar ice disappears. Temperatures in Barrow -- a US outpost some 340 miles (547.2 km) north of the Arctic circle -- are frequently below zero F (-17.77C), so you'd think keeping ice frozen would be easy, but that is not always the case. ""The problem is that due to global warming, the volume of sea ice (in the Arctic Ocean) has decreased and it doesn't last from one season to the next,"" Zabilansky said, speaking at the lab and in a subsequent telephone interview. When this seasonal ice melts in the summer, it creates an open-water pathway for ice further out on the ocean to gather speed and move toward shore, Zabilansky said. This ocean ice can be extremely destructive when it hits land. ""There's wind-driven ice that has room to accelerate,"" Zabilansky said. ""We have to de-accelerate it before it gets to downtown."" So at a test basin at the lab, researchers built a large hump made of coarse gravel meant to block incoming ice before it reached shore. The ice picked up the stones and went over the top of the hump in simulations, Zabilansky said. The next step is to bring in boulders nearly 6 feet (1.829 metres) in diameter in a test for a shoreline protection system for Barrow. If this works, there will be at least one more challenge: these big rocks are relatively easy to get in New Hampshire, but they will have to be sent by barge from Nome if tests show they will be effective for Barrow. This design might prove adaptable to other Arctic sites, Zabilansky added.",0
"But it’s not the swimmer whose life is at risk. It’s the jellyfish. A bump from the swimmer could mean a death sentence. In a rare marine lake on a hatchet-shaped atoll in Indonesia, four species of jellyfish have evolved in isolation and lost their ability to sting humans. There are believed to be millions of these benign jellyfish in Kakaban Lake, which has become a popular spot for tourists intrepid enough to reach the remote archipelago known as the Derawan Islands. But it’s a fragile ecosystem, and these animals are vulnerable both to climate change and the growing numbers of visitors who casually invade their space. Colliding with one of these delicate, easily injured jellyfish can spell its doom, as a wounded one is far more susceptible to being nibbled to death by small fish also inhabiting the lake. For that reason, swimmers here are not allowed to use flippers and are urged to swim as slowly and gently as they can. But the jellyfish are so numerous, it can be hard to avoid harming them. And as more tourists arrive, the dangers to the jellyfish are escalating. At times, the wooden dock at Kakaban Lake gets so crowded with divers in their black wetsuits that they resemble the sea lions basking in the sun at San Francisco’s Pier 39. Not all of the divers arrive with an environmentally sensitive mindset, either. A group of more than 80 employees of the Indonesian tax collector’s office recently came to the lake on a team-building exercise, traveling from the city of Tarakan in North Kalimantan province, about three hours away by boat. The tax workers, many of them wearing life jackets, formed a giant circle in the lake, kicking and treading water, oblivious to the creatures around them. Their leader shouted instructions over a bullhorn, and someone unfurled a banner that floated on the water. A drone snapped their picture. A dive guide who watched the scene unfold figured the photo cost the lives of hundreds of jellyfish. There are about 200 marine lakes in the world, part saltwater and part freshwater, and stingless jellyfish have evolved in several of them. Without any ocean predators, jellyfish no longer needed their natural defence system, and their sting evolved into one so weak that people don’t feel it. For scientists, these lakes serve as proxies to explore what may come as ocean waters heat up because of climate change. “The lakes have environmental conditions that are warmer, more acidic and less oxygenated — in a way, a projection of our future climate,” said Intan Suci Nurhati, a climate and ocean researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Many thousands of years ago, Kakaban Lake was a lagoon connected to the sea. But the island was elevated during a period of geologic uplift, creating a 92-acre lake that today is surrounded by a ridge over 130 feet high. The lake, a mix of saltwater and rainwater and noticeably warmer than the surrounding sea, is still connected to the ocean through underground fissures, but the openings are too small for an exchange of any but the smallest life-forms. Kakaban Lake is the main attraction of Kakaban Island, one of about 30 islands, nearly all uninhabited, in the Derawan archipelago, which lies some 35 miles off Borneo. The archipelago, located in the Sulawesi Sea, is known as one of the world’s best diving spots, offering crystal-clear waters, manta rays, sea turtles and whale sharks. The world’s best-known jellyfish lake, in the nation of Palau, suffered a dramatic population crash in 2016, most likely because of drought and increased salinity caused by an El Niño weather condition. The deaths underscored how vulnerable the animals are to fluctuations in their environment. While the jellyfish continue to thrive on Kakaban, the island has just two human inhabitants: Suari, 28, and his uncle, Jumadi, 48. Their extended family owns the strip of land where visitors can dock and hike over a wooden walkway to the lake. On some days, hundreds of tourists arrive. But after they leave, life on Kakaban is lonely. “It is really quiet here,” Suari said. About 4,000 people, mostly Muslim, live on nearby Maratua, the largest of the Derawan islands. Most are Bajau people, renowned as deep-sea divers, whose ancestors arrived here from the Philippines eight generations ago. Darmansyah, a former chief of the Bohesilian village on Maratua, said residents of the atoll were still mainly fishermen. “Bajau people are not interested in farming,” he said. “We always run to the sea.” But he is no longer fishing for a living, he said. Instead, like most other residents, he is happy to see a growing investment in tourism, including the recent construction of an airport and several new dive resorts. Residents are building dozens of homestay units — holiday lodging in a family’s home — in anticipation of a tourist boom. Darmansyah, 60, has built two such units. Maratua has at least two marine lakes. One, Haji Buang, once had jellyfish to rival Kakaban Lake. But about five years ago, its owner, Hartono, thought he could make some quick cash by raising more than 30 hawksbill sea turtles in the lake. Only after he put the turtles in the water did he discover that it would be illegal to sell their shells because the species is critically endangered. The hawksbills, which feed on jellyfish, have nearly exterminated the lake’s population. “Now I regret it,” said Hartono, 62. “There used to be more jellyfish than in Kakaban Lake, but we didn’t realise this could be a tourist area.” Hartono said he wanted to catch the turtles so he could return them to the sea — with the hope that the jellyfish population would recover. The local tourism agency at Haji Buang is spending over $40,000 to build facilities there, including a wooden bridge, dock and covered seating area. Hartono said he had no interest in preserving nature for nature’s sake but appreciated the government’s investment in his property. He said he would abide by the wishes of tourism officials and not cut down trees or build houses on the lake’s edge. “I would rather build and develop this,” he said as he tossed his cigarette butt into the lake. “If you leave it like this, it will only stay like this.” © 2019 New York Times News Service",0
" Last year was the world's second hottest behind 1998 in a temperature record dating back to 1850, the director of research at Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Phil Jones said on Wednesday. Jones' unit, compiling data with the Met Office Hadley Centre, is one of three main groups worldwide tracking global warming. Last week the other two, based in the United States, said 2010 was tied for the hottest on record. The data showed that all but one year in the past decade were among the 10 hottest on record, underlining a warming trend linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases, Jones told Reuters. ""All the years from 2001 to 2010, except 2008, were in the top ten,"" he said. The global fight against climate change suffered a setback in the wake of the financial crisis, slowing finance for renewable energy projects and knocking momentum from efforts to agree a new climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2013. The new data appeared to bolster evidence for manmade climate change, after leaked e-mails, including from the CRU, showed climate scientists in 2009 sniping at sceptics. Errors made by a UN climate panel also exaggerated the pace of melt of glaciers in the Himalayas. Last year was 0.498 degrees Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average, the CRU and Hadley data showed, compared with 1998's 0.517 degree. The nearest year to 2010 was 2005, at 0.474 degree warmer than the long-term average. The US National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) reported similar findings last week. They found that 2010 was tied for the hottest year with 2005. The three groups use similar observations but in slightly different ways. For example, GISS takes greater account of Arctic weather stations, where warming has been fastest. All the warmest years are separated by only a few fractions of a degree.",0
" Australian Prime Minister John Howard vowed to keep Australian troops in Iraq despite mounting pressure at home to withdraw, as annual Asia-Pacific meetings began in Sydney. ""Our commitment to Iraq remains. This is not the time for any proposals of a scaling down of Australian forces,"" Howard told a joint news conference with US President George W. Bush, pointing to next week's crucial progress report to the US Congress on the American troop surge in Iraq. ""It's historic work, Mr Prime Minister, and it's important work, and I appreciate the contribution that the Australians have made,"" Bush replied to the veteran Australian leader, whose support for the war in Iraq is clouding his re-election hopes. The two men then clambered aboard a luxury yacht, and accompanied by a dozen zodiac boats packed with heavily armed, black-clad security personnel, sped across Sydney harbour to join several hundred Australian troops and sailors for lunch at the Garden Island naval base. ""I""m looking forward to you buying me lunch today. I'm a meat guy,"" Bush joked to Howard, who has been prime minister since 1996. It was genuine camaraderie between two old friends whose popularity has suffered over the four-year war in Iraq. Australia has about 1,500 troops in and around Iraq, while the United States has 160,000 soldiers there. Bush rewarded Howard for his loyalty by signing a treaty with him on Wednesday giving Canberra improved access to top-secret US military technology and intelligence. Australia had long complained of US restrictions on weapons technology and information because of Washington's concerns about espionage. BIGGEST SECURITY OPERATION Bush arrived early for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this weekend in order to prepare for next week's report to Congress on the Iraq war. Australia has launched the country's biggest ever security operation, including erecting a 2.8 metre (9 feet) security fence that has virtually cut Sydney centre in two, and which has put residents in a grumpy mood. Australia has never experienced a terrorist attack within its borders. Anti-war activists plan mass weekend protests, expected to draw up to 20,000 people onto the streets against Bush's visit and the Iraq war. ""I have absolutely no doubt that minority groups will engage in a level of violence not previously experienced in Sydney,"" police chief superintendent Steve Cullen said. But at an anti-Bush rally at Sydney Railway Station on Tuesday ahead of the President's arrival, media outnumbered the noisy but peaceful protesters. Trade liberalisation and climate change top the agenda at the APEC meetings, and Bush wants the group's 21 economies to agree to a strongly worded pledge to reinvigorate the Doha round of world trade talks. Bush and Howard also talked about the rise of China, whose President Hu Jintao is also in Australia and was expected in Sydney for APEC later on Wednesday. Hu visited a farm near the Australian capital, Canberra, to watch sheep being shorn. China is Australia's biggest wool export destination and resource market, and -- in contrast to Bush -- Hu has received a warm public reception in Australia. Ice sculptures of Bush's and Howard's face were placed by protesters near Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge to slowly melt in the sun, symbolising the refusal of the United States and Australia to sign the Kyoto climate pact. About 40 trade and foreign ministers, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, gathered at Sydney's main convention centre on Darling Harbour to hammer out a declaration for their leaders to consider at a weekend summit. A draft of that declaration, obtained by Reuters, says the 21 APEC members will try to develop a more robust approach to strengthening food and product safety standards in the region. APEC has begun work on a recovery programme to revive trade in the event of a terrorist attack and a set of principles ""to help protect the food supply against deliberate contamination"", the draft declaration said. On trade, APEC will focus this year on ""behind the border issues"", competition policy, strengthening capital markets, combating corruption, promoting good governance, and a more certain legal and regulatory climate. The draft declaration, however, gives short shrift to a US-backed Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific.",0
"His wife, Sherry, said the cause was brain cancer. Out in the wild, knowing how to treat a venomous snakebite or a gangrenous infection can mean the difference between life and death. In the 1970s, however, the specialised field of health care known as wilderness medicine was still in its infancy. Then Auerbach showed up. A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory. “We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.” “And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.” Back at Duke, he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material. “I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snakebites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’” Auerbach started researching material for the book in 1978, when he began his medical residency at UCLA, finding the time to do so despite gruelling 12-hour hospital shifts. He collected information about how to treat burn wounds, hypothermia, frostbite and lighting injuries. He interviewed hikers, skiers and divers. And he assigned chapters to doctors who were passionate about the outdoors. The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections such as “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.” “Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.” In the early 1980s, hearing from doctors and nurses with similar interests in outdoor medicine, Auerbach founded the Wilderness Medical Society with Geehr and Dr Ken Kizer. The group is now the largest-membership organisation in its field and has hosted events such as a trek to a Mount Everest base camp and a trip to a station in the Utah desert that simulates life on Mars. Auerbach joined Stanford as chief of its emergency medicine division in 1991. He left the university four years later to work in the private health care sector before returning to the university in 2005 and remaining there until his retirement this year. He became an elder statesman in his field. He spoke at conferences around the world, in one case describing how the erectile-dysfunction pill Viagra can be used to treat high-altitude pulmonary edema because it reduces artery pressure. At Stanford, Auerbach encouraged his students, foremost, to respect the outdoors. “When house staff and residents and young doctors say, ‘How do I learn wilderness medicine?’ My very first answer to them always is, ‘Learn the wilderness first,'” he said in the Stanford interview. “Because you can’t help anybody if you’re just scrambling to keep yourself alive.” In 2010, when an earthquake devastated Haiti, Auerbach travelled to the country with a team of emergency medical workers, and despite his years of experience, he found the trip harrowing. A few years later, when an earthquake hit Nepal, he went there to assist with emergency care and later helped establish a hospital there. Auerbach said it was imperative never to get too comfortable when dealing with the whims of nature. “You have to be afraid when you go into work,” he said. “You have to stay humble.” Paul Stuart Auerbach was born Jan 4, 1951, in Plainfield, New Jersey. His father, Victor, was a patents manager for Union Carbide. His mother, Leona (Fishkin) Auerbach, was a teacher. Paul was on his high school wrestling team and grew up spending summers on the Jersey Shore. He graduated from Duke in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in religion and then enrolled in Duke’s medical school. He met Sherry Steindorf at UCLA, and they were married in 1982. (In the 1980s, he worked part time as a sportswear model.) Auerbach studied at Stanford’s business school shortly before joining the university’s medical faculty in 1991. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Brian and Daniel; a daughter, Lauren Auerbach Dixon; his mother; a brother, Burt; and a sister, Jan Sherman. As he grew older, Auerbach became increasingly devoted to expanding the field of wilderness medicine to account for the uncertainties of a new world. In revising his textbook, he added sections about handling environmental disasters, and, with Jay Lemery, he wrote “Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health” (2017). Last year, shortly before he received his cancer diagnosis, the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, and Auerbach decided to act. “The minute it all first happened, he started working on disaster response,” his wife said. “Hospitals were running out of [personal protective equipment]. He was calling this person and that person to learn as much as he could. He wanted to find out how to design better masks and better ventilators. He never stopped.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"Coal's contribution to electricity generation in India fell for the second straight year in 2020, marking a departure from decades of growth in coal-fired power. Still, the fuel accounts for nearly three-fourths of India's annual power output. Environmental activists have long rallied against India adding new coal-fired capacity. Solar and wind energy prices are falling to record lows, which would help the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter cut emissions. US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry this month said India was ""getting the job done on climate, pushing the curve,"" as he began talks with government leaders aimed at cutting carbon emissions faster to slow global warming. But a 28-page February draft of the National Electricity Policy (NEP) 2021 - which has not been made public - showed India may add new coal-fired capacity, though it recommended tighter technology standards to reduce pollution. ""While India is committed to add more capacity through non-fossil sources of generation, coal-based generation capacity may still be required to be added in the country as it continues to be the cheapest source of generation,"" the NEP draft read. All future coal-based plants should only deploy so-called ""ultra super critical"" less polluting technologies ""or other more efficient technology"", it added. 
 
 A worker carries coal in a basket in an industrial area in Mumbai, India May 31, 2017. REUTERS 

State-run NTPC Ltd, India's top electricity producer, said in September it will not acquire land for new coal-fired projects. Private firms and many run by states across the country have not invested in new coal-fired plants for years saying they were not economically viable.  A worker carries coal in a basket in an industrial area in Mumbai, India May 31, 2017. REUTERS  A source with direct knowledge said a government panel of various power sector experts and officials will discuss the draft and could make changes before seeking cabinet approval. India's power ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. The draft document also proposed trade of renewable energy in day-ahead markets, creating separate tariffs for electric vehicle charging stations and privatizing electricity distribution companies. ALTERNATE POWER SOURCES The NEP 2021 is India's first attempt at revising its electricity policy enacted in 2005, when the country produced negligible renewable energy. Experts say phasing in renewable energy sources and phasing out conventional sources such as coal and natural gas rapidly could lead to instability in the electricity grid, potentially causing blackouts. While suggesting flexible use of coal-fired and natural gas-fired power to ensure grid stability in the coming years, the draft policy lists promoting clean power as its primary objective. The policy draft suggested expediting adoption of ""cost effective"" pumped hydro storage to support the electricity grid, adding that only 4.8 gigawatts (GW) of a potential 96.5 GW of pumped storage capacity has been developed so far. The policy also recommends compensating natural gas-fired plants for operating at reduced efficiency to ensure grid stability, and for suffering higher wear and tear due to fluctuations in generation.",0
" The United States together with its allies and a Syrian opposition group all urged the UN Security Council on Monday to end its ""neglect"" of the violence raging in Syria and rapidly endorse an Arab League plan for a political transition there. ""We have seen the consequences of neglect and inaction by this council over the course of the last 10 months, not because the majority of the council isn't eager to act - it has been,"" said Washington's UN Ambassador Susan Rice. ""But there have been a couple of very powerful members who have not been willing to see that action take place,"" she told reporters. ""That may yet still be the case."" Western officials were discussing the issue on the eve of a meeting by the 15-nation Security Council to consider the Arab plan in the face of reluctance by Russia, an ally of the Syrian government and a veto-holder on the council, which has demanded changes to the proposed resolution. Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby and Qatar's prime minister are due to plead with the council on Tuesday to back the plan for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to transfer powers to his deputy to prepare for elections. Western countries are deploying their big guns to try to overcome Russian objections, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe due to attend the session. Rice's complaint about some countries reluctance to act referred to Russia and China, which vetoed a Security Council resolution in October that would have condemned Syria for its bloody crackdown on anti-government protests and threatened it with possible sanctions. Rice added that there was no need for ""an extended negotiation"" on the new European-Arab draft resolution endorsing the Arab plan aimed at ending the crisis, which has led to thousands of civilian deaths. Clinton also urged the council to act swiftly. ""The Security Council must act and make clear to the Syrian regime that the world community views its actions as a threat to peace and security,"" she said in a statement. ""The violence must end, so that a new period of democratic transition can begin."" In Paris, a French diplomatic source said what Juppe wanted ""is that this visit at least speeds up negotiations."" LAVROV NOT ANSWERING PHONE The head of the opposition Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghalioun, said he had met with Russian officials in New York and would meet with Rice later on Monday. Germany's U.N. mission said Ghalioun also met with Ambassador Peter Wittig in New York. ""Clearly the Russians are not happy with our position asking for Assad to step down before any negotiation, but our position is based on the will of the Syrian people,"" he said. Ghalioun also urged the council to support the European-Arab draft, saying it was high time for it to act. ""The inaction of the international community has only encouraged the Assad regime to continue killing innocent protesters,"" he said. Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said last week that he was willing to engage on the European-Arab draft, which Morocco submitted to the council. But while he did not explicitly threaten to use his veto, he said the text was unacceptable in its current form. Diplomats said Elaraby would be meeting with Churkin in New York to explain to him that vetoing the draft resolution would be tantamount to vetoing the Arab world. A vote on the draft resolution is unlikely before Thursday or Friday, Western diplomats said on condition of anonymity. Russia sought on Monday to avert a swift council vote, saying it wanted to study recommendations from Arab observers in Syria before discussing the league's plan. Russia also said Damascus had agreed to take part in talks in Moscow, but a senior figure in the Syrian opposition said it would not attend. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton had been trying unsuccessfully to connect with Lavrov. ""The secretary, frankly, has been trying to get Foreign Minister Lavrov on the phone for about 24 hours,"" she said in Washington. ""That's proven difficult."" As street battles rage in Syria, Nuland said the suspension of an Arab League monitoring mission over the weekend due to the worsening security climate may have negative consequences. ""We are gravely concerned that as these Arab League monitors have pulled out, the Syrian regime has taken this as an excuse to just let loose in horrific ways against innocents,"" she said. Rice said the resolution was ""quite straightforward"" and made no reference to the use or threat of force. Russia has said NATO countries distorted a March 2011 council resolution on Libya to help rebels topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi. While few expect Russia to support the Syria resolution, Western officials said they were hopeful Moscow might be persuaded to abstain, allowing it to pass. The question was what changes would be needed in the text to secure that outcome.",2
"Biden, 78, will become the oldest US president in history at a scaled-back ceremony in Washington that has been largely stripped of its usual pomp and circumstance, due both to the coronavirus as well as security concerns following the Jan 6 assault on the US Capitol by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump. With only a small number of attendees present, the Democrat will take the oath of office before US Chief Justice John Roberts just after noon (1700 GMT), placing his hand on an heirloom Bible that has been in the Biden family for more than a century. His running mate, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, will become the first Black person, first woman and first Asian American to serve as vice president after she is sworn in by US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina member. The ceremony will unfold in front of a heavily fortified US Capitol, where a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building two weeks ago, enraged by his false claims that November’s election was stolen with millions of fraudulent votes. The violence prompted the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives to impeach Trump last week for an unprecedented second time. Thousands of National Guard troops were called into the city after the siege, which left five people dead and briefly forced lawmakers into hiding. Instead of a throng of supporters, the National Mall will be covered by nearly 200,000 flags and 56 pillars of light meant to represent people from US states and territories. Biden, who has vowed to “restore the soul of America,” will call for American unity at a time of crisis in his inaugural address, according to advisers. He will waste little time trying to turn the page on the Trump era, advisers said, signing a raft of 15 executive actions on his first day in office on issues ranging from the pandemic to the economy to climate change. The orders will include mandating masks on federal property, rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. In an early sign of his plan to reach across the political aisle, Biden has invited top congressional leaders, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, to join him at church on Wednesday morning. Biden’s global leadership ambitions complicated by US Capitol riotIn a break with more than a century and a half of political tradition, Trump plans to depart the White House ahead of the inauguration, declining to meet with his successor and affirm the peaceful transfer of power. Vice President Mike Pence, former US Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and both McCarthy and McConnell are all expected to attend Biden’s inauguration ceremony. Trump, who has grown increasingly isolated in the waning days of his tenure, has still not formally conceded the Nov 3 election. He will hold a sendoff event at Joint Air Force Base Andrews in the morning, although top Republicans, including Pence, are not expected to attend. GRIM MILESTONES For Biden, who long harboured presidential ambitions, the inauguration is the zenith of a five-decade career in public service that included more than three decades in the US Senate and two terms as vice president under former President Barack Obama. But he will confront a set of overlapping crises that would challenge even someone of his political experience. The novel coronavirus reached a pair of grim milestones on Trump’s final full day in office on Tuesday, reaching 400,000 US deaths and 24 million infections - the highest of any country. Millions of Americans are out of work because of pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions. Biden has vowed to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis, including a more robust testing and tracing program and a massive vaccination drive. His top priority is a $1.9 trillion plan that would enhance jobless benefits and provide direct cash payments to households. It will require approval from a deeply divided Congress, where Democrats will hold slim advantages in both the House and Senate. Wednesday’s executive actions, by contrast, are intended to advance Biden’s priorities without the need for legislation. The president will establish a new White House office coordinating the coronavirus response, revoke the permit granted to the contentious Keystone XL oil pipeline and end Trump’s emergency declaration that helped fund a Mexico border wall, among other orders. Jen Psaki, the incoming White House press secretary, said Biden plans additional executive orders in the coming weeks, including eliminating Trump’s restrictions on transgender troops and reversing a policy blocking US funds for overseas programmes linked to abortion. Although Biden has laid out an ambitious agenda for his first 100 days, including delivering 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations, the Senate could be consumed by Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial, which will move ahead even though he has left office. The trial could serve as an early test of Biden’s promise to foster a renewed sense of bipartisanship in Washington.",0
" UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lent support on Tuesday to President George W Bush on Iraq, saying violence there was a problem for all countries. As Bush hosted Ban at the White House, the UN chief also welcomed the president's plan to hold a high-level meeting on the Middle East peace process in the autumn. ""As for the Iraqi situation, this is the problem of the whole world,"" Ban said, promising UN help with rebuilding Iraq politically, economically and socially. On Monday, Ban warned against an ""abrupt withdrawal"" by US forces from Iraq and said the international community should not abandon the Iraqi people, shocking some UN officials for inserting himself into the US debate on the war. At least six people were killed on Wednesday when a pair of roadside bombs exploded in south-eastern Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Five people were wounded in the attacks in the Al-Amin district, which police said occurred in an area used as a stopping point by people travelling by bus to the capital from the Shi'ite south. U.S. and Iraqi forces have launched a major security clampdown in and around Baghdad to thwart sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs, but violence has continued to flare. Bus terminals mainly used by Shia have been attacked on numerous occasions in the past. The show of Ban's support comes as Bush faces the American public's growing frustration with the Iraq war and rising pressure even from within his own Republican Party for a US pullout. The two discussed climate change, said Ban, who invited Bush to participate in a conference on the environment that he has called for September, on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly. Bush looks forward to attending the Sept. 24 event, a White House spokesman said later. Climate change is a contentious issue in the Bush administration, which has fought mandatory caps on the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Ban said he was encouraged by Bush's initiatives on climate change at last month's G8 summit, where world leaders agreed to pursue substantial cuts in greenhouse gases.",0
"Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of around 60,000 euros (about $70,000), eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway. All of that is why Djordjevic polishes the star on his car. “The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said. But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler — or people making combustion engines. “I’m proud of what I do,” Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.” Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety. As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater. To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed. There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents. There is the coal worker in the former communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone. “She has known about the danger of climate change for longer than we’ve been alive,” one of the brothers told me while standing on the grassy dike that protects the small island, Pellworm, from flooding. “Why hasn’t she done anything about it?” As Merkel steered her country through successive crises and left others unattended, there was change that she led and change that she allowed. She decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany. She ended compulsory military service. She was the first chancellor to assert that Islam “belongs” to Germany. When it came to breaking down her country’s and party’s conservative family values, she was more timid but ultimately did not stand in the way. “She saw where the country was going and allowed it to go there,” said Roland Mittermayer, an architect who married his husband shortly after Merkel invited conservative lawmakers to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, even though she herself voted against it. No other democratic leader in Europe has lasted longer. And Merkel is walking out of office as the most popular politician in Germany. Many of her postwar predecessors had strongly defined legacies. Konrad Adenauer anchored Germany in the West. Willy Brandt reached across the Iron Curtain. Helmut Kohl, her onetime mentor, became synonymous with German unity. Gerhard Schröder paved the way for the country’s economic success. Merkel’s legacy is less tangible but equally transformative. She changed Germany into a modern society — and a country less defined by its history. She may be remembered most for her decision to welcome more than 1 million refugees in 2015-16 when most other Western nations rejected them. It was a brief redemptive moment for the country that had committed the Holocaust and turned her into an icon of liberal democracy. “It was a sort of healing,” said Karin Marré-Harrak, headmaster of a high school in the multicultural city of Offenbach. “In a way we’ve become a more normal country.” Being called a normal country might seem underwhelming elsewhere. But for Germany, a nation haunted by its Nazi past and four decades of division between East and West, normal was what all postwar generations had aspired to. Almost everywhere, however, there was also a nagging sense that the new normal was being threatened by epic challenges, that things cannot go on as they are. THE GERMAN DREAM Djordjevic lives near Stuttgart, the capital of Germany’s powerful car industry. In 1886, Gottlieb Daimler invented one of the first cars in his garden here. These days the city is home to Daimler, Porsche and Bosch, the world’s biggest car-part maker. Arriving home after his shift one recent afternoon, Djordjevic was still wearing his factory uniform — and, beside the Mercedes logo, the hallmark red pin of the metal worker union. Most Daimler employees are unionized. Worker representatives take half of the seats on the company’s supervisory board. “The success story of German industry is also the story of strong worker representation,” he said. The security, the benefits, the opportunities to build skills — all of that underpins “the loyalty workers feel to the product and the company.” If the American dream is to get rich, the German dream is job security for life. Djordjevic, 38, always knew he wanted to work for Daimler. His father worked there until he died. “It was like an inheritance,” he said. When he got his first job at age 16, he thought he had arrived. “I thought, ‘That’s it,’” he recalled. “‘I’ll retire from here.’” Now he is less sure. Like other German carmakers, Daimler was late to start its transition to electric cars. Its first pure electric model was launched only this year. Daimler’s target is to phase out combustion engines by 2030. No one knows what exactly that means for jobs, but Djordjevic was doing the math. “There are 1,200 parts in a combustion engine,” he said. “There are only 200 in an electric car.” “Sustainable cars are great, but we also need sustainable jobs,” he said. Daimler is still growing. But much of the job growth is in China, said Michael Häberle, one of the worker representatives on the company board. Häberle, too, has been at the company all 35 years of his working life. He started as a mechanic and worked his way up to a business degree and eventually a seat on the board. Standing in one of the factories now churning out batteries for the new EQS line of electric cars, Häberle said he hoped company would not only survive this transformation but come out stronger on the other side. The main question, he said, is: Will Germany? There was a time when he took his country’s export prowess for granted. But now, he said, “Germany is in a defensive crouch.” A GERMAN HIJAB Germany’s car industry helped fuel the country’s postwar economic miracle. And immigrants fuelled the car industry. But they don’t really feature in that story. They were known as “guest workers” and were expected to come, work and leave. Until two decades ago, they had no regular path to citizenship. Among them were the grandparents of Ikbal Soysal, a young high school teacher in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt, whose father worked in a factory making parts for Mercedes. Soysal’s generation of immigrant Germans do feature in the story of Germany today. Not only do they have German passports, many have university degrees. They are doctors, entrepreneurs, journalists and teachers. Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. When Merkel came into office in 2005, 18% of Germans had at least one parent who was born outside the country. By now it is 1 in 4. In Soysal’s school in Offenbach, 9 in 10 children have at least one parent who emigrated to Germany. Many of the teachers do, too. “When I started teaching here, all teachers were Germans with German roots,” the head teacher, Karin Marré-Harrak, said. “Now, nearly half of them have diverse roots.” Soysal, a Muslim, always wanted to be a teacher, but she knew it was a risk. There had never been a high school teacher with a headscarf in her state. So when she was invited for her first job interview, she called ahead to warn the school. It was 2018. The secretary consulted with the headmaster, who promptly reassured her, “What matters is what’s in your head, not what’s on your head.” She got that job and others since. It wasn’t always easy. “The students forget about the headscarf very quickly,” Soysal said. But some parents complained to the head teacher. Once, a student asked Soysal’s advice. The girl was wearing a headscarf but was unsure about it. “If it doesn’t feel right, you need to take it off,” Soysal told her. For her, that is what freedom of religion, enshrined in the German constitution, is all about. “The thing is, I am German,” she said, “so my headscarf is German, too.” THE ALTERNATIVE TO MERKEL Leaving Offenbach, the next stop is Hanau. It was here, in February last year, that a far-right gunman went into several bars and shot nine mostly young people who had migrant backgrounds. The backlash against the diversification and modernization that Merkel has overseen has turned increasingly violent. Germany suffered three far-right terrorist attacks in less than three years. The ideological breeding ground for that violence is in many ways embodied by a party that chose its name in opposition to the chancellor. Merkel often justified unpopular policies by calling them “alternativlos” — without alternative. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was founded in 2013 in opposition to the bailout of Greece that Merkel’s government engineered during Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. When she welcomed more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016, the party adopted a noisy anti-immigrant stance that catapulted it into Germany’s parliament. The AfD is marginalised in the country’s West. But it has become the second-strongest party in the former communist East, the place where Merkel grew up. Politically at least, Merkel’s Germany is more divided between East and West than at any other point since reunification. In Forst, a once-prosperous textile hub on the Polish border that lost thousands of jobs and one-third of its population after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD came first in the last election. Downtown, shuttered factories and smoke stacks still dot the skyline. The lingering inequality between East and West three decades after reunification is still evident, even though taxpayers’ money has flowed east and things have gradually improved. With the government planning to phase out coal production by 2038, billions more in funding are promised to help compensate for the job losses. But as Mike Balzke, a worker at the nearby coal plant in Jänschwalde, put it: “We don’t want money — we want a future.” Balzke recalled his optimism when Merkel first became chancellor. Because she was an easterner and a scientist, he expected her to be an ambassador for the East — and for coal. Instead, his village lost one-quarter of its population during her chancellorship. A promised train line from Forst to Berlin was never built. The post office shut down. Balzke, 41, worries that the region will turn into a wasteland. That anxiety runs deep. And it deepened again with the arrival of refugees in 2015. TWO FATHERS AND TWO SONS Merkel’s decision to welcome the refugees was one reason Balzke stopped voting for her. But for plenty of other people, the opposite was true. Mathis Winkler, a development aid worker in Berlin, had never voted for Merkel’s party. As a gay man, he was appalled by its narrow conservative definition of family that until only a few years ago excluded him, his long-term partner and their two foster sons. But after Merkel became the target of far-right anger during the refugee crisis, he joined her party in solidarity. Merkel pushed her own base on several fronts. On her watch, legislation was passed that allows mothers and fathers to share 14 months of paid parental leave. The conservative wing of her party was up in arms, but only a decade later, it has become the new normal. Merkel never backed same-sex marriage outright, but she allowed lawmakers to vote for it, knowing that it would go through. Winkler left the party again in 2019 after Merkel’s successor as conservative leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, disparaged same-sex marriage. But he acknowledged his debt to the chancellor. On June 30, 2017, the day of the vote, he wrote her a letter. “It is a pity that you could not support opening marriage to same-sex couples,” he wrote. “Still, thank you that you ultimately made today’s decision possible.” Then he invited her to visit his family, “to see for yourself.” She never replied. But he and his family used to live just around the corner from Merkel, who never gave up her apartment in central Berlin. They would see her occasionally in the supermarket checkout line. “There she was with toilet paper in her basket, going shopping like everyone else,” Winkler’s partner, Roland Mittermayer, recalled. Even after 16 years, they are still trying to figure the chancellor out. “She is an enigma,” Winkler said. “She’s a bit like the queen — someone who has been around for a long time, but you never feel you really know her.” THE POST-MERKEL GENERATION Six hours northwest of Berlin, past endless green fields dotted with wind farms and a 40-minute ferry ride off the North Sea coast, lies Pellworm, a sleepy island where the Backsen family has been farming since 1703. Two years ago, they took Merkel’s government to court for abandoning its carbon-dioxide emission targets under the Paris climate accord. They lost, but then tried again, filing a complaint at the constitutional court. This time they won. “It’s about freedom,” said Sophie Backsen, 23, who would like to take over her father’s farm one day. Sophie’s younger brothers, Hannes, 19, and Paul, 21, will vote for the first time on Sunday. Like 42% of first-time voters, they will vote for the Greens. “If you look at how our generation votes, it’s the opposite of what you see in the polls,” Paul said. “The Greens would be running the country.” Pellworm is flush with the sea level and in parts even below it. Without a dike ringing the coastline, it would flood regularly. “When you have permanent rain for three weeks, the island fills up like a bath tub inside the dikes,” Hannes said. The prospect of rising sea levels is an existential threat here. “This is one of the most important elections,” Hannes said. “It’s the last chance really to get it right.” “If not even a country like Germany can manage this,” he added, “what chance do we stand?” ©2021 The New York Times Company",0
"It is a
global contest with huge economic consequences for automakers, small battery
startups and car buyers, who in a few years will chose from a dizzying array of
electric cars that use different kinds of batteries as the combustion-engine
era recedes. The chemical
makeup of batteries — a technical subject that was the province of engineers —
has become one of the hottest topics of discussion in the corporate boardrooms
of General Motors, Toyota, Ford Motor and Volkswagen, as well in the White
House. With
financial and technological support from the government, these giant companies
are embracing startups working to remake the battery so they are not left
behind by the industrial revolution unleashed by the electric car. Automakers’
ability to master battery technology could help determine which companies
thrive and which are overtaken by Tesla and other electric car businesses. Batteries
will help determine the price of new cars and could become the defining feature
of vehicles. Like the megapixels on cameras or the processing speeds of
computer chips that consumers once obsessed over, the features of batteries
will be the yardstick by which cars and trucks are judged and bought. “This is
going to be the new brand differentiation going forward — the battery in
electric vehicles,” said Hau Thai-Tang, chief product platform and operations
officer at Ford Motor. “So, we’re making a huge effort.” Batteries,
of course, will also play a central role in the fight against climate change by
helping to move cars, trucks and the power sector away from oil, coal and
natural gas. Automakers
are taking a crash course in battery chemistry because demand for electric cars
is taking off. Companies have to figure out how to make batteries cheaper and
better. Today, batteries can make up one-quarter to one-third of the cost of
electric cars. And most of those batteries are made by a few Asian companies. Even Tesla,
the dominant producer of electric cars, relies on Asian suppliers and is seeking
to bring more manufacturing in house. President
Joe Biden this month encouraged companies to move more of the battery supply
chain to the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underlined the
strategic importance of such efforts. Volkswagen was forced to temporarily shut
down its main electric vehicle factory in Germany after the fighting disrupted
the supply of parts made in western Ukraine. Auto giants
such as Stellantis, which owns Ram and Jeep, are lavishing cash on startups
such as Factorial Energy, which has fewer than 100 employees in an office park
in Woburn, near Boston. Factorial
executives, who have stopped returning calls from automakers offering bags of
money, are developing a battery that can charge faster, hold more energy and be
less likely to overheat than current batteries. “Money can
come and go,” said Siyu Huang, a co-founder at Factorial, who began
experimenting with battery technology as a graduate student at Cornell
University. “We want to deliver the safest battery and change the way people
are living.” (BEGIN
OPTIONAL TRIM.) Top Biden
administration officials have said they want to help, acknowledging that the
United States has done a poor job capitalizing on battery technologies created
domestically. Many of those inventions have given birth to a huge industry in
China. The Energy
Department is considering financing companies that make batteries or supply the
parts or critical minerals needed to build them. The agency already has at
least 10 pending applications asking for a total of more than $15 million to
support these battery-related projects, according to an agency tally. Transportation
Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last month that a failure to innovate hurt his
hometown, South Bend, Indiana, once home to Studebaker, which went out of
business in the 1960s. “Innovation
is central to the past, present and future for our auto industry, and we see
that right now with the opportunity for America to lead the electric vehicle
revolution,” he said. Cheaper and More-Durable Batteries The most
immediate change coming is in the building blocks of batteries. Most lithium
ion batteries used in electric vehicles rely on nickel, manganese and cobalt.
But some automakers, including Tesla and Ford, are moving to use batteries in
at least some vehicles that rely on lithium iron phosphate, which is popular in
China. These LFP
batteries, as they are known, cannot store as much energy per pound, but they
are much less expensive and last longer. Tesla plans
to offer LFP batteries in shorter-range, lower-priced electric vehicles. Ford
is planning to use them in some trucks sold under its Ion Boost Pro brand for
fleet owners. “It could be
delivery, it could be plumbers, electricians, landscapers that work in a fixed
geographic zone,” said Thai-Tang, the Ford executive. Ford is
teaming up with SK Innovation of Korea to make its batteries, but it hopes to
bring much of that manufacturing to the United States, Thai-Tang said. “That
will reduce some of the geopolitical as well as just logistics cost
challenges.” But the LFP
battery is not a complete solution. Teslas using these batteries can drive only
about 270 miles on a charge, compared with about 358 miles for similar models
powered by nickel and cobalt batteries. Also, LFP batteries can lose some of
their power when the temperature drops below freezing and take longer to
charge. New Designs
and Ingredients Ford’s new
electric F-150 pickup truck, which has not gone on sale but already has 200,000
reservations, will rely on batteries with a higher percentage of energy-dense
nickel, also made by SK Innovation. Tesla in
February said it had already built 1 million cells for its next-generation
“4680” battery that it has started to use in its Model Y crossovers. CEO Elon
Musk has said the battery will have 16 percent more range because of its
distinctive honeycomb design. “It’s hard until it’s discovered, and then it’s
simple,” he said in 2020. GM claims
that its Ultium battery cell needs 70% less cobalt than the cells used in the
Chevrolet Bolt electric hatchback. The company has added aluminum to its
battery. The GMC Hummer pickup, which GM recently started selling, is the first
vehicle to have this battery. GM, in
partnership with South Korea’s LG Chem, is building a $2.3 billion battery
factory in Lordstown, Ohio. It is one of at least 13 large battery factories
under construction in the United States. Batteries
are already becoming important to auto branding — GM is running ads for Ultium
batteries. It adds to the imperative that they ensure these batteries are
reliable and safe. GM has had to recall the Bolt to fix a battery defect that
can lead to fires. Many
automakers are eager to reduce their reliance on cobalt in part because it
mostly comes from the Congo, where it is mined by Chinese-financed companies or
by freelancers who sometimes employ children. “It’s the
potential violation of human rights, the child labor or the artisan miners who
are digging under very difficult circumstances — that’s the major concern that
we have,” said Markus Schäfer, a senior Mercedes executive responsible for
research and development. The auto
industry is also concerned about nickel, because Russia is an important
supplier of the metal. A team of
about 25 government scientists at the Oak Ridge National Lab wants to push
these innovations further still. Conventional
electric car batteries have been set up next to an experimental cobalt-free
alternative. Scientists spend weeks charging and discharging them, measuring
how they perform. Ilias Belharouak, who runs the Oak Ridge Battery
Manufacturing Center, said the goal was to cut battery costs by as much as
half, increase their range beyond 300 miles and get charge times down to 15
minutes or less. (Current batteries typically take 30 minutes to 12 hours to
charge depending on the car and outlet.) Some of this
work will be funded by $200 million the Energy Department allocated late last
year to seven national labs. The department next month will host a “virtual
pitchfest” where battery designers present ideas to scientists, government
officials and industry executives. The Quest
for Solid-State Batteries Factorial
Energy and other US startups, such as Solid Power and QuantumScape, are aiming
to revolutionize the way batteries are constructed, not just change their
ingredients. Batteries today rely on a liquid solution for the electrolyte that
allows the flow of electricity between different components. Solid-state
batteries don’t have a liquid electrolyte and, thus, will be lighter, store
more energy and charge faster. They are also a lot less likely to ignite and,
therefore, need less cooling equipment. Most major
carmakers have placed big bets on solid state technology. Volkswagen
has put its money on QuantumScape, based in San Jose, California. BMW and Ford
are wagering on Solid Power, based in Louisville, Colorado. GM has invested in
SolidEnergy Systems, which emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and is based in Singapore. But it’s not
clear how soon solid-state batteries will arrive. Stellantis has said it hopes
to introduce mass-market vehicles with those batteries by 2026, but executives
at other companies say the technology might not be broadly available until
about 2030. Whichever
carmaker offers solid state batteries first will have an enormous advantage. Huang of
Factorial said it was not unusual for her and her business partner, Alex Yu, to
work all night as they race to achieve technical bench marks. She is
motivated, she said, by memories of the polluted air she breathed while growing
up near Shanghai. “Our company’s founding mission is to strive toward a fossil
free future,” Huang said. “That is what I strive for in my life.” Eventually,
Factorial, which Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai have also invested in, wants to
build factories around the world — an ambitious goal considering the company
just moved into a second floor. In a series
of laboratories, employees wearing white coats and intense expressions test
prototype cells. Despite this
frenzied activity, the auto industry could struggle to fill demand for new
batteries because the world cannot mine and process all the raw materials
needed, particularly for lithium, said Andrew Miller, chief operating officer
at Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, which tracks battery makers and supplies
worldwide. “All of the
models that are being announced, everything those companies want to do over the
next three years,” Miller said, “I don’t know where the raw materials are
coming from.” © 2022 The
New York Times Company",0
" The United Nations says momentum is building for broader long-term action to fight global warming beyond the UN's Kyoto Protocol and a climate meeting starting in Vienna on Monday will be a crucial test. About 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries at the Aug 27-31 talks will seek common ground between industrial nations with Kyoto greenhouse gas caps until 2012 and outsiders led by the United States and China, the top two emitters. ""Momentum is very much building,"" for global action, Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, said of the meeting of senior officials, scientists and activists. ""And Vienna's going to be crucial."" ""The coming week will give us an indication of whether the political community ... is willing to move beyond well-intentioned platitudes towards real negotiations,"" he told a news conference on the eve of the talks. ""The fight against climate change must be broadened,"" Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said, welcoming U.S. willingness to take part in a long-term U.N. deal to cut emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels. Vienna will try to break a diplomatic logjam and enable environment ministers to agree at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December to launch formal two-year negotiations to define stiffer long-term curbs on greenhouse gases. But while delegates talk about talks, many worry that climate change is already taking its toll, especially in developing nations heavily dependent on agriculture. ""We have a very dangerous situation developing,"" said Lesotho's Minister of Natural Resources Monyane Moleleki. ""For the past 30 years climate change has been spooky to say the least."" The number of severe droughts in southern Africa had doubled since 1978 compared to the rest of the 20th century, he said. ""And when the rains come they come in deluges, torrents that are useless."" ""Cape Verde is an island state, hit by all vulnerabilities of climate change,"" said Cape Verde Environment Minister Madalena Neves, pointing to risks such as rising seas and desertification. Chances of a deal in Bali have risen sharply after UN reports this year blamed human activities, led by use of fossil fuels, for a changing climate set to bring ever more severe heat waves, droughts, erosion, melting glaciers and rising seas. And President George W. Bush, a Kyoto opponent, agreed in June with his industrial allies on a need for ""substantial cuts"" in greenhouse gas emissions. It is unclear exactly what ""substantial"" means for Washington. The European Union, Japan and Canada have all talked about a need to halve world emissions by 2050 to slow warming. Many nations want a ""Bali road map"" agreed in Indonesia -- a two-year plan to work out a deal to succeed Kyoto, which obliges 35 industrial nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A road map could include principles that a deal should include major emitters, that it should not undermine economic growth in developing nations and that rich nations should take the lead, delegates say. Even though there are five years left until 2012, many experts say time is already running short. Anyone planning to build a coal-fired power plant, or to invest in carbon markets, wants to know the long-term rules.",1
"But people can have an impact, experts say, both by how they spend their money and how they spend their time. Mary Weathers Case, for instance, chose to offset the carbon cost of a cross-country plane trip for her family through the site Gold Standard. Case, a psychiatrist who lives in South Salem, New York, with her husband and two children, said she had been reading and watching more news about climate change during the pandemic and had been motivated to do her part after hearing about the searing temperatures in the West. What surprised her, though, was that after spending $3,000 on plane tickets to Portland, Oregon, she could offset that carbon for $150. “I was surprised that it was so cheap,” Case said. Buying carbon offsets for a plane trip is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But people can allocate their money in other ways, both big and small, that reduce their contribution to climate change. Take how you invest. With certain investments — namely, those that reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere — there are defined ways to measure their environmental impact. With others, like water conservation, the metrics are not as clear because there is not an agreed-upon unit to measure. “The improvement in measurement is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Sir Ronald Cohen, an early venture capitalist and the author of the book “Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change.” He advocates using what are called impact-weighted accounts, an initiative led by Harvard Business School, to evaluate a company’s positive and negative impact on the environment. By this measure, he has written, airlines like Lufthansa and American Airlines have an environmental impact that makes both companies unprofitable. Yet he is also open to a less-bad approach. People invested in fossil fuel companies should consider that Exxon Mobil caused $39 billion in environmental damage from its carbon impact, according to Harvard Business School estimates, while BP caused $14 billion in damage. It is like deciding which energy bar is better for you to eat: Those that have less sugar have a better health impact. “It’s where the world is heading,” Ronald said. “You can buy the products of the company whose values you share.” Individuals can make other environmentally conscious choices as well, beyond carbon offsets or investing in cleaner energy. When Leah Weinberg, owner and creative director of Color Pop Events, which plans weddings, was moving from Long Island City, New York, to Forest Hills in Queens, she found a company that had done away with cardboard boxes. Instead, the company, Movers, Not Shakers, provides the plastic, flip-top boxes that retailers like CVS use to deliver products to stores. Weinberg said that it had cost the same as another estimate from a moving company but that she and her husband, Marc, felt better about not having scores of cardboard boxes to recycle. “I think it was easier because the boxes are hard plastic, so they’re built to stack, and you don’t have to worry about the handles coming off,” she said. Mark Ehrhardt, the company’s founder, said the mover had decided to emphasise its environmental consciousness to distinguish itself from competitors. The company does about 4,000 moves a year within the five boroughs of New York. Those moves save 160 tons of cardboard, he estimated. His trucks are also powered by biodiesel. This ethos can be woven into however people spend their money. Paul Greenberg, whose new book is “The Climate Diet: 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Diet,” said continuing to work from home at least a few days a week was one significant way to reduce the carbon emissions from driving a car. But such decisions are not always so straightforward. Take buying clothes. A shirt made with a synthetic material, like polyester, which is derived from petrochemicals, is more carbon-intensive than a cotton shirt. But that cotton shirt requires huge amounts of water to produce — more water than a person drinks in a year, Greenberg’s research found. His recommendation? Consider buying used clothing. Some choices are harder than others. Dogs and cats may be beloved companions, but they are carnivores that are bad for the environment. “If you had a choice between a carnivorous dog and a guinea pig that eats seeds,” Greenberg said, “go with the guinea pig.” The real beasts, though, are free-standing homes. To reduce their carbon footprint, people can look for electricity providers that get their power from solar and wind. Once the electricity coming into the home is clean, Greenberg said, people can switch to electric appliances. He replaced his gas stove with an electric induction stove. Solar panels have grown in popularity as their costs have fallen and their efficiency has increased. Milton Ross, who has owned a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighbourhood since 1979, no longer has an electric bill because of the panels he had installed on his roof. “My system back in 2015 was around $30,000,” Ross said. “My neighbours don’t do it because of the cost. I used my home equity line of credit, and I could claim the interest as a tax deduction. It just made sense to me. Meanwhile, everything is all paid back, and I don’t have an electric bill anymore.” He has also replaced two gas-fired water heaters with an electric heat pump water heater, which cost him several thousand dollars to buy and have installed. “These things pay for themselves down the road,” he said. Brooklyn Solar Works, which installed Ross’ array, said it had put in place more than 1,000 sets of solar panels in New York City. On average, federal, state and city incentives cover about 60% of the cost, which ranges from $28,000 to $40,000. For most homes, the remaining amount is paid off in electricity savings over about eight years, said TR Ludwig, the company’s founder. He said most of his company’s systems offset about 10,000 pounds of carbon each year and produce about 7,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, about one-quarter of what a family of four would use in a year. “The limiting factor is, real estate is so constrained here,” he said. A suburban home usually has more roof space or a yard for a solar array. Case said her experience buying carbon offsets for a plane trip had led her to research how to reduce her household’s carbon emissions. She consulted the website of a company called Wren, which asks a series of questions — how big is your house, how many cars do you have, how often to you order online — to determine how much carbon her household emitted. “Right now, we don’t look so good,” Case said. “We have two cars. We live in a house. I got into the habit in the pandemic of ordering everything through Amazon.” Still, even with an above-average rating for carbon emissions, she said, the offset costs only $35 a month. Greenberg said some things mattered more than others. Using paper straws and LED light bulbs is not a huge way to reduce your carbon footprint. But steering clear of bottled water does help, since it takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce the world’s plastic water bottles each year. “It’s always good to do something rather than nothing,” he said. “The problem is, sometimes we’re doing a lot of self-soothing when we buy some LED light bulbs. The real beast in our home lies beyond light bulbs.” Case said she would feel better when she and her family moved to Brooklyn this summer and got rid of one car and started walking more in their neighbourhood. She is also committed to buying things locally and not ordering them online. “A lot of people tell me it doesn’t matter, that it’s too late,” she said. “That might be true. But I still think there’s value to doing the right thing.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said much of the melting will take place within a decade, although the winter ice will stay for hundreds of years. The changes will mean the top of the Earth will appear blue rather than white when photographed from space and ships will have a new sea route north of Russia. Scientists say evidence of melting Arctic ice is one of the clearest signs of global warming and it should send a warning to world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December for UN talks on a new climate treaty. ""The data supports the new consensus view -- based on seasonal variation of ice extent and thickness, changes in temperatures, winds and especially ice composition -- that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within about 20 years,"" Wadhams said in a statement. ""Much of the decrease will be happening within 10 years."" Wadhams, one of the world's leading experts on sea ice cover in the North Pole region, compared ice thickness measurements taken by a Royal Navy submarine in 2007 with evidence gathered by the British explorer Pen Hadow earlier this year. Hadow and his team on the Catlin Arctic Survey drilled 1,500 holes to gather evidence during a 450km (280 miles) walk across the Arctic. They found the average thickness of ice-floes was 1.8 metres, a depth considered too thin to survive the summer's ice melt. Sometimes referred to as the Earth's air-conditioner, the Arctic Sea plays a vital role in the world's climate. As Arctic ice melts in summer, it exposes the darker-coloured ocean water, which absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it, accelerating the effect of global warming. Dr Martin Sommerkorn, from the environmental charity WWF's Arctic programme, which worked on the survey, said the predicted loss of ice could have wide-reaching affects around the world. ""The Arctic Sea ice holds a central position in our Earth's climate system. Take it out of the equation and we are left with a dramatically warmer world,"" he said. ""This could lead to flooding affecting one-quarter of the world's population, substantial increases in greenhouse gas emissions .... and extreme global weather changes."" Britain's Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the research ""sets out the stark realities of climate change"". ""This further strengthens the case for an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen,"" he added.",0
" India must ban incandescent light bulbs in favour of more energy efficient light sources, environmental group Greenpeace said on Monday, adding the ban would cut the nation's greenhouse gas emissions by four percent. Currently contributing to around three percent of total global emissions, India is already amongst the world's top five polluters, along with the United States, China, Russia and Japan. Experts say the populous Asian nation's carbon emissions, like those of China, are set to rise steeply due to its rapid economic development. ""With India's growing population and ambitious economic plans, carbon emissions will rise to three times more than current levels by 2050,"" K. Srinivas, Greenpeace's climate change campaigner, told a news conference. ""It is therefore essential that India looks at becoming more energy efficient. And one way of doing this is through replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights or CFLs which use much less energy and will cut emissions by four percent."" Experts say unchecked greenhouse gas emissions could see temperatures rising between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) in the 21st century. The Indian subcontinent is expected to be one of the most seriously affected regions in the world by global warming, which will mean more frequent and more severe natural disasters such as floods and droughts, more disease and more hunger. Srinivas said CFLs -- although eight times more expensive than the yellow incandescent bulbs that have been in use virtually unchanged for 125 years -- use 80 percent less energy and would save households and industries money. Approximately 20 percent of electricity generated in India is consumed by lighting, he said, adding that switching to CFLs would also help address the country's growing power needs. In February, Australia announced it would be the first country to ban the light bulbs, saying they would be phased out within three years. However, there are concerns about the mercury content in CFLs by environmentalists, who say disposing of them could present serious health risks due to the toxicity of the heavy metal. Global demand for CFLs remains relatively low, accounting for only 10 percent of the world's market share in light sources. India uses 640 million incandescent light bulbs every year compared to 12 million CFLs, Greenpeace said.",0
"SINGAPORE, Jul 11, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Rising seas, a rapid weakening of the Indian monsoon and spiralling costs of adapting to a warmer, drier world are just some of the looming risks from rapid climate change, a report for the Australian government says. The report, ""Climate change 2009, faster change and more serious risks"", examines the rapid progress of climate change science in recent years and the growing threats that face billions of people around the planet. Rising temperatures, drought and long-term drying out of farmlands in Australia, Africa, the United States, acidifying oceans and rapid switches in weather patterns all threaten to undermine societies and cost billions in damage. ""Part of the reason for suggesting that the risks are higher than we thought is that the climate system appears to be changing faster than we thought likely a decade ago,"" the report's author Will Steffen told Reuters on Friday from Canberra, Australia. The report was written for the Department of Climate Change and comes five months before a major U.N. meeting that aims to seal a broader pact to fight global warming. (The report is available here) Many scientists have revised upwards their projections for the pace of global warming since United Nation's Climate Panel issued a major report in 2007, underscoring the increased focus on understanding the risks from climate change. Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, said drought and long-term drying out of farmlands and water catchment areas will likely cause costs to spiral as societies try to adapt. ""I think there are risks that are potentially more important. One is drought and drying risk and not just in Australia but in other parts of the world where that appears to be linked to climate change. That's going to affect water resources, it's affecting it now,"" he said. He said there was now evidence of climate change being linked to the drying trends in major agricultural regions of Victoria state and southern South Australia. Evidence was much stronger for the grain-growing area of south-west of Western Australia. SEA LEVEL Sea level was less of a risk in the medium-term. ""Whereas sea level rise, unless there is a really fast, catastrophic event in West Antarctica, we're not going to see huge changes till the second half of the century at least,"" he said referring to a major collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Potentially greater threats were abrupt changes to the ocean and atmosphere that led to irreversible switches in weather or ocean patterns, so-called ""tipping points"". ""An example is the Indian monsoon. According to some models, that could switch into a drier mode in a matter of years,"" he said. More than a billion people in South Asia rely on the monsoon for agriculture and water supplies. Steffen pointed to the accumulation of carbon-dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, in the atmosphere that is now near the upper range of scenarios by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 report. Sea level rise of more than 3 millimetres per year was also tracking near the upper range of the panel's projections. The rate at which global ocean temperatures have been rising had also been revised up by 15 percent, he said. ""I think the reports coming out at various fora are clear the system seems to moving at the upper range of IPCC projections,"" he said. ""That in itself is a major change in thinking. What it says is there's a sense of urgency to getting on top of this issue.""",0
"This study revealed that nerve cells existing deep inside the brains of quails, called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)-contacting neurons, respond directly to light.These neurons are involved in detecting the arrival of spring and thus regulate breeding activities in birds.""The mechanism of seasonal reproduction has been the focus of extensive studies, which is regulated by photoperiod,"" said Takashi Yoshimura from the University of Nagoya in Japan.""Small mammals and birds tend to breed during the spring and summer when the climate is warm and when there is sufficient food to feed their young offspring,"" he noted.Light sensitive cell hidden deep in the brains of birds, responds directly to light and regulates photo biological functions.The study was published online in the journal Current Biology.",6
"Perhaps most striking is the warning about large productivity losses already being experienced due to heat stress, which can already be calculated for 43 countries. The paper estimates that in South-East Asia alone “as much as 15% to 20% of annual work hours may already be lost in heat-exposed jobs”. And that figure may double by 2030 as the planet continues warming − with poor manual labourers who work outdoors being the worst affected. The release of the papers on July 19 coincided with the start of a conference on disaster risk reduction, held in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and jointly sponsored by the International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and the UN Development Programme. The aim was to alert delegates to the already pressing scale of the problem and the need to take measures to protect the health of people, and to outline the economic costs of not taking action. Substantial health risks In an introduction to the six-paper collection, UNU-IIGH research fellows Jamal Hisham Hashim and José Siri write that humanity faces “substantial health risks from the degradation of the natural life support systems which are critical for human survival. It has become increasingly apparent that actions to mitigate environmental change have powerful co-benefits for health.” The author of the paper on heat stress, Tord Kjellstrom, director of the New Zealand-based Health and Environment International Trust, says: “Current climate conditions in tropical and subtropical parts of the world are already so hot during the hot seasons that occupational health effects occur and work capacity for many people is affected.” The worst area for this is problem is South-East Asia, with Malaysia being typical. In 2010, the country was already losing 2.8% of gross domestic product (GDP) because of people slowing or stopping work because of the heat. By 2030, this will rise to 5.9% − knocking $95 billion dollars off the value of the economy. The most susceptible jobs include the lowest paid − heavy labour and low-skill agricultural and manufacturing. Even so, the global economic cost of reduced productivity may be more than US $2 trillion by 2030. India and China are two of the worst affected economies. By 2030, the annual GDP losses could total $450 billion, although mitigation may be made possible by a major shift in working hours, which is among several measures employers will need to take to reduce losses. The list of 47 countries includes many in the hottest parts of the world, but countries in Europe − among them, Germany and the UK − are also on the list, along with the US. One of the side-effects of this increased heat is the demand for cooling, which is placing a major strain on electricity infrastructure. Dr  Kjellstrom notes that the additional energy needed for a single city the size of Bangkok for each 1°C increase of average ambient temperature can be as much as 2,000 MW, which is more than the output of a major power plant. The rising demand for cooling also contributes to warming the world. Air conditioners not only pump heat out directly, the electricity required is typically produced by burning fossil fuels, adding to atmospheric greenhouse gases. People acclimatised to air conditioning also become less heat tolerant, further increasing demand for cooling. But heat stress is only one of the problems addressed by the papers. From 1980 to 2012, roughly 2.1 million people worldwide died as a direct result of nearly 21,000 natural catastrophes, such as floods, mudslides, drought, high winds or fires. The number of people being exposed to disasters has increased dramatically – in cyclone-prone areas, the population has grown in 40 years from 72 million to 121 million. The papers also say: “Disastrously heavy rains can expand insect breeding sites, drive rodents from their burrows, and contaminate freshwater resources, leading to the spread of disease and compromising safe drinking water supplies. “Warmer temperatures often promote the spread of mosquito-borne parasitic and viral diseases by shifting the vectors’ geographic range and shortening the pathogen incubation period. Combination of disasters “Climate change can worsen air quality by triggering fires and dust storms and promoting certain chemical reactions causing respiratory illness and other health problems. They say that central and south China can anticipate the highest number of casualties from this combination of disasters that will befall them as a result of continuing climate change. This knowledge may help to explain why China has been so pro-active in tackling global warning in the last year. The authors underline the fact that fast-rising numbers of people are being exposed to the impacts of climate change, with much of the increase occurring in cities in flood-prone coastal areas or on hills susceptible to mudslides or landslides. Especially vulnerable are people living in poverty, including about one billion in slums. Urban planners, the authors say, can help by designing cities “in ways that enhance health, sustainability, and resilience all at once” – for example, by incorporating better building design, facilitating a shift to renewable energy, and fostering the protection and expansion of tree cover, wetlands and other carbon sinks. The delegates at the conference will be discussing ways to better prepare for and create warning systems to improve disaster response. They will also be recommended to take steps to reduce casualties by enhancing drainage to reduce flood risks and by strengthening healthcare, especially in poor areas.",3
" Vladimir Putin took the oath as Russia's president on Monday with a ringing appeal for unity at the start of a six-year term in which he faces growing dissent, economic problems and bitter political rivalries. Parliament is expected to approve to his ally Dmitry Medvedev, 46, as prime minister on Tuesday, completing a job swap that has left many Russians feeling disenfranchised two decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Outside the Kremlin's high red walls, riot police prevented protests by rounding up more than 120 people, including men and women in cafes wearing the white ribbons symbolising opposition to Putin, a day after detaining more than 400 during clashes. But in the Kremlin, 2,000 dignitaries applauded Putin's every step down the red carpet into a vast hall with gilded columns, the throne room of tsars, where he was sworn in with his right hand resting on the red-bound Russian constitution. ""We will achieve our goals if we are a single, united people, if we hold our fatherland dear, strengthen Russian democracy, constitutional rights and freedoms,"" Putin said in a five-minute speech after taking the oath for the third time. ""I will do all I can to justify the faith of millions of our citizens. I consider it to be the meaning of my whole life and my obligation to serve my fatherland and our people."" The Kremlin's bells pealed, and the national anthem blared at the end of a ceremony which was followed by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church blessing Putin and the president taking charge of the nuclear suitcase. Although he has remained Russia's dominant leader for the past four years as prime minister, Putin, 59, has now taken back the formal reins of power he ceded to Medvedev in 2008 after eight years as president. AUTHORITY WEAKENED Putin is returning with his authority weakened by months of protests that have polarised Russia and left the former KGB spy facing a battle to reassert himself or risk being sidelined by the business and political elites whose backing is vital. ""We want to, and we will, live in a democratic country,"" Putin declared, evoking patriotic images of Russia as a great nation and urging people to show a sense of responsibility and national pride to make the country stronger. Putin made no mention of the protest movement in his speech and no promises of political reform in a series of decrees he signed after the ceremony, most of them focused on economic goals and efforts to improve living standards. Despite his pledge, riot police, nervous after battling protesters at an anti-Putin rally on Sunday, cracked down on the slightest sign of dissent on the streets of central Moscow, many of which were almost empty. At least 22 protesters were led away when a crowd of more than 100 started shouting ""Russia without Putin"" near two luxury hotels 500 metres (yards) from the Kremlin. ""This shows that Putin is scared of dissatisfied citizens. Although there are not so many of us, there are not so few either,"" said 18-year-old student Pavel Kopilkov. Dozens of others were detained by police on a boulevard near the route of Putin's motorcade to the ceremony, including some who had been sitting outside a French bistro wearing the white ribbon of protest on their jackets and coats. A Reuters correspondent saw tables and chairs being overturned as the people were hauled away. ""This is shameful. This is not how you celebrate a holiday - this is how you celebrate seizing power,"" liberal opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said shortly before he was detained. Moscow police said a total of 120 had been detained for staging unsanctioned pickets and most would soon be released, but several more people were detained trying to protest after police gave that number. In Putin's hometown of St Petersburg, police detained a few protesters in a crowd of dozens on the central Palace Square. PUTIN UNDER PRESSURE Although the protests, sparked by allegations of electoral fraud, had lost momentum before Sunday's rally, they have given birth to a civil society that will press on with attempts to undermine Putin's authority by contesting local elections. Many of the protesters are angry that Putin is extending his 12-year domination of Russia and fear he will stifle political and economic reform in his third term as president. He is under pressure to show he can adapt to the new political landscape. Few think he has changed much, if at all. He has eased up on the choreographed macho antics that long burnished his image in Russia, such as riding horseback barechested and shooting a tiger with a tranquiliser gun. Harder to shake off will be his habit of seeking total control, as political rivals begin to gain status and a rising middle class demands more political freedom. He has to quell rivalries between liberals and conservatives battling for positions in the new cabinet under Medvedev, who is swapping jobs with Putin. The outcome of the struggle could help determine how far reforms go to improve the investment climate. The $1.9 trillion economy is in better shape than that of most European countries, but is vulnerable to any drop in the price of oil, the main export commodity. The budget is under pressure from Putin's lavish pre-election spending promises. Putin has said he wants to attract more foreign investment by improving the business climate, reduce corruption and red tape, and end Russia's heavy dependence on energy exports. He called for the creation of a ""new economy"" in the speech and reiterated those goals in economic decrees signed on Monday, but critics say he has had plenty of time to tackle the persistent problems in his years in power. He set out aims on a range of issues in other decrees, from higher wages for teachers and other state workers to better weapons for the military and a decrease in Russia's death rate. As in the past, he is likely to use tough anti-Western rhetoric on foreign policy to drum up support if times get tough in Russia. But he never yielded his strong influence over foreign policy as premier, so a major policy shift is unlikely. Putin struck familiar chords in a decree on foreign policy, emphasising opposition to interferece in the internal affairs of sovereign states and saying Moscow wants ""strategic"" ties with the United States but will not tolerate meddling.",2
"Wealthy nations are under ever-greater pressure to deliver on an unmet pledge, made in 2009, to send $100 billion a year to help finance an adequate response by developing countries to rising global temperatures as the world prepares for COP26. ""This $100 billion that the advanced economies are talking about actually for innovation in climate finance, you know, it's a drop in the ocean,"" KV Subramanian told Reuters. ""I think their commitment needs to be much greater."" Even though India has not yet committed to a net-zero emission target year, Asia's third largest economy will keep adding renewables to its energy mix and push industries to see the benefit of using cleaner fuels, he said. Subramanian said the government was creating incentives for firms to pursue cleaner energy, without which net zero is just ""talk without actually the actions happening."" COAL FIRED PLANTS India has installed over 100 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy, which accounts for over 25% of its overall capacity. The energy hungry nation plans to increase its green energy capacity to 450 GW by 2030. India will do everything that is necessary to attain average annual economic growth of over 7 percent and coal fired plants will be part of the mix, he said. India is the world’s third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States and thus is vital in the fight against climate change, currently focused on reaching global net zero emissions by mid century or thereabouts. The COP26 summit is seen as a crucial chance to wring out ambitious enough commitments from governments to stop global warming spiralling beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius - the limit that scientists say would avoid the worst impacts of climate change. China has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060 while US President Joe Biden has promised to cut US emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Earlier this year Reuters, citing sources, reported that India was unlikely to bind itself to a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goal by 2050.",0
" Industrialised nations have broken promises to alleviate poverty and provide better health and education, leading to the deaths of millions of people in poorer nations, Oxfam International said on Thursday. Group of Eight (G8) nations had fallen far short of meeting a $50 billion funding pledge made at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland two years ago, said Oxfam, an independent group that works to fight poverty. ""In the past two years, overall progress has fallen far short of promises. The cost of this inaction is millions of lives lost due to poverty,"" Oxfam said in a report ahead of a meeting of G8 leaders in the German resort of Heiligendamm. German Chancellor Angela Merkel will host the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States at the June 6-8 summit, which will focus on climate change, African poverty and economic cooperation. Oxfam said that promises made at the summit in Scotland to increase international aid by $50 billion by 2010 could fall $30 billion short if the current rate of donations continued. Industrialised nations were also failing to provide the billions of dollars needed by poor countries to help them adapt to the challenges of climate change. ""They are providing just a few million and diverting these small amounts from existing aid budgets,"" the statement said. Germany should use the summit to push for further debt cancellation for poor countries and more HIV/AIDS medication for women and children, Oxfam said.",0
"The small Himalayan state of Sikkim on India's border with Tibet was declared fully organic in 2016 after phasing out chemical fertilisers and pesticides and substituting them with sustainable alternatives. Sikkim's experience shows that ""100 percent organic is no longer a pipe dream but a reality,"" said Maria-Helena Semedo, deputy director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which co-organises the Future Policy Awards. The awards have previously honoured policies combating desertification, violence against women and girls, nuclear weapons and pollution of the oceans. This year's was for agroecology, which includes shunning chemicals, using crop residues as compost, planting trees on farms and rotating crops to improve the soil and protect against pests. Proponents say agroecology could increase farmers' earnings and make farms more resilient to climate change as erratic rainfall and extended dry periods hamper food production. Tourism numbers in Sikkim rose by 50 percent between 2014 and 2017, according to the World Future Council, another co-organiser. ""Sikkim sets an excellent example of how other countries worldwide can successfully upscale agroecology,"" said Alexandra Wandel, director of the World Future Council. ""We urgently need to shift to more sustainable food systems. Agroecology is absolutely vital to make our food systems sustainable and inclusive,"" she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email. The second prize was split three ways, with Brazil honoured for a policy of buying food for school meals from family farms; Denmark for a successful plan to get people buying more organic food, and Ecuador's capital Quito for boosting urban gardening. The prizes honour ""exceptional policies adopted by political leaders who have decided to act, no longer accepting widespread hunger, poverty or environmental degradation,"" added FAO's Semedo.",0
"Australian climate finance expert Howard Bamsey announced he was stepping down as executive director of the GCF at the end of the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea, the GCF said in a statement. The GCF, whose South Korean headquarters opened in 2013 with backing from almost 200 nations, aims to help poor nations cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt their economies to heatwaves, storms and rising seas. But it has been bogged down by disputes between rich and poor nations about how and where to invest. ""This has been a very difficult and disappointing board meeting for all of us, but most importantly for those people who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts, and who depend on the activities of the Fund,"" GCF chair Lennart Baage said in a statement. The meeting had ""challenging and difficult discussions between Board members"", the GCF said in a statement. A GCF spokesman said Baage declined further comment. The meeting failed to add to its portfolio of 76 projects worth $3.7 billion, which range from promoting rooftop solar energy in India to helping Colombia safeguard wetlands. The fund, which won initial pledges from developing nations totalling $10.3 billion in 2014, including $3 billion from the United States, has been plagued by red tape and suffered last year when Trump said it was a waste of US taxpayer dollars. Trump halted US contributions as part of his decision to quit the 2015 Paris climate agreement. That cut the GCF to $8 billion, since former president Barack Obama had paid $1 billion of the planned $3 billion. The GCF did not give a reason for Bamsey's departure, which was effective immediately, but Baage said he had done an ""exceptional job"" since taking over in 2016. As part of the Paris agreement, rich nations pledged to raise total climate finance, from both private and public sources, to $100 billion a year by 2020 and to raise it further in the 2020s.",0
"A New Year's eve address by Bongo ""reinforced doubts about the president's ability to continue to carry out of the responsibilities of his office,"" said Lieutenant Kelly Ondo Obiang, who described himself as an officer in the Republican Guard and leader of the self-declared Patriotic Movement of the Defence and Security Forces of Gabon. In a video circulating on social media, Ondo Obiang is seen in a radio studio wearing military fatigues and a green beret as he reads the statement, which was broadcast at around 4:30 a.m. local time (0530 GMT). Two other soldiers with large assault rifles stand behind him. Ondo Obiang said the coup was being carried out against ""those who, in a cowardly way, assassinated our young compatriots on the night of August 31, 2016,"" a reference to deadly violence that erupted after Bongo was declared the winner of a disputed election. A source close to the government said there were gunshots around the national television station, but that the plotters appeared to be a small group of soldiers. A spokesman for the presidency told Reuters he would make a statement shortly. Bongo, 59, was hospitalised in October in Saudi Arabia after suffering a stroke. He has been in Morocco since November to continue treatment. In his speech on New Year's, Bongo acknowledged health problems but said he was recovering. He slurred some of his words and did not move his right arm, but otherwise appeared in decent health. The Bongo family has ruled the oil-producing country for nearly half a century. Bongo has been president since succeeding his father, Omar, who died in 2009. His re-election in 2016 was marred by claims of fraud and violent protest. Bongo won re-election in 2016 by fewer than 6,000 votes, sparking deadly clashes between protesters and police during which the parliament was torched. The European Union said it found anomalies during the election in Bongo’s stronghold province of Haut-Ogooue, where he won 95 percent on a 99.9 percent turnout.",2
" Rivers in some of the world's most populated regions are losing water, many because of climate change, researchers reported on Tuesday. Affected rivers include the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa, and the Colorado in the southwestern United States. When added to the effects from damming, irrigation and other water use, these changes could add up to a threat to future supplies of food and water, the researchers reported in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate. ""Reduced runoff is increasing the pressure on freshwater resources in much of the world, especially with more demand for water as population increases,"" Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who led the study, said in a statement. ""Freshwater being a vital resource, the downward trends are a great concern."" Dai's team looked at records of river flow in 925 big rivers from 1948 to 2004, finding significant changes in about a third of the world's largest rivers. Rivers with decreased flow outnumbered those with increased flow by 2.5 to 1, they said. For instance, annual freshwater discharge into the Pacific Ocean fell by about 6 percent, or 526 cubic kilometers -- about the equivalent volume of water that flows out of the Mississippi River each year. Annual river flow into the Indian Ocean dropped by about 3 percent during the 56-year period, or 140 cubic kilometers. The Columbia River in the U.S. Northwest lost about 14 percent of its volume from 1948 to 2004, largely because of reduced precipitation and higher water usage in the West, Dai's team said. But the Mississippi River drains 22 percent more water because of increased precipitation across the U.S. Midwest since 1948, they said. Annual discharge from melting ice into the Arctic Ocean also rose about 10 percent, or 460 cubic kilometers. ""Also, there is evidence that the rapid warming since the 1970s has caused an earlier onset of spring that induces earlier snowmelt and associated peak streamflow in the western United States and New England and earlier breakup of river-ice in Russian Arctic rivers and many Canadian rivers,"" the researchers wrote. ""As climate change inevitably continues in coming decades, we are likely to see greater impacts on many rivers and water resources that society has come to rely on,"" said NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, who worked on the study.",0
" It's US National Bike to Work Day on Friday and Americans are facing record high gasoline prices, but most commuters will stick to their cars. The combination of gas near $4 a gallon and the annual campaign to get people to pedal to work may prompt a few more people than usual to commute on two wheels. But the majority won't consider the bicycle as a regular means of transport because they simply have too far to go and feel nervous about riding on traffic-choked streets, bicycling advocates and dedicated motorists say. ""It's never just a matter of picking up a few things you could carry on your bike,"" said Crystal Kelson, 33, a nurse and mother from North Philadelphia. ""You need a car."" Kelson said there was no real alternative to her Dodge Charger -- which now costs her $65 a week in gasoline -- even for short trips to the supermarket. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, the number of Americans who bike ""frequently"" -- 110 days a year or more -- fell almost 10 percent in 2007 to 3.7 million people. Similarly, the number of people who ride bikes at least six times a year fell to 35.6 million in 2006, the lowest since the survey began in 1984, from 56.3 million in 1995. Thomas Doyle, vice president of information and research at the association, said the decline was probably due to the aging population, reluctance by parents to allow children to ride bikes and more children using wheeled toys such as scooters and skateboards. The proportion of personal trips made by bike is less than 1 percent, according to the League of American Bicyclists, a Washington-based advocacy group. That compares with 27 percent in the Netherlands and 18 percent in Denmark, both of which have networks of bike-only paths, bike lanes and calm streets where people of all ages can feel safe riding. SIGNS OF A TURNAROUND Still, American bicycle advocates said there are signs the trend could be reversed, prompted most recently by gas prices, and by concerns over climate change, air pollution, energy security and personal health. ""All the indications are that people are looking at cycling and other transportation alternatives, and gas prices are pushing them to do that,"" said Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. Some American cities including Portland, Oregon, and Washington have higher rates of bike use than the national average thanks to bike-friendly infrastructure. In Philadelphia, the jump in gas prices has become the ""tipping point"" for getting more people on their bikes, said Alex Doty, director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. He said bike use in the city rose 25 percent in 2007 and is up 6 percent this year, but only 1.4 percent of personal trips in Philadelphia are made by bike, compared with 30 percent in Amsterdam. Jesse Gould, a salesman at Assenmacher's Cycling Center in Flint, Michigan, said more people are buying bikes for commuting. ""Gas prices give them a kick, but the big thing that makes them start riding to work is that they see their friends doing it,"" Gould said. Edgar Gil bikes seven miles to work in Washington from his home in Arlington, Virginia, every day. He will be making the trip -- about 60 percent of which is on traffic-free bike paths -- on Bike to Work Day to show seven coworkers how he does it. Gil, 35, said biking saves about $100 a month in bus fares, and, despite the traffic and pollution, he simply likes to ride. ""You enjoy it more, you get to work relaxed,"" he said. ""You have a better day."" Catherine Williams, a retiree, filled her Cadillac with $3.77 gasoline at a BP station in North Philadelphia for a 50-mile (80-km) roundtrip to the doctor's office. She said she uses public transportation when she can, but wouldn't feel safe on a bike. ""This is the U.S. and people will kill you out there riding your bike,"" she said. ""I would not take my life in my hands and ride a bike."" ",0
"With just two weeks left in the campaign, Trump does not hold an edge on any of the most pressing issues at stake in the election, leaving him with little room for a political recovery absent a calamitous misstep by Biden, the Democratic nominee, in the coming days. The president has even lost his longstanding advantage on economic matters: Voters are now evenly split on whether they have more trust in him or Biden to manage the economy. On all other subjects tested in the poll, voters preferred Biden over Trump by modest or wide margins. Biden, the former vice president, is favoured over Trump to lead on the coronavirus pandemic by 12 points, and voters trust Biden over Trump to choose Supreme Court justices and to maintain law and order by 6-point margins. Americans see Biden as more capable of uniting the country by nearly 20 points. Overall, Biden is backed by 50% of likely voters, the poll showed, compared with 41% for Trump and 3% divided among other candidates. Most of all, the survey makes clear that crucial constituencies are poised to reject Trump because they cannot abide his conduct, including 56% of women and 53% of white voters with college degrees who said they had a very unfavourable impression of Trump — an extraordinary level of antipathy toward an incumbent president. His diminished standing on economic matters and law and order is a damaging setback for the president, who for much of the general election has staked his fortunes on persuading Americans that a Biden administration will leave them impoverished and unsafe. But that argument has not managed to move the electorate in his direction. Nor, according to the poll, have Trump’s efforts to tarnish Biden’s personal image and make him unacceptable to swing voters. Fifty-three percent of voters said they viewed Biden in somewhat or very favourable terms, compared with 43% who said the same of Trump. A majority of voters said they saw Trump unfavorably, with 48% viewing him very unfavourably. The margin of sampling error for the poll, which was conducted from Oct. 15 to 18, was 3.4 percentage points. Part of the shift away from Trump on the economy may stem from voters’ urgent hunger for new relief spending from the federal government — which Trump has nominally endorsed but which he has not sought actively to extract from congressional Republicans. Seven in 10 voters, including more than half of Republicans, said they wanted to see a new multitrillion-dollar stimulus program that includes government support for citizens and emergency help for state and local governments. There is also widespread public support for a $2 trillion renewable energy and infrastructure package that Biden has proposed as a form of economic stimulus. Michael Zemaitis, an independent voter in Minnesota, said that he did not have complete confidence in Biden but that he saw him as a clearly superior option to Trump when it came to the pandemic and the economy. “I guess I would say I have 70% confidence in him,” said Zemaitis, 49, who said he believed a Democratic administration would better handle the coronavirus pandemic. “Once that is dealt with, the economy will fall back into line.” Voters have also been unpersuaded by Trump’s insistence, in defiance of public facts, that the coronavirus is receding as a problem. A slim majority of voters said they believed that the worst of the pandemic was yet to come, compared with 37% who said the worst was over. But many voters also seem to be separating their personal well-being from their views on the state of the country. About half said that they were personally better off than they were four years ago, compared with 32% who said they were worse off. However, a clear majority of voters — 55% — said the country as a whole was doing worse than in 2016. Trump retains a few important bastions of support, most notably among white voters without college degrees, who continue to favor him over Biden by 23 percentage points. But that lead is far narrower than the advantage Trump held among less-educated whites in 2016, when those voters preferred him over Hillary Clinton by 37 points. Biden is on track to win with the overwhelming support of women, people of color and whites with college degrees. If women alone voted, the election would be a landslide of epic proportions: Biden is ahead of Trump among female voters by 23 points, 58% to 35%. And unlike four years ago, the Democratic nominee is leading Trump among white women by a formidable margin, 52% to 43%. Kathryn Jorgensen, 51, a registered Republican in Brookfield, Wisconsin, said that she did not vote for Trump in 2016 and would not do so this year. Trump, she said, has been “so divisive” throughout his tenure as president. “The important thing is bringing the country back together and addressing the divisions affecting people like racial equity,” Jorgensen said. A rare spot of welcome news for Republicans came on the subject of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court: While more voters said they would like to see Biden choose future justices, rather than Trump, a plurality of voters also said that the Senate should vote on Barrett’s nomination before the election. Voters were about evenly split on Barrett as a nominee, indicating that the Supreme Court fight had not given a clear electoral advantage to either party. But a sizable number of voters — about 1 in 7 — gave no opinion, suggesting the court fight had not become an all-consuming issue. Forty-four percent of voters supported Barrett’s nomination, 42% opposed it, and the remainder declined to take a position. If Biden win the election, it remains to be seen whether he will be a compelling enough president to meld a broad array of anti-Trump constituencies into a sturdy governing alliance. Cassandra Williams, 21, of Greenville, North Carolina, said she saw Biden as a flawed candidate who might nevertheless be sufficient for the moment. A college student majoring in chemistry, Williams said she hoped he would focus on the coronavirus and climate change at the outset of his presidency. “If his opponent wasn’t President Trump, he would be a subpar candidate,” said Williams, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary race. The poll shows that Trump is facing widespread rebuke because he has not met the great challenge of his presidency. Voters remain deeply concerned about the virus, with 51% of those sampled saying they feared the worst of COVID-19 was still to come, and just 37% saying they believed the worst was over. Among voters over 65, a bloc that has drifted away from Trump, the difference was even starker: Fifty-six percent said they worried the worst was still to come, and only 29% said the opposite. Even more striking was the disconnect between Trump’s cavalier approach toward wearing a mask to guard against the virus and the broad support to mandate the practice in public. Voters supported mandatory mask-wearing, 59% to 39% overall, and among women support for a mandate grew to 70%. Among voters over 65, 68% favoured it, and even about 30% of Republicans said they backed a nationwide requirement. There was also hesitation on taking an eventual vaccine for the coronavirus, with 33% saying they would definitely or probably not take a vaccine after it was approved by the FDA. Biden, if he wins, will find consensus on some of his policy priorities. Two in three voters supported allowing people to buy a health insurance plan through the federal government, a so-called public option, and the same supermajority backed Biden’s $2 trillion plan to increase the use of renewable energy and build energy-efficient infrastructure. Even more voters, 72%, said they backed the sort of package House Democrats have been seeking for months to send to Trump: a $2 trillion stimulus package that would extend increased unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most Americans and provide financial support to state and local governments. In a sign of how broad the support is for additional relief, and the risk congressional Republicans may be taking if they block further spending, even 56% of Republicans said they backed another $2 trillion package. What may prove riskier for Biden and his party, though, is the issue that he has for weeks sought to avoid staking out a clear position on: adding more justices to the Supreme Court. The poll showed that 58% of voters said Democrats should not expand the court beyond nine justices, and 31% said they should. Opposition was even firmer among independents: Sixty-five percent of them said they were against enlarging the court. ©2020 The New York Times Company",0
"The ragpicker of Brooklyn sews in the back, behind a makeshift wall sprouting a riot of scraps. Under the pattern-cutting table there are bins of scraps of scraps, sorted by color (red and yellow and blue and black), and on one wall are shelves of Mason jars containing gumball-size scraps of scraps of scraps; up front are clothing rails and a dressing room canopied by a lavish waterfall of castoff cuttings that flows down onto the floor like a Gaudí sandcastle. The ragpicker of Brooklyn, whose name is Daniel Silverstein and whose nom de style is Zero Waste Daniel, looks like a fashion kid, which he is (or was). He is 30 and tends to dress all in black, with a black knit cap on his head; went to the Fashion Institute of Technology; interned at Carolina Herrera; and even was on a fashion reality TV show. And the ragpicker of Brooklyn would rather not be called that at all. “I prefer to think of it as Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold,” Silverstein said one day in early November. He was on West 35th Street, in the garment district, with his partner and husband, Mario DeMarco (also all in black). They were hauling home sacks of cuttings from their own production run at HD Fashion, which also makes clothes for Rag & Bone and Donna Karan’s Urban Zen line. Silverstein’s straw is more formally known as pre-consumer, postproduction waste, which is a fancy way of saying he works with the fabrics that other designers and costume departments and factories would normally throw out. His gold is streetwear: sweatshirts, pants, T-shirts and the occasional anorak, collaged together from rolls of old fabric, mostly black and gray, often containing brightly colored geometric patchwork inserts of smaller, brighter bits, like an exclamation point or an Easter egg. Those patchwork inserts have been put together from the castoffs of the bigger pieces, and then the castoffs from the inserts are saved and pieced together into mosaic appliqués (the hands from the Sistine Chapel and Earth as seen from above, for example). The appliqués can be custom-made and attached to any piece. Leftovers, all the way. As fashion comes to grips with its own culpability in the climate crisis, the concept of upcycling — whether remaking old clothes, reengineering used fabric or simply using what would otherwise be tossed into landfill — has begun to trickle out to many layers of the fashion world. That includes the high end — via the work of designers like Marine Serre, Emily Bode and Gabriela Hearst as well as brands like Hermès — and the outdoor space, with the Patagonia Worn Wear and Recrafted programs (to name a few). And yet, because there are few economies of scale and even fewer production systems, such clothing remains for many designers an experiment rather than a strategy, and for many consumers, a luxury rather than a choice. Silverstein, whose clothes range from $25 for a patch to $595 for an anorak made from what was a New York City Sanitation Department tent and who works only with fabric that would otherwise be thrown away, is one of several new designers trying to change that. How he got there, with lots of false starts and belly flops, is perhaps as representative as anything of the way fashion may be stumbling toward its future. We make too much, and we buy too much, but that doesn’t have to mean we waste too much. Welcome to the growing world of trashion. Saved by the Dumpster “I came to New York for that fashion dream — what I’d been watching on TV,” Silverstein said a few weeks before his garment district scrap-saving trip. “I wanted that life so badly.” He was sitting in the back of what he calls his “make/shop,” which he and DeMarco renovated in 2017 using materials from Big Reuse, a Brooklyn nonprofit. The make/shop has three sewing machines but no garbage can. Silverstein was born in Pennsylvania, and when he was 10, his parents moved to New Jersey so their fashion-aware son could be closer to New York. Silverstein’s father owned a swimming pool and hot tub supply company, and his mother worked part-time in the business. (She is also a therapist.) As a family, they did some recycling but were not particularly attuned to the environment. Silverstein always knew he wanted to be a designer. When he was 4, he started making clothes for his sister’s Barbies out of tissue paper and tinfoil. By the time he was 14, he was taking weekend classes at FIT and making his friends’ prom dresses. His Damascene moment was more like a series of cold-water splashes. For a senior-year competition for the Clinton Global Initiative, he designed a pair of sustainable jeans, which became his first zero-waste pattern. He didn’t win, but his teacher told him to hold onto the idea. “‘You have something there,’” he recalled the teacher saying. After graduating, he found himself working as a temp at Victoria’s Secret making knitwear. He would scroll through style.com looking at recent runway shows, find a sweater he liked, then create a technical design packet for a similar style for Victoria’s Secret. One of the patterns involved an asymmetric cut with a long triangular piece in front. Because of the irregular shape, the fabric “had an insanely poor yield,” Silverstein said, meaning that only a portion of every yard was used for the garment; almost half was waste. He did the math and realised, he said, “that if this is yielding only 47% per each sweater, and we are cutting 10,000 sweaters, then we are knitting, milling, dying and finishing 5,000 yards of fabric just to throw out.” The next day, he said, he left Victoria’s Secret to focus on a business he and a friend had started based on his zero-waste patterns. They were making classic ready-to-wear — cocktail dresses and suits and such — but with no waste left on the cutting-room floor. One of their first customers was Jennifer Hudson, who wore a turquoise dress that ended up in the pages of Us Weekly. Stores like Fred Segal in Los Angeles and e-tail sites like Master & Muse picked up the line, which was called 100% (for the amount of fabric used), and Silverstein spent a season on “Fashion Star,” ending his tenure as second runner-up. Still, the economics of fashion, in which stores pay after delivery, were working against him. In 2015, after American Apparel — which had bought Oak NYC, a store that was known for its edgy choices and was one of his wholesale accounts — declared bankruptcy, he was left with $30,000 worth of unpaid orders. He decided to quit. Silverstein got a part-time job helping students get their art portfolios together and, he said, “lay on the couch for a while.” Finally he boxed up his studio and threw all of his leftover fabric in a garbage bag. He was set to haul it to a dumpster, only to have the bag break, spilling its contents onto the floor. “I thought, ‘I can’t throw this out; it’s the antithesis of my mission,’” he said. “So I took the afternoon and made myself a shirt and put it on my Instagram. I had maybe 2,000 followers, and probably the most likes I had ever gotten was 95. I posted this dumb selfie of a shirt I’d made out of my own trash because I was too poor to go shopping, and it instantly got 200 likes. It was the most popular thing I’d ever done.” It occurred to him this may be a better way to go. He made “a bunch of scrappy shirts” and became Zero Waste Daniel, his Instagram name (which he had chosen because Daniel Silverstein was already taken). He rented a booth at a flea market and sold them all. Johnny Wujek, Katy Perry’s stylist, bought one. Chris Anderson — a mentor who ran Dress for Success in Morris County, New Jersey, where Silverstein had interned during high school — said she would back him. His father put in some money, too, as did Tuomo Tiisala, a professor at New York University who saw his work at a market. Silverstein got a small space at Manufacture New York, a group incubator in the Sunset Park neighborhood (it disbanded after a year), and made a deal with a factory that supplied the Marshalls chain to pick up its scraps. Fabric dumping, although less discussed than the clothes consumers throw out, is just as much a byproduct of fashion production and just as culpable in the landfill crisis. Reverse Resources, a group that has created an online marketplace to connect factories and designers who want to reuse their scraps, released a study in 2016 that estimated that the garment industry creates almost enough leftover textile per year to cover the entire republic of Estonia with waste. That was a best-case scenario. Worst case would be enough to cover North Korea. At that stage, Silverstein was mostly making sweatshirts, piecing them together by hand, but, he said, “people started making little videos about my work and putting up posts, and I started getting more orders than I could keep up with.” In 2017, he met DeMarco, who worked in hospitality. This year he joined the business full-time. In many ways, social media has also been their door to a customer base. Just as it creates pressure to buy new stuff, it can create pressure to buy new old stuff. Message vs Money “My freshman year at FIT, one of my teachers said there are good designers and there are great designers,” Silverstein said. “Good designers have careers and see their stuff in stores, and great designers change the way people dress. And, perhaps, think about dress.” He was driving a small U-Haul truck. He had spent the morning with DeMarco in FabScrap, a concrete loft in the erstwhile Army Terminal complex in Sunset Park filled with trash bags and storage boxes bulging at the seams with fabric waste. They were on the hunt for 400 or so yards of random black remnants with some stretch. Silverstein doesn’t ragpick in the 19th-century way (the way that gave birth to the term), sifting through garbage on the streets. He picks through giant boxes and metal shelves of castoff fabric rolls and then sews his finds together to make new rolls. He doesn’t really have seasons or shows by a traditional definition, although he flirts with the idea. In 2018, the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge invited him to do a show for New York Fashion Week, and instead of a runway, he decided to do a one-man stand-up routine called “Sustainable Fashion Is Hilarious,” which was more about concept than clothes. The hotel sold tickets online, and all of the proceeds went to Fashion Revolution, a nonprofit that advocates industry reform. In September, he did the same at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan. Silverstein is planning a performance for February at Arcadia Earth, the climate installation museum in downtown New York, which also sells some of his work. Last year the Sanitation Department came calling. It had done a collaboration with designer Heron Preston and was looking for another partner. While Preston saw the opportunity as a way to elevate the role of the sanitation worker in a one-off show, Silverstein saw it as a great partnership for raw material. The department’s dead-stock T-shirts, tents and tablecloths have proved something of a treasure trove for him. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Silverstein was one of the star companies in an American Express showcase on Small Business Saturday. He is also teaming up with a former mentor at Swimwear Anywhere for a line of bathing suits made in Taiwan, which will be his first foray into offshore production. (The scraps will be sent back along with the trunks and one-pieces, which are made from recycled ocean fishing nets.) Recently Lin-Manuel Miranda wore a Zero Waste Daniel sweatshirt at an Amex event. Drag queen Pattie Gonia wore a long mosaic gown based on Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” at the Tony Awards in June and made Vogue’s best-dressed slideshow, albeit without identification. The company has been profitable for a year, Silverstein said, and ships across the United States as well as to Canada, Britain, Brazil and Germany. Now Silverstein is at another turning point. Does he get bigger? Does he train other ragpickers to do what he does? Does he open another outlet? Does he really get in the game? He is not sure. “I can’t clothe the world, and maybe the world doesn’t need me to,” he said. Maybe the drive to clothe the world is part of what created the problem he is now trying to solve in the first place. “When I think about what I want in terms of brand recognition, I would love to see this brand as a household name. But I think that’s very different than dollars. And I don’t want to be any bigger than I can guarantee it’s a zero-waste product or that I feel happy.” He was gathering pieces for a Freddie Mercury mosaic. “Right now,” he said, surveying his mountain of scraps, “I am so happy.” © 2019 New York Times News Service",2
" Australia promised to press on with its carbon trade plan on Tuesday despite the UN climate summit's failure to set emissions targets, but the Copenhagen outcome has cooled chances an early election on climate policy. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the government would consider targets by other countries before finalising domestic targets to curb carbon emissions, blamed for gobal warming. ""We have our target range, we will consider what is put forward by the rest of the world under this agreement, and we will do no more and no less,"" Wong told Australian radio. Australia is the world's biggest coal exporter and the developed world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gas per person, and has promised a broad target to curb carbon emissions by between 5 and 25 percent of 2000 levels by 2020. The accord from the UN climate summit of 193 countries in Copenhagen included no new emissions targets, but agreed that deep cuts were needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. The result is also likely to make it harder for US President Barack Obama to win Congressional support for a cap and trade carbon scheme in the United States. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants carbon trading to start in Australia in July 2011, obliging 1,000 of the biggest companies to buy permits for their carbon emissions and providing a market-based incentive to clean up pollution. But laws to set up the carbon trade scheme have twice been rejected in parliament's upper house, where the opposition has the largest voting bloc, giving Rudd the option of calling an early election on his key climate policy to resolve the deadlock. Rudd plans to re-introduce the carbon trade laws to parliament in February, but the opposition Liberal Party has hardened its stand after electing new leader Tony Abbott, who won the job with the backing of climate sceptics. Abbott has been buoyed by the outcome at Copenhagen, saying the lack of firm emissions targets was a rebuff for Rudd and proved Australia should wait to see what other countries do. EARLY ELECTION COOLS Analyst Rick Kuhn said the results in Copenhagen would now make Rudd cautious about an early election, with the government more likely to wait for a regular poll due in late 2010. ""Climate change is now clearly not the issue to go to an early election on. I think for the time being, it is off the agenda,"" Kuhn, from the Australian National University, told Reuters. Opinion polls continue to show Rudd holds a strong lead and would easily win a fresh election with an increased majority, although analysts expect Abbott's election as opposition leader will see a shift back towards the opposition. Betting agency Centrebet on Tuesday said Abbott's honeymoon period may already be over, with the odds of the government winning the next election narrowing over the past two weeks to $1.19 for a $1 bet from $1.23. Kuhn said Abbott, a blunt speaking social conservative who once studied to become a Catholic priest, would win back votes from traditional Liberal Party supporters, but was unlikely to secure enough support to win an election. ""He can play all sorts of right-wing issues, but unless he has some traction on the economic issues, I don't think he is going to get that far,"" he said.",0
" South Korea's president-elect named the first member of his cabinet on Monday, saying he wants a veteran diplomat and a low-key conservative who is now working on a UN climate change team to be his prime minister. By naming Han Seung-soo as premier, Lee Myung-bak is turning to a proven technocrat who has already served as foreign, finance and commerce minister, to manage the government's policy at home and abroad, analysts said. Prime ministers in South Korea hold little real power but play an important role in coordinating the tasks of various government agencies. Analysts view Han's appointment favourably, seeing him as more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. ""At a time like this, the new government will face some economic difficulties,"" Han said at a news conference. ""But if it eases regulations and investment in the private sector becomes active, I think many of these problems can be overcome."" Conservative Lee, who takes office Feb. 25, won the Dec. 19 presidential election with pledges to rebuild South Korea's economy and improve ties with the United States and Japan, which had been strained by the current liberal government. Han's appointment needs to be approved by parliament, which is controlled by left-of-centre lawmakers.",0
" Computer models have accurately forecast conditions on Mars and are valid predictors of climate change on Earth, US and French astronomers said on Tuesday. These computer programs predicted Martian glaciers and other features on Earth's planetary neighbor, scientists found. ""Some public figures imply that modeling of global climate change on Earth is 'junk science,' but if climate models can explain features observed on other planets, then the models must have at least some validity,"" lead researcher William Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute said in a statement. The team's findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's planetary sciences division in Reno, Nevada. Some climate change skeptics, notably US Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, dismiss human-spurred global warming as a hoax. Others accept that Earth's climate is changing, but discount a human cause. Still others, including Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, accept the idea of climate change, but maintain the science is inconclusive. The science of climate change prediction is dependent in part on complex computer models that take into account multiple factors that influence Earth's climate, including the level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Many such models have forecast the globally averaged temperature will rise by 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) this century if greenhouse emissions continue at current levels. Recent global temperature increases support these predictions. On Monday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that September 2012 was tied for the warmest month on Earth in the modern record, and was the 331st consecutive month above the 20th century average. MODELING MARTIAN SNOWS Hartmann, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said he and his team confirmed the earthly computer models' effectiveness by using them to forecast conditions on Mars. New satellite observations of glaciers, ice flows and other features on the red planet showed that the models' predictions corresponded with what was on the Martian surface, Hartmann said in a telephone interview. One key difference between Earth and Mars is their tilt, he said. Earth's axis is fixed, with very small variations, at 23.5 degrees, held steady by the gravitational pull of our moon. This tilt is responsible for changing seasons as Earth moves through the year, alternately tipping its northern and southern hemispheres toward the sun. Mars lacks a big moon to stabilize its tilt, and its rotational axis can vary as much as 70 degrees toward the sun. When that happens, polar ice evaporates and puts moisture into the Martian atmosphere, which dumps snow, ice and ultimately glaciers in Mars' mid-latitudes. The last time this happened, astronomers say, was between 5 million and 20 million years ago. Factoring in the planet's varying tilt, topography, atmosphere and other information, the climate models forecast specific regions for massive snowfalls, and the remnants of those snowfalls are right there, Hartmann said. So are ice flows and other features, viewed by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. ""We do have a lot of public figures, in our country particularly, saying that the global climate modeling studies have very little value,"" Hartmann said. ""If the global climate modeling people can run these models on Mars and we actually see things that come out of the model on another planet, then the climate modeling people must be doing something right.""",0
" Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the UN panel on climate change that won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore, said on Friday he was overwhelmed by the news. ""I can't believe it, overwhelmed, stunned,"" Pachauri told reporters and co-workers after receiving the news on the phone at his office in New Delhi. ""I feel privileged sharing it with someone as distinguished as him,"" he added, referring to former US Vice President Gore. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year made the strongest ever link between mankind's activities and global warming -- gaining widespread publicity around the world. ""I expect this will bring the subject to the fore,"" he said. ",0
" President George W Bush on Tuesday urged Congress to give his new Iraq plan a chance in his State of the Union speech, saying it is not too late to shape the outcome in Iraq. He also sought to push a domestic agenda, including plans to address climate change, create a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants and expand health care for Americans. Following are some reactions to the speech: SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL, SENATE MINORITY LEADER AND KENTUCKY REPUBLICAN ""Americans want to see success in Iraq. We are not a country that shies from challenges. I think the president should be given a chance to carry out his plan for a secure Iraq."" SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM, SOUTH CAROLINA REPUBLICAN, MEMBER OF SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE ""I completely agree with President Bush that the outcome in Iraq is part of the overall war on terror. Success in Iraq with a functioning democratic government will empower moderates throughout the Mideast. Failure in Iraq will lead to regional chaos. SENATOR HARRY REID, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER AND NEVADA DEMOCRAT, NANCY PELOSI, HOUSE SPEAKER AND CALIFORNIA DEMOCRAT, IN JOINT STATEMENT ""Unfortunately, tonight the president demonstrated he has not listened to Americans' single greatest concern: the war in Iraq. The overwhelming majority of Americans, military leaders, and a bipartisan coalition in Congress oppose the president's plan to escalate the war."" ""While the president continues to ignore the will of the country, Congress will not ignore this president's failed policy. His plan will receive an up-or-down vote in both the House and the Senate, and we will continue to hold him accountable for changing course in Iraq."" SENATOR JOHN KERRY, MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRAT AND 2004 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ""The President missed a golden opportunity tonight to admit that he made a mistake in Iraq and to share with the American people a plan for gradually removing our troops and allowing the Iraqis to solve the political crisis in Iraq."" SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY, MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRAT, CHAIRMAN OF SENATE HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR AND PENSIONS COMMITTEE: ""The President has laid out a vision of comprehensive immigration reform that includes genuine enforcement of immigration laws; creation of an employment program that would meet the needs of our economy; establishment of a path to citizenship for the millions of immigrants who have roots in our country; and integration of immigrants into American life through civic education and English language training."" ""We can agree with the principles the President has put forth and we look forward to working with the administration and our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to enact a comprehensive bill."" SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, ILLINOIS DEMOCRAT AND POSSIBLE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ""The President offered some serious proposals tonight on two issues -- energy and health care -- that we all agree must be addressed. But the last election proved that politics-by-slogan and poll-tested sound bites aren't going to cut it with the American people anymore, and that's why the real test of leadership is not what the president said to Congress tonight, but how he works with Congress to find real solutions to the problems we face. ROBERT LIEBER, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ""I thought it was a civil and sober speech in which the president made the case for his Iraq policy as an integral part of a 'generational struggle.'"" ""He was mainly on foreign policy side making the case for his Iraq strategy and the specific initiatives he referred to -- the main one of course is the increase of 20,000 troops in Iraq now -- and it is an initiative which Congress is, practically speaking, not likely to be able to do anything about even if a majority of members of Congress disagree with that."" JON ALTERMAN, DIRECTOR OF MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ""Where I saw something new was on the domestic side, rather than on the foreign policy side. On the foreign policy side he fell into the familiar pattern of 'al Qaeda wants it, it must be bad, and if we want it, then al Qaeda must not want it.' I don't think that's how the world works. Part of the problem is that the president doesn't seem to recognize that some of what alienates people is what we do, and it doesn't just alienate extremists but it alienates people in the middle. KEN WARREN, ST LOUIS UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR ""Generally I think that he did a pretty good job under the circumstances but his circumstances are so pathetic. He didn't say anything to rally anyone or turn the numbers around for him with the American people. It was old hat stuff. We've heard it all before ... with a Congress not really behind anything he said."" JOHN STREMLAU, HEAD OF THE PEACE PROGRAMS AT THE CARTER CENTER ""It was all gain and no pain, the rhetoric and reality part company. If I was in a foreign country I would say America is missing in action. He's lost in Iraq and he's bogged down in a domestic salvage operation, trying to do things he should have years ago."" CHARLEY RICHARDSON, CO-FOUNDER OF MILITARY FAMILIES SPEAK OUT ""He says if we leave Iraq it will fall into chaos. I think Iraq is the classic definition of chaos. The idea of putting more US troops into a situation where the presence of US troops is the problem makes absolutely no sense.""",0
"In a video posted on Twitter on Saturday, Thunberg said the environmental impact of farming as well as disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which is believed to have originated from animals, would be reduced by changing how food was produced. ""Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change,"" Thunberg said in the video marking the International Day of Biological Diversity. A focus on agriculture and linking the climate crisis to health pandemics is a new angle for Thunberg who has typically focused her ire on policy-makers and carbon emissions from fossil fuels. ""The climate crisis, ecological crisis and health crisis, they are all interlinked,"" she said. Thunberg said the spillover of diseases from animals to humans was caused by farming methods, adding that a move to a plant-based diet could save up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 each year. The World Health Organisation has said the coronavirus was probably transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, while scientists say 60percent of the infectious human diseases that emerged from 1990 to 2004 came from animals. Meanwhile, demand for alternatives to regular meat is surging worldwide due to concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment. More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029. The Global Center on Adaptation, which works to accelerate climate resilience, said in January climate change could depress global food production by up to 30 percent, while rising seas and more intense storms could force hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities out of their homes.",2
"Four years after Sri Lanka's army crushed the Tamil Tiger guerrilla army and ended a civil war that had lasted nearly three decades, Tamils say they are blatantly repressed in Jaffna, the capital of this Indian Ocean island's northern peninsula.Newspaper printing machines have been burned, former rebels say they face extortion and sexual harassment and army spies keep a close eye on political activity. It all makes ethnic Tamils feel they are still seen as enemies of the state.As a summit of Commonwealth nations opens in Sri Lanka's capital on Friday, the nation is under intense scrutiny after a chorus of warnings from the United Nations and the West that its failure to resolve old enmity means it is losing the peace.President Mahinda Rajapaksa defended his government's human rights record on Thursday, saying Sri Lanka had legal procedures to deal with complaints.He and his government say Sri Lanka is on the path to reconciliation, helped by fast economic growth, and bristle at charges of creeping authoritarianism favouring the Sinhalese majority.But some observers warn that, in the long term, the repressive climate and slow progress towards Tamils' demand for more autonomy risks making Rajapaksa's fears of a resurgence in violence a self-fulfilling prophecy.""If it continues to close off avenues of peaceful change, the risks of violent reaction will grow,"" the International Crisis Group said this week in a report entitled 'Sri Lanka's Potemkin Peace: Democracy Under Fire'.For land activist Somasundaram Sugeerthan, the threat beeped onto his phone one Sunday night. It read: ""Hey dog, do you know what will happen to you if you protest? We'll send your body without the head in front of your home.""In the morning, he found a cow's skull on the gatepost of his house. Cows are worshipped by ethnic Tamils like Sugeerthan who follow the Hindu religion on the Buddhist-majority island.Sugeerthan believes the threat came from the army, which still occupies 6,400 acres (2,400 hectares) of prime farmland outside Jaffna despite promises to return it to deed holders after the war ended in 2009.Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya said the army had released over 25,000 acres since the war and more than half of the land still occupied is used for an airport and port.""Even out of that, we are trying to release as much land as possible,"" he said, branding claims of threats by military agents ""false allegations simply to serve one or other agenda"".CLIMATE OF FEAR AND SUSPICIONThe war pitted the army against the ruthless Tiger separatists, infamous for popularising the suicide bomb and striking civilian targets. Its bloody stalemate ended after Rajapaksa launched an assault in 2006 that ultimately wiped the rebels out.The United Nations says tens of thousands of civilians died during the assault, mainly due to army shelling but also because many were used by the Tigers as human shields. It has called for an international inquiry into allegations of war crimes in the final months of the conflict.Land is perhaps the most sensitive issue in post-war Sri Lanka. Tamil leaders believe the government has a strategy to give army-occupied land to Sinhala Buddhist settlers to change the demographic mix.""The reason is the ethnic percentage range,"" Sugeerthan said, barefoot and in a white sarong, among a few dozen protesters symbolically fasting under the watchful eye of police and men with cameras whom he suspected were army intelligence. ""They want to settle the area with non-Tamil army families.""The government denies this, but the army presence and the climate of fear and suspicion in Jaffna spreads mistrust and a belief that the Tamil population is still seen as a threat.""We are not insurgents, we want to make peace, we want a settled life like the people of the south,"" said retired teaching assistant B. Murugesu, who was forced off his land in 1990 and has drifted between half a dozen towns ever since.Peacetime has brought new buildings, smooth roads and gleaming consumer showrooms to Jaffna, a watery peninsula that was cut off from the country and the rest of the world until 2009. But it has not changed attitudes towards many Tamils, especially those with links to the former rebels.""It is an occupational army ... everything is being done to repress the rights of the people, take over their lands, take over economic activities,"" said C.V. Wigneswaran, the newly elected chief minister of the northern province.The airy offices of Uthayan, a leading newspaper in Jaffna, are decorated with gruesome photos of six journalists slain in armed attacks since 2006. The walls are riddled with bullet holes. In April, a group of unknown armed men poured gasoline over the central printing press and set it alight.""There is no chance at all for reconciliation, the government is not inclined to seek a solution,"" said E. Saravanapavan, the owner of the newspaper, which represents the views of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the former political proxy for the Tigers that won the September election.Although the TNA won with a landslide, the new chief minister finds his decisions blocked by the governor, a retired general appointed by Rajapaksa.FORMER FIGHTERS VULNERABLEFormer rebel fighters are especially vulnerable. Viewed with suspicion by the army, even after a government rehabilitation programme, many struggle to find work and are ostracised partly because other Tamils fear harassment for associating with them.They are frequently picked up by intelligence agents and taken into custody. Often money changes hands to stop threats.Human Rights Watch and advocacy group Freedom From Torture have recorded dozens of cases of former fighters now living in Britain who claim they were tortured in custody after the war.Ananthi Sasitharan, the wife of a rebel leader who has been missing since he surrendered at the climax of the war, said women whose husbands disappeared or were killed at that time are sometimes coerced into having sex with army officers.No victim of sexual violence was willing to meet Reuters for this story, citing fears of social stigma and reprisals.One ex-rebel glanced nervously out a window as he recounted how he had been ordered to visit a local military base several times in the last year, and was forced each time to pay bribes.Soldiers in civilian dress he recognises from the base also regularly visit his corner store to demand small payments. He said he had paid a total of $35,000 to soldiers since being released from jail in 2011.Wigneswaran, the new chief minister, says that - so long after the war - there is no need for a robust military presence, and worries about where it will lead.""If you allow this to happen it will definitely lead to some form of violence in the future,"" he said.",2
"HANOI, Tue May 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Asian and European foreign ministers condemned North Korea's nuclear test on Tuesday, and urged Myanmar to free detainees and lift political restrictions as Aung San Suu Kyi defended herself in a controversial trial. As the two-day meeting ended, several diplomats applauded China for taking a strong position on both issues at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) foreign ministers' conference in Hanoi. Beijing is the closest thing that North Korea has to an ally and a strong backer of the junta that runs the former Burma. In a statement, the ministers said they ""strongly urge"" North Korea not to conduct further tests and to comply with UN resolutions, and called on Pyongyang to ""immediately return"" to so-called six-party talks with regional powers aimed at ending its nuclear programme. ""Bearing in mind the need to maintain peace and stability in the region and the international non-proliferation regime, ministers condemn the underground nuclear test ... which constitutes a clear violation of the six-party agreements and the relevant UNSC resolutions and decisions,"" it said. ASEM comprises 44 countries and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) secretariat. North Korea is not a member, but Myanmar is. A separate, more general statement at the end of a two-day meeting said the ministers had discussed the situation in Myanmar ""in light of the concern about the recent developments relating to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi"". ""They called for the early release of those under detention and the lifting of restrictions placed on political parties,"" it added. Carl Bildt, Foreign Minister of Sweden, said that wording went beyond anything previously endorsed by China or Vietnam. ""I think it's a major step forward,"" he said. ""It's a substantial increase on the political pressure on the regime in Burma."" Jan Kohout, foreign minister of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, went a step further in his closing remarks, saying Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was an ""indespensible partner in the dialogue leading to national reconciliation"". ""She should be released immediately and the Burmese government should engage in an inclusive dialogue with all relevant political and ethnic groups,"" he said. The statement also called for more humanitarian assistance to Myanmar and the ministers ""affirmed their commitments to the sovereignty and territorial integrity"" of Myanmar. CHINA'S ROLE Some diplomats sensed that China had adopted a fresh tone on Myanmar and had been constructive on North Korea. ""We can certainly say that they have not been pushing on the brake. I'm not saying that they're pushing on the accelerator either, but they are not holding things up,"" Finland's Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said on Tuesday. He said in discussions on Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi ""did mention political prisoners and he did talk about the dangers of the nuclear test in North Korea. So, the message that we got in the meeting room was loud and clear"". Another senior European diplomat, who declined to be named, said Yang did not mention Suu Kyi by name, ""but he de-facto did"". ""It was a new tone from China on the question of Burma. That, I think, can be said. There's no question about it,"" he said. Yang declined to comment specifically on Tuesday. Asked about the statements, Yang told Reuters: ""It's a consensus"". Last week, after the military junta that rules Myanmar put Suu Kyi on trial, China's foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Myanmar should be left to handle its own affairs. In Beijing on Tuesday he said there had been no change in this position. Myanmar's Foreign Minister Nyan Win declined repeatedly to comment to journalists on the sidelines of the Hanoi meeting, but diplomats said that in bilateral meetings and the larger forum he defended the regime's charges and the trial of Suu Kyi. ""If I'm honest, I think the Burmese regime has miscalculated and has been somewhat taken aback by the force of international reaction,"" said Bill Rammell, Britain's junior foreign minister. The global financial crisis, pandemic flu and climate change were among other issues on the agenda of the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), involving 45 member countries.",0
" Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad on Saturday renewed his attack on his successor, calling him intolerant and asking the people to reject nepotism. The outspoken 81-year-old, in his first political speech after a lull following a heart attack in November, said Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had created a climate of fear within his ruling UMNO party. Speaking at a forum in the southern city of Johor Baru, he also warned Abdullah, whose son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin is an ambitious politician, against forming a political dynasty. ""Don't try to make your son or son-in-law as the PM,"" Mahathir, who in September asked Abdullah to resign, told the 400-strong crowd at a function. ""I hope all Malaysians would oppose any attempts to start a dynasty. In our country anybody can become the PM even the fisherman."" The rally could mark the start of a second round of an Abdullah-Mahathir fight which has unsettled Malaysians as well as foreign investors. Mahathir, who led the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and the country for 22 years until he handed power to Abdullah in late 2003, remains a party member. ""I feel very sad because UMNO has now changed. Today it is not ready to hear what it doesn't want to hear,"" he said. ""There's climate of fear."" Abdullah's aides could not be immediately reached for comments.",1
" The prime minister said on Monday he wanted to lower the average age of his cabinet, a remark that could signal a greater role for young and reformist ministers in a team dominated by a socialist old guard. Prime Minister Manmohan's Singh's comments came ahead of a possible cabinet reshuffle before the winter parliament session begins in November. Several elderly and powerful ministers have been criticised for scuttling new thinking in the government, frustrating Singh's efforts toward rapid reforms, like opening up retail to foreign investors, after last year's resounding election victory. ""I would like to reduce the average age of my cabinet,"" Singh was quoted by the semi-official Press Trust of India news agency as saying after the 77-year-old leader met newspaper and television editors in New Delhi. The Congress party-led government's term has seen the rise of some younger figures like Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who who created a stir last year by suggesting that India could be more flexible in its negotiating stance at the Copenhagen climate change summit. He soon backed down under pressure. Singh's drive for youth is also backed by Rahul Gandhi, 40-year-old son of Congress party head Sonia Gandhi and a likely future prime minister. ""Younger people are more dynamic, they are open to newer ideas and can be more flexible -- all these are things investors will like,"" said DH Pai Panandikar, head of the New Delhi-based private think-tank RPG Foundation. The average age of Singh's cabinet is almost 64 -- old compared with that of Britain at about 51 years or even the United States at just above 57 years. Most ministers heading top ministries are about 70 years old or more. The younger ministers have been in the headlines, for trying to push established norms of policy-framing or even the use of modern technology such as Twitter. But any attempt at building a younger cabinet may mean Singh will only bring in more young faces rather than drop ageing ministers, most of whom remain powerful. He may give more responsibilities to incumbent junior ministers who are young.",0
"But as their call ricocheted around the planet, it only underscored the challenge ahead: getting the world’s biggest polluters and its most vulnerable countries to cooperate against a grave global threat. In unequivocal terms, the new UN report said that the world has been so slow to cut emissions, it was certain to miss one of its basic goals to limit warming. It said atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide had not been this high in at least 2 million years, and the past decade is likely the hottest the planet has been in 125,000 years. And in unusually direct terms, it said that human activity — burning oil, gas and coal — was squarely to blame. The report prompted outrage among some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, whose leaders demanded that rich, industrialised powers immediately reduce their planet-warming pollution, compensate poor countries for the damages caused and help fund their preparations for a perilous future. “What science is now saying is actually happening in front of our eyes,” said Malik Amin Aslam, special assistant on climate change to the prime minister of Pakistan, where temperatures exceeded 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) last year. “It’s like a hammer hitting us on the head every day.” Tensions over the report’s findings are likely to course through negotiations taking place ahead of a major UN climate conference set for November in Glasgow. The report concluded that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by humans burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat. Environmental groups said those findings will bolster international legal strategies to try to hold fossil fuel companies and governments accountable. The report may prove particularly valuable because, unlike previous reports, it focuses extensively on regional effects of climate change. That may allow environmental groups to fashion stronger, more specific legal arguments. “It’s like a turbocharge” for some of the legal strategies that Greenpeace and other organisations have been pursuing in courts for years, said Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International. Earlier this year, Greenpeace successfully sued Royal Dutch Shell in a Dutch court using evidence from an earlier UN report. “I just expect the pace and the scale of the calls for action, whether they be in the courtrooms or on the streets or in the committee hearing rooms, to be clearer louder, bigger than ever before,” Morgan said. Hours after the report was published, demonstrations were being planned for later this month in London and other cities. The report shows that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue at the same levels or are only slightly reduced, the outcome will be continued warming and worsening effects for at least the rest of the century. But if governments make immediate, drastic cuts in emissions, they can stabilise the climate at about 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to preindustrial levels. The Earth has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius. Despite the jolt the report sent through world capitals, it was clear that some of the biggest polluters, including China and the United States, were unlikely to make the kind of immediate pivot away from fossil fuels that scientists say is needed to hold the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius, the higher limit set by the 2015 Paris climate accord, an agreement among nations to fight global warming. Nearly every nation that signed the accord is far off track to meet its commitment. At this point, every fraction of a degree of warming would bring ever more destructive floods, deadlier heat waves and worsening droughts as well as accelerating sea-level rise that could threaten the existence of some island nations, the report said. The United States, which historically has pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country, in April pledged to roughly halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. While that is an ambitious goal, it is slightly below the target enshrined in law by the European Union and significantly below that of Britain. John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, said the UN report showed that “we need all countries to take the bold steps required” to limit global warming to relatively safe levels. Unmentioned was the fact that current US laws and regulations are insufficient to meet its own climate goals. China, the world’s biggest current producer of greenhouse gases, is still increasing its emissions from power plants, transportation and industry. It plans to hit peak emissions by 2030 before starting to cut back until it no longer produces a net increase of carbon dioxide by 2060. The Chinese government didn’t respond to the UN findings. But in a recent talk, the country’s top climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, objected to proposals to set new goals to cut global emissions beyond the level agreed upon by nations in 2015 as part of the Paris climate accord. “As we’ve already achieved this consensus, there’s no need to ignite fresh controversy now over this goal,” Xie told an event organised by a Hong Kong foundation, adding, “Our issue now is taking action and stepping up.” And in India, where emissions per capita are a fraction of those of wealthy nations yet growing at a rapid pace, the government said the UN findings point to the need for industrialised nations to do more. India also has been resistant to new language demanding all nations take stronger action to hold global temperatures to a 1.5 degree Celsius increase, arguing wealthy countries have not yet made good on their own targets. “Developed countries have usurped far more than their fair share of the global carbon budget,” Bhupender Yadav, India’s environment minister, said in a statement. The report “vindicates India’s position that historical cumulative emissions are the source of the climate crisis that the world faces today,” he said. Referring to the report as “a code red for humanity,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres renewed his call for an end to the construction of new coal-burning plants as well as an end to fossil fuel subsidies by governments. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet,” he said in a statement. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents major oil and natural gas producers in the United States, said in a statement that “reducing methane emissions and addressing the risks of climate change are top priorities for our industry.” It added that the industry has already made gains but said, “we have more work to do.” A representative from Shell declined to comment; Exxon Mobil did not respond to a request for comment. For the most vulnerable countries, the report may have given new life to a fight that they have waged with mixed success in recent years to persuade wealthy nations to pay for the climate-change-related damages they are suffering. “What’s happening in the science affects us immediately,” said Tina Stege, a climate envoy for the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a nation of coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, much of which is only about 6 feet above sea level. Wealthier polluting countries need to step up their assistance “not just to protect our future generations, but current generations,” she said. Vulnerable island nations said they require financial assistance for relocation efforts, early warning systems and other critical steps to adapt to a changing climate. Wealthy nations agreed in 2009 to deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 in public and private finance to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition to clean, renewable energy like wind and solar. That promise hasn’t been met. At the same time, poor countries have sought money to address the climate-fuelled disasters happening now. “People are suffering and somebody needs to pay for this,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh. Noting that Germany’s Cabinet recently approved $472 million to help its citizens recover from recent devastating floods, he questioned why nations could not find money for disasters being suffered by the countries that did the least to cause climate change. Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s minister of climate and the environment, sidestepped the issue of whether wealthy nations would agree to pay compensation to vulnerable countries. Europe and the United States have resisted calls for climate compensation to poor nations. “It remains of vital importance that the limited funding should be directed at saving lives, adapting to climate change and also to mitigation efforts,” Rotevatn said. Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa, a climate think tank based in Nairobi, said the UN report predicts a dire future that some are already experiencing. “Those of us who live in Africa have been aware of the urgency of the climate crisis for many years,” he said. “Lives and livelihoods have been shattered. It was time, Adow added, “for us to act on the scientific words.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.",0
"The new Superman, Jonathan Kent — who is the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane — will soon begin a romantic relationship with a male friend, DC Comics announced Monday. That same-sex relationship is just one of the ways that Jonathan Kent, who goes by Jon, is proving to be a different Superman than his famous father. Since his new series, ""Superman: Son of Kal-El,"" began in July, Jon has combated wildfires caused by climate change, thwarted a high school shooting and protested the deportation of refugees in Metropolis. “The idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white saviour felt like a missed opportunity,” Tom Taylor, who writes the series, said in an interview. He said that a “new Superman had to have new fights — real world problems — that he could stand up to as one of the most powerful people in the world.” The coming out of Superman, perhaps the most archetypal American superhero, is a notable moment even in an age when many comics have embraced diversity and are exploring pressing social issues. Batman’s sidekick, Robin, recently came out as bisexual (not Dick Grayson — who was Batman’s partner for over four decades — but Tim Drake, a later replacement; there are multiple Robins just as there are multiple Supermen). And a new Aquaman comic stars a gay Black man who is positioned to become the title hero. It has been a steady evolution for an industry that had moved to censor itself in a number of ways after “Seduction of the Innocent,” a 1954 book by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, raised concerns about sex, gore and violence and suggested a link between reading comics and juvenile delinquency. In one section, Wertham described Batman and Robin as “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” The book helped inspire congressional hearings and led to the creation in 1956 of the Comics Code Authority, in which the comics industry set standards on what comics could depict. The character of Batwoman was introduced that year as a love interest for the Caped Crusader. She eventually fell into obscurity but was rebooted in 2006. (As part of her new backstory, she leaves the military because she refuses to lie about being a lesbian.) One of the earliest mainstream comics to feature gays or lesbians appeared in 1980. It was not a positive portrayal. In the story, Bruce Banner, the alter ego of Marvel’s Hulk, is at a YMCA, where two gay men try to rape him. Things had started to evolve by 1992, when Northstar, another Marvel hero, came out — an event that was praised in an editorial in The New York Times. “Mainstream culture will one day make its peace with gay Americans,” the editorial said. “When that time comes, Northstar’s revelation will be seen for what it is: a welcome indicator of social change.” Though Superman is not the first LGBTQ hero and will not be the last, comics experts said that there was something particularly momentous about Superman coming out. “It is not Northstar, who your aunt has never heard of,” said Glen Weldon, the author of “Superman: The Unauthorised Biography,” and the co-host of the Pop Culture Happy Hour on NPR. “It’s not Hulkling. It’s not Wiccan. It’s not Fire and Ice. It’s not Tasmanian Devil. It is Superman. That counts for something — just in terms of visibility, just in terms of the fact that this is going to attract attention.” There has been some blowback to the recent evolution charted by comics. In August, as rumours about the Superman development began to circulate, a commenter on one website complained that “Marvel and DC have ruined their characters to please the woke mob, who don’t even buy comics.” But others have cheered the news: “It’s nice to see queer superheroes being more mainstream now, I’m very happy to see people like me being the main characters,” a commenter wrote on another site. Weldon said that the changes in comics can lead to more vibrant storytelling. “Any step that can be taken to make the world on the superhero comics page look more like the world outside of it is good,” he said. “That gives you access to more varied stories, more interesting stories, more compelling stories, more different ways of telling stories.” Jonathan Kent took the mantle of Superman alongside his father this year. The Clark Kent version of Superman was introduced in 1938. He married Lois Lane in 1996. Jonathan was introduced in 2015 and — let us skip a lot of comic book shenanigans — spent some time as Superboy before being encouraged by his father to become the new Superman. Jonathan and Jay Nakamura met in an August story during the new Superman’s ill-fated attempt to establish a secret identity and attend high school. Last month, Jay, a budding journalist, met Jonathan’s parents — and was awe-struck by Lois Lane. Jonathan and Jay will share a kiss in a story that will be published next month. This month, readers will discover that Jay has special abilities. “Jay could be the only person in Jon’s life that he does not have to protect,” Taylor said. “I wanted to have a really equal, supportive relationship for those two.” The editors at DC were already considering similar lines of the development for the character and were supportive, he said. “I’ve always said everyone needs heroes, and they deserve to see themselves in their heroes,” Taylor said. “For so many people, having the strongest superhero in comics come out is incredibly powerful.”     © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"""The countries most responsible for historic and present-day emissions are not yet doing their fair share of the work,"" Johnson told reporters after a Group of 20 summit, before flying to Glasgow for the COP26 meeting. ""If we are going to prevent COP26 from being a failure, then that must change, and I must be clear that if Glasgow fails then the whole thing fails.""",0
" European Union leaders on Friday named former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a past critic of Turkey's EU membership bid, to head a ""reflection group"" to study the long-term future of the 27-nation bloc. The panel was the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a vehement opponent of Turkish accession, who called in August for the EU to create a group of ""wise people"" to consider Europe's final borders. The mandate has since been changed to look at the future of the region in 2020-2030, focusing mostly on the economic challenges of globalisation. Sarkozy said on Friday the group would study the issue of EU borders, not specifically Turkey. But Sarkozy appeared to have scored a point by stealth with the choice of Gonzalez, a socialist who governed Spain from 1982 to 1996. Spanish newspapers quoted the ex-premier in May 2004 as telling a Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona there were limits to the enlargement of Europe, which should ""stop at the borders of Turkey"" because of social and cultural differences. Asked about those comments, Gonzalez's spokesman Joaquin Tagar told Reuters in Madrid on Friday: ""He was just expressing a theoretical opinion, not taking a definite position on the matter. He was just pointing out the difference between European and Turkish culture."" Pressed to say what Gonzalez's position on Turkey's candidacy was now, he said: ""What he has been saying in recent times is that if the European Union has a commitment to Turkey, it should honour it."" WHERE DOES EUROPE END? The reflection group, which will number no more than nine people, is mandated to look at ""the stability and prosperity of the Union and of the wider region,"" touching on the sensitive issue of EU enlargement. The formulation deliberately left open whether Turkey would be part of the Union or the wider region in 2020-2030. ""We cannot talk about the European project without raising the question of its territory,"" a French diplomat said. The panel will also look at issues such as energy, climate change and justice matters. It is due to report its findings to EU leaders in June 2010. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Jorma Ollila, the chairman of mobile phone giant Nokia , were named as the two vice-chairs of the panel. Some politicians were critical of the choice of a leader from the 1980s to study the EU's future. ""If you ever wanted to see Jurassic Park in reality, then this appointment (of Gonzalez) is just that,"" said Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrat political group in the European Parliament. ""It's not about age, but all three of the panel so far represent old Europe."" But Spain voiced delight at the choice of Gonzalez, who has been canvassed for top European jobs but never received one. ""It's a very happy day for the Spanish people, for Spain, and for Europe,"" Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters.",1
"New Delhi has the worst air quality of all world capitals, but even by its sorry standards Friday's reading was extra bad, as people paid the price for celebrating India's biggest festival in the noisiest, and most smoky way. The Air Quality Index, or AQI surged to 451 on a scale of 500 - the maximum recorded this year - indicating ""severe"" conditions that affect healthy people and seriously impacts those with existing diseases, according to the federal pollution control board's guidance. The AQI measures the concentration of poisonous particulate matter PM2.5 in a cubic metre of air. In Delhi, a city of nearly 20 million people, the PM2.5 reading on Friday averaged 706 micrograms, whereas the World Health Organization deems anything above an annual average of 5 micrograms as unsafe. Airborne PM2.5 can cause cardiovascular and respiratory diseases such as lung cancer. And, in India, toxic air kills more than a million people annually. ""The firecracker ban didn't seem to be successful in Delhi, which led to hazardous pollution levels adding on top of existing perennial sources,"" Sunil Dahiya, Analyst, Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, or CREA said. Every year, either government authorities or India's Supreme Court impose a ban on firecrackers. But the bans rarely appear to be enforced. Making matters worse, Diwali falls in period when farmers in the Delhi's neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana burn the stubble left after harvesting to prepare their fields for the next crop. Stubble fires accounted for up to 35 percent of New Delhi's PM2.5 levels, according to data from SAFAR's monitoring system, which falls under the federal Ministry of Earth Sciences A rare spell of clear skies in October due to intermittent rains and winds had helped Delhiites breathe their cleanest air in at least four years. But during winter months pollution levels surge in northern India, as lower temperatures and a drop in wind speed tend to trap pollutants in the air longer. Sick of the lack of commitment to making the capital more livable, Ambrish Mithal, a doctor at the Max HealthCare hospital in New Delhi, vented his frustration over the deteriorating AQI readings. ""It's terrible for those with allergies and asthma. We will continue to squabble over reasons and are doomed to suffer,"" he wrote in a post on Twitter. Indian governments are often accused of not doing enough to curb pollution, as they prioritise economic growth to lift living standards in the world's second-most populated country. On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow that India would achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2070, but some experts reckoned that target was at least two decades too late.",0
"Swaraj will lead an Indian delegation to Islamabad for talks on Afghanistan, India's foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said on his Twitter page. Top Pakistani foreign affairs official Sartaj Aziz said Swaraj would meet him and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. ""This is a good beginning, that the deadlock that was present has to some extent been removed,"" Aziz, the prime minister's adviser on security and foreign affairs, told reporters. The visit comes after the collapse of talks in August that raised questions about the ability of the nuclear-armed rivals to overcome animosity that has festered since their independence from British rule almost seven decades ago. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sharif resumed high-level contacts with a brief conversation at climate change talks in Paris last week and their national security advisers met in Bangkok on Sunday. Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, said the foreign minister's visit showed the Modi government had softened its hard-line stance towards Pakistan after realising that the lack of sustained talks yielded no returns. ""The countries can agree to disagree, but they will have to start talking,"" Sibal said. Taken by surprise, Indian opposition parties questioned the government's on-off approach to talks and a former foreign minister from Modi's party said the policy was being conducted in the shadows. Since taking office in 2014, Modi has authorised a more robust approach to Pakistan, giving security forces the licence to retaliate forcefully along their disputed border and demanding an end to insurgent attacks in Indian territory. Swaraj's visit is the first ministerial-level visit to Pakistan since the then foreign minister, SM Krishna, travelled to Islamabad in 2012, which was before Modi became prime minister. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part. India has for years accused Pakistan of backing separatist Muslim rebels in India's part of Kashmir. Despite considerable evidence, Pakistan denies the accusations and blames India violating human rights in Kashmir and fomenting unrest in Pakistan.",1
" Australia said Tuesday it remained in talks with East Timor over a regional asylum-seeker centre, despite a rejection by the country's parliament which dealt the pre-election policy a severe blow. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Timor's government was still discussing processing Australia's poor Asian migrants -- a major plank of her election strategy which has become mired in difficulty. Australia's first woman leader, who is expected to announce polls within days after ousting the once hugely popular Kevin Rudd last month, was speaking after 34 of Timor's 66 lawmakers voted against the plan. ""This was a vote on a resolution in the East Timorese parliament at a time when the parliament was not well attended,"" she told reporters in Canberra. ""We, of course, are dealing with the East Timorese government. We have officials in East Timor, they were involved in discussions with East Timor yesterday. Those discussions will continue. ""Our focus is on discussions with the East Timor government, and the East Timor government continues to confirm to us that it is open to the dialogue about the regional processing centre, and we're in that dialogue now."" Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is also holding talks on the proposal this week in Indonesia, a major transit point, following criticism that Gillard did not consult widely enough before making her announcement. The prime minister was forced to backtrack last week when she said Timor was only one possible location for the centre, despite earlier indicating it would be built there. The controversy has taken some gloss off the straight-talking, Welsh-born lawyer's image, which had gleamed after she settled a damaging mining tax row just days into her premiership. ""The East Timor solution is totally and utterly sunk,"" said opposition leader Tony Abbott. Australia's ruling Labor Party and opposition have both unveiled tough policies on asylum-seekers, with Greens party chief Bob Brown saying the debate reminded him of 1990s anti-immigration firebrand Pauline Hanson. Gillard's ""Timor Solution"" has won favour with about two-thirds of voters, although a similar number also believes the policy was badly thought-out, according to a poll of voters released this week. The prime minister is also expected to announce a new strategy on climate change this week before calling elections. Australia currently processes asylum-seekers at Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, but a steady flow of refugees has overwhelmed facilities and forced the reopening of centres on the mainland. The arrival of asylum-seekers, mainly from war-torn Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, proved a thorn in Rudd's side after he scrapped the harsh mandatory detention policy of his conservative predecessor, John Howard. Some 2,982 asylum-seekers were intercepted this year until May 19, official figures show, putting 2010 on course to beat the 2001 record of 5,516 arrivals. But Gillard has said the asylum-seekers are only a tiny fraction -- 0.6 percent -- of the world's total, and make up just eight percent of Australia's overall migrant intake. East Timor, a mainly Catholic country of just over a million people, remains aid-dependent more than 10 years after its bloody vote to split from Indonesia. Australia is a major donor and has about 400 peacekeeping troops there.",1
"It has taken weeks for EU countries to
agree on the contours of the measure, and intensive talks will continue over
the weekend before the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, puts a
finalised proposal on paper for EU ambassadors to approve. The ambassadors will
meet Wednesday and expect to give their final approval by the end of the week,
several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process say. The diplomats and officials spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on
the progress of the sensitive talks. The oil embargo will be the biggest and
most important new step in the EU’s sixth package of sanctions since Russia
invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The package will also include sanctions against
Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, which has so far been spared, as well as
additional measures against high-profile Russians, officials said. Barring an unlikely last-minute demand
by Hungary, which has been dragging its feet, the process should be completed
without requiring an EU leaders’ meeting — avoiding the time-consuming effort
of dragging all 27 heads of state to Brussels. The embargo is likely to affect Russian
oil transported by tankers more quickly than oil coming by pipeline, which
could take a matter of months. In both cases, however, it is likely that the
bloc will allow its members to wind down existing contracts with Russian oil
companies as it did with its coal ban, which was given four months to be fully
put in place. Germany’s position has been critical in
finalising the new measure. The country, the bloc’s economic leader, was
importing about one-third of its oil from Russia at the time of the Ukraine
invasion. But its influential energy minister, Robert Habeck, said this week
that Germany had been able to cut that to just 12% in recent weeks, making a
full embargo “manageable.” “The problem that seemed very large for
Germany only a few weeks ago has become much smaller,” Habeck told the news
media during a visit to Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday. “Germany has come very,
very close to independence from Russian oil imports,” he added, but he did not
explain how it was able to accomplish that so quickly. Russia is Europe’s biggest oil supplier,
providing about one-quarter of the bloc’s yearly needs, according to 2020 data
— about half of Russia’s total exports. As the oil embargo is phased in,
officials said the bloc would seek to make up the shortfall by increasing
imports from other sources, such as Persian Gulf countries, Nigeria, Kazakhstan
and Azerbaijan. The embargo, even if softened by a
monthslong phase-in period, is likely to put pressure on global oil prices,
compounding already high energy costs around the world. An idea to lessen the
impact, floated by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week, was to impose
tariffs or a price cap on Russia’s oil instead of an outright embargo. But that
did not gain traction with Europeans, officials said. © 2022 The New York Times Company

",2
"As the coronavirus now stampedes across Britain and much of the world, Johnson is heeding the same principle, spurning the mass closures that have become commonplace across Europe and gambling his political future on a more restrained approach. While countries across Europe have shut schools, sporting events and even restaurants and bars, Johnson has largely kept Britain open, opting for more targeted measures like asking people with respiratory symptoms to stay home. In effect, his government has said that mass closures will not halt the outbreak, and that exposing a large segment of the population will help build immunity and limit future infections. That strategy has startled some epidemiologists, drawn criticism from a former health secretary and political ally, and prompted angry demands that Johnson’s government reveal more of its reasoning. Cases of the coronavirus in Britain, held low for weeks as officials tracked down the contacts of known patients, have now surged, rising to nearly 800 on Friday from fewer than 600 a day before. With testing limited to hospital patients, Johnson said on Thursday that the true number of people infected may be as many as 10,000. President Donald Trump, citing the rising case count, said Friday that he was considering adding Britain to the list of European countries whose citizens are banned from flying to the United States. 
 
 People at Convent Garden in London on Friday, Mar 13, 2020. The New York Times 

“There’s no other country in the world managing the epidemic in the same way,” Francois Balloux, an infectious disease epidemiologist at University College London, said of Britain’s approach. But, he said, “It’s not an insane decision. And it might actually pay off.”  People at Convent Garden in London on Friday, Mar 13, 2020. The New York Times  The government is leaning heavily on scepticism in some scientific circles about the effectiveness of mass closures. Some epidemiologists fear that closing schools only pulls front-line doctors and nurses away from their work, and believe that large events are less dangerous for spreading the virus than more intimate gatherings at bars or at people’s homes. It has also said that the measures it has taken, like asking people with persistent coughs and high temperatures to stay home for a week, will reduce the spread of the virus considerably. But British advisers are also leaning on a more contentious theory: that exposing a large proportion of the population to the coronavirus could help people develop immunity, and put Britain in a better position to defend itself against the virus roaring back next winter. Sir Patrick Vallance, England’s chief scientific adviser, said the government was looking “to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.” Herd immunity, a term usually used to refer to the way mass vaccinations can stop the spread of disease and protect people who are not immune, is not seen by many scientists as a tool to be used against the coronavirus. Vallance has said that it would require roughly 60% of Britons to become infected, creating enough immunity in the population that a second surge in cases next winter would be less severe. But experts said that was an unusual and untested approach, and that it would be impossible to keep older and more vulnerable people from becoming infected too, putting them at a significant risk. They cautioned that the science was unsettled on how quickly people develop immunity to the coronavirus, and for how long. And experts urged the government to show more of the evidence behind its thinking. “Herd immunity means 70% of people or so have been infected,” said Martin Hibberd, a professor of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “In my mind, that’s not a desirable aim. That’s a kind of consequence of the strategy.” Britain’s approach reflects the hyper-rationalist self-image of a prime minister who has not always hewed so closely to scientists in the past, as when he occasionally trafficked in discredited theories about climate change. In this instance, Johnson has fashioned himself as the dispassionate answer to leaders across Europe who have acted more aggressively. 
 
 A woman helps her young daughter put on a face mask as they arrive at London's Heathrow Airport, for their flight on Friday, Mar 13, 2020. The New York Times 

But his government is not immune from public alarm, signalling late Friday night that it would reverse course on at least some aspects of its approach. It told British news outlets that it would ban some mass gatherings, like sporting matches and concerts, starting next weekend, and lay the groundwork for more widespread working at home.  A woman helps her young daughter put on a face mask as they arrive at London's Heathrow Airport, for their flight on Friday, Mar 13, 2020. The New York Times  So far, in the absence of government-mandated shutdowns, private entities in Britain have taken up the slack. Unilever, the British-Dutch consumer goods company, said on Friday that it was ordering all its office-based employees to work from home starting next week. And the Premier League, England’s highest-level soccer league, suspended games until at least next month. Johnson’s government itself moved on Friday to postpone hundreds of local elections and the London mayoral election for a year after a watchdog said the coronavirus would affect campaigning and voting. But Johnson has resisted other measures, like closing schools, restricting mass gatherings, steering people away from restaurants or bars and banning crowds from sporting events. “They’re trying to walk this terrible balance between not alarming the public, not hurting the economy, but making sure you try to flatten this epidemic,” said Roy Anderson, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London. “Is it going to work? I’m not sure, to be honest.” The strategy amounts to a blunt admission by the British government that stopping the coronavirus here was now impossible, and replicating the success of places like Hong Kong that have encouraged more extreme social distancing a futile hope. Instead, Britain is effectively banking that its more modest restrictions will keep the outbreak limited until summer, scientists said. By then, it hopes that the warmer weather will reduce further transmission — though virologists still do not know if that will hold true — and the National Health Service, free of the usual wintertime crowds, will be better able to cope with whomever is infected. “The idea is more to minimise the number of casualties over the long term,” Balloux said, “and that’s completely unique. All other countries are firefighting in the short term.” 
 
 President Donald Trump during a meeting with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, at the White House in Washington, where topics included the coronavirus, Thursday, Mar, 12, 2020 

But the clamour for short-term firefighting has picked up in recent days.  President Donald Trump during a meeting with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, at the White House in Washington, where topics included the coronavirus, Thursday, Mar, 12, 2020  Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, who like Johnson is a Conservative lawmaker, broke ranks and called for more stringent restrictions: banning visitors from nursing homes, encouraging people to work from home and closing schools. “I think it is surprising and concerning that we’re not doing any of it at all when we have just four weeks before we get to the stage that Italy is at,” Hunt said in a television interview. “You would have thought that every single thing we do in that four weeks would be designed to slow the spread of people catching the virus.” Some epidemiologists have also bristled at the government’s reliance on a private firm of behavioural scientists, known as the “nudge unit.” That unit has helped shape the government’s approach to delaying any shutdowns until later in the course of the virus, on the theory that people will get bored of staying at home by the time the outbreak is at its peak and separation is most needed. Helen Ward, a professor of public health at Imperial College London, said the government’s advisers should disclose more of their thinking. “We don’t know the evidence on which the government has made its decisions,” Ward said. She also said the government should consider making stronger recommendations to older people to cut back on their exposure. Johnson discouraged older Britons this week only from going on cruises, though many epidemiologists urge considerably stronger precautions. And Hibberd, of the London School of Hygiene, said the government’s approach may not rely enough on testing. Without knowing whether Britain is suffering a more concentrated outbreak, as in the north of Italy, or whether its death rate is as low as it believes, it is difficult to craft the right response. “If there’s something I feel is missing,” he said, “it’s that they haven’t tested sufficiently.” © 2020 New York Times News Service",0
"All that’s left of this village in Guatemala is their memories. “This is where I live,” said Jorge Suc Ical, standing atop the sea of rocks and muddy debris that entombed his town. “It’s a cemetery now.” Already crippled by the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, Central America is now confronting another catastrophe: The mass destruction caused by two ferocious hurricanes that hit in quick succession last month, pummelling the same fragile countries, twice. The storms, two of the most powerful in a record-breaking season, demolished tens of thousands of homes, wiped out infrastructure and swallowed vast swaths of cropland. The magnitude of the ruin is only beginning to be understood, but its repercussions are likely to spread far beyond the region for years to come. The hurricanes affected more than 5 million people — at least 1.5 million of them children — creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate. Officials conducting rescue missions say the level of damage brings to mind Hurricane Mitch, which spurred a mass exodus from Central America to the United States more than two decades ago. “The devastation is beyond compare,” said Adm. Craig S Faller, head of the US Southern Command, which has been delivering aid to survivors of the storm. “When you think about COVID, plus the double punch of these two massive, major hurricanes back to back — there are some estimates of up to a decade just to recover.” The relentless rain and winds of Hurricanes Eta and Iota downed dozens of bridges and damaged more than 1,400 roads in the region, submerging a Honduran airport and making lagoons out of entire cities in both countries. From the sky, Guatemala’s northern highlands look as though they’ve been clawed apart, with giant gashes marking the sites of landslides. If the devastation does set off a new wave of immigration, it would test an incoming Biden administration that has promised to be more open to asylum-seekers but may find it politically difficult to welcome a surge of claimants at the border. In Guatemala and Honduras, authorities readily admit they cannot begin to address the misery wrought by the storms. Leaders of both countries last month called on the United Nations to declare Central America the region most affected by climate change, with warming ocean waters making many storms stronger and the warmer atmosphere making rainfall from hurricanes more ruinous. “Hunger, poverty and destruction do not have years to wait,” said President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, pleading for more foreign aid. “If we don’t want to see hordes of Central Americans looking to go to countries with a better quality of life, we have to create walls of prosperity in Central America.” Giammattei also requested that the United States grant so-called temporary protection status to Guatemalans currently in the country, so they won’t be deported amid the natural disaster. With hundreds of thousands of people still crowded into shelters in Guatemala, the risk of coronavirus spread is high. Aid workers have found widespread disease in remote communities hammered by the twin storms, including fungal infections, gastritis and flulike sicknesses. “We are facing an imminent health crisis,” said Sofía Letona, director of Antigua to the Rescue, an aid group, “Not just because of Eta and Iota, but also because these communities are completely unprotected from a second wave of COVID.” Just as pressing are the illnesses brought on by a lack of food, potable water and shelter from continuing rain. “What I’m seeing is that the smallest children are the most affected by nutritional disorders,” said Francisco Muss, a retired general helping lead Guatemala’s recovery. With little government support, Guatemalans have had to come up with creative solutions. Near the border with Mexico, people crowd into handmade rafts to cross immense lakes created by the storms. To traverse one river in the east, commuters hop into a wire basket, attached to a zip line where a bridge used to be. 
 
 Food supplies are unloaded from an American military helicopter in the Guatemalan village of Playa Grande on Nov 26, 2020. Hurricanes Eta and Iota displaced hundreds of thousands of people, creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate north and setting up an early test for the incoming Biden administration. Daniele Volpe/The New York Times 

Francisco García swims back-and-forth across a muddy waterway to pick up food for his neighbours.  Food supplies are unloaded from an American military helicopter in the Guatemalan village of Playa Grande on Nov 26, 2020. Hurricanes Eta and Iota displaced hundreds of thousands of people, creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate north and setting up an early test for the incoming Biden administration. Daniele Volpe/The New York Times  “I did this during Mitch,” he said, gesturing toward the crowd of young boys who have gathered to watch him take his fourth trip of the day. “They have to learn.” No one knows exactly how many people in Quejá died in the mudslide, though local officials put the toll at about 100. The Guatemalan government called off the search for the dead in early November. Just a few weeks earlier, the town was celebrating: The monthslong coronavirus curfew had been lifted, and the local soccer league’s championship tournament could begin. The first round was held in Quejá, known for its pristine, natural-grass soccer field. Hundreds streamed in to watch their favourite teams, while local fans now in the United States followed the game live on Facebook. “People went there because of the field,” said Álvaro Pop Gue, who plays midfield for one of Quejá’s teams. “It was beautiful.” Now their season is on hold, with their beloved field sinking in water. Reyna Cal Sis, principal of the town’s primary school, believes 19 of her students died that day, including two kindergartners and a 14-year-old named Martín, who liked to help her clean up after class. “He had just started sprouting hairs on his upper lip,” she said. “He lived with his mother and his siblings, right near where the land came down.” The boulders blanketing Quejá today are almost as tall as the electricity wires. The only road into the village is encased in mud so thick and wet that its residents leave holes in it the shape of legs. Still, they walk it, carrying tattered wardrobes and bags of coffee beans on their backs, extracting what they can from the wreckage of their homes. People started leaving here for the United States only a few years ago, but Cal Sis is certain more will follow. “They are determined, now that they’ve lost almost everything,” she said. Suc, 35, was eating lunch with his family when the sound shook his home. “It was like two bombs exploding,” he said. He ran out to find a gusher of mud crushing everything in sight, sending roofs and walls careening through the town. “There are houses right in front, and they are coming at us all of a sudden,” Suc said. “A lot of people were trapped in there.” One of them was his niece, Adriana Calel Suc, a 13-year-old with a knack for customer service honed by selling soda and snacks in her mother’s store. Suc never saw her again. After the disaster, Suc walked for four hours to reach Santa Elena, the nearest dry village, pulling along his grandfather and distributing two of his children to stronger, taller family members who hoisted them above waist-deep water on the journey. But after he and other survivors spent weeks in makeshift shelters there, the town’s hospitality ran out. On Saturday, a group of Santa Elena residents looted the stock of provisions in town that had been donated to Quejá’s residents. Suc is now looking for anywhere else to go. He has no idea how he could make it to the United States, but he’s ready to try. “Yes, we’re thinking about migrating,” he said, eyeing the dwindling bag of corn he has left to feed his family. “Because, to give our children bread? We have nothing.” © 2020 New York Times News Service",0
"“Growing up in Oklahoma, wearing the hijab, I had to come to terms with being visibly Muslim,” the Iranian American organizer and activist said. “People would call me a terrorist or pretend to run me over.” And when policymakers held up the hijab and women’s rights as part of the rationale for military action in Afghanistan or economic sanctions on Iran, she said, “that’s when I started really thinking about clothes.” A decade and a half later, Katebi, 27, has become a leading critic of the global garment industry, particularly its fast-fashion sector. Where many of us might avoid peering too closely at our wardrobe’s iffy provenance, Katebi has devoted herself to that hidden world — and to ultimately tearing it down. “Rather than just, say, campaigning to get garment workers paid a dollar more,” she said, “we’re calling for an end to the system that puts workers in these positions to begin with.” The “we” there is Blue Tin Production, a small apparel manufacturing workers’ cooperative in Chicago run by working-class women of colour, which Katebi founded in 2019. Blue Tin executes clothing contracts in ways that are antithetical to the contemporary sweatshop: full equity and transparency, no exploitation, abuse or greenwashing (a term applied when a company exaggerates its eco-consciousness). The goal is to produce high-quality luxury apparel while shining a light on systemic issues stitched into fashion. In addition to running Blue Tin, Katebi works as a community organiser, speaker and writer, all while attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “I run on saffron ice cream and coloniser tears,” she said. (The following interview has been condensed and edited.) Q: What does abolitionism mean in the context of your work? A: Fast fashion is a very specific type of manufacturing, basically focused on speed and output. While the rest of the fashion industry usually works on a four-season year, fast fashion works on 52: There’s a new season every week. There’s no way that amount of product can be created in a way that’s ethical or sustainable. The system requires violence in order to function. Assaults on workers by managers are common, on top of the general subjugation and enforced poverty that give people little choice but to do this work. That violence can’t be reformed away. An easy analogy is slavery — you can ask slave owners to be nicer, but the institution is inherently violent. So Blue Tin is an abolitionist response to the fast-fashion industry. Q: How did fashion become your focus? A: I discovered fashion blogs just before college. It was a fun outlet. But some of my favourite people were working with brands on the BDS list, (a list of companies and individuals that support Israel). They weren’t thinking about the politics behind the aesthetics. When I created my first website, it was to push people to think about their clothes in a more complex and nuanced way. Everything relates to fashion. Fashion is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, for example — it contributes more greenhouse gases than all of maritime shipping and air travel combined, (according to figures from the United Nations Environment Program and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation). Then there’s the connection between sustainability and policing, which upholds the ability for cheap labour to exist. That, in turn, allows certain neighbourhoods to be disproportionately impacted by, say, a coal power plant that pollutes the air, which in turn keeps the community there from thriving. Any issue that you care about, you can find in fashion. On top of that, 1 in 6 people in the world works in the fashion industry. No one knows this because the majority of them are working-class women of colour and farmers. Q: Can you provide an example of how this system resists change? A: In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, factories will intentionally hire undocumented workers and then not pay them for months. When the workers get upset, management calls (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and has a self-reported raid of their own factory. Some of our former Blue Tin members have gone through that process. Q: What are your biggest challenges at Blue Tin? A: Abolition means putting an end to this industry, and it also means thinking about the world we want to create in its place. How can we create clothes in a way that’s not violent? That feels like a low bar, but it’s extremely complicated and stressful. I cry about once a week. Q: How does that play out on a day-to-day basis? A: At Blue Tin we try to prioritise people who are “unhirable” by the labour industry’s standards. That means people who may not speak English, or who have child care needs, or maybe they need to sit and process the trauma that they’ve been through because they’re domestic violence survivors. People who our systems have harmed in different ways. The year we started, one of our members got a call that her uncle and his 8-year-old son were killed in bombings in Damascus, Syria. We asked her, “What do you need in this moment?” We stopped production to go on a walk with her and to build care around her. So we were very behind on our production, and we lost that client. At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist world. We can’t create a utopia — so the question is, how can we create the best of what this can be, even if it’s flawed? Q: I’ve noticed that you tend not to use the word “refugees” when describing the Blue Tin team, though others do. A: For me, the class part is more important than the identity part because I hate identity politics. And “immigrant” and “refugee” have become catchphrases in the fashion industry. People are like, “Aw, a cute sewing circle of immigrant women.” The team didn’t want to be framed by their trauma. We’re trying to completely reimagine the fashion industry and build garment worker power, so brands should work with us because of these incredible skill sets and backgrounds, not because they feel bad. Oh, sure, go for the PR; I don’t care. But really it’s the beautiful clothes, and them bringing art and craftsmanship back to fashion where it belongs. Q: What’s everyone working on now? A: Right now they’re in “panty purgatory,” as they call it. They’ve been making underwear nonstop, for a big client. I think that’s finally done, but we’re basically panty entrepreneurs now. Q: How did your consciousness around these issues take shape? A: A lot of my values come from Islamic values of divine compassion and divine mercy. Those don’t sound radical, but it actually is a radical demand that we instead live in a world of compassion and mercy. So I’m all for an assault on empire and capitalism. But some nurturing is required, too. You have to hold both at the same time. I guess you throw your Molotov, but you also give someone a hug. ©2022 The New York Times Company",2
" Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama's Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a ""different theology."" A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using ""political science"" in the debate about climate change. Obama's agenda is ""not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,"" Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel. When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, ""If the president says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."" But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama's values run against those of Christianity. ""He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I'm not going to,"" Santorum told reporters. A social conservative, Santorum is increasingly seen as a champion for evangelical Christians in fights with Democrats over contraception and gay marriage. ""This is just the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity - a stark contrast with the President who is focused everyday on creating jobs and restoring economic security for the middle class,"" said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. The campaign's response signaled a new respect for Santorum. Until this week, the Obama campaign appeared exclusively focused on Mitt Romney. Republicans are waging a state-by-state contest to pick a candidate to challenge Obama in November's election. At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an ""avowed Muslim."" Santorum told CNN after that incident, ""I don't feel it's my obligation every time someone says something I don't agree with to contradict them, and the president's a big boy, he can defend himself."" QUESTIONS ROMNEY RECORD ON OLYMPICS On Saturday, Santorum also took aim at Romney, his main Republican rival, on one of the central accomplishments of his resume, saying the former Massachusetts governor's rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics required millions of dollars in handouts from the federal government. The attack was a response to the Romney camp trying to portray Santorum as a proponent of big government because of his use of earmarks while he served in the US Senate. ""He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake Olympic Games - in an earmark,"" Santorum said. ""One of his strongest supporters, John McCain called it potentially the worst boondoggle in earmark history. And now Governor Romney is suggesting, 'Oh, Rick Santorum earmarked,' as he requested almost half a billion dollars of earmarks as governor of Massachusetts to his federal congressmen and senators. Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?"" Santorum said. Romney often talks of how he turned around the struggling Olympics organization and is appearing in Utah on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Olympics. In a statement, the Romney campaign said Santorum was in a weak position to challenge its candidate on big spending. ""Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Mitt Romney wants to ban earmarks, Senator Santorum wants more 'Bridges to Nowhere,'"" said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.",1
"BEIJING, Tue May 26, (dnews24.com/Reuters) - Ties between the United States and China could be transformed by cooperation on climate change, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, linking environmental concerns to human rights and the rule of law. Pelosi told an audience in the Chinese capital on Tuesday that the two nations -- the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases -- must work together to fight global warming. ""China and the United States can and must confront the challenge of climate change together,"" she said at a meeting organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. ""I think that this climate change crisis is a game-changer in the US-China relationship. It is an opportunity that we cannot miss."" Pelosi was speaking during a visit to China with a group of US lawmakers examining how the two powers can cooperate better while governments seek to agree on a new global treaty on fighting global warming from greenhouse gases. But Pelosi, a Democrat well known as a critic of China over human rights and its rule in Tibet, also obliquely linked that concern to rights concerns, calling it a matter of ""environmental justice"". Fighting global warming would require political transparency, rule of law and accountability, Pelosi told the audience, which included former Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and its current ambassador to Washington, Zhou Wenzhong. Pelosi, however, did not mention specific human rights issues in her speech. Whether Washington and Beijing can agree on how each will help contain greenhouse gas emissions will be crucial to negotiations aimed at striking a new treaty by the end of the year in Copenhagen. While the two sides have struck up-beat notes since President Barack Obama took office, much still divides them. Many US lawmakers want China to make firm commitments to contain its growing greenhouse gas output before they back any deal. Pelosi's visit comes on the heels of the House Energy and Commerce Committee approving a climate change bill on Thursday that would cut US emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activity, by 17 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2020. But Beijing has said that in a new climate change pact all developed countries should agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by a much steeper 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. As the world's biggest emitter of these gases, China also faces pressure to begin cutting them soon. But it says developing nations should not accept mandatory emissions caps to solve a problem caused over the centuries by wealthy countries, which still have much higher per capita emissions.",0
" Scientists counting emperor penguins from space have found twice as many of the birds in Antarctica as expected. The discovery is reassuring for a species seen as under threat from global warming and will provide researchers with a benchmark for monitoring the giants of the penguin world in years to come. Using high-resolution satellite images to study each of 44 colonies around the coastline of Antarctica, experts said on Friday they put the total emperor penguin population at 595,000, or roughly double previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000. ""It's good news,"" team leader Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey said in an interview. ""It gives us a bit more confidence not only that there are lots of emperor penguins out there but that we can actually keep track of them as well."" Seven of the colonies studied had never been seen before. A key advantage of satellites is that they can capture multiple images in one go, whereas visiting dozens of remote colonies in temperatures as low as -50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit) would be hugely expensive and time-consuming. Still, conducting a penguin roll-call from space is not simple. It took a special technique known as pan-sharpening to increase the resolution of the satellite images to differentiate between birds, shadows and penguin poo, or guano. While some images remained tricky to analyse, Fretwell believes the overall population figure is correct to within a 10-12 percent margin of error. Scientists are concerned that emperor penguins will be badly affected by climate change, since they form large colonies on the sea-ice, which is fragile and vulnerable to earlier spring warming. Their more northerly colonies are particularly at risk. The study by Fretwell and colleagues, published in the online journal PLoS ONE (link.reuters.com/byb67s), marks the first time that researchers have counted the entire population of any species by satellite in a single season. In future, the same technique could also be use to tot up numbers of other wild animals that stand out clearly against their natural habitat, such as flamingos or reindeer. Counting other types of penguins from space, however, may not be so easy. While emperors are large and contrast sharply against the white snow and ice on which they stand, other species are smaller and tend to breed on dark-coloured rock.",0
" A remote chain of Arctic islands is advertising itself as a showcase of bad things to come from global warming. Visitors to Svalbard can see reindeer, seals or polar bears in the Arctic, where U.N. scientists say warming is happening twice as fast as on the rest of the planet in what may be a portent of changes further south. Local authorities said such visits are less environmentally harmful than Russian-led tours on nuclear ice-breakers or sky-diving trips over the North Pole. ""This is one of the few ecosystems we have in the world that is functioning, with the polar bear as the top predator,"" said Rune Bergstrom, environmental expert at the governor's office. ""Svalbard is probably the best place to see change, and the easiest place to reach in the high Arctic,"" he said. Glaciers have been retreating in parts of the Norwegian-run archipelago, Europe's largest wilderness. Last summer, some previously unknown islands were found after a glacier shrank. U.S. senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain, among contenders to take over from President George W. Bush in 2009, visited in 2004. Since then Nordic prime ministers, tourists, climate students and Arctic researchers are coming too. Tourists, many on cruise ships, spent a total of 70,000 nights in the islands last year, up from almost zero 20 years ago. Bergstrom said tourists were rich, and so could be influential when they returned home. ""Svalbard is an important meeting place...You clearly see the melting of the ice, problems for polar bears, for birds, which are damaged by global warming and environmental pollutants,"" Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy told Reuters. Norway wants more world action to fight global warming and last month set the toughest national goal in the world, to become ""carbon neutral"" by 2050, with no net emissions of greenhouse gases that come mostly from burning fossil fuels. Trying to influence politicians to go green is a big change for Longyearbyen, a village of 1,800 people built around a coal mine where temperatures in early May are about minus 5 Celsius (23.00F) even with a midnight sun. A coal-fired power plant emits greyish smoke from a high chimney into the pristine Arctic air over Svalbard, whose islands cover an area about as big as Ireland. Svalbard is trying to clean up its own act with a plan to bury the carbon dioxide emissions from the local coal-fired power plant by about 2025. Bright blue, red and yellow houses nestle in a valley between snow-covered peaks, and specialities in a local restaurant include seal and whale. Visitors are warned that a climber was killed by a polar bear in 1995 on a mountainside above the village. A road sign warns of polar bear danger on the entire island. Bjoernoy is planning a conference on Svalbard in August -- guests will include the head of the U.N. climate panel which released reports this year warning of widening damage from droughts, floods, a spread of disease and rising seas. Companies are also visiting the islands to raise awareness. A group of Dutch, British and Irish students attended a climate change college in Longyearbyen run by Ben & Jerry's, a U.S. ice cream maker, to educate them about climate change and help them launch grassroots environmental campaigns back home. Briton Rob Bell, for instance, wants mobile phone companies to create chargers that switch off when the phone is full: ""If everyone unplugged their phone chargers it would be enough to power 33,000 homes for a year."" Anne Leeflang said she would try to persuade students in the Netherlands to shift to water-saving shower heads. And Lesley Butler from Ireland will work as a consultant to help small businesses go green. Environment Minister Bjoernoy she said she saw no contradiction between showing off the impacts of global warming in the Arctic when many oil companies, such as Norway's state-controlled Statoil, are hoping for new finds as the sea ice recedes. ""It's important for Norway to contribute to develop technologies for oil and gas and simultaneously be honest about the problems posed by our production,"" she said. Norway is the world's number 5 oil exporter. Experts say the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet because darker water and land, when exposed by melting ice and snow, soaks up more heat and accelerates the thaw.",0
"CHINA Currently the world’s top carbon emitter, China’s near-future actions will help determine whether the world can meet its climate goals. It is also facing the impact of climate change, including extreme rainfall that devastated the province of Henan and unleashed flooding that killed more than 300 people in the summer. President Xi Jinping said last year China planned for an emissions peak in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 – 10 years beyond the target scientists say is needed. China also pledged to halt funding coal projects overseas and to start cutting its own coal consumption in 2026. But an economic slowdown coupled with power shortages in recent weeks have fuelled policymakers’ arguments that China is not yet ready to make bolder moves. Xi is not expected to attend the talks in person, and China will likely send vice-environment minister Zhao Yingmin, but analysts say that without Xi there would be little chance for a bold announcement. UNITED STATES The United States is currently the world’s second-largest carbon emitter but has historically put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country since the Industrial Revolution. It returns this year to UN climate talks, after former President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement and eschewed global efforts to curb emissions. US public awareness has grown amid a series of climate-fuelled disasters, including wildfires and the worst drought in nearly a century in the US West. President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and has pledged that the country will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% from 2005 levels by 2030. But domestic climate legislation is facing headwinds in Congress. A lack of concrete policies will undermine US efforts in Glasgow to push major emitters like China, India and Brazil to do more, diplomats and NGOs have said. UNITED KINGDOM The conference host, along with Italy. British minister Alok Sharma, who is leading the conference, said he hopes the talks “consign coal power to history.” In 2019, Britain pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and earlier this year committed to a 78% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2035 compared to 1990 levels. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government faces a dilemma: there is increasing public pressure to halt new North Sea oil and gas exploration, but doing so would leave the country more reliant on imported fuel. EUROPEAN UNION The 27-country bloc produces around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and its emissions have been trending downward for years. The EU has fixed into law targets to cut net emissions at least 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels, and reduce them to zero by 2050. Now, its member countries are negotiating a huge legislative package to meet those goals. Extreme heatwaves and floods killed thousands in Europe over the last two years. EU countries negotiate as one group at the climate talks, and are expected this year to push for rules requiring stronger climate targets every five years from all countries, a position likely to prove sticky in negotiations. LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES (LDCs) This group represents the world's 46 poorest nations, whose 1 billion citizens across Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable to climate change, but least responsible for causing it. Along with blocs such as the African Group of Negotiators and the Climate Vulnerable Forum, LDCs are expected to push wealthy countries to honour a pledge to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance to the developing world for the 2020-2024 period - a target they are on track to miss. 'BASIC' COUNTRIES Brazil, South Africa, India and China make up this bloc of populous, fast-developing countries with high-polluting economies. Each has called on rich countries to provide more climate financing, and have demanded equity through the UNFCCC concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities” – meaning wealthy countries that contributed the most emissions to the atmosphere have a greater responsibility to address it. New Delhi has said the current $100 billion a year pledge is not enough, and that India is unlikely to commit to a net-zero target by 2050. Brazil also wants financial compensation to halt rampant Amazon deforestation. South Africa wants stronger evidence that developed countries will come up with the $100 billion they have promised, but also says the figure should be more like $750 billion. OTHER NEGOTIATING BLOCS INCLUDE: CLIMATE VULNERABLE FORUM Representing 48 countries most at risk from climate impacts, including Bangladesh and the Maldives, this group urges the need for a strong global agreement and is also asking for countries to update their climate pledges annually, instead of every five years. ALLIANCE OF SMALL ISLAND STATES The alliance's countries are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change effects, particularly sea level rise and coastal erosion. POWERING PAST COAL ALLIANCE Spearheaded by the UK and Canada, 41 nations and dozens more local governments and private companies have pledged faster transitions from coal to clean energy. HIGH AMBITION COALITION Formed in 2015 by the Marshall Islands, Costa Rica, the United States, the EU, and others, this group pushes for more progressive emissions targets and climate policies. G77 + CHINA A longtime alliance of 77 developing countries and China, this group holds the line on the concept that different countries have differing responsibilities. UMBRELLA GROUP This alliance of non-EU developed countries includes Australia, Japan, Russia, and the United States. AFRICA GROUP Africa’s UN members will push for additional climate financing for the developing world.",0
"If the results apply throughout the tropics, much of the carbon stored underground could be released as the planet heats up. “The loss rate is huge,” said Andrew Nottingham, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. “It’s a bad news story.” The thin skin of soil that covers much of our planet’s land stores vast amounts of carbon — more, in total, than in all plants and the atmosphere combined. That carbon feeds hordes of bacteria and fungi, which build some of it into more microbes while respiring the rest into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Many of these microbes grow more active at warmer temperatures, increasing digestion and respiration rates. The finding “is another example of why we need to worry more” about how fast the globe is warming, said Eric Davidson, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland College of Environmental Science in Frostburg who was not involved in the research. In an attempt to forecast the future, ecologists began in the early 1990s building apparatuses to artificially heat soils. Such experiments in temperate and boreal forests have shown that carbon-rich soils almost always belch carbon dioxide when warmed. In 2016, a group of researchers estimated that, by 2050, soils could release so much of the planet-warming gas that it would be like adding the carbon emissions of a new country the size of the United States. But that study left out the perpetually warm, mega-biodiverse tropics, where a third of all soil carbon resides. Figuring out the fate of this carbon would require grappling with the many pitfalls of doing research in the tropics: humidity, storms and a multitude of hungry animals that can take a toll on research equipment — chewing through electrical wires or protective coverings, for example — and on researchers themselves. For understanding soils’ contributions to climate change, the tropics “is a really important region” that “really hasn’t been studied,” said Margaret Torn, an ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, who was not involved in the study. In 2014, Nottingham, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, traveled to Barro Colorado Island, a human-created island in the Panama Canal area that’s home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He buried electrical wires in five circular plots to a depth of nearly 4 feet. For protection from the elements and ravenous insects, he shielded the wires inside metal structures shaped like freakishly large spiders. Measurements were logged inside weatherproof boxes. 
 
 A photo provided by Ben Turner, shows, One of Dr Andrew Nottingham’s soil profile pits in Panama. Warming soils in the tropics could cause microbes to release carbon dioxide from storage. (Ben Turner via The New York Times) 

“Our experiment was basically me as a postdoc making things out of a DIY shop,” Nottingham said.  A photo provided by Ben Turner, shows, One of Dr Andrew Nottingham’s soil profile pits in Panama. Warming soils in the tropics could cause microbes to release carbon dioxide from storage. (Ben Turner via The New York Times)  The team encountered a number of hiccups, including poor electrical connections that blew up and cost the researchers nearly a year and much of their budget to repair. Starting in November, 2016, the wires’ electrical resistance began warming the soil by almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit, within the range of how much the tropics are projected to warm by century’s end according to current climate models. Other equipment measured the carbon dioxide coming out of both experimental plots and nearby plots that weren’t artificially warmed as well as microbial activity in the plots. An experiment warming soil in El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico had turned on two months earlier but was pummeled by back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes in September 2017; the study team didn’t turn the power back on for a year. The results from Nottingham’s team are sobering: Over two years, warmed soils spewed out 55% more carbon than control plots. “This is a very large response,” said Torn, who runs a similar warming experiment in a California forest that reported a roughly 35% increase in carbon emissions after two years. “It’s one of the largest I’ve heard of.” If the entire tropics were to behave similarly, the researchers estimate that 65 billion metric tons of carbon would enter the atmosphere by 2100 — more than six times the annual emissions from all human-related sources. Scaling the results to account for the entire tropics is complicated, however. The soils on Barro Colorado Island are richer in nutrients than many others, such as those of much of the vast Amazon rainforest, Davidson noted. That could make it easier for the Panamanian microbes to ramp up their activity. Microbial communities in African and Asian soils are very different from those in the Americas, Torn added. And while there is agreement that climate models need to treat soil more realistically, how best to do that is unclear. The new study strikes a blow against simple theories predicting that tropical soils will respond weakly to warming, said Kathe Todd-Brown, a soil scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not part of the research team. But to really get a handle on the problem, she said, modelers will need information about how microbes respond to variations in soil moisture and nutrients in addition to temperature. By warming only the soil, the Barro Colorado Island experiment did not capture how plants would fare under warmer conditions, said Tana Wood, a US Forest Service ecologist who is leading the Puerto Rico experiment. If plants were to photosynthesize more, for example, they could take up some of the carbon dioxide that soils release, making the overall impact on the climate less severe. “This is only telling half the carbon story,” she said. (Her team is warming both the soil and the air with infrared heaters and measuring how plants and microbes respond.) Torn said she was eager to see more than two years’ worth of data, which could reveal whether the carbon dioxide spike is prolonged or short-lived. “In the life of a tropical forest, that’s a very short time,” she noted. Nottingham has funding to keep the Panama project running for at least another five years. But even two years has shown how critical it is to find ways to keep ecosystems intact, he said. “It makes you realize how fortunate we’ve been up until this point to have a relatively stable climate.” © 2020 The New York Times Company",0
" The United States and other major powers on Wednesday told Iran to prepare a ""serious response"" by October 1 to demands it halt its nuclear program or risk the consequences. The demand from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany came after U.S. President Barack Obama made his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly, urging leaders to stop blaming America and join him in confronting world issues including Iran's nuclear plans. ""We expect a serious response from Iran and will decide, in the context of our dual track approach, as a result of the meeting, on our next steps,"" British Foreign Minister David Miliband said, reading a statement agreed by Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said all sides agreed there could be consequences if Iran did not reply substantively when negotiators meet in Geneva next month. But China later said that stepping up pressure on Iran would not be effective. ""We believe that sanctions and exerting pressure are not the way to solve problems and are not conducive for the current diplomatic efforts on the Iran nuclear issue,"" Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news briefing in Beijing. Jiang's comments suggest China, which often says it does not interfere in other nations' internal affairs, might be a brake on efforts to build up international pressure on Tehran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in his own U.N. address, did not directly mention the nuclear issue. But the Iranian leader delivered his usual tough rhetoric on Israel, accusing it of ""inhuman policies"" in the Palestinian territories and of dominating world political and economic affairs. U.S. and British officials in the assembly hall left at the time of Ahmadinejad's comments about Israel. ""It is disappointing that Mr. Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,"" said U.S. mission spokesman Mark Kornblau. Hours after protesters gathered outside Iran's U.N. mission to accuse him of stealing the June election, Ahmadinejad hailed the ""glorious and fully democratic"" poll which ""entrusted me once more with a large majority."" 'GREED, EXCESS AND ABUSE' Obama, in his first speech to the assembly since taking office in January, pledged U.S. global engagement but said the United States could not shoulder the responsibility alone. ""Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone,"" Obama said. Obama, who will host a Group of 20 nations summit in Pittsburgh this week, also pledged to work with allies to strengthen financial regulation to ""put an end to the greed, excess and abuse that led us into disaster."" Obama was among the first major speakers at the gathering, which brings more than 100 heads of state and government together to air issues ranging from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism to climate change and global poverty. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, delivering his own inaugural U.N. address, took a swipe at the veto power wielded by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. He called the group the ""terror council"" and demanded it be scrapped. Obama has brought a new tone in U.S. foreign policy, stressing cooperation and consultation over the unilateralism of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But despite Obama's global popularity, the new approach has delivered few concrete foreign policy achievements. U.S. officials were again disappointed this week when Israel and Palestinians rebuffed a new Obama push to restart peace talks in time for the U.N. meeting. On Wednesday, however, Obama got some good news as both Russian and U.S. officials signaled the two sides may be moving closer on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program -- one of his most pressing foreign policy priorities. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said sanctions could be inevitable -- a significant hardening of Moscow's position. U.S. officials denied the Russian shift represented payback for Obama's decision last week to scale back a Bush-era plan for European missile defense that had angered Moscow. But they acknowledged that the climate had changed. ""It wasn't that long ago where we had very divergent definitions of the threat and definitions of our strategic objectives vis-a-vis Iran. That seems to me to be a lot closer, if not almost together,"" Michael McFaul, a White House adviser on Russia, said in New York. But Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi repeated his nation's position that the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme should be resolved through dialogue.",0
"Globally there were 8.6 million fresh cases of people fleeing conflict last year within borders, an average of 24,000 a day, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report. More than half of those were in the Middle East. Some 2.2 million people in Yemen, or 8 percent of its population, were newly displaced in 2015, largely the result of Saudi-led air strikes and an economic blockade imposed on civilians, the report said. IDMC said the number of people forced from their homes by conflict but staying in their own countries was twice those who have become refugees by crossing international borders. ""The world is in a tremendous displacement crisis that is relentlessly building year after year, and now too many places have the perfect storm of conflict and/or disasters,"" said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs IDMC. ""We have to find ways to protect people from these horrendous forces of both nature and the man-made ones."" The UN refugee agency has said the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide was likely to have ""far surpassed"" a record 60 million in 2015, including 20 million refugees, driven by the Syrian war and other drawn-out conflicts. The IDMC report said displacement in the Middle East and North Africa had ""snowballed"" since the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010 and the rise of the Islamic State militant group, which is waging war in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. ""What has really led to the spike we have seen most recently has been the attack on civilians - indiscriminate bombing and air strikes, across Syria but also Yemen,"" said Alexandra Bilak, IDMC's interim director. ""People have nowhere to go."" Disaster prevention Globally, there were 19.2 million new cases of people forced from their homes by natural disasters in 2015, the vast majority of them due to extreme weather such as storms and floods, IDMC said. In Nepal alone, earthquakes in April and May uprooted 2.6 million people. Egeland said many countries, such as Cuba, Vietnam and Bangladesh, had improved their record on preventing and preparing for natural disasters. ""But in Asia I would say, and to some extent Latin America, still too little is done to meet the growing strength of the forces of nature fuelled by climate change,"" he added. The former UN aid chief urged this month's World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul to focus on building resilience to natural disasters, and finding ways to avert conflicts and protect civilians in war. IDMC's Bilak said political action was needed to stop more people being forced from their homes, and staying displaced for long periods. ""The numbers are increasing every year, which clearly shows that the solutions to displacement are not being found,"" she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Sudan and South Sudan have featured in the list of the 10 largest displaced populations every year since 2003, the report noted. ""People are not returning, they are not locally integrating where they have found refuge, and they are certainly not being resettled somewhere else,"" Bilak said.",0
"WASHINGTON, Thu Nov 6, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has some environmental advice for the incoming Obama administration: focus on energy efficiency and renewable resources, and create a unified US power grid. On Thursday, the group Gore founded rolled out a new media campaign to push for immediate investments in three energy areas it maintains would help meet Gore's previously announced challenge to produce 100 percent clean electricity in the United States in a decade. Pegged to Obama's election victory on Tuesday, the Gore group's ads on television, in newspapers and online, pose the question, ""Now what?"" ""Our nation just made history,"" one video says. ""We have an historic opportunity to boost our economy and repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. It will create new American jobs, end our addiction to dirty coal and foreign oil and solve the climate crisis."" More information on the campaign is available online at repoweramerica.org. Gore -- former vice president, Nobel Peace laureate and star of the Oscar-winning documentary ""An Inconvenient Truth"" -- has said repeatedly he wants to play no official government role in the fight against climate change. But with environmental activists talking about a possible ""climate czar"" in President-elect Barack Obama's White House, Gore's name inevitably gets mentioned. IMMEDIATE ENERGY INVESTMENTS The plan advocates immediate investment in energy efficiency, renewable power generation -- including public investment in wind, solar and geothermal technology -- and the creation of a unified national smart grid. ""Modernize transmission infrastructure so that clean electricity generated anywhere in America can power homes and businesses across the nation,"" the alliance said in a statement. The alliance favors ""national electricity 'interstates' that move power quickly and cheaply to where it needs to be (and) local smart grids that buy and sell power from households and support clean plug-in cars."" Gore and his group are in line with most US environmental groups, which see the next administration as a chance to act to stem global warming, after what many see as the Bush administration's stalling on this issue. R.K. Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gore in 2007, sounded a similar note in a statement issued after the vote. ""The US now has a unique opportunity to assume leadership in meeting the threat of climate change, and it would help greatly if the new president were to announce a coherent and forward looking policy soon after he takes office,"" Pachauri said on his blog at blog.rkpachauri.org/.",0
"The show includes some mind-bending, beautiful work, on view through the end of May. But the collective emerged to serve longer-term, more radical goals. It taps into a legacy of Black collectives from earlier eras. In 1893, Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass joined to publish “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Seven years later, W E B Du Bois, Booker T Washington and Thomas J Calloway organized a display of charts and photographs about the African American experience to counter depictions of Black Americans at the world’s fair in Paris. These were necessary responses to a system of cultural exclusion that, time and again, erased, demeaned and denied Blackness. By the 1960s, in the wake of the Black Power movement, a variety of Black artists’ collectives had coalesced, among them Spiral, which included Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden; Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Movement; and AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black artists’ commune. “We have a responsibility beyond the exhibition, beyond us,” is how Amanda Williams, a Chicago-based architect and artist, and one of the members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, summed up the group’s thinking. The MoMA show was organised by Sean Anderson, an associate curator at the museum, and Mabel O Wilson, an architect, Columbia University professor and author, among much else, of “White by Design,” which describes the Modern’s failure to display and collect works by Black architects and designers. “Reconstructions” proceeds from a question: “How do we construct Blackness?” The architects enlisted to answer this question are a multigenerational mix, including some familiar names. Nearly all run small or solo practices. Their projects occupy rooms at the Modern dedicated to Philip Johnson, the New York power broker, architect and founding director of MoMA’s architecture department, who died in 2005, at 98. Members of the collective petitioned the museum to remove Johnson’s name from the wall because of his history of racism and Nazi sympathy. The museum declined. “Manifesting Statement,” a textile by the collective, temporarily covers the name. Other works in the show remap Los Angeles according to Black settlement patterns. They picture a mile-long stretch of Oakland rebuilt according to principles outlined in the Black Panthers’ 10-Point Programme. They contemplate how Black people might “navigate their way to free space,” which can take the form of the open sea or outer space — a project that also recalls Kinloch, Missouri. Having thrived for generations as an incorporated Black town, Kinloch ended up a victim of urbicide when authorities in neighboring St Louis converted town land to build an airport. All these projects re-imagine architecture from the perspective of Black people, a mission of the collective — and a first for the Modern. Until now, the museum hasn’t devoted any exhibition to African American architects. There is nothing in its permanent collection by major Black architects like Paul Revere Williams, J Max Bond Jr, Vertner Woodson Tandy or Amaza Lee Meredith. Since 1929, when MoMA opened its doors, it has acquired only two works by Black designers, both since 2016, neither of them strictly architecture: one is Charles Harrison’s “View-master (model G)” from 1962, the other a series of photographs by Amanda Williams. Which is to say, the Modern itself partly necessitated the Black Reconstruction Collective. The group addresses the bigger question: How can Blackness construct America? Four of the members gathered on Zoom the other day to talk about the collective’s impetus and goals: Amanda Williams, Emanuel Admassu, J Yolande Daniels and V Mitch McEwen. The four were chosen as representatives by the other members: Sekou Cooke, Germane Barnes, Felecia Davis, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood and Olalekan Jeyifous. The following is an edited, condensed version of the conversation. Michael Kimmelman: How did the idea of a collective come up? Amanda Williams: It was partly born from a lack of awareness by MoMA about what it meant to invite Black and (predominantly) solo practitioners to do a show like this. We were each given insufficient stipends to make full-scale, one-to-one objects. The real cost of doing this sort of thing may not mean much to big firms like OMA or Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who’ve been in MoMA shows. For them it may be the marketing budget on a single competition, I don’t know. But this reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of what it took for us to produce work of the calibre that we are capable of. There’s often an attitude when Black people enter certain spaces, despite having all the pedigrees and credentials, that we are like high schoolers getting a special chance. So early on, we started talking to each other, asking, “What if we pooled our resources?” J Yolande Daniels: There was also, I think, an assumption in our discussions with the exhibition advisory board that our projects were supposed to solve social problems, that that’s what Black architects do — we do community housing, as if it’s still the 1960s. That way of thinking about African American practitioners doesn’t afford us the luxury of doing speculative or other kinds of work, which white architects are automatically afforded. That wasn’t the brief from MoMA, was it — do affordable housing? Emanuel Admassu: No, but whenever you have a group of Black people in a predominantly white institution the idea is that it’s our responsibility to fix racism. Williams: Don’t worry! We’re here now! The word inclusion makes my skin crawl, because in a context like this it implies tolerance: tolerating Black people, tolerating a monolithic idea of Blackness. Instead of inclusion I prefer collectivity, the sharing of things — power, vision, access — which is not the typical mindset of institutions like MoMA and of people in positions of privilege and power, who tend to be straight, white and male. As Black architects and artists, we realised as we became involved with this show that we had to form a collective whether we liked it or not. Black people in every profession have to place the collective ahead of the individual. Ultimately, we have little choice. But we also realised that we could use the opportunity — that forming a collective could be the project’s most radical gesture. So what are your goals? Admassu: The exhibition is just a passing event. All the research we’ve done, all the amazing conversations we had about reconstruction, architecture and race with the advisory committee that Mabel and Sean put together — the museum didn’t seem to have any agenda going forward. We asked about the possibility of endowing a curatorial position to focus on race and architecture, about whether there are long-term plans to address the history of exclusion. There was no answer. The museum is committed long-term to programs around the environment and sustainability, but when it comes to the last 500 years of colonisation and subjugation of Black people, it’s a different story. V Mitch McEwen: That’s an understatement. MoMA created an effectively Whites Only architecture archive and department, by design. Engaging with these issues in the context of primarily white institutions can be emotionally draining and rife with conflicts. A number of us are on the boards of various national architecture organizations, whose origins tend to go back to groups of the most privileged architects sharing their European drawing techniques and travel sketches. We’ve seen from the inside the need for a radical shift in the role that architecture can play in civil society, whether it’s around issues like climate change or inequality. We can’t afford to keep waiting for the old models to adapt. We need to begin a different kind of work with each other. Daniels: So we spent long hours establishing the collective as a 501(c)(3), an independent nonprofit, to pursue liberation practices, to raise money and provide platforms for other African American architects, including students. I remember what it felt like when I was a Columbia student 30 years ago, how isolated I felt as a Black woman. Last year, in the course of putting the MoMA show together, the collective organised talks at Columbia, Harvard and MIT, and we heard back from Black students who said the talks really helped them deal with their sense of isolation. It was very moving. You said liberation practices. Daniels: They begin by asking questions like, What is an architecture of reconstruction? Can we imagine an architecture of reparations? What might be the architecture of Black futurity? Admassu: How can we redefine what architecture means? Daniels: Because as constituted, architecture rejects Blackness. Within the field of architecture there are certain terms and theories involving autonomy, critical distance. These terms basically support whiteness by rejecting, or devaluing, all other forms of experience, especially minority experience, because these other experiences are not abstract, they’re too subjective. I went to this lecture by Fernando Lara … A Brazilian architect and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Daniels: Right. And he was talking about abstraction and colonialism, how those things are all tied together and, in effect, make up the tool kit of modern architects. Architectural theories involving autonomy and critical distance basically support whiteness by rejecting other forms of experience — the Black experience, the Native American experience — because these other experiences are not abstract, they’re too subjective. McEwen: The status quo depends on a backward concept, which is that architecture is expensive, luxurious, elite and (pseudo) avant-garde — whereas I think architecture can be cheap, temporary, flexible. Admassu: I agree with Mitch. Mabel Wilson makes a distinction between buildings and Architecture, because Architecture with a capital A implies an academic infrastructure of discourse and knowledge production tied to Europe, whereas buildings are made all over the world. Part of what our collective wants to do is reclaim the larger, civic promise of architecture. Williams: I’ve stopped worrying about Architecture with a capital A. We should just be talking about spatial practice. How can Black people move through spaces in ways that are self-determined? Ultimately, we should be designing for freedom in these spaces — not a freedom from, but a freedom to. McEwen: The terminology is complicated. Four years ago I did a workshop in Detroit on reparations, and activists who showed up got very excited when I started talking about building for reparations, because in the lexicon of Black politics, you build when you talk with someone. You say, “I want to build with you.” It means I want to engage in politics. I want to build a movement. When I said, no, I meant actually building, folks suddenly seemed deflated, as if talking about the literally built environment negated the rhetoric of empowerment. They said, “We’re going to build joy. We’re going to build sharing. We’re going to build our arts together.” I was like, that’s great, and can we also start to put some parametres around where and how much we’re going to re-imagine the built environment? They thought that I was missing the nuance. I think that’s on architecture — the sense that architecture is not about building community, that it’s about exploiting people like us. There’s a widespread misperception that it’s just for rich people, museums, academics, or what’s on HGTV. Admassu: Let me add, I’m a Black immigrant who moved to the United States as a teenager from the continent of Africa. You cross the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is basically a planetary scar dividing Africa from the Americas, and to the west you become Black. To the east, you’re Yoruba, Amhara or whatever. Part of our goal as a collective is thinking about how these spaces, which are not considered architecture, come to be imbued with meaning because of how Black people occupy them — and in doing so, expand the conversation around Black spatial practices beyond the United States. Your project for MoMA focuses on Atlanta, Emanuel, and spaces like highways, strip malls and parking lots. Mitch, you conjure up an alternate New Orleans in which a failed 1811 uprising against slave owners had succeeded. You ask a remarkable question: “What architecture would Black people have already invented if we had been truly free for the last 210 years?” McEwen: As a discipline, architecture involves lots of speculative work. It allows us to picture what this country might look like, what reparations might look like. Williams: Folks who go to the MoMA show and expect to find the next 10 great Black architects, the next Paul R Williams or Vertner Tandy, or who think we’re going to solve gentrification — or other problems we understand personally and very well but didn’t create — they won’t find any of that. We need the next Paul Williams. But we also need to create the conditions for change. So that’s the goal of the collective. Williams: To empower architecture as a vehicle for liberation and joy.",0
" Vipul Tejani runs a small factory in Surat, the diamond capital of India which in the past 15 years has been hit by massive floods, rising sea levels, and even the plague. His workshop is tucked in a warren of small diamond cutting businesses and textile mills employing thousands of workers. Like three-quarters of the city, it was flooded by muddy waters reaching two storeys high in 2006. But in Surat, someone like Tejani does not see himself as another disaster statistic. With a smile on his face, he says: ""I am not planning to shift from here."" Just next to India's west coast, Surat is learning to live with big upheavals and now wants to become a front-runner in preparing for the impact of climate change in a country with fast-rising emissions but generally low environmental awareness. GPS technology is being used to map the city of 4 million, which will enable rescuers to pinpoint where relief should be sent and whom to evacuate first if the flood waters come rushing. Flood warnings appear on LCD screens on the streets. Every year, an action plan is prepared ahead of monsoon season. Rescue boats are kept at the ready at fire stations. Families are trained on basics such as what medicines to keep in the house or where to take vulnerable people like pregnant women. ""Whether it's in government or in the business community, there's a remarkably high level of engagement,"" said Ashvin Dayal, the Asia managing director for the Rockefeller Foundation. The 2006 flood ""really consolidated in the minds of the citizens of the city the need for action. That's not something you see commonly across most cities in India"", he added. TEST CASE The U.S.-based foundation chose Surat as one of a handful of Asian cities in which to fund adaptation studies. Successful projects could then inspire other cities at risk. It joined hands with a local business lobby, the consulting film TARU in a climate umbrella group that has its own website and Facebook page. ((www.suratclimatechange.org/)) The stakes on adaptation are high for India, seen as one of the nations most at risk from a warmer planet. But change may not be easy with its rowdy democracy of more than 1.1 billion and daunting development statistics despite India's global economic rise. Around 40 percent live on less than $1.25 a day and more than half are dependent on agriculture. Suruchi Bhadwal of the New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute, said the country must top up existing government schemes to keep pace with escalating climate risks. ""In terms of climate change adaptation, there's not much happening in India,"" she said, adding ""implementation and hardcore active research is missing."" Who should foot the bill for adaptation became a global debate ahead of the December global climate talks. Climate change will likely increase the intensity and frequency of extreme events the likes of which hit Surat, and leave India more vulnerable to floods, heatwaves, disease and erratic monsoon rains upon which its farmers rely. A government report said a 1 metre sea-level rise would flood nearly 6,000 sq km (2,300 square miles) of India, which could cause ""significant population movements"" among 63 million people in low-lying areas -- roughly the population of Britain. Surat could become a test case for India, the world's fourth largest emitter. Jyoti Parikh, who sits on the prime minister's climate change council, visited the city to scout out what lessons can be applied on a national level. ""In some sense, it could become a laboratory or a best practice model for us,"" she told Reuters in late November. Surat's highest tide on record came in 2008, and rainfall on its flood plain is predicted to increase in the coming decades. Tidal pulls cause creeks in Surat to surge in areas populated by slum dwellers unable to live elsewhere. One such slum is Kamrunagar, built on a sloping hill down to a filthy pool. On one small shop, one can see a faded red line and a date, one of many such markers dotted around the city which record the water level rise of particular floods. ""We want to shift over there to protect ourselves from the floods,"" said Sheikh Afsana Sheikh Yusuf, as children run around her in the slum and a small fire burns in a nearby skip. ""Over there"" is a government-funded block of flats next to the slum, built on stilts as a first defence against water level surges, one of many to shift thousands from flood-prone areas. Surat has come a long way from 1994, when poor flood cleanup caused a global health scare with an outbreak of deadly pneumonic plague that prompted hundreds of thousands to flee the city. Favourable comparisons are now made between the handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and the 2006 flood in the much more populous Surat, where seven times as many people, 3.5 million, were affected according to the Surat government. ""The city was brought back to normal in two weeks' time, where it took months to bring back New Orleans,"" said Kamlesh Yagnik, the group chairman of the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, part of the climate group. ""It tells us we are equal for flood management.""",0
" India and China signed on Wednesday a broad agreement to cooperate in the fight against climate change and also underlined a common position on contentious talks for a tougher global climate deal. The sweeping agreement covers cooperation for action to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gases, transfer of technology and in areas of energy efficiency and renewables, among others. It comes weeks before a major climate meeting in Copenhagen in December the United Nations hopes will end with agreement on a broader pact to slow the pace of climate change that scientists say is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Finding ways to get big developing nations to join is crucial, the United Nations says, with China now the world's top greenhouse gas emitter and India the fourth largest. The deal is among several India is sealing with rich and developing nations as proof of its commitment towards sealing a new climate pact meant to expand or replace the existing Kyoto Protocol. ""My clear understanding is that India is in no way signing bilateral deals to undermine multi-lateral negotiations. This is an expression of interest in finding common ground,"" said Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment. Tuesday's agreement, which holds good for five years, was signed by India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and Xie Zhenhua, vice minister at China's National Development and Reform Commission. India signed a similar deal with Japan this week and has spoken of cooperation with South Korea, Brazil and the United States. The India-China agreement said developed countries should take the lead in fighting climate change by reducing emissions and providing finance and technology to poorer nations. It said: ""...that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol are the most appropriate framework for addressing climate change."" The Kyoto Protocol, the first phase of which ends in 2012, obliges 37 rich nations to cut emissions by an average of five percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A huge gap also exists between rich countries reluctant to pay the fiscal and lifestyle costs of deep cuts in their emissions, and developing states which say they must be allowed to increase emissions so their economies can catch up. Negotiations have stumbled on lack of clarity on the amount, sources and management of any climate funds as well as the legal nature of any new post-2012 pact.",1
"UPDATE 2- (Adds SSE move, updates shares, background)
LONDON, Jan 18 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - British Gas, Britain's biggest energy supplier, raised charges for domestic gas and electricity by 15 percent with immediate effect, its owner Centrica said on Friday. It said wholesale forward gas prices had risen 51 percent since it cut household charges last spring, eroding its profit margins to around 1 per cent, and if it didn't hike prices now it would make a loss in 2008. British Gas has a string of gas-fired power stations and is therefore more exposed to swings in the wholesale price of gas than its rivals, many of which have hydroelectric and coal-powered stations. It made its move after the energy regulator this week ruled out newspaper allegations the big power firms were colluding on prices. Centrica shares rose 2.6 percent to 346.75 pence by 1241 GMT. Rival EDF Energy said this week it would increase power prices for its customers from Friday, less than two weeks after Germany's RWE announced double digit increases for customers of its UK unit npower. Britain's energy regulator met finance minister Alistair Darling on Tuesday to assure the government the price hikes were the result of rising global energy costs, the cost of fighting climate change and increased network investment. Scottish & Southern, which has a broad mix of power sources including coal, hydro and wind, said it would not raise prices until March 30 at the earliest. British Gas called for the rest of Europe to follow Britain by liberalising energy markets faster to help break the historic link between gas prices and oil prices, which have recently reached historic highs. ""The UK gas market is competitive but is now fully linked to Continental Europe where the gas market is less competitive and prices are linked to oil prices,"" British Gas MD Phil Bentley said. ""As oil prices have increased, so has the cost of gas across Europe, and this has hit the UK,"" he added.",0
" The Group of 20 rich and developing nations promised to give rising powers such as China more say in rebuilding and guiding the global economy, and declared their crisis-fighting efforts a success on Friday. Leaders pledged to keep emergency economic supports in place until sustainable recovery is assured, launch a framework for acting together to rebalance economic growth, and implement tougher rules governing banks by 2012. ""Here in Pittsburgh, leaders representing two thirds of the planet's population have agreed to a global plan for jobs, growth and a sustained economic recovery,"" British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said after a two-day summit. US President Barack Obama's first turn hosting a major summit ended on an upbeat note, with leaders claiming victory in stopping the recession from turning into a depression. ""It worked,"" they said in the final communique. ""Our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in global activity and stabilize financial markets."" Obama said, ""We cannot tolerate the same old boom-and-bust economy of the past. We can't wait for a crisis to cooperate. That's why our new framework will allow each of us to assess the other's policies, to build consensus on reform, and to ensure that global demand supports growth for all."" The Pittsburgh gathering was the third summit in a year for the G20, which said it would now be the ""premier forum"" for economic cooperation, supplanting the Western-dominated G7 and G8 that were the primary international forums for decades. ""This is a symbolic act of inclusion of immense importance to international politics,"" said Colin Bradford, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. ""There is tremendous significance to the history being made today that this decision does not enlarge the G7 but replaces it."" Others were more skeptical. ""I think the G7 is something of a zombie -- very hard to kill,"" said Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist. ""They have a lot of inter-connections ... but obviously at the summit level, they are gone."" The move was a clear acknowledgment that fast-growing countries such as China and India now play a much more important part in world growth. ""This movement to the G20 and away from the G7 is recognizing economic realities. You can't talk about the global economy without having the major dynamic emerging economies at the table,"" John Lipsky, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told Reuters Television. Disclosure of a second Iranian uranium enrichment plant gave Obama, with the leaders of Britain and France at his side, an opportunity to press for united action against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program. Obama said Iran was ""on notice"" that it must choose when it meets with world powers in Geneva on October 1 whether it would ""continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation"". JOB NOT DONE Tough economic tasks remained for the group. The G20 vowed not to return to the ""reckless behavior"" blamed for triggering the financial crisis, which exploded two years ago when failing U.S. mortgage loans caused catastrophic losses at financial firms around the world. ""A sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency,"" the G20 leaders said in their summit communique. ""We want growth without cycles of boom and bust and markets that foster responsibility not recklessness."" In addition to the regulatory reforms, which are supposed to be developed by the end of 2010 and put in place two years later, the G20 took aim at lavish pay packages for bankers. The leaders agreed that firms should be able to claw back or reclaim pay and bonuses in certain instances. The measure was aimed at making sure bankers don't get huge payouts for making risky bets that later go bad. The leaders agreed to shift some voting power at the International Monetary Fund to underrepresented countries such as China from rich ones, another sign that the developed world had accepted the changing balance of economic power. In the statement, the G20 endorsed a plan to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as a way to combat global warming, and to step up efforts to complete the Doha round of trade talks. REBALANCING GROWTH World leaders also backed a U.S.-led push for reshaping the global economy to smooth out huge surpluses in exporting powerhouses such as China and large deficits in big importing countries such as the United States. Obama wants to ditch the U.S. borrow-and-spend mold and embrace saving and investment but that means countries such as China that rely on exports for growth must also adjust. G20 leaders agreed to work together to assess how domestic policies mesh and to evaluate whether they are ""collectively consistent with more sustainable and balanced growth."" Countries with sustained, significant surpluses -- a description that could fit China -- pledged to strengthen domestic sources of growth, according to the communique. By the same token, countries with big deficits -- such as the United States -- pledged to support private savings. Economists have warned for years that these large imbalances could destabilize the global economy, and previous attempts to correct them have fallen flat. The United States thinks the effort will succeed this time because China and other big exporters suffered severe slumps when global trade collapsed during the recession, showing their economies were vulnerable to outside shocks. CLIMATE CHANGE Despite the show of solidarity, there were some sources of friction. Many Europeans were frustrated that little was agreed on how to pay for fighting climate change, particularly with a December climate summit in Copenhagen fast approaching. ""I do not hide my concern at the slow rate of progress...It's time to get serious now, not later,"" European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement. Kept at a distance from the G20 convention center, about 10,000 protesters marched against capitalism and the G20's agenda, some of them chanting ""You're sexy, you're cute, take off that riot suit"" to the police. There was only one arrest on Friday and the mood was buoyant, in contrast to protests on Thursday when there were clashes with police and dozens of arrests. ",0
"The cancellation was a rare snub of Denmark’s head of state, Queen Margrethe II, who had extended the invitation to the president and would have hosted him and the first lady. Later in the day, Trump further strained ties, calling the Danish prime minister’s rejection of the idea “nasty.” News that Trump had called off his visit “came as a surprise,” the Royal House’s communications director told the state broadcaster, adding, “That’s all we have to say about that.” Others, however, had more to say. “Is this some sort of joke?” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former prime minister, wrote on Twitter. “Deeply insulting to the people of Greenland and Denmark.” It was not a joke. A day earlier, Trump said on Twitter that Denmark was “a very special country with incredible people” but added that he was abandoning plans to visit because of the country’s refusal to sell Greenland, a semiautonomous part of the kingdom of Denmark. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had said she had no interest in discussing the sale of Greenland. “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland,” Frederiksen told a Danish newspaper this week. “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.” Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said that she had been “nasty” to describe the suggestion as “an absurd discussion.” “All they had to do is say, ‘No, we’d rather not do that or we’d rather not talk about it,’” he said. “Don’t say what an absurd idea that is.” He added, “You don’t talk to the United States that way.” Frederiksen, asked about his remarks on Danish television, said, “I’m not going to enter a war of words with anybody, nor with the American president.” She said she found the Danish response to the president’s visit and its cancellation “good and wise.” On Sunday, Trump said the idea of buying Greenland has been discussed in his administration because of the strategic benefits and in part because of its natural resources, like coal and uranium. He also suggested that the territory was a financial burden to Denmark. “Essentially, it’s a large real estate deal,” Trump told reporters on Sunday of his interest in buying Greenland. “A lot of things can be done. It’s hurting Denmark very badly, because they’re losing almost $700 million a year carrying it. So they carry it at a great loss.” Greenland’s government is in charge of most aspects of its affairs except foreign policy and defence. Local governments have not managed to develop a sustainable economy and receive more than 50% of the island’s budget in direct subsidies topped with additional Danish spending on defence and enforcement of sovereignty. The total bill amounts to $740 million annually. The idea of buying Greenland, which came to light last week, had been immediately and flatly rejected by leaders in Greenland and Denmark, who found themselves in the odd position at the time of having to publicly state that “Greenland is not for sale.” On Wednesday, disbelief and condemnation echoed through the political landscape, as it began to sink in that Trump wasn’t kidding. “Please stop,” Martin Lidegaard, head of the foreign affairs committee in Parliament, wrote on Twitter, before citing several other areas of discussion that he said should be of interest to both countries: the Arctic, climate change and the Middle East. “Total chaos,” the former finance minister Kristian Jensen wrote. “This has gone from a great opportunity for a strengthened dialogue between allies to a diplomatic crisis.” Before Trump cancelled his visit, Frederiksen told a television reporter on Sunday in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland: “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there.” She also added, “Jokes aside, we would naturally love to have an even closer strategic relationship with the US.” But on Wednesday, Frederiksen acknowledged that the cancellation had been a surprise and “unusual” and that she “regretted” it. Adding to the already considerable awkwardness, Trump’s announcement that he was cancelling his trip came not long after the American ambassador, Carla Sands, wrote on Twitter that Denmark was excited about the president’s visit. A headline in Berlingske, a conservative daily, read “The US and Denmark’s relationship has never been this ice-cold. It will have wide-ranging consequences.” A headline on the website of the state broadcaster read, “Trump sends Denmark and the US’s relationship to the freezing point.” Frederiksen, however, dismissed speculation that Danish-American relations had been damaged. “I don’t believe the relationship is in crisis,” she said Wednesday. “We are closely connected, and the United States is one of our most important allies. Our cooperation will only expand in strength and range.” She said that any upcoming decisions about Danish contributions to military missions in Syria or the Strait of Hormuz would be unaffected. She added that Trump was welcome to visit the country at another time. “The American president and the American people are always welcome in Denmark,” she said. Many Danes had seen Trump’s visit as a recognition of a special relationship with the United States built on decades of friendly relations, mutual interests in the Arctic, and Danish responsiveness to American calls to action. Danish troops took part in US-led missions in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, where 43 Danish troops were killed, a staggering number for a nation of 5.5 million not used to war. But the suggestion of a potential sale of Greenland by Denmark still stuck many as beyond the pale. “For no reason Trump assumes that (an autonomous) part of our country is for sale,” Rasmus Jarlov, a former minister of business, wrote on Twitter. “Then insultingly cancels visit that everybody was preparing for. Are parts of the US for sale? Alaska? Please show more respect.” Ole Spiermann, a former professor of international law and legal adviser to the government of Greenland, said that from the perspective of international law, “the Danish state has the sovereign right to sell or trade Greenland if it wishes.” But Greenland’s right to self-determination under international law and also the Danish Constitution demand that “Greenland’s status cannot be changed without acceptance from the Greenlandic people.” Any offer from Trump should be addressed to both Denmark and Greenland, Spiermann said. Should the people of Greenland want an association with the United States against the will of the Danish government, he added, they would first have to become independent from Denmark and then join the United States. But perhaps suggesting he was enjoying the outrage over his interest in Greenland, Trump tweeted a photograph of a gold skyscraper standing in the middle of a field and wrote, “I promise not to do this to Greenland!” Pernille Skipper, the speaker of Parliament’s leftist red-green alliance, said on Twitter that Trump “lives on another planet. Smug and disrespectful. Noting that the president’s tweet said the visit had been postponed, rather than abandoned, Soren Espersen, who speaks for the populist Danish People’s Party on foreign affairs, suggested there was little point in Trump coming. “Why not just cancel?” he said. “We are so busy here with other things.” c.2019 The New York Times Company",0
" When President Barack Obama sits down with his Chinese counterpart next week to talk climate change, it is highly unlikely they will craft a definitive plan to tackle global warming. But the summit between the world's two biggest spewers of carbon dioxide will probably set the tone for next month's U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. Any progress in bridging the North-South climate divide would help lift the shroud of pessimism enveloping Copenhagen and Obama told Reuters this week he was optimistic of progress. Conversely, a failure to advance, or any sign the big two could conspire to effectively let each other off the hook in Denmark, would probably condemn the talks to failure. ""Everyone is very pessimistic about Copenhagen, so there's a need for a positive signal from China and the United States,"" said Zhang Haibin, a professor of environmental diplomacy at Peking University. ""A joint statement that both countries are willing to cooperate and will not abandon this process would help lift hopes for Copenhagen. Without it, Copenhagen looks even bleaker, and the subsequent negotiations would also be damaged."" TOP EMITTERS The United States has emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any country on earth but China has since taken up the mantle as top producer of the gases blamed for warming the Earth's atmosphere. Together, they account for 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. So there can be little progress without cooperation between the two countries at the December 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen that is designed to succeed the Kyoto climate protocol. ""You are not only talking about the two greatest emitters but the two emitters that are iconic of the whole divide between developed and developing countries,"" said Julian L. Wong, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington. Wong thinks the international climate talks are far too complicated for Obama and President Hu Jintao to hammer out a definitive agreement on climate change when they meet next week. But the two sides are expected to make announcements showing how they are engaging on renewable energy projects and research into things like electric cars and capturing carbon at power plants for storage underground. The two leaders will pledge greater cooperation on climate but specifics of any bilateral plan might be sparse. ""There will also be discussion of how to achieve some sort of agreement in Copenhagen -- something to boost global confidence -- but no major breakthroughs,"" said Wang Ke, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing OBAMA'S OPTIMISM Obama told Reuters in an interview prior to the trip that it was key the two countries reach a framework agreement other nations could buy into. ""I remain optimistic that between now and Copenhagen that we can arrive at that framework,"" he said, adding he would travel to Denmark next month if he saw a chance of progress. Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Resources Institute Climate and Energy Program, said the two leaders need to show they want to go to Copenhagen to seal the deal. ""The signal President Obama and Hu Jintao sends is very vital for hopefully inspiring others to come to Copenhagen with a high level of ambition,"" she told a journalists' briefing. But both leaders will also be constrained by domestic issues and policies. Obama must be careful not to preempt Congress, or risk a backlash. ""The Senate needs to feel like it's beginning to tackle climate change itself, not because Obama boxed them in after visiting Beijing,"" said Michael Levi, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations. A sweeping climate bill that would seek to reduce U.S. emissions is struggling through the congressional maze in Washington and it faces opposition across the political divide on concerns about costs for industry. But the Chinese could help Obama if they recognize Obama's domestic constraints. ""Any progress on the part of the Chinese in accepting the political reality in the U.S. Congress would be very important,"" said Levi. For its part, China is making strides embracing renewable energy and has pledged to reduce its emissions intensity -- the amount of emissions from each unit of economic output -- by a ""notable margin."" But China is resisting pressure from the United States and other developed countries to agree to a specific emissions targets. ""Developed countries must lead the way with transforming their unsustainable production and lifestyle, and lead the way with deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions,"" Xie Zhenhua, minister in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission, told a meeting in Beijing, according to an official Chinese climate news website. ""As a responsible country, we will continue enhancing efforts to save energy and reduce emissions, but we will also resolutely oppose any effort to impose unreasonable demands on us,"" he said.",0
" At the current rate of progress it will take 300 years to turn back China's advancing deserts, a senior official said on Tuesday, bemoaning the low level of investment in fighting a serious environmental problem. Over a quarter of China's land area is covered by desert, or land which is turning into desert in which soil loses its fertility, putting crops and water supplies at risk for the world's second-largest economy. ""The area of land being desertified is enormous, and prevention work most hard,"" Liu Tuo, head of China's anti-desertification efforts, told a news conference. ""There is about 1.73 million square km of desertified land in China, and about 530,000 square km of that can be treated. At our present rate of treating 1,717 square km a year, I've just calculated we'll need 300 years,"" he added. ""Investment is seriously insufficient, with a huge gap existing for our needs at present,"" Liu said. In some parts of China, which he did not name, regional governments were not taking the problem seriously enough. ""They say it is important, but their actions show that's not the case,"" Liu said. Climate change could exacerbate China's desertification problem, he added. ""Climate change could cause extreme weather, such as drought, which will have a very serious impact upon desertification."" Still, Zhu Lieke, deputy head of the State Forestry Administration, claimed a measure of success for managing to reduce overall the area of desertified land in the past five years, though by less than half a percentage point. ""Generally speaking we have bought the situation under initial control,"" Zhu said.",0
" London's Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone put climate at the core of his re-election campaign on Tuesday, trying for the first time in Britain to make the environment a key electoral issue. With Livingstone and his main opponent Conservative mayoral candidate Boris Johnson being actively backed by the leaders of their national parties, the campaign could have implications for the next general election due by mid-2010. London is seen as the jewel in the crown for both Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron. Losing the May 1 election would be a blow for Brown, trailing badly in opinion polls after just nine months in office, but a boost for Cameron. ""Climate change and the environment is the big issue that confronts the world at the beginning of the 21st century,"" Livingstone said. ""Protecting and improving London's environment is both about a higher quality of life for us all today and about the kind of city we leave for our children and grandchildren."" But he faces an uphill struggle, dogged by accusations of nepotism and arrogance and with the gaffe-prone Johnson 12 points ahead in opinion polls. While Brown's predecessor Tony Blair managed to put global warming on the international agenda in 2005, and Brown made much of the greenness of his successive budgets as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the issue has not featured in national elections. Little in Livingstone's environmental manifesto is new after two consecutive terms in office, making it all the more difficult for his opponents to match or beat. He has already said he aims to cut the city's climate changing carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2025, a far more ambitious target than the government's plan to achieve the same national reduction by 2050. He pledged to go ahead with a 25 pounds a day tax on gas guzzling cars entering central London -- a policy rejected by Johnson and being legally challenged by luxury car maker Porsche -- and to extend the city's low emission zone to more vehicles. Livingstone, who has already put London at the forefront of the C40 international group of leading cities pooling their knowledge to fight climate change, also promised to press ahead with making civic buildings more environmentally friendly. He also vowed to oppose the planned expansion of Heathrow airport, make London more bicycle friendly, boost renewable energy -- particularly from recycling waste -- and bring in more hybrid buses. ""I have made environmental policy a central focus of all I have done as Mayor,"" Livingstone said. ""From the groundbreaking congestion charge, to the London Climate Change Action Plan ... and the London-wide clean air zone ... London now sets a global lead on green issues. ""If I am re-elected I will embark upon an even more ambitious programme to improve London's environment and tackle climate change."" Livingstone promised a major new green space programme with a huge new park around the Olympic stadium being built for the 2012 Games and a new grid of open areas to act as the city's green lungs and improve notoriously poor air quality.",0
"The prize has changed the lives of presidents, freedom fighters or humble human rights workers but some winners say it is hard to be put on a lifelong pedestal where actions, flaws and foibles can get judged against a yardstick of sainthood.This year that flip side of fame is more relevant than ever because Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Taliban a year ago on Wednesday for demanding education for girls, is just 16.All other winners have made career choices as adults. She would be half the age of the youngest winner of the award since it was set up in 1901 - Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni peace activist, was 32 when she shared the prize in 2011.Geir Lundestad, who hosts and attends the meetings of the peace committee as director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, says there is no age limit.""It will transform their lives,"" he said of new laureates.""They will be flooded by invitations. They will be listened to, and some of them may even be considered saints,"" he said. ""But I haven't met anyone yet who regrets being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize.""This year there are a record 259 nominees but Yousafzai has been widely nominated. The committee of five, usually political appointees from Norway's top parties, whittles them down before picking a winner from a shortlist which is not made public.SAINTLY CREATUREJody Williams, who won a share of the prize as coordinator for the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines in 1997, is outspoken about the downsides, writing in a 2013 autobiography that winning ""hasn't been all joy and wonder"".Some people seem to imagine a Nobel Prize transforms winners ""into something resembling a saintly creature. It's rather frightening actually,"" she wrote, adding she was poles apart from Mother Teresa, the 1979 winner who was beatified in 2003.Any loose remark can be picked over and magnified, she said. On the day she won, for instance, she said it might have been a mistake to call then US President Bill Clinton a ""weenie"" for failing to sign up to the landmine treaty.Kristian Harpviken, head of the independent Peace Research Institute Oslo, said Yousafzai was his top pick for this year's $1.25 million prize. She is also the bookmakers' favorite and widely tipped by Norwegian media.""The main question about Malala is her age,"" he said.He said he believed the prize would only marginally affect the risks that Yousafzai, who is now in England, might again be a target for the Taliban.But he added: ""The other aspect is of course to burden somebody, who is still basically a child, with having to carry the weight of a Nobel Prize for the rest of her lifetime, and that, admittedly, is tough call.""Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian chair of the UN's panel of climate scientists which shared the 2007 award with former US vice-president and climate campaigner Al Gore, said the prize had generally been a huge benefit despite the media microscope.""You get an enormous amount of scrutiny from the public and the media. There are of course upside and downsides of that,"" he said. ""In some senses it brought climate change scientists closer together.""JAILEDLundestad, an authority on the prize because he has been the committee's secretary for 23 years, said the five members were acutely aware of candidates' desires and risks - especially Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese dissident who won in 2010.The committee discussed ""can you give the prize to Liu Xiaobo when you know that the short-term impact will most likely be negative for him personally? This is a very deep moral question. It was the committee's strong impression that he did want the prize,"" he said.Other candidates mentioned this year include Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist who helps survivors of sexual violence, and Bradley Manning, a US soldier convicted of leaking secret files to WikiLeaks.Thousands of people have the right to nominate people for the award - including members of every national parliament in the world and university professors of history, philosophy or law. ""It's very easy to get nominated,"" Lundestad said.He said many people wrongly believed that getting nominated was a sign of endorsement by the committee - yet even Hitler once made it to the list.""If someone outrageous is being nominated for the prize I will come to work the day after and find hundreds of e-mail messages,"" he said. ""And they will all say: ""you idiot"".",0
"Led by grassroots group Extinction Rebellion, the actions were timed to coincide with the closing of the COP25 summit, where negotiators have been unable to agree on how to implement the 2015 Paris climate agreement. ""Just like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, this COP’s fiddling of carbon accounting and negotiating of Article 6 is not commensurate to the planetary emergency we face,"" Extinction Rebellion said in a statement. Twelve members of the group stood on melting blocks of ice, nooses drawn tight around their necks to symbolise the 12 months remaining until the next summit, when the Paris deal enters a make-or-break implementation phase. Attached to the pile of manure was a short message to leaders saying ""the horseshit stops here."" In contrast to a protest held last weekend, in which hundreds of demonstrators blocked one of Madrid's central shopping streets for a mass disco-dance, the mood at the gathering was subdued. ""Even if they reach an agreement it's still not enough. This is the 25th COP they've had and nothing has really changed,"" protester Emma Deane told Reuters from her perch atop an ice block, holding her young daughter in her arms. ""She's going to grow up in a world where there's no food on the shelves and that breaks my heart."" Still, Extinction Rebellion spokesman Ronan McNern stressed the importance of humour in the face of the climate crisis. ""Out of shit comes the best roses. We hope that the international community comes together to create a beautiful future,"" McNern said.",0
"A report by the World Meteorological Organization showed that carbon dioxide levels surged to 413.2 parts per million in 2020, rising more than the average rate over the last decade despite a temporary dip in emissions during COVID-19 lockdowns. Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said that the current rate of increase in heat-trapping gases would result in temperature rises ""far in excess"" of the 2015 Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average this century. ""We are way off track,"" he said. ""We need to revisit our industrial, energy and transport systems and whole way of life,"" he added, calling for a ""dramatic increase"" in commitments at the COP26 conference beginning on Sunday. The Scottish city of Glasgow was putting on the final touches before hosting the climate talks, which may be the world's last best chance to cap global warming at the 1.5-2 degrees Celsius upper limit set out in the Paris Agreement. The stakes for the planet are huge - among them the impact on economic livelihoods the world over and the future stability of the global financial system. Saudi Arabia's crown prince said on Saturday that the world's top oil exporter aims to reach ""net zero"" emissions of greenhouse gases, mostly produced by burning fossil fuels, by 2060 - 10 years later than the United States. He also said it would double the emissions cuts it plans to achieve by 2030. Australia's cabinet was expected to formally adopt a target for net zero emissions by 2050 when it meets on Monday to review a deal reached between parties in Prime Minister Scott Morrison's coalition government, official sources told Reuters. The ruling coalition has been divided over how to tackle climate change, with the government maintaining that harder targets would damage the A$2-trillion ($1.5-trillion) economy. In Berlin, officials from Germany and Canada were set to present a plan about how rich countries can help poorer nations finance the overhaul needed to address climate change. Wealthy countries have so far failed to deliver their 2009 pledge to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance to poorer countries by 2020. A Reuters poll of economists found that hitting the Paris Agreement goal of net-zero carbon emissions will require investments in a green transition worth 2%-3% of world output each year until 2050, far less than the economic cost of inaction. In London, climate activists restarted their campaign of blockading major roads by disrupting traffic in the city's financial district.",0
"This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. The price of gasoline was already rising before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24, and it has risen every day since then. As the most important measure of inflation that most Americans regularly see, this daily increase is a big problem in itself. But it’s more than that: It is a tax on working people, a drag on economic growth and a conspicuous emblem of the acute problems afflicting a range of financial assets, from stocks and bonds to commodities like gold, nickel and wheat. These issues are minor compared with the anguish that the Russian onslaught has inflicted on Ukrainians. But it’s worth noting that both Russia’s brutal invasion as well as Western efforts to counter it and aid Ukraine are spilling over into global financial markets, affecting, in ways big and small, virtually everyone in the United States and around the world. PRICES AT THE PUMP Consider that since the Russian invasion, the average price of regular gas in the United States had increased 17% through Wednesday. It was up 23% from the beginning of the year. On Tuesday alone, the average price of a gallon of regular rose 8 cents to $4.25, according to statistics compiled by the AAA motor club, and it is much higher in states like California, where a gallon of regular costs $5.57, on average. For a variety of reasons, the price in many communities is much steeper than that. More price increases, and big ones, are already inevitable. Gasoline prices are based on the cost of crude oil, which is jumping in response to the invasion and Western sanctions. With the announcement Tuesday that the United States and Britain would ban imports of Russian energy, the climb of world oil prices appeared to be far from over. Where oil prices go, wholesale and retail prices for gasoline eventually follow, as Paul Ashworth, chief US economist for Capital Economics, explained in an interview Monday. Even if the price of oil went no higher (although it already has), the average price of retail gas in the United States would reach $4.50 a gallon by April, he said. “That’s just the way the markets work,” he said. Further increases seem likely. In fact, after the US and British announcements, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s analytics, said on Twitter on Tuesday that he expected world oil prices to rise to $150 a barrel — an increase in the 20% range — “at least for a few weeks until things begin to sort out.” That would translate to about $5 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline, on average. Current gasoline prices already surpass the previous records, which were set in the summer of 2008, if you don’t account for inflation. If you do take inflation into account, the picture isn’t very comforting, either. In July 2008, a gallon of regular cost roughly $5.35 in today’s money. Remember what happened next? Two months later, Lehman Bros. collapsed, helping to set off a global financial crisis, a stock market crash and a severe recession. Gasoline and oil prices were not the immediate causes of those calamities but, as James D Hamilton, professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, concluded in a paper in 2009, they “made a material contribution” to the recession. A REGRESSIVE TAX ON WORKERS  Price increases for gasoline and other basics are already hurting people with tight budgets who must drive to work or school — and who can’t cut back on food purchases. Yardeni Research, an independent economic and stock market consultant, estimated that the average US household would spend about $3,100 on gasoline in 2022, based on price levels in December 2021. The price increases since then mean that households would have to pay about $2,000 more. That’s not a big deal if you are wealthy or if you own an electric vehicle. But for many working people, it’s equivalent to a tax. “A lot of people have little choice,” Ashworth said. “They have to drive.” In addition, food prices have been increasing. Russia and Ukraine accounted for 28% of the global wheat trade and 18% of corn exports last year. The futures price of wheat has risen 37% this year and 28% since the war started Feb 24. The story is similar for corn, barley and sunflower oil, commodities for which Russia and Ukraine are major players. Shipments through Black Sea ports have been obstructed, financial sanctions are limiting trade — and futures prices are spiking. This is beginning to translate into food inflation in the United States — and quite possibly into a hunger crisis around the globe in the months ahead. In the United States, Yardeni Research estimates, the average household will have to spend $1,000 more on food this year, given the difference between price trends now and in December 2021. Combined, those increased costs for food and gas this year could amount to about $3,000. They have the effect of a hefty tax, one that is extremely regressive, in that it hits lower-income people much harder than the rich. HEADACHES FOR THE FED  This creates additional challenges for the Federal Reserve, which already has plenty of them. Inflation has been running hot for a while. The consumer price index for February, which is to be released Thursday, is likely to be even higher than the 7.5% annual rate that was reported last month. The spillover effects of the war will probably result in a high inflation reading next month as well. After that, year-over-year comparisons with high inflation caused in large part by supply chain disruptions during the pandemic will start to make the inflation numbers look better. But if commodity prices keep rising, the inflation numbers won’t go down rapidly as I, and many economists, had thought only a month ago. So the Fed will remain under considerable pressure to begin raising interest rates at its meeting next Tuesday and Wednesday. Higher interest rates could slow the economy. At the same time, price increases and reductions in consumer spending imposed by the war are likely to be a drag on the economy. With the combination of rising interest rates and an oil shock, two unpleasant words are coming back into circulation: stagflation and recession. They are just possibilities, but worries about them are weighing on the markets. STOCKS AND BONDS IN DISARRAY  Yields on long-term bonds have fluctuated, suggesting the markets have little conviction about where the economy is headed. If the Fed raises rates, it won’t take much for short-term interest rates to exceed the level of long-term ones — which would be another bad omen for the economy. Such a juxtaposition of interest rates, known as a yield curve inversion, has often preceded recessions. The broad stock market has gotten off to one of its worst starts since 1900, Bloomberg records show. The markets are swinging up and down. But already this year, the S&P 500 has sunk more than 10% from its peak, a drop known on Wall Street as a correction, while the Nasdaq composite has fallen more than 20% from its peak in November, putting it into what Wall Street calls bear market territory. Commodity bets have paid off. The iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Indexed Trust, an exchange-traded fund that tracks a diversified group of commodities, is up 51% this year. Energy stocks have soared, but little else has done well. For long-term investors with balanced, diversified portfolios containing stocks and bonds, declines like this occur periodically. They can be painful, but if history echoes itself, the stock market will recover and surpass its past highs. If the effective closing of Russian financial markets and rising commodity prices lead to a steeper stock market decline, or have other, unexpected consequences, the Fed will be in a tough place. It is moving toward tightening monetary conditions but might have to reverse itself and engage in another rescue operation, as it did in March 2020. This is a risky moment, as Liz Ann Sonders and Kevin Gordon of Charles Schwab said in a note Monday. It is conceivable that the war could end abruptly, and energy prices could sharply decline, but “betting on that in the near term seems a fool’s errand.” It is remarkable that in March 2022, decades after the oil shocks of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are worrying about oil and gas prices and a renewed Cold War, and not focusing on combating climate change and ending the pandemic. But to return to those concerns, we will have to get past the Russian war. © 2022 The New York Times Company",0
"Washington, Sep 5 (bdnews24.com/Reuters)— The head of the World Bank said on Thursday he is preparing broad reforms at the development lender to make it more effective in ending global poverty and will discuss the changes with member countries at meetings in Tokyo next week. The annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from October 11-14 in Japan will be the first opportunity for Jim Yong Kim to put his mark on the institution since becoming president in July. Incidentally, the announcement from Kim comes barely a week after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called for reforms to the multinational donor agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the UN General Assembly. ""We're not ready to ask for specific changes yet ... but if we are going to be really serious about ending poverty earlier than currently projected ... there are going to have to be some changes in the way we run the institution,"" Kim told reporters. He said he wants the poverty-fighting institution to be less focused on pushing development loans out of the door and more on making a difference on the ground. ""Specifically, I am going to ask the governors to work with us so the organization can move to a model where we move more quickly, we can make mid-course corrections more easily and where our board and our governors focus much more on holding us accountable for results on the ground in countries, rather than focusing so much on approval of large loans,"" he added. Kim said he would be more specific about reforms at the next meetings of member countries in April. ""The need for these changes have been clear for a very long time,"" he added. With the United States and European countries wrestling with weak growth and high debt burdens, Kim said now was not the time to ask big donors to pony up money for the World Bank. ""At this point, I see really no appetite ... it is not the time for us to have a discussion about a capital increase, this is something I don't think the donor countries are ready for,"" he added. Kim, a Harvard-trained medical doctor and anthropologist, said the Tokyo meetings would also highlight growing concerns about rising food prices and the impact climate change is having on farmers around the globe. The worst drought in half a century in the United States and poor crops from the Black Sea bread basket have lifted world prices of staples such as corn, wheat and soybeans. While prices have not reached 2008 record levels, increased food price volatility is a worry. As the first scientist to head the World Bank, Kim said the increases have raised his concern over the impact on poor countries from climate change. ""This is the first drought that scientists clearly attributed to man-made climate change,"" Kim said. ""Climate change is real, the scientific community is overwhelming in agreement about the dimensions about man-made climate change and we simply must face it."" Until now, the World Bank has been reluctant to speak out loudly on global climate change for fear of getting involved in the politics of combat ting global warming. Developing countries have blamed the European Union, the United States and other rich economies for trying to avoid deeper emissions cuts and dodging increases in finance to help poorer nations deal with climate change. Slowing global growth Kim said the euro zone debt crisis and its impact around the world would also loom large in the Tokyo meetings. Developing nations, which have so far weathered the global crisis well, are now seeing clear signs of slowing economic activity as a two-year debt crisis in the euro zone continues to stifle demand and financial markets are roiled by uncertainty over bailout prospects for Greece and Spain. Despite the slowdown, economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America are still likely to grow at rates above 5 percent thanks to more than a decade of solid policies and a growing interest by investors to tap into so-called frontier markets. ""All of us are rooting for the Europeans to quickly find a path toward solidarity in a way to resolve their problems,"" Kim said, adding that the World Bank stood ready to offer its expertise to any country, include those in the euro zone. The bank has had decades of experience working with governments in developing countries to help improve the functioning of their economies through structural changes. Some analysts believe that expertise could help countries like Greece and Portugal. As Kim hones in on ways to make the World Bank more flexible, he said it should focus on helping governments create an environment where businesses can flourish and create jobs - one of the most pressing issues facing many countries. ""One of the things we are trying to do is define more clearly what is the bottom line for the World Bank, what is it that we really do, and how we are going to organize ourselves so that every day we are working toward that bottom line,"" he said. ""It seems clear that what we're best at and what people have the greatest passion for is to work to end poverty. The way we do that is by boosting prosperity,"" Kim added.",0
"Palin, a former Alaska governor who was Republican Senator John McCain's running mate in the 2008 election won by Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, appeared with Trump at a rally in Ames, Iowa, two weeks before the state's Feb. 1 caucus, the country's first nominating process ahead of the Nov. 8 election. Trump is in a close race in Iowa with fellow conservative Republican Ted Cruz. Palin's folksy, plain-speaking style has won her a loyal following among some conservatives, but she remains a polarizing figure, even among Republicans. It is unclear whether she can attract additional support to Trump, whose own blunt rhetoric has helped lift him to the top of the crowded Republican field. ""He is from the private sector, not a politician,"" Palin said in an animated speech after joining the business mogul and former host of TV's ""The Apprentice"" onstage. ""Can I get a hallelujah?"" She described Trump as an anti-establishment candidate who would ""kick ISIS' ass,"" referring to the Islamic State militant group. Just hours after Palin backed Trump, police in Alaska said they had arrested her eldest son, Track Palin, on suspicion of assaulting a woman and carrying a gun while intoxicated. Palin said there was nothing wrong with Trump being a multibillionaire and that it did not make him an elitist, citing all the time he had spent with construction workers as a real-estate developer. As Trump stood alongside, Palin said: ""The status quo has got to go,"" adding that the political establishment had been ""wearing political correctness kind of like a suicide vest."" In a statement before the event, Trump said he was ""greatly honored"" by the endorsement. ""She is a friend, and a high-quality person whom I have great respect for."" Trump has led national opinion polls among Republicans for months but is in a tight contest with Cruz, a US senator from Texas, for the support of Iowa Republicans, who lean conservative and whose evangelical Christians comprise a major voting bloc. Palin, who often discusses her Christian faith, is popular among that group and endorsed Cruz when he ran for the US Senate in 2012. Cruz responded to her switch of allegiance with magnanimity. ""Regardless of what she does in 2016,"" he tweeted, ""I will always be a big fan."" She devoted a large portion of her speech to deflecting criticism from Cruz and others that Trump, who did not oppose legal abortion at least for a time, was not a true conservative. CELEBRITY APPEAL? Despite the Democratic victory, Palin's 2008 vice presidential run made her a national celebrity. Suggesting there were no fiercer fighters for conservative values than a small-town ""hockey mom,"" the former beauty-pageant winner professed a love of hunting with guns and thought it more important that the United States increase drilling for oil than fret about climate change. Since resigning her governorship in 2009, Palin has worked as a conservative political commentator and as the producer and star of lightly staged television shows about her large family enjoying Alaska's rugged landscapes. But even some former admirers have wondered if her moment had passed, particularly after a speech a year ago before conservative Iowa voters that at times was hard to transcribe and even harder to follow. Joe Brettell, a Republican strategist in Texas, said he thought Palin would not help Trump much ""beyond a jolt in the news cycle."" The crowd in Ames listened to Palin warmly but was divided afterward as to how valuable she would be. June Heidn, 62, said Palin was ""inspiring"" and might help Trump appeal to female voters. Mike Caruso, 40, said it did not help him as he weighs giving Trump his vote. ""I think he's pretty solid without her,"" he said.",0
" Nearly one in 10 people believe global warming is part of a natural cycle of events, and nothing to really worry about, an alarming increase on the figures from two years ago, according to a global poll. Although a third of respondents to the survey of more than 13,000 people this year said they were very concerned about climate change, 9 percent said they weren't, up from 4 percent when the same survey was conducted two years ago. ""The issue of climate change has continued its rough ride,"" said Steve Garton of market research firm Synovate which, along with German media company Deutsche Welle, conducted the poll in 18 markets from the United States to Australia. ""Global conferences that have been organised to tackle the challenges have struggled to reach a meaningful consensus whilst the underlying science has been questioned by some. ""At the very least, the most important beliefs of the impacts relating to climate change have not been made simple and clear enough to people around the world,"" Garton said in a statement. Nearly two-thirds of those polled in China, Colombia and Ecuador said they were most concerned about global warming -- the highest numbers in the world -- and the vast majority of those surveyed, or almost 90 percent, feel that companies have a responsibility to help reduce climate change. Globally, nearly a third believe humans are to blame for what is happening to the environment, although aircraft and cars were cited among the factors contributing the least to climate change. Human waste, population increases, energy use and deforestation were listed as the worst contributors to global warming. For almost a third of respondents, the biggest danger from climate change was extreme weather conditions, followed by desertification and drought. And most people surveyed said they were personally doing something about global warming, with saving electricity the most popular activity, followed by reducing water consumption and recycling waste. Almost half of those surveyed said they would also be willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products. The survey was conducted from February to April this year.",0
" US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks with Indonesia's president on Thursday on a trip aimed at building ties with the Islamic world, before heading to South Korea for talks on the North's military threat. Clinton said on Wednesday she wanted to deepen cooperation with the world's most populous Muslim nation on counterterrorism, climate change and security. ""It is exactly the kind of comprehensive partnership that we believe will drive both democracy and development,"" she said, adding it was ""no accident"" Indonesia had been picked for her trip. Her talks also covered the global financial crisis and Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said Jakarta had discussed the possibility of assistance from the United States in the form of a currency swap agreement and possible contingency funding to support Southeast Asia's top economy. Indonesia is already seeking to extend a $6 billion currency swap arrangement with Japan and has similar deals, each worth $3 billion, with China and South Korea. Clinton, dressed in a navy-blue jacket, was greeted by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at his office in the white colonial-style presidential palace in Jakarta before the two headed inside for talks. Yudhoyono, seeking a second term this year, is keen to showcase Indonesia's stability since its transformation from an autocracy under former President Suharto -- who was forced to resign in 1998 -- to a vibrant democracy. Clinton has held up Indonesia as proof that modernity and Islam can coexist as she visited the country where US President Barack Obama spent four years as a boy. NEXT STOP SEOUL She was due to visit a USAID project in Jakarta before flying out to South Korea later on Thursday as tensions mount on the Korean peninsula. North Korea has repeatedly threatened in recent weeks to reduce the South to ashes and on Thursday said it was ready for war. Pyongyang is thought to be readying its longest-range missile for launch in what analysts say is a bid to grab the new US administration's attention and pressure Seoul to ease up on its hard line. Clinton said in Tokyo on Tuesday at the start of her first foreign trip since taking office that a North Korean missile launch would be ""very unhelpful"".",0
"CANBERRA, Thu Jan 22, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd heads to India and the World Economic Forum in Davos nezt week aiming to win support for climate action, and a greater role for G-20 developing nations to fight the global financial crisis. Rudd, a former diplomat, popular with voters but derided also as a ""nomad"" for his frequent globetrotting, arrives in New Delhi ahead of the World Economic Forum talks and after attending Pacific crisis talks on military-ruled Fiji. But even as his government fights to avert near certain recession and rising job losses as financial shockwaves pound Australia, Rudd sees his India trip as too vital to delay, especially with difficult world climate talks late this year. ""The defining feature of the Rudd government's emerging foreign policy is its ambition. It seeks for Australia a shaping role in addressing a number of urgent international challenges,"" says Allan Gyngell, a foreign analyst who leads the respected Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. Rudd, a China expert, faces a tricky reception in India after his government overturned the previous conservative government's plans to sell uranium ore to India despite its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Rudd has tried to keep options and the promise of an Australian free trade deal with India alive by supporting U.S.-led efforts to win approval from nuclear supply countries to authorize sale of uranium and other nuclear goods to New Delhi. He hopes also to persuade India to cut its greenhouse emissions expected to treble by 2050 and play a role in getting developing country backing for a post-Kyoto climate deal at international talks in Copenhagen later this year. Australia, itself one of the world's major per-head polluters, is also one of the countries climate scientists expect to be most affected by climate warming and is anxious for a strong global deal that will also not harm vital coal exports. REGIONAL PLAYER Rudd has set ambitious goals for Australia to be a ""regional power prosecuting global interests"", including a non-permanent place on the United Nations Security Council in 2013-14. He hopes also to build support in Asia for an EU-style regional bloc minus the sensitive monetary, political and security union, yet still somehow bringing China, the United States, India, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific together. ""Individually each of these objectives is a dauntingly difficult task for Australian diplomacy. (Rudd) genuinely wants to help shape the international system ... and he wants to play a part in this himself,"" says Gyngell. In Davos, Rudd will argue for a stronger role for the Group of 20 leading world economies, tying Brazil, China and India with major nations, in responding to still-unfolding global financial turmoil. Governments must ""look at the rules that govern financial markets for the future and to change them and to say that the days of casino capitalism have gone"", Rudd said on Thursday. Global reforms should include curbs on executive pay, stronger supervisory roles for governments and steeling the International Monetary Fund to give it authority to do prudential analysis and early warning, while recasting IMF governance, Rudd said.",0
" India made its voice heard on global trade and climate change at a G8 summit in Italy this month, in a sign of growing diplomatic heft that can help it push for a bigger role in global governance. India's emergence is seen as a logical outgrowth of two of the world's biggest current challenges, the financial crisis and climate change, and its ability to help resolve those problems with a trillion dollar economy still growing at about 7 percent. While the slowdown spurred a shift towards economic inclusion, a landmark civilian nuclear deal with the U.S. last year also helped India's entry into the global order as it vies with a rising China for a say in international policymaking. Just two years ago Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from a G8 summit in Germany complaining that India was a sideshow and attending such meetings as an invitee was a waste of time. Italy saw a far more strident India, speaking with authority on trade protectionism and climate change, which boosted hopes of Asia's third largest economy gaining a seat at the high table of global governance. ""What has changed India's profile is the relative dynamism of its economy -- its estimated 7 percent growth -- vis-a-vis the global economy"", said Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper. ""Any decision in the name of global community that leaves out China and India will not be seen as legitimate."" U.S. President Barack Obama said there was a need to include the big emerging players in policymaking, which India can count as a victory for its own aspirations. At the end of the summit, Obama said tackling global challenges ""in the absence of major powers like China, India and Brazil seems to be wrongheaded."" TRADE AND CLIMATE At the summit, India stirred the pot with a firm stand on climate change, refusing to give in to pressure from rich nations to sign up to carbon emission targets. While India seeks a climate solution that does not impede growth and efforts to pull millions out of poverty, its position, along with other developing nations, underlined the difficulties of securing a new U.N. climate pact in Copenhagen in December. The European Union has already hinted its frustration at what it sees as developing countries' unwillingness to play ball, and said negotiations have slowed because too many countries were asking others to do something without acting themselves. On the other hand, global trade talks, locked for almost a decade, got a boost at the summit after developing countries led by India and rich nations agreed to conclude the Doha Round by 2010, in a possible end to squabbles over tariffs and subsidies. ""It is the ability of India to bring some substance to the table which has put it in focus"", said Uday Bhaskar, a New Delhi-based strategic affairs expert and director of the National Maritime Foundation. But while such issues underscore India's growing relevance, the country's long-term goal is to find a place at the high table of global powers and be taken as seriously as China, government officials say. ""India doesn't want to be a one-issue or a two-issue country, but an equal partner in global decision-making"", said a senior Indian official. ""I think this summit shows India has begun moving towards that goal ... India's voice has been bolstered."" Singh -- not usually known to use tough diplomatic language -- called for reforming global institutions to recognise the relevance of major emerging economies. ""It is clear to me that meaningful global action on all these issues requires a restructuring of the institutions of global governance, starting with the U.N. Security Council,"" Singh said at the end of the summit in the central Italian city of L'Aquila. To that end, India is participating in alternative fora like the G20 group of industrialised and developing economies and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) gathering of the world's biggest emerging markets.",0
"“AZD1222 (AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate) contains the genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein, and the changes to the genetic code seen in this new viral strain do not appear to change the structure of the spike protein,” an AstraZeneca representative said in an email. Drugmakers are scrambling to test their COVID-19 vaccines against the new fast-spreading variant of the virus that is raging in Britain, the latest challenge in the breakneck race to curb the pandemic. “Through vaccination with AZD1222, the body’s immune system is trained to recognise many different parts of the spike protein, so that it can eliminate the virus if it is later exposed,” the AstraZeneca representative added. The mutation known as the B.1.1.7 lineage may be up to 70% more infectious and more of a concern for children. It has sown chaos in Britain, prompting a wave of travel bans that are disrupting trade with Europe and threatening to further isolate the island country. The AstraZeneca-Oxford shot is considered vital for lower-income countries and those in hot climates because it is cheaper, easier to transport and can be stored for long periods at normal refrigerator temperatures. Data from AstraZeneca’s late-stage trials in the UK and Brazil released earlier this month showed the vaccine had efficacy of 62% for trial participants given two full doses, but 90% for a smaller sub-group given a half, then a full dose.",3
" World temperatures could soar by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the 2060s in the worst case of global climate change and require an annual investment of $270 billion just to contain rising sea levels, studies suggested on Sunday. Such a rapid rise, within the lifetimes of many young people today, is double the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) ceiling set by 140 governments at a UN climate summit in Copenhagen last year and would disrupt food and water supplies in many parts of the globe. Rising greenhouse gas emissions this decade meant the 2 degree goal was ""extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3 or 4 degrees C within this century,"" an international team wrote. The studies, published to coincide with annual UN climate talks in Mexico starting on Monday, said few researchers had examined in detail the possible impact of a 4 degrees C rise above pre-industrial levels. ""Across many sectors -- coastal cities, farming, water stress, ecosystems or migration, the impacts will be greater,"" than at 2 degrees, wrote Mark New of Oxford University in England, who led the international team. One study, published in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, said temperatures could rise by 4 degrees C in the worst case by the early 2060s. Other scenarios showed the threshold breached later in the century or not at all by 2100, raising risks of abrupt changes such as a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, a thaw in permafrost or a drying out of the Amazon rainforest. MIGRATION One of the papers gave what it called a ""pragmatic estimate"" that sea levels might rise by between 0.5 and 2 meters (1.64 to 6.56 feet) by 2100 if temperatures rose 4 degrees Celsius. Containing a sea level rise of 2 meters, mostly building Dutch-style sea walls, would require annual investments of up to $270 billion a year by 2100. That sum might limit migration to perhaps 305,000 people from the most vulnerable areas, wrote Robert Nicholls of the University of Southampton. Lack of protective measures could mean the forced resettlement of 187 million people. People living on small islands, in Asia, Africa or river deltas were most at risk. The studies concluded that governments should do more both to cut greenhouse gas emissions and research back-up methods such as ""geo-engineering"" programs that could dim sunlight or seek to suck greenhouse gases from the air.",0
"Tipped to win, the opposition Social Democrats scored 17.7 percent, while their eurosceptic Finns Party rivals were at 17.5 percent, according to final results from the justice ministry. The co-ruling Centre Party of Prime Minister Juha Sipila and centre-right National Coalition stood at 13.8 percent and 17.0 percent, respectively, marking the first time in a century that no party won more than 20 percent in a general election. With a fragmented parliament and deep divisions within the mainstream parties over how to tackle rising costs of expensive public services, coalition talks following the election could be protracted. But Social Democrat leader Antti Rinne, 56, a former union boss, was expected to have the first shot at forming a government, with most party leaders having ruled out cooperation with the populist Finns. ""For the first time since 1999 we are the largest party in Finland ... SDP is the prime minister's party,"" Rinne told supporters and party members celebrating in central Helsinki. With the European Parliament election less than two months away, the Finnish ballot is being watched in Brussels. Underscoring a growing confidence among the far-right in Europe, anti-immigration parties, including the Finns, have announced plans to join forces after the May 26 EU election in a move that could give them a major say in how the continent is run. At stake in Finland is the future shape of the country's welfare system, a pillar of the social model across the Nordics, which the leftists want to preserve through tax hikes and the centre-right wants to see streamlined because of rising costs. Just as the Social Democrats are benefiting from a growing sense of insecurity among Finland's older and poorer voters, the Finns argue that the nation has gone too far in addressing issues such as climate change and migration at its own expense. MOST POPULAR POLITICIAN After losing some ground when hardliner Jussi Halla-aho took the party's reigns in 2017, the Finns have made rapid gains in recent months when a number of cases of sexual abuse of minors by foreign men stirred anti-immigration sentiments. But Halla-aho, who was fined by the Supreme Court in 2012 for blog comments linking Islam to paedophilia and Somalis to theft, emerged as Finland's most popular politician on Sunday, garnering the highest number of votes - more than 30,000. The Social Democrats' Rinne won roughly 12,000. ""I could not expect a result like this, and no one could,"" Halla-aho told supporters on Sunday, referring to the party's overall result. The Finns Party's stance on environmental policies, which includes opposing a proposed tax on meat consumption, appeals to rural voters in particular who worry about soaring fuel costs and resent any efforts to change what they see as the traditional Finnish way of life. The party is the only group in Finland - a country that has the highest air quality in the world, according to the World Health Organisation - to argue the next government should not speed up cutting carbon emissions to combat climate change. Unlike Finland's Social Democrats as well as populists in the south of Europe who resonate with voters angry over slow economic growth in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Finns call for fiscal restraint. One area that has suffered most in the Nordics is the region's cherished welfare model. Healthcare systems across much of the developed world have come under increasing stress in recent years as treatment costs soar and people live longer, meaning fewer workers are supporting more pensioners. Reform has been controversial in Finland and plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years, leaving older voters worried about the future. ""It's good that we are the biggest party in Finland, but it's tough competition with other parties. Negotiations for a new government will be very tough and very difficult,"" Social Democrat supporter Mikko Heinikoski, 37, said.",0
"COPENHAGEN, Dec 18,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - World leaders tried to rescue a global climate agreement on Friday but the failure of leading greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States to come up with new proposals blocked chances of an ambitious deal. US President Barack Obama and other leaders are trying to reach consensus on carbon emissions cuts, financial aid to poor nations, temperature caps and international scrutiny of emissions curbs. There has been progress in some areas, but gaps remain over emissions targets and monitoring, delegates said. ""We are ready to get this done today but there has to be movement on all sides, to recognise that it is better for us to act than talk,"" Obama told the conference. ""These international discussions have essentially taken place now for almost two decades and we have very little to show for it other than an increase, an acceleration of the climate change phenomenon. The time for talk is over."" At stake is an agreement for coordinated global action to avert climate change including more floods and droughts. Two weeks of talks in Copenhagen have battled suspicion between rich and poor countries over how to share out emissions cuts. Developing countries, among them some of the most vulnerable to climate change, say rich nations have a historic responsibility to take the lead. The environment minister of EU president Sweden, Andreas Carlgren, said the United States and China held the key to a deal. The United States had come late to the table with commitments to tackle climate change, he said. China's resistance to monitoring was a serious obstacle. ""And the great victims of this is the big group of developing countries. The EU really wanted to reach out to the big group of developing countries. That was made impossible because of the great powers,"" Carlgren said. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen on Thursday with a promise that the United States would join efforts to mobilise $100 billion (61 billion pounds) a year to help poor nations cope with climate change, provided there was a deal. But there were no such new gestures from Obama. He stuck to the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. That works out at 3-4 percent versus 1990, compared with an EU target of 20 percent. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao also reiterated existing targets, although he said the world's top carbon emitter may exceed them. ""We will honour our word with real action,"" Wen said. ""Whatever outcome this conference may produce, we will be fully committed to achieving and even exceeding the target."" Obama and Wen then met for nearly an hour in what a White House official described as a ""step forward."" ""They had a constructive discussion that touched upon ... all of the key issues,"" the official told reporters. ""They've now directed their negotiators to work on a bilateral basis as well as with other countries to see if an agreement can be reached."" Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, urged China and the United States, which together account for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, to act. ""The U.S. and China account for almost half the world's emissions. They simply must do their part. If they don't, we will not be able to meet the 2 degree target,"" he told the conference. 'NOT GREAT' Speaking after Obama's speech a British official said: ""The prospects for a deal are not great. A number of key countries are holding out against the overall package and time is now running short."" Negotiators failed in overnight talks to agree on carbon cuts. Obama and other leaders failed to achieve a breakthrough in talks on Friday morning. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Chinese resistance to monitoring of emissions was a sticking point. ""The good news is that the talks are continuing, the bad news is they haven't reached a conclusion,"" he said. A draft text seen by Reuters called for a ""goal"" of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations cope with climate change. It also supported $30 billion for the least developed countries from 2010-2012, and said the world ""ought to"" limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius versus pre-industrial levels. Scientists say a 2 degrees limit is the minimum to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change including several metres sea level rise, extinctions and crop failures. The aim of the two weeks of talks in Copenhagen is to agree a climate deal which countries will convert into a full legally binding treaty next year, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol whose present round ends in 2012. The United States never ratified Kyoto, and the pact doesn't bind developing nations. Friday's draft text foresees ""continuing negotiations"" to agree one or more new legal treaties no later than end 2010.",0
"CHICAGO, Dec 21, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama underscored on Saturday his intent to push initiatives on climate change by naming John Holdren, an energy and climate specialist, as the new White House science adviser. Holdren is a Harvard University physicist who has focused on the causes and consequences of climate change and advocated policies aimed at sustainable development. He has also done extensive research on the dangers of nuclear weapons. Obama pledged to put a priority on encouraging scientific breakthroughs in areas such as alternative energy solutions and finding cures to diseases, as he announced the pick of Holdren and other top science advisers in the Democratic weekly radio and video address. ""Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation,"" Obama said. ""It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology."" ""From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier,"" Obama said. Obama said that government has played an important role in encouraging those breakthroughs and could do so in the future. The Bush administration has had a rocky relationship with the scientific community and was at times accused by critics of ignoring scientific evidence in its efforts to make political points on issues such as global warming. Holdren, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Obama, who takes office on January 20, this week finished naming Cabinet secretaries for his incoming administration. On Friday, he introduced his choices of Illinois Republican congressman Ray LaHood to head the Transportation Department and California Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis to be secretary of labor. HAWAII VACATION After working for weeks in his hometown of Chicago to assemble his team, Obama leaves on Saturday morning for Hawaii for a Christmas vacation with his family. Obama has named Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics who was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, to head the Energy Department. He has also tapped former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner for a new post that will coordinate White House policy on energy and climate change. In addition to the pick of Holdren, Obama also announced that marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University would be his nominee for head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Obama also named two people to work with Holdren to lead the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also known as PCAST. One of them, Eric Lander, is founding director of the Broad Institute, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that focuses mapping the human genome. The other is Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health who won a Nobel Prize for his studies on cancer and genetics. For the past nine years, Varmus has served as president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.",0
" Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of ""new"" sins such as causing environmental blight. The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils. Asked what he believed were today's ""new sins,"" he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics. ""(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,"" he said. The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning. Girotti, in an interview headlined ""New Forms of Social Sin,"" also listed ""ecological"" offences as modern evils. In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had become gravely important for the entire human race. Under Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, the Vatican has become progressively ""green"". It has installed photovoltaic cells on buildings to produce electricity and hosted a scientific conference to discuss the ramifications of global warming and climate change, widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels. Girotti, who is number two in the Vatican ""Apostolic Penitentiary,"" which deals with matter of conscience, also listed drug trafficking and social and economic injustices as modern sins. But Girotti also bemoaned that fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession at all. He pointed to a study by Milan's Catholic University that showed that up to 60 percent of Catholic faithful in Italy stopped going to confession. In the sacrament of Penance, Catholics confess their sins to a priest who absolves them in God's name. But the same study by the Catholic University showed that 30 percent of Italian Catholics believed that there was no need for a priest to be God's intermediary and 20 percent felt uncomfortable talking about their sins to another person.",0
" Washington claimed progress on Monday in easing rifts with Beijing on ways to fight global warming as UN climate talks got under way in Mexico with warnings about the rising costs of inaction. The United States and China, the world's largest economies and top greenhouse gas emitters, have accused each other of doing little to combat global warming in 2010, contributing to deadlock in the UN talks among almost 200 nations. ""We have spent a lot of energy in the past month working on those issues where we disagree and trying to resolve them,"" said Jonathan Pershing, heading the US delegation at the talks in Cancun. ""My sense is that we have made progress ... It remains to be seen how this meeting comes out,"" he said. The talks, in a tightly guarded hotel complex by the Caribbean with warships visible off the coast, are seeking ways to revive negotiations after the UN Copenhagen summit failed to agree to a binding treaty in 2009. The United Nations wants agreement on a new ""green fund"" to help developing nations as well as ways to preserve rainforests and to help the poor adapt to climbing temperatures. The meeting will also seek to formalize existing targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions. China's chief delegate, Su Wei, was more guarded about progress. ""We've had a very candid, very open dialogue with our US friends and I think both the U.S. and China would very much like to see a good outcome at Cancun,"" he told Reuters. Climate is one of several disputes between the two top economies, along with trade and exchange rates. Preparatory UN climate talks in China in October were dominated by US-Chinese disputes. Pershing said President Barack Obama was committed to a goal of cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 despite Republican gains in November elections. Earlier, the talks opened with calls for action to avoid rising damage from floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels. The talks will draw more than 100 environment ministers next week, and about 25 prime ministers and presidents. CRITICAL POINT ""Our relation with nature is reaching a critical point,"" Mexican President Felipe Calderon said. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN panel of climate scientists, said: ""Delays in action would only lead to impacts which would be much larger and in all likelihood more severe than we have had so far."" He said costs of containing global warming, by switching from fossil fuels towards renewable energies such as wind or solar power, would rise the longer the world waited. The Alliance of Small Island States warned that that some low-lying countries, such as Tuvalu or the Maldives, were facing ""the end of history"" due to rising sea levels. It urged far tougher targets for limiting climate change. The talks are seeking to find a successor to the United Nations' existing Kyoto Protocol, which obliges rich nations except the United States to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Kyoto backers say they will only deepen their cuts, shifting from fossil fuels to clean energies like wind and solar power, until 2020 if the United States and big emerging economies led by China and India take on binding curbs. Developing nations say they need to burn more energy, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, to fight poverty. Success would help get the talks back on track after the acrimonious Copenhagen summit agreed to a non-binding deal to limit a rise in world temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial times. Failure would raise questions about the future of Kyoto, which underpins prices in carbon markets. Unless a new round is negotiated, Kyoto will end in 2012, leaving a patchwork of national measures to combat climate change.",0
" President Barack Obama told Turkish and Mexican leaders on Saturday that WikiLeaks' actions were ""deplorable"" as the US administration kept up damage control efforts over the website's embarrassing release of masses of secret US cables. In Obama's separate calls with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, the leaders all agreed that WikiLeaks' campaign would not harm their countries' ties with Washington, the White House said. The leaks touching on US relations in virtually every part of the world have threatened to increase tensions with allies, spurring US officials to seek to prevent foreign friends from reducing engagement on sensitive matters. Documents relating to Turkey showed US diplomats casting doubt on the reliability of their NATO ally and portraying its leadership as divided. In Obama's call to Erdogan on Saturday, the two discussed ""the enduring importance of the US-Turkish partnership and affirmed their commitment to work together on a broad range of issues,"" the White House said. ""The president expressed his regrets for the deplorable action by WikiLeaks and the two leaders agreed that it will not influence or disrupt the close cooperation between the United States and Turkey,"" it said. Obama made similar comments to Calderon, which the US leader used to praise his Mexican counterpart for the outcome of an international climate change conference in Cancun. ""The presidents also underscored the importance of the US-Mexico partnership across a broad range of issues,"" the White House said. ""The presidents discussed the deplorable actions by WikiLeaks and agreed its irresponsible acts should not distract our two countries from our important cooperation."" According to State Department documents made public by WikiLeaks, a top Mexican official said the government was in danger of losing control of parts of the country to powerful drug cartels.",0
" Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades. ""The World Bank's foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon,"" Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital. ""Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank's attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts,"" he said. Before they agree to any sort of restrictions on emissions of the greenhouse gases fuelling global warming, poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts. The money will be used for everything from flood barriers against rising sea levels to ""clean"" but costly power stations, an example of the ""technology transfer"" developing countries say they need to curb emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide. As well as the obvious arguments about how much money will be needed -- some estimates run into the trillions of dollars by 2050 -- rich and poor countries are struggling even to agree on a bank manager. At the week-long Bangkok conference, the World Bank pushed its proposals for a $5-10 billion Clean Technology Fund, a $500 million ""adaptation"" fund and possibly a third fund dealing with forestry. However, developing countries want climate change cash to be administered through the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which they feel is much less under the control of the Group of 8 (G8) richest countries. ""Generally we have been unpleasantly surprised by the funds,"" said Ana Maria Kleymeyer, Argentina's lead negotiator at the meeting. ""This is a way for the World Bank and its donor members to get credit back home for putting money into climate change in a way that's not transparent, that doesn't involve developing countries and that ignores the UNFCC process,"" she said.",1
" European Union leaders planned on Thursday to appease critics of the bloc's bold plans to fight climate change amid economic turmoil with concessions to heavy industry and former communist nations. But they were set to reaffirm a December deadline and stick to their ambitious targets of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by a fifth by 2020 at a summit overshadowed by tumbling stock markets and the threat of a punishing recession. ""The European Council confirms its determination to honor the ambitious commitments it has made on climate and energy policy,"" said the draft final statement circulated to leaders at the final session of a two-day summit and obtained by Reuters. ""In this connection, it reaffirms that its objective is to reach agreement in December,"" said the text, which could still be changed by leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged other leaders to push for a deal by December, and Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauaer warned of difficult negotiations ahead to win over the plan's critics. ""We've got two months for intensive work,"" he said. ""It's often that way in Europe -- that people yearn for national measures and then we agree on something on a European level."" During combative discussions on Wednesday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk threatened to use his veto unless more was done to shield Poland's coal-based economy from the impact of the measures. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also dangled a veto threat to demand more time to negotiate the package and less burden on Italian industry, already plagued by a loss of competitiveness to emerging economies. CRISIS In deference to these critics, the draft called for quick work on ""applying that package in a rigorously established cost- effective manner to all sectors of the European economy and all member states, having regard to each member state's specific situation."" Rafal Grupinski, senior aide to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, said: ""In the conclusions, we expect that either there is no December date for agreement or, if there is the date, that our proposals are accepted and the specificity of our country and other countries will be taken into account."" The 27-nation bloc aims to lead the world in battling global warming, mindful of U.N. predictions of more extreme weather and rising sea levels. The economic crisis pushed climate change down the agenda of the summit, but some western European leaders argued fighting climate change could go hand in hand with efforts to rebuild economies while cutting risks from volatile energy imports. European companies could lead the world by exporting technologies from a new low-carbon economy -- such as electric cars and wind turbines -- while green jobs could replace all those lost in old economy industries like steel, they said. But environmentalists said that while EU leaders including French President Nicolas Sarkozy were busy making big promises to protect the environment in public, their ministers and advisers were busy creating loopholes in the legislation to protect industries at home. ""Mr Sarkozy and others are showing that they are unwilling to walk the walk when it comes to decisive action,"" said Greenpeace spokesman Mark Breddy.",0
" Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said on Thursday she would not push the accelerator on emissions trading after miner BHP Billiton called for her government to move ahead with a price on carbon. Gillard's is under subtle pressure from Greens, supporting her minority Labor government since indecisive elections last month, to curb greenhouse gas output in coal-reliant economy and lower the world's highest level of per capita emissions. Gillard has promised multi-party talks next year to build consensus on carbon pricing after the dead-heat Aug. 21 vote left Labor needing support from three independents and one Green member of parliament to pass laws in the lower house. ""We'll work through (it) and I'm under no illusion about the complexity. So we'll take the time it needs,"" she told reporters. Gillard went to the election promising a 5 percent cut in 2000-level emissions by 2020, and to seek consensus for its carbon trading plan, currently shelved until at least 2013 and the end of the Kyoto global climate protocol. But under a deal with the Greens, who will wield sole balance of power in the upper house Senate from mid-2011, Labor has promised a new committee of lawmakers and experts to work on a policy to price carbon pollution and promote renewable energy. The Greens want the government to introduce a carbon tax as an interim step ahead of market-based carbon trading, although the government has previously ruled out a carbon tax. BHP chief executive Marius Kloppers said on Wednesday it was in Australia's long-term interest to move ahead with a carbon price even in the absence of a global agreement to succeed Kyoto. HOPE FOR CONSENSUS Kloppers said the company wanted a predictable and gradual transition to a carbon price, and favoured a combination of a carbon tax, land use actions and limited carbon trading. ""The decisions we take now on power production will still be with us long after a global price for carbon is finally in place,"" Kloppers said in a speech in Sydney. His speech is a boost to Gillard's hopes of finding a political consensus on carbon pricing despite opposition from rival conservatives, who have promised to try and force a change of government before elections due in three years. BHP also called for the government to return any revenue raised from carbon pricing to individuals and businesses affected by the policy, possibly through tax cuts or lump sum grants, and said the government should rebate emissions costs for products exposed to trade competition. ""We want to work through options,"" Gillard said in response. ""Obviously, I believe climate change is real. I believe we've got to take steps to address climate change."" Greens leader Bob Brown said Kloppers was talking common sense and BHP's view would help guide the committee in decisions on adopting either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade carbon scheme favoured by Gillard's Labor. ""It recognises that we have to move on beyond the coal-burning, carbon-polluting age that we're in,"" he said.",0
"Some were heading to job training, others to an environmental conference. Some were simply going home. All were passengers on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed Sunday shortly after take off, killing the 157 on board and raising questions about the safety of the aircraft model, the Boeing 737 Max 8. On Monday, as the identities of more victims were revealed, heartache rippled through convention halls, classrooms and living rooms across the globe. Tributes flowed on social media. Colleagues observed moments of silence. The campus of Kenyatta University in Kenya mourned the death of Isaac Mwangi, a lecturer in the department of education, communication and technology, and Agnes Gathumbi, a director of teacher professional development. Mwangi wrote dissertations on using technology in secondary education and worked on projects related to integrating images and graphics into the teaching of poetry. He was “diligent and proactive,” Olive Mugenda, a former vice chancellor at the university who worked with Mwangi for more than a decade, wrote on Twitter. Gathumbi published dozens of papers, including one on how administrators react differently to graffiti scrawled by girls instead of boys. She had received certifications in French, African storybook writing, computer studies and other areas from across the world, including institutions in Britain and Slovakia. Hussein Swaleh, the 52-year-old former head of the governing body for Kenyan soccer, was also among those who died on the flight, according to Barry Otieno, the federation’s head of communications. “It’s a sad day for football in Kenya, very sad day,” said Otieno. “We were looking to roll out a youth development football tournament for the future of youth and football in the country, we had a lot planned.” Thirty-two Kenyans died on the flight, more than from any other country. James Macharia, the transport secretary, said the government was working to get the family members to Ethiopia so they could identify the bodies. Aid workers were also killed in the crash. Four were employees of Catholic Relief Services, all of them Ethiopian citizens travelling to Nairobi for training. Sintayehu Aymeku was a procurement manager who left behind a wife and three daughters. Sara Chalachew was a senior project officer for grants. Mulusew Alemu was a senior officer in the finance department. Getnet Alemayehu was a senior project officer for procurement and compliance. He had a wife and one daughter. “Although we are in mourning, we celebrate the lives of these colleagues and the selfless contributions they made to our mission, despite the risks and sacrifices that humanitarian work can often entail,” the organisation said in a statement. In Nigeria, the government confirmed the death of Abiodun Bashua, a former ambassador who had been working with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. He joined the Nigerian foreign service in 1976 and worked in several countries, including Austria, Ivory Coast and Iran, according to the Nigerian Foreign Ministry. He also worked with the United Nations on peacekeeping operations and climate change issues. Two Spaniards were on the flight. Jordi Dalmau Sayol, 46, was a Catalan chemical engineer who was on a business trip. He was working for a water infrastructure company that was awarded a water desalination project in Kenya, according to the Spanish daily La Vanguardia. Dalmau’s death was confirmed by his company. Pilar Martínez Docampo, 32, worked for an aid organization and was travelling to Kenya to give language classes to children, according to La Opinión, a newspaper in her home region of Galicia, in northwestern Spain. Authorities in her hometown, Cangas do Morrazo, confirmed her death. A day after the crash, a sombre mood engulfed the UN headquarters in Nairobi, as politicians, environmentalists and government officials gathered for a major UN meeting on the environment — the United Nations Environment Assembly — a destination for many people on the flight. The meeting focused on sustainable development and environmental challenges related to poverty, natural resources and waste management. Among the passengers were at least 22 people who worked for UN-affiliated agencies. The crash — of a flight that had been nicknamed the “UN shuttle” because of how often UN staff members take it — has highlighted the organisation’s work in some of the world’s most troubled regions, from South Sudan to North Korea. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, offered “heartfelt condolences” to the loved ones of the UN staff members who died in the crash. He also said in an email to staff that flags at UN offices would fly at half-staff Monday to honour the victims. Among the passengers traveling to the meeting was Victor Tsang, a gender expert from Hong Kong who worked for the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi. According to his biography on the agency’s website, Tsang had worked in Chad, Ethiopia, Panama and South Sudan. A Twitter account that appears to be Tsang’s says that while he worked in sustainable development, his passion was camping with his 2-year-old son in his family’s garden. “Victor was so dedicated, and a dear colleague,” one of his former colleagues in Nairobi, Oona Tully, wrote on Twitter. The World Food Programme said seven of its staff members had died in the crash, the most of any UN organisation. The program’s work focuses on widespread hunger caused by war or instability in Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, among other countries. “As we mourn, let us reflect that each of these WFP colleagues were willing to travel and work far from their homes and loved ones to help make the world a better place to live,” David Beasley, the head of the programme, said in a statement. “That was their calling.” The World Food Programme victims included Ekta Adhikari of Nepal, who had worked for the programme in Ethiopia; Michael Ryan of Ireland, who had helped Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh prepare for seasonal monsoons; and Zhen-Zhen Huang of China, who had worked in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. “I cannot imagine the loss felt by your loved ones, especially your son,” one of Huang’s colleagues, Faizza Tanggol, wrote on Twitter. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said three staff members had died: Nadia Adam Abaker Ali, 40, a Sudanese citizen; Jessica Hyba, 43, from Canada; and Jackson Musoni, 31, from Rwanda. Ali, who leaves a husband and 6-year-old daughter, was a health specialist who joined the agency in Sudan eight years ago, helping people who fled conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region. Musoni also worked in Sudan helping to coordinate operations in East Darfur. He had worked for Rwanda’s Foreign Ministry before joining the UN agency in 2014; he had three children, aged 8, 5 and 4, the refugee agency said. Hyba, a mother of two daughters aged 9 and 12, had joined the refugee agency in 2013 and had started a new post as its senior external relations officer in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, only last month. Other victims of the crash had been traveling to UN events. One was Sebastiano Tusa, an underwater archaeologist from Italy who had been traveling to Kenya for a UNESCO conference about safeguarding underwater cultural heritage in Eastern Africa. Joanna Toole, a UN fisheries consultant from southwestern England, had planned to attend the conference to represent the aquaculture department of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Two days before the flight she tweeted that she was happy to be among an increasing number of women working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Toole, 36, was from Exmouth, in the southwestern English region of Devon. The Exmouth Journal reported that she had attended a local community college before studying animal behaviour at a university. “Everybody was very proud of her and the work she did. We’re still in a state of shock,” her father, Adrian Toole, told the local news site Devon Live. “Joanna was genuinely one of those people who you never heard a bad word about.” Toole, who had kept homing pigeons and pet rats as a child, often posted on social media about initiatives to protect animals from marine pollution and make the fishing industry more environmentally friendly. Toole’s next retweet was of a post by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. “We won’t bring about peace in the world merely by praying for it; we have to take steps to tackle the violence and corruption that disrupt peace,” the Dalai Lama wrote. “We can’t expect change if we don’t take action.”   c.2019 New York Times News Service",0
"The agreement, which included few specific commitments, was announced Saturday night, Washington time, after President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, visited China for three days of talks in which the negotiators managed not to be sidetracked by those disputes. “It’s very important for us to try to keep those other things away, because climate is a life-or-death issue in so many different parts of the world,” Kerry said in an interview Sunday morning in Seoul, where he met with South Korean officials to discuss global warming. “What we need to do is prove we can actually get together, sit down and work on some things constructively.” The agreement comes only days before Biden is scheduled to hold a virtual climate summit with world leaders, hoping to prod countries to do more to reduce emissions and limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Many scientists now argue that warming must be kept below that threshold to avert catastrophic disruptions to life on the planet. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is among those who have been invited to the virtual summit. While he has yet to publicly accept the invitation, the agreement with Washington appeared to make his participation more likely. On Friday, Xi said that China remained committed to climate goals he had announced last fall, including a promise that its carbon emissions would peak before 2030. At the same time, Xi suggested that the world’s most advanced nations had a responsibility to take the lead in making deeper cuts. In what seemed to be a retort to the United States, he warned that the climate issue should not be “a bargaining chip for geopolitics” or “an excuse for trade barriers.” “This is undoubtedly a tough battle,” Xi said in a conference call with President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, according to an account of the meeting issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “China is sure to act on its words, and its actions are sure to produce results,” he went on. “We hope that the advanced economies will set an example in momentum for emissions reductions and also lead the way in fulfilling commitments for climate funding.” The White House has signalled that Biden will announce more ambitious plans for reducing emissions domestically, after four years in which his predecessor, Donald Trump, disparaged the issue. “We’ve seen commitments before where everybody falls short,” Kerry said. “I mean, frankly, we’re all falling short. The entire world right now is falling short. This is not a finger-pointing exercise of one nation alone.” Kerry met in Shanghai with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, over three days, in talks that at one point went late into the night. Kerry said they stayed focused on climate change and did not touch on increasingly rancorous disputes over issues like China’s political crackdown in Hong Kong and its threats toward Taiwan. On Friday, even as the two envoys met, the State Department sharply criticised prison sentences handed down in Hong Kong to prominent pro-democracy leaders, including Jimmy Lai, a 72-year-old newspaper tycoon. On the same day, China warned the United States and Japan against “collusion” as Biden met at the White House with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, with China’s rising ambitions one of the major issues on the table. Chinese officials and the state news media noted Kerry’s visit but markedly played it down, focusing instead on Xi’s meetings. But in the joint statement with the United States, the Chinese government pledged to do more on climate, although without detailing any specific steps. The statement said that both countries would develop “long-term strategies” to reach carbon neutrality — the point when a country emits no more carbon than it removes from the atmosphere — before the next international climate conference in November, in Glasgow, Scotland. In a joint statement after the White House meetings between Biden and Suga, the United States and Japan said they intended to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 by promoting renewable energy sources, energy efficiency and storage, and through innovations in capturing and recycling carbon from the atmosphere. Despite Biden’s renewed focus on global warming after Trump’s term, Chinese officials have in recent weeks chided the United States for demanding that other countries do more. They noted that Trump had pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which most countries committed to targets for reducing emissions. China has since presented itself as the more responsible leader on the issue, even though it is now the world’s worst emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for 28% of the world’s total. The United States is second, at 15%. Xi pledged last year that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060 and that its emissions would peak before 2030. Environmentalists have welcomed those promises but pressed for more details about the steps China would take to reach them. Kerry said China was effectively pledging to move more quickly than Xi had initially promised by “taking enhanced climate actions that raise ambition in the 2020s,” as the statement put it. The two countries will continue to meet to discuss the issue, Kerry added. China’s new five-year economic plan, unveiled in March, offered few new specifics for reaching Xi’s stated emissions goals, raising concerns that they might be more aspirational than actual. China has continued, for example, to approve new coal plants, one of the leading sources of carbon emissions, prioritising social stability and the development of an important domestic industry. “For a big country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily delivered,” Le Yucheng, the vice minister of foreign affairs, told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. “Some counties are asking China to do more on climate change. I’m afraid that is not very realistic.” © 2021 New York Times News Service",0
"Lyall beckoned me up an old chairlift ramp. He swept his ski pole across the panorama and pointed to the snow-covered summits of Okemo and Killington, ski resorts that lie within a 30-mile radius. The White Mountains of New Hampshire felt close enough to touch. “There would be many times that I would stand up here and watch storms dump snow on those ski areas and just bypass Ascutney. We couldn’t win,” said Lyall, an avid backcountry skier. In its heyday, the Ascutney ski resort boasted 1,800 vertical feet of skiing on more than 50 trails and included a high-speed quad chairlift, three triple chairlifts and a double chairlift. But when it closed in 2010 because of scant snow and mismanagement (twin killers of small ski resorts), it threatened to take with it the nearby community of West Windsor, Vermont, population 1,099. “Property values plummeted, condos on the mountain saw their value decrease by more than half, and taxes went up,” recalled Glenn Seward, who worked at the resort for 18 years, once as the director of mountain operations. The town’s general store, the gathering place of the community, also went broke and closed. “We were desperate,” said Seward, who at the time was chair of the West Windsor Selectboard, a Vermont town’s equivalent of a city council. That desperation led the community to hitch its fortune to the mountain, becoming a model for how a small ski area and its community can thrive in the era of climate change. Working with the state of Vermont as well as the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, the town bought the failed ski area in 2015. But instead of allowing a private company to run the mountain, contracting out its operations, the local residents themselves would chart a sustainable, volunteer-driven path for the ski area. Seven years later, Mount Ascutney and West Windsor are magnets for families and outdoor enthusiasts. Between 2010 and 2020, the town’s population jumped more than 20%, and median single-family home sale prices more than doubled, to $329,750. A bustling new general store featuring local products has opened in the village of Brownsville, reinvigorating the centre of the West Windsor community. The town and mountain draw people year-round, from endurance runners and mountain bikers in the warm months to skiers in winter. At the heart of this revival is Ascutney Outdoors, a nonprofit with more than 100 volunteers that now runs recreation on the mountain. Instead of high-speed quads and snow-making, skiers take a rope tow or T-bar that accesses 435-vertical feet of skiing, found on 10 natural-snow trails that are groomed. There is also a lift for snow tubing. A lift ticket costs $20, or $100 for a season pass. The lifts run on Saturday and Sunday when there is enough snow, and it takes about 40 volunteers to staff a busy weekend. The upper 1,300 vertical feet of the mountain, maintained by Ascutney Trails Association, is reserved for backcountry skiers to skin up and ski down for free — although donations are appreciated. Thursday night ski races take place under lights, and an after-school program brings children to the mountain every afternoon. The mountain is also home to 45 miles of renowned mountain bike trails, numerous hiking trails and Mount Ascutney State Park. It is one of the top hang-gliding sites in New England. “When there’s snow, we ski, and when there’s not, we do other things,” said Seward, who is now executive director of Ascutney Outdoors. “That’s a pretty easy model to sustain.” “WE LOST OUR IDENTITY AS A SKI TOWN” Mount Ascutney (elevation 3,144 feet), Vermont’s most famous volcano, has lured skiers for decades. Skiing began on Ascutney in the winter of 1935-36 on the 5,400-foot-long Mount Ascutney Trail, opened by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Windsor Outing Club. The first skiers skinned up the mountain under their own power, just like backcountry skiers today. The Mount Ascutney ski area opened in 1946 with rope tows. In a harbinger of the struggles to come, the ski area endured several poor winters and went bankrupt four years after opening. New owners periodically came and went, and Ascutney remade itself as a destination resort, attracting tourists and second-home owners from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. It was described in a 2005 New York Times article as “less fashionable than some of its competitors” with a base lodge that was “small and utilitarian.” Local skiers continued to be its loyal mainstay. Ascutney Resort was bedeviled by years of erratic snow levels. In the 1980s, a new ownership group, Summit Ventures, poured $55 million into lifts, condos and snow-making. A hotel was built at the foot of the mountain. (It is now a Holiday Inn Club Vacations.) By 1991, the ski area was forced into liquidation. The ski resort closed for the final time in 2010 and sold off its lifts. It was a crushing blow for the community. “We lost our identity as a ski town,” said Seward, who grew up in the community and married his wife, Shelley, on the mountain. Lyall added, “You saw everyone at the school, the general store, the post office and at the ski area. We were in jeopardy of losing all four and becoming just a bedroom community.” 
 
 Visitors go snow tubing at Ascutney Outdoors in Brownsville, Vt, in January 2022. The New York Times 

SKIING IN A WARMING WORLD   Visitors go snow tubing at Ascutney Outdoors in Brownsville, Vt, in January 2022. The New York Times  Climate change poses an existential threat to New England ski areas, which now number 89 in six states. A 2019 study showed that in northeastern states besides Vermont, at least half of ski areas will close by the mid 2050s if high greenhouse gas emissions continue. A study published in 2021 in the journal Climate showed that New England is warming significantly faster than the rest of the planet. From 1900 to 2020, winter temperatures in Vermont rose 5.26 degrees Fahrenheit. “That means more of our winter precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, less of it is accumulating on the ground, and there is more midwinter melt,” said Elizabeth Burakowski, research assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. New England is littered with the ghosts of abandoned ski areas: According to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project, more than 600 ski areas have closed in the region. Ski industry leaders warn that the survival of ski areas depends on political action. “It’s absolutely critical that the business leaders in the outdoor and ski industries come together to strongly advocate for bipartisan climate action at the federal and state levels,” said Adrienne Saia Isaac, director of marketing and communications for the National Ski Areas Association. West Windsor was determined to re-imagine a future that did not rely on the vagaries of winter. In 2014, the West Windsor Selectboard asked the Trust for Public Land to help it purchase and conserve 469 acres of the former ski area to be used for backcountry skiing, mountain biking and other human-powered recreation. The ski area would be added to the existing town forest and protected by a 1,581-acre conservation easement safeguarding the land from development. A special town meeting was held in October 2014 asking West Windsor voters to approve the town spending $105,000 toward the $640,000 purchase of the former ski area, part of the $905,000 project price to return the land to recreational use. The purchase was approved by a 3-1 margin. In 2015, a group of townspeople gathered at Lyall’s house to start Ascutney Outdoors. A new rope tow was installed that same year, followed by the tubing lift in 2017 and a T-bar in 2020. The community raised funds to build the Ascutney Outdoor Center, a 3,000-square-foot base lodge, at the foot of the mountain. REVIVING A COMMUNITY HUB  Brownsville Butcher and Pantry is minutes from Ascutney Outdoors, and their fates are tightly bound. Peter Varkonyi and Lauren Stevens opened the store in November 2018, and on a recent weekday, cheerily greeted a steady stream of customers and regulars. This is not your typical general store. It has a wall of Vermont craft beer, and a butcher was carving a side of pork hung from a meat hook in front of refrigerator cases that include Vermont wagyu beef, fresh goat and all the makings for sushi. In the cafe nearby, customers can choose from homemade bagels and housemade hot pastrami to a vegetarian smoked-beet Reuben and three varieties of burgers. In 2018, a community group, Friends of the Brownsville General Store, bought the foreclosed building from the bank for $95,000 and invested $250,000 to renovate it. The group then leased the building to Varkonyi and Stevens for $1 per year, with an option that the couple could purchase it at any time for cost. Chris Nesbitt, an organiser of the Friends group, urged his neighbours to “think of this like the common good. You are investing in the community.” Buying local “is the basis to what we do every day,” said Stevens, proudly itemising $35,000 in purchases of organic produce from Edgewater Farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire, and $30,000 in lamb, goat and pork from Yates Farm just down the road. In 2021, she tallied, “our tiny business put $500,000 back into local businesses.” In December, the couple bought the store from the Friends. A lifelong resident of the community and teacher at the local elementary school, Amanda Yates, was sitting with her young son enjoying burger night at the general store. Yates motioned to the bustling cafe and store. “I credit the store and Ascutney Outdoors with bringing the town back,” she said. “They brought places where you could meet, get good food, where you could see people again around town. “They really brought back that community hub.” © 2022 The New York Times Company",0
" Companies seeking oil in the Arctic will need better technology to clean up spills onto ice and could new face hazards such as rougher seas caused by climate change, experts said on Friday. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated this week that 22 percent of the world's undiscovered, technically recoverable reserves of oil and gas were in the Arctic, raising environmentalists' worries about possible impact on wildlife. ""The Exxon Valdez showed what a catastrophe can be caused by oil in the Arctic,"" said Ilan Kelman, a scientist at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. ""The environment is remote, harsh and vulnerable."" The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground off Alaska in 1989, spilling 11 million U.S. gallons of oil off Alaska and killing thousands of birds and marine mammals. Commercial Arctic oil exploitation began in Canada in the 1920s at Norman Wells but oil companies still lack full technology to handle spills, for instance, if oil seeps into or below ice floating on the sea. ""Responding to major oil spills remains a major challenge in remote, icy environments. This is especially true for spills in waters where ice is present,"" according to a 2007 report by the Arctic Council, grouping all governments with Arctic territory. New cleanup technologies ""have yet to be fully tested...spill prevention should be the first priority for all petroleum activities,"" according to the study for the United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Governments and oil companies are developing stringent safety standards to minimize risks of spills. The WWF environmental group urged a moratorium on all oil and gas exploration until there was proper anti-spill technology and an ability to deploy clean-up equipment quickly to remote sites hit by winter darkness. DARKNESS ""We still lack technology to clean up spills in the ice and we can't do it in the dark,"" said Neil Hamilton, head of the WWF's Arctic Programme. ""We need a moratorium until the oil spill response gap is filled."" Chill temperatures mean that any spilt oil breaks down slowly, lingering longer in the environment and posing a threat to creatures such as seabirds or polar bears. Global warming is set to make the Arctic region more accessible to oil firms as ice recedes. Arctic summer ice shrank in 2007 to a record low since satellite measurements began. Kelman said that easier access to the Arctic could have unexpected side-effects -- the seas might become rougher if a blanket of sea ice recedes. ""Ice on the sea prevents storms from causing big waves,"" he said. He said that oil or gas facilities around the Arctic need to be built especially strong since climate change could cause shifts in sea currents, storms and higher waves. Paul Johnson, principal scientist at the research laboratories of environmental group Greenpeace in Exeter, England, said the world should not look to the Arctic for oil even with prices at almost $130 a barrel. ""We are dealing with ecosystems that may not recover once they are disturbed,"" he said.",0
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Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman said on Monday the Generalised System of Preferences was going through its own process in Washington. “It will be finalised sometime in June. And that is all I can say about that.”The US diplomat currently in Dhaka as co-chair of the second US-Bangladesh Partnership Dialogue said the working groups had covered a wide range of issues.The extent of progress made in such short time, according to her, was rather impressive. “I could not have had a better partner,” Sherman said near the beginning of her short brief to the press at the Ruposhi Bangla Hotel.Regarding the Trade and Investment Cooperation Framework Agreement that the US has been pushing for over several years, Sherman said both parties were working towards it. “We hope to finalise it soon,” she said without giving out further details or a concrete timeline when asked when this deal might be signed.The partnership dialogue has covered a number of areas including development, governance, security, climate change, trade and regional integration with promises and potential of further cooperation in almost all the areas.The textile sector has been in focus since the building collapse killing over 1100 people in Savar last month and it featured prominently on Monday too. In fact, Sherman took a moment to remember some of the victims, whose ‘haunting’ images she said were ‘seared in memory’.As regards US reaction to such a tragedy, Sherman refrained from issuing any caution or warning but said she hoped that this tragedy one that triggers transformation.She recalled the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York on Mar 25, 1911 where over 100 people died triggering a sea of change including a new building code, greater freedom of association besides other things that have gone on to ensure a safer workplace.Sherman hoped that the Rana Plaza collapse would also work in a similar manner for Bangladesh.  ",0
"Those are hot topics in the news industry right now, and so the program at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy drew an impressive roster of executives at CNN, NBC News, The Associated Press, Axios and other major US outlets. A couple of them, though, told me they were puzzled by the reading package for the first session. It consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. The story had been pushed by aides and allies of then-President Donald Trump who tried to persuade journalists that the hard drive’s contents would reveal the corruption of the father. The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organisations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary. The Hunter Biden laptop saga sure is instructive about something. As you may recall, panicked Trump allies frantically dumped its contents onto the internet and into reporters’ inboxes, a trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name. The big social media platforms, primed for a repeat of the WikiLeaks 2016 election shenanigans, reacted forcefully: Twitter blocked links to a New York Post story that tied Joe Biden to the emails without strong evidence (though Twitter quickly reversed that decision) and Facebook limited the spread of the Post story under its own “misinformation” policy. But as it now appears, the story about the laptop was an old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign, and describing it with the word “misinformation” doesn’t add much to our understanding of what happened. While some of the emails purportedly on the laptop have since been called genuine by at least one recipient, the younger Biden has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his. And the “media manipulation campaign” was a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal, an attempt at an October Surprise that has been part of nearly every presidential campaign I’ve covered. The Wall Street Journal, as I reported at the time, looked hard at the story. Unable to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to change US policy to enrich a family member, the Journal refused to tell it the way the Trump aides wanted, leaving that spin to the right-wing tabloids. What remained was a murky situation that is hard to call “misinformation,” even if some journalists and academics like the clarity of that label. The Journal’s role was, in fact, a pretty standard journalistic exercise, a blend of fact-finding and the sort of news judgment that has fallen a bit out of favour as journalists have found themselves chasing social media. While some academics use the term carefully, “misinformation” in the case of the lost laptop was more or less synonymous with “material passed along by Trump aides.” And in that context, the phrase “media manipulation” refers to any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike. (Emily Dreyfuss, a fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at the Shorenstein Center, told me that “media manipulation,” despite its sinister ring, is “not necessarily nefarious.”) The focus on who’s saying something, and how they’re spreading their claims, can pretty quickly lead Silicon Valley engineers to slap the “misinformation” label on something that is, in plainer English, true. Shorenstein’s research director, Joan Donovan, who is leading the program and raised its funding from the John S and James L Knight Foundation, said that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation — it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.” Donovan, a force on Twitter and a longtime student of the shadiest corners of the internet, said she defines “misinformation” as “false information that’s being spread.” She strongly objected to my suggestion that the term lacks a precise meaning. She added that, appearances aside, she doesn’t believe the word is merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like. Instead, she traces the modern practice of “disinformation” (that is, deliberate misinformation) to the anti-corporate activists the Yes Men, famous for hoaxed corporate announcements and other stunts, and the “culture jamming” of Adbusters. But their tools, she wrote, have been adopted by “foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers.” Donovan is among the scholars who have tried to unravel the knotty information tangle of contemporary politics. She’s currently a compulsive consumer of Steve Bannon’s influential podcast, “War Room.” Like many of the journalists and academics who study our chaotic media environment, she has zeroed in on the way that trolls and pranksters developed tactics for angering and tricking people online over the first half of the last decade, and how those people brought their tactics to the right-wing reactionary politics in the decade’s second half. To the people paying close attention, this new world was riveting and dangerous — and it was maddening that outsiders couldn’t see what was happening. For these information scholars, widespread media manipulation seemed like the main event of recent years, the main driver of millions of people’s beliefs, and the main reason Trump and people like him won elections all over the world. But this perspective, while sometimes revelatory, may leave little space for other causes of political action, or for other types of political lies, like the US government’s long deception on its progress in the war in Afghanistan. What had been a niche preoccupation has now been adopted by people who have spent somewhat less time on 4chan than Donovan. Broadcaster Katie Couric recently led the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. I moderated a panel at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum with a different, somewhat dental, label for the same set of issues, “truth decay.” (The Rand Corp seems to have coined that one, though T Bone Burnett did release an album by that name in 1980.) There, an Australian senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, said she thought the biggest culprit in misleading her fellow citizens about climate change had been Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — hardly a new issue, or one that needs a new name. The New York Post’s insistence that the emails prove Joe Biden’s corruption, and not just his son’s influence peddling, are part of the same partisan genre. This hints at a weakness of the new focus on misinformation: It’s a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as much about politics as technology. The new social media-fuelled right-wing populists lie a lot, and stretch the truth more. But as American reporters quizzing Trump’s fans on camera discovered, his audience was often in on the joke. And many of the most offensive things he said weren’t necessarily lies — they were just deeply ugly to half the country, including most of the people running news organizations and universities. It’s more comfortable to reckon with an information crisis — if there’s anything we’re good at, it’s information — than a political one. If only responsible journalists and technologists could explain how misguided Trump’s statements were, surely the citizenry would come around. But these well-meaning communications experts never quite understood that the people who liked him knew what was going on, laughed about it and voted for him despite, or perhaps even because of, the times he went “too far.” Harper’s Magazine recently published a broadside against “Big Disinfo,” contending that the think tanks raising money to focus on the topic were offering a simple solution to a political crisis that defies easy explanation and exaggerating the power of Facebook in a way that, ultimately, served Facebook most of all. The author, Joseph Bernstein, argued that the journalists and academics who specialise in exposing instances of disinformation seem to believe they have a particular claim on truth. “However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality,” he wrote. In fact, I’ve found many of the people worrying about our information diets are reassuringly modest about how far the new field of misinformation studies is going to take us. Donovan calls it “a new field of data journalism,” but said she agreed that “this part of the field needs to get better at figuring out what’s true or false.” The Aspen report acknowledged “that in a free society there are no ‘arbiters of truth.’” They’re putting healthy new pressure on tech platforms to be transparent in how claims — true and false — spread. The editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, Sewell Chan, one of the Harvard course’s participants, said he didn’t think the program had a political slant, adding that it “helped me understand the new forms of mischief making and lie peddling that have emerged.” “That said, like the term ‘fake news,’ misinformation is a loaded and somewhat subjective term,” he said. “I’m more comfortable with precise descriptions.” I also feel the push and pull of the information ecosystem in my own journalism, as well as the temptation to evaluate a claim by its formal qualities — who is saying it and why — rather than its substance. Last April, for instance, I tweeted about what I saw as the sneaky way that anti-China Republicans around Trump were pushing the idea that COVID-19 had leaked from a lab. There were informational red flags galore. But media criticism (and I’m sorry you’ve gotten this far into a media column to read this) is skin-deep. Below the partisan shouting match was a more interesting scientific shouting match (which also made liberal use of the word “misinformation”). And the state of that story now is that scientists’ understanding of the origins of COVID-19 is evolving and hotly debated, and we’re not going to be able to resolve it on Twitter. The story of tech platforms helping to spread falsehoods is still incredibly important, as is the work of identifying stealthy social media campaigns from Washington to, as my colleague Davey Alba recently reported, Nairobi. And the COVID-19 pandemic also gave everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to my colleagues at The New York Times a new sense of urgency about, for instance, communicating the seriousness of the pandemic and the safety of vaccines in a media landscape littered with false reports. But politics isn’t a science. We don’t need to mystify the old-fashioned practice of news judgment with a new terminology. There’s a danger in adopting jargony new frameworks we haven’t really thought through. The job of reporters isn’t, ultimately, to put neat labels on the news. It’s to report out what’s actually happening, as messy and unsatisfying as that can be. © 2021 The New York Times Company",2
" Tradeable credits from saving forests, wetlands and endangered species is set to be a growth area for investors seeking to fight climate change, the head of a New Zealand-based carbon trading market says. The world's growing carbon market, worth more than $60 billion a year, lets firms or nations buy and sell greenhouse gas emissions offsets to meet both voluntary and mandatory targets. But demand is growing for projects that preserve or restore forests and their biodiversity and save rivers and water flows. In return for protecting such environmental assets, developers sell credits, potentially a major growth area for emissions trading markets looking to sell new products. ""It's not just about the biodiversity credits in terms of plants,"" Mark Franklin, chief executive officer of TZ1, said on Thursday. ""Even species biodiversity and water will be big issues in the future, so we're looking at products in all of these areas."" TZ1 is closely linked with New Zealand stock exchange operator NZX Ltd. It plans to formally launch its own carbon exchange using NZX's infrastructure by the first quarter of next year for trading and settlement of carbon credits. TZ1 also runs one of only four global registries for the voluntary carbon standard (VCS), set by international and environmental bodies to measure carbon emissions and convert them into tradeable units. ""A biodiversity credit is a little bit like an emissions offset but it's something somebody is willing to invest in for the purposes for the next generation,"" Franklin said. ""It's amazing how much of this stuff is actually happening right now with goodwill and giving money to good causes as opposed to being a commercial venture that has a pay back,"" he told Reuters from Auckland. Conservation credit schemes should last for about 50 years to be attractive, Franklin added. BIODIVERSITY REGISTRY TZ1 has also launched a biodiversity registry and in August listed 1.36 million biodiversity conservation credits from a forest project in the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo island. The Malua BioBank scheme involves the protection and restoration of 34,000 hectares (80,000 acres) of orangutan habitat and a U.S.-backed fund has pledged $10 million to the project, which is to be preserved and managed for 50 years. In return, investors can buy credits listed by TZ1, with each credit covering 100 square meters of forest. So far, 21,500 credits have been sold at US$10 each. Franklin said there had been a jump in global interest since TZ1's involvement with the Malua BioBank and New Forests, one of the Sabah project's main backers. ""People are looking at wetlands conservation, moving of water rights, species conservation,"" he said. ""These are things that may have sounded pretty weird about 10 to 20 years ago but there's a real momentum forming."" He said TZ1 was discussing projects with several developers. ""Over time, there will be more and more products than carbon on the registry but I don't think it will get up to 50 percent in the intermediate period. Carbon will be the major product listed on the registry,"" Franklin added. Asked about the impact of the financial crisis and a looming global recession on carbon markets, he said players remained focused because carbon trading was simply the way of the world. But he also pointed to the need for developing emissions trading schemes, such as Europe's, New Zealand's from next year and Australia's from 2010, to be open. ""My view is if most of the countries had open systems then there would be trading and offsetting where people could do it better. That was the whole point of having a global mechanism.""",0
" The UN climate chief Yvo de Boer has resigned to join a consultancy group as an adviser, the UN climate secretariat said on Thursday, two months after a disappointing Copenhagen summit. De Boer will step down on July 1 to join KPMG, the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) said in a statement. He has led the agency since 2006. ""It was a difficult decision to make, but I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,"" de Boer said in the statement. ""Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen,"" he added.",0
" Chinese President Hu Jintao gave qualified support on Thursday to an Australian initiative on climate change, saying the ""Sydney Declaration"" is fine as long as it is in line with a UN framework. Hu made the comments in a rare news conference after meeting Australian Prime Minister John Howard. ""We very much hope that this Sydney Declaration will give full expression to the position that the UN framework convention on climate change would remain the main channel for international efforts to tackle climate change,"" he said. The declaration should also reflect UN principles of ""common but differentiated responsibilities"" toward lowering harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Australia, as host of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, has put climate change at the top of the agenda. Its draft declaration calls for a new global framework that would include ""aspirational"" targets for all APEC members on lowering greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say is causing the climate to change. Australia, backed by the United States, says the Kyoto protocol, the main climate change treaty, is flawed because it does not commit big polluters in the developing world, such as India and China, to the same kind of targets as industrialised nations. That approach is getting a decidedly lukewarm response at the APEC meeting from developing countries, which prefer to see the whole issue handled at a U.N. meeting later this month in New York. ""As one of our ministers, (Malaysia Trade Minister) Rafidah said, that E (in APEC) stands for economic, not environment,"" Indonesian Trade Minister Mari Pangestu told reporters, adding ministers should look at how climate change affects business. APEC ministers were grappling with the issue behind closed doors at a two-day meeting ending on Thursday, trying to agree on the wording of the declaration to be issued at a weekend summit. Kyoto's first phase runs out in 2012 and the APEC summit is one of a growing number of efforts to find a formula that brings rich and developing countries together on climate change. Hu has had a warm reception since his arrival in Australia on Monday when he visited the mining-rich state of Western Australia before heading to Canberra and a tour of a sheep farm. But in Sydney, three rallies were scheduled on Thursday to protest against China's human rights record, including one by the religious group Falun Gong that attracted up to 2,000 people in Sydney's Hyde Park. Australia has launched its biggest ever security operation in Sydney to welcome the 21 leaders attending this week's APEC meetings. Newspapers have dubbed the city of more than 4 million people ""Fortress Sydney"". Bush meets Hu later on Thursday and says he expects to have robust discussions on everything from product safety and trade to climate change, jailed dissidents, Beijing's support for Myanamar's junta, the Dalai Lama and Iran. The two men are only scheduled to meet for 20 minutes. At his news conference, Hu said China took international concerns over product safety very seriously. ""The Chinese side is willing and ready to work together with the international community to step up cooperation in quality inspections and examinations and further deepen mutually beneficial economic cooperation and trade,"" he said. On climate change, Bush said China has ""to be a part of defining the goals"". ""Once we can get people to define the goals, then we can encourage people to define the tactics necessary to achieve the goals,"" he said at a news conference on Wednesday. ""I believe this strategy is going to be a lot more effective than trying ... to say, this is what you've got to do."" Bush started his day on Thursday meeting Australia's opposition leader Kevin Rudd, who has vowed to bring back Australian frontline troops from the Iraq war, calling it the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. Rudd holds a commanding lead in opinion poll over Howard -- a staunch supporter of the war -- ahead of a general election expected in the coming weeks, and soon could be in a position to reverse Howard's policies on the war.",1
"""Demand will take a long time to recover if it recovers at all,"" he told reporters after the Anglo-Dutch energy company reported a sharp drop in second-quarter profit. Van Beurden wasn't alone in his gloomy view. Like much else during the pandemic, what was happening in fuel markets was unprecedented. Demand had fallen so sharply as people stopped travelling, the oil industry simply couldn't cut production fast enough to match it. Worse, the fall in demand came as Russia and Saudi Arabia - the two most powerful members of the OPEC+ group - were locked in a supply war that flooded markets. There was so much oil there was nowhere to put it, and in mid-April 2020 the price of a barrel of West Texas crude went below $0 as sellers had to pay to get rid of it. But less than two years later, the predictions of Van Beurden and others about oil's demise look premature. Benchmark Brent crude futures hit $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since 2014 as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered military operations in Ukraine. The potential for conflict to interrupt supply added more pace to a rally underpinned by a recovery in demand that has been faster than oil producers can match. Worldwide oil consumption last year outstripped supply by about 2.1 million bpd, according to the International Energy Agency, and will surpass 2019-levels this year. Oil suppliers had to drain inventories to meet demand, and consumer nations are pleading for companies like Shell to drill more. BOOM AND BUST Such a cycle has replayed often throughout the history of oil. ""If you go back to the days of whale oil, oil has been a story of boom and bust,"" said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. ""It’s a peak-to-valley cycle and usually when you hit the valley, get ready because the peak isn’t that far ahead."" The trough in oil prices in early 2020 triggered political moves that might have otherwise been unimaginable. Donald Trump, the US president at the time, became so concerned about the potential collapse of domestic oil drillers that he delivered Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman an ultimatum in an April phone call: cut production or risk the withdrawal of US troops from the kingdom. Investor and governmental pressure for oil producers to cut emissions was also on the rise. In mid-May 2021, the International Energy Agency said there should be no new funding of major oil-and-gas projects if world governments hoped to prevent the worst effects of global warming. It was an about-face for an organisation long seen as a major fossil fuel cheerleader. POLICY POWER The politics of the transition have made European oil majors reluctant to invest in increasing production, so their typical reaction to higher prices - to pump more - has been slower than it might otherwise have been. Several OPEC+ members simply didn't have the cash to maintain oilfields during the pandemic as their economies crashed, and now cannot increase output until costly and time-consuming work is completed. Those with spare capacity such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are reluctant to overstep their OPEC+ supply share agreements. Even the US shale industry - the world's most critical swing producer from 2009 through 2014 - has been slow to restore output amid pressure from investors to increase their financial returns rather than spending. All of this sowed the seeds for the current boom. The Biden Administration, which wants to fight climate change but also protect consumers from high pump prices, is now encouraging drillers to boost activity and calling for OPEC+ to produce more oil. So is the IEA. That could be a struggle, according to Scott Sheffield, CEO of US shale producer Pioneer Natural Resources. He told investors last week that OPEC+ does not have enough spare capacity to handle rising world demand, and that his own company would limit production growth to between zero and 5%. RBC Capital's Mike Tran said it will be high prices, not new supply, that ultimately balances the market. ""It simply does not get more bullish than that,"" he wrote in a note this month. But others think the supply will come eventually. After all, a boom always comes before a bust. ""We think $100 crude brings in all the wrong things - too much supply, too fast,"" said Bob Phillips, CEO of Crestwood Equity, a midstream operator based in Houston. ""We don’t think it’s sustainable.""",0
" Growing speculation that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard could be dumped by her party before the end of the year forced senior ministers to rally behind her Friday after a disastrous start to 2012. Defense Minister Stephen Smith joined a string of cabinet ministers to offer support for Gillard despite media suggestions that she could face a leadership challenge this year from Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who she replaced in June 2010. Some political analysts now believe Gillard is unlikely to lead the party to the next election, due in the second half of 2013, with a move against her most likely in the latter part of the year. ""MPs are starting to think the boat is going down, and they're starting to panic,"" Monash University political analyst Nick Economou told Reuters. ""I don't think she'll lead the Labor Party to the next election."" The first major opinion polls for 2012 found government support stalled near record lows, while online bookmakers Sportsbet Friday said odds on Rudd returning as leader by the end of the year have shortened to just $1.20 for a $1.00 bet. ""I'm a strong supporter of the Prime Minister. I think she's doing a very good job in very tough circumstances,"" Smith told Australian television from Brussels. He joined Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, and Regional Affairs Minister Simon Crean, who have all called for an end to party dissent, with Crean saying Rudd was not a team player. Rudd is seen as a lone operator by his Labor colleagues and was toppled as prime minister in a party room coup after his government struggled to pass reforms, but polls show he remains popular with voters. Adding to the government's dilemma is the fact Gillard governs with support from two independents and the Greens, and any leadership change could force a change of government or an early election if a new leader can't negotiate similar support. That means a leadership spill could trigger a change of government, with the conservative opposition promising to scrap a new 30 percent mining tax and a carbon tax, both due to start on July 1 this year. Gillard dismissed the latest rumblings Friday, saying she was focused on delivering good policy. ""I don't worry about chatter in the media, I get on with the job,"" she said. DISASTROUS NEW YEAR Gillard finished 2011 strengthened after a disaffected opposition lawmaker became parliamentary speaker, effectively bolstering her majority from one vote to three. But she has had a poor start to 2012. She lost the support of one independent in January after she reneged on a promise to change gambling laws, and then lost a staffer who quit over his role in promoting a rowdy protest against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that turned into a security scare. That means the government is back to square one, commanding only a one seat majority in parliament and with one lawmaker under a cloud, due to an ongoing police investigation over the use of union money to pay for prostitutes. At the same time, house prices are falling and manufacturers continue to cut jobs, although Gillard may get a reprieve if the central bank cuts interest rates next week as economists expect. Australian Financial Review political editor Laura Tingle said the past week had seem a shift in support away from Gillard, although most Labor lawmakers were still deeply hostile about Rudd. ""The tide has turned with a sharp but silent menace against Julia Gillard,"" Tingle wrote Friday. Economou said any move against Gillard would be unlikely before July, when the carbon tax and mining tax both start. That would allow Labor to deliver its budget in May, and to campaign for the March 24 Queensland state election, where polls suggest Labor will be thrown from office. ""The dangerous time is after the carbon tax comes in,"" Economou said. ""If things don't improve by then, she'll have to go.""",0
"The investor, which manages in excess of $100 billion, plans
to seek opinions from consultants on whether HSBC Asset Management should help
manage its sustainability funds in the wake of the controversial comments, said
the person with direct knowledge of the matter. Staff inside the bank 0005.HK have also sought reassurances
about its policies amid concerns about how HSBC will be perceived by clients,
two other sources said. The sources declined to be named as they were not
authorised to speak to the media. A spokesperson for HSBC declined to comment. Earlier this month, Stuart Kirk, who is the global head of
responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management, told a conference in London
that ""climate change is not a financial risk we need to worry about"",
comments that prompted the bank to suspend him and conduct an internal
investigation.  Kirk declined to comment when reached by Reuters. Kirk's presentation was met with criticism from campaigners
who have been pressuring the bank and its peers in the financial services
industry to play a bigger role in the fight against climate change.  It also prompted The Pensions Regulator in the UK to warn
that any pension scheme failing to consider the impacts of climate change was
""ignoring a major risk to pension savings"". HSBC is a leading provider of investment services to such
schemes. HSBC Chief Executive Noel Quinn has said that Kirk's
comments were ""inconsistent with HSBC’s strategy and do not reflect the
views of the senior leadership"". Nicolas Moreau, who heads the asset
management division, also distanced the bank from Kirk's remarks. HSBC Asset Management has received a number of inquiries
from institutional clients about Kirk's comments, one of the sources said. Some of the institutions said they felt obligated to seek
more clarity and understand HSBC's official stance, the source added. The possibility of HSBC Asset Management, a division that
oversees some $640 billion, losing business comes as the company invests in the
unit as part of a broader push to grow fee income. Over the last year, HSBC has
bought businesses in Singapore and India as it seeks to expand in Asia in
particular. The unease has also rippled through the bank’s internal
meetings. Employees feeling concerned raised questions to senior management
during a recent town hall, two of the sources said. Still, several industry experts have defended Kirk, saying
that he had sparked a legitimate debate and that there should be room for
dissenting voices in finance. The impact of climate risk on portfolios can indeed be
exaggerated as Kirk claimed, Tariq Fancy, a former head of sustainable
investing at BlackRock Inc., told Financial News in an interview on Monday.",2
"They are necessary precautions, said Rachel Reeves, the Labour candidate who has represented this area of Leeds in Parliament since 2010 and uses the space as both her constituency office and now as her campaign headquarters. The death threats, abuse on social media and graffiti calling for ‘traitor’ lawmakers to be hanged have changed her approach before Britain’s upcoming general election. This is the new reality, she and other lawmakers say, in a campaign environment that has become remarkably nasty, particularly for women, who face a torrent of abuse and threats often laced with misogyny. And it is happening across the political spectrum. “I do think it’s a very different atmosphere and environment now compared to the first two times I stood,” Reeves said. “People are a lot angrier and there’s a lot more polarisation, particularly around the Brexit issue.” In the dwindling days before Britain heads to the polls, candidates, particularly women, are finding themselves campaigning in a climate where they say abuse, threats and a culture of intimidation have become the norm. With the Labour and Conservative parties hurling blame and allegations of racism and wrongdoing at each other, and anger and exhaustion over the still unresolved issue of Brexit, the country is divided like never before. Where once candidates might try to be as visible as possible, many are proceeding with caution, heeding warnings from the police. The abuse is not directed entirely at women. Men have come in for their share as well. But a study conducted during the most recent election showed that female lawmakers receive disproportionately more abuse on social media, with women of colour receiving an even larger share. And when more than a dozen female lawmakers cited threats and online abuse last month as part of their rationale for not running in the upcoming election, a discomforting spotlight was again thrust on the treatment of women in British politics. In a system where women are already underrepresented, making up just 32% of Parliament, some feared the abuse would drive away potential new candidates. Despite the charged atmosphere heading into the campaign, a record number of women — 1,124 of 3,322 registered candidates — are running in the election, the BBC reported. But many say they are having to adjust to a new reality where threats and intimidation are the norm. “I think that we are a little bit more reticent in advertising where we are going to be,” Reeves said, so she instead shares photos of campaign appearances after the fact. It is a precaution the police have suggested since the murder of her close friend Jo Cox, she said. In Leeds, the 2016 murder of Cox, a Labour lawmaker who represented the nearby area of Batley and Spen, is never far from people’s minds. Cox was shot by a man shouting “Britain first!” and “death to traitors” while she campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union before the Brexit referendum. “We really needed to learn the lessons from that, and yet here we are, 3 1/2 years later, and I think the environment is much more toxic,” Reeves said. She believes Brexit divisions and the language used by leaders in Parliament have fuelled the anger. “The language of betrayal, of traitor, of treachery, of surrender,” she said, repeating words that she and many of her female Labour colleagues have criticised Prime Minister Boris Johnson for using against his opponents in the past. But, she said, the misogyny is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. A man was jailed last month for sending a threatening letter to Anna Soubry, a onetime Conservative who now heads an upstart party, Change UK. Two Labour activists were injured in separate attacks last week while canvassing door to door. Six people have been convicted recently of criminal offenses for abuse and threats directed at Luciana Berger, a former Labour lawmaker and now Liberal Democrat candidate. Both the far right and far left went after her for her Jewish religion or her stance on Brexit. Andrea Jenkyns, a Conservative lawmaker who is running to retain her seat in the constituency of Morley and Outwood, 5 miles south of Reeves’ area in Leeds, detailed a barrage of abuse after she won her district in the 2015 election, ending an 85-year reign by Labour. Jenkyns — ardently pro-Brexit and an outspoken supporter of Johnson’s withdrawal deal — has received emails at her office threatening sexual violence, and detractors on social media have called her a bad mother. Six weeks ago, her staff arrived at their office on Morley’s main street to find graffiti scrawled in the entryway: “Andrea just kill yourself pls.” Many of her campaign signs, which depict a smiling Jenkyns standing alongside Johnson, have been defaced. In one, a hole was punched through her face. Jenkyns believes the current climate is a departure from the “grown-up politics” of her first two campaigns, and blames heightened tensions on Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, for driving that party further to the left. But, she conceded, Brexit has also played a role. “The sad thing is, you deal with it on a daily basis so you are probably not shocked anymore and you accept it,” Jenkyns said. “And what kind of society is that?” For the first time, Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates law enforcement across the country, and the Electoral Commission issued a nationwide set of safety guidelines for candidates and activists. It advises canvassing in groups and encourages candidates and their supporters to report threats, including those made online. The decision to hold an election in December, when daylight is in short supply across Britain, has also forced many candidates to rethink their strategy, with some, including Jenkyns, swearing off knocking on doors in the dark because of safety concerns. Before previous elections, much of Reeves’ canvassing would take place after the workday ended. Now, it’s dark by 4:30pm. On Tuesday, she set out at 4pm, knocking on doors with a small team of volunteers who folded leaflets through mail slots in the Fairfield Estate, a mixture of public housing projects and privately owned homes spread out over a steep hillside. The streetlights came on as she made her way along the densely packed terraced houses, her red Labour candidate badge visible in the darkness. Few answered the door. But those who happened to be home were mostly positive, mixed with a few curt responses from those not supporting Labour. “I think we are certainly a little more vigilant,” Reeves said, describing a few confrontations. “We would never have someone go door knocking by themselves.” Cox’s younger sister, Kim Leadbetter, believes that the conversation around Brexit has grown increasingly vitriolic in the years since her sister’s death. She worries it could prove damaging to the democratic process and discourage young people, particularly women, from politics. “When Jo was murdered, there was a short period of time when politicians said all the right things about how politics needed to take a step back,” she said. But it didn’t last. Instead, she said, anger, frustration, and violent language seem to dominate the conversation. Leadbetter, an ambassador for the Jo Cox Foundation, a nonpartisan, community-building charity that was created after her sister’s death, said that while her sister was an advocate of robust debate, “we have to be able to disagree agreeably.” While there is undoubtedly an issue with threats of violence on social media — due in part to the anonymity the platforms can provide — Leadbetter warned against dismissing them as just an online problem. “It only takes one individual who cannot see the difference between violent, aggressive and abusive language and an act of violence that can change people’s lives forever,” she said. © 2019 New York Times News Service",0
"NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Mon May 4, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The global downturn could lead to unrest, more poverty and environmental challenges in Asia, regional leaders were warned on Monday, after they agreed on a $120 billion emergency fund to counter the crisis. Asia has been hard hit by the collapse in global demand largely because of the region's heavy reliance on exports. Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan are in recession and growth elsewhere is the weakest in years. ""Poverty is worsening in many countries. Businesses are struggling. The extremely urgent climate change agenda could be affected,"" Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank. ""If all this goes unchecked, down the road we could see social and political unrest in many countries,"" he told representatives of the ADB's 67-member countries, including finance ministers and central bank governors. To counter the downturn, the ADB said it will raise lending by half and Asian governments agreed at the weekend to launch a $120 billion fund countries can tap to avert a balance of payments crisis. Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano warned that private capital flows into Asian developing nations could turn negative in 2009 after falling below $100 billion in 2008 from over $300 billion in 2007. ""ADB should play a leading role to cushion the impact of such a brutal reversal in capital flows,"" he told the meeting, adding though that a resurgence in Asia could trigger a global recovery. Longer term, it was vital for emerging Asian economies to build domestic demand to counter the reliance on export earnings, ADB delegates said. Many Asian exporters have seen demand for their products halve from a year earlier as the deepest global downturn in decades hammered world trade. ""The Chinese government's basic approach is to expand domestic demand, particularly consumer demand, to promote growth,"" Finance Minister Xie Xuren said. Karen Mathiasen, the chief U.S. delegate, said the shift to rely more on domestic demand would be profound. ""Such a fundamental economic transformation will not be easily or rapidly attainable, but ultimately will be key to underpinning a healthy, global and balanced recovery."" MORE SPENDING To achieve this goal, ADB Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said Asia needed to channel more savings into investments and consumption. ""They need to spend more on health, education and social security to reduce household needs for precautionary savings. They need strategies to transfer more corporate savings to households to encourage greater consumer spending."" The ADB has forecast that the region's economies are likely to grow just 3.4 percent in 2009, the slowest pace since the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. It sees growth recovering to 6.3 percent next year if demand rebounds. But transforming household savings into consumer spending and investments has been a difficult task for Asian policymakers. In the 10 Southeast Asian or ASEAN nations -- Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- savings exceed investments by at least 10 percent, ratings agency Standard and Poor's says. The ADB is meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, where finance ministers from China, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN on Sunday set up a $120 billion emergency fund aimed at countering the sort of capital flight seen during the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis. It is Asia's first independently managed multilateral liquidity facility and will be launched by the end of the year. Japan, the region's biggest economy, also announced a plan to supply up to 6 trillion yen ($61.54 billion) to support its neighbors in an economic downturn. Several Asian policy makers have flagged the risk of social unrest if governments fail to deal with the crisis. Chinese officials have warned economic discontent could threaten social stability as the giant economy's growth dropped below double digits for the first time in years. And during the last crisis a decade ago, Indonesia's long-term president, Suharto, stepped down after street protests. Governments also changed in South Korea and Thailand. To counter the current crisis, the ADB plans to ramp up lending to its developing members to about $33 billion in 2009 and 2010, almost a 50 percent increase over 2007-2008. Most of the new loans will be for infrastructure. If approved, the bank will also create a $3 billion fast-disbursing facility to meet ""urgent needs,"" Kuroda said.",0
"At first glance, it seems to adopt much of the Trump administration’s conviction that the world’s two biggest powers are veering dangerously toward confrontation, a clear change in tone from the Obama years. But the emerging strategy more directly repudiates the prevailing view of the last quarter century that deep economic interdependence could be counted on to temper fundamental conflicts on issues like China’s military buildup, its territorial ambitions and human rights. It focuses anew on competing more aggressively with Beijing on technologies vital to long-term economic and military power, after concluding that President Donald Trump’s approach — a mix of expensive tariffs, efforts to ban Huawei and TikTok, and accusations about sending the “China virus” to American shores — had failed to change President Xi Jinping’s course. The result, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, put it during the campaign last year, is an approach that “should put less focus on trying to slow China down and more emphasis on trying to run faster ourselves” through increased government investment in research and technologies like semiconductors, artificial intelligence and energy. Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will road-test the new approach in what promises to be a tense first encounter Thursday with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska. It is a meeting they delayed until they could reach the outlines of a common strategy with allies — notably Japan, South Korea, India and Australia — and one they insisted had to take place on American soil. But it will also be a first demonstration of Beijing’s determination to stand up to the new administration, and a chance for its diplomats to deliver a litany of complaints about Washington’s “evil” interference in China’s affairs, as a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman put it Wednesday. The United States imposed sanctions on 24 Chinese officials Wednesday for undermining Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, an action whose timing was pointed and clearly intentional. Blinken said in Tokyo this week that “we will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.” And that is happening almost daily, he conceded, including Beijing’s efforts to terminate Hong Kong’s autonomy, intimidate Australia and Taiwan, and move ahead, despite international condemnation, with what Blinken has said is a “genocide” aimed at China’s Uyghur minority. It is all part of the initial resetting of the relationship that has marked Biden’s renewed, if now far more tense, encounters with Xi. Back when Biden was vice president and Xi was consolidating power on his way to becoming China’s most powerful leader in decades, the two men met in China and the United States and offered public assurances that confrontation was not inevitable. The intelligence assessment inside the American government at the time was that Xi would proceed cautiously, focus on economic development at home and avoid direct confrontation with the United States. But in their years out of power, the aides who are now managing Biden’s new approach concluded that the earlier assessment badly misjudged Xi’s intentions and aggressiveness. And the new approach — a mix of promises to cooperate in areas of mutual concern like climate change while taking China on more directly in technology and military competition in space and cyberspace — is gradually becoming clear. Its outlines were reflected, aides said, during a two-hour telephone conversation last month between Biden and Xi whose contents have been tightly held by both sides. Biden, the aides reported, warned Xi not to believe China’s own narrative that the United States is a declining power, consumed by the political divisions that were on full display in the Jan 6 riot at the Capitol. Shortly after the conversation, though, Xi reportedly told local officials in northwest China that “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world is the United States,” which he also described as “the biggest threat to our country’s development and security.” Sullivan and Blinken are betting that Xi’s declaration reveals a pang of Chinese insecurity, a fear that, for all the country’s bluster about new weapons systems and advances in artificial intelligence, it is vulnerable to “choke points” where the United States remains in control of foundational technology. The result is that both nations are racing to secure their own supply chains and to reduce dependency on each other — a reversal of 40 years of economic integration. But more broadly it reflects the end of a post-Cold War construct that assumed the interests of the two powers were inextricably intertwined. “There’s no doubt that the trajectory has shifted in a dramatic way,” said Elizabeth C Economy, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of a biography of Xi. “I think fundamentally there’s a lack of trust that will be extremely difficult to overcome.” For a Democratic president, the Biden approach represents a full reversal from the days of Bill Clinton’s assurances, in his talks with Chinese university students more than 20 years ago, that a wealthier, internet-connected China would become a more democratic and pluralistic one. President Barack Obama’s talk of managing China’s “peaceful rise” is also gone. Today, there seems to be broad agreement that US-China relations have not only reached one of their lowest points since the country’s 1949 communist revolution, but that they threaten to grow even worse. Henry Kissinger, the man who cleared the way for America’s opening to China nearly 50 years ago, said shortly after Biden was elected that the United States and China were increasingly drifting toward confrontation. “The danger,” he said at a Bloomberg conference in November, “is that some crisis will occur that will go beyond rhetoric into actual military conflict.” Chinese authorities have read and reread an article published three years ago in Foreign Affairs that said the world had to acknowledge “the end of a post-Cold War construct that assumed these two great powers had to learn to get along — and thus would.” America, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner wrote, “underestimated China’s willingness to directly take on the United States, or use its economic might to rewrite the rules of trade and technology in its favour” and failed “to detect Mr. Xi’s authoritarian-nationalist instincts.” Today Campbell is the White House Asia policy coordinator, with new authorities over a range of government departments. And Ratner, recently installed as the Pentagon’s top official for Asia, is in charge of a four-month rush project to reassess the military competition between the two countries. Ratner’s review is expected to encompass everything from Beijing’s slow-but-steady embrace of a more sophisticated nuclear arsenal to its growing capabilities in space and hypersonic weaponry, much of it intended to keep American carrier groups at bay — and prevent the United States from taking the risk of mounting a defense of Taiwan. U.S. officials warn that a Taiwan crisis could be brewing, as Xi, emboldened by his success in suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, turns to the intimidation of an island it regards as a breakaway province. Last week, the chief of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm Philip Davidson, warned that China could try to take control of Taiwan within the next six years. An American destroyer sailed through the Taiwan Strait the next day, the traditional reminder that an overt move to take over the island would provoke a response from the United States. Nonetheless, many in the Pentagon believe that Chinese strategists increasingly regard such shows of force as empty gestures, convincing themselves that an America already tired of failed wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere would not take the risk of direct military confrontation. Sullivan holds a more nuanced view. Before taking office he cautioned against assuming China’s plan was to attain power through territorial gains in the Pacific. Instead, he suggested, Xi may be banking on expanding Chinese influence through “increasing emphasis on shaping the world’s economic rules, technology standards and political institutions.” The risk, he conceded, is that it could be pursuing both strategies simultaneously. At the heart of the Biden administration’s critique of the Trump administration’s approach to China was the absence of a competitive strategy. Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threatened allies that were negotiating to install Huawei’s 5G communications network, telling them they could be cut off from US intelligence because Washington could not risk having critical data diverted to the Chinese. But there was no American alternative to offer them, since US companies had largely exited the field. Biden’s team promises a different approach — one that is exploring, for example, ways of organising Western democracies to draw on American open-source software and European-made switching gear from Nokia and Ericsson to offer a more secure, Western-made alternative to Huawei. But putting together such combinations requires a level of government and private-sector cooperation that is rare in peacetime, and can take years to assemble. It is far from clear that other nations will hold off on their purchases, especially as China uses its leverage — most recently in providing coronavirus vaccines — to bolster Huawei’s chances in nations where only months ago it was blocked. Similarly, the Biden administration regards Trump’s effort last year to block TikTok, the Chinese social media operation, and force a de facto takeover of its American operations, as such a hastily assembled deal that it will never survive legal challenge. It promises a different strategy that focuses on the key issue: how to monitor the software that is pumped into the phones of over 100 million users in the United States. “The Cold War was primarily a military competition,” Campbell said. But “the modern ramparts of competition will be in technology,” he said, such as 5G networks, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics and human sciences. Competing in those areas, Sullivan said recently, would require “making progressive, ambitious public investment here in the United States so that we stay on the cutting edge.” Elements of Trump’s approach remain, of course, including punishing tariffs on Chinese imports, which one Biden official briefing reporters last month called a source of “leverage.” But Biden has walked away from Pompeo’s declaration that with enough pressure, the Communist Party in China will collapse. Last month Graham Allison, a political scientist at Harvard, and Fred Hu, a prominent investor, argued that for now there is no choice but to deal with China as it is. “Preventing military crises, combating climate change, containing future pandemics, preventing nuclear proliferation, fighting terrorism, managing financial crises,” they wrote, “none of this can be done without accepting the reality that the autocratic regime in Beijing runs China now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" Global climate talks may have to continue into 2011 after failing last month to agree on a Kyoto successor, the UN's climate chief Yvo de Boer, told Reuters on Friday. A lack of trust and the economic crisis complicated prospects for a global climate deal in Mexico at a December meeting, said President Felipe Calderon, the prospective host of those talks. The world failed to commit in Copenhagen last month to succeed or extend the existing Kyoto Protocol from 2013. De Boer could not guarantee a deal in Mexico, the next scheduled ministerial meeting. ""Whether we can achieve that in Mexico or need a bit more time remains to be seen and will become clearer in the course of the year,"" he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where business executives said they would invest in low-carbon technologies regardless of a global UN climate deal. ""It's very difficult to pin down. One of the lessons from Copenhagen was don't rush it, take the time you need to get full engagement of all countries and make sure people are confident about what is being agreed."" Deadlock last month centred on how far big emerging economies should follow the industrialised world and enforce binding actions to fight climate change. ""We will do our best,"" said Calderon. ""My perception is that the lack of consensus is related to the economic problems in each nation, because there are economic costs associated with the task to tackle climate change."" ""We want in Cancun a robust, comprehensive and substantial agreement,"" by all 193 signatories of the UN's climate convention, he said. ""We need to try to learn from our mistakes ... we need to return trust and confidence between the parties."" The UN's de Boer said countries must arrange additional meetings this year, in addition to the two already timetabled in Bonn in June, and then in Mexico if they wanted agreement. De Boer said he was ""very happy"" to receive confirmation yesterday from the United States that it had beaten a Jan. 31 deadline to submit formally its planned carbon cuts, to be written into a non-binding ""Copenhagen Accord"".",0
" Rich and poor nations alike criticised a new blueprint for a UN climate treaty on Friday as two weeks of talks among 185 countries ended with small steps towards an elusive deal. A streamlined climate draft, meant to help talks on a new pact, cut out some of the most draconian options for greenhouse gas and dropped all references to ""Copenhagen"" -- where a UN summit in December fell short of agreeing a treaty. ""The group is dismayed that the ... text is unbalanced,"" developing nations in the Group of 77 and China said in a statement. Several of them said the 22-page text wrongly put emphasis on greenhouse gas curbs by the poor, not the rich. Among rich nations, the United States said it would study the text but that some elements were ""unacceptable"". The European Union also expressed ""concerns"" about the text, which updates a previous 42-page draft rejected last week. The new text outlines a goal of cutting world emissions of greenhouse gases by ""at least 50-85 percent from 1990 levels by 2050"" and for developed nations to reduce emissions by at least 80-95 percent from 1990 levels by mid-century. It drops far more radical options, some championed by Bolivia, for a cut of at least 95 percent in world emissions by 2050 as part of a fight to slow droughts, floods, a spread of disease and rising sea levels. Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe of Zimbabwe, who chairs the UN talks on action by all nations to slow global warming, said the text would be updated for a next meeting in Bonn in August. SHORTCOMINGS Yvo de Boer, the departing head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said he felt the main reaction to the text was that, ""yes, it has shortcomings...but that people are willing to take it as the basis for future work."" Many delegates say that a new legally binding deal is out of reach for 2010 and now more likely in 2011. Apart from deep splits over negotiating texts, US legislation on cutting emissions is stalled in the Senate. The May 31-June 11 session was the biggest since Copenhagen, where more than 120 nations agreed a non-binding deal to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times. But it lacked details of how to reach this goal. ""This session has made important progress...Countries have been talking to each other rather than at each other,"" de Boer said of the Bonn talks. De Boer said there was progress on climate funds, sharing green technology and issues such as slowing deforestation. He said an extra meeting of negotiators was likely in China before an annual meeting in Mexico from Nov. 29-Dec. 10. The new draft text keeps some elements of the Copenhagen Accord, including a plan for aid to developing nations of $10 billion a year from 2010 to 2012, rising to more than $100 billion from 2020. Australian delegate Robert Owen-Jones announced in Bonn that Canberra was contributing 559 million Australian dollars ($469 million) to the 2010-12 funds.",0
" Australia won an ovation at the start of UN-led climate change talks in Bali on Monday by agreeing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, isolating the United States as the only developed nation outside the pact. Soon after an Australian delegate promised immediate action on Kyoto, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took the oath of office and signed documents to ratify, ending his country's long-held opposition to the global climate agreement. ""I think I can speak for all present here by expressing a sigh of relief,"" conference host and Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar told the conference opening session. About 190 nations are in Bali seeking a breakthrough for a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009 to avert droughts, heatwaves and rising seas that will hit the poor hardest. ""The world is watching closely,"" Witoelar told delegates at the Dec. 3-14 meeting trying to bind outsiders led by the United States and China into a long-term U.N.-led fight against warming. ""Climate change is unequivocal and accelerating,"" he told the opening ceremony in a luxury beach resort on the Indonesian island. ""It is becoming increasingly evident that the most severe impacts of climate change will be felt by poor nations."" A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United States and developing nations have no caps under Kyoto. The United States, as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, has been feeling the heat from developing nations demanding the rich make stronger commitments to curb emissions. Australia, the world's top coal exporter and among the world's highest per-capita greenhouse gas polluters, has been criticised for years for refusing the ratify Kyoto. ""It was an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol,"" Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat, said of the ovation. The United States was unfazed. ""NO ROAD BLOCKS"" ""We respect Australia's decision,"" Harlan Watson, head of the U.S. delegation, told reporters. ""We're not here to be a roadblock. We're committed to a successful conclusion here."" De Boer told delegates rich nations had to agree to axe emissions from burning fossil fuels to encourage poor countries to start braking their own rising emissions. ""Bold action in the north can fuel clean growth in the south,"" he said, urging a sharing of clean energy technologies such as solar or wind power. ""I fervently hope you will make a breakthrough here in Bali by adopting a negotiating agenda."" Others urged caution. ""At the opening ceremonies for the climate talks in Bali, there was lots of good will and optimism, but there is clearly a challenging road ahead,"" said Angela Anderson, vice president for climate programs at the Washington-based National Environmental Trust. ""Agreements on adaptation, deforestation and technology cooperation must be reached before the high-level officials arrive next week. While all the governments agree in principle, there is significant disagreement on the details."" Climate change talks have been bogged down by arguments over who will pay the bill for cleaner technology and how to share out the burden of emissions curbs between rich and poor nations. China and India, among the world's top polluters and comprising more than a third of humanity, say it's unfair and unrealistic for them to agree to targets, particularly as they try to lift millions out of poverty. The European Union, which has pledged to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, said that countries should start to look at hard new commitments in Bali.",0
"BANGKOK, Oct 7, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The United States came under pressure to show leadership in UN climate talks on Wednesday with Mexico saying its neighbor is a stumbling block in efforts to try to craft a tough global climate agreement by December. The United States has been criticized by developing countries and green groups in talks in the Thai capital for not being able to put a tough emissions reduction target for 2020 on the table, instead focusing on a 2050 target. Developing nations also worry over Washington's position that any new climate pact should set legally binding domestic steps to cut emissions as a benchmark for global action to fight climate change. ""I think that they are in an uncomfortable position since they cannot put on the table any figures unless the Congress process is clearer,"" Fernando Tudela, head of the Mexican climate delegation in Bangkok, told Reuters in an interview. ""They are increasingly identified as a stumbling block for the negotiations and it's up to them to dispel this perception and to show the real leadership we're expecting from them."" A climate bill drafted by U.S. Senate Democrats aims for a 20 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 from 2005 levels. But President Barack Obama's administration says he is unlikely to sign the legislation before a major December conference in Copenhagen aimed at sealing a new climate pact. The Senate bill target equates to a 7 percent cut on 1990 levels by 2020, far below the 25-40 percent cuts by then that the U.N. climate panel and developing countries say rich nations should support to avoid dangerous climate change. ""Whenever Congress delivers legislation then once again the U.S. will not be in a process to negotiate because (its) hands will be tied by whatever comes out of the Congress,"" Tudela said. ""They still have to prove that, in whatever legal form, they are able to deliver the abatement that would be conducive to a fair share toward meeting the climate targets."" Delegates from about 180 nations are in Bangkok to try to narrow differences on sharing the burden of slowing climate change through a tougher agreement that from 2013 would replace the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto only binds 37 rich nations, not including the United States, to emissions targets between 2008-12. The Bangkok talks are the last major negotiation round before the Dec 7-18 Copenhagen meeting. TRANSPARENT Tudela worried about efforts by the U.S. and other rich nations to shift away from Kyoto to a new framework. ""Our preference would be to keep Kyoto as it is, and build a compliment to Kyoto, involving enhanced participation from developing countries with support from developed countries and a much enhanced participation of the US"" The head of the U.S. delegation, Jonathan Pershing, called on developing nations to be more transparent in what actions they take to curb emissions growth. Many poorer nations have resisted this unless they receive money and technology to adapt to the impacts of climate change and green their economies. Big developing nations such as China, India and Indonesia are among the world's top greenhouse gas emitters. ""The United States is of the view that there are two pieces to what's binding,"" Pershing told reporters. ""The first piece is what every country does at home. Our view is that the strongest part of a legal instrument is what we each commit to in our countries. So what we're looking for is for countries to pass laws to move forward on this issue,"" he said. ""An international agreement is strong because it supports that national action. We do think it should be binding internationally. We think that countries should take their actions and make them publicly visible, transparent.""",0
" The United States might have earned global ire for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but not every American is a climate villain, US lawmakers and activists at climate talks in Bali say. Rep. Edward J. Markey and 10 House committee chairmen, in a letter to a top UN figure at the Bali talks, highlighted what they said was the willingness of the US Congress and voters to act against a policy of delay adopted by the administration of George W Bush. ""As world leaders and the United Nations meet in Bali to plan a future without global warming, the world must know that President Bush's avoidance of action is not the status quo here in America,"" said Markey, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. ""With Congress, the states, cities, and Americans from coast to coast looking to act immediately on global warming, the international community must know they have significant support here in the United States,"" he said in the letter to Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat. ""In total, 55 percent of the US population lives in a state that has already established rigorous mandatory greenhouse gas reduction targets,"" the Massachusetts Democrat added. Among the House committee leaders supporting the letter were Tom Lantos of the Foreign Relations Committee; Henry A Waxman, Oversight and Government Reform Committee; and George Miller, Education and Labor Committee. A US youth delegation met their government's negotiating team in Bali on Wednesday to demand tougher action against global warming. The United States is the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases and says Kyoto is a failure because it doesn't commit big developing nations such as China and India to emissions targets. The meeting in Bali, involving about 190 nations, aims to initiate a two-year dialogue leading to a broader climate pact by 2009 to replace or upgrade Kyoto. US youth delegation member Richard Graves said the State Department team did not offer much hope for the negotiations in Bali. ""The best we could get from them was that nothing is off the table,"" he told a small gathering at the conference. ""The youth represent the future of the United States and not the past and this delegation doesn't have very long left and represents the past."" A report released on Tuesday by the US-based National Environmental Trust says many individual US states release more greenhouse gas emissions than entire groups of developing countries. Wyoming, the most sparsely populated state in the US with only 510,000 people, emits more carbon dioxide than 69 developing countries that are home to 357 million, it said.",0
"He made the appeal after unveiling a research paper on CSR by Management and Research Development Initiative (MRDI) in Dhaka on Wednesday. Addressing bank officials, he said, “You can undertake long-term projects. Providing short-term aid with CSR is not enough; steps should be taken to eradicating poverty.” The Governor urged the scheduled banks to increase participation in confronting the effects of climate change. The resource paper has described the drastic changes in the lives of the inhabitant’s of the Sundarbans and its adjoining areas after cyclones Sidr and Aila increased the region’s salinity level. MRDI Executive Director Hasibur Rahman Mukur said Bangladeshi banks, which together disburse Tk 4.5 billion as CSR funds every year, should work in these areas. He added that if banks could disburse their CSR funds independently, Bangladesh would not need foreign financial assistance to fund social development work.",4
" UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promised a review of security for UN operations around the world on Wednesday after car bombs claimed by al Qaeda killed at least 11 UN employees in Algeria. The UN staff were among dozens killed in Tuesday's twin car bombs at UN buildings and a government building. Al Qaeda's North African wing claimed responsibility for the bombs targeting what it called ""the slaves of America and France."" Ban addressed the U.N. General Assembly by videolink from Bali, in Indonesia, where he is attending a conference on climate change. He said the bombs were ""a despicable strike against individuals serving humanity's highest ideals under the UN banner,"" and ""an attack on all of us."" Ban said he had sent Kemal Dervis, the head of the United Nations Development Program which lost a number of staff, to Algeria to oversee support for victims and their families. ""The security and welfare of UN staff is paramount,"" Ban said. ""We will take every measure to ensure their safety, in Algeria and elsewhere, beginning with an immediate review of our security precautions and policies."" Ban said the world body had enhanced security since a bomb that destroyed the U.N. office in Baghdad in 2003 and killed 22 people, including mission chief Sergio Vieira de Mello. ""Our brave men and women continue their difficult and dangerous work,"" he said. ""The Baghdad attack will not deter us. Neither will this most recent attack,"" he said, addressing the General Assembly after it stood for a minute's silence for the victims. The U.N. staff union called on Tuesday for a full investigation ""to determine if adequate security measures were in place to prevent such a horrifying act."" Authorities were still searching for survivors on Wednesday. Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci told Europe 1 television the official death toll was 30, while a Health Ministry source on Tuesday said 67 people were killed.",0
"But what if I told you that no matter where you live or how high your socioeconomic status, climate change can endanger your health, both physical and mental, now and in the future? Not only your health, but also the health of your children and grandchildren? Might you consider making changes to help mitigate the threat? Relatively few Americans associate climate change with possible harms to their health, and most have given little thought to this possibility. Even though I read widely about medical issues, like most Americans, I too was unaware of how many health hazards can accompany climate change. Studies in the United States and Britain have shown that “people have a strong tendency to see climate change as less threatening to their health and to their family’s health than to other people’s health,” according to Julia Hathaway and Edward W Maibach at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Two recently published reports set me straight. One, by two public health experts, called for the creation within the National Institutes of Health of a “National Institute of Climate Change and Health” to better inform the medical community, public officials and ordinary citizens about ways to stanch looming threats to human health from further increases in global warming. The experts, Dr Howard Frumkin and Dr. Richard J. Jackson, both former directors of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that recent climate-related disasters, including devastating wildfires and a record-breaking hurricane season, demonstrate that our failure to take climate change seriously is resulting in needless suffering and death. The second report appeared just as I began investigating the evidence supporting their proposal: a full-page article in The New York Times on Nov 29 with the headline “Wildfire Smoke in California Is Poisoning Children.” It described lung damage along with lifelong threats to the health of youngsters forced to breathe smoke-laden air from wildfires that began raging in August and fouled the air throughout the fall. Children are not the only ones endangered. Anyone with asthma can experience life-threatening attacks when pollution levels soar. The risks of heart disease and stroke rise. And a recent study in JAMA Neurology of more than 18,000 Americans with cognitive impairment found a strong link between high levels of air pollution and an increased risk of developing dementia. “While anyone’s health can be harmed by climate change, some people are at greatly increased risk, including young children, pregnant women, older adults, people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, outdoor workers, and people with fewer resources,” Hathaway and Maibach wrote in Current Environmental Health Reports. Alas, said Jackson, emeritus professor at UCLA, “Human beings respond only to what is a threat to them at the moment. Californians are now much more aware — the fires got people’s attention.” The wildfire season is now starting much earlier and ending later as a result of a warming climate, an international research team reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in November. Frumkin, emeritus professor at the University of Washington, told me, “Lots of people who don’t consider climate change a major problem relative to themselves do take it seriously when they realise it’s a health concern. Heat waves, for example, not only kill people, they also diminish work capacity, sleep quality and academic performance in children.” “Our changing climate will have much more of an impact on people’s health over time,” Jackson said. People of all ages will develop respiratory allergies, and those who already have allergies can expect them to get worse, as plants and trees respond to a warmer climate and release their allergens in more places and for longer periods. Infectious diseases carried by ticks, mosquitoes and other vectors also rise with a warming climate. Even small increases in temperature in temperate zones raise the potential for epidemics of Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, encephalitis and other tick-borne infections, as well as mosquito-borne West Nile disease, dengue fever and even malaria. Climate change endangers the safety of foods and water supplies by fostering organisms that cause food poisoning and microbial contamination of drinking water. Extreme flooding and hurricanes can spawn epidemics of leptospirosis; just walking through floodwaters can increase the risk of this bacterial blood infection 15-fold. These are just a smattering of the health risks linked to global warming. They are extensive and require both societal and individual efforts to minimise. Yes, society is changing, albeit slowly. The Biden administration has rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. General Motors, the nation’s largest car manufacturer, announced it would dedicate itself to electric vehicles and other green energy initiatives, and Ford, Volkswagen and others are doing the same. Lest you feel you can’t make a difference, let me suggest some steps many of us can take to help assure a healthier future for everyone. I assume you’ve already changed your light bulbs to more efficient LEDs. But have you checked the source of your electricity to see that it relies primarily on nonpolluting renewable energy sources? Can you install solar panels where you live? If you can afford to, replace old energy-guzzling appliances with new efficient ones. And don’t waste electricity or water. Now tackle transportation. Drive less and use people power more. Wherever possible, commute and run errands by cycling, walking or scootering, which can also directly enhance your health. Or take public transportation. If you must drive, consider getting an electric car, which can save fuel costs as well as protect the environment. How about a dietary inventory, one that can enhance your health both directly and indirectly? Cutting back on or cutting out red meat to reduce greenhouse gases, relying instead on plant-based foods, is the perfect start to a healthier planet and its human inhabitants. Reduce waste. Currently, Jackson said, 30 percent of our food is wasted. Buy only what you need and use it before it spoils. Support organisations like City Harvest, which distributes unsold food from stores and unused food from restaurants to those in need. Reuse or recycle materials instead of throwing out everything you no longer want nor need.   © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the northwestern United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia, researchers reported on Thursday. The airborne fungus, called Cryptococcus gattii, usually only infects transplant and AIDS patients and people with otherwise compromised immune systems, but the new strain is genetically different, the researchers said. ""This novel fungus is worrisome because it appears to be a threat to otherwise healthy people,"" said Edmond Byrnes of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study. ""The findings presented here document that the outbreak of C. gattii in Western North America is continuing to expand throughout this temperate region,"" the researchers said in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens here ""Our findings suggest further expansion into neighboring regions is likely to occur and aim to increase disease awareness in the region."" The new strain appears to be unusually deadly, with a mortality rate of about 25 percent among the 21 U.S. cases analyzed, they said. ""From 1999 through 2003, the cases were largely restricted to Vancouver Island,"" the report reads. ""Between 2003 and 2006, the outbreak expanded into neighboring mainland British Columbia and then into Washington and Oregon from 2005 to 2009. Based on this historical trajectory of expansion, the outbreak may continue to expand into the neighboring region of Northern California, and possibly further."" The spore-forming fungus can cause symptoms in people and animals two weeks or more after exposure. They include a cough that lasts for weeks, sharp chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, fever, nighttime sweats and weight loss. It has also turned up in cats, dogs, an alpaca and a sheep. bdnews24.com/lq/1604h.",6
" The wearin' of the brown? Forty shades of beige? Climate change could turn Ireland's legendary emerald landscape a dusty tan, with profound effects on its society and culture, a new study released in time for St. Patrick's Day reported. Entitled ""Changing Shades of Green,"" the report by the Irish American Climate Project twins science gleaned from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the musings of a poet, a fiddler, a fisherman, a farmer and others with deep connections to Ireland. ""The lush greens could turn to brown and the soft rains that people talk about as a blessing -- 'May the rains fall soft upon your field' -- those soft rains could turn harsh,"" said Kevin Sweeney, an environmental consultant who directs the climate project. ""It really is changing the look and feel of Ireland,"" Sweeney said in a telephone interview. The report is available online at http://irishclimate.org. While he acknowledged the impact of climate change on Ireland is less than that elsewhere, notably in Africa, Sweeney emphasized the difference this global change could make on a place that millions of people picture as lush and green. FEWER POTATOES, MORE BOG BURSTS Among other findings, the report said: -- Potatoes, the quintessential staple of Irish agriculture, might cease to be a commercial crop under the stress of prolonged summer droughts; -- Dried grasses in summer and autumn would change hillsides from green to brown; -- Pastures could be saturated until late spring, making it impossible for livestock to graze; instead, farmers would plant row crops to grow animal feed, a change in the look of Ireland; -- Reduced summer rains would hurt inland fisheries for salmon and sea trout; -- Bog bursts, caused when summer heat lifts peat bogs off the bedrock on hillsides and sends the bogs sliding down the slope, would be more frequent. But the most evident change could be the difference in rainfall. ""The nickname Emerald Isle is a legacy of Ireland's steady rainfall,"" the report said. ""By mid-century, winters could see an increase of more than 12 percent and summers could see a decrease of more than 12 percent. Seasonal storm intensity changes will increase the impact of these changes."" The southeast may have elements of a Mediterranean climate, according to the report. ""If it's pouring rain, I'll say, 'We're in the climate of the music,'"" Irish fiddler Martin Hayes said in the report. "" ... That softness of the rain, it's there."" Discussing the climate changes possible in Ireland, Hayes said, ""I feel frightened and worried. I feel despair. It goes into every aspect of my life."" Ireland is especially good as a focus because some 80 million people around the world can claim Irish heritage, compared to the 5 million or so who actually live in Ireland. Of these, Sweeney said, most associate Ireland with green pastures, rolling hills and rain. And that image could change. ""This is not Africa, where ... the rain may dry up and millions of people might have to move,"" Sweeney said. ""People can raise their children, they can make a living, they can find sustenance in Ireland, but it will look and feel and be different. And that's the subtlety we want to explain here. We don't want to project that this is catastrophe. What it is, is it's heartbreaking.""",0
" The United States will tell a July meeting of the Group of Eight rich nations that it cannot meet big cuts in emissions of planet-warming gases by 2020, its chief climate negotiator Harlan Watson said. ""It's frankly not do-able for us,"" he told Reuters on Tuesday, referring to a goal for rich countries to curb greenhouse gases by 25-40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. A draft summit declaration, dated May 5 and seen by Reuters, showed Washington is blocking efforts to get the summit to agree targets for cutting carbon emissions, insisting that responsibility be shared by big emerging economies. The European Union says it will cut emissions by 30 percent if other rich countries do and supports a goal of 25-40 percent for all industrialized nations. But the candidates running to replace U.S. President George W. Bush, and who all support action to stem climate change, were only talking about returning to 1990 or 2000 U.S. emissions levels by 2020, Watson said. ""And I think most analysis of whether we could do that (say) it would be a heavy lift for the United States given our current infrastructure."" U.S. power production is about 50 percent reliant on high carbon-emitting coal, Watson added. Watson was speaking on the sidelines of U.N.-led climate talks in Germany. He held out hope for agreement in the July G8 meeting on a global goal to halve emissions by 2050. ""We'd certainly like to get agreement on that, I'm not going to say specific numbers. We're seriously considering this 50 by 50,"" he said, referring to a halving of global greenhouse gases by mid-century, supported by Japan and the EU. CLIMATE FIGHT The United States wants all major economies -- code for including big developing countries such as China -- to agree to contribute more to the climate fight, for example funding R&D into clean energy technologies. Financing such research was currently dominated by the United States and Japan, Watson said. Talks this week in Bonn are meant to dovetail with the upcoming G8 meeting and a U.S. initiative on the fringes of the G8 involving all major economies, into a U.N. process to agree a new global climate pact by the end of next year in Copenhagen. A key sticking point in talks is how to split the cost of re-deploying the world's entire energy system away from fossil fuels, and how soon emerging economies adopt emissions caps. The present Kyoto Protocol caps the greenhouse gases of some 37 industrialized countries, but not the world's top two emitters -- the United States and China. Scientists say that the world must brake and reverse annual increases in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change including rising seas and more extreme weather. ",0
" Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, said he was getting straight back to work on the ""planetary emergency"" of climate change. But he refused to answer reporters' questions on whether the award would make him change his mind and enter the U.S. presidential campaign as a Democratic candidate before the November 2008 election. ""We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing,"" Gore said, appearing in public nearly nine hours after the award was announced in Oslo. Gore shared the Nobel prize with the U.N. climate panel for their work helping galvanize international action against global warming. ""It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway,"" said Gore, standing with his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University faculty members who work with the U.N. climate panel. ""This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now."" ""I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning,"" Gore added, leaving the 70 journalists hanging by not taking questions. That left unanswered a question on the minds of many in the United States after his Nobel win: would Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, jump in to join a crowded Democratic field of candidates ahead of the presidential election next year. Gore has made it known he is not interested, although some Democratic activists are campaigning for him to get into the race, and the Nobel award on Friday further fueled their hopes. Gore has campaigned on climate change since leaving office in 2001 after the bruising and disputed election result that put Bush in the White House. BUSINESS AS USUAL Gore, who appeared somber rather than elated over the award, said, ""For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency."" ""It truly is a planetary emergency and we have to respond quickly,"" he said. Gore carried on with his plans despite the life-changing announcement, attending a scheduled meeting in Palo Alto in the heart of the Silicon Valley, where innovators are eager to jump start the clean technology industry. Stanford biology professor Chris Field said the prize ""adds tremendous momentum"" to work on conservation, efficiency, new technology and carbon capture and storage. ""I think we are seeing there is no single solution ... but there are great opportunities in all four areas,"" Field said. Gore said in a statement earlier that he would donate all of his share of the Nobel prize winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection -- a nonprofit group Gore founded last year to raise public awareness of climate change. ""This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis -- a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years,"" Gore said in his earlier written statement.",1
"A pressing issue not in the official program is the controversy that has been swirling for weeks around the chief of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, threatening her leadership. An investigation last month accused Georgieva of rigging data to paint China as more business-friendly in a 2018 report when she was CEO at the World Bank. Georgieva has denied any wrongdoing. The scandal has focused on the bank’s credibility — billion-dollar decisions can be made on the basis of its information — as well as Georgieva’s culpability. But lurking behind the debate over her future are foundational questions about the shifting role of the IMF, which has helped guide the global economic and financial system since the end of World War II. Once narrowly viewed as a financial watchdog and a first responder to countries in financial crises, the IMF has more recently helped manage two of the biggest risks to the worldwide economy: extreme inequality and climate change. Some stakeholders, though, have chafed at the scope of the fund’s ambitions and how much it should venture onto the World Bank’s turf of long-term development and social projects. And they object to what’s perceived as a progressive tilt. “There is a modernizing streak here running through major financial institutions, which is creating a kind of tension,” said Adam Tooze, a historian at Columbia University and the author of “Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy.” Other pressures weigh on the agency as well. Washington is still home to the IMF’s headquarters, and the United States is the only one of the 190 member countries with veto power, because it contributes more money than any other. But its dominance has been increasingly challenged by China — straining relations further tested by trade and other tensions — and emerging nations. The willingness of the Federal Reserve and other central banks to flush trillions of dollars into the global economy to limit downturns also means that other lenders, aside from the IMF, have enough surplus cash on hand to lend money to strapped nations. China has also greatly expanded its lending to foreign governments for infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, long-held beliefs like the single-minded focus on how much an economy grows, without regard to problems like inequality and environmental damage, are widely considered outdated. And the preferred cocktail for helping debt-ridden nations that was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s — austerity, privatization of government services and deregulation — has lost favour in many circles as punitive and often counterproductive. 
 
 International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks during a joint news conference at the end of the Summit on the Financing of African Economies in Paris, France May 18, 2021. Ludovic Marin/Pool via Reuters 

The debate about the role of the IMF was bubbling before the appointment of Georgieva, who this month started the third year of her five-year term. But she has embraced an expanded role for the agency. A Bulgarian economist and the first from an emerging economy to head the fund, she stepped up her predecessors’ attention to widening inequality and made climate change a priority, calling for an end to all fossil fuel subsidies, for a tax on carbon and for significant investment in green technology.  International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks during a joint news conference at the end of the Summit on the Financing of African Economies in Paris, France May 18, 2021. Ludovic Marin/Pool via Reuters  She has argued that however efficient and rational the market is, governments must step in to fix built-in flaws that could lead to environmental devastation and grossly inequitable opportunity. Sustainable debt replaced austerity as the catchword. When the coronavirus pandemic brutally intensified the slate of problems — malnourishment, inadequate health care, rising poverty and an interconnected world vulnerable to environmental disaster — Georgieva urged action. Here was “a once in a lifetime opportunity,” she said, “to support a transformation in the economy,” one that is greener and fairer. The IMF opposed the hard line taken by some Wall Street creditors in 2020 toward Argentina, emphasizing instead the need to protect “society’s most vulnerable” and to forgive debt that exceeds a country’s ability to repay it. This year, Georgieva created a special reserve fund of $650 billion to help struggling nations finance health care, buy vaccines and pay down debt during the pandemic. That approach has not always sat well with conservatives in Washington and on Wall Street. Former President Donald Trump immediately objected to the new reserve funds — known as special drawing rights — when they were proposed in 2020, and congressional Republicans have continued the criticism. They argue that the funds mostly help US adversaries such as China, Russia, Syria and Iran while doing little for poor nations. Georgieva’s activist climate agenda has also run afoul of Republicans in Congress, who have opposed carbon pricing and pushed to withdraw from multinational efforts like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris climate agreement. So has her advocacy for a minimum global corporate tax such as the one that more than 130 nations agreed to on Friday. In July, Laurence D. Fink, who runs BlackRock, the world’s largest investment management company, and was at odds with the IMF’s stance on Argentina, called the fund and the World Bank outdated and said they needed “to rethink their roles.” The investigation into data rigging at the World Bank focused on what is known as the Doing Business Report, which contains an influential index of business-friendly countries. WilmerHale, the law firm that conducted the inquiry, said various top officials had exerted pressure to raise the rankings of China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Azerbaijan in the 2018 and 2020 editions. The law firm reported that Georgieva was “directly involved” with efforts to improve China’s rating for the 2018 edition. She said WilmerHale’s report was inaccurate and rejected its accusations. The IMF executive board is reviewing the findings. The United States, which is the fund’s largest shareholder, has declined to express support for her after the allegations. Before a meeting of the IMF board on Friday, Georgieva maintained strong support from many of the fund’s shareholders, including France, which had lobbied hard for her to get the job in 2019. Late Friday, the IMF released a statement saying the board would “request more clarifying details with a view to very soon concluding its consideration of the matter.” In Congress, Republicans and Democrats called for the Treasury Department to undertake its own investigations. A letter from three Republicans said the WilmerHale inquiry “raises serious questions about Director Georgieva’s ability to lead the International Monetary Fund.” Several people sprang to her defence, including Shanta Devarajan, an economist who helped oversee the 2018 Doing Business Report and a key witness in the investigation. He wrote on Twitter that the law firm’s conclusions did not reflect his full statements, and that the notion that Georgieva had “put her thumb on the scale to benefit one nation is beyond credulity.” “It was her job to ensure the final report was accurate and credible — and that’s what she did,” Devarajan added. In an interview, he said critics had used the investigation to discredit Georgieva. The problem, he said, is “how people may have chosen to read the findings of the report and use that to criticize Kristalina’s credibility and leadership.” Devarajan was not the only one to make the case that the controversy was functioning in some ways as a proxy for the contest over the IMF’s direction. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia, wrote in The Financial Times that Georgieva was receiving “McCarthyite treatment” by “anti-China forces” in Congress. Whatever role one might prefer for the IMF — traditional, expanded or something else entirely — the scandal is both a distraction and a threat. Nicholas Stern, a British economist who formerly served as the chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, said this controversy could not come at a worse moment. “The coming few years are of vital importance to the future stability of the world economy and environment,” he wrote in a letter to the IMF board in support of Georgieva. “This is as decisive a period as we have seen since the Second World War.”   © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"More than 19 million children live in the most disaster-prone districts of low-lying Bangladesh, according to a new report from the UN children's agency UNICEF. In addition, longer-term changes such as rising sea levels are pushing families deeper into poverty and forcing some from their homes, disrupting children's education and access to health services, UNICEF said. ""Children who miss out on good nutrition or on education, who are uprooted from their homes, or who are forced into exploitative labour, will fail to fulfil their potential as citizens,"" said the author of the report, Simon Ingram. The call comes weeks after schoolchildren around the world walked out of classes to protest against global government inaction on climate change. Global temperatures are on course to rise by 3 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, far overshooting a global target of limiting the increase to 2C or less, the UN World Meteorological Organization says. That is bringing growing risks from extreme weather - including worsening droughts, floods, fires and storms - as well as threats of worsening hunger, poverty and water shortages, scientists say. Bangladesh ranked ninth in the Global Climate Risk Index 2019, which said it was the seventh worst hit by climate change between 1998 and 2017, with 37 million people affected. UNICEF said Bangladesh had already done much to reduce the exposure of poorer communities to cyclones and other threats, notably through the construction of shelters. But it called for more focus on the specific needs of children threatened by the effects of climate change, including food shortages and increased migration to cities as flooding and drought make some rural areas uninhabitable. That should include making schools and health facilities in flood-prone areas more resilient and introducing stronger measures to protect children affected by climate-induced disasters against exploitation and abuse, said Ingram. Nurul Qadir, a senior official at Bangladesh's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the government was already addressing the issues raised in the report. ""Right now, we are going to schools across the country to make children aware about climate change and how it can be tackled,"" he said. The UNICEF study found 12 million children in Bangladesh live near rivers that regularly burst their banks. Another 4.5 million live in coastal areas vulnerable to cyclones and 3 million are at risk from drought, it said. These risk factors are forcing people from rural areas into cities, where children are at greater risk of being pushed into forced labour or early marriage. ""They face danger and deprivation in the cities, as well as pressure to go out to work despite the risk of exploitation and abuse,"" said UNICEF Bangladesh representative Edouard Beigbeder.",0
"Xi has not left China in 21 months — and counting. The ostensible reason for Xi’s lack of foreign travel is COVID-19, though officials have not said so explicitly. It is also a calculation that has reinforced a deeper shift in China’s foreign and domestic policy. China, under Xi, no longer feels compelled to cooperate — or at least be seen as cooperating — with the United States and its allies on anything other than its own terms. Still, Xi’s recent absence from the global stage has complicated China’s ambition to position itself as an alternative to American leadership. And it has coincided with — some say contributed to — a sharp deterioration in the country’s relations with much of the rest of the world. Instead, China has turned inward, with officials preoccupied with protecting Xi’s health and internal political machinations, including a Communist Party congress next year where he is expected to claim another five years as the country’s leader. As a result, face-to-face diplomacy is a lower priority than it was in Xi’s first years in office. “There is a bunker mentality in China right now,” said Noah Barkin, who follows China for the research firm Rhodium Group. Xi’s retreat has deprived him of the chance to personally counter a steady decline in the country’s reputation, even as it faces rising tensions on trade, Taiwan and other issues. Less than a year ago, Xi made concessions to seal an investment agreement with the European Union, partly to blunt the United States, only to have the deal scuttled by frictions over political sanctions. Since then, Beijing has not taken up an invitation for Xi to meet EU leaders in Europe this year. “It eliminates or reduces opportunities for engagements at the top leadership level,” Helena Legarda, a senior analyst with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said of Xi’s lack of travels. “Diplomatically speaking,” she added, in-person meetings are “very often fundamental to try and overcome leftover obstacles in any sort of agreement or to try to reduce tensions.” Xi’s absence has also dampened hopes that the gatherings in Rome and Glasgow can make meaningful progress on two of the most pressing issues facing the world today: the post-pandemic recovery and the fight against global warming. Biden, who is attending both, had sought to meet Xi on the sidelines, in keeping with his strategy to work with China on issues like climate change even as the two countries clash on others. Instead, the two leaders have agreed to hold a “virtual summit” before the end of the year, though no date has been announced yet. “The inability of President Biden and President Xi to meet in person does carry costs,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was the director for China at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. Only five years ago, in a speech at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Xi cast himself as a guardian of a multinational order, while President Donald Trump pulled the United States into an “America first” retreat. It is difficult to play that role while hunkered down within China’s borders, which remain largely closed as protection against the pandemic. “If Xi were to leave China, he would either need to adhere to COVID protocols upon return to Beijing or risk criticism for placing himself above the rules that apply to everyone else,” Hass said. Xi’s government has not abandoned diplomacy. China, along with Russia, has taken a leading role in negotiating with the Taliban after its return to power in Afghanistan. Xi has also held several conference calls with European leaders, including Germany’s departing chancellor, Angela Merkel; and, this week, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, will attend the meetings in Rome, and Xi will dial in and deliver what a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hua Chunying, said Friday would be an “important speech.” While Biden has spoken of forging an “alliance of democracies” to counter China’s challenge, Xi has sought to build his own partnerships, including with Russia and developing countries, to oppose what he views as Western sanctimony. “In terms of diplomacy with the developing world — most countries in the world — I think Xi Jinping’s lack of travel has not been a great disadvantage,” said Neil Thomas, an analyst with the Eurasia Group. He noted Xi’s phone diplomacy this week with the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, James Marape. “That’s a whole lot more face time than the prime minister of Papua New Guinea is getting with Joe Biden,” Thomas said. Still, Xi’s halt in international travel has been conspicuous, especially compared with the frenetic pace he once maintained. The last time he left China was January 2020, on a visit to Myanmar only days before he ordered the lockdown of Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus emerged. Nor has Xi played host to many foreign officials. In the weeks after the lockdown, he met with the director of the World Health Organization and the leaders of Cambodia and Mongolia, but his last known meeting with a foreign official took place in Beijing in March 2020, with President Arif Alvi of Pakistan. Chinese leaders have long made a selling point of their busy schedule of trips abroad, especially their willingness to visit poorer countries. Before COVID, Xi became the first to outpace his American counterpart in the annual average number of visits to foreign countries, according to research by Thomas. In the years before COVID, Xi visited an average of 14 countries annually, spending around 34 days abroad, Thomas estimated. That notably surpassed Obama’s average (25 days of foreign travel) and Trump’s (23). “President Xi’s diplomatic footsteps cover every part of the world,” said an article shared by Communist Party media outlets in late 2019. Xi has made his mark on the world by jettisoning the idea that China should be a modest player on the international stage — “hiding our strength and biding our time,” in the dictum of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping. Now, though, he finds himself trying to project China’s new image of confident ambition over video meetings. He is doing so while facing international scrutiny over many of China’s policies; the origins of the coronavirus; mounting rights abuses in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang; and its increasingly ominous warnings to Taiwan. Surveys have shown that views of China have deteriorated sharply in many major countries over the past two years. Victor Shih, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, said that Xi’s limited travel coincided with an increasingly nationalist tone at home that seems to preclude significant cooperation or compromise. “He no longer feels that he needs international support because he has so much domestic support, or domestic control,” Shih said. “This general effort to court America and also the European countries is less today than it was during his first term.” The timing of the meetings in Rome and Glasgow also conflicted with preparations for a meeting at home that has clearly taken precedence. From Nov 8-11, the country’s Communist elite will gather in Beijing for a behind-closed-doors session that will be a major step toward Xi’s next phase in power. Xi’s absence in Rome and Glasgow could be a missed opportunity for countries to unite around a stronger, unified global effort on climate or economic recovery. It seems unlikely that the Chinese delegations will have the authority on their own to negotiate significant compromises. “These are issue areas where there was some hope for cooperation and some hope for positive outcomes,” Legarda, the China analyst at the Mercator Institute, said of the climate summit in Glasgow. “With Xi Jinping not attending, it is, first of all, unclear if they will manage to get there. Second, I guess the question is, is this not a priority for Beijing, in many leaders’ minds?” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" The Obama administration backed away on Friday from a showdown with Beijing over the value of China's currency that would have caused new frictions between the world's only superpower and its largest creditor. The Treasury Department delayed a much-anticipated decision on whether to label China as a currency manipulator until after the U.S. congressional elections on November 2 and a Group of 20 leaders summit in South Korea on November 11. Washington and the European Union accuse China -- set to become the world's second-largest economy after the United States this year -- of keeping the yuan artificially low to boost exports, undermining jobs and competitiveness in Western economies. Fears are growing of a global ""currency war"" as major trading powers, such as the United States and Japan, seek to weaken their currencies while emerging economies such as Brazil and South Korea raise or threaten tougher controls to limit capital flows. The decision to delay the Treasury's semi-annual currency report reflects a desire by the Obama administration to pursue diplomacy to resolve the dispute with China rather than provoke a confrontation that could potentially lead to a trade war and affect long-term interest rates. In July, China held $847 billion in U.S. government debt. In its statement, the Treasury seemed to be encouraged by China's recent action to allow its currency to rise by roughly 3 percent against the dollar since June 19. ""Since September 2, 2010, the pace of appreciation has accelerated to a rate of more than 1 percent per month,"" it said. ""If sustained over time, this would help correct what the IMF (International Monetary Fund) has concluded is a significantly undervalued currency."" China argues that moving too quickly with currency reforms could devastate its export-driven economy. It blames the United States for sluggish growth, high debts and an easy monetary policy that has flooded the market with newly printed dollars, weakening the U.S. currency and putting pressure on emerging countries to keep their currencies low. But Washington argues that Beijing could relieve that pressure by letting the yuan strengthen. ""YUAN SHOULD NOT BE A SCAPEGOAT"" The Treasury said the G20 gathering in Seoul would give world leaders an opportunity to look at how best to rebalance the global economy. This was not just the responsibility of China and the United States, it stressed. In another important summit, leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum will meet on November 13-14. ""The Treasury will delay the publication of the report on international economic and exchange rate policies in order to take advantage of the opportunity provided by these important meetings,"" it said. China left little doubt about the rancor that would ensue if it is branded as a currency manipulator -- a largely symbolic move by the United States that would mandate more consultations with Beijing but no immediate penalties. ""The Chinese yuan should not be a scapegoat for the United States' domestic economic problems,"" Commerce Ministry spokesman Yao Jian said on Friday. The decision to delay the Treasury report appears to have been taken at the last minute. Industry sources had been primed to expect it by 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Friday. The Obama administration, seeming to anticipate criticism from U.S. lawmakers who are pushing for stronger action against China, brought forward an announcement of an investigation into whether Chinese support for its clean energy sector violates international trade rules. But that was not enough to appease Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who has sponsored legislation to get tough with China over its currency practices. ""The Obama administration is treating the symptom but not the disease,"" he said. ""An investigation into China's illegal subsidies for its clean energy industry is overdue but it's no substitute for dealing with China's currency manipulation."" CONGRESS EYES DUTIES ON CHINA The Treasury's decision may raise pressure on the Senate to approve a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would allow the United States to slap duties on imports from countries with fundamentally undervalued currencies. ""Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are prepared to move legislation confronting China's currency manipulation this year,"" Schumer said. ""We hope to have the administration's support but will go forward without it if necessary."" There had been speculation Obama might be tempted to label China as a currency manipulator for the first time in 16 years to look tough before the elections in which his Democrats risk big losses over discontent with his handling of the economy. But there are concerns about angering China, whose support is needed on issues such as rebalancing the global economy, climate change and the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. In an article published on Friday, Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan pledged a continuation of yuan reform but only on Beijing's gradual terms. ""The yuan exchange rate will be basically stable at a reasonable and balanced level,"" he wrote in China Finance, a magazine published by the central bank. The Treasury Department is mandated by law to issue a report every six months on whether any country is manipulating its currency for an unfair trade advantage. But the last time any administration -- Republican or Democrat -- has cited a country under the 1988 currency law was in July 1994, when China was put in the spotlight.",0
"The facility earned BP Plc  more than $650 million in profits in 2019, according to financial filings reviewed by Reuters. Yet the oil major agreed to sell a third of its majority stake in the project earlier this year. The deal exemplifies a larger strategy to liquidate fossil-fuel assets to raise cash for investments in renewable-energy projects that BP concedes won't make money for years. BP's big bet is emblematic of the hard choices confronting Big Oil. All oil majors face mounting pressure from regulators and investors worldwide to develop cleaner energy and divest from fossil fuels, a primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. That scrutiny has increased since early August, when the United Nations panel on climate change warned in a landmark report that rising temperatures could soon spiral out of control. BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney, who took office in February 2020, is gambling that BP can make the clean-energy transition much faster than its peers. Last year, he became the first major oil CEO to announce that he would purposely cut future production. He aims to slash BP's output by 40%, or about 1 million barrels per day, an amount equal to the UK's entire daily output in 2019. At the same time, BP would boost its capacity to generate electricity from renewable sources to 50 gigawatts, a 20-fold increase and equivalent to the power produced by 50 US nuclear plants. To hit those targets, Looney plans $25 billion in fossil-fuel asset sales by 2025. That's equivalent to about 13% of the company's total fixed assets at the end of 2019. Under his watch, BP has already sold legacy projects worth about $15 billion. In addition to the Oman deal, Looney unloaded oil and gas fields in Alaska and the North Sea and sold off BP's entire petrochemical operation, which produced a $402 million profit in 2019. Two of BP's key renewables investments, by contrast, are losing tens of millions of dollars, according to a Reuters review of financial filings with Companies House, Britain's corporate registry. BP owns half of Lightsource, a solar energy company that lost a combined 59.3 million pounds ($81.8 million) in 2018 and 2019, the last year for which data is available. The company's UK-based electric-vehicle charging firm, bp pulse, lost a combined 22.3 million pounds ($30.8 million) over the two years. Performance figures for other assets recently bought or sold by BP are not available because, like other oil majors, it does not usually disclose financials of individual projects. The performance numbers for the two renewable projects and the Oman unit have not been previously reported. BP did not give Reuters updated financials for those projects or others beyond 2019. The company acknowledged that its fast-growing clean-energy business - including its solar, EV-charging and wind ventures - continues to lose money. BP does not expect profits from those businesses until at least 2025. The losses are not slowing Looney's spending on renewable energy. He aims to boost annual investment to $5 billion by 2030, a 10-fold increase over 2019. For bp pulse, that means operating 70,000 charging points by 2030, up from 11,000 now. Lightsource, meanwhile, recently completed a $250 million solar farm in rural north Texas and, separately, acquired a US solar company for $220 million. BP is also moving aggressively into offshore wind power, and paying a high cost of entry relative to companies who got established in the business earlier. As he launched the transition, Looney has slashed jobs, cutting 10,000 employees, or about 15% of the workforce he inherited. BP's share price, meanwhile, has fallen 39% since Looney arrived, the worst performance by any oil major during the period.  In an interview with Reuters, BP Chief Financial Officer Murray Auchincloss dismissed the importance of the company's recent share performance and said BP and its investors can weather the rapid transformation. The declining oil-and-gas revenue this decade will be offset, in part, by higher expected revenues from gasoline stations and their attached convenience stores, he said. Those stations will increasingly offer electric vehicle charging, a business Auchincloss said is growing much faster than BP had expected, especially in Europe, because of plans by automakers including BMW and Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, to introduce more electric models. ""Electrification is growing at a much faster pace than we ever could have dreamed,"" Auchincloss said. When BP's wind and solar investments start returning healthy profits, Auchincloss said, the returns will be lower than BP expects from oil and gas. But they will be far more stable, he said, compared to the ""super volatile"" oil business, where prices can rise or fall dramatically. The company also plans to boost profits through its energy-trading operation, one of the world's largest, which will benefit from BP's new focus on generating electricity, Auchincloss said. Seven current and former BP executives spoke with Reuters on condition of anonymity and shared their views on Looney's transition plan. The executives generally supported the direction but expressed varying levels of concern that Looney is moving too fast in trading high-quality oil assets for more speculative renewable-energy investments. Some worried in particular that selling higher-quality oil assets now could leave BP with mostly lower-quality assets, which will become harder to unload later as the entire industry looks to transition to cleaner energy sources. A recent attempted sale illustrates the increasing challenge of selling oil assets. When BP tried to sell two stakes in North Sea fields to Premier Oil, it slashed its price by two-thirds in negotiations, to $205 million, only to see the deal collapse entirely late last year when Premier hit financial difficulties. One former senior BP executive said that Looney may have erred in setting a specific target for renewable-power capacity - one that would be difficult to meet while also hitting profit targets. Meeting those two conflicting goals will become harder as industry competition to acquire renewable assets heats up, said the former executive, who recently left BP. Missing either mark will not go over well with investors, the executive said. A current senior BP executive countered that Looney, backed by company directors, has taken a bold but reasonable strategy to tackle the vexing challenges facing the industry. ""The board knows that you can't please everybody,"" this executive said, ""and the worst thing you can do is take no stand."" BP spokesman David Nicholas said the company has been ""strictly disciplined"" in choosing renewable investments that meet certain financial criteria and will allow Looney to continue hitting corporate profit targets. Looney faces a steep challenge in convincing shareholders to come along on what promises to be a wild ride for BP, said Russ Mould, the investment director for AJ Bell, one of UK's largest consumer-investing platforms, serving 368,000 people. ""BP is still looking to sell assets, at a time when demand for them is not great, and recycle that cash into renewable-energy assets, where competition for them is fierce,"" Mould said in an August note to investors. ""That sounds like a potential recipe for selling low, buying high and destroying shareholder value along the way."" 'BEYOND PETROLEUM' REDUX Looney is a 50-year-old Irishman who grew up on a family farm in County Kerry with four siblings. He joined BP in 1991 as a drilling engineer and rose through the ranks of its oil-and-gas exploration and production division -- ""upstream"" in industry parlance -- before becoming its head in 2016. Confident and charismatic, Looney set his ambitions on ""reinventing"" BP as a green-energy provider when he took over the CEO's job from Bob Dudley. Looney's transition may unnerve shareholders who recall BP's late-1990s foray into renewables -- the ultimately abandoned effort to rebrand BP as ""Beyond Petroleum."" Then-CEO John Browne was the first oil major chief to publicly acknowledge that fossil fuels contributed to climate change. He invested billions of dollars in wind and solar projects, only to see most of them fail over the next decade. Browne did not respond to a request for comment. This time, BP is going beyond investing in renewables; it's unloading core oil and gas assets. The Oman project is among the world's largest natural-gas fields, and BP reported to Companies house that the field earned a 17% return on capital deployed in 2019. When BP expanded the Oman project in October 2020 to boost its gas output, Looney called it central to BP's strategy. He has said he envisions natural gas, which has lower emissions of atmosphere-warming carbon than crude oil or coal, as a long-term revenue source to finance the company's metamorphosis. Late last year, however, Looney faced rising pressure to steady the ship amid the coronavirus crisis, which sapped global fuel demand and crushed oil and gas prices. BP ended the year with $39 billion in net debt, a level that concerned executives including Looney, according to one senior BP executive with knowledge of their internal deliberations. The debt had become problematic because of the company's falling value, which increased its debt-to-equity ratio and jeopardised its credit rating. The concerns, the executive said, also stemmed from a difficulty in convincing bankers and investors that BP's growing renewable-energy business could make money. In early 2021, Looney called a meeting of BP's top leadership and told them to urgently find ways to cut debt to below $35 billion, the executive said. Soon after, on February 1, BP announced the agreement to sell part of its stake in the Oman gas field for $2.6 billion to Thailand's PTT Exploration and Production. BP gave up a third of its 60% ownership - or 20% of the whole project - in the deal. That sale and others helped BP cut debt to $33 billion by the end of March. The effort was also aided by rising oil and natural gas prices. Three current and former BP executives told Reuters that the company decided to sell the stake in such a profitable project because it struggled to find buyers for other assets during the pandemic, which left few firms with an appetite for acquisitions. BP spokesman Nicholas said that BP had started planning to sell a stake in the Oman project before Looney launched the drive to cut debt. In a brief interview at a company announcement in April, Looney told Reuters that he was happy with the price for the Oman stake and didn't sell it under duress. ""We're not in a panic here,"" Looney said. ""There is no rush; net debt is very much under control."" Anish Kapadia, head of energy at the investor advisory service Palissy Advisors, said the price for the Oman stake was relatively low compared to comparable sales of natural-gas assets. Based on the project's earnings, Kapadia said he would have expected a value about 25% higher. BP also might have made substantially more money, Kapadia said, by waiting until the oil-and-gas industry rebounded. ""They're selling a profitable, long-life, long-reserve business,"" Kapadia said of BP. ""They're selling it and using those proceeds to fund alternative businesses that aren't going to generate free cash flow for the best part of this decade."" Several months before the Oman deal, in June 2020, BP sold its petrochemicals business for $5 billion to chemicals giant INEOS. The business generated about 4% of BP's total annual profit in 2019. Some other majors, by contrast, have targeted petrochemicals as a growth area and a hedge against expected long-term declines in oil demand. Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil have in recent years invested heavily in petrochemicals, which supply industries including plastics. BP spokesperson Nicholas said the company had long ago, in 2005, sold a bigger piece of its petrochemical business to INEOS and only retained two specialist operations that were not integrated with the rest of BP. ""We sold for a very good price,"" he said, ""to a company that could integrate them into their business."" Looney has often delighted in taking a different path - especially more recently, as the company reported strong second-quarter profits of $2.8 billion on the strength of its recovering oil-and-gas business. Looney has indicated, however, that the fresh influx of cash only makes him want to sell BP's oil assets faster - while it can fetch higher prices for them to finance more renewable investments. ""While we understand the questions in some investors' minds, we do see a compelling proposition to deliver competitive returns"" in renewable energy, Looney told investors on the August earnings call. Mould, the AJ Bell investment director, said Looney's strategy may prove to be the ""least bad option"" facing BP and other oil firms under pressure to overhaul their businesses. Investors who buy BP shares at their current, beaten-down prices, he said, could see strong long-term returns. LOSS LEADERS As BP's fossil-fuel footprint shrinks, it faces a steep challenge in filling the financial void with profits from clean-energy ventures. For now, BP's renewable projects are taking losses. The firm bought its bp pulse electric-vehicle charging firm - then named Chargemaster - in June 2018 for 130 million pounds ($179.3 million). The oil major hopes to boost the firm's fortunes in part by installing thousands of fast EV chargers alongside gas pumps at its large service-station network. The stations and their attached convenience stores have been a key profit driver, and BP is betting that EV drivers will shop and snack more while charging their cars, which takes longer than a gasoline fill-up. BP announced a deal to acquire a 43% stake in Lightsource in December 2017 for $200 million. It now owns 50% of the firm, which operates solar farms in 15 countries and has tripled capacity since 2017 to 20 gigawatts. Dev Sanyal, chief of BP's natural-gas and renewables businesses, said that solar-power businesses start delivering profits more quickly than offshore wind, where development can take much longer. But solar initially delivers lower returns than wind, Lightsource BP CEO Nick Boyle said in the 2019 filing reviewed by Reuters. The returns increase gradually, in part because solar has lower maintenance costs than wind facilities. BP this week announced the appointment of Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, a veteran renewables and power sector executive, as its new head of natural gas and renewables, replacing Sanyal. The move was seen as further sign of Looney's drive to diversify away from oil and gas. read more PRICEY WIND PROJECTS BP moved aggressively into offshore wind in October 2020 when it bought a 50% stake from Norwegian energy giant Equinor in two projects off the US East Coast for about $1 billion. Offshore projects, the industry's next frontier, are far more complex and capital-intensive than onshore projects and use newer technology. Many top oil companies with experience in operating deepwater oil and gas fields have made a similar push. Some, such as Shell and Equinor, started their offshore wind ventures several years ago. Utilities such as Spain's Iberdrola and Denmark's Orsted are also well established. That stiff competition means BP is paying a hefty price of entry, some rivals say privately. In February, BP and its partner Energie Baden-Württemberg AG paid 900 million pounds ($1.24 billion) for the rights to build two projects in the Irish Sea in Britain's offshore wind licensing round. BP's Sanyal acknowledged the high costs of entry. But he said the prospect of long-term power-supply contracts will make the returns more reliable. ""You don't have the highs and lows of oil and gas,"" Sanyal said. It will be years before investors know the outcome of Looney's wager on renewables. Still, even BP's relatively fast transformation doesn't go far enough in reducing climate damage, said Kim Fustier, an oil-and-gas analyst at HSBC bank. She expects BP's earnings from renewables and low-carbon businesses to represent 4% to 5% of total earnings by the middle of the decade and 10% to 15% by 2030. ""This is nowhere near enough for investors to start thinking of these companies as being part of the solution,"" Fustier said.",0
"The Taliban government, struggling to cope
with the disaster that has affected more than a third of its provinces, will
approach international relief organisations for help, officials said. ""Due to flooding and storms in 12
provinces, 22 people have died and 40 injured,"" said Hassibullah Shekhani,
head of communications and information at Afghanistan's National Disaster
Management Authority. The rain and flooding were particularly
severe in the western provinces of Badghis and Faryab and the northern province
of Baghlan. Afghanistan has been suffering from drought
in recent years, made worse by climate change, with low crop yields raising
fears of serious food shortages. The weather has exacerbated problems of
poverty caused by decades of war and then a drop in foreign aid and the
freezing of assets abroad after the Taliban took over, and US-led forces
withdrew, in August. Shekhani said 500 houses were destroyed,
2,000 damaged, 300 head of livestock killed and some 3,000 acres of crops
damaged. He said the International Committee of the
Red Cross was helping and officials would approach other international
organisations for help. The international community is grappling
with how to help the country of some 40 million people without benefiting the
Taliban.",0
"The program titled ‘Leadership matters- Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi in the Contemporary World,' was organised by the Indian mission and staged at the UN headquarters. The heads of seven countries, including the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, and the president of South Korea, participated in the programme. Gandhi was a true patriot, a statesman and a saint who dedicated his life for humankind, said the Bangladesh leader. “His brilliant and mesmerising leadership showed the world that an individual could bring earth-shaking social and political change in a non-violent way.” Mahatma Gandhi was an influential politician and spiritual leader of the subcontinent, the Father of the Nation of India, and one of the pioneers of the anti-British movement. Born on Oct 2, 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi on Jan 30, 1948, a year and a half after the creation of two independent states, India and Pakistan.   He was given the title of Mahatma (Great Spirit) because of his selfless love for all people, regardless of social status, customs and creed. Expressing her honour at attending the event, Hasina said, ""We are living in a world, where hatred and bigotry leading to terrorism and violent extremism are dividing the humankind more than ever before."" “Gandhiji’s philosophy of life and his unwavering support for all peoples can unite us today to meaningfully and effectively address formidable challenges of global concerns like hunger, poverty and impacts of climate change.” She continued: “His selfless love and affection for people, regardless of social standing, caste, colour, creed or religion earned him the title ‘Mahatma.’ His principles of tolerance, non-violence and harmonious coexistence would continue to guide us as we seek to build nations. In fact, his ideals of diversity are cherished and celebrated all over the globe, wherever democracy is practised.” Hasina then told the audience that Bangladesh was proud to have the Gandhi Ashram Trust, which followed the Gandhian philosophy of rural development, peace and social harmony, and worked for the rural poor with particular focus on women.  She also revealed that her father Bangabandhu took inspiration from Gandhi during the formative stage of his leadership. ""We are now preparing to celebrate the Birth Centenary of Bangabandhu beginning in March 2020,"" she announced. Hasina underscored Gandhi's love for common people and ideals of non-violence, which contributed to shaping Bangabandhu’s vision of struggle against the oppression and tyranny by the then Pakistani rulers against the peace-loving Bangalis. “In the face of provocations, Bangabandhu remained unmoved and committed to the principles of non-violence. He, however, declared the independence of Bangladesh in the early hours of Mar 26, 1971 and called for armed struggle against the Pakistan occupation military when they unleashed an unprecedented genocide against the unarmed civilians in Bangladesh.”",1
"NEW DELHI, Mon Mar 16,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - India is pressing ahead with a trading scheme centred on energy efficient certificates that could possibly expand to renewable energy, the country's climate change envoy said on Monday. The plan involves creating a market-based mechanism that would allow businesses using more energy than stipulated to compensate by buying energy certificates from those using up less energy or using renewable energy. The government is setting up energy benchmarks for each industry sector. Those companies that do not meet the benchmarks would have to buy these certificates under a reward and penalty system. ""We hope that this may perhaps even be linked with the concept of renewable energy certificates,"" Shyam Saran told a business meeting in New Delhi. ""And if this link could be established we will probably have a very fast growing market in energy efficiency, renewable energy certificates in this country. And that would be a very major innovation."" Energy efficiency is among eight areas that India identified in its national climate change policy last year. It hopes to reduce energy consumption by at least 25 percent in energy-intensive sectors such as power and cement. No timeline is prescribed for reaching the target. Most firms in India, which is Asia's third-largest economy and the fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, have yet to plan for the impact of climate change and do not measure emissions or have deadlines to curb them, according to studies. India's top firms also face little stakeholder pressure to combat climate change with only about 40 percent of the companies setting voluntary carbon emissions reduction goals, according to a survey of CEOs by KPMG consultants last year. Experts say Indian firms' response to climate issues is driven largely by the need to comply with expected regulations, while leaving the leadership role in tackling global warming to the government. Saran hoped a domestic trading system would draw upon the market mechanism to further encourage energy efficiency. India says it wants to save 10,000 Megawatts by the end of the 2012 through energy efficiency measures. ""We are looking at trading mechanisms so if you are more efficient you get a certain credit, if you are less efficient you have to buy it,"" Saran said. India, whose economy has grown by 8-9 percent annually in recent years, contributes around 4 percent of mankind's global greenhouse gas emissions, but says its levels will never go beyond those of developed countries. The country faces an election in a few weeks, and though climate change is not a poll issue, many fear policy announcements such as energy efficiency trading schemes could get delayed until a new government is installed.",0
"SINGAPORE, Sep 14, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A team of scientists studying rock samples in Africa has shown a strong link between falling carbon dioxide levels and the formation of Antarctic ice sheets 34 million years ago. The results are the first to make the link, underpinning computer climate models that predict both the creation of ice sheets when CO2 levels fall and the melting of ice caps when CO2 levels rise. The team, from Cardiff, Bristol and Texas A&M Universities, spent weeks in the African bush in Tanzania with an armed guard to protect them from lions to extract samples of tiny fossils that could reveal CO2 levels in the atmosphere 34 million years ago. Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, mysteriously fell during this time in an event called the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition. ""This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago,"" said co-author Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University. The study reconstructed CO2 levels around this period, showing a dip around the time ice sheets in Antarctica started to form. CO2 levels were around 750 parts per million, about double current levels. ""There are no samples of air from that age that we can measure, so you need to find something you can measure that would have responded to the atmospheric CO2,"" Paul Pearson of Cardiff University told Reuters. Pearson, Wade and Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol gathered sediment samples in the Tanzanian village of Stakishari where there are deposits of a particular type of well-preserved microfossils that can reveal past CO2 levels. ""Our study is the first that uses some sort of proxy reconstruction of CO2 to point to the declining CO2 that most of us expected we ought to be able to find,"" Pearson said on Monday from Cardiff. He said that CO2, being an acidic gas, causes changes in acidity in the ocean, which absorbs large amounts of the gas. ""We can pick that up through chemistry of microscopic plankton shells that were living in the surface ocean at the time,"" he explained. Evidence from around Antarctica was much harder to find. ""The ice caps covered everything in Antarctica. The erosion of sediments around Antarctica since the formation of the ice caps has obliterated a lot of the pre-existing evidence that might have been there."" ""Our results are really in line with the most sophisticated climate models that have been applied to this interval,"" Pearson added. The results were published online in the journal Nature. ""Those models could be used to predict the melting of the ice. The suggested melting starts around 900 ppm (parts per million),"" he said, a level he believes could be reached by the end of this century, unless serious emissions cuts were made.",6
"Nearly 63 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 in the region as rising seas and rivers swallow villages, and drought-hit land no longer supports crops, said ActionAid International and Climate Action Network South Asia in a report. The projection does not include those who will be forced to flee sudden disasters such as floods and cyclones and so is likely an under-estimate, noted Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid. He said the situation could become ""catastrophic"". Many will head from rural areas to towns and cities in their own countries, in search of work, he said. There they often end up living in slum areas exposed to flooding and with very limited access to social services, doing precarious jobs such as rickshaw-pulling, construction or garment-making. ""Policy makers in the Global North and the Global South are not yet waking up to this reality,"" Singh told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. ""They are not realising the scale of the problem, and how we are going to deal with (it)."" He urged rich nations with high planet-warming emissions to redouble efforts to reduce their carbon pollution and provide more funding for South Asian countries to develop cleanly and adapt to conditions on a warming planet. If governments meet a globally agreed goal to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, the number of people driven to move in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal could be cut almost by half by 2050, the report said. It builds on research published in 2018 by the World Bank, which said unchecked climate change could cause more than 140 million people to move within their countries' borders by 2050 in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. The new report, which used an updated version of the same methodology, raises the original 2050 projection for South Asian migration by about half, adding in new data on sea level rise, as well as the effects of ecosystem losses and droughts. The new report also tracks expected migration on a finer scale. PREPARING FOR MOVEMENT The projections have financial implications for countries such as India and Bangladesh, where the poorest people often lack the means to move far from their original homes to safer places without state support. 
 
 Residents are evacuated by boat in Bangladesh before cyclone Amphan on May 19, 2020. 

The new figures show the largest number of people are expected to migrate by 2050 in India, at more than 45 million.  Residents are evacuated by boat in Bangladesh before cyclone Amphan on May 19, 2020.  But the country with the sharpest projected rise in migration is Bangladesh, with a seven-fold increase from today. The report included examples collected by aid workers of people who have already been hit by worsening climate pressures. In Pakistan's arid Tharparkar district, Rajo, 37, and her husband, both labourers, moved to three different places in their area in the last three years to escape hunger caused by severe drought. She lost a baby because of heavy lifting in her job and had to borrow money from the landowner to cover medical bills for her family, she told the researchers. Kabita Maity, from an island in the Sundarbans delta region of India, has had to move five times as previous homes were gobbled up by the sea. ""We will have to stay here until the sea forces us out, as we do not have resources to buy land and resettle inwards,"" Maity was quoted as saying. The report called on South Asian governments to do more to prepare for worsening displacement linked to climate change - and emphasised the importance of acting now to limit the number of people who will be forced to migrate in the future. It recommended strengthening social protection systems to provide cash and work for those affected by climate extremes and improving essential services for migrant workers in cities - now hit doubly by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many left jobless. Measures that can help prevent ""distress migration"" include promoting farming methods that keep soils in good condition, managing water more efficiently, improving access to markets or trying new crops and ways to earn money, the report noted. Where people are relocated, authorities need to ensure the land is safe and fertile, tenure rights are secure and people have enough money to build new homes, it added. Sanjay Vashist, director of Climate Action Network South Asia, said tackling poverty and inequality also needed to be part of regional responses to climate migration. ""South Asian leaders must join forces and prepare plans for the protection of displaced people,"" he said in a statement.",0
"Climate scientists can’t say where or when the next big storm will hit, but all the evidence points to this: Global warming is bringing the planet into an era of wilder, more dangerous rains with ruinous and long-lasting consequences. “Where it rains, it’s raining heavier,” said Raghu Murtugudde, a professor of Earth systems science at the University of Maryland who edited a recent book on extreme weather in the tropics. “It’s the classic loaded-dice analogy.” The dice, he said, are “throwing up some numbers more often” in the form of extreme weather. How? The greenhouse gases humans have already injected into the atmosphere have heated up the planet and now pack so much moisture into the air that they heighten the risk of more extreme precipitation. The good news is that floods and storms don’t kill as many people as they once did. Early warning systems are in place. So are shelters. People have learned to evacuate from danger zones, including in flood-prone places like the lowlands of Bangladesh, where individual storms once killed tens of thousands of people. In the Philippines this year, Typhoon Mangkhut left a death toll of 100, sharply lower than the 6,000 fatalities from Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever recorded, which hit the country in 2013. The bad news is everything else. Even after floodwaters recede, the ruin from a storm can be felt for a very long time. A study of more than 6,500 cyclones found that tropical storms, especially if they struck frequently, could substantially alter a country’s economic trajectory. Researchers found that in countries hit by the storms, national incomes hadn’t caught up to their previous pace of growth even 15 years after the disaster. 
 
 Video grab shows heavy rain and wind caused by Typhoon Trami in Okinawa, Japan in this September 29, 2018 photo by @KAZU.KTOMSN. Instagram @KAZU.KTOMSN via Reuters 

Storms have struck the Philippines very frequently. And they have affected how the country feeds itself.  Video grab shows heavy rain and wind caused by Typhoon Trami in Okinawa, Japan in this September 29, 2018 photo by @KAZU.KTOMSN. Instagram @KAZU.KTOMSN via Reuters  Between 2006 and 2013, the Philippines was pummelled by 76 natural disasters, primarily floods and tropical storms, with an estimated $3.8 billion in losses to the country’s agricultural sector over that 8-year period, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This year, because of Typhoon Mangkhut, which struck the country’s rice belt, the Philippines is expected to import much more rice than it otherwise would have. Sometimes, a disaster can reverberate years later in unexpected ways. In the Philippines, researchers found, baby girls were more likely to die in the two years after a typhoon than at other times, a reflection of the grim decisions that families made about how to stretch their resources in the aftermath of disaster. 
 
 A damaged house is seen after Typhoon Mangkhut hits Philippines, Bolinao, Pangasinan, Philippines Sept 15, 2018 in this still image obtained from a social media video. Daeve Del Fierro via Reuters 

And in Peru, children born right before or right after the 1997-98 El Niño storm cycle that ruined roads and destroyed crops were more likely to be stunted, a symptom of malnutrition that can diminish a child’s intellectual capacity for life, according to another study.  A damaged house is seen after Typhoon Mangkhut hits Philippines, Bolinao, Pangasinan, Philippines Sept 15, 2018 in this still image obtained from a social media video. Daeve Del Fierro via Reuters  On average, floods and storms have displaced nearly 21 million people every year over the last decade, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. That is three times the number displaced by conflict. Worldwide, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, damaging floods and storms have more than tripled in number since the early 1980s. Their economic losses have risen sharply, too, with two record years in the last decade in which damages topped $340 billion. The company said 2017 was “a wake-up call.” “The slow speed of adaptation to the higher risks is my biggest issue,” said Ernst Rauch, chief climatologist at Munich Re. “We all know, we should know, the risks are changing.” Preparing for that future of wilder storms, climate scientists acknowledge, is especially difficult when it’s hard to pinpoint, when, where and how often extreme weather will strike, except to warn that it will. 
 
 Luis Durban walks with supplies through floodwater caused by Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, North Carolina, US Sept 16, 2018. Reuters 

In the United States, heavy downpours in most parts of the country have increased “in both intensity and frequency since 1901,” a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2017. The largest increases were in the Northeast.  Luis Durban walks with supplies through floodwater caused by Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, North Carolina, US Sept 16, 2018. Reuters  NOAA also said 2017 was a record year for high-tide floods. And 2017 was a particularly nasty hurricane year, in part because of the warming of the Atlantic Ocean, with six major hurricanes with wind speeds of at least 111 mph. “The problem is how much money am I willing to spend for how much protection when I know only that we need more protection but not how much,” said Anders Levermann, a climate scientist at Potsdam University in Germany. The cost of doing nothing is likely to be steep. Levermann’s team concluded that river floods alone would result in global economic losses of approximately 17 percent worldwide in the next 20 years. Climate change, though, doesn’t just bring more rain. While some of the wettest parts of the world are seeing heavier and more unpredictable precipitation, scientists say, some drier parts of the planet are becoming measurably drier. The combination can be dangerous. In India, for instance, even as total annual rainfall has dipped slightly, bursts of intense rain are becoming more powerful, one recent study concluded. Another group of researchers drilled down to find that, in the centre of India between 1950 and 2015, there was a threefold increase in what were once rare cloudbursts, those that dump 150 millimetres, or nearly 6 inches, or more of rain on a single day. 
 
 Partially submerged houses are seen at a flood-affected village in Hojai district, in the northeastern state of Assam, India, June 16, 2018. Reuters 

Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute at Columbia University, compared the atmosphere to “a big giant sponge” that grows heavy with moisture and, at some point when it’s too heavy, has to be squeezed out, resulting in intense rains.  Partially submerged houses are seen at a flood-affected village in Hojai district, in the northeastern state of Assam, India, June 16, 2018. Reuters  The results can be overwhelming. If emissions continue to rise and global temperatures grow by 2 degrees Celsius, the mighty Ganges River could double in volume, with devastating consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who live in its basin. All that unpredictability creates painful choices for government officials who manage reservoirs and dams: Whether to store water in case of drought, or release it to avert floods. Take Kerala, one of India’s richer states, for instance. Its record rains this summer followed a long dry spell. After years, the reservoirs were good and full. And even though meteorologists warned of unusually heavy rains in August, dam operators did not open the floodgates in advance. It was a difficult call: What if the forecasts were wrong? What if the rains didn’t come? By the time the dam gates were opened, it was too late. The water engulfed whole villages and towns. More than 500 people died. The devastation was only beginning. Soon came an outbreak of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can damage the liver and kidneys and is sometimes fatal. More than 57,000 hectares of farmland were decimated. Yields of Kerala’s high-value spices, including cardamom and black pepper, were sharply hit. Even the best forecasts, Murtugudde pointed out, are only as good as the people who use them. To avert the worst impacts of disaster in the age of wild rains, it’s not just the science that matters, he said, but the ability of climate experts to persuade the people to follow the science. “You have to get them to trust the forecast,” he said.© 2018 New York Times News Service",0
"But there is nothing he likes less than feeling belittled. Learning that he could not have his large security detail at Glasgow — security has been an obsession since a failed coup against him in 2016 — when the American president was allowed one seems to have enraged Erdogan enough for him to cancel his appearance abruptly. Not going to the climate talks, known as COP26, might have seemed self-defeating, given his recent green pivot, but Erdogan tried to play to his home base and cast his turnaround as a matter of honour. “We never allow our country’s reputation or honour to be damaged anywhere,” he said in remarks to journalists on the flight home from Europe. “One more time we showed that we can establish a fair world only with a more equitable approach.” Unpredictable, combative, politically astute, Erdogan has been in power for 18 years by always knowing which buttons to push. Yet he is politically vulnerable these days, more so perhaps than at any time in his career. The president is sliding in the polls as the economy stumbles. Last month, the lira hit a new low against the dollar. Unemployment among his supporters is rising. Inflation is galloping at nearly 20%. Increasingly, Erdogan finds himself on his back foot in the face of a vibrant, unified opposition. Determined to become modern Turkey’s longest-serving ruler by winning reelection in 2023, Erdogan is showing signs of growing frustration, as his usual tactics are not working, and voters, especially young people eager for a change, grow restless. “I think he is worried and afraid of losing power, and it seems to be a plausibility, even to him, for the first time in many years,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute. “He has been in office for too long, nearly two decades,” Cagaptay added. “He is suffering from establishment fatigue, simply too tired to be on top of his game and of the opposition all the time.” As Erdogan’s grip on power turns shaky, some analysts warn that the Turkish president may become even more unpredictable as elections approach. In particular over the past decade, Erdogan has used foreign policy as a tool to burnish his image at home, said Sinan Ulgen, chair of the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. He has in turn insulted foreign leaders, presented himself as a champion of the Turkish diaspora and of Muslims worldwide, and notably last year projected Turkey’s military muscle in a series of interventions abroad. He pursued military operations in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan and stirred tensions with Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean by sending out drilling ships to explore for gas. Since last November, however, when he fired his son-in-law as finance minister, the dire state of the Turkish economy has led Erdogan to soften his stance internationally, dialling back on the rhetoric, Ulgen said. “The main issue now is to prevent or preempt tension so the economy can rebound,” he said. But Erdogan has accumulated so many powers that his whims carry the day, and he seems not always to be able to help himself. He reverted to his old tactics in the last couple of weeks, ignoring his closest advisers and threatening a diplomatic crisis in a show of strength for his supporters. When 10 Western ambassadors issued a statement calling for the release of a jailed Turkish philanthropist, Erdogan railed against them for interference in Turkey’s affairs and threatened to expel them all. Then, just as suddenly, he backed down. “He went against his own best interests and also against the best counsel from his most trusted advisers, and that’s what makes me think that he is not on top of his game anymore,” Cagaptay said. The expulsion of the ambassadors was narrowly averted after frantic diplomacy, in time for Erdogan to meet President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Rome, only to have Erdogan create another fuss over security protocol at Glasgow. It was yet another display of the impetuousness that has become a hallmark of Erdogan’s relations with the world, risking major upsets with international partners in a sometimes dubious, increasingly desperate effort to lift his domestic standing. Sensing political opportunity, Erdogan had recently made a startling climate conversion after years in which Turkey stood out as an environmental laggard. He renamed his environment ministry as the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change and offered Biden a copy of a book on the green revolution for which he had written the introduction. He had allowed the Paris climate agreement to languish but then had the Turkish Parliament ratify it Oct 6, and he was prepared to announce to the gathering of world leaders that Turkey would aim to be carbon neutral by 2053. “Climate change is a reality and threatens the future of humanity, so Turkey naturally will have a leading role in such a vital matter,” he said in a televised address in Turkey before the COP26 summit. Erdogan’s conversion came after Turkey suffered a bruising summer. The worst forest fires in recorded memory scorched a swath of coastal forestland eight times the size of average annual fires, killing at least eight people. Flash floods killed at least 82 people in the northeast in the heaviest rains seen in hundreds of years. And an outbreak of slime choked sea life in the Marmara Sea. The disasters gave fresh momentum to support for climate action that had been steadily building — in public opinion, in business circles, among civil society groups and across the political spectrum — over the last year or so. “All the public opinion polls are showing that now the political parties in Turkey in the next elections will have to address this issue very seriously,” said Bahadir Kaleagasi, president of the Institut du Bosphore, a French association that encourages Turkish relations with France and Europe. In the end, though, the climate summit went begging. Erdogan apparently saw more benefit in kicking up a diplomatic fuss over the security protocol than in addressing the gathering. Or, as rumours flew about his health, he needed a rest. He had, in any case, already obtained what analysts said he really wanted from the weekend: an hour with Biden on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting, a sign of potential improvement in US-Turkish relations that might lift Turkey’s standing in international markets. After Erdogan had failed to secure a meeting with Biden in New York in September during the United Nations General Assembly, a meeting this month with the American president “became the No. 1 issue of the Turkey-US relations,” said Aydin Sezer, a political analyst and former trade official. The Biden administration, while maintaining pressure on Erdogan over human rights and the rule of law — Turkey has notably not been invited to Biden’s democracy summit in December — has made clear that it regards the country as an important NATO ally and strategic partner. “We may have differences, but we never lose sight of the strategic importance we and our partners hold each to the other,” David Satterfield, the American ambassador to Turkey, said at a reception aboard the command ship Mount Whitney, which called in to Istanbul on Wednesday. But an overriding US concern will be to keep relations with the unpredictable Erdogan on an even keel, said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. That has meant dialling back the close, if stormy, personal relationship that former President Donald Trump had with Erdogan in favour of something a bit more at arm’s length. “Ankara is simultaneously vulnerable and bellicose,” she said. “Washington’s way of dealing with this duality is distancing itself from Turkey. “There is a desire to keep this at this stable level — at least for another year — but given that this is an election year, it may not be so easy,” she added. © 2021 The New York Times Company",1
"The cache of 113 documents, translated and declassified by US intelligence agencies, are mostly dated between 2009 and 2011, intelligence officials said. The documents - the second tranche from the raid to have been declassified since May 2015 - depict an al Qaeda that was unwavering in its commitment to global jihad, but with its core leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan under pressure on multiple fronts. US President Barack Obama has said drone strikes and other counter-terrorism operations depleted al Qaeda's original leadership, culminating in bin Laden's killing by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. In the years since, the organization has proved resilient from Afghanistan to North Africa, and its ideological rival, Islamic State, has grown and spread. In one document, bin Laden issues instructions to al Qaeda members holding an Afghan hostage to be wary of possible tracking technology attached to the ransom payment. ""It is important to get rid of the suitcase in which the funds are delivered, due to the possibility of it having a tracking chip in it,"" bin Laden states in a letter to an aide identified only as ""Shaykh Mahmud."" In an apparent reference to armed US drones patrolling the skies, bin Laden says his negotiators should not leave their rented house in the Pakistani city of Peshawar ""except on a cloudy overcast day."" While the document is undated, the hostage, Afghan diplomat Abdul Khaliq Farahi, was held from September 2008 to late 2010. Another, fragmentary document acknowledges that al Qaeda executed four would-be volunteers on suspicion of spying, only to discover they were probably innocent, according to senior US intelligence officials authorized to discuss the materials in advance of their public release. ""I did not mention this to justify what has happened,"" wrote the undated letter's unidentified author, adding, ""we are in an intelligence battle and humans are humans and no one is infallible."" In a May 11, 2010 letter to his then second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, bin Laden urged caution in arranging an interview with al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan, asserting that the United States could be tracking his movements through devices implanted in his equipment, or by satellite. ""You must keep in mind the possibility, however, slight, that journalists can be under surveillance that neither we nor they can perceive, either on the ground or via satellite,"" he wrote. GROWING PRESSURE Even as al Qaeda came under growing pressure, bin Laden and his aides planned a media campaign to mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the documents show. They plotted diplomatic strategy and opined on climate change and the US financial collapse. In a undated letter ""To the American people,"" the al Qaeda chief chides Obama for failing to end the war in Afghanistan; and accurately predicts that the US president's plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will fail. On April 28, 2011, just four days before his death, bin Laden was editing a document he had written on the Arab Spring revolutions. Al Qaeda's leaders also urged further attacks on the United States. ""We need to extend and develop our operations in America and not keep it limited to blowing up airplanes,"" says a letter, apparently written by bin Laden, to Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of al Qaeda's Yemen branch. Bin Laden ""was still sort of thinking in very kind of grand schemes, and still ... trying to reclaim that 9/11 'victory',"" said one of the senior intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. But he was ""somewhat out of touch with the (actual) capabilities of his organization,"" the official said. The documents show the strains of managing al Qaeda's external networks, including identifying capable leaders and finding resources to fund operations abroad. One associate, who signed his 2009 note simply as ""Your beloved ""Atiyah,"" acknowledged troubles replacing an ineffective leader for external operations, saying some of the best candidates were dead. ""There are new brothers, perhaps some would be suitable in the future, but not now,"" he wrote. Suspicion of tracking devices pops up again and again in the group's writings. The concern may have been merited - the United States conducts extensive electronic surveillance on al Qaeda and other Islamic militant groups. Abu Abdallah al-Halabi - who the US Treasury has identified as a name used by bin Laden's son-in law Muhammad Abdallah Hasan Abu-Al-Khayr - writes in a letter to ""my esteemed brother Khalid"" about intercepting messages of ""spies"" in Pakistan, who he said would facilitate air strikes on al Qaeda operatives by marking cars with infrared streaks that can be seen with night vision equipment. In another, bin Laden, writing under the pseudonym Abu Abdallah, expresses alarm over his wife's visit to a dentist while in Iran, worrying that a tracking chip could have been implanted with her dental filling. ""The size of the chip is about the length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli,"" he wrote.",0
"One of the best-known international NGOs, with aid programmes running across the globe, Oxfam was under threat of losing its British government funding over sexual misconduct allegations first reported by the Times newspaper last week. The scandal was fast escalating into a broader crisis for Britain's aid sector by bolstering critics in the ruling Conservative Party who have argued that the government should reduce spending on aid in favour of domestic priorities. Aid minister Penny Mordaunt, who threatened on Sunday to withdraw government funding from Oxfam unless it gave the full facts about events in Haiti, summoned senior managers from the charity to a meeting on Monday. ""Oxfam made a full and unqualified apology – to me, and to the people of Britain and Haiti - for the appalling behaviour of some of their staff in Haiti in 2011, and for the wider failings of their organisation's response to it,"" Mordaunt said after meeting Oxfam's chief executive, Mark Goldring. ""I told Oxfam they must now demonstrate the moral leadership necessary to address this scandal, rebuild the trust of the British public, their staff and the people they aim to help, and deliver progress on these assurances,"" she added in a statement. The statement did not address the question of funding. There was no immediate comment from Oxfam. The Times newspaper reported on Friday that some staff who were in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there had paid for sex with prostitutes. Oxfam has neither confirmed nor denied that specific allegation but has said an internal investigation in 2011 had confirmed sexual misconduct had occurred. Reuters could not independently verify the allegation. Announcing her resignation on Monday, Deputy Chief Executive Penny Lawrence said Oxfam had become aware over the past few days that concerns were raised about the behaviour of staff in Chad as well as Haiti that the organisation failed to adequately act upon. ""It is now clear that these allegations - involving the use of prostitutes and which related to behaviour of both the country director and members of his team in Chad - were raised before he moved to Haiti,"" she said. ""As programme director at the time, I am ashamed that this happened on my watch and I take full responsibility."" UN target Oxfam has said that as a result of its internal investigation in 2011, four people were dismissed, and three others - including the Haiti country director who had previously held the same role in Chad - had resigned. Reuters was unable to reach any of the Oxfam staff who worked in Haiti at the time. In its last financial year Oxfam received 32 million pounds ($44 million) from Britain's aid ministry, about 8 percent of its overall income. Whether or not it loses that funding, private donations could be hit by the bad publicity. Founded in 1942, Oxfam is one of Britain's best-known charities. Its 650 shops selling second hand clothes and books to raise funds are a familiar sight on the high street. For a sex scandal to hit such a high-profile brand, it risks affecting the wider British charity sector. Britain is one of only six nations to hit the UN target of spending 0.7 percent of gross national income on aid - about 13 billion pounds a year - but there have been increasingly vitriolic attacks on that spending in recent years. Meeting the UN target was a policy championed by former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as part of his efforts to re-brand his party as more compassionate. But with Cameron gone after campaigning on the losing side in the 2016 Brexit referendum, the political climate on aid has changed. Priti Patel, an aid critic despite being Mordaunt's predecessor as international development minister, said the Haiti incidents were just ""the tip of the iceberg"" and there was a ""culture of denial"" in the sector. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a prominent right-wing Conservative lawmaker, delivered to May's office on Friday a petition by readers of the Daily Express newspaper complaining that the aid budget was not well spent and should be cut.",2
" Airports operator BAA won a court injunction on Monday barring environmental activists from disrupting London's Heathrow airport next week. BAA, owned by Spanish construction and services group Ferrovial, went to the High Court in London to restrict the actions of campaigners attending a ""Climate Action"" camp near the airport between Aug. 14 and 21. The judge, Justice Caroline Swift, said her decision would allow peaceful and lawful protests but barred a named group of individuals from taking disruptive action. She said it was nothing like as wide-ranging as originally sought by BAA, which had focused on four representatives from four different groups. The camp is being held to demonstrate against climate change and a proposed third runway at Heathrow. ""The purpose of the injunction is to enable the airport to continue to function and to permit those responsible for security at the airport and elsewhere to focus on their prime concern of protecting the public from the risk of terrorist attack,"" Swift said. Swift said it would only apply to a limited group of individuals ""intent upon disrupting the operation of the airport irrespective of the rights of passengers and others to go about their lawful activities"". The order names Joss Garman and Leo Murray, representing activist group Plane Stupid, one of the organisers of the protest, and another individual, John Stewart. It also applies to any protester associated with any unlawful activity carried out by Plane Stupid. Environmental umbrella group AirportWatch had claimed the original injunction would hit millions of its members in its affiliated bodies, which include groups as diverse as Greenpeace, the National Trust and Friends of the Earth. Heathrow Airport Managing Director Mark Bullock said the injunction had never been about stopping lawful protests but was to minimise disruption to the 1.5 million passengers due to pass through the airport in the week of the planned protests. Garman said the injunction granted was not far-ranging enough to stop the protests. ""BAA have lost badly,"" he told BBC television. ""The Camp for Climate Action is going ahead."" BAA runs London airports Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick, and four other airports in Britain. It was bought by Ferrovial for 10.1 billion pounds last year. ",0
"Scientists studying global warming have warned that rising temperatures make many species worldwide vulnerable, but the phenomenon is already playing out in Latin America where frog and toad species are heading toward extinction. ""Some 60-70 percent of (amphibians) are in critical danger or almost extinct,"" said Luis Merlo, a veterinarian working with the animals, surrounded by terrariums filled with small toads. The survival of nearly 20 frog and toad species, which top Venezuela's list of endangered species, may rest on a small group of academics in a Caracas laboratory attempting to recreate the amphibians' natural reproductive conditions. Merlo leads Venezuela's first center for the conservation of amphibians, where studies them in hope of boosting the fledgling population. 
 
 Dendrobates leucomelas 

Amphibians in the Venezuelan wild have been increasingly threatened over the last two decades, according to this year's ""Red Book of Venezuelan Fauna,"" published by a group of Venezuela-based scientists.  Dendrobates leucomelas  There are 15 species of a small frog endemic to Venezuela's mountains that have been hit especially hard, their brilliant colors not seen for some three decades. Biodiverse Venezuela boasts vast tracts of rainforest, Andean mountains and Caribbean coastline. It is in the world's top 10 nations in terms of amphibian numbers. ""They are very sensitive, dependent on the environment and beneficial to humans,"" Merlo said. Bellwethers These amphibians are also considered bellwethers for the health of their ecosystem. They are especially susceptible to warming because they have non-hard-shelled eggs, which cannot survive drying. An epidemic of the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus, which attacks their skin, has also led to the frogs' decline worldwide. 
 
 Mannophryne herminae 

  Mannophryne herminae  The wave of frog extinction began in Mexico and has spread south to South America, said Jon Paul Rodriguez of the Species Conservation Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Countries such as Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador have also initiated conservation centers. ""The toads are like the canaries that were used in ancient times in the mines: they are a sign that something serious is going on in the environment,"" Rodriguez said.  ""If we do not stop it in time, we will all be losers.""",0
"LONDON, Jun 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai issued a 24-hour deadline to President Robert Mugabe on Thursday to negotiate or face being shunned as an illegitimate leader responsible for the killing of civilians. From the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the top regional body, to former South African President Nelson Mandela, African leaders have piled increasing pressure on Mugabe to call off a presidential election on Friday. Mugabe, 84, who trailed Tsvangirai for the presidency in a first round election in March, has dismissed international condemnation of violence against the opposition and has vowed to extend his 28 years in power. Tsvangirai, who withdrew from Friday's run-off and has taken refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare since Sunday, said in an interview with Britain's Times newspaper the time for talking to Mugabe would end if he went ahead with the election. ""Negotiations will be over if Mr Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?"" said Tsvangirai, who insists Mugabe must go so Zimbabwe can end its political turmoil and economic meltdown. If Mugabe approached him afterwards, Tsvangirai said he had this message: ""I made these offers, I made these overtures, I told you I would negotiate before the elections and not after -- because it's not about elections, it's about transition. ""You disregarded that, you undertook violence against my supporters, you killed and maimed, you are still killing and maiming unarmed civilians, the army is still out there. ""How can you call yourself an elected president? You are illegitimate and I will not speak to an illegitimate president."" ""PRIME TARGET"" Tsvangirai said it was too early to say when he would leave the Dutch embassy. ""I am the prime target. I am not going to take chances with my safety. It's not just about Mr Mugabe, it's about the people out there who could take the law into their own hands. There is no rule of law here,"" said Tsvangirai. His Movement for Democratic Change says nearly 90 of its supporters have been killed by militias loyal to Mugabe. On Wednesday, the SADC's security troika urged the postponement of Friday's election, saying the re-election of Mugabe could lack legitimacy in the current violent climate. Regional power South Africa added to the pressure, saying a top negotiator was in Harare mediating talks on options including postponement of the vote. The troika, comprising African Union chairman Tanzania, Swaziland and Angola, called at its meeting near the Swazi capital Mbabane for talks between Mugabe's government and the opposition before a new run-off date was set. It said the group had been briefed by South African President Thabo Mbeki, the designated SADC mediator on Zimbabwe. Mbeki has been widely criticized in the past for taking a soft line with Mugabe and for not using South Africa's powerful economic leverage with landlocked Zimbabwe. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga called on Wednesday for a new mediator. Mandela, revered by many across the world for his role in ending apartheid in South Africa, rarely speaks on political issues these days but used a speech at a dinner in London to condemn a ""tragic failure of leadership"" in Zimbabwe. President George W. Bush said after meeting members of the UN Security Council at the White House Friday's poll had no credibility and that the ""Mugabe government is intimidating people on the ground in Zimbabwe"". But Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission ruled last Sunday's withdrawal from the election by Tsvangirai had no legal force and that the poll would go ahead. Mugabe has presided over a slide into economic chaos, including 80 percent unemployment and inflation estimated by experts at about 2 million percent. He blames sanctions by former colonial power Britain and other Western countries. Millions of Zimbabweans have fled to neighboring countries to escape the economic woes of their once prosperous homeland.",2
"But now the streets of the Ashok Meadows housing complex where she lives are clear, with workers picking up garbage from residents' doorsteps each day and turning some of it into electricity. Since 2017, the complex has fed its food waste into a digester that converts it into biogas used to light the area's streetlights, park, social club and gym. ""Clean energy from our rancid food leftovers, vegetable peels and other such throwaways? It is unbelievable how the concept of waste management has changed in the past few years,"" Bai Patil, 62, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Biogas generators like the one used in Ashok Meadows are now installed in more than 75 locations across India. Developed by Xeon Waste Managers (XWM), based in Pune, the EnergyBin systems let communities turn waste into free, renewable energy, said company president Jalaj Kumar Chaturvedi. ""It is a common sight to find overburdened landfills with garbage that grows by the day. But since these EnergyBins dispose of the waste at the source itself, the landfills are spared,"" he said. According to Ashok Meadows resident Rishika Mahalley, the complex's system - operated and maintained by residents - has helped solve the problem of how to dispose of the nearly a tonne of garbage produced each day by the complex's 550 homes and common areas. Before the community bought the generator at the cost of 2.3 million Indian rupees ($31,000), it struggled with unreliable municipal garbage collection, which often left waste piling up, Mahalley noted. But ""we have now gotten rid of the buzzing flies, scourge of mosquitoes and other insects, besides of course the stink that came from the vats where the garbage would be left until the municipal vehicles arrived to collect them,"" she said. FOOD TO FUEL Each day, waste pickers paid by the Ashok Meadows residents put between 550 kg and 600 kg (1,300 pounds) of food waste into the biogas plant, Mahalley said. As the organic matter breaks down it produces a flammable gas made up mainly of methane and carbon dioxide. The methane is then pressurised and piped into a power generator that burns the gas to convert it into 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity for the community each day. Mahalley said before the plant was installed the complex spend about 550 rupees ($7.50) a day on electricity for streetlights and other common facilities - a cost that has now virtually disappeared. It also saves the residents up to 6,000 rupees ($82) every month on municipal garbage disposal costs, she said. COSTS The biggest benefit of biogas plants - which are becoming increasingly popular around the world as a way to create climate-smart energy - is their ability to reduce emissions, said Jitendra S Sangwai, a chemical engineering professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. In particular, by capturing climate-changing gases that would normally be released into the atmosphere when organic matter decays in the open, such technology can curb emissions of methane gas, a potent short-term driver of climate change. While many small-scale biogas digesters are in operation around the globe, for now the costs and climate benefits of large biogas generators like EnergyBins are limited to communities that can afford them, Sangwai added. The systems can be expensive to buy, set up and maintain, he said. But XWM president Chaturvedi said the digesters provide multiple benefits. Besides cutting electricity and rubbish collection costs, some municipalities can tap into property tax rebates offered to residents who process their own organic waste, part of an effort to ease the heavy burden on landfills, he said. ""With that tax concession and the other savings, the generators pay for themselves in three years,"" he said. GREEN GARBAGE DISPOSAL At the South Eastern Railways (SER) headquarters, a complex of offices and staff residences in Kolkata, a 1,000-kg-capacity XWM biogas generator has been operating since January 2020. It services a complex that houses 1,200 homes, a market, a social club and a hospital, which has a kitchen that generates food waste throughout the day. Prior to the installation of the digester, a once-daily municipal collection was not enough to get rid of all of the food leftovers produced, said the hospital's senior dietician Dr Sanchita Mazumder. ""It was a nightmare to dispose of so much waste. We had to dig holes in the backyard to dump it,"" she said, adding that stray animals would then dig up the garbage and spread it around the complex. That has not been a problem since the biogas unit was installed, she said, noting that the gas generated from the kitchen's garbage has helped the hospital reduce its use of LPG gas for cooking by 80%. Having a better way to dispose of waste has also cut littering around the complex, said Altaf Hussain, head of the SER conservancy department. ""The best part is how the community is learning to adopt clean garbage disposal methods,"" he said. ($1 = 74.2490 Indian rupees)",0
" Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday. The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting permafrost that underlies about 25 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere. Emissions of the gas measured from thawing wetlands in Zackenberg in eastern Greenland leapt 20 times to levels found in tropical forests, which are among the main natural sources of the heat-trapping gas. ""Measurements of nitrous oxide production permafrost samples from five additional wetland sites in the high Arctic indicate that the rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Zackenberg soils may be in the low range,"" the study said. The scientists, from Denmark and Norway, studied sites in Canada and Svalbard off northern Norway alongside their main focus on Zackenberg. The releases would be a small addition to known impacts of global warming. Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas from human activities, dominated by carbon dioxide ahead of methane. It is among the gases regulated by the UN's Kyoto Protocol for limiting global warming that could spur more sandstorms, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. Nitrous oxide comes from human sources including agriculture, especially nitrogen-based fertilisers, and use of fossil fuels as well as natural sources in soil and water, such as microbes in wet tropical forests. The scientists said that past studies had reckoned that carbon dioxide and methane were released by a thaw of permafrost while nitrous oxide stayed locked up. ""Thawing and drainage of the soils had little impact on nitrous oxide production,"" Nature said in a statement of the study led by Bo Elberling of Copenhagen University. ""However, re-saturation of the drained soils with meltwater from the frozen soils -- as would happen following thawing -- increased nitrous oxide production by over 20 times,"" it said. ""Nearly a third of the nitrous oxide produced in this process escaped into the atmosphere,"" it added.",0
" Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is expected to win a resounding victory in Monday's election, partly due to the growth and stability he has delivered since the 1994 genocide and partly because of a crackdown on rivals. Rights groups and foreign diplomats say signs of repression have marred the runup to the poll, although donors expect it to be peaceful and say the revised electoral code will make it more transparent than in 2003 when Kagame won 95 percent of the vote. Kagame is applauded locally and internationally for rebuilding institutions, promoting women, boosting agricultural output and tripling household income. His two main rivals in the presidential race offer little genuine alternative, having spent 16 years as part of the ruling coalition led by his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). ""RPF is strong, it is organized, it has planned over a long time, historically it has been with the people to resolve challenging issues and therefore that results in a kind of overwhelming support,"" Kagame told reporters on his last day of campaigning. ""I have no regrets about it, I make no apologies."" Rights group Amnesty International says the poll will take place in a climate of fear. Registration troubles prevented three outspoken parties from fielding candidates. Two party chiefs were arrested on charges including stirring ethnic hatred and genocide ideology. Opponents say they have been threatened and intimidated. Two newspapers were suspended in April, a critical journalist was shot in the head in June and a senior member of the Democratic Green Party was found nearly beheaded in July. Some analysts say that although Rwandans would like more choice, they are haunted by the genocide, in which gangs of Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. ""A lot of Rwandans would want him (Kagame) to be a lot more open, and like to see more choices and feel more consulted but I don't see any evidence that they want radical regime change,"" author Philip Gourevitch told Reuters. ""I'm afraid I can't see how a candidate like Victoire Ingabire, who is clearly identified with the old Hutu Power politics, would be healthy for this country at this time,"" said Gourevitch, who wrote ""We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,"" a book about the genocide. Ingabire, a former accountant who lived in exile in the Netherlands for 16 years, returned to Rwanda earlier this year to run for office. Her name will not appear on the ballot paper. The genocide was spawned, in part, by the surge of radical ethnic politics that followed the birth of multi-party democracy in Rwanda in the early 1990s. ""Kagame is afraid that widening the democratic space would allow in wolves in sheepskins,"" said a western diplomat. Foreign diplomats said Kagame's real challenge comes from within his Tutsi cadres in the ruling party and army and that his war on graft, which has seen former political associates locked up, is a way of sidelining possible threats to his power. Since the beginning of the year top army officials have fled the country, been arrested, demoted or shot in mysterious circumstances. Kagame rejects allegations of a rift with his brothers in arms. ""What I know does not suggest any kind of crisis at all. There are differences in terms of opinions like anywhere else in the world,"" he said. But exiled army and intelligence top brass are sounding increasingly belligerent and say Rwandans should stand up and fight for their freedom. ""It boils down to a struggle for power among the party's inner cabal that could end up becoming very nasty. In private, RPF officials have told me: 'This is probably the biggest challenge we have faced as a party in many years,'"" independent regional analyst Jason Stearns said on his Congo Siasa blog.",2
"In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly since his resounding election victory in May, Modi also invoked India's Hindu and ascetic traditions, saying they might provide answers to climate change. Modi appeared to chastise Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had used his own General Assembly address on Friday to blame India for the collapse of the latest talks over Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed in full by both countries. ""By raising this issue in this forum,"" Modi said in Hindi, ""I don't know how serious our efforts will be, and some people are doubtful about it."" Last month, India announced it was withdrawing from the planned peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors because of plans by Pakistan to consult Kashmiri separatists beforehand. India was willing to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan, Modi said, so long as those talks are in ""an atmosphere of peace, without a shadow of terrorism."" India says Pakistan supports separatist militants that cross from the Pakistan-controlled side of Kashmir to attack Indian forces. Pakistan denies this, saying India's military abuses the human rights of Kashmiris, most of whom are Muslim. Modi is India's first Hindu nationalist prime minister in a decade, embracing a strain of politics that maintains that India's culture is essentially Hindu, although his Bharatiya Janata Party says such a culture is welcoming to other religions. He has said fears that he will favor India's Hindu majority over its large religious minorities, including some 170 million Muslims, are unfounded, and his comments on spirituality in his address are likely to be scrutinized for evidence of this. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when religious riots raged across the northwestern state in 2002 after a Muslim mob set alight a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, most of them Muslims. Critics have accused Modi of allowing or even encouraging the riots to happen, but courts have found no evidence to indict him. In his address on Saturday, Modi invoked the ""ancient wisdom"" of India's Vedic era, during which Hinduism's most sacred texts were written. He also encouraged more people to take up yoga, the spiritual practice that predates the arrival of Islam in India. ""Yoga should not be just an exercise for us, but it should be a means to get connected with the world and with nature,"" he said, calling on the United Nations to adopt an International Yoga Day. ""It should bring a change in our lifestyle and create awareness in us, and it can help fighting against climate change."" 
 
 

Modi is due to have private meetings with the prime ministers of Nepal and Bangladesh and the president of Sri Lanka on Saturday in New York. No meetings are planned with Sharif or other Pakistani officials, according to the Indian delegation.   Next week, less than a decade after the United States banned him from visiting the country in 2005 under a law barring entry to foreigners who have severely violated religious freedoms, Modi is due to meet with US President Barack Obama at the White House. Modi will not eat at the state dinner, however, as he will be fasting for the Hindu festival of Navratri, his delegation has said.",1
"The Indian Ocean chain of islands, famous for its luxury resorts, has been in turmoil since February 2012 when former president Mohamed Nasheed was ousted in what his supporters called a coup.Nasheed, who won the Maldives' first free election in 2008 and was frontrunner for Saturday's halted vote, warned on Sunday of a ""constitutional void"" if a new election was not held before President Mohamed Waheed's term ends on November 11.He demanded the resignation of Waheed, who in turn said he would carry the country forward ""without any bloodshed"" and had no desire to stay in office beyond the deadline.The police said they stopped the vote because they could not support an election held in contravention of the Supreme Court guidelines after some candidates failed to sign a new voter register. Nasheed's supporters condemned it as a new coup.""We have decided to hold the first round of presidential elections on November 9, and if necessary, a second round on November 16,"" Elections Commissioner Fuwad Thowfeek told reporters in the capital Male.He said the commission set the date after discussions with the political parties and the government.World powers, including the Commonwealth, the United States and Britain, condemned as a threat to democracy the delay to Saturday's polls, which came just weeks after the Supreme Court had annulled a first attempt to hold the election on September 7, citing allegations of fraud.""LAST DECISION""Waheed, who was Nasheed's vice president and took power when he was ousted, said he did not want to stay in the office ""even a day beyond November 11"".""It is not me who will decide on an arrangement post November 11. I believe the Supreme Court and the People's Majlis (parliament) need to think about this,"" he told reporters.Dismissing the international criticism, Waheed said: ""I know the dangers and opportunities in the Maldives. We do things with the advice of others like Commonwealth and other governments, but I will make the last decision.""""I have to consider the country's interests to carry the country forward without any bloodshed,"" he said.Nasheed has called for blocking of all streets in Male and bring the densely populated island and the capital of the archipelago to a standstill after the delay in the polls.Nasheed's supporters have staged protests since he was ousted in 2012, and masked men this month fire-bombed a television station that backs Nasheed, who came to international prominence in 2009 after holding a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear to highlight the threat of climate change.His main election rival is Abdulla Yameen, a half-brother of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who ruled for 30 years and was considered a dictator by opponents and rights groups. Holiday resort tycoon Gasim Ibrahim, finance minister under Gayoom, was also running.Nasheed had looked set to return to office when he won the first round of the election on September 7, putting him in a good position to win a run-off vote set for September 28. But it was cancelled by the Supreme Court citing fraud despite international observers saying the election was free and fair.The country's new leader will need to tackle a rise in Islamist ideology, rights abuses and a lack of investor confidence after Waheed's government cancelled the biggest foreign investment project, with India's GMR Infrastructure.",0
" The International Monetary Fund should set up an early warning system to prevent crises like the global credit crunch, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday. Proposing sweeping changes to international institutions, Brown called for rapid response teams of police and experts to be set up that could be sent quickly to trouble spots to restore order and begin rebuilding after conflicts. And he called for the creation of a multi-billion-dollar global climate change fund within the World Bank to finance environmentally sustainable development in the poorest countries. Brown believes that the rapid spread of the credit crisis last year after problems with US sub-prime mortgages points to failings in global financial supervision that must be fixed. ""With financial markets and flows transformed by globalisation, I propose that -- acting with the same independence as a central bank -- the IMF should focus on surveillance of the global economic and financial system and thus prevent crises, not just resolve them,"" he said in excerpts of a speech he will deliver to business executives in New Delhi. The IMF, working with the Financial Stability Forum -- a group of central banks, regulators and international bodies -- ""should be at the heart of an early warning system for financial turbulence affecting the global economy,"" he said. The credit crunch claimed a high-profile casualty when British mortgage lender Northern Rock suffered the country's first bank run in more than a century last year. Northern Rock has borrowed about 26 billion pounds ($50.9 billion) from the Bank of England, creating a huge political headache for Brown. CALL FOR CHANGE ""The IMF and World Bank ... have to change to become properly equipped for a world where national problems can quickly become global -- and contagion can move as swiftly as the fastest communication,"" said Brown, who ends a four-day trip to India and China later on Monday. Brown meets the leaders of France, Germany and Italy as well as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in London on January 29 to discuss how to respond to the crisis. Brown said he supported India's bid for a permanent place, with other countries, on an expanded UN Security Council. British officials would not say however how many permanent members they believed a reformed Security Council could have. Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States have been veto-bearing permanent members of the council since the United Nations was created in 1945. But they face growing pressure for reform with Brazil, Germany, India and Japan all demanding permanent seats. Brown said another problem was that there was no mechanism for quickly sending in experts, police and judges to get states back on their feet when peacekeepers intervened in a conflict. ""We must do more to ensure rapid reconstruction on the ground once conflicts are over,"" he said. ""I propose that we constitute rapid response standby teams of judges, police, trainers and other civilian experts who can work on the ground to help put countries on the road to economic recovery and political stability,"" he said. He called for a new UN crisis prevention and recovery fund to provide immediate support for reconstruction in such cases.",1
"Like other right-wing populists, from Britain and Brazil to Poland and Germany, Orban was still coming to grips with the defeat of populism’s flamboyant standard-bearer in the White House. The Hungarian leader acknowledged that a victory by Trump was his “Plan A.” There wasn’t really a Plan B. While Trump’s defeat is a stinging blow to his populist allies, its consequences for populism as a global political movement are more ambiguous. Trump, after all, won more votes than any American presidential candidate in history aside from Biden, which attests to the enduring appeal of his message. The economic, social and political grievances that fed populist and xenophobic movements in many countries are still alive, and indeed, may be reinforced by the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. Social media continues to spread populist ideas, often cloaked in conspiracy theories designed to sow doubt about the scientific facts behind the virus or the legitimacy of the electoral process that brought about Trump’s defeat. “It’s arguably the most consequential election in our lifetime, but I would be very cautious about a mood swing toward believing populism is finished,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University. “In general,” he said, “all such extreme mood swings are mistaken, and specifically, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump.” Moreover, some of these leaders are likely to be able to exploit the aftereffects of the pandemic — from chronic unemployment and insecurity to soaring public debt and racial tensions — even if they themselves worsened the problems by playing down the threat of the virus and politicising the public-health response. Some tried to pivot quickly to the new political reality. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom Trump once referred to as “Britain’s Trump,” spoke by phone with Biden on Tuesday, telling him he looked forward to working with the United States on “shared priorities, from tackling climate change to promoting democracy, and building back better from the coronavirus pandemic.’” That last line was a reference to a slogan from Biden’s campaign, also used by Johnson’s government. For all the talk of a populist wave that swept the world after Britain’s Brexit vote in June 2016 and Trump’s election five months later, experts point out that the populist and far-right movements in Germany and other European countries always had their own roots that were distinct and predated the Anglo-American variety. Their fortunes have waxed and waned, largely independent of Trump. In France, right-wing leader Marine Le Pen suffered a crushing defeat by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, at a time when the American president was riding high. Now, with Macron beleaguered by the pandemic and deeply unpopular, polls suggest that Le Pen is poised to make a comeback in elections scheduled for 2022. In Italy, where Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, once dreamed of opening an academy to train populist leaders in a converted monastery, the far-right parties built their political base by opposing migration from the south, a phenomenon that predated Trump and will outlast his presidency. “Trump gave these parties legitimacy,” said Fabrizio Tonello, a political-science professor at the University of Padua. But he said the president’s unyielding manner and winner-take-all style never had much influence in Italy’s messy politics, where the premium is on deal-making and compromise. In Germany, Trump’s complicated legacy was evident in how the main rightist party, Alternative for Germany, dithered over how to treat Biden’s victory. While some lawmakers parroted Trump’s false claims about the vote counting, party leaders quietly congratulated Biden after the vote was called. Some interpreted the more conciliatory tone as a recognition that Trump’s defeat was also a defeat for the polarising politics of the German party, which has seen its popularity hover around 10% in recent surveys. “All of those who focused on a politics of polarization around the globe have suffered a setback,” said Hans Vorländer, a professor of political science at the Technical University Dresden “It is a very clear signal.” Others, though, are more sceptical. Populism in Europe is a homegrown phenomenon, they said, so while populist leaders could point to Trump as a kindred spirit while he was in office, their fortunes were not directly tied to his. “Trump was more or less irrelevant for populist and right-wing movements in Germany and Europe,” said Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democratic politician who is vying to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel as leader of the party. “For that reason, his defeat will not affect them in a fundamental way.” Conspiracy theorists and the movements they have spawned — like QAnon, which has taken root in Germany — will also be unmoved by Trump’s defeat, according to some experts, because his allegations of fraud simply give them another opportunity to spin the situation to their advantage. “The wonderful thing about conspiracy theories is that they are non-falsifiable and impossible to refute with facts,” said Anna Grzymala-Busse, a professor of politics at Stanford University who specializes in populism. Where Trump will continue to cast a shadow, Röttgen said, is in how the United States engages with the world. Immigration, the great-power rivalry with China, suspicion of foreign entanglements, and doubts of the value of alliances — all these themes will continue to drive debates over the country’s foreign policy. Populist leaders are also likely to keep borrowing from Trump’s playbook. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, a retired military officer who dined with the president at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, Mar-a-Lago, modelled his response to the pandemic on Trump’s — disdaining lockdowns and face masks, and endorsing an anti-malaria pill that was ineffective and dangerous. Bolsonaro mimicked Trump in making unsubstantiated allegations of voting irregularities, which he said were to blame for him having to compete in a runoff election in 2018. Political scientists in Brazil said they viewed Trump’s refusal to concede his electoral loss as a dangerous precedent. In Hungary, Orban made no secret of his preference in the US election. “We root for Donald Trump’s victory,” he wrote on Nov 3. While the ballots were being counted, his Cabinet posted a message saying, “We supported Donald Trump, whereas Joe Biden has been supported by George Soros,” the billionaire financier who is the perennial subject of conspiracy theories on the right. When Orban finally congratulated Biden on Sunday, it was for his “successful presidential campaign,” not for winning the White House. He went on to wish Biden “continued success in fulfilling your responsibilities.” The departure of Trump will make life more difficult for Orban and other populists in Eastern Europe, said Andras Biro-Nagy, of Policy Solutions, a think tank in Budapest that has tracked Orban for the past decade. But he questioned whether Biden would succeed in getting them to change their ways. “For leaders like Viktor Orban, the easy days are over,” Biro-Nagy said. “The biggest challenge for them is that there will be more pressure and more attention on policies that went unchecked in the last four years.” For example, he cited Orban’s expulsion of the Central European University from Hungary. Founded in Budapest by Soros, the school was forced to move the majority of its operations to Vienna. Biro-Nagy said it was “unprecedented” that the State Department did not intervene in the situation. “Orban could get away with policies that hurt American interests,” he said. “The big question for me, is how important will Hungary or Poland be to the new U.S. administration? At least this open support will cease to exist.” To some experts, the greatest significance of Trump’s defeat is not how it will change the populists but whether it will embolden those who oppose them. In countries like Hungary, where the democratic system has been corroded almost out of recognition, the vanquishing of Trump could serve as a beacon. “It shows them it really is possible to get rid of the populists,” Grzymala-Busse said.   c.2020 The New York Times Company",0
"Obviously, in a world of differences, some people can do more to tackle the climate crisis than others. So it’s essential to recognise how much neglected potential exists among nearly half the human race. But there’s a snag, and it’s a massive one: the women and girls who can do so much to avert global heating reaching disastrous levels need to be able to exercise their right to education. Bold claims?  Project Drawdown is a group of researchers who believe that stopping global heating is possible, with solutions that exist today. To do this, they say, we must work together to achieve drawdown, the point when greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere start to decline. The project’s conclusions are startling − and positive. One is that educating girls works better to protect the climate than many technological solutions, vital though they are, and including several variants of renewable energy. Yet, the group finds, girls and women suffer disproportionately from climate breakdown, and failures in access to education worsen this problem. After the horrendous 2004 tsunami, for example, an Oxfam report found that male survivors outnumbered women by almost 3:1 in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India. Men were more likely to be able to swim, and women lost precious evacuation time trying to look after children and other relatives. But given more power and say in how we adapt to and try to prevent global heating, the female half of humankind could make disproportionally positive contributions, the project says. Using UN data, it suggests that educating girls could result in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 51.48 gigatonnes by 2050. The UN Environment Programme says that total greenhouse gas emissions had reached a record high of 55.3 gigatonnes in 2018. Multiple barriers The Rapid Transition Alliance (RTA) is a UK-based organisation which argues that humankind must undertake “widespread behaviour change to sustainable lifestyles … to live within planetary ecological boundaries and to limit global warming to below 1.5°C”. It says that although access to education is a basic human right, across the world. girls continue to face multiple barriers based on their gender and its links to other factors such as age, ethnicity, poverty and disability. But the RTA adds: “Research shows that for each intake of students, educating girls has multiple benefits that go far beyond the individual and any particular society. It can also result in rapid and transformative change that affects the planet itself.” One example it cites is from Mali, in West Africa, where women with secondary education or higher have an average of 3 children, while those with no education have an average of 7 children. Environmentalists’ failure It says that while the UN currently thinks the world’s population will grow from 7.3 billion today to 9.7bn by 2050, with most of the growth happening in developing countries, recent research shows that if girls’ education continues to expand, that number would total 2 billion fewer people by 2045. It argues that it is not just politicians and the media who fail to focus on this grossly slewed access to education. The RTA says the environmental movement itself rarely makes connections between the education of girls and success in tackling climate change. One example of conservation work being tied successfully to educating and empowering women it cites is the Andavadoaka clinic in Madagascar, which is funded by a British charity, Blue Ventures Conservation (BVC). The link between population growth, the lack of family planning facilities and the increasing pressure on fragile natural resources prompted BVC to establish the clinic, which has been running for over a decade and is part of a wider programme serving 45,000 people. As well as the original clinic other projects have grown up that concentrate on specific economic and participation opportunities for women and girls. Making a difference In the least developed countries women make up almost half of the agricultural labour force, giving them a huge role in feeding the future population. But there is a massive gap between men and women in their control over land, their ability to obtain inputs and the pay they can expect. Individual girls and women continue to make a massive difference, whether Greta Thunberg spurring action on climate change or Malala Yousafzai, shot for trying to attend school in Afghanistan, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign for girls’ education. Women who have climbed high up the political ladder have sometimes used their success to ensure that girls are taken seriously. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African country − Liberia − used her power to expand the quality of provision in pre-school and primary education by joining the Global Partnership for Education, and the former US First Lady, Michele Obama, spearheaded the Let Girls Learn organisation. The Rapid Transition Alliance’s conclusion is short and simple: “Educating girls brings broad benefits to wider society as well improving efforts to tackle the climate emergency.”",0
" Mexico scrambled to break an impasse between rich and poor nations over future cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on Friday as 190-nation climate talks went down to the wire. Delegates said there was little progress in overnight talks in Mexico's beach resort of Cancun and that the negotiations, due to end on Friday, may well be extended into Saturday as all sides seek a deal to address global warming. ""It's in the hands of the Mexican presidency,"" John Ashe, who is chairing key discussions about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, told Reuters. The Kyoto Protocol currently binds almost 40 rich countries to cut greenhouse gases until 2012, but wealthy and poor nations are divided over what obligations they should all assume over the next few years. Negotiators hope for a modest deal in Cancun to set up a fund to help developing nations tackle climate change, protect tropical forests and agree a mechanism to share clean technologies Ambitions are low after last year's U.N. summit in Copenhagen fell short of a treaty. Mexico's Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa is presiding over the two weeks of talks in Cancun and is leading efforts to broker a deal over the future of Kyoto which is blocking progress on other issues. Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan by telephone to discuss the standoff after Tokyo said it would not sign up for an extension of Kyoto beyond 2012 unless developing nations also commit to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. The position has angered many developing countries. A Japanese foreign ministry statement said that Kan would work to make the talks a success. Delegates of Britain and Brazil are also working in Cancun to help unlock a deal. Ashe said it was ""hard to say"" if there would be progress on Friday, adding that Mexico's Espinosa was drawing up new texts for delegates. ""At least there's confidence that she could put something for them to consider. This was not the case in Copenhagen. If there's one thing that we've learned in Cancun is that trust has been restored,"" he told Reuters. The Copenhagen summit collapsed in acrimony, agreeing only a non-binding accord to limit a rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times. Another failure in Cancun would badly damage the UN-led talks. Kyoto currently obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels from 2008 to 2012. Japan insists that all major emitters, including China, India and the United States, must sign up for a new treaty to succeed Kyoto. Developing nations say that rich nations, which have emitted most greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, must extend Kyoto before the poor sign up for curbs that would damage their drive to end poverty. Separately, India said that it might eventually commit itself to legally-binding emissions curbs in a shift that could help the negotiations in Cancun. India has previously rejected any legally binding commitments.",0
"The incongruity was on centre stage both at the global climate summit taking place in Scotland, and in Rome this past weekend during a gathering of leaders from the 20 largest economies. The president’s comments highlighted the political and economic realities facing politicians as they grapple with climate change. And they underscored the complexity of moving away from the fossil fuels that have underpinned global economic activity since the Industrial Age. “On the surface, it seems like an irony,” Biden said at a news conference Sunday. “But the truth of the matter is — you’ve all known; everyone knows — that the idea we’re going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight,” he said, was “just not rational.” Biden’s words have drawn fire from energy experts and climate activists, who say the world cannot afford to ramp up oil and natural gas production if it wants to avert catastrophic levels of warming. Environmental groups are intensely watching to see how the president intends to meet his ambitious goal of halving the nation’s emissions, compared to 2005 levels, by the end of this decade. A recent International Energy Agency report found that countries must immediately stop new oil, gas and coal development if they hope to keep the average global temperature from increasing 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth faces irreversible damage. The planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius. “We are in a climate crisis. There is no room for the left hand and the right hand to be doing different things,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace International. “It’s not credible to say you’re fighting for 1.5 degrees while you’re calling for increased oil production.” With gasoline prices rising above $3.30 a gallon nationwide, Biden over the weekend urged major energy producing countries with spare capacity to boost production, part of a larger effort to pressure OPEC countries and Russia to increase the supply of oil. He was joined by President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose country hosted the 2015 meeting in Paris where 200 countries agreed to collectively tackle global warming. At the conclusion Sunday of a Group of 20 summit that ended with lofty rhetoric on climate but fewer concrete actions than activists had hoped, Biden addressed the irony head-on. The transition to lower-emission sources of energy would take years, and in the meantime, it was important to ensure that people can afford to drive their cars and heat their homes, he said at a news conference. “It does, on the surface, seem inconsistent,” the president said, “but it’s not at all inconsistent in that no one has anticipated that this year we’d be in a position — or even next year — that we’re not going to use any more oil or gas; that we’re not going to be engaged in any fossil fuels. We’re going to stop subsidising those fossil fuels. We’re going to be making significant changes. And it just makes the argument that we should move more rapidly to renewable energy — to wind and solar and other means of energy.” Biden’s climate and social spending plan pending in Congress does not eliminate government subsidies for fossil fuels, which are estimated to be about $20 billion annually. His comments came as the president and his aides are struggling to parry Republican attacks linking his economic agenda to rising inflation, including higher gasoline prices, which are helping to drive down his approval ratings. Biden has shown a high sensitivity to the politics of the pump. He repeatedly rebuffed efforts by Republican senators earlier this year to raise federal gasoline taxes — a move economists widely say would discourage oil demand — over concerns that they would place an undue burden on middle-class Americans and violate his pledge not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year. Middle-class Americans “have to get to their work. They have to get in an automobile, turn on the key, get their kids to school,” Biden said at the news conference. “The school buses have to run.” He said the idea “that there’s an alternative to walk away from being able to get in your automobile is just not realistic; it’s not going to happen.” Higher gas and oil prices can have a ripple effects across the broader economy, raising costs for transportation-related industries such as trucking. That in turn increases the costs of anything that has to be shipped, pushing up prices for goods. And if consumers are spending a greater share of their income to fill up their cars and heat their homes, they have less money to spend on those goods. The president’s answers in some ways echoed the executives of several large oil and gas companies, who testified last week before a House panel investigating the role of their industry in disinformation aimed at slowing down a transition to wind, solar and other clean energy. As Democrats on the committee tried to extract promises from the executives that they would phase out oil and gas development, Republicans noted that Biden was asking the companies to increase production. “Oil and gas will continue to be necessary for the foreseeable future,” Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon Mobil, told the committee. “We currently do not have the adequate alternative energy sources.” Biden’s legislative agenda seeks to speed the migration away from oil in several ways. The large spending bill pending in Congress includes $550 billion in climate initiatives, largely concentrated in tax credits to incentivise solar power, electric cars and other technologies meant to reduce emissions. A separate piece of legislation, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, includes a down payment on Biden’s goal of building out a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations. But those initiatives have not yet passed. And even if they do, they could take years to begin to bend American consumer preferences away from gasoline-powered vehicles, a lag that administration officials repeatedly cite in explaining his push for more oil production in the short term. “If he were asking them to boost their production over five years, I’d quit,” John Kerry, Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, told reporters Sunday. “But he’s not. He’s asking them to boost production in this immediate moment.” Kerry maintained that as the world expands wind and solar energy and invests in new transmission networks to carry that renewable electricity to homes and businesses, it will “liberate” countries from dependence on fossil fuels. “But you can’t just shut down everybody’s economy across the planet and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to use oil’ or whatever,” Kerry said. Some energy analysts agreed, saying that while the timing of Biden’s request for increased oil production may be awkward, doing so reflects economic reality. “There’s a difference between the world we have today and the world we want in the future,” said Jason Bordoff of the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University. “It makes perfect sense for the Biden administration to simultaneously seek to make sure there’s adequate and affordable energy for households today and at the same time take the most aggressive measures in US history to spur vehicle electrification and move beyond oil in the future,” he said. In its road map detailing how to slash global carbon dioxide emissions by midcentury, the International Energy Agency urged ending sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035; phasing out by 2040 power plants that burn coal, oil and gas without capturing their emissions; and creating a global energy sector based largely in renewables by 2050. The IEA also warned that emissions are still rising and that the world is still going in the wrong direction, failing to grasp the massive transformation of the global energy system required to keep the planet safe. The World Meteorological Organization reported last month that the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a record level in 2020, despite an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic, and is rising again this year. Meanwhile, China is expanding coal production and imports in response to power shortages the past several months. Justin Guay, director of global strategy with the Sunrise Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for a global transition away from oil, gas and coal, said the United States and other nations need to immediately halt new fossil fuel production. “Net zero lives or dies on whether we move beyond fossil fuels,” said Guay, whose group is not affiliated with the Sunrise Movement activist group. “That starts with an immediate halt to the expansion of coal, oil and gas. Not next year or next decade. Right now.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",0
"Johnson will head to India on Thursday with calls for
his resignation ringing in his ears after he was fined for breaking his own
COVID-19 lockdown rules by attending a birthday party for him in Downing Street
in June 2020.  Parliament returns from its Easter vacation on Tuesday
and Johnson has said he would ""set the record straight"" about
gatherings in his office. He had previously told lawmakers there were no
parties and guidance was always followed. In details released late on Saturday, Johnson's office
said the British leader would use his trip to India to deepen relations,
including in-depth talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Mod on the two
nations' ""strategic defence, diplomatic and economic partnership"". He will also push for progress in talks on a free
trade deal, which Britain is hoping to strike as part of its post-Brexit
strategy. His office said such a trade deal was predicted to boost Britain's
total trade by up to 28 billion pounds ($36.5 billion) annually by 2035. But the visit will be overshadowed in part by
disagreement over the Ukraine conflict. Western allies have called for India, which imports
arms from Russia, to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin in stronger
terms, and US President Joe Biden earlier this week told Modi that buying more
oil from Russia was not in India's interest.  British trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan also said
last month Britain was very disappointed with India's stance. However,
Johnson's office made no direct reference to the conflict, although a source
said it was expected Ukraine would be discussed ""among other geopolitical
issues"". Johnson said India, as a major economic power, was a
highly valued strategic partner. ""As we face threats to our peace and prosperity from
autocratic states, it is vital that democracies and friends stick
together,"" he said in a statement. Last year, he was forced to cancel a
planned trip to India because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last May, the two countries announced a partnership involving
more than 530 million pounds of Indian investment into Britain, and Downing
Street said Johnson was expected to announce further major investment and new
collaboration on cutting-edge science, health and technology. ",2
"Down at the waterfront port, which is spread across several artificial islands, the land moved like water, rippling in the seismic waves. Concrete quays collapsed into Osaka Bay. These structures built to keep water out no longer did. Seismographs quickly confirmed: A magnitude 6.9 earthquake had paralysed the entire city. Bridges and highways were ruined; water, electricity, and telecommunication lines were cut off. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. Over 6,000 people died. Restoration work endured for years. Today, researchers worldwide view Kobe as an example of a modern city where structures failed to perform the way engineers thought they would. Halfway around the world another metropolis — San Francisco — has drawn worrisome parallels: Like Kobe, the Northern California coastal city sits at the heart of a dense, seismically active urban area constructed on enormous areas of filled land, much of which is protected by a sea wall vulnerable to the rising waters caused by climate change. Its particular confluence of geology, city construction and overdue infrastructure updates feeds into its vulnerability, but other cities around the world, too, face the twin challenges of seismic hazards and rising seas, from Jakarta, Indonesia to Christchurch, New Zealand, and any city along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean from Alaska in North America to Patagonia in South America. While each locale must find solutions suited to its individual circumstances, the premise remains the same: Time is running short to fortify infrastructure built in a world that did not account for climate change. Wealthier countries will have better odds of succeeding. Nonetheless, the challenge for all becomes how cities secure themselves against disaster today while also anticipating future adjustment and adaptation. San Francisco is a microcosm of some of the challenges lurking around the globe. And while the city is making some progress in fortifying its protective sea wall, the question is: Are the plans unfolding fast enough? Are they ambitious enough? Researchers from the US Geological Survey say San Francisco has a 72% chance of at least a magnitude 6.7 quake’s occurring before 2043, and it could come as early as tomorrow. At levels like that, Port of San Francisco engineers calculate that the city’s underwater sea wall, a 19th-century pile of rocks and concrete that holds the northeast waterfront in place, is likely to slide into the San Francisco Bay. The result: a catastrophic unhemming of a city of nearly 900,000 people. That the wall has already sunk into the bay makes future risk that much more foreseeable. In an earthquake over 7.0 in magnitude and with an epicenter within 10 miles of San Francisco, the Embarcadero roadway, which on a typical day hosts around 94,000 vehicle passenger trips, is predicted to split. Along this thoroughfare, bookended by views of the city’s two bridges, lies the West Coast’s key financial district on one side, and the historic waterfront that welcomes over 15 million visitors each year on the other. About 300,000 tourists arrive through its international cruise terminal each year, and as many as 48,000 regional commuters pass through the Embarcadero BART station each weekday. It’s a central channel for utilities that keep the city in motion, from water to sewer lines, electrical to natural gas conduits. During one of the most worrisome earthquake scenarios, described in Waterfront Resilience Programme documents, when the ground spills into the bay, engineers fear that so, too, might the utility corridor, rupturing pipes and electricity lines. The historic pier sheds and bulkhead wharves would tumble into the water, and the wooden piles supporting them would splinter. Researchers predict that the land supporting near-shore blocks of the city — former marshland — will convulse like water just as in Kobe, displacing anything and anyone atop it. If the quake hits on a weekday, 40,000 people could be along the waterfront, many stuck in collapsed structures or piers over water. This same area, along the Embarcadero, holds the city’s disaster response services, including evacuation facilities and its emergency operation centre, which would be cut off when most needed. Over $100 billion in building value and economic value are potentially at risk from sea wall collapse, not including pricey utility repair. Port engineers fear much of the sea wall itself would be irreparable. The Port of San Francisco (which manages 7.5 miles of the city’s waterfront, including the 3 miles buttressed by the sea wall) had assumed the wall needed upgrading, but it did not know just how direly until 2016, when officials released a preliminary study of the seismic vulnerabilities. Unlike some sea walls, San Francisco’s provides structural support as well as flood protection. The subsequent 2020 report detailed its weak points on both fronts. As climate change makes ocean levels rise, the sea wall will increasingly have to perform in a context it was not designed for. Given that an earthquake could strike any day, the port’s immediate priority is ensuring the sea wall’s integrity in such an event. But doing so also must consider sea level rise, and its uncertainties of how fast and how high. Risk mitigation decisions made now must allow for the unknowable. Patrick King, who directs port and maritime work at Jacobs, the engineering firm managing the port’s resiliency programme, articulates the urgent challenge of designing a future waterfront. “This infrastructure was built for a certain environment that no longer exists and is rapidly changing,” he said. And now, to the best of their ability, “We need to predict what that environment is going to look like.” “Wall” is a generous word for the pile of rocks sitting on top of mud running along San Francisco’s northeastern waterfront. During the feverish early days of the gold rush, San Franciscans built the sea wall in a slapdash effort to establish some flat land at the edge of the hilly city. Horses were struggling to lug gold-filled wagons over the hills, and San Franciscans needed warehouses and counting-houses on level ground. Impatient for steam-powered shovels to arrive from across the country, residents began dumping into the marshland of Yerba Buena Cove whatever was on hand: loose sand, debris remnant from city construction, unwanted goods, trash, remains of abandoned ships. After a year, San Francisco had expanded three blocks into the Bay. To rein in the construction chaos, the California Legislature established a Board of State Harbour Commissioners to create a harbour development plan. Construction of their first sea wall — essentially a rescue mission for the trashed harbour — began in 1867. A better-funded effort took off in 1878, and construction continued in stages over the next four decades. Though longevity was not at the forefront of the undertaking, the wall still stands — long outlasting what anyone could have expected. And to some experts, this is worrisome. “I would suggest that San Francisco has triple jeopardy,” King said: earthquakes, sea level rise and aged infrastructure. Until now, the wall has mostly worked, though barely. In the 1906 earthquake, the sea wall shifted into the Bay, crumpling streetcar tracks, rupturing pipes and destroying homes. Entire stretches of street slid sideways; other portions dropped a couple of feet. In today’s city, a similar disaster would be even worse. In 1989, the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake liquefied sections of soil, most notably in the Marina District, where terrible fires broke out. Along the Embarcadero, the sea wall cracked. Some of its construction joints split open. “We had a huge fissure out here,” recalled Mac Leibert, 51, general manager of Pier 23 Cafe Restaurant & Bar, gesturing to the Embarcadero roadway outside of the squat blue-and-white cafe. The epicentre of Loma Prieta was 60 miles southeast of San Francisco. The effects of its shaking in the city were tempered by its distance. Next time, San Francisco might not be so lucky. Despite impending bleak scenarios, steps to a safer, more secure future along the waterfront have started to become visible. Ahead lies the difficult work of balancing design solutions, an unknown future and budget constraints — all against the backdrop of the fast-ticking clock. Seismically shoring up the sea wall is first on the port’s list of projects. This means retrofitting bulkhead wharves and walls by reinforcing piles, joints, and decks, and strengthening the fill so it will not liquefy. It also involves working with emergency medical workers and emergency responders to understand how their capabilities might be affected by an earthquake. Right now, the port is in “the creative phase,” developing its first adaptation plans, which will be revealed in the fall. The measures will not be restricted to seismic risks. According to the port’s Waterfront Resilience Program director, Brad Benson, “It’s better to build once to solve multiple problems.” Making seismically fortified structures resilient to rising seas is not as simple as raising the wall’s height. Generally speaking, most sea wall infrastructure has, until now, been designed to weather an isolated storm, allowing time to repair before the next one. Going forward, sea walls will need to provide protection not just several days a year, but twice daily, at increasingly elevated high tides. Infrastructure design will have to account for this increased stress, and even more so in seismic zones, says Mark Stacey, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “The seismic aspect has to be really robust, and probably some redundancies or over design,” he explained. “Because earthquakes will coincide with those flood protection systems being active.” While much of the San Francisco Bay is suited to marshes or other green infrastructure as flood control, the Embarcadero nearshore waters are generally too deep for such strategies. Certain ecological interventions, like a textured sea wall to encourage marine life, could provide critical habitat but will not benefit seismic or flooding mitigation strategies. However structures are seismically strengthened, the ability to adjust them will be built in. Because the sea wall material, the mud and fill underneath, and the infrastructure adjacent vary along the waterfront, so will strengthening and adaptation techniques. “It can’t just be, let’s elevate 3 feet so that we can’t flood in this particular area,” King said. “It’s got to be, what is the future state of this environment, and what is the population going to need? You have to build in the adaptive capacity to change as the environment changes.” The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission recently permitted a levee upgrade project in nearby Foster City that exemplifies how adaptation over time could play out. Every five years, the city will evaluate the physical structures and updated federal and regional guidance. If necessary, it will perform a new risk assessment, potentially adjusting structures. The looming question over any discussion is how to pay for these projects. The sea wall project is estimated at $5 billion, and it is only one of many port projects addressing waterfront resiliency. But it is a price tag that will be paid over 30 years, and funding options look better now than they have recently. The successes of public-private partnerships in existing waterfront projects bode well for future work. California’s state budget surplus just yielded a proposed $11.8 billion to address climate risks, with $211.5 million allocated to coastal resiliency. The Biden administration recently announced expanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities programme, which provides preemptive hazard mitigation funding. All these options are positive developments in the United States, where funding is typically not allocated until after the disaster: Think of the FEMA and HUD money after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. “This really separates us from other places, doing upfront planning,” said Brian Strong, San Francisco’s capital planning director and chief resilience officer. “It’s very hard to get the money before the disaster happens, to be proactive about it.” Strong’s remarks come just months after his city weathered other simultaneous disasters: COVID-19, noxious air quality, extreme heat. The surplus budget enabling climate funding happened in part because the pandemic did not sink the economy as severely as projected. According to California Assembly member Al Muratsuchi, chair of the Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change Policies, now could be “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to invest in climate crisis preparedness. After shepherding his city through the challenges of the past year and culling lessons about disaster response along the way, Strong is sanguine, if sober, about San Francisco’s ability to be prepared for what comes next. “We really don’t have a choice,” he says. “It’s impossible to solve everything in a few years. We’re taking a long-term view.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"SYDNEY, Dec 24(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - An ancient underground water basin the size of Libya holds the key to Australia avoiding a water crisis as climate change bites the drought-hit nation. Australia's Great Artesian Basin is one of the largest artesian groundwater basins in the world, covering 1.7 million sq km and lying beneath one-fifth of Australia. The basin holds 65 million gigalitres of water, about 820 times the amount of surface water in Australia, and enough to cover the Earth's land mass under half a metre of water, says the Great Artesian Basin Coordinating Committee. And it is slowly topped up with 1 million megalitres a year as rain filters through porous sandstone rock, becoming trapped in the underground basin. ""There is probably enough water in there to last Australia's needs for 1,500 years, if we wanted to use it all,"" says John Hillier, a hydrogeologist who has just completed the Great Artesian Basin Resource Study. But he and other experts warn that access to the basin's water supply is under threat from declining artesian pressure, which forces the water to the surface via bores and springs. If artesian pressure falls too far, due to excessive extraction of water, the ancient water source will be unreachable, except through costly pumping. Lying as much as two km below ground, some parts of the basin are 3 km deep from top to bottom. The basin was formed between 100 and 250 million years ago and consists of alternating layers of waterbearing sandstone aquifers and non-waterbearing siltstones and mudstones. Basin water is extracted through bores and is the only source of water for mining, tourism and grazing in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia states, and the Northern Territory. The underground water spawns A$3.5 billion (US$2.4 billion) worth of production a year from farming, mining and tourism, says the Great Artesian Basin Coordinating Committee. The mining and petroleum industry extracts 31,000 megalitres of basin water a year, which is used in production or pumped out as a by-product of mining, and is vital for future expansion. Mining giant BHP-Billiton draws about 11,680 megalitres a year from the basin to operate its Olympic Dam gold, copper and uranium mine in South Australia. It would treble water usage under a plan to double production, with the extra water drawn from the basin and a new desalination plant. Swiss-based miner Xstrata Plc is looking at the basin as a water source for what would be Australia's biggest open cut thermal coal mine, at Wandoan in Queensland, which would supply 20 million tonnes a year, with a mine life of 30 years. But the pastoral industry is by far the biggest user, taking 500,000 megalitres a year to water some of Australia's most productive farmlands. Angus Emmott runs a cattle property called Moonbah in central Queensland and relies on basin water in times of drought. ""The bores underpin the social and economic value of this huge inland area of Australia where there wasn't permanent fresh water,"" said Emmott. ""With climate change, we will be more reliant on the Great Artesian Basin, so we're morally obliged to make the best use of that water...so we don't waste it."" BASIN WATER THREATENED Since it was first tapped in 1878, an estimated 87 million megalitres has been extracted and up to 90 percent of it wasted. As a result of falling water pressure, more than 1,000 natural springs have been lost and one-third of the original artesian bores have ceased flowing. The extraction of ancient basin water into the atmosphere also contributes to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, releasing 330,000 tonnes of CO2 annually. A 15-year Great Artesian Basin Sustainability project started in 1990 aims to protect the water supply and the hydraulic pressure necessary to access it. Today, there are still some 3,000 bores which pour water into 34,000 km of open bore drains, with 90 percent of the water evaporating in the outback heat. But more than 1,052 bores have now been controlled and tens of thousands of kilometres of open drains removed and pipelines laid, saving 272 gigalitres of water a year. Farmers are now fencing off bores and using mobile telephone, satellite and computer imaging technology to control livestock access to bores and control bore flows. ""Bores and springs that had previously ceased to flow have begun to flow again. It's a huge change to land management and has allowed better pasture and stock management,"" said Emmott. ""With the capping and piping programme you don't get the bogging of domestic animals, you don't get the maintenance cost of drains and you don't get soil salination,"" he said. SUSTAINABLE USAGE Farmers and scientists say it is crucial that more work is done to avoid a water crisis in the Great Artesian Basin as there will be greater demand on basin water in the future. ""It is absolutely crucial for the existence of communities that it is looked after,"" said Emmott. ""We realise there is a lot there, but we need to look after it very carefully because it needs such a huge time for recharge that if we lose it now it will not recharge in human lifetimes."" A A$17 million long-term sustainability report on the Great Artesian Basin announced this month will look at how to ensure water for future mining, pastoral and environmental development. The global commodities boom in recent years has seen mining activity over the basin increase dramatically and authorities expect the mining industry's extraction will continue to rise. ""An expansion in exploration and mining activities in the area will place increased demands on securing groundwater allocations for economic development,"" said Andy Love, from Flinders University in Adelaide, who will lead the study. ""Clearly a balance between development and environmental protection needs to be achieved. However, this is not possible without increased knowledge about the amount of groundwater that can be safely extracted,"" said Love. ",0
"The UNHCR estimated that more than 85,000
people had fled into neighbouring Chad in recent days, while at least 15,000
people had been forced to seek shelter within Cameroon. ""Indications are that displacement into
Chad has accelerated,"" UNHCR spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh told
reporters, adding that the agency and humanitarian partners were rushing to
deliver life-saving assistance. Forty-four people have been killed in the
fighting and 111 injured, Saltmarsh said. Chad is home to nearly a million
refugees and internally displaced people. The vast majority of new arrivals into Chad
were children, and 98% of the adults were women, Saltmarsh said, adding that
refugees ""are in dire need of shelter, blankets, mats and hygienic
kits"". The clashes broke out in early December after
disputes between herders, fishermen and farmers over dwindling water resources,
the agency said, adding that climate change is exacerbating a competition for
resources, especially water. ""The surface of Lake Chad has decreased
by as much as 95% in the past 60 years,"" Saltmarsh said. ""We're
calling for support from the international community to assist the forcibly
displaced.""",0
"The decree's main target is former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan that required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015. The so-called ""Energy Independence"" order also reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, undoes rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduces the weight of climate change and carbon emissions in policy and infrastructure permitting decisions. ""I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations,"" Trump said at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, speaking on a stage lined with coal miners. The wide-ranging order is the boldest yet in Trump’s broader push to cut environmental regulation to revive the drilling and mining industries, a promise he made repeatedly during the presidential campaign. But energy analysts and executives have questioned whether the moves will have a big effect on their industries, and environmentalists have called them reckless. ""I cannot tell you how many jobs the executive order is going to create but I can tell you that it provides confidence in this administration’s commitment to the coal industry,"" Kentucky Coal Association president Tyler White told Reuters. Trump signed the order with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence by his side. US presidents have aimed to reduce US dependence on foreign oil since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, which triggered soaring prices. But the United States still imports about 7.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, almost enough meet total oil demand in Japan and India combined. While Trump's administration has said reducing environmental regulation will create jobs, some green groups have countered that rules supporting clean energy have done the same. The number of jobs in the US wind power industry rose 32 percent last year while solar power jobs rose by 25 percent, according to a Department of Energy study. 'Assault on American values' Environmental groups hurled scorn on Trump's order, arguing it is dangerous and goes against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies. ""These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American,"" said billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, the head of activist group NextGen Climate. Green group Earthjustice was one of many organizations that said it will fight the order both in and out of court. ""This order ignores the law and scientific reality,"" said its president, Trip Van Noppen. An overwhelming majority of scientists believe that human use of oil and coal for energy is a main driver of climate change, causing a damaging rise in sea levels, droughts, and more frequent violent storms. But Trump and several members of his administration have doubts about climate change, and Trump promised during his campaign to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, arguing it would hurt US business. Since being elected Trump has been mum on the Paris deal and the executive order does not address it. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change who helped broker the Paris accord, lamented Trump's order. ""Trying to make fossil fuels remain competitive in the face of a booming clean renewable power sector, with the clean air and plentiful jobs it continues to generate, is going against the flow of economics,"" she said. The order will direct the EPA to start a formal ""review"" process to undo the Clean Power Plan, which was introduced by Obama in 2014 but was never implemented in part because of legal challenges brought by Republican-controlled states. The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Some 85 percent of US states are on track to meet the targets despite the fact the rule has not been implemented, according to Bill Becker, director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of state and local air pollution control agencies. Trump’s order also lifts the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management's temporary ban on coal leasing on federal property put in place by Obama in 2016 as part of a review to study the program's impact on climate change and ensure royalty revenues were fair to taxpayers. It also asks federal agencies to discount the cost of carbon in policy decisions and the weight of climate change considerations in infrastructure permitting, and reverses rules limiting methane leakage from oil and gas facilities.",1
"Heckling is something Trudeau has always faced, but this time the attacks have new bite. After six years in office, a prime minister who promised “sunny ways” and presented himself as a new face is now the political establishment, with a track record and missteps for opponents to criticise. Even if the Liberal Party clings to its hold on Parliament, as observers expect, this bruising election campaign has done him no favors. Ben Chin, the prime minister’s senior adviser, said that no politician could have sustained Trudeau’s initial popularity. “If you’re in power for six years or five years, you’re going to have more baggage,” Chin said. “You have to make tough decisions that not everybody’s going to agree with.” For much of his time in office, opposition party leaders have accused Trudeau of putting his personal and political interests before the nation’s good — of which the snap election being held Monday is the most recent example. They also have had rich material to attack him on over controversies involving a contract for a charity close to his family, and a finding that he broke ethics laws by pressing a minister to help a large Quebec company avoid criminal sanctions. And for every accomplishment Trudeau cites, his opponents can point to unfulfilled pledges. Anti-vax protesters have thronged his events, some with signs promoting the far-right People’s Party of Canada, prompting his security detail to increase precautions. One rally in Ontario where protesters significantly outnumbered the police was shut down over safety concerns, and at another in the same province, the prime minister was pelted with gravel as he boarded his campaign bus. A local official of the People’s Party later faced charges in that episode of assault with a weapon. Trudeau has many achievements since 2015 to point to. His government has introduced carbon pricing and other climate measures, legalized cannabis, increased spending for Indigenous issues and made 1,500 models of military-style rifles illegal. A new plan will provide day care for 10 Canadian dollars a day per child. Although his popularity has diminished, Trudeau’s star power remains. When he dropped by the outdoor terrace of a cafe in Port Coquitlam, an eastern suburb of Vancouver, for elbow bumps, quick chats and selfies with voters, a crowd soon swelled. “We love you, we love you,” Joy Silver, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher from nearby Coquitlam, told Trudeau. But as Election Day nears, many Canadians are still asking why Trudeau is holding a vote now, two years ahead of schedule, with COVID-19 infections on the rise from the delta variant, taxing hospitals and prompting renewed pandemic restrictions in some provinces or delaying their lifting in others. Also criticized was that he called the vote the same weekend Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, when Canadian troops were struggling to evacuate Canadians as well as Afghans who had assisted their forces. “They’ve been struggling with answering that question the whole campaign,” said Gerald Butts, a longtime friend of Trudeau’s and a former top political adviser. “And that’s part of why they’re having trouble getting the message across.” Trudeau has said that he needs to replace his plurality in the House of Commons with a majority to deal with the remainder of the pandemic and the recovery that will follow — although he avoids explicitly saying “majority.” The Liberal Party’s political calculation was that it was best to strike while Canadians still held favorable views about how Trudeau handled pandemic issues, particularly income supports and buying vaccines. “We’re the party with the experience, the team and the plan to continue delivering real results for Canadians, the party with a real commitment to ending this pandemic,” Trudeau said at a rally in Surrey, another Vancouver suburb, standing in front of campaign signs for candidates from the surrounding area. “Above all, my friends, if you want to end this pandemic for good, go out and vote Liberal.” During much of the 36-day campaign, the Liberals have been stuck in a statistical tie with the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Erin O’Toole, each holding about 30% of the popular vote. The New Democrats, a left-of-center party led by Jagmeet Singh, lies well behind at about 20 percent. Kimberly Speers, a political scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said that Trudeau’s personality and celebrity may be working against him. “The messaging, from the NDP and the Conservatives especially, is that it’s a power grab and it’s all about him,” she said. “And that message has just really seemed to stick with voters.” Some scandals during Trudeau’s tenure have helped the opposition, too. In 2019, Trudeau’s veterans affairs minister, an Indigenous woman, quit amid allegations that when she was justice minister, he and his staff had improperly pressured her to strike a deal that would have allowed a large Canadian corporation to avoid a criminal conviction on corruption charges. Despite his championing of diversity, it emerged during the 2019 election that Trudeau had worn blackface or brownface three times in the past. And last year a charity with deep connections to his family was awarded a no-bid contract to administer a COVID-19 financial assistance plan for students. (The group withdrew, the program was canceled, and Trudeau was cleared by the federal ethics and conflict of interest commissioner.) His opponents have also focused on promises they say he has fallen short on, including introducing a national prescription drug program, creating a new electoral structure for Canada, lowering debt relative to the size of the economy, and ending widespread sexual harassment in the military and solitary confinement in federal prisons. The Center for Public Policy Analysis at Laval University in Quebec City found that Trudeau has fully kept about 45 percent of his promises, while 27 percent were partly fulfilled. Singh has been reminding voters that Trudeau vowed to bring clean drinking water to all Indigenous communities. There were 105 boil-water orders in effect at First Nations when Trudeau took power, with others added later. The government has restored clean water to 109 communities, but 52 boil-water orders remain. “I think Mr Trudeau may care, I think he cares, but the reality is that he’s often done a lot of things for show and hasn’t backed those up with real action,” Singh said during the official English-language debate. O’Toole, for his part, has sought to portray the vote as an act of personal aggrandisement. “Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives: privileged, entitled and always looking out for No 1,” he said at a recent event in rural Ottawa. “He was looking out for No 1 when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic.” Security and secrecy have increased at Trudeau’s campaign stops after several of them were disrupted by protesters angry about mandatory COVID-19 vaccination rules and vaccine passport measures that the prime minister has imposed. At the rally outside a banquet hall in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, Trudeau, sleeves rolled up and microphone in hand, gave an energetic speech before diving into a mostly South Asian crowd eager to pose for pictures with him. In a change from previous practice, the crowd had been gathered by invitation rather than by public announcement, partly to keep its size within pandemic limits, and no signs promoted the event on the formidable gate to the remote location. Up on the hall’s roof, two police snipers in camouflage surveyed the scene. After an earlier rally in Ontario was canceled, Trudeau was asked if U.S. politics had inspired the unruly protests. His answer was indirect. “I think we all need to reflect on whether we do want to go down that path of anger, of division, of intolerance,” he said. “I’ve never seen this intensity of anger on the campaign trail or in Canada.” Translating wider poll results into precise predictions of how many seats the parties will hold in the next House of Commons is not possible. But all of the current polling suggests that Trudeau may have alienated many Canadians with an early election call and endured abuse while campaigning, for no political gain. The most likely outcome is that the Liberals will continue to hold power but not gain the majority he sought. If that proves to be the case, Butts said, “it’s going to end up pretty close to where we left off, which is a great irony.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",4
" Southeast Asian nations are battling a surge in dengue cases, amid signs that climate change could make 2007 the worst year on record for a disease that often gets less attention than some higher-profile health risks. The spread of dengue, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito and is endemic in much of the region, has also accelerated in recent years due to increasing urbanisation and travel or migration within the region, experts say. Efforts to develop a vaccine are proving difficult because dengue can be caused by four viruses. So the only real method to fight the disease at present is to eliminate likely breeding spots for mosquitoes from discarded tires to plant pots. ""The threat of dengue is increasing because of global warming, mosquitoes are becoming more active year by year and their geographical reach is expanding both north and south of the Equator,"" said Lo Wing-lok, an expert in infectious diseases. ""Even Singapore, which is so affluent and modern, can't exercise adequate control,"" Hong Kong-based Lo added. Dengue cases in Hong Kong usually involve people returning from hotter parts of Asia, but Lo warned that warmer temperatures meant the disease could ultimately become endemic in southern China. Dengue sufferers often describe the onset of high fever, nausea and intense joint pain. There is no real treatment, apart from rest and rehydration, and in severe cases it can be fatal. In Indonesia, where concerns over bird flu more frequently grab headlines, dengue saw a dramatic peak earlier this year after much of the Jakarta area was flooded. ""It's not so much the rise in temperature that affects dengue, rather the rising rainfall has lengthened the lifespan of the epidemic each season,"" said Wiku Adisasmito, a dengue expert at the University of Indonesia. The Asian Development Bank developed a model suggesting that dengue might rise three-fold in Indonesia due to climate change. By last month there had been 68,636 cases and 748 deaths so far this year, according to Health Ministry data. Although cases are slowing at the end of the wet season, experts warn that 2006's record 106,425 cases could easily be overtaken. The record number of deaths was 1,298 in 2005. ANTI-DENGUE CAMPAIGNS The picture looks similar in neighboring countries. Thailand had more than 11,000 cases of dengue fever and 14 deaths by this month, up 18 percent from the same period of 2006. In May, the worst month, 3,649 people were found with dengue. Most patients were between 10-24 years old, Deputy Public Health Minister Morakot Kornkasem said in a statement. The number of dengue cases in Singapore last month was nearly three times that in the same period a year ago, according to the government, which says warmer weather was partly to blame. The surge in cases has prompted the government to step up its anti-dengue campaign, urging Singaporeans to clear roofs and gutters, and throw out stale water in containers. Between May 20 and 26, there were 259 dengue cases according to the Straits Times newspaper, the highest weekly figure this year, but below the weekly record of 714 cases in September 2005. In Malaysia, 48 people died from dengue during the first five months of the year, health officials said, up roughly 71 percent from 2006. By May 26, 20,658 people had caught the disease, a surge of 55 percent over the corresponding 2006 figure. ""We are concerned over the increase and we need everyone to cooperate with the authorities to fight the menace,"" Health Ministry official Hasan Abdul Rahman told the New Straits Times recently. Prevailing weather patterns of hot days punctuated by a day of rain have worsened the problem. ""There is no medicine to cure dengue fever, so the only treatment is to have a lot of electrolytes,"" said Noranita Badrun, a Kuala Lumpur resident whose daughter, Nurin Syakilah, spent a week in hospital in April battling the disease. If not diagnosed early, dengue can kill, but Nurin, who received 18 bottles of intravenous fluids during her hospital stay, recovered soon and is back at school, where two other students also had the disease, Noranita said.",0
"“Indian Ocean has remained at the centre of interest to the major players of the world because of its strategic location and natural resources,” AH Mahmood Ali said on Friday, speaking at a conference on the Indian Ocean in Singapore. India Foundation, in collaboration with the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS), Institute of Policy Studies Sri Lanka and S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore, organised the conference, the foreign ministry said. Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan inaugurated the conference which brought together ministers, senior civil and military bureaucrats, diplomats, academicians, researchers and civil societies of the countries along the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean region has emerged as the most prominent global economic highway with 66 percent of the world’s oil shipments, 33 percent of its bulk cargo and 50 percent of the world’s container traffic passing through its waters. 
 
 

The oil arteries of the world flow through the Indian Ocean, the foreign minister said.   “It is not only trade and economy, competition among some of the major powers in securing visible and credible presence in the Indian Ocean has shaped the dynamics of the Indian Ocean region,” he said. “We see growing interests among countries in the region to develop new infrastructures in the Indian Ocean. Countries also seek to build, expand and strengthen their naval infrastructures in the Indian Ocean. “Overlapping territorial claims and disputes have added new dimension to this evolving security scenario,” he said. Ali noted that countries in Asia and the Pacific are four times more likely to be affected by a natural catastrophe than those in Africa, and 25 times more vulnerable than Europe and North America. The climate change impacts and resultant sea level rise have further enhanced the risks and vulnerabilities of the Indian Ocean countries. A variety of security threats is posing danger to maritime peace and stability. Piracy continues to remain as one of the most worrisome maritime security challenges to date, the foreign minister observed. 
 
 

Maritime terrorism has also surfaced as an omnipresent global and regional threat. Human trafficking and drug smuggling are the twin issues that have lately re-captured global attention.   “It, however, requires strong commitment from all the nations of the Indian Ocean region and beyond towards achieving this shared objective,” he said. “We must follow the path of cooperation and collaboration, not competition and conflict in tapping the full potentials of the Indian Ocean.” Former president of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom delivered the keynote address at the session. The session proposed to organise a summit level conference, engaging governments, academicians, civil society and private sectors to find out a “common approach” for cooperation to respond the challenges. The foreign minister said the maritime disputes including the overlapping territorial claims need to be resolved through “peaceful” means. He referred to Bangladesh’s steps in settling the maritime problems with the neighbours -- India and Myanmar. 
 
 

Ali meets Singapore minister, Indian state minister   According to the foreign ministry, Mahmood Ali also held meeting with his Singapore counterpart Balakrishnan on the sidelines and discussed issues of mutual interests and cooperation. Indian State Minister for External Affairs MJ Akbar also called on him. Balakrishnan appreciated the “prompt and bold” actions taken by the Bangladesh government in tracking and eliminating the terrorists including the masterminds. Mahmood Ali briefed him on security, political and social measures adopted in combating terrorism and violent extremism in Bangladesh. During the meeting with MJ Akbar, both sides expressed satisfaction over the current pace of progress of bilateral relations and reaffirmed their commitment to further strengthening and expanding the relations. Akbar renewed India’s support to Bangladesh in fight against terrorism and violent extremism. He conveyed that the prime minister of India is certain in two aspects, as far as Bangladesh is concerned -- Bangladesh has the absolute liberty to decide its own course of actions as an independent nation, and India attaches high importance to building equal partnership for development with Bangladesh. And this was particularly for the advancement of the marginalised and disadvantaged people, Akbar said.",1
"Back then, they desperately struggled to feed their families. Today, the collection of villages in Lalmonirhat district has a bustling marketplace, well-built homes with TVs inside and solar panels on the roofs, and thriving fields of a crop that pulled the community out of poverty: corn. ""Once I was landless and a rickshaw-puller,"" said Hasen Ali, 50, who spent more than two decades in the capital Dhaka scraping together an income before returning to his farm about five years ago. After failing to grow both rice and wheat on his land, Ali tried corn, also called maize, and now earns about 200,000 taka ($2,360) each season, he said. ""I restored my property and bought some new land by selling maize,"" he said, adding he now sends his children to school. Around Bangladesh's flood-prone north, farmers who can no longer grow their regular crops in the sandy soil after flood waters recede are turning to corn, which needs less water and brings in more money than most other staple crops here. ""No other crop is better and more profitable than maize cultivation in sandy land,"" said Romij Uddin, an agronomy professor at Bangladesh Agricultural University. Maize is currently grown on more than 101,300 hectares in the northern region, which produces one-third of the national supply, according to government figures. This fiscal year, which ends in June, farmers who a decade ago grew rice, tobacco and wheat have produced a record 1 million tonnes of the grain. As the impacts of climate change drive more frequent and devastating floods in the north, agriculture expert Mahfuzul Haque said maize can help farmers adapt and prosper. ""Its root can go as deep as 6 feet (1.83 m) to absorb water... Paddy (rice) roots can go only down six inches in sandy soil,"" said Haque, senior scientific officer at the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute. And the ""huge demand"" in Bangladesh for corn - used to make everything from poultry feed to sugar and paper - means it is more profitable than rice or wheat, he said. Farmers can earn up to 850 taka for about 40 kg (88 pounds) of corn, about 15% more than they would earn growing rice and 40% more than wheat, said Rafiqul Islam, an agriculture officer in Hatibandha upazila, where Shaniazan is located. ALL-YEAR WORK Ataur Rahman, who teaches water resources engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said riverbank erosion and flooding were becoming increasingly common problems in northern Bangladesh. Rising global temperatures melt glaciers in the Hindu Kush mountains, causing more water to surge through major rivers downstream, which brings large amounts of sand, he explained. ""Heavy rainfall also creates floods in the monsoon season, and when the water recedes after flooding, the cultivable land is filled with sand,"" he added. Farmer Abdul Latif Talukdar, 62, recalled the impact of the flooding in Shaniazan three decades ago, when the Teesta river overflowed and then changed course a few years later. The villagers got their land back but could not grow anything on it, he said. He and some other local farmers decided to experiment with maize, after consulting a local agriculture officer. Following the first few attempts, which involved switching to higher-quality seeds and fertiliser, they produced a decent yield, he said. ""We were very happy to know that something was being cultivated in this sandy land and it would alleviate our poverty,"" Latif Talukdar said. By 1997, having borrowed 300,000 taka from the Agricultural Development Bank, the farmers were cultivating about 400 kg of maize on one acre of land. A year later, the same plot yielded nearly four times as much, the farmer said. Today, Shaniazan's farmers produce so much corn they generate enough work to last the entire year, according to Abdus Sabur, who buys their harvest to sell to poultry feed companies. Workers keep busy preparing fields, weeding, irrigating, collecting and drying the cultivated grain. ""No one is unemployed here,"" he said. GOVERNMENT BACKING With training, financial assistance and incentives, the government is encouraging farmers all over Bangladesh to grow corn in a bid to move away from thirstier crops and meet demand, said MD Moniruzzaman, regional deputy director at the Department of Agriculture Extension. Even with more than 3.8 million tonnes of maize being produced, the country will still need to import 2 million tonnes of corn this financial year, he added. Agriculture Minister Mohammad Abdur Razzaque said the number of farmers starting to grow corn is ""increasing day by day"". ""If we can properly utilise sandy land for maize cultivation, then we would be able to get extra maize for export within five years,"" he said in a phone interview. In Shaniazan, Abuja Mia, 50, remembers barely getting by as a day labourer until about seven years ago, when he used all his savings to lease a piece of land to grow maize. Since then, he has bought three acres of land and grows corn on two of them, last year earning 140,000 taka. Now he has a new motorcycle, a satellite TV connection and solar panel on his roof, and makes enough to send his son and daughter to school. Before growing corn, ""I had to struggle very hard to maintain my family. I couldn't even ensure three meals a day for them. My children's education was only a dream,"" he said. ""But maize cultivation has ended my struggle and made my dream come true.""",0
"Governments agreed in Poland that a new deal in 2015 would consist of a patchwork of national contributions to curb emissions that could blur a 20-year-old distinction between the obligations of rich and poor nations.The two-week meeting also created a Warsaw International Mechanism to help the poor cope with loss and damage from heatwaves, droughts, floods, desertification and rising sea levels - although rich nations refused to pledge new cash.Many said Warsaw had fallen short of what was needed.""We did not achieve a meaningful outcome,"" said Naderev Sano, a Philippines delegate who had been fasting throughout the talks to urge action in sympathy with victims of Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 5,000 people.No major nation offered tougher action to slow rising world greenhouse gas emissions and Japan backtracked from its carbon goals for 2020, after shutting down its nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster.GREEN PROTESTEnvironmentalists walked out on Thursday, exasperated by lack of progress. Rich nations are preoccupied with reviving their weak economies rather than climate change.""It is abundantly clear that we still have a long way to go,"" said Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief.Negotiators were on course for a 2015 summit in Paris but not on track for limiting global warming to an agreed ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times to avoid dangerous change, she said.In September, the UN panel of climate experts raised the probability that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, were the main cause of warming since 1950 to 95 percent, from 90 in a previous assessment.Delegates in Warsaw agreed that a new global deal, due to be struck in Paris in 2015 and to enter into force from 2020, would be made up of what they called ""intended nationally determined contributions"" from both rich and poor nations.Until now, rich nations that have emitted most greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution have been expected to take the lead with ""commitments"" to cut emissions while the poor have been granted less stringent ""actions"".""In the old system you had this firewall between commitments and actions, now there is one word for all,"" European Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said. ""There are many ways to Paris that would be more beautiful and faster.""But developing nations said the rich still needed to lead. ""In my understanding the firewall exists and will continue to exist,"" India's Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said.Either way, US climate envoy Todd Stern said there would be no coercion. ""It is not like someone is going to stand over you with a club and tell you what to do,"" he said.The Warsaw deal called on those nations able to do so to put forward their plans for curbs on emissions by the first quarter of 2015 to give time for a review before a summit in Paris at the end of the year.Under the last climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, only the most developed countries were required to limit their emissions - one of the main reasons the United States refused to accept it, saying rapidly growing economies like China and India should also take part.Until Saturday, the only concrete measure to have emerged in Warsaw was an agreement on new rules to protect tropical forests, which soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.Developed nations, which promised in 2009 to raise aid to $100 billion a year after 2020 from $10 billion a year in 2010-12, rejected calls to set targets for 2013-19.A draft text merely urged developed nations to set ""increasing levels"" of aid.",0
" Backers of extreme technologies to curb global warming advocate dumping iron dust into the seas or placing smoke and mirrors in the sky to dim the sun. But, even though they are seen by some as cheap fixes for climate change when many nations are worried about economic recession, such ""geo-engineering"" proposals have to overcome wide criticism that they are fanciful and could have unforeseen side effects. ""We are at the boundaries, treading in areas that we are not normally dealing with,"" said Rene Coenen, head of the Office for the London Convention, an international organization that regulates dumping at sea. The London Convention, part of the International Maritime Organization, will review ocean fertilization at a meeting this week. Among those hoping for approval for tests is Margaret Leinin, chief science officer of California-based Climos, a company that is looking at ways to use the oceans to soak up greenhouse gases. ""The world has not been able to get carbon emissions under control"" Leinin said. ""We should look at other options."" Climos is seeking to raise money to test adding iron dust to the southern ocean to spur growth of algae that grow by absorbing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air. When algae die, they fall to the seabed and so remove carbon. Other short-cut ideas include spraying a smoke of tiny particles of pollutants into the sky to dim sunlight, or even deploying a vast thin metallic barrier in space, with 100 space shuttle flights, to deflect the sun's rays. ""CHEMICAL SOUP"" The U.N. Climate Panel has said world greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, rose 70 percent between 1970 and 2004. But it said that fertilizing the oceans or dimming the sun ""remain largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side-effects."" ""More evidence has been coming in since then, but it's far from making a reliable case for geo-engineering,"" said Terry Barker, head of the Cambridge Center for Climate Change Mitigation Research and one of the leading authors of the U.N. panel report. The seas are already suffering enough from a ""chemical soup"" of pollution from humans, he said. ""There's no need to add to the mess."" With fears of recession and amid the deepest financial crisis since the 1930s, some governments may find cheap geo-engineering attractive compared with reducing carbon emissions. ""It would be shortsighted,"" Baker said. Last year, the London Convention said that ""knowledge about the effectiveness and potential environmental impacts of ocean iron fertilization currently was insufficient to justify large-scale operations."" Those doubts were ""still valid,"" the Convention's Coenen said. Firms such as Australia's Ocean Nourishment, Atmocean in New Mexico and Climos are working on varying sea-based projects. Another start-up, Planktos, indefinitely suspended operations in February after failing to raise cash. Some like Climos hope that sucking carbon into the ocean, if it works, could qualify for credits as carbon trading. ""It is possible to design experiments to avoid harm to the oceans,"" said Leinin. Climos wants to test iron fertilization in the southern ocean, at the earliest in January 2010 in a test that could $15-20 million, she said. If it works, Leinin said it could be one of the cheapest ways to combat global warming. LESSER RISK Among objections are that carbon makes water more acidic and could undermine the ability of shellfish, crabs or lobsters to build shells. That in turn could disrupt the marine food chain. Backers of geo-engineering say the risks are slight compared to far bigger disruptions from climate change, stoked by human emissions of greenhouse gases, which could lead to heatwaves, floods, droughts, more disease or rising seas. ""We are already bludgeoning nature,"" said Victor Smetacek, a professor at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, who is planning an iron sulphate fertilization experiment off Antarctica in early 2009. His institute will cooperate with India to disperse 20 tonnes of iron sulphate near South Georgia over 300 sq kms (115 sq miles). ""Iron has a very positive effect. Added to the ocean it's like water in the desert,"" he said. ""We don't have space to store the carbon we are producing on land,"" he said of proposals including planting more forests. They will study how far algae grow and absorb carbon. The extra algae, as food, might help a recovery of stocks of shrimp-like krill, a species on which penguins and whales depend. Among other schemes, Nobel chemistry prize winner Paul Crutzen has floated the idea of blitzing the upper atmosphere with sulfur particles to reflect some sunlight back into space. ""The price is not a factor...it's peanuts,"" he told Reuters in Nicosia earlier this month. ""The cost has been estimated at some 10, 20 million U.S. dollars a year."" Similar smoke is released naturally by volcanic eruptions, such as Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 or Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. The Indonesia eruption led to a ""year without a summer,"" according to reports at the time. Other proposals reviewed by the U.N. Climate Panel include installing a metallic screen covering a 106 sq km (40.93 sq mile) patch of space 1.5 million kms (930,000 miles) away from earth in the direction of the sun. The 3,000-tonne structure could be put in place over 100 years by 100 space shuttle flights. ""The cost has yet to be determined,"" the panel said. Another idea is to spew more sea spray into the air -- a natural process caused by waves. The plan would make low-level clouds slightly whiter and bounce solar rays back into space. Advantages are that the only ingredient is sea water, and production could be turned off. But the U.N. panel said ""the meteorological ramifications need further study."" ",0
"LONDON Nov 25, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Cutting meat production and consumption by 30 percent would help to reduce carbon emissions and improve health in the most meat-loving nations, scientists said on Wednesday. Using prediction models, British and Australian researchers found that improving efficiency, increasing carbon capture and reducing fossil fuel dependence in farming would not be enough to meet emissions targets. But combining these steps with a 30 percent reduction in livestock production in major meat-producing nations and a similar cut in meat-eating, would lead to ""substantial population health benefits"" and cut emissions, they said. The study found that in Britain, a 30 percent lower intake of animal-source saturated fat by adults would reduce the number of premature deaths from heart disease by some 17 percent -- equivalent to 18,000 premature deaths averted in one year. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, it could mean as many as 1,000 premature deaths averted in a year, they said. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are from meat production and experts say rising demand for meat, particularly in countries with growing economies, could drive livestock production up by 85 percent from 2000 levels by 2030. The scientists said global action was needed to maximise the benefits of cutting meat production and consumption, and that the environmental advantages ""may apply only in those countries that currently have high production levels."" The study was published in The Lancet medical journal as part of a series in climate change and health ahead of the Copenhagen global climate summit scheduled next month. In a second study, British scientists found that increased walking and cycling, and fewer cars, would have a much greater impact on health than low-emission vehicles in rich and middle-income countries. Andrew Haines, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and head of the research series, said delegates at Copenhagen needed ""to understand the potential health impacts of their plans"".",0
"WASHINGTON, Wed Sep 24, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A US Senate panel voted on Tuesday to approve the US-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement without a controversial proposal that would give Congress more influence over future deals. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 19-2 in favor of the deal, which would end the three-decade ban on US nuclear trade with India and is seen by the White House as the cornerstone of a new strategic partnership with New Delhi. Critics believe the deal undermines efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and sets a precedent allowing other nations to seek to buy nuclear technology without submitting to the full range of global nonproliferation safeguards. The bill text approved did not include language advocated by an influential congressman to give the US Congress greater say over future such agreements. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman last week proposed changing US law so any future agreements would become effective only if Congress votes to approve them, sources familiar with the matter said. Such agreements now typically go into effect unless Congress rejects them during a 60-day period. As a result, the law is now tilted in favor of the agreements going through. Berman asked for the change in the Atomic Energy Act in exchange for speeding up a vote on the US-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement. The fuel and technology deal would help India meet rising energy demand without aggravating climate change and open a market worth billions of dollars. US lawmakers are racing to finish their work this week, including a massive Bush administration financial bailout plan for Wall Street, so they can campaign for the Nov. 4 election. It is unclear whether the measure can get passed during this week and, if it does, whether Berman's proposal may be included. House Foreign Affairs Committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil declined direct comment on the details of Berman's proposal, but stressed that he supported nuclear cooperation with India and was discussing ways to expedite approval of the deal. A senior US official who spoke on condition that he not be named said that the Bush administration was still in negotiations with members of Congress and hoped to assuage their concerns and to secure approval this year. ""I don't know where we are going to come out of this but certainly ... the spirit is positive and I think there is a chance we can come through this and win congressional approval in this session in a way that addresses many, if not all, of the concerns that have been raised,"" said the official.",0
"China aims to create a basic financial policy framework by
2030 to support green and low-carbon development, and will also aim to give
more play to market mechanisms like carbon and pollution discharge trading,
according to policy recommendations from the Ministry of Finance published late
on Monday. The world's biggest producer of climate warming greenhouse
gas has pledged to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030 and to become
fully carbon neutral by around 2060. It has already vowed to start cutting coal consumption from
2026 and bring wind and nearly double solar power capacity to 1,200 gigawatts
by the end of the decade. The new guidelines are aimed at creating ""a fiscal and
taxation policy system that promotes the efficient use of resources and green,
low-carbon development,"" the ministry quoted an unnamed official as
saying. The ministry also aims to build an ""incentive and
restraint mechanism"" to encourage green and low-carbon practices among
local governments, the official said. According to the recommendations, the tax system will be
adjusted to include more preferential policies encouraging energy and water
conservation as well as carbon emission cuts. Import tariffs should also be
adjusted to meet low-carbon development requirements, it said. As well as focusing on key sectors such as energy storage
and the shift to renewables, new financial tools will also be developed to help
transform the transportation sector and promote new energy vehicles, and
encourage recycling and the comprehensive use of resources. The ministry also said more financial policy support would
be given to the construction of carbon sinks, the protection of forests and
grasslands, as well as climate change adaptation.",0
"SYRACUSE, Italy, April 22(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Environment ministers from rich and poor nations discussed a green technology stimulus on Wednesday to help tackle global warming and overcome the global economic crisis. The three-day meeting of the Group of Eight industrial countries and major developing economies opened in Sicily, with attention focused on how far the new U.S. administration would go in its environmental strategy. The meeting, taking place on Earth Day, marked the first ministerial-level talks this year in negotiations toward a major U.N. deal on climate change, due to be signed in December in Copenhagen to replace the 1997 Kyoto agreement. ""Without leadership from the G8 countries an international response to climate change will not happen. This meeting needs to point the way,"" said Yvo de Boer, the United Nation's top climate change official. ""The new American administration is incredibly important to addressing this issue. Trying to come to a climate change agreement without the United States makes no sense."" U.S. President Barack Obama has already pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, reversing the policies of his predecessor George W. Bush, whose administration refused to sign up to Kyoto. Delegates said they were watching closely for any details of American plans for action. On Wednesday, the meeting discussed ways to reconcile the investment required to cut carbon emissions with the trillions of dollars being spent to stabilize financial markets. Many of the countries present, including the United States and China, have already pledged major investment in green technologies. Wednesday's talks focused on the most efficient ways to focus spending and the best means to promote green technologies in developing countries. ""This G8 aims to spread low-carbon technology in order to allow developing and emerging countries to follow the path to eco-friendly development hand in hand with Western countries,"" Italian Environment Minister Stefania Pestigiacomo said. For the first time, the G8 ministerial meeting included a broad spread of developing countries in the hope of forging a broader consensus, grouping China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, South Korea and Egypt. U.N.-sponsored talks in Germany this month exposed wide differences on emissions, with poor countries saying rich nations that earned their wealth from industrialization must act first and help pay for the cost of their carbon reduction. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has put the price of a ""green revolution"" to halve emissions by 2050 at $45 trillion. De Boer said he would hold talks with developed countries at Syracuse to discuss funding for green technology.",4
" A threat warning issued by the United States in Germany last month could involve attack plans by an al Qaeda-affiliated group of Kurdish militants, officials said on Friday. US and German authorities said, however, that there was no new threat in Germany beyond the official April 20 State Department warning. They were responding to a report by ABC News on its Web site on Friday that officials believe terrorists were in the advanced planning stages for an attack on US military personnel or tourists in Germany. In the April 20 warning, the US Embassy in Germany encouraged Americans in the country to increase their vigilance and take appropriate steps to bolster their personal security. ""We're unaware of anything new. We have not changed our force posture,"" a US defense official said on Friday. In Germany, the Interior Ministry said there had been no change in the security situation. ""There is nothing new,"" a spokesman for the ministry said. ""What we're looking at is the state of affairs that has been long since known. This caused the US authorities to publish a warning to their own citizens in Germany."" Counterterrorism officials in Europe and the United States have for weeks been investigating a suspected plot against US interests in the country, which will host a G8 summit of major industrialized countries next month. US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said recent intelligence reports suggested possible involvement by Kurdish Islamists from outside Germany. The group is believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda but not formally a part of the militant network led by Osama bin Laden, they said. They had no specific information about targets or timing. Some German media reports have suggested involvement by Iraqi militants. However, US officials rejected the notion of a role by Ansar al-Islam, a militant group of Iraqi Kurds and Arabs who have vowed to establish an independent Islamic state in Iraq. ""There is intelligence reporting suggesting there is a group interested in staging an attack, potentially in Germany,"" said a US official who asked not to be named because the issue involves classified information. ""The thinking is that this plot was beyond the talking stage, certainly,"" the official added. ""The concerns are real, but not new."" ABC News quoted German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as saying, ""The danger level is high. We are part of the global threat by Islamist terrorism."" The ABC report, quoting US and German law enforcement officials, said Patch Barracks, headquarters to the US military's European Command, could be a target following reports that suspected terrorists had conducted surveillance at the facility. An official with US European Command said there was no new intelligence strong enough to warrant heightened security at military facilities in Germany. ""The threat condition has not been raised,"" the official said. ""There's been no actionable intelligence."" German Chancellor Angela Merkel will host the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States at the June 6-8 summit, which will focus on climate change, African poverty and economic cooperation. Schaeuble has said border controls have been tightened ahead of the summit.",0
"Now, the
heat wave that has been pummeling India and Pakistan for weeks is expected to
intensify over the weekend. In some hard-hit areas, it may be weeks before the
region's annual monsoon sweeps in to provide relief. Heat-related
watches were in effect Thursday afternoon for all but a few of India’s 28
states, encompassing hundreds of millions of people and most of the country’s
major cities. An alert — one notch up in severity — was in effect for the
northwestern state of Rajasthan on Thursday and would come into effect for
other central and western states starting Saturday. The heat
wave poses health and logistical challenges for manual laborers, farmers,
firefighters, power engineers, government officials and others, particularly in
areas where air-conditioning is scarce. “Our
condition is not good,” said Sawadaram Bose, 48, a cumin and wheat farmer in
Rajasthan, where temperatures climbed to 112 degrees Fahrenheit this week. He and his
family are only leaving the house before 11 a.m. or after 5 pm, he said, and
never without a water bottle or head and face coverings. The
temperatures are well above normal. The
subcontinent’s scorching weather is a reminder of what lies in store for other
countries in an era of climate change. Climate scientists say that heat waves
around the world are growing more frequent, more dangerous and lasting longer.
They are certain that global warming has made heat waves worse because the
baseline temperatures from which they begin are higher than they were decades
ago. “Extreme
heat is obviously one of the hallmarks of our changing climate,” said Clare
Nullis, an official at the World Meteorological Organisation, a UN agency that
certifies weather records at the international level. It is too
early to say whether the current temperatures in India or Pakistan will lead to
any national-level weather records, she added. In India,
where forecasters said that March was the hottest month the country has
witnessed in over a century, the National Weather Forecasting Centre said this
week that temperatures in some states were 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more above
normal in some areas. The
heat-related watches in parts of southern and eastern India, where rain was in
the forecast, were expected to end within a day or two, authorities said. But
in a diagonal band stretching from Rajasthan in the northwest to Andhra Pradesh
in the southeast, the watches were expected to persist or be elevated into heat
alerts through Monday. The forecast
looked similar in most of neighboring Pakistan, where government forecasters
said this week that a high pressure system would likely keep temperatures above
normal through Monday. Pakistan’s
Meteorological Department also warned that in regions dotted with glaciers, the
heat could lead to so-called outburst floods, in which water spills from
glacial lakes into populated areas. In 2013, an outburst flood in the northern
Indian state of Uttarakhand led to flooding that destroyed villages and killed
several thousand people. In both
countries, the forecasts cited only temperature, not the heat index — a measure
that combines temperature and humidity and tends to give a more accurate
portrait of what extreme weather feels like. Dr Fusaram
Bishnoi in Barmer, an area of Rajasthan that has recorded some of India’s
highest temperatures this week, said he had seen a surge of patients arriving
with heat-related illnesses in recent days. That includes not only heat stroke,
he said, but also foodborne illnesses linked to the consumption of food that spoiled
in the heat. “We tell
people not to venture out during the day and to drink more, and more water,”
Bishnoi said. ‘Everything
is ready to burn.’ The extreme
heat poses a problem for agriculture, a primary source of income for hundreds
of millions of people across the subcontinent. In India, wheat farmers have
been saying for weeks that high temperatures were damaging their yields. The
Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip garden closed a week early this spring because
many bulbs had flowered and then died before an annual monthlong exhibition had
run its course. Bose, the
farmer who lives in the Barmer district of Rajasthan, said that about 15
percent to 20 percent of the local wheat crop, as well as half the cumin crop,
had already been lost because of unseasonably hot weather and changes in wind
flow. It does not help, he added, that the current heat wave has made it harder
to work outdoors. “No work
during the day in the fields,” he said. The heat
wave is also straining basic municipal services. In India, more than 10 states,
including the one that includes the city of Mumbai, have faced power shortages
in recent days. That is partly a function of the heat but also of a national
shortage of coal, a fuel that accounts for about three-quarters of the country’s
power supply. In New Delhi
this week, there has been a rash of landfill fires that officials said were
caused by spontaneous combustion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India said
Wednesday that the extreme heat was raising the risk that more fires would
occur in the capital, and beyond. Calls to
fire departments in New Delhi typically rise at this time of year, but an
increase in recent months — from 60 to 70 calls per day to more than 150 per
day — has been larger than usual, said Atul Garg, the director of fire services
in New Delhi. “Everything
is ready to burn,” he said. © 2022 The
New York Times Company",0
"Dhaka, Mar 15 (bdnews24.com)—The government is optimistic over fair distribution of Teesta waters between Bangladesh and India, said a minister on Sunday, though co-speakers at a conference highlighted the challenges for managing the country's water resources. Discussion with India is continuing over distribution of waters, said food and disaster management minister Abdur Razzaque at the international conference on water and flood management. He said he hoped the successful resolution in Ganges water sharing would be duplicated in the case of the Teesta. Though 57 rivers of India enter Bangladesh, he said, a water-sharing agreement had been reached for only the Ganges. He said Dhaka and New Delhi would discuss the Tipai Mukh dam project in the Indian state of Manipur, addressing its impact on the Surma, Kushaira and Meghna rivers. The dam has already been given the go-ahead by the Indian government. A.M.M. Shafiullah, vice chancellor of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said three major rivers of the sub-continent fall into Bangladesh making the water resources system extremely complex and its management a big challenge. Fritz Meijndert, Dutch deputy ambassador and head of development cooperation at the mission, said long term vision and commitment was required to manage water resources. He said it could not be managed without addressing climate change. Bangladesh had a strategy to face climate change, but lacked the broader vision over the next 10 to 50 years, he said. He pledged the Netherlands' support for Bangladesh's water management. The three-day conference, to end Monday, was being held by the BUET Institute of Water and Flood Management at the Bangladesh-China Friendship Centre. A total 135 experts from 13 countries, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, UK, USA, Nepal, Australia, Japan and France, are participating.",1
" Major corporations are joining environmental groups to press US President George W Bush and Congress to address climate change more rapidly, news reports said on Friday. The coalition, including Alcoa Inc, General Electric, DuPont, and Duke Energy plans to publicize its recommendations on Monday, a day ahead of the president's annual State of the Union address, The Wall Street Journal reported. The group also includes Caterpillar, PG&E, the FPL Group, PNM Resources, BP and Lehman Brothers, The New York Times reported. The group, known as the United States Climate Action Partnership, will call for a firm nationwide limit on carbon dioxide emissions that would lead to reductions of 10 to 30 percent over the next 15 years, the NYT reported. The Journal said the coalition will discourage the construction of conventional coal-burning power plants and a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. The coalition's diversity could send a signal that businesses want to get ahead of the increasing political momentum for federal emissions controls, in part to protect their long-term interests, the Times said. Officials from the companies were not immediately available for comment. Bush in his speech next week is likely to support a massive increase in US ethanol usage and tweak climate change policy, sources familiar with the White House plans said on Tuesday. The White House on Tuesday confirmed that the speech will outline a policy on global warming, but said Bush has not dropped his opposition to mandatory limits on the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is the only global pact obliging signatories to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but the United States is not a member, nor are China and India. The protocol expires in 2012. News of the coalition comes as different governments and groups devote more attention to global environmental policy. Global warming has moved to the heart of European foreign policy, the EU executive's top diplomat said on Thursday. On Monday, a summit of Asian leaders promised to encourage more efficient energy use to help stave off global warming. An EU-United States summit in April is expected to focus on energy security and a Group of Eight summit in early June will highlight energy and climate. Most scientists agree that temperatures will rise by 2 and 6 degrees Celsius this century, mainly because of increasing carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.",0
"But the future, or at least a forewarning of it, came to her instead in the shape of Typhoon Haiyan, underlining concerns that damaging storms could increasingly threaten coastal nations such as the Philippines as oceans warm and seawater levels rise.Scientists have cautioned against blaming individual storms such as Haiyan on climate change. But they agree that storms are likely to become more intense.""It's just about impossible to attribute a specific extreme event to climate change,"" said Kevin Walsh, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne.But ""a fair amount of work has been done that suggests the likelihood of extreme tropical cyclones like Haiyan is likely to increase around the world"".As Haiyan bore down, Segayo, a member of the Philippine Climate Change Commission, dashed to the airport in Tacloban city to try to get back to Manila. The storm, with winds of 314 kph (195 mph), the fastest ever recorded as having made landfall, met her there.""It sounded like a pig being slaughtered,"" Segayo said, referring to the noise of the city being torn apart and inundated with surging seawater. ""We experienced first hand what we had been lecturing.""The monster storm that has killed an estimated 10,000 people in Tacloban alone has thrown a fresh spotlight on climate change. It comes as governments gather in Warsaw, Poland for the latest round of talks on achieving a global climate pact. Only piecemeal progress is expected.Major tropical storms - variously called cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons, depending on where they strike - are a hard riddle for climate scientists to solve.The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it is ""more likely than not"" that storms will increase in intensity in the coming century.""SEVERE STORMS""At the heart of the uncertainty is the decades of detailed data of storm behaviour needed to actively plot trends, said Walsh of the University of Melbourne.But one thing is fairly concrete, said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute: climate change is causing surface waters to warm, which in turn feeds more energy into storms.""You can't say that any single event, like the typhoon that hit the Philippines, was caused or even exacerbated by climate change. But you can say with some confidence that we're loading the dice for more severe storms in the future,"" he said.One area of climate change where there is even more certainty is the rise in sea levels. Higher seas mean storm surges like the tsunami-like flood that caused much of the devastation in Tacloban will get worse, Steffen said.At Tacloban, it appears rising sea levels played a small role, contributing to about 5 percent of an estimated four-metre (13 ft) storm surge, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the website Weather Underground.That is based on sea level rises of less than two cm (0.8 inch) over the 20th century. The IPCC estimates the coming century could see rises of between 26 and 62 cm (10 and 24 inches).""So we can expect future storms like Haiyan to be even more destructive, due to higher storm surges from sea level rises,"" Masters said.MORE SOUTHERN STORMSThe Philippines has a long history of being lashed by deadly typhoons, although none as intense as Haiyan, which cut across a number of areas including Leyte, Samar and Cebu islands.While about 20 typhoons strike the country each year, most hit the north along the main island of Luzon.Concerns over extreme weather have been exacerbated by an apparent shift in location of those storms, which in the past two years have also battered southern regions that rarely if ever experienced the powerful gusts of typhoons.Bopha, a category 5 typhoon with maximum winds of 280 kph (174 mph) slammed into Davao Oriental province last December, the first storm to ever hit the province, killing about 600 and leaving thousands homeless in the southern Mindanao region.Philippines climatologists earlier this year said Mindanao could no longer regard itself as a typhoon-free region after two straight years of strong storms. Tropical storm Washi hit the western coast of Mindanao in December 2011, triggering flashfloods that killed around 700. Haiyan also grazed Mindanao.""Before, they almost never reached Cebu and definitely not Davao. Now they are reaching that area,"" said Jose Maria Lorenzo Tan, president of World Wildlife Fund Philippines, a local arm of the global conservation group.",0
"He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Dominguez was hooked.As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel.Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office.
 
 Matheus Dominguez, who said YouTube was crucial to shifting his political views to the far right, recording a YouTube video in Niterói, Brazil, April 29, 2019. YouTube built its business on keeping users hooked. This has been a gift to extremist groups. An investigation in the company’s second-biggest market found serious consequences. (Dado Galdieri/The New York Times) 

Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grassroots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.Some parents look to “Dr YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.The system now drives 70% of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in more than $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some of the findings and promised to make changes.Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said YouTube has “invested heavily in the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a break with the status quo, Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.“This is happening everywhere,” she said.The Party of YouTubeMaurício Martins, the local vice president of Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”“It was like that with everyone,” he said.The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian schools.“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D, a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Jordy took inspiration from bloggers like Moura and his political mentor, Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the federal legislature.“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”Down The Rabbit HoleA few hundred miles from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over computers, trying to understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be tilting the site’s overall political content.In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by YouTube’s recommendation engine.Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Moura’s.Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them, the researchers concluded.One of those channels belonged to Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political base, which barely existed on a national level.Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate.‘Dr YouTube’The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them: some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged northeastern Brazil.The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.The consequences have been pronounced in poorer communities like Maceió, a city in Brazil’s northeast that was among the hardest hit by Zika.“Fake news is a virtual war,” said Flávio Santana, a pediatric neurologist based in Maceió. “We have it coming from every direction.”When Zika first spread in 2015, health workers distributed larvicides that killed the mosquitoes that spread the disease.Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.Dr Auriene Oliviera, an infectious disease specialist at the same hospital, said patients increasingly defied her advice, including on procedures crucial to their child’s survival.“They say, ‘No, I’ve researched it on Google, I’ve seen it on YouTube,’ ” she said.Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing.Mardjane Nunes, a Zika expert who recently left a senior role in the Health Ministry, said health workers across Brazil have been reporting similar experiences. As more communities refuse the anti-Zika larvicide, she added, the disease is seeing a small resurgence.“Social media is winning,” she said.Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels.A spokesman for YouTube confirmed the Times’ findings, calling them unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool surfaced videos related to Zika.An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions mandatory.As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Diniz said.Threats of rape and torture filled Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Küster’s videos, she said.Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.When the university where Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’ ”“We need the companies to face their role,” Diniz said. “Ethically, they are responsible.”As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.Jordy, Bolsonaro’s tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said.“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”‘The Dictatorship of the Like’Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right.But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some people around Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings.“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.  Matheus Dominguez, who said YouTube was crucial to shifting his political views to the far right, recording a YouTube video in Niterói, Brazil, April 29, 2019. YouTube built its business on keeping users hooked. This has been a gift to extremist groups. An investigation in the company’s second-biggest market found serious consequences. (Dado Galdieri/The New York Times) ",5
"TOKYO, Nov 13, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - US President Barack Obama arrived in Tokyo on Friday, kicking off his first Asian tour since becoming leader, during which he is expected to try to smooth troubled ties with Japan and deepen relations with China. Obama will hold a summit later in the day with Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who took office in September vowing to steer a more independent diplomatic course from the United States, sparking concerns about the 50-year-old alliance. On Saturday, Obama will give a speech on US relations with Asia and meet Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko before moving on to Singapore for a forum of regional leaders at which the global economy is expected to top the agenda. He then moves on to China and South Korea. Tokyo is the first stop in a nine-day Asian tour that will take Obama to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific summit, to China for talks on climate change and huge trade imbalances and to South Korea where Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions will be in focus. Washington's relations with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's new government, which has pledged to steer a diplomatic course less dependent on its long-time ally and forge closer ties with Asia, have been frayed by a feud over a US military base. Obama and Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party ousted its long-dominant rival in a historic August election, were expected to turn down the heat in the dispute over the US Marines' Futenma air base on Japan's southern Okinawa island, a key part of a realignment of the 47,000 US troops in Japan. ""I want to make this a summit that shows the importance of Japan-US relations in a global context,"" Hatoyama told reporters on Friday morning ahead of Obama's arrival. But assuaging anxiety and beginning to define a new direction for the five-decade-old alliance will be a difficult task. No breakthroughs were likely in the feud over Futenma during Obama's visit, although Hatoyama said on Thursday he would tell the US leader that he wants to resolve the issue soon. U.S. officials have made crystal clear they want Tokyo to implement a 2006 deal under which Futenma, located in a crowded part of Okinawa, would be closed and replaced with a facility in a remoter part of the island. Replacing Futenma is a prerequisite to shifting up to 8,000 Marines to the U.S. territory of Guam. REDEFINING THE ALLIANCE But Hatoyama said before the election that the base should be moved off Okinawa, fanning hopes of the island's residents, reluctant hosts to more than half the US forces in Japan. Entangled with the feud are deeper questions about whether Obama and Hatoyama can start to reframe the alliance in the face of changing regional and global dynamics. China is forecast to overtake Japan as the world's second-biggest economy as early as next year, raising concerns in Japan that Washington will cosy up to Beijing in a ""Group of Two"" (G2) and leave Tokyo out in the cold. While Obama begins his Asian trip in Tokyo, he will spend just 24 hours in the Japanese capital compared to three days in China, where he will discuss revaluing the yuan, encouraging Chinese consumers to spend and opening Chinese markets further. Some in Washington are equally worried by signs Japan is distancing itself from its closest ally by promoting an as yet ill-defined East Asian Community, despite Hatoyama's assurances the US-Japan alliance is at the core of Tokyo's diplomacy. Hatoyama has said he wants to begin a review of the alliance with an aim to broadening ties longer term, and the leaders could agree at the summit to begin that process. The two leaders will also call for an 80 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and issue a statement pledging to cooperate to promote nuclear disarmament, Japanese media said.",0
"They already know the answer to one crucial question:
Although it appeared to be the largest eruption in the world in three decades,
the explosion of the Hunga volcano on Saturday will very likely not have a
temporary cooling effect on the global climate, as some past enormous eruptions
have. But in the aftermath of the event, there may be
short-term effects on weather in parts of the world and possibly minor
disruptions in radio transmissions, including those used by global positioning
systems. The shock wave produced by the explosion, as well as
the unusual nature of the tsunamis it generated, will have scientists studying
the event for years. Tsunamis were detected not just in the Pacific, but in the
Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean as well “Not that we weren’t aware of volcanic explosions and
tsunamis,” said Lori Dengler, an emeritus professor of geophysics at Humboldt
State University in California. “But to witness it with the modern array of
instruments we have is truly unprecedented.” The explosion of the underwater volcano, which is
formally known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Haʻapai, rained hazardous ash over the
region, including the Tongan capital, Nuku’alofa, about 40 miles south. The
capital also experienced a 4-foot tsunami and higher wave heights were reported
elsewhere. The government called the eruption an “unprecedented
disaster,” although the full scope of the damage has been difficult to
determine because the explosion severed undersea telecommunications cables and
ash has forced Tonga’s airports to shut down. Beyond Tonga, though, the enormity of the explosion
was readily apparent. Satellite photos showed a cloud of dirt, rock, volcanic
gases and water vapour several hundred miles in diameter, and a narrower plume
of gas and debris soared nearly 20 miles into the atmosphere. Some volcanologists drew comparisons to the
catastrophic explosion of Krakatau in Indonesia in 1883 and to the most recent
huge eruption, of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, in 1991. Pinatubo erupted for several days, sending about 20
million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere
There, the gas combined with water to create aerosol particles that reflected
and scattered some of the sun’s rays, keeping them from hitting the surface. That had the effect of cooling the atmosphere by about
1 degree Fahrenheit (about half a degree Celsius) for several years. (It is
also the mechanism of a controversial form of geoengineering: using planes or
other means to continuously inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to
intentionally cool the planet.) The Hunga eruption “was matching the power of Pinatubo
at its peak,” said Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland
in New Zealand who has studied earlier eruptions at the volcano. But the Hunga eruption lasted only about 10 minutes,
and satellite sensors in the days that followed measured about 400,000 tons of
sulfur dioxide reaching the stratosphere. “The amount of SO2 released is much,
much smaller than, say, Mount Pinatubo,” said Michael Manga, an earth sciences
professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So unless the Hunga eruption resumes and continues at
a similarly strong level, which is considered unlikely, it won’t have a global
cooling effect. Cronin said the power of the eruption was in part
related to its location, about 500 feet underwater. When superhot molten rock,
or magma, hit seawater, the water instantly flashed into steam, expanding the
explosion many times over. Had it been much deeper, water pressure would have
dampened the explosion. The shallower depth created perfect “almost
Goldilocks” conditions, he said, to supercharge the explosion. The blast produced a shock wave in the atmosphere that
was one of the most extraordinary ever detected, said Corwin Wright, an
atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath in England. Satellite readings
showed that the wave reached far beyond the stratosphere, as high as 60 miles
up, and propagated around the world at more than 600 mph. “We’re seeing a really big wave, the biggest we’ve
ever seen in the data we’ve been using for 20 years,” Wright said. “We’ve never
seen anything really that covers the whole Earth like this, and certainly not
from a volcano.” The wave resulted when the force of the blast
displaced huge amounts of air outward and upward, high into the atmosphere. But
then gravity pulled it down. It then rose up again, and this up-down
oscillation continued, creating a wave of alternating high and low pressure
that moved outward from the blast source. Wright said that although the wave occurred high in
the atmosphere, it may potentially have a short-term effect on weather patterns
closer to the surface, perhaps indirectly by affecting the jet stream. “We don’t quite know,” he said. “We’re looking to see
what happens over the next few days. It could just sort of ripple through and
not interact.” Wright said that because the wave was so high, it
could also potentially have a slight effect on radio transmissions and signals
from global positioning systems satellites. The atmospheric pressure wave may have also played a
role in the unusual tsunamis that occurred. Tsunamis are generated by the rapid displacement of
water, usually by the movement of rock and soil. Large underwater faults can
generate tsunamis when they move in an earthquake. Volcanoes can cause tsunamis as well. In this case,
the underwater blast, and the collapse of the volcano’s crater, may have caused
the displacement. Or one flank of the volcano may have become unstable and
collapsed, with the same result. But that would only account for the local tsunami that
inundated Tonga, scientists said. Ordinarily, said Gerard Fryer, an affiliate
researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who formerly worked at the
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. “You’d expect that energy to decay away with
distance,” Fryer said. But this event generated tsunamis of roughly the same
size of the local one, and over many hours, in Japan, Chile and the West Coast
of the United States, and eventually generated small tsunamis in other basins
elsewhere around the world. That’s a sign that as it travelled through the
atmosphere, the pressure wave may have had an effect on the ocean, causing it
to oscillate as well. It will take weeks or months of analysing data to
determine if that’s what happened, but some researchers said it was a likely
explanation. “We know that the atmosphere and the ocean are
coupled,” Dengler said. “And we see the tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean. It
didn’t go around the tip of South America to get there.” “The evidence is very clear that the pressure wave
played a role. The question is how big a part.” © 2022 The New York Times Company",1
"COPENHAGEN, Nov 17, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A binding international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions will slip to mid-2010 or beyond and a summit in Copenhagen next month will fall short of its ambitions, the United Nations and Denmark said on Monday. The United Nations' top climate official said a treaty could be wrapped up at talks in Bonn by mid-2010. Denmark, host of next month's meeting, said it might take longer - until Mexico in December. Negotiations on a deal, initially due to be reached at the Dec. 7-18 summit in Copenhagen, have stalled. US President Barack Obama and some other Asia Pacific leaders embraced a proposal by Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen on Sunday that next month's summit should aim for political agreements but delay a legally binding treaty. A prominent member of the US Congress also acknowledged it could be months before the Senate gets around to passing a domestic climate bill. Senator John Kerry, who is leading Senate negotiations on a compromise US measure to tackle global warming, said he and other Democrats were working toward ""trying to see if we can get this to the (Senate) floor sometime in the early spring, as early as possible."" Denmark still wants the summit to agree emissions cuts by each developed country, actions by developing nations to slow their rising emissions, and new funds and technology to help the poor. Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said he favoured at most a six-month delay for a legally binding deal -- until a meeting in Bonn in mid-2010. That would give time for the US Senate to pass carbon-capping laws, he said. ""It's like metal, you've got to beat it when it's hot,"" he told Reuters at two days of talks involving 40 environment ministers. They are trying to end rich-poor splits blocking even a political deal for sharing out greenhouse gas curbs. ""If we get clarity on (emission) targets, developing country engagement and finance in Copenhagen, which I'm confident we will, then you can nail that down in a treaty form six months later."" MEXICAN TREATY? Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard also said the December summit should end with a clear deadline. ""Maybe a realistic deadline would be Mexico but it depends on how far parties go on crunch issues,"" she told reporters. Ministerial talks are scheduled for Mexico in December 2010. Denmark wants world leaders to sign up to a 5-8 page ""political agreement"" next month, backed up by annexes outlining commitments by each nation. At a UN food summit in Rome, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: ""I remain positive about Copenhagen. There is no cause for alarm."" He also said a climate deal was crucial to fighting global hunger because climate change hurts farm output in poor countries. ""There can be no food security without climate security,"" he said. ""Next month in Copenhagen, we need a comprehensive agreement that will provide a firm foundation for a legally binding treaty on climate change."" China, which is under pressure to restrict its emissions growth even though its industrial expansion is very recent, said it was ""studying"" the Danish proposal for a political deal. China has overtaken the United States as top emitter. It made clear it is keen to tie down points that have been agreed in principle on transfers of technology and funding from long-industrialised nations to the developing world. India's Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh said: ""It seems like the inability of the US to come forward with a meaningful emissions cut by the year 2020 has led to such a situation ... I am hoping that we can get a full agreement but it looks increasingly unlikely."" STILL HOPING Poor nations insisted that a binding treaty was still possible next month, even though Obama and most other leaders reckon it has slipped out of reach, not least because the US Senate is unlikely to pass carbon-capping laws by December. ""We believe that an internationally legally binding agreement is still possible,"" Michael Church, the environment minister of Grenada who chairs the 42-nation Alliance of Small Island States, told Reuters. Developing nations say they are most at risk from heatwaves, droughts, floods, disease and rising sea levels, and so are pressing for action most urgently.",0
" Germany on Wednesday agreed to make all trips on government business 'carbon neutral', joining a recent trend among companies and individuals in Europe to offset the environmental impact of trips by car and plane. Keen to demonstrate its environmental credentials during its six-month presidency of the European Union, Germany will 'offset' the emissions produced by the journeys taken by government employees and ministers from 2007 onwards. This will include all ministerial flights on the country's official aircraft and journeys made in the government's fleet of cars, Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a statement. ""With this step the Federal Government is setting a good example and is also making a clear signal of the need for more climate protection given the alarming revelations about climate change,"" Gabriel said. Carbon offsetting involves paying others to cut or compensate for emissions on your behalf, for example by planting trees or building wind farms. The programme will cost the government three to four million euros ($4-$5.3 million), the environment ministry said, a sum that will be included in the 2008 budget. Germany is Europe's biggest polluter and has a history of defending its heavy industry against environmentally-friendly legislation. It put up resistance to a cap by the European Commission on carbon dioxide emissions earlier this year and also complained over new EU emissions limits for cars.",0
"Sarah Famery, a 20-year resident of the Marais neighbourhood, braced for the tumult. She looked left, then right, then left and right again before venturing into a crosswalk, only to break into a rant-laden sprint as two cyclists came within inches of grazing her. “It’s chaos!” said Famery, shaking a fist at the swarm of bikes that have displaced cars on the Rue de Rivoli since it was remade into a multilane highway for cyclists last year. “Politicians want to make Paris a cycling city, but no one is following any rules. It’s becoming risky just to cross the street!” The mayhem on Rue de Rivoli — a major traffic artery stretching from the Bastille past the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde — is playing out on streets across Paris as authorities pursue an ambitious goal of making the city a European cycling capital by 2024. Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen, Denmark-style cycling revolution. She has made highways along the Seine car-free and last year, during coronavirus lockdowns, oversaw the creation of more than 100 miles of new bike paths. She plans to limit cars in 2022 in the heart of the city, along half of the Right Bank and through the Boulevard Saint Germain. Parisians have heeded the call: A million people in a metropolis of 10 million are now pedalling daily. And Paris now ranks among the world’s Top 10 cycling cities, But with success has come major growing pains. “It’s like Paris is in anarchy,” said Jean-Conrad LeMaitre, a former banker who was out for a stroll recently along the Rue de Rivoli. “We need to reduce pollution and improve the environment. But everyone is just doing as they please. There are no police, no fines, no training and no respect.” At City Hall, the people in charge of the transformation acknowledged the need for solutions to the flaring tensions, and to the accidents and even deaths that have resulted from the free-for-all on the streets. Anger over reckless electric scooter use in particular boiled over after a 31-year-old woman was killed this summer in a hit-and-run along the Seine. 
 
 Delivery workers along Rue de Rivoli in Paris, Sept 16, 2021. The New York Times 

“We are in the midst of a new era where bikes and pedestrians are at the heart of a policy to fight climate change,” said David Belliard, Paris’ deputy mayor for transportation and the point person overseeing the metamorphosis. “But it’s only recently that people started using bikes en masse, and it will take time to adapt.”  Delivery workers along Rue de Rivoli in Paris, Sept 16, 2021. The New York Times  Belliard hopes Parisians can be coaxed into complying with laws, in part by adding more police to hand out 135 euro fines ($158) to unruly cyclists and by teaching schoolchildren about bike safety. Electric scooters have been restricted to a speed of 10 kph (just over 6 mph) in crowded areas and could be banned by the end of 2022 if dangerous use does not stop. The city also plans talks with delivery companies such as Uber Eats, whose couriers are paid per delivery and are some of the biggest offenders when it comes to breaking traffic rules. “Their economic model is part of the problem,” Belliard said. Probably the biggest challenge, though, is that Paris does not yet have an ingrained cycling culture. The abiding French sense of “liberté” is on display in the streets at all hours, where Parisians young and old jaywalk at nearly every opportunity. They appear to have carried that freewheeling spirit to their bikes. “In Denmark, which has a decadeslong cycling culture, the mentality is, ‘Don’t go if the light is red,’ ” said Christine Melchoir, a Dane who has lived in Paris for 30 years and commutes daily by bike. “But for a Parisian, the mentality is, ‘Do it!’ ” Urban planners say better cycling infrastructure could help tame bad behaviour. Copenhagen — the model that Paris aspires to — has efficient layouts for cycling paths that allow bikes, pedestrians and cars to coexist within a hierarchy of space. Citizens are taught from a young age to follow rules of the road. In Paris, parts of the 1,000-kilometer citywide cycling network (about 620 miles) can steer bikers into hazardous interactions with cars, pedestrians and other cyclists. At the Bastille, a once-enormous traffic circle that was partly appropriated from cars, a tangle of bike lanes weave through traffic. Cyclists who respect signals can take up to four minutes to cross. “Paris has the right ideas and they’re absolutely the main city to watch on the planet, because no one is near them for their general urban transformation visions,” said Mikael Colville-Andersen, a Copenhagen-based urban designer who advises cities on integrating cycling into urban transport. “But the infrastructure is like spaghetti,” he said. “It’s chaotic, it doesn’t connect up and there’s no cohesive network. If you can get that right, it will eliminate a lot of confusion.” Belliard, the deputy mayor, said Paris would soon unveil a blueprint to improve infrastructure. But for now, the tumult continues. On a recent afternoon, eight cyclists ran a red light en masse on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, a major north-south artery. Wary pedestrians cowered until one dared to try crossing, causing a near pileup. Back on the Rue de Rivoli, cyclists swerved to avoid pedestrians playing a game of chicken with oncoming bikes. “Pay attention!” a cyclist in a red safety vest and goggles shouted at three women crossing against a red light, as he nearly crashed in the rain. Cyclists say Paris has not done enough to make bike commuting safe. Bike accidents jumped 35% last year, from 2019. Paris en Selle, a cycling organization, has held protests calling for road security after several cyclists were killed in collisions with motorists, including, recently, a 2-year-old boy riding with his father who was killed near the Louvre when a truck turned into them. A small but growing number of cyclists say they are too nervous to ride anymore. “I’m afraid of being crushed,” said Paul Michel Casabelle, 44, a superintendent at the Maison de Danmark, a Danish cultural institute. On a recent Sunday, Ingrid Juratowitch had to talk her daughter Saskia safely across bike lanes near the Saint Paul metro station while she held her two other young daughters at a safe distance from the street. “Be careful, there are bikes coming from the left and right,” said Juratowitch, who has lived in Paris for 14 years. She is increasingly reluctant to let her children walk to school for fear of reckless riders. “There’s another one coming,"" Juratowitch said. ""OK, now you can go! “From an environmental point of view, we don’t want to see the city go back to cars,” Juratowitch said. “But it’s not safe. It’s as if bikes and pedestrians don’t know how to coexist.” Saskia, 12, chimed in. “It’s not the bikes; it’s the bikers,” she said. “They think the rules apply to everyone except them.”   © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned his top lieutenants on Friday that the global financial crisis jeopardized everything the United Nations has done to help the world's poor and hungry. ""It threatens to undermine all our achievements and all our progress,"" Ban told a meeting of UN agency chiefs devoted to the crisis. ""Our progress in eradicating poverty and disease. Our efforts to fight climate change and promote development. To ensure that people have enough to eat."" At a meeting also attended by the heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Ban said the credit crunch that has stunned markets worldwide compounded the food crisis, the energy crisis and Africa's development crisis. ""It could be the final blow that many of the poorest of the world's poor simply cannot survive,"" he added, in one of his bleakest assessments of the impact of the financial turmoil. In a statement after the meeting, Ban picked up a theme he has stressed since the crisis erupted last month, that it should not be allowed to hit hardest ""those least responsible"" -- the poor in developing countries. The UN chief told reporters he would put that case to a financial summit in Washington on Nov. 15 by US called by President George W. Bush. Ban has been invited to that gathering along with leaders of the G20 -- the Group of Seven top industrial democracies and key emerging economies. ""As secretary-general I am going to emphasize, as I have been doing in the past, to ask the world leaders to give priority in addressing the challenges of developing countries,"" he said. Ban said it was important that, despite the world economic downturn, the United Nations continue to pursue its so-called Millennium Development Goals -- eight targets for slashing poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. He also said the world must persist with efforts to tackle climate change through two major conferences over the next 15 months, and he called on rich countries to keep up their overseas aid despite domestic financial woes. In a statement, the UN chiefs promised ""proactive leadership"" to ensure a ""coordinated and comprehensive response on trade, development, employment, finance, humanitarian assistance, environment and the protection of global goods and norms."" They also pledged to support a ""meaningful, comprehensive and well-coordinated reform of the international financial system,"" but offered no specifics on what this should entail. ",0
" UK Environment Secretary David Miliband will unveil plans on Thursday to improve Britain's poor record on recycling its rubbish. The government's new Waste Strategy will outline how it plans to meet tough European Union rules on reducing the amount of garbage buried in landfill sites in England. A government consultation document last year proposed increasing the level of recycling and composting of household waste from 27 percent today to 40 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2020. Britain is near the bottom of Europe's recycling league, with only Greece and Portugal recycling less, according to figures from the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Green Alliance. Campaigners want the government to introduce a rising level of charges for rubbish collections to encourage householders to recycle more. Last year's consultation found strong support among the public for some form of variable charging, but there was also concern that extra costs could lead to a rise in fly-tipping. Friends of the Earth said the recycling targets should be set as high as 75 percent of all household waste by 2015. It said Flanders in northern Belgium was already recycling 71 percent. The environmental group said there should also be legally binding recycling targets for businesses. It said government proposals in the consultation to build more incinerators to burn waste instead of burying it would be a backward move. It said incinerators produced more climate-changing carbon dioxide than gas-fired power stations and would face fierce opposition from local communities concerned about other pollutants released into the air.",1
" The global average temperature has increased over the past 160 years, but short-term trends in temperature and sea ice seem to be at odds with each other and need more research, the UK Met Office's Hadley Center said. In a report on long and short-term climate trends, the Hadley Center found several factors that indicate a warming world and said 2010 has been one of the warmest years on record. The report drew on the work of more than 20 institutions worldwide and used a range of measurements from satellites, weather balloons, weather stations, ocean buoys, ships and field surveys. The report showed increases in air temperatures above both land and sea, increases in water temperature and humidity, sea level rises and the shrinking of Arctic sea ice. ""The average temperature over the first decade of the 21st century was significantly warmer than any preceding decade in the instrumental record, stretching back over 160 years,"" the report said. Despite variability from year to year, with some years warmer and others cooler, a clear trend of increasing global temperature can be seen from the late 1970s onwards at about 0.16 degrees per decade, the report said. ""It is clear from the observational evidence across a wide range of indicators that the world is warming,"" said Matt Palmer, ocean observations specialist at the Met Office. ""As well as a clear increase in air temperature observed above both the land and sea, we see observations which are all consistent with increasing greenhouse gases,"" he added. However, short-term trends in temperature and sea ice seem to be at odds with each other. The rate of temperature increases has slowed over the past 10 years, while the level of sea ice has increased. Climate models suggest that the internal variability of the climate system may be responsible for the recent decrease in the rate of warming, the report said. Changes in solar activity, water vapor, increased aerosol emissions from Asia and changes to the way sea surface temperatures are measured over the past decade could have contributed to some artificial cooling, the report said. ""We expect warming to increase in the next few years ... However, other future external factors, such as volcanic eruptions or changes in solar activity, could prolong the current reduction in warming,"" the report said. More research is needed into some of the factors that influence short-term climate trends, which are not fully understood or represented in climate models.",0
"That's the view of some major automakers, including BMW and Audi, which are developing hydrogen fuel-cell passenger vehicle prototypes alongside their fleets of battery cars as part of preparations to abandon fossil fuels. They are hedging their bets, calculating that a change in political winds could shift the balance towards hydrogen in an industry shaped by early-mover Tesla's decision to take the battery-powered road to clean cars. Global auto hub Germany is in sharp focus. It is already betting billions on hydrogen fuel in sectors like steel and chemicals to meet climate targets, and closely-fought elections this month could see the Greens enter the coalition government and further push the technology. BMW is hydrogen's biggest proponent among Germany's carmakers, charting a path to a mass-market model around 2030. The company also has one eye on shifting hydrogen policies in Europe and in China, the world's largest car market. The Munich-based premium player has developed a hydrogen prototype car based on its X5 SUV, in a project already partly funded by the German government. Jürgen Guldner, the BMW vice president who heads up the hydrogen fuel-cell car programme, told Reuters the carmaker would build a test fleet of close to 100 cars in 2022. ""Whether this (technology) is driven by politics or demand, we will be ready with a product,"" he said, adding that his team is already working to develop the next generation vehicles.",1
"The German chancellor, although credited for navigating multiple crises, was long criticised for lacking strategic vision. Macron, whose more swaggering style has sometimes ruffled his European partners — and Washington — has put forward ideas for a more independent and integrated Europe, better able to act in its own defence and its own interests. But as the Anglo-American “betrayal” in the Australian submarine affair has underscored, Macron sometimes possesses ambitions beyond his reach. Despite the vacuum Merkel leaves, a Macron era is unlikely to be born. Instead, analysts say, the European Union is heading for a period of prolonged uncertainty and potential weakness, if not necessarily drift. No one figure — not even Macron or a new German chancellor — will be as influential as Merkel was at her strongest: an authoritative, well-briefed leader who quietly managed compromise and built consensus among a long list of louder and more ideological colleagues. That raises the prospect of paralysis or of Europe muddling through its challenges — on what to do about an increasingly indifferent America, on China and Russia, and on trade and technology — or even of a more dangerous fracturing of the bloc’s always tentative unity. And it will mean that Macron, who is up for reelection in April and absorbed in that uncertain campaign, will need to wait for a German government that may not be in place until January or longer, and then work closely with a weaker German chancellor. “We’ll have a weak German chancellor on top of a larger, less unified coalition,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “A weaker chancellor is less capable of exerting influence in Europe, and then with the Macron election, the political cycles of these two key countries will not be in sync.” The uncertainty is likely to last until after the French parliamentary elections in June — and that is presuming Macron wins. Macron has argued forcefully that Europe must do more to protect its own interests in a world where China is rising and the United States is focusing on Asia. His officials are already trying to prepare the ground on some key issues, looking forward to January, when France takes over the rotating EU presidency. But given the likelihood of lengthy coalition talks in Germany, the window for accomplishment is narrow. Macron will need German help. While France and Germany together can no longer run the European Union by themselves, when they agree, they tend to bring the rest of the bloc along with them. So building a relationship with the new German chancellor, even a weaker one, will be a primary goal for Macron. He must be careful, noted Daniela Schwarzer, executive director for Europe and Eurasia of the Open Societies Foundations, not to scare off the Germans. “Macron’s leadership is disruptive, and the German style is to change institutions incrementally,” she said. “Both sides will need to think through how they make it possible for the other side to answer constructively.” French officials understand that substantive change will be slow, and they will want to build on initiatives already underway, like the analysis of Europe’s interests called “the strategic compass” and a modest but steady increase in military spending on new capabilities through the new European Defense Fund and a program called Pesco, intended to promote joint projects and European interoperability. After the humiliation of the scuttled submarine deal, when Australia suddenly cancelled a contract with France and chose a deal with Britain and the United States instead, many of his European colleagues are more likely now to agree with Macron that Europe must be less dependent on Washington and spend at least a little more in its own defence. Few in Europe, though, want to permanently damage ties with the Americans and NATO. “Italy wants a stronger Europe, OK, but in NATO — we’re not on the French page on that,” said Marta Dassu, a former Italian deputy foreign minister and director of European affairs at the Aspen Institute. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, whose voice is respected in Brussels, believes strongly in the trans-Atlantic relationship, Dassu said, adding, “We’re closer to Germany than to France, but without all the ambiguities on Russia and China.” France also wants to become more assertive using the economic and financial tools Europe already has, especially trade and technology, the officials say. The point, they say, is not to push too hard too fast, but to raise the European game vis-à-vis China and the United States, and try to encourage a culture that is comfortable with power. But France’s German partners will be going through a period of uncertainty and transition. A new German chancellor is expected to win only one-quarter of the vote and may need to negotiate a coalition agreement among three political parties. That is expected to take at least until Christmas, if not longer. The new chancellor will also need to get up to speed on European issues, which barely surfaced in the campaign, and build credibility as the newcomer among 26 other leaders. “So it’s important now to start thinking of concrete French-German wins during a French presidency that Macron can use in a positive way in his campaign,” Schwarzer said. “Because Berlin does not want to ponder a scenario in which Macron loses” to far-right Marine Le Pen or in which euroskeptics like Matteo Salvini take over in Italy. Whoever wins, German policy toward Europe will remain roughly the same from a country deeply committed to EU ideals, cautious and wanting to preserve stability and unity. The real question is whether any European leader can be the cohesive force Merkel was — and if not, what it will mean for the continent’s future. “Merkel herself was important in keeping the EU together,” said Ulrich Speck of the German Marshall Fund. “She kept in mind the interests of so many in Europe, especially Central Europe but also Italy, so that everyone could be kept on board.” Merkel saw the European Union as the core of her policy, said a senior European official, who called her the guardian of true EU values, willing to bend to keep the bloc together, as evidenced by her support for collective debt, previously a German red line, to fund the coronavirus recovery fund. “Merkel acted as mediator when there have been a lot of centrifugal forces weakening Europe,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, head of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. “It’s less clear how the next chancellor will position himself or herself and Germany.” Still, Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted that “whoever is the chancellor, Germany is still responsible for more than half of Chinese trade with Europe.” Germany is “vastly more important than the other countries on all the big issues, from how to handle China to the tech wars and climate change,” he said. That means Macron “knows he has to channel German power behind his vision,” he said. But French and Italian positions will be crucial, too, on important pending financial issues like fiscal and banking integration, trying to complete the single market and monitoring the pandemic recovery fund. Merkel’s departure may provide an opportunity for the kinds of change Macron desires, even if in vastly scaled-down version. Merkel’s love of the status quo, some analysts argue, was anachronistic at a time when Europe faces so many challenges. Perhaps most important is the looming debate about whether to alter Europe’s spending rules, which in practical terms means getting agreement from countries to spend more on everything, from defence to climate. The real problem is that fundamental change would require a treaty change, said Guntram Wolff, director of Bruegel, a Brussels research institution. “You can’t have fiscal and defence integration by stealth,” he said. “It won’t have legitimacy and won’t be accepted by citizens.” But the German election debates ignored these broad issues, he said. “The sad news,” Wolff said, “is that none of the three chancellor candidates campaigned on any of this, so my baseline expectation is continued muddling forward.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
"BEIJING,Feb 21(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The United States and China must work together in dealing with the global financial crisis, climate change and North Korea, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Beijing on Saturday. ""It is, in our view, imperative that the United States and China cooperate on a range of issues from the economy to global climate change to development and so much else,"" Clinton told Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi during talks. On Friday, Clinton said Washington would press China on human rights but added that this would not keep them from working together on a range of issues such as the financial crisis and how to respond to the security threats posed by North Korea. Clinton's visit to China is the fourth and final leg of a tour of Asia that has also taken her to South Korea, Indonesia and Japan. It is her first trip abroad as secretary of state. Earlier, Yang said the world faced a series of ""major and pressing"" challenges. ""The larger situation requires our two countries to strengthen dialogue ... and work together to elevate our relationship to a new level,"" Yang said. The United States has long accused China of human rights abuses and pressed Beijing to grant greater autonomy to Tibet. In a 1995 speech in Beijing, Clinton openly criticized China's human rights record. The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Clinton's comments on Friday had undermined human rights reform in China and sent the wrong message to the Chinese government. ""Secretary Clinton's remarks point to a diplomatic strategy that has worked well for the Chinese government -- segregating human rights issues into a dead-end dialogue of the deaf,"" said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. ""A new approach is needed, one in which the U.S. engages China on the critical importance of human rights to a wide range of mutual security interests."" Clinton will also meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday. High on the agenda will be how to get North Korea to fulfill its commitments to dismantle its nuclear arms program and well as recent threats by the reclusive state to carry out missile tests. China is the nearest North Korea has to a powerful ally.",0
"Much of the displacement caused by cyclones, floods and fires appeared temporary and in some cases due to better efforts to evacuate people ahead of danger, Oxfam researchers said. But its “sheer scale” was a surprise, said Tim Gore, Oxfam’s climate policy leader, with island nations like Cuba, Dominica and Tuvalu seeing on average close to 5 percent of their people out of their homes in any given year. “This is the warming world we have long been warning about. Now we’re seeing it play out before our eyes,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Oxfam study, released as two weeks of UN climate negotiations start in Madrid, examined the numbers of people displaced inside their home countries by climate-fuelled disasters between 2008 and 2018, based on government and international agency data, as well as media reports. People were three times more likely to be displaced by cyclones, floods or fires than by conflicts, it found. Some countries, like war-torn Somalia, were battered by both droughts and floods, sometimes in the same year. That “confluence of disasters” leaves many poor nations - where most of the displacement is occurring - struggling to recover from one crisis before the next hits, Gore said. Some have run aid appeals for both drought and flood relief simultaneously, he said. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “This is climate chaos - what it actually looks like.” Seven of the top 10 countries with the highest displacement by proportion of their population were developing island states, largely in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the report found. But around 80 percent of all people forced from their homes by weather disasters over the last decade were in Asia, where large populations in countries from the Philippines to Sri Lanka live in areas threatened by cyclones or flooding, it said. In May, Cyclone Fani alone led to the displacement of 3.5 million people in Bangladesh and India, most of them evacuated in advance of the storm in order to hold down casualties. Overall, the number of weather disasters considered extreme grew five-fold over the last decade, researchers said. The study did not look comprehensively at how many people were uprooted by “slow onset” disasters like droughts where it is harder to judge the beginning and end, Gore said. Including drought-linked displacement would make the numbers “much higher”, he added. It also did not estimate how much of the displacement became permanent - “a really unknown quantity”, Gore said. In 2018, Oxfam made a rough estimate of the number displaced by extreme weather disasters during the year who were still out of their homes by the end of it, and came up with about 10-20 percent. SPIRALING COSTS As more people leave their homes as a result of weather disasters, costs - and threats to social stability - are rising quickly for the countries trying to manage that displacement, often with few resources, the report said. At the UN climate talks in Madrid, environmental and development groups are pushing to establish a fund to bail out countries on the frontline of “loss and damage” as a hotter planet brings wilder weather and rising seas. A Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage was created at climate negotiations in 2013 with the aim of aiding poor nations that have produced few of the emissions that drive climate change but are suffering its strongest effects. So far, however, the mechanism has produced little concrete help or new money for those countries, beyond backing the use of insurance policies to limit losses, critics say. Gore said insurance alone could not address the whole problem. “Loss and damage is the next key battleground of the climate talks,” he added. Recent analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute, endorsed by nearly 100 civil society groups, estimated new finance of at least $50 billion a year would be needed by 2022 to deal with loss and damage, rising to $300 billion by 2030. Gore said no amount of help would enable everyone to stay in their homes as climate change impacts strengthen, and preparing now would help protect those on the move. “Are we going to manage this, or see the people least responsible for the crisis forced from their homes in a chaotic way that tramples on their rights?” he asked. “The costs are going to continue to spiral. The sooner we get down to serious negotiations about how to manage it in a serious, responsible way, the better,” he said.",0
"With more fires burning this season than any since 2018, British Columbia is scorching, trapped in a record-breaking heat wave driven in part by climate change. In June, the relentless wildfire season claimed the small town of Lytton, after three consecutive days of extreme heat broke national temperature records, rising to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (about 49 degrees Celsius). Two people died, the only casualties of the province’s wildfire season, which is mainly affecting sparsely populated areas. Since April, more than 1.6 million acres have burned, data released by the province this week show. That is about 80% more than what would normally have been expected at this time in wildfire season, based on the province’s 10-year average. At least 3,100 firefighters and personnel are working to suppress the flames. Powerful firefighting tanker airplanes whir about, with fleets that include helicopters fitted with a 2,650-gallon tank that can be filled in less than one minute. The flames have forced the evacuation of thousands of homes — but some residents have refused to leave, prompting the government to warn against complacency. Where are the wildfires? The majority of the nearly 260 wildfires still burning are in the interior region, closer to British Columbia’s southeast border with the province of Alberta, and miles away from the Pacific coastline. One massive fire has burned more than 139,600 acres, and was stoked further Tuesday by gusting winds and dry conditions at White Rock Lake, about 21 miles northwest of a bigger town, Vernon. It’s one of more than 30 wildfires that are considered to pose a threat to public safety under the province’s wildfire classification system. The rest are viewed as less of a threat. Some say government officials are not doing enough. In Monte Lake, a town near one of the fires ranked as most dangerous, the flames have been burning since July 13, and residents criticised the province for what they called a slow response. Rick Manwaring, a deputy minister for British Columbia’s forest and natural resource operations department, defended the government’s efforts. Two crews and one helicopter with a 1000-liter water bucket responded to the blaze immediately, he said at a news conference Tuesday. “And this has been standard for us this unusual fire season,” Manwaring said. The crews worked with local ranchers and residents to build barriers to protect property, he said. A network of close to 200 helicopters, mass-water delivery systems and other heavy machinery have been dispatched across the various sites to help quell the flames. And more than 150 firefighters from outside the province, including 100 from Mexico who arrived in late July, are assisting thousands of local fire crew members and Canadian armed forces personnel. But countries that would normally be ready to assist Canada, including the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, have not been able to provide support this year because they are battling wildfires on their own soil. Pandemic travel restrictions have also complicated things. How are the evacuations going? As of Tuesday, about 5,400 properties were under an evacuation order. Another 31,000 are on alert for evacuation, meaning that the authorities are asking residents to prepare grab-and-go bags of essential items. They have also been advised to have an evacuation plan for pets and livestock, and a full tank of gas in the car in case they are told to flee their homes on short notice. The authorities have urged residents to obey evacuation orders immediately. A failure to do so, they warned, could put the lives of firefighters at risk should evacuation routes become blocked by flames. “I know people are scared and frustrated,” said Katrine Conroy, the minister of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development. “You simply put your life and lives of others at risk, and we can’t ask firefighters to risk their lives and face down a wall of flames because someone made an unwise decision to not evacuate.” Ryan Reynolds, a postdoctoral researcher in household preparedness and evacuations at the University of British Columbia, said forest fires posed a complex challenge for emergency planners. Among the biggest problems is their unpredictability: In the blink of an eye, the flames can change direction and suddenly threaten evacuation routes. The province has 14 reception centres open to support evacuees, and group lodging facilities. Some evacuation orders have been scaled back, allowing businesses like the Monte Creek Winery, previously evacuated because of the White Rock Lake fire, to reopen. “It feels like a normal thing for us now,” said Ashley Demedeiros, a marketing manager at the winery. Businesses, Demedeiros said, have long since learned that people need to have a wildfire plan. “It’s not a drill anymore,” she said. What is causing the fires? During the past decade in British Columbia, an average of 58% of the wildfires have been caused by lightning, and 42% by humans. But that changed a bit in 2018 — a record 3.3 million acres burned — when 70% of the fires were attributed to lightning, according to government data. Of the active wildfires now taking place, more than 180 were ignited by natural causes, including lightning, and just over a dozen by human activity, the government says. What has the health effect been? Casualties have been low, in part because of evacuation orders and in part because of the distance between the fires and population centres. But Canada’s environmental agency warned that the air quality has deteriorated in areas like the Okanagan Valley and Kamloops because of the smoke. That can lead to chronic illness, including some that shorten lives, said Michael Brauer, a professor at the University of British Columbia who researches the effects of air pollution on human health. What’s next? More hot weather, unfortunately. Temperatures in British Columbia’s Interior region are expected to rise from Thursday to Saturday. Some forecasts predict temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit or above, according to weather alerts by Environment and Climate Change Canada, a government agency. That makes it even harder to fight the fires already taking place. When the thermometer climbs, helicopter engines can overheat and other machines can fail. That happened during the province’s record-breaking heat wave in June. © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" The Arctic and Antarctica are poles apart when it comes to the effects of human-fueled climate change, scientists said on Friday: in the north, it is melting sea ice, but in the south, it powers winds that chill things down. The North and South poles are both subject to solar radiation and rising levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the researchers said in a telephone briefing. But Antarctica is also affected by an ozone hole hovering high above it during the austral summer. ""All the evidence points toward human-made effects playing a major role in the changes that we see at both poles and evidence that contradicts this is very hard to find,"" said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. An examination of many previous studies about polar climate, to be published May 6 in the journal Eos, ""further depletes the arsenal of those who insist that human-caused climate change is nothing to worry about,"" Francis said in a telephone briefing. In the Arctic, Francis and co-authors of the research said, warming spurred by human-generated carbon dioxide emissions has combined with natural climate variations to create a ""perfect Arctic storm"" that caused a dramatic disappearance of sea ice last year, a trend likely to continue. 'NEW STATE' ""Natural climate variability and global warming were actually working together and they've sent the Arctic into a new state for the climate that has much less sea ice,"" said James Overland, an oceanographer at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ""There's very little chance for the climate to return to the conditions of 20 years ago."" In Antarctica, the ozone hole adds a new factor to an already complicated set of weather patterns, according to Gareth Marshall of the British Antarctic Survey. The changes in air pressure that go along with depleted stratospheric ozone are responsible for an increase in the westerly winds that whip around the Southern Ocean, at latitudes a bit north of most of Antarctica. These winds isolate much of the southern continent from some of the impact of global warming, Marshall said. The exception is the Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches northward toward South America. There, the effects of warming have been dramatic, he said, because the winds that protect the rest of Antarctica do not insulate the peninsula. The stratospheric ozone hole, caused by the ozone-depleting release of chemicals found in refrigerants and hair sprays, is likely to fully recover by 2070 as less of these chemicals are in use, as a result of international agreements. The ozone layer shields Earth from harmful solar radiation, but its recovery is likely to open the way for warming in central Antarctica, the scientists said. ",0
" Hollywood celebrities Harrison Ford, Bo Derek and Robert Duvall on Monday threw their support behind a new global initiative by the World Bank to save tigers from extinction. While the global development agency's main mission is to fight poverty in developing countries, it has rarely taken on wildlife conservation efforts of endangered species. The new Tiger Conservation Initiative will bring together wildlife experts, scientists and governments to try to halt the killing and thriving illegal trade in tiger skins, meat and body parts used in traditional Asian medicines. Ford, a long-time environmental activist, said efforts to protect tigers would only succeed if local communities were involved in conservation efforts. ""By committing to help wild tigers, the World Bank is sounding its intention to be a global leader in biodiversity conservation,"" Ford, the star of the latest ""Indiana Jones"" movie, told an event at Washington's Smithsonian National Zoo. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the decline in the number of tigers was ""shocking"" from over 100,000 a century ago to currently less than 4,000. The clearing of large areas of forest land for urban development has added to their decline and disappearance from Central Asia, the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, and most of China. POACHING AT ALL-TIME HIGH A World Bank report warned that ""if current trends persist, tigers are likely to be the first species of large predator to vanish in historic times."" ""Just as with many other challenges of sustainability, such as climate change, pandemic disease, or poverty, the crisis facing tigers overwhelms local capabilities and it is one that transcends local borders,"" Zoellick said. ""This is a problem that cannot be handled by individual nations alone, it requires an alliance of strong local commitment backed by deep international support,"" he added. Zoellick said the World Bank would convene a series of discussions with countries, conservationists and the private sector to mobilize funding for tiger conservation, and launch studies on how better to protect the cats. The World Bank chief said there were examples of where tigers had been brought back from the brink of extinction, such as in Russia and Nepal, but added that saving the world tiger population would not be an easy task. ""All those concerned may not agree but this does not mean we should stand on the sidelines and do nothing,"" he said. John Seidensticker, chief scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo's Conservation Ecology Center, said tiger poaching and trafficking in tiger parts and meat was at an all-time high and the biggest immediate threat to tigers. ""For wild tigers to live they must have much better security on their home ground,"" he said, also calling on countries to properly enforce laws to protect tigers. This, Seidensticker said, required strong political will. ""We're at a tipping point and we're going to lose wild tigers but with the World Bank initiative wild tigers now have a chance,"" he added Seidensticker said tiger conservation efforts needed to be more coordinated and focused, and the World Bank could help as a global institution.",0
" United Nations climate talks threaten Saudi Arabia's economic survival and the kingdom wants support for any shift from fossil fuels to other energy sources such as solar power, its lead climate negotiator said. Contrasting interests of different countries are challenging faltering climate talks, meant to forge by December a new global deal in Copenhagen to curb man-made climate change. Small island states say their survival is threatened by rising seas. But Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, says it could suffer from any pact which curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. ""It's a matter of survival for us, also. So we are among the most vulnerable countries, economically,"" Mohammad Al Sabban told Reuters on the fringes of talks which end on Wednesday, after the latest in a series of meetings meant to thrash out a deal to replace or extend the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. ""Saudi Arabia has not done that much yet to diversify."" Other divisions in the talks include rich versus poor, nations which contribute more to climate change than others, and countries more vulnerable to sea level rise, floods and droughts. Saudi Arabia wants support, for example, to develop alternative energy sources and to earn credits for burying greenhouse gases underground in near-depleted oil wells. Al Sabban said Saudi Arabia's solar power ambition was ""much larger"" than Abu Dhabi's $15 billion Masdar project to invest in renewable energy and build a carbon neutral city, but declined to put a dollar number on Saudi plans. ""We have a lot of sun, a lot of land. We can export solar power to our neighbors on a very large scale and that is our strategic objective to diversify our economy, it will be huge."" ""We need the industrialized countries to assist us through direct investment, transfer of technologies,"" to ease the burden of a new climate deal, he added. CASH Developing nations want more cash from rich countries to help fund their fight against climate change but may have to wait until the final days and weeks of haggling in December. Saudi Arabia wants to access an existing adaptation fund which the U.N.'s climate chief Yvo de Boer describes as a ""pittance."" The country may have to compete with others which want funds to prepare for sea level rise and extreme weather. ""Adaptation is not only to the impact of climate change but also the impact of climate policies,"" said Al Sabban. Other Saudi demands from the U.N. talks include a re-vamping of fossil fuel taxes in industrialized countries to focus on carbon rather than energy, which may benefit oil because it emits less of the greenhouse gas compared to coal. It also wants an elimination of subsidies for rival biofuels which it says harm the environment and hike food prices. The new U.S. administration of President Barack Obama has called for an increase in the amount of corn-based ethanol to be used in gasoline in the United States. Al Sabban said Saudi Arabia was ""worried"" about a ""dangerous"" threat to its economy but would cooperate. Environmental groups say the country has obstructed the climate talks for years, filibustering with frequent interventions in debates involving up to 190 countries. ""We get used to these allegations,"" Al Sabban said. ""We are faithfully engaging in these negotiations. Everybody here is coming to protect their interests, we are doing the same, the EU is doing the same, the United",0
" European Union foreign ministers sought on Monday to narrow differences on how to combat climate change but resistance remained to a German bid to fix mandatory targets for the use of 'green fuels'. It will be up to EU leaders meeting this week to hammer out whether the bloc commits to binding objectives for the use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power as part of its ambition to lead the world in fighting climate change. ""There was no final solution,"" one EU diplomat said after the talks. ""As expected the summit will have to deal with it,"" he said of the meeting set for Brussels on Thursday and Friday. ""They (ministers) repeated the well-known positions. It's been like that for months,"" said another EU official, adding that only Sweden, Denmark, Britain and Italy had stated their support during the talks for establishing binding targets on renewable energy. The EU plans to adopt a unilateral commitment to a 20 percent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases, rising to 30 percent if other major industrialised and emerging powers join in. Germany, the current EU president, also wants the summit to set a binding target for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to supply 20 percent of energy consumption by 2020. France and some 10 other countries, including several in central Europe, are wary of binding targets that would impinge on their national energy strategies. British officials have signalled that Prime Minister Tony Blair has dropped resistance to a binding target. Some EU diplomats said they expect French President Jacques Chirac to yield in exchange for a recognition that France's nuclear power programme helps cut carbon dioxide emissions. ""Many EU countries have demonstrated a significant readiness to commit to 20 percent (on renewables) as a binding goal,"" German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily in an interview. She did not name those countries. A possible compromise, diplomats said, could be to make the 20 percent target binding on the EU as a whole but not on individual states, with burden-sharing to be negotiated later. Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said the EU should aim for something stronger than vague guidelines. ""If the requirements are drafted in such a way that they are in the form of guidelines that we should respect, that is good. But I am personally in favour of clearer requirements,"" he said. Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said binding targets would be a sign the EU was serious. ""Europe has to become greener and credibly so. So benchmarking and setting ourselves goals and ambitions explicitly is a reasonable instrument,"" she told reporters. Underlining the difficulties ahead, an independent audit of British climate change policies reported by the Guardian on Monday said Britain will fall short of a target of a 30 percent cut in CO2 emissions by 2020, not reaching that level till 2050. The ministers were also due to discuss crises in Darfur, the Middle East and Iran's nuclear programme. They are expected to urge the United Nations to consider tightening sanctions on Sudan over Darfur and pledge funds to help create a joint African Union-UN peace force. On the Middle East, they are expected to reiterate a willingness to work with a new Palestinian national unity government provided it adopts an acceptable platform.",0
"While cooler weather overnight brought some relief for firefighters in New South Wales (NSW) state, attention shifted to its northern neighbour, Queensland, where hot, dry and windy conditions brought severe fire danger. Authorities issued a ""leave immediately"" warning, the highest level, for several areas including Noosa, a beachside holiday destination 150 km north of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland. ""Conditions are now very dangerous and firefighters may soon be unable to prevent the fire advancing,"" Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) said. ""The fire may pose a threat to all lives directly in its path."" Noosa Mayor Tony Wellington told Reuters many of the residents in the affected north, accessible only by ferry or via the beach, had got out this week. But he added that winds were picking up, making things particularly tricky. ""There are plenty of crews battling the fire, including two helicopters,"" he said. The blaze in Noosa is one of more than 80 fires across Queensland, leaving firefighters stretched. QFES said one its water-bombing helicopters crashed while battling a fire in Pechey, west of Brisbane, though the pilot escaped with minor injuries. Bushfires are common in Australia's hot, dry summers, but the ferocity and early arrival of the fires in the southern spring this year has caught many by surprise. The blazes have claimed three lives and destroyed about 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of farmland and bush, fuelled by extremely dry conditions after three years of drought, which experts say has been exacerbated by climate change. 'OUT OF WATER' The hot and windy conditions are set to spike again next week. ""We will not have all these fires contained before then,"" NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told reporters in Sydney. ""We will not have all these fires contained and locked up for many, many weeks."" ""Unfortunately, what we need is rain ... and there is certainly nothing in the forecast for the foreseeable future that's going to make any discernible difference to the conditions."" Some 300 homes have been destroyed in NSW in recent days, Fitzsimmons said, as flames stretched from the state's north coast to within metres of homes in Greater Sydney. No deaths were reported on Tuesday as warning systems and evacuation plans appeared to save lives in the face of what officials said was the greatest threat in at least a decade. ""It was just chewing up everything,"" Karen Weston told Australian Broadcasting Corp from an evacuation centre of a fire near Taree on the mid-north coast. ""I've survived two other bushfires before this but never anything like this."" Academy award winning actor Russell Crowe tweeted photos and video footage on Wednesday of firefighters using helicopters to waterbomb his property near Nana Glen, an rural community some 580 km (360 miles) north of Sydney. Crowe said the property had ""lost a couple of buildings"", some fires were still burning and ""we are out of water"". The fires have sparked increasingly acrimonious debate over climate and fire-prevention policies, with the ruling conservative Liberal Party and the minor opposition Australian Greens exchanging barbs. Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce was among those who have suggested that climate activists were at least partly responsible for the fires by lobbying to reduce so-called back burns, fires deliberately lit to clear dry undergrowth. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, meanwhile, said linking the fires to the government's support of the coal industry was ""the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies"". Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has declined to comment on climate change during the crisis, has called for moderation in the debate.",0
" A multibillion dollar trade deal to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions may sweeten talks this month on tackling climate change, providing an answer to the question of who pays to save the planet. When delegates to the UN climate talks sit down in Kenya on November 6, they will be mindful of this week's British report which warned of economic catastrophe if urgent and dramatic action is not taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of global warming will be at the heart of the Nairobi talks, meant to make progress on drawing up a successor to the UN's Kyoto Protocol on cutting emissions, and agreeing much tougher emissions targets to those which run out in 2012. But to get consensus the world will have to plug big cracks between rich and poor countries over the bill. The United States -- the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases -- pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol partly because big developing countries like China were not included in the cuts. China is the world's number two emitter but Beijing argues that as industrialised nations bear historical responsibility for most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it should be allowed to pursue economic growth without emissions limits. One way round the problem is to set much tougher targets for developed nations only, but sweeten these by expanding Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), allowing them to pay developing countries like China and India to deliver the cuts. The CDM allows rich nations to invest in developing nations -- ranging from hydropower dams in India to capturing methane from trash dumps in Brazil -- and then claim the credits back home for averted greenhouse gas emissions. ""The key term you'll be hearing in Nairobi is scaling up,"" said Michael Zammit Cutajar, head of the UN group set up to plot Kyoto's future post-2012. ""If we're heading to a much more energetic and ambitious emission reduction strategy beyond 2012 there'll have to be a bigger CDM."" The British report on the economic consequences of global warming, by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, said that to avoid catastrophic climate change the world should cut emissions by some 50 to 70 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent -- 50-70 gigatonnes -- per year by 2050. The CDM could contribute to a big chunk of that -- say 10 percent -- even though this would mean scaling up by a factor of 20 the emissions cuts pledged under CDM last year, said Janos Pasztor, an official at the UN's climate change body. ""Potentially it (CDM) could be much, much bigger, "" he said. ""I don't see any inherent problem scaling up. All of this is feasible, let it come."" Expanded carbon trading under Kyoto could help raise $100 billion annually by 2050 to fund clean energy projects in poor countries, the head of the U.N.'s climate change secretariat Yvo de Boer said in September. How can CDM grow so fast? The Nairobi talks will broach this question -- but it seems there's no lack of scope. First up could be a proposal to allow oil firms and others to earn carbon credits by burying carbon dioxide underground using an emerging technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS), considered a potentially vital climate change bandage. A report last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated in all some 2,000 gigatonnes of CO2 could be buried, just the kind of volume Stern would find useful to balance the emissions books. Next could be forest protection through ""avoided deforestation."" Deforestation to make way for crops and pastures was responsible for more than 7 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2000 alone -- nearly a fifth of annual emissions -- according to the World Resources Institute. As trees burn and rot, they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. ""Industrial countries could pay the poor farmers for forest conservation, at some amount between $200 and $10,000 a hectare, and both parties would gain,"" said a detailed World Bank report published in October, which identified gains from including deforestation under CDM. Expanding CDM to include carbon capture and storage and deforestation will not be cleared up in Nairobi, but support there could be a big step in that direction. ""Both CCS and avoided deforestation themes are in vogue, but both processes have some way to go,"" said Cutajar. And he said CDM still had to solve perhaps its biggest problem -- a focus on big developing countries like China, Brazil and India, to the detriment of ""greening"" the economies of small countries that also need help, for example in Africa. By October, around one third of the carbon credits in a CDM pipeline of hundreds of projects come from just 15 industrial-scale cases, according to Stern. ""It's not only an African problem, it's an issue for many smaller, poor developing countries, it's important to build capacity to design and host projects.""",0
"Often the features of our dystopia are
itemised, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising
inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically
described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty
centre, which is the destruction of the Earth through global warming caused by
humans. This style is native to Twitter, but it has
migrated to earnest slice-of-life Facebook pages, to Netflix, to books. Lauren
Oyler’s coolly funny novel “Fake Accounts” begins in this mode (“Consensus was
the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”) and Bo Burnham’s depressed
drama-kid Netflix special “Inside” ends in it, as Burnham shrugs off the rising
oceans and sings, “You say the world is ending. Honey, it already did.” And it
is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age
positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock
photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and
“Humanity is not doomed.” Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it
is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance. That is
not to say that the rhetoric signals a lack of concern about climate change.
But global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems on such an
extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity. This creates its own
perverse flavour of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly
accept it, at least not enough to urgently act. This paralysis itself is almost
too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our
brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about
humankind — even the apocalyptic ones. This “end of the world” does not resemble the
ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment
culminates in dramatic final spectacles. Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state,
inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end. Faced with
this inexorable decline, the fire-and-brimstone fantasies grow ever more
appealing. The apocalyptic drumbeat of social media gestures at the
hopelessness of our situation while supplying a kind of narcotic comfort for
it. Some plead: Just hit us with the comet already. That brings us to the premise of “Don’t Look
Up,” Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy that he has said is an allegory for
inaction on global warming. In it, an American astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio)
and a PhD candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth.
More chilling than this cosmic snowball is the fact that no one seems
particularly concerned by its approach. Comet denialists hold rallies
instructing people to “don’t look up,” but even those who accept the situation
only gesture lazily at trying to stop it. A pop star (Ariana Grande) stages a
grotesque benefit concert; a daytime television host (Tyler Perry) jokes that
he hopes the comet takes out his ex-wife; his co-host (Cate Blanchett) is more
interested in bedding the astronomer than heeding him. As she paws at him in a
hotel corridor, her subconscious death drive becomes manifest, as she purrs:
“Tell me we’re all gonna die!” “Don’t Look Up” fails as a climate change
allegory, because climate change resists metaphor. Even though I count among
the film’s villains (all its journalists are bad), I do not feel as implicated
as I should. For one thing, humans didn’t make the comet. Global warming is not
approaching from space but oozing all around. My attention is diverted not only
by shiny pop stars but also by taxing responsibilities and traumas, many of
which are themselves related to ecological collapse. I am terrified of how global
warming will affect my son’s generation, but when I learned we would need to
travel regularly to a hospital as COVID spiked in New York City, I bought a
car. But the greatest liberty “Don’t Look Up” takes
with its source material comes at the end: The comet hits Earth at its
appointed time, at which point nearly everybody dies. It is final, dramatic,
easy to understand. So, nothing like our current situation. Global warming is what eco-philosopher Timothy
Morton calls a hyperobject, a concept that is too large to be adequately
comprehended by human beings. (McKay’s production company is called Hyperobject
Industries.) Its scale is not just world-historical but geological, and though
it is already very bad, it will only fulfil its catastrophic potential many
lifetimes from now. Its effects are distributed unequally; what I experience as
an ambient stressor may cause strangers to suffer or die. Global warming suggests that humans are
powerful enough to destroy the world but too weak to stop it. Though we are driven
toward world-changing innovation, we are inflexible, fearful of abandoning the
destructive comforts we once saw as progress: our cars, our meats, our free
next-day deliveries. Knowing all this, isn’t it about time we do
something? Hmmm. “Don’t Look Up” turns on one of the most vexing aspects of the
crisis: Stating the data, shouting it even, often fails to move people, though
the film is largely incurious about why. One of the stories we tell ourselves
about global warming is that we need only “listen to the science.” When this
does not work, we are supplied with more science — more glacier drone shots,
more projections of soaring temperatures, more scary stories about dead bees. In the book “Being Ecological,” Morton calls
this “ecological information dump mode,” in which an expert commences “shaking
your lapels while yelling disturbing facts.” But even this seemingly rational
approach stokes an irrational fantasy: that we have a certain amount of time
“left” to stop global warming — just as soon as we get our heads around what’s
going on. The word “apocalypse” is derived from the
Latin for “revelation,” and our current predicament draws out the irony of that
double meaning, as we mistake obsessing about the “end of the world” for acting
on it. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 cli-fi novel “Weather,” is
an information person: a Brooklyn librarian who assists the host of a cult-hit
global warming podcast called “Hell or High Water.” The podcast is “soothing to
me even though she talks only of the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,”
Lizzie says. The more Lizzie doomscrolls about climate change, the more she
turns away from the outside world, lurking on survivalist forums and planning
her family doomstead. “Weather” sketches a scene of intellectual
preppers hoarding information about global warming as if cramming for a cosmic
test. But the more information they find, the more they are able to tailor it
to satisfy their own egos. In “Weather,” a podcast listener waves off talk of
melting glaciers and asks: “But what’s going to happen to the American
weather?” A parable unfolds along these lines in the
final season of “Search Party”: The show’s crew of millennial narcissists
founds a Brooklyn startup called Lyte, which manufactures an “enlightenment”
pill with the unfortunate side effect of turning people into zombies. As the
group’s craven pursuit of consumerist illumination inadvertently hastens the
apocalypse, an egomaniacal imp, Dory (Alia Shawkat), tries to explain that she
just wanted to help people, but all that comes out is this: “I just wanted …” We may not fully comprehend global warming,
but we can feel it, and not just in the weather. A whole lexicon has arisen to
attempt to describe its psychological impact: climate nihilism, climate grief,
climate melancholia, eco-anxiety, pretraumatic stress. A global survey of young
people released last year found that more than half of respondents between the
ages of 16 and 25 “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty”
about it, and believed that “humanity is doomed.” In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,”
teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global
warming nearly killed her. After watching a film in school featuring “starving
polar bears, flooding, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed
and anxious, stopped speaking and “almost starved to death.” We are getting accustomed to the idea that
global warming feels bad, and this provides its own sense of comfort, as if our
psychological distress proves that we are taking the problem seriously. “Civilians love to panic,” says an
epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is partially
set in an unbearably hot, totalitarian future Manhattan ruled by blinkered
scientists. “Survival allows for hope — it is, indeed, predicated on hope — but
it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.” In our response to
global warming, we resemble the frog who does not hop from the heating water
until it’s too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just
can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot. Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we
must abandon to address global warming is the anaesthetising stream of global
warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book, “The
Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily
represent progress, as “we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by
restaging them in theatres of our own design and control.” Even YouTube videos
of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like
Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities
onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said
that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we
can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us. The internet is often criticised for feeding
us useless information, and for spreading disinformation, but it can enable a
destructive relationship with serious information, too. If you’re a person who
accepts the science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual
doomsaying of social media is so seductive: It helps us signal that we care
about big problems even as we chase distractions, and it gives us a silly
little tone for voicing our despair. Most of all, it displaces us in time. We are
always mentally skipping between a nostalgic landscape, where we have plenty of
energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic one, where it’s too late to
do anything. It’s the centre, where we live, that we can’t bear to envision.
After all, denial is the first stage of grief. ©2022 The New York Times Company",2
" Hollywood celebrities Harrison Ford, Bo Derek and Robert Duvall on Monday threw their support behind a new global initiative by the World Bank to save tigers from extinction. While the global development agency's main mission is to fight poverty in developing countries, it has rarely taken on wildlife conservation efforts of endangered species. The new Tiger Conservation Initiative will bring together wildlife experts, scientists and governments to try to halt the killing and thriving illegal trade in tiger skins, meat and body parts used in traditional Asian medicines. Ford, a long-time environmental activist, said efforts to protect tigers would only succeed if local communities were involved in conservation efforts. ""By committing to help wild tigers, the World Bank is sounding its intention to be a global leader in biodiversity conservation,"" Ford, the star of the latest ""Indiana Jones"" movie, told an event at Washington's Smithsonian National Zoo. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the decline in the number of tigers was ""shocking"" from over 100,000 a century ago to currently less than 4,000. The clearing of large areas of forest land for urban development has added to their decline and disappearance from Central Asia, the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, and most of China. POACHING AT ALL-TIME HIGH A World Bank report warned that ""if current trends persist, tigers are likely to be the first species of large predator to vanish in historic times."" ""Just as with many other challenges of sustainability, such as climate change, pandemic disease, or poverty, the crisis facing tigers overwhelms local capabilities and it is one that transcends local borders,"" Zoellick said. ""This is a problem that cannot be handled by individual nations alone, it requires an alliance of strong local commitment backed by deep international support,"" he added. Zoellick said the World Bank would convene a series of discussions with countries, conservationists and the private sector to mobilize funding for tiger conservation, and launch studies on how better to protect the cats. The World Bank chief said there were examples of where tigers had been brought back from the brink of extinction, such as in Russia and Nepal, but added that saving the world tiger population would not be an easy task. ""All those concerned may not agree but this does not mean we should stand on the sidelines and do nothing,"" he said. John Seidensticker, chief scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo's Conservation Ecology Center, said tiger poaching and trafficking in tiger parts and meat was at an all-time high and the biggest immediate threat to tigers. ""For wild tigers to live they must have much better security on their home ground,"" he said, also calling on countries to properly enforce laws to protect tigers. This, Seidensticker said, required strong political will. ""We're at a tipping point and we're going to lose wild tigers but with the World Bank initiative wild tigers now have a chance,"" he added Seidensticker said tiger conservation efforts needed to be more coordinated and focused, and the World Bank could help as a global institution.",2
" Water levels in Indian Kashmir's rivers and streams have decreased by two-thirds as a result of global warming which is melting most of the Himalayan region's glaciers, a voluntary group said on Monday. According to an ActionAid report on the impact climate change is having in Kashmir, many small glaciers in the disputed state have completely disappeared over the last four decades. ""The study shows that the water level in almost all the streams and rivers in Kashmir has decreased by approximately two-thirds during the last 40 years,"" said the report titled ""On the Brink?"" The report said the average temperature in the mountainous parts of the restive state had increased by 1.45 degrees Celsius (2.6 Fahrenheit) over the last two decades, while in the southern plains the temperature rise was 2.32 degrees Celsius (4.2 Fahrenheit). Scientists warn that receding Himalayan glaciers could jeopardise water supplies for hundreds of millions of people and rising sea levels threaten Indian cities like Mumbai and Kolkata. Floods and droughts could become more common, diseases more rampant and crop yields lower as temperatures rise, they add. Kashmir is in the grip of a nearly 18-year-old insurgency that has killed 42,000 people. Human rights groups put the toll at about 60,000.",0
"SINGAPORE, Fri Jul 10, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Rising seas, a rapid weakening of the Indian monsoon and spiralling costs of adapting to a warmer, drier world are just some of the looming risks from rapid climate change, a report for the Australian government says. The report, ""Climate change 2009, faster change and more serious risks"", examines the rapid progress of climate change science in recent years and the growing threats that face billions of people around the planet. Rising temperatures, drought and long-term drying out of farmlands in Australia, Africa, the United States, acidifying oceans and rapid switches in weather patterns all threaten to undermine societies and cost billions in damage. ""Part of the reason for suggesting that the risks are higher than we thought is that the climate system appears to be changing faster than we thought likely a decade ago,"" the report's author Will Steffen told Reuters on Friday from Canberra, Australia. The report was written for the Department of Climate Change and comes five months before a major U.N. meeting that aims to seal a broader pact to fight global warming. (The report is available here) Many scientists have revised upwards their projections for the pace of global warming since United Nation's Climate Panel issued a major report in 2007, underscoring the increased focus on understanding the risks from climate change. Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, said drought and long-term drying out of farmlands and water catchment areas will likely cause costs to spiral as societies try to adapt. ""I think there are risks that are potentially more important. One is drought and drying risk and not just in Australia but in other parts of the world where that appears to be linked to climate change. That's going to affect water resources, it's affecting it now,"" he said. He said there was now evidence of climate change being linked to the drying trends in major agricultural regions of Victoria state and southern South Australia. Evidence was much stronger for the grain-growing area of south-west of Western Australia. SEA LEVEL Sea level was less of a risk in the medium-term. ""Whereas sea level rise, unless there is a really fast, catastrophic event in West Antarctica, we're not going to see huge changes till the second half of the century at least,"" he said referring to a major collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Potentially greater threats were abrupt changes to the ocean and atmosphere that led to irreversible switches in weather or ocean patterns, so-called ""tipping points"". ""An example is the Indian monsoon. According to some models, that could switch into a drier mode in a matter of years,"" he said. More than a billion people in South Asia rely on the monsoon for agriculture and water supplies. Steffen pointed to the accumulation of carbon-dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, in the atmosphere that is now near the upper range of scenarios by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 report. Sea level rise of more than 3 millimetres per year was also tracking near the upper range of the panel's projections. The rate at which global ocean temperatures have been rising had also been revised up by 15 percent, he said. ""I think the reports coming out at various fora are clear the system seems to moving at the upper range of IPCC projections,"" he said. ""That in itself is a major change in thinking. What it says is there's a sense of urgency to getting on top of this issue.""",0
" Mankind is to blame for climate change but governments still have time to slow accelerating damage at moderate cost if they act quickly, a draft UN report shows. Underlining the need for speed, it says a European Union goal of holding temperature rises to a maximum 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times is almost out of reach. The 21-page study, due for release in November, lays out possible responses to global warming but cautions that some impacts are already inevitable, such as a gradual rise in sea levels that is set to last for centuries. The report gives a first overview of 3,000 pages of research by the UN's climate panel already published in three instalments this year about the science, the likely impacts and the costs of slowing climate change. The authoritative summary, obtained by Reuters and meant to guide governments in working out how to slow warming, reiterates that humans are to blame for climate change but that clean technologies are available to offset the most harmful emissions. ""Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (from human activities) greenhouse gas concentrations,"" it says. ""Very likely"" means at least 90 percent probability, up from 66 percent in a previous report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 when the link was only judged ""likely"". The IPCC draws on work by 2,500 scientists. The report shows a table indicating worsening damage such as bleached corals, coastal flooding, increasing costs of treating disease, deaths from heatwaves and rising risks of extinctions of species of animals and plants. But it says: ""Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed"" by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Among options to offset warming, blamed mainly on greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are energy efficiency, wider use of renewable energies, carbon markets or burying carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. The report indicates that the cost of such initiatives would be manageable for the world economy. Global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2030 would be reduced by up to 3 percent in the most stringent case that would require emissions to peak within about 15 years. Other less tough goals would mean only a fractional loss of GDP by 2030. The report will be issued in Valencia, Spain, on Nov. 17 after review by governments, along with an even shorter 5-page summary. The draft is dated May 15 -- an updated version has been written this month to take account of government suggestions, scientists said. ""Warming of the climate is now unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global mean sea level,"" the summary begins. The report reiterates best estimates that temperatures will rise by 1.8 to 4.0 Celsius (3 to 7 Fahrenheit) this century and that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres. But it says ocean levels are likely to keep rising ""for many centuries"" even if greenhouse gases are stabilised, because water expands as it heats up. The deep oceans will keep heating up as warmth filters down from the surface. Under a range of scenarios, such thermal expansion of the oceans alone would bring sea level rises of 0.4 to 3.7 metres in coming centuries, without counting any melting of ice in glaciers or in the vast Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. About 1,000 delegates from 158 nations are meeting in Vienna this week to discuss ways to extend the UN's Kyoto Protocol for fighting warming beyond 2012 and to widen it to include outsiders such as the United States and developing nations. ",6
"""In the past – as far back as the 1940s, but continuing for decades – the Department of State was among many public and private employers that discriminated against employees and job applicants on the basis of perceived sexual orientation, forcing some employees to resign or refusing to hire certain applicants in the first place,"" Kerry said in a statement. ""These actions were wrong then, just as they would be wrong today."" He added: ""On behalf of the Department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the Department's steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTI community."" US Senator Ben Cardin, the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Maryland, wrote Kerry in November referring to the time as a ""deep stain on our national history and that of the State Department."" Cardin told Kerry he intended to ""remedy this injustice"" by introducing legislation to acknowledge the ""lavender scare"" years and offer an apology on behalf of Congress.",2
" UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world on Wednesday to agree to work out a new climate treaty by 2009 and said detailed greenhouse gas cuts can be worked out after UN talks in Bali. Entering a dispute pitting the United States against the European Union and some developing nations, Ban said the overriding goal of the Dec. 3-14 meeting was to agree to launch negotiations on a pact to succeed the current Kyoto Protocol. Ban told more than 120 environment ministers that climate change was the ""moral challenge of our generation"" and said there was a ""desperate urgency"" to act to curb rising seas, floods, droughts, famines and extinctions of wildlife. ""The time to act is now,"" Ban told the ministers, split over the ground rules for agreeing to launch formal negotiations on a new long-term global treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions, expanding the 37-nation Kyoto pact to all countries. Washington is leading opposition at talks of any mention of scientific evidence of a need for cuts in greenhouse gases of 25 to 40 percent by 2020 below 1990 levels as part of the guidelines for negotiations. ""Practically speaking this will have to be negotiated down the road,"" Ban said, echoing a view given by Washington. ""We have two years' time before we can conclude an international deal on this issue."" Still, he also said that countries should respect a finding by the U.N. climate panel that a range of 25-40 percent was needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change. ROADMAP ""You need to set an agenda -- a roadmap to a more secure climate future, coupled with a tight timeline that produces a deal by 2009,"" he said. The United Nations wants a new pact adopted at a meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009. The United States, supported by Japan, Canada and Australia, says that even a non-binding mention of a 25-to-40 percent range could prejudge the outcome of negotiations. ""We don't want to be pre-determining what will come out of this process,"" said Paula Dobriansky, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs. But the European Union insisted that rich nations needed to show they were leading by example to convince developing nations, such as China and India, to start braking the rise of their surging emissions from burning fossil fuels. ""I don't need a paper from Bali that says we will just meet again next year,"" German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said. ""If you want to go a long way you need to know the starting point and where you want to go."" Ban called on all nations, including the United States, to show flexibility. He also said the threat of global warming had a ""silver lining"" because creative solutions could create jobs and ease poverty in developing nations from Africa to Asia. Earlier, Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd handed formal papers to Ban ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, isolating the United States as the only rich nation without binding caps on greenhouse gas emissions under the U.N. deal stretching to 2012. Rudd, whose Labor Party won a landslide election victory last month, said Australia was already suffering from climate change -- ranging from a drying up of rivers to disruptions to corals of the Great Barrier Reef. ""What we see today is a portent of things to come,"" he said. The talks are set to wrap-up by Friday or early Saturday and traditionally annual U.N. climate meetings feature hard-bargaining and all-night sessions. The United Nations wants a deal in place by the end of 2009 to give parliaments three years to ratify and help guide billions of dollars of investments in everything from solar panels and wind turbines to coal-fired power plants. It took eight years for enough countries to ratify Kyoto for it to come into force in 2005, a process that was slowed in 2001 by Washington's decision not to sign up. A failure of Bali to agree to start talks would sour chances of a successor to Kyoto. Apart from Australia, 36 Kyoto nations have promised to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United States argues Kyoto would hurt its economy and wrongly excludes 2008-12 targets for big developing nations.",0
"Laying out his new Cuba policy in a speech in Miami, Trump signed a presidential directive to roll back parts of Obama’s historic opening to the Communist-ruled country after a 2014 diplomatic breakthrough between the two former Cold War foes. But Trump was leaving in place many of Obama’s changes, including the reopened US embassy in Havana, even as he sought to show he was making good on a campaign promise to take a tougher line against Cuba. ""We will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer,"" Trump told a cheering crowd in Miami’s Cuban-American enclave of Little Havana, including Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who helped forge the new restrictions on Cuba. ""Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration's completely one-sided deal with Cuba,"" Trump declared as he made a full-throated verbal assault on the government of Cuban President Raul Castro. Trump’s revised approach, which will be contained in a new presidential directive, calls for stricter enforcement of a longtime ban on Americans going to Cuba as tourists, and seeks to prevent US dollars from being used to fund what the Trump administration sees as a repressive military-dominated government. 
 
 

But facing pressure from US businesses and even some fellow Republicans to avoid turning back the clock completely in relations with communist-ruled Cuba, the president chose to leave intact some of his Democratic predecessor's steps toward normalization.   The new policy bans most US business transactions with the Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group, a Cuban conglomerate involved in all sectors of the economy, but makes some exceptions, including for air and sea travel, according to US officials. This will essentially shield US airlines and cruise lines serving the island. ""We do not want US dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exploits and abuses the citizens of Cuba,"" Trump said, pledging that US sanctions would not be lifted until Cuba frees political prisoners and holds free election. However, Trump stopped short of breaking diplomatic relations restored in 2015 after more than five decades of hostilities. He will not cut off recently resumed direct US-Cuba commercial flights or cruise-ship travel, though his more restrictive policy seems certain to dampen new economic ties overall. The administration, according to one White House official, has no intention of “disrupting” existing business ventures such as one struck under Obama by Starwood Hotels Inc, which is owned by Marriott International Inc, to manage a historic Havana hotel. Nor does Trump plan reinstate limits that Obama lifted on the amount of the island’s coveted rum and cigars that Americans can bring home for personal use. While the changes are far-reaching, they appear to be less sweeping than many US pro-engagement advocates had feared. Still, it will be the latest attempt by Trump to overturn parts of Obama's presidential legacy. He has already pulled the United States out of a major international climate treaty and is trying to scrap his predecessor's landmark healthcare program. Trump justified his partial reversal of Obama’s Cuba measures to a large extent on human rights grounds. His aides contend that Obama’s efforts amounted to ""appeasement"" and have done nothing to advance political freedoms in Cuba, while benefiting the Cuban government financially. Trump’s critics have questioned why his administration is now singling out Cuba for its human rights record but downplaying the issue in other parts of the world. Citing the lack of human rights concessions from Cuba in the detente negotiated by Obama, Trump said, ""It's hard to think of a policy that makes less sense than the prior administration's terrible and misguided deal with the Castro regime."" International human rights groups say, however, that again isolating the island could worsen the situation by empowering Cuban hard-liners. The Cuban government has made clear it will not be pressured into reforms in exchange for engagement. The Cuban government had no immediate comment, but ordinary Cubans said they were crestfallen to be returning to an era of frostier relations with the United States with potential economic fallout for them.",2
"The speeches, aired hours apart, combined the inspirational advice given to graduates — build community, do what is right, be a leader — with pointed criticism of the handling of an outbreak that has killed more than 87,000 Americans and crippled much of the economy. “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said in his first address, directed at graduates of historically black colleges and universities. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.” Although Obama did not mention President Donald Trump by name, some saw his comments as criticism of his successor. “President Trump’s unprecedented coronavirus response has saved lives,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that cited the administration’s travel restrictions, small business loan program and use of the private sector “to fill the stockpile left depleted by his predecessor.” In speeches that spoke to social inequities, Obama said the pandemic was a wake-up call for young adults, showing them the importance of good leadership and that “the old ways of doing things just don’t work.” “Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think,” he said during a prime time special for high school seniors. “Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up. I hope that instead, you decide to ground yourself in values that last, like honesty, hard work, responsibility, fairness, generosity, respect for others.” Obama’s comments were one of his few public addresses to a national audience during the outbreak, and he said a leadership void had created a clear mandate for the graduates: “If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said. Obama’s remarks were billed as commencement speeches, but they also appeared to be an effort to comfort and assure an American public divided by Trump’s handling of the crisis. The former president also used the occasions to attempt to rally the nation in an election year around values historically championed by Democrats, like universal health care and environmental and economic justice. Since leaving office three years ago, Obama generally has avoided publicly criticising Trump. But his jabs at the pandemic response could further inflame tensions between the two most recent occupants of the White House. Obama called the current administration’s response to the pandemic “anemic and spotty” in a private call last week with thousands of supporters who had worked for him. And in recent days Trump has unleashed tirades against Obama on Twitter and on television, resurrecting unfounded claims that his predecessor tried to bring him down by manufacturing the Russia investigation. The prime-time event, “Graduate Together: High School Class of 2020 Commencement,” was organized by XQ Institute, a think tank that works with schools, in partnership with LeBron James’ foundation and the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a philanthropic organisation. It aired on major television networks. Obama told the seniors the outbreak had forced them to “grow up faster than some generations,” as they have had to deal with the pressures of social media, school shootings, climate change and, now, a pandemic. He encouraged the high school graduates to face down those challenges, as scary as they might be. “If we’re going to create a world where everybody has the opportunity to find a job and afford college; if we’re going to save the environment and defeat future pandemics, then we’re going to have to do it together,” he said. “So be alive to one another’s struggles.” Hours earlier, Obama addressed more than 27,000 students at 78 participating historically black colleges and universities, known as HCBUs. That two-hour event, “Show Me Your Walk HBCU Edition,” was streamed on the social media platforms of its corporate sponsor, JPMorgan Chase. Hosted by Kevin Hart, it also featured dozens of prominent African American athletes, politicians and entertainers, many of whom were HBCU graduates. Obama told the college graduates, most of whom are black, that the coronavirus “just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.” The disparities are not just in public health but also “just as we see it when a black man goes for a jog, and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him if he doesn’t submit to their questioning,” he said. It was a reference to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was chased by a white father and son and fatally shot in a coastal Georgia community in February. As communities across the country emerge from stay-at-home measures and people clash over how much freedom they should have, Obama suggested that Americans needed to be considerate of others. He encouraged the graduates to work with other marginalised groups in their efforts to create societal change. “It doesn’t matter how much money you make if everyone around you is hungry and sick,” he said, later adding that, “our society and democracy only works when we think not just about ourselves but about each other.” Ariel Turnley, 21, watched her own Spelman College virtual graduation with her mother and aunt in the living room of her Lauderhill, Florida, home, then tuned into Obama’s speech for HBCU students. “I think President Obama said what so many of us feel, that those in power are not doing the best things they can during this pandemic with the power they have,” said Turnley, who graduated with a degree in computer science. “I also appreciated him talking about the injustices that have been highlighted during this pandemic. This is not the graduation that we imagined, but I felt like he offered the words I wanted to hold on to during this crisis.” Obama’s speech came at a time when new social-distancing norms have dashed many graduation traditions — from the ritual of walking across the stage to the tossing of the graduation caps — so popular political leaders and celebrities have stepped in to offer assuring messages as graduates enter a world shaped by uncertainty, infection fears and economic instability. Obama is scheduled to make a third online commencement address June 6, along with Michelle Obama, in a ceremony hosted by YouTube. While he was president, Obama delivered the commencement addresses at three historically black schools, Hampton University, Howard University and Morehouse College. The former president has had a complicated relationship with the HBCU community. While overall funding for the institutions increased during his eight years in office, some complained that he did not make them a priority, and that cuts and changes made under his watch to Pell grants and other loan programs made life difficult for some HBCU students. He called HBCU graduates the “inheritors of one of America’s proudest traditions” and said they needed to act. “Whether you realize it or not, you’ve got more road maps, more role models, and more resources than the Civil Rights generation did,” he said. “You’ve got more tools, technology and talents than my generation did. No generation has been better positioned to be warriors for justice and remake the world.” c.2020 The New York Times Company",0
"By Steve Holland WASHINGTON June 4 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama had a blunt, ""tough-love"" message for Arabs and Israelis that thrust him deeper into Middle East peacemaking -- a tangled web that bedeviled his predecessors and carries risks for him. Quoting a Koran passage to ""speak always the truth,"" Obama set aside diplomatic niceties in a speech in Cairo demanding that Israel stop building Jewish West Bank settlements that antagonize Palestinians, that Palestinians work for peace and accept Israel's right to exist and for Palestinian militants to halt violence. ""We cannot impose peace,"" Obama said in Thursday's speech to the world's Muslims. ""But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true."" His foray into the Middle East comes far earlier in his presidency than that of his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who waited until late in their terms to make a major push and found themselves disappointed at the outcome. Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said taking the initiative on Middle East peace this early means Obama's ability to deliver will become a test of his credibility. ""This administration three years from now when we're in the middle of an election campaign will in part be measured on the extent to which it brings Arabs and Israelis closer to a two-state solution,"" he said. The president, who is a Christian but whose Kenyan father came from a family that includes generations of Muslims, stressed his Muslim roots in a way that he never did during his presidential campaign last year, when it might have been seen as a political liability. 'CHANGED THE CLIMATE' That may have helped him in delivering a speech which Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called a blunt, honest address that was critical to signaling ""a new era of understanding with Muslim communities worldwide."" ""He said things that if previous presidents had said them, it wouldn't have mattered, but because he is who he is, it changed the climate in which he said them, made it more meaningful,"" said Ron Kaufman, who was a political adviser to former President George H.W. Bush. ""The fact that a Barack Hussein Obama said these things, he can say them in a way that the moderate Muslims would listen,"" Kaufman said. While direct and frank, Obama struck an empathetic tone with Muslims in seeking what he called a ""new beginning"" with them, trying to move beyond tensions left by the Bush administration's war in Iraq. A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk of the Saban Center for Middle East policy, said Obama presented ""a dramatic and persuasive American manifesto for a new relationship with the Muslim world."" Obama's demand for Israel to freeze settlements represented a challenge for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has defiantly resisted taking that step, and raises the possibility of frictions with pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Congress, many from Obama's own Democratic Party. ELUSIVE GOAL The top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, said he was concerned that Obama had seemed to place ""equal blame"" on the Israelis and the Palestinians."" ""Because Hamas is a terrorist organization, they've been funded by the Syrians and the Iranians, and I just don't think the Israelis deserve to be put in the same playpen with terrorists,"" he said. History shows tangling with Israel can at times prove costly for U.S. presidents. George H.W. Bush, president from 1989 to 1993, angered Israel and its U.S. backers by saying he would not support new money for Israel to use for settlements. He has since told former aides he believed a loss of Jewish support was one reason he lost his 1992 re-election bid. Given that Middle East peace has been an elusive goal of every president of the past 50 years, it would come as a surprise to most Americans if Obama were to succeed in bringing Arabs and Israelis together. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted late in May found that only 32 percent of Americans believed there would come a time when the two sides would be able to settle their differences and live in peace. And 66 percent doubted it would happen.",1
"Texas, the nation’s leading energy-producing state, seemed like the last place on Earth that could run out of energy. Then last week it did. The crisis could be traced to that other defining Texas trait: independence, both from big government and from the rest of the country. The dominance of the energy industry and the “Republic of Texas” ethos became a devastating liability when energy stopped flowing to millions of Texans who shivered and struggled through a snowstorm that paralysed much of the state. Part of the responsibility for the near-collapse of the state’s electrical grid can be traced to the decision in 1999 to embark on the nation’s most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation, handing control of the state’s entire electricity delivery system to a market-based patchwork of private generators, transmission companies and energy retailers. The energy industry wanted it, the people wanted it, both parties supported it. “Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates and offering consumers more choices about the power they use,” George W. Bush, then the governor, said as he signed the top-to-bottom deregulation legislation. Bush’s prediction of lower-cost power generally came true, and the dream of a free-market electrical grid worked reasonably well most of the time, in large part because Texas had so much cheap natural gas as well as abundant wind to power renewable energy. But the newly deregulated system came with few safeguards and even fewer enforced rules. With so many cost-conscious utilities competing for budget-shopping consumers, there was little financial incentive to invest in weather protection and maintenance. Wind turbines are not equipped with the de-icing equipment routinely installed in the colder climes of the Dakotas and power lines have little insulation. The possibility of more frequent cold-weather events was never built into infrastructure plans in a state where climate change remains an exotic, disputed concept. “Deregulation was something akin to abolishing the speed limit on an interstate highway,” said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston. “That opens up shortcuts that cause disasters.” The state’s entire energy infrastructure was walloped with glacial temperatures that even under the strongest of regulations might have frozen gas wells and downed power lines. But what went wrong was far broader: Deregulation meant that critical rules of the road for power were set not by law, but rather by a dizzying array of energy competitors. Utility regulation is intended to compensate for the natural monopolies that occur when a single electrical provider serves an area; it keeps prices down while protecting public safety and guaranteeing fair treatment to customers. Yet many states have flirted with deregulation as a way of giving consumers more choices and encouraging new providers, especially alternative energy producers. California, one of the early deregulators in the 1990s, scaled back its initial foray after market manipulation led to skyrocketing prices and rolling blackouts. States like Maryland allow customers to pick from a menu of producers. In some states, competing private companies offer varied packages like discounts for cheaper power at night. But no state has gone as far as Texas, which has not only turned over the keys to the free market but has also isolated itself from the national grid, limiting the state’s ability to import power when its own generators are foundering. Consumers themselves got a direct shock last week when customers who had chosen variable-rate electricity contracts found themselves with power bills of $5,000 or more. While they were expecting extra-low monthly rates, many may now face huge bills as a result of the upswing in wholesale electricity prices during the cold wave. Gov Greg Abbott on Sunday said the state’s Public Utility Commission has issued a moratorium on customer disconnections for nonpayment and will temporarily restrict providers from issuing invoices. There is regulation in the Texas system, but it is hardly robust. One nonprofit agency, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, was formed to manage the wholesale market. It is supervised by the Public Utility Commission, which also oversees the transmission companies that offer customers an exhaustive array of contract choices laced with more fine print than a credit card agreement. But both agencies are nearly unaccountable and toothless compared to regulators in other regions, where many utilities have stronger consumer protections and submit an annual planning report to ensure adequate electricity supply. Texas energy companies are given wide latitude in their planning for catastrophic events. Into a Snowstorm With No Reserves One example of how Texas has gone it alone is its refusal to enforce a “reserve margin” of extra power available above expected demand, unlike all other power systems around North America. With no mandate, there is little incentive to invest in precautions for events, such as a Southern snowstorm, that are rare. Any company that took such precautions would put itself at a competitive disadvantage. A surplus supply of natural gas, the dominant power fuel in Texas, near power plants might have helped avoid the cascade of failures in which power went off, forcing natural gas production and transmission offline, which in turn led to further power shortages. In the aftermath of the dayslong outages, ERCOT has been criticised by both Democratic and Republican residents, lawmakers and business executives, a rare display of unity in a fiercely partisan and Republican-dominated state. Abbott said he supported calls for the agency’s leadership to resign and made ERCOT reform a priority for the Legislature. The reckoning has been swift — this week, lawmakers will hold hearings in Austin to investigate the agency’s handling of the storm and the rolling outages. For ERCOT operators, the storm’s arrival was swift and fierce, but they had anticipated it and knew it would strain their system. They asked power customers across the state to conserve, warning that outages were likely. But late on Sunday, Feb 14, it rapidly became clear that the storm was far worse than they had expected: Sleet and snow fell, and temperatures plunged. In the council’s command centre outside Austin, a room dominated by screens flashing with maps, graphics and data tracking the flow of electricity to 26 million people in Texas, workers quickly found themselves fending off a crisis. As weather worsened into Monday morning, residents cranked up their heaters and demand surged. Power plants began falling offline in rapid succession as they were overcome by the frigid weather or ran out of fuel to burn. Within hours, 40% of the power supply had been lost. The entire grid — carrying 90% of the electric load in Texas — was barrelling toward a collapse. In the electricity business, supply and demand need to be in balance. Imbalances lead to catastrophic blackouts. Recovering from a total blackout would be an agonising and tedious process, known as a “black start,” that could take weeks, or possibly months. And in the early morning hours last Monday, the Texas grid was “seconds and minutes” away from such a collapse, said Bill Magness, president and chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council. “If we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn’t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,” Magness said. “We’d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.” Earlier Warnings of Trouble The outages and the cold weather touched off an avalanche of failures, but there had been warnings long before last week’s storm. After a heavy snowstorm in February 2011 caused statewide rolling blackouts and left millions of Texans in the dark, federal authorities warned the state that its power infrastructure had inadequate “winterisation” protection. But 10 years later, pipelines remained inadequately insulated and heaters that might have kept instruments from freezing were never installed. During heat waves, when demand has soared during several recent summers, the system in Texas has also strained to keep up, raising questions about lack of reserve capacity on the unregulated grid. And aside from the weather, there have been periodic signs that the system can run into trouble delivering sufficient energy, in some cases because of equipment failures, in others because of what critics called an attempt to drive up prices, according to Hirs of the University of Houston, as well as several energy consultants. Another potential safeguard might have been far stronger connections to the two interstate power-sharing networks, East and West, that allow states to link their electrical grids and obtain power from thousands of miles away when needed to hold down costs and offset their own shortfalls. But Texas, reluctant to submit to the federal regulation that is part of the regional power grids, made decisions as far back as the early 20th century to become the only state in the continental United States to operate its own grid — a plan that leaves it able to borrow only from a few close neighbours. The border city of El Paso survived the freeze much better than Dallas or Houston because it was not part of the Texas grid but connected to the much larger grid covering many Western states. But the problems that began with last Monday’s storm went beyond an isolated electrical grid. The entire ecosystem of how Texas generates, transmits and uses power stalled, as millions of Texans shivered in darkened, unheated homes. Texans love to brag about natural gas, which state officials often call the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. No state produces more, and gas-fired power plants produce nearly half the state’s electricity. “We are struggling to come to grips with the reality that gas came up short and let us down when we needed it most,” said Michael E Webber, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The cold was so severe that the enormous oil and natural gas fields of West Texas froze up, or could not get sufficient power to operate. Though a few plants had stored gas reserves, there was insufficient electricity to pump it. The leaders of ERCOT defended the organisation, its lack of mandated reserves and the state’s isolation from larger regional grids, and said the blame for the power crisis lies with the weather, not the overall deregulated system in Texas. “The historic, just about unprecedented, storm was the heart of the problem,” Magness, the council’s chief executive, said, adding: “We’ve found that this market structure works. It demands reliability. I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet market structure that could have managed the extreme lows and generation outages that we were facing Sunday night.” In Texas, energy regulation is as much a matter of philosophy as policy. Its independent power grid is a point of pride that has been an applause line in Texas political speeches for decades. Deregulation is a hot topic among Texas energy experts, and there has been no shortage of predictions that the grid could fail under stress. But there has not been widespread public dissatisfaction with the system, although many are now wondering if they are being well served. “I believe there is great value in Texas being on its own grid and I believe we can do so safely and securely and confidently going forward,” said state Rep Jeff Leach, R-Plano, who has called for an investigation into what went wrong. “But it’s going to take new investment and some new strategic decisions to make sure we’re protected from this ever happening again.” Steven D Wolens, a former Democratic lawmaker from Dallas and a principal architect of the 1999 deregulation legislation, said deregulation was meant to spur more generation, including from renewable energy sources, and to encourage the mothballing of older plants that were spewing pollution. “We were successful,” said Wolens, who left the Legislature in 2005. But the 1999 legislation was intended as a first iteration that would evolve along with the needs of the state, he said. “They can focus on it now and they can fix it now,” he said. “The buck stops with the Texas Legislature and they are in a perfect position to determine the basis of the failure, to correct it and make sure it never happens again.”     © 2021 The New York Times Company",0
" Antarctica lost billions of tonnes of ice over the last decade, contributing to the rising seas around the world, a climate researcher said on Monday. The ice melted from two particular parts of the southern continent, according to Eric Rignot and colleagues, who wrote about the phenomenon in the journal Nature Geoscience. Using satellites to monitor most of Antarctica's coastline, the scientists estimate that West Antarctica lost 132 billion tonnes of ice in 2006, compared to about 83 billion tonnes in 1996. The Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches toward South America, lost about 60 billion tonnes in 2006. To put this in perspective, 4 billion tonnes of ice would be enough to provide drinking water to the more than 60 million people of the United Kingdom for a year, fellow author Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol said in a statement. This ice loss is not from the so-called ice sheets that cover the water around the continent. This melting occurred in the glaciers that cover much of the Antarctic land mass, and when that melts, it contributes to sea level rise in a way that sea ice does not. ""One immediate consequence (of the melting Antarctic ice) is to raise sea level,"" Rignot, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an e-mail interview. Antarctica's contribution to global sea level rise was about 0.02 inch (0.5 mm) in 2006, compared to about 0.01 inch (0.3 mm) in 1996. Rignot noted that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figured Antarctica would not contribute at all to sea level rise, and in fact predicted a growth of the big ice sheet the covers much of the continent from enhanced precipitation. This prediction was supposed to come from increased evaporation from the oceans as the planet warmed up, but this has not been observed so far in Antarctica, Rignot said. ""In some regions the ice sheet is close to warm sources of water. ... The parts of Antarctica we are seeing change right now are closest to these heat sources,"" he said. These findings are in line with what is happening to the Greenland ice sheet, which melted at a record rate last year, and with studies of Arctic sea ice, which ebbed to its lowest level ever measured in 2007. A study last week by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that older, thicker Arctic sea ice that lasts from year to year is giving way to younger, thinner sea ice that is more susceptible to melting. ",0
"Trained in soldering, she aspired to a career in electrical work but hemmed saris for her husband's tailor shop in the west Indian city of Pune until two years ago, when she found work in the country's fast-expanding electric vehicle (EV) sector. Kumbhar's ambition, stalled by motherhood and safety worries about working in a roadside electrical shop, has now taken wings as she assembles circuits for EV speedometers at a factory in Pune - her first job as a formal worker with fixed wages. She is one of a small but growing group of women blazing a trail amid India's EV boom, driven by record sales and a policy push, as the government seeks to cut planet-heating emissions by promoting the use of electric scooters, rickshaws and cars run on power that is set to become increasingly clean over time. Despite concerns over safety and quality, as well as a shortage of charging stations, demand for EVs is outstripping supply - and as firms ramp up production, they are offering rare jobs to women in an auto industry that has been male-dominated. ""I work fixed hours and I am financially independent,"" said Kumbhar, assembling circuits with pink-gloved fingers on an all-female shop-floor at Kinetic Communications, a manufacturer of EV components and a subsidiary of Indian auto-maker Kinetic Group. ""My soldering is good and I may get a promotion. This was my dream,"" she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The factory's workforce is about four-fifths women, which goes against the grain in India, where only 20% of women are in the labour force. The South Asian nation has one of the world's lowest female participation rates, far below the global average of 47% of women employed or seeking a job compared with 74% of men. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated India's gender gap, as nearly half of women lost their jobs across the formal and informal sectors during lockdowns and had not returned to work by the end of 2020, research shows. Yet in the past two years, as sales of EVs surged by over 200% in India and more factories sprang up to produce them, the doors have started to open for women in manufacturing, design and leadership roles. In contrast to manufacturing of internal combustion engine vehicles, which relies on heavy machinery, EV companies are focused on electronics, assembly, software and design - skill-sets more widely available among women, industry analysts say. Labour rights advocates see women's comparative advantage in the EV business as an opportunity to increase their pay and strengthen their status and influence in the workplace. Rashmi Urdhwareshe, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, noted that startups in the EV ecosystem are bringing in new ideas and, unlike legacy auto firms with a conventional male workforce, are building their business from scratch. Ride-hailing firm Ola Cabs and Italian motor manufacturer Piaggio have set up all-women shop-floors at their India-based factories in the last year. And Kinetic Green and fellow leading EV makers Hero Electric and Ather Energy plan to expand and employ largely women. Battery-maker Esmito Solutions and EV manufacturing majors Kinetic Green and Mahindra Electric, meanwhile, are helmed by women, as is the federal power ministry's energy transition company. Urdhwareshe, one of the few women in India's auto industry when she started work in the 1980s, said women have the mindset needed to navigate the challenges of a fledgling business, because they care about safety and value for money. ""But there are not enough women yet, and the few that are there are trend-setting examples,"" she emphasised. 
 
 Mahindra's, e2oPlus, operated by Indian ride-hailing company Ola, is seen at an electric vehicle charging station in Nagpur, India Jan 24, 2018. REUTERS/Aditi Shah 

BREAKING BIAS  Mahindra's, e2oPlus, operated by Indian ride-hailing company Ola, is seen at an electric vehicle charging station in Nagpur, India Jan 24, 2018. REUTERS/Aditi Shah  Prabhjot Kaur, the co-founder and CEO of Esmito, a startup producing batteries and battery-swapping stations for EVs, remembers having to patiently explain her job in meetings where she was often the only woman. ""I would be asked two, three, four times about what I do. I remember the faces and expressions of everyone who assumed I was a secretary, and then saw me take the floor to make my presentation,"" said the 42-year-old with a smile. Sulajja Firodia Motwani, founder and CEO of Kinetic Green, has also been in Kaur's shoes. After finishing university and returning from the United States in the mid-1990s, she joined her family's auto business, only to be met with scepticism by staff. ""They thought I was a privileged daughter who was here for a little time and that I would disappear in a few days,"" said Motwani, 51. Kaur and Motwani have faced other challenges common to most women in the EV corporate world, from a lack of female toilets to not being taken seriously by colleagues. More positively, many women leaders and shop-floor workers told the Thomson Reuters Foundation their parents had been their loudest cheerleaders, with fathers especially egging them on to pursue their ambitions. Born and brought up in Rajpura, a small town in largely agrarian northern Punjab state, Kaur traces her determination back to her desire to hold her own in the karate classes she took as a teenager - the only girl in a class of 50. Kaur did not want to go, but her father persuaded her. ""I was very angry and it translated into me being the best student,"" she said. ""It also taught me not to fear my surroundings and so I never feared large groups of men."" As a child, Motwani whiled away the hours in her grandfather's office, scribbling away on its walls - but when she came back armed with a degree from Carnegie Mellon University, she still had to prove her worth. ""I have earned my place in the industry... I never took this platform for granted. I was back at work four days after my baby was born,"" said Motwani, sitting in the same office. In her early days, she travelled across 200 districts to get to know the firm's dealership network. But it is not just female CEOs who are helping steer India's EV surge - there are also thousands of women factory workers. Nasreen Banu, 25, was the first woman from her family to study and find a job. As a production supervisor on scooter manufacturer Ather's battery assembly line, she said she was ready to ""break the bias about what girls can and cannot do"". ""I love the job and I know how everything here works,"" she said. ""A battery weighs 25 kg and we often hear that girls can't lift it, but I do,"" she said on a break during her shift at the Ather factory in Hosur in southern Tamil Nadu state. E-MOBILITY FOR ALL? In India's capital, New Delhi, Mahua Acharya heads Convergence Energy Services Limited (CESL), the federal power ministry's energy transition company. With an environmental management degree from Yale and experience in green finance, renewable energy and carbon markets, Acharya views heading up CESL as an opportunity to ""get EVs deployed on Indian roads at scale"". ""I spend a lot of time thinking of business models and innovative ways to put these vehicles on the road,"" she said. Government incentives and tax benefits for manufacturers and buyers have supported a rise in the production and sales of EVs, which so far currently number a million, or nearly 2% of all vehicles on Indian roads. CESL is trying to push these still small numbers higher by setting up more charging stations, facilitating easy loans for buyers and placing bulk orders for public transport vehicles in cities, making them more affordable. But Acharya's vision for scale faces obstacles ranging from out-of-stock vehicles and limited supplies of batteries and semiconductors, to safety concerns and too few charging stations mainly fed by fossil-fuel power. As a woman heading the government's e-mobility push, she has not faced bias personally, despite often being the only woman in meetings alongside 15 men, she said. In her experience, women bring up issues men fail to spot, such as flagging the importance of locating EV charging stations ""in an area that is safe, not far away or grungy-looking"", rather than based solely on electricity and land availability. The perspective and nuance brought by women is welcomed by some in the industry. ""We (men) are cut-throat, but discussions are more malleable with them,"" said Sohinder Singh Gill, CEO of Hero Electric and director general of the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles. About eight years ago, at a meeting with major auto brand representatives - all men - discussing the future of EVs in India, Motwani remembers wondering why they were talking only about cars and Tesla. She spoke out over the chatter to draw attention to the fact that, in India, 90% of people used two- and three-wheeled vehicles or buses, while only 10% drove cars. Her persistence led the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers to set up a focus group on two and three-wheelers, which she was asked to champion. That has enabled her to ""contribute and make a difference"" to India's new policy for electric vehicles - which she said pays attention to green mobility for the masses. SAFETY FEARS As EV demand outstrips supply in India, the excitement in the business is palpable, despite its teething troubles. Conversations with EV company CEOs are peppered with hopeful predictions that the ""sunrise industry"" will account for 30% of all vehicle sales sooner than India's target year of 2030. Those working in policy speak of an ""unprecedented"" response by Indian states to make the EV switch - which promises to reduce crude-oil import costs and nudge India closer to its target to cut emissions to net zero by 2070, announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last November. But beyond the smiling faces of new EV users on social media with their brightly-coloured wheels, the industry faces some big barriers: from e-scooters bursting into flames to a lack of charging points that is eroding buyer confidence. Delhi resident Dolly Maurya, 26, took advantage of a state subsidy and purchased a lilac-coloured electric rickshaw in April, but she fears taking it out in a sprawling city that only has about 600 charging stations. ""If the battery gets discharged, where will I go? How will I take it home?"" asked Maurya, who wants to use the vehicle for part-time work transporting passengers around the capital as she prepares for an entrance test for a government job. Other concerns are mounting among EV users as sales rise. Esmito's Kaur has tracked recent cases of e-scooters catching fire with an increasing sense of dismay. ""It is worrying, because it sends out the wrong signals at a time when the industry is growing,"" said Kaur, who is set to scale up her manufacturing, currently done in the basement car park of the IIT research park in Chennai. Kaur - also the founder of the Centre for Battery Engineering and Electric Vehicles, which collaborates with auto firms to develop batteries as an alternative to fossil fuel engines - said more R&D was needed to make batteries safe. ""Most companies, and there are over 400, import parts and assemble them,"" she added. ""We need to adapt everything to our environment, our needs."" CITY SUPPORT To build a consumer base from zero five years ago, Kinetic Green's Motwani partnered with non-profit groups and states to subsidise electric three-wheeler rickshaws as a new source of income for women in insurgency-hit Dantewada in eastern India and bicycle rickshaw pullers in northern Uttar Pradesh state. ""We showcased EVs as a means to earn a livelihood with a low running cost,"" said Motwani, sitting next to a cabinet covered with dozens of business leadership awards. ""They could run the e-rickshaw and earn 1,000 rupees ($13) a day and we took care of the servicing,"" said Motwani, who believes in the Hindi saying: ""jo dikhta hai woh bikta hai (what you see, sells)"". For her part, Acharya in the federal government is pushing for state agencies that operate public buses to recruit more women drivers. ""It is a good job, pays well, has defined hours. One of the things women want is certainty of when they can get home,"" she said. The Delhi government this year removed height restrictions for bus drivers so that more women can apply and abolished the heavy vehicle driving-licence fee of 15,000 rupees for them. The city has also rolled out e-rickshaws, reserving a third of the vehicles it is subsidising for women like Maurya. ""It is about creating an opportunity for women to work,"" said Delhi transport minister Kailash Gahlot. The initiative is also about ""good messaging"" to encourage more people to switch to EVs and spread a sense of safety among public transport users, he added. CLIMATE-CONSCIOUS Beyond financial incentives, rising EV sales in India are also rooted in growing awareness about climate change, soaring fuel prices and mobility challenges in a pandemic-hit world. Mumbai resident Rajni Arun Kumar, 43, an associate director at a human resources startup, frowned on fuel-guzzling cars and used public transport until COVID-19 made her worry about taking her two unvaccinated children out in crowded spaces. She found the perfect solution for her office commute and dropping her children at their hobby classes: an orange e-scooter. But she is now hoping to get a charging point in the vicinity as the nearest one is 3 km (1.86 miles) and a traffic jam away. ""There has to be some point where people begin to act to help conserve the environment,"" she emphasised. Companies know that women like Kumar are key decision-makers on household purchases. Hero Electric's Gill said e-scooters have more women buyers than conventional scooters, as the new machines remove the bother of trips to fuel stations and are easier to manoeuvre. Besides being price-sensitive, Indian women base their purchases on practical features, said Prerana Chaturvedi, co-founder and CEO of Evolet India, an EV startup in Gurgaon near Delhi. Its scooter has a lower seat height and clean edges to stop scarves and saris getting entangled, said Chaturvedi, a former military aviator in the Indian Air Force who believes EVs should be as simple to operate as cell phones. WORKERS' RIGHTS Off the highway connecting Chennai to Bengaluru, cutting through the industrial town of Hosur, the road to the Ather factory meanders through rose plantations. It is a long way from the bustle of Banu's village in Bhatkal, a coastal town in southern Karnataka state, but she loves the independence her job at Ather has given her. She aspired to work in a bank or an air-conditioned office, but her late father encouraged her to join the auto industry. ""He kept telling me I could do what boys could do. And here I am, working on batteries, which are the heart of an electric scooter,"" she said, teary-eyed as she talked about her ""hero"". Banu, who has a diploma in electrical engineering and electronics, is among thousands who have enrolled in courses at industrial training institutes nationwide, before joining the workforce and honing their skills on the job. Recruitment agency TeamLease Digital, which scouts talent for EV firms, said hiring of both sexes rose by more than 30% in the last two years, with 40% growth forecast by the end of 2022. The government has projected that the EV sector will create 750,000 jobs in the next five years. Munira Loliwala, business head at TeamLease Digital, estimated the number of new job openings at more than 200,000 in the last six months alone - with women especially sought after. ""It's like when mobile (phone) manufacturing began in India, women were needed to handle minute pieces with care, their fingers being thinner, more nimble,"" she said. Similarly, chip manufacturing for EVs requires precise soldering, welding and assembly, bolstering demand for women on the shop-floor and in design and production. ""Women leaders are already inspiring many to join,"" Loliwala added. While welcoming the new job prospects for women, labour and gender campaigners said EV companies should introduce robust measures to better protect labour rights and equalise pay. Other manufacturing industries like clothing, which also employs a majority of women, often opt for female workers because they are regarded as easier and cheaper to employ. They are generally paid less for the same job as men, keeping production costs low, and cause less trouble for bosses, said Preeti Oza, coordinator of the non-profit Centre for Labour Research and Action. ""(Women) tend to rush home after work, don't collectively raise demands and hesitate to unionise, making them preferred hires,"" she added. But for Banu, who is determined to carry on working even after she gets married, the compact Ather factory is home. She fondly recalls the day she took her father to the bus station after his monthly visit to check on her. ""There was an Ather parked near the bus station and I excitedly told him that I could dismantle it and put the entire scooter back together right there. He laughed loudly and said the owner might take offence,"" she said. ""He was so proud of me.""",0
" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Monday completing a 2005 U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal would boost investment opportunities in his country, a hopeful sign for US companies eyeing India's potential $150 billion market in power plants. Singh, speaking to U.S. business leaders on the eve of talks with U.S. President Barack Obama, said India's ambitious infrastructure build-up would propel growth amid a global slowdown and be open to foreign investors. ""We are currently finalizing the details that will make the agreement fully operational,"" he said of the civilian nuclear deal. ""This will open a large area of commercial opportunity."" Singh and former U.S. President George W. Bush signed the deal in 2005, but India's parliament has to debate a new law to limit U.S. firms' liability in case of a nuclear accident. The United States has still not signed a nuclear fuel reprocessing agreement with India. The Indian prime minister did not elaborate on what might be announced at his White House summit on Tuesday regarding the unfinished nuclear deal. But some experts familiar with the talks have said the two leaders might issue a joint statement on implementing a deal that would open India's potential $150 billion market in power plants to U.S. suppliers. Singh said he and Obama would sign a set of agreements on energy security, clean energy and climate change to deepen cooperation in an economic relationship that has grown rapidly since India began opening its economy 15 years ago. India's economy was hit by the global crisis and growth moderated to 6.7 percent in 2008 and was likely to grow 6.5 percent this year. But Delhi expects the growth rate to get back to 9.0 percent within three years, Singh told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a speech. He urged the U.S. business community to take advantage of an improved approval and implementation process for infrastructure projects in India and to look at public-private sector projects being signed by his country's federal and state governments. ""We need massive investment in energy, transport and urban infrastructure to be able to support a high rate of economic growth,"" Singh said. Two-way trade, was just $5 billion in 1990 and $14 billion in 2000. But commerce rose to nearly $50 billion last year, according to U.S. figures, making the United States India's largest trading partner. Tuesday's summit is expected to highlight improvement in U.S.-India ties during the past 15 years and underscore shared values between the world's two biggest democracies. But Singh also underscored that India's view on climate change differs from that of the United States and other industrialized states. ""India was a latecomer to industrialization and as such we have contributed very little to the accumulation of greenhouse gases that cause global warming,"" he said in a separate speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. Singh said his country wanted to join a global solution as long as it did not come at the expense of economic development and called on developed countries to make more resources and technology available to help poor nations fight climate change. Indian Ambassador Meera Shankar told a separate gathering of businessmen that India-U.S. trade had doubled in the three years before the global financial crisis erupted last year and that U.S. exports had tripled during that period.",0
" Australia's deadliest bushfire has killed at least 84 people, some as they fled in cars or as they huddled in houses when the inferno engulfed rural towns in the country's south east, police said on Sunday. The fire storm tore through several small towns north of Melbourne on Saturday night destroying everything in its path. One family was forced to dive into a farm reservoir to survive while others took refuge in a community shed with firefighters standing between them and a wall of flames. A badly burned man in the town of Kinglake, where there were many fatalities, was kept alive for six hours by being partially submerged by friends in a pool until help arrived. ""It rained fire,"" said one survivor, showing his singed shirt. ""We hid in the olive grove and watched our house burn."" On Sunday, the remains of charred cars littered the smoldering towns, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Melbourne. Some vehicles had crashed into each other as their drivers frantically tried to escape the fire. ""Out there it has been hell on earth,"" Victoria state Premier John Brumby said in a television address. Police said the toll could continue to rise as they search the ruins of the wild fires and with 20 people with serious burns in hospital. Thousands of firefighters were still battling scores of fires in Victoria and New South Wales state on Sunday night. ""We will find more bodies as we gain access to different parts of the fire areas,"" Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon told a news conference. ""We have found people in cars, it looks like they have decided late to leave their premises. We have found people who have been in properties, in their paddocks. We've found others in their houses. And the sad part is that we found children."" Nixon said some of the fires may have been deliberately lit. The previous worst bushfire tragedy was in 1983 when 75 people were killed in the ""Ash Wednesday"" fires. Survivors said the Victorian inferno reached four storeys high and raced across the land like speeding trains. ""It went through like a bullet,"" Darren Webb-Johnson, a resident of the small rural town of Kinglake, told Sky TV. TOWNS DESTROYED ""Hell and its fury have visited the good people of Victoria,"" said Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who announced a A$10 million aid package. ""The nation grieves with Victoria. Many good people now lie dead. Many others lie injured,"" said Rudd. The government also put the army on standby. Firefighters said more than 700 homes have been destroyed in the fires across Victoria state so far this weekend, the vast majority in the worst-affected areas north of Melbourne. Wildfires are a natural annual event in Australia, but this year a combination of scorching weather, drought and tinder-dry bush has created prime conditions for blazes to take hold. Green lawmakers have been urging stiffer climate-change policies to reduce the risk of more such summer disasters. Dazed survivors, wrapped in blankets, wandered through twisted and charred remains on Sunday, some crying, not knowing whether friends of family had survived. At the town of Wandong, about 50 km (30 miles) north of Melbourne, one survivor said he had found the body of a friend in the laundry of a burned-out house. ""Another 20 seconds and we were gone. We lost our dogs. There have been a lot of dead people. My next door neighbor didn't make it,"" said one survivor.",2
" Obesity contributes to global warming, too. Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says. This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school's researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday. ""We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility,"" Edwards said in a telephone interview. ""Obesity is a key part of the big picture."" At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese. In their model, the researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese with a body mass index of near 30. Many nations are fast approaching or have surpassed this level, Edwards said. BMI is a calculation of height to weight, and the normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with more than 25 considered overweight and above 30 obese. The researchers found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a stable BMI. Because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel for transportation and for agriculture, Edwards said. This is also important because 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture, he added. The next step is quantifying how much a heavier population is contributing to climate change, higher fuel prices and food shortages, he added. ""Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,"" Edwards and Roberts wrote. ",0
"Calling oceans the “beating blue heart of our planet,” the president, Danny Faure, said the sea had “a special relationship with all of us.” Faure, dressed in salmon-colour shorts and a T-shirt with the Seychelles flag, gave his speech from a submersible craft that had dived to 406 feet off Desroches Island in the Seychelles, part of a series of scientific missions to explore and protect the Indian Ocean. Marvelling at the underwater beauty and biodiversity of his surroundings, Faure called for more protection for the ocean’s ecosystem. “It keeps the planet alive, it keeps us alive, and it is clear to me that it is under threat like never before,” he said. The Seychelles, a chain of islands off eastern Africa, faces an existential threat from climate change and rising sea levels. The country, along with other small island nations, is expected to bear the brunt of global warming, including the loss of fresh water, land erosion, dying coral reefs and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. While global powers have gathered repeatedly for summit meetings on how to reduce and mitigate carbon emissions, island nations have expressed increasing desperation at the lack of meaningful action. “The ocean is huge, covering almost 70 percent of our planet, but we have managed to seriously impact this vast environment through climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, plastic and other pollution,” Faure said, adding, “We need decisive, coordinated, international action.” The series of scientific expeditions, called First Descent, was organised by Nekton, a nonprofit research institute, in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The Seychelles mission has included 75 dives so far and has created 3D maps of the seabed from seven research sites, according to a statement issued by Faure’s government. Oceans are major producers of oxygen — due largely to the actions of phytoplankton, tiny single-celled ocean plants — and they absorb half of all climate-warming carbon dioxide, according to the organisation. But the total amount of vertebrate sea life, including fish, has reduced by more than a third since 1970, the fund said.   © 2019 New York Times News Service",0
" Delegates from about 190 nations gathered in Bali on Sunday to try to build on a 'fragile understanding' that the fight against global warming needs to be expanded to all nations with a deal in 2009. The UN's top climate change official told thousands of delegates that the eyes of the world would be on their Dec 3-14 talks in an Indonesian beach resort, saying time was running short to avert ever more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas. ""We're already seeing many of the impacts of climate change,"" Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference in the tightly guarded venue. ""We are on a very dangerous path."" The meeting, of senior officials with environment ministers at the final days, will try to launch negotiations ending with a new UN climate pact in two years including outsiders led by the United States and China, the top greenhouse gas emitters. So far, only 36 industrialised nations in the Kyoto Protocol have caps on greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, running to 2012. Most governments agree on a need for more action but disagree about how to share out the burden. ""More discussions will be needed to build on this fragile understanding and explore how it can be put into practice,"" according to a UN report to be submitted in Bali. The report, summing up two years of talks about new ways to fight climate change, said some countries were willing to make deeper cuts in emissions, others said existing promises should be kept and still others wanted incentives to join in. ""We heard no dispute that developed countries need to keep taking the lead,"" wrote Howard Bamsey of Australia and Sandea De Wet of South Africa, the authors of the report. BUSH Prospects for a global deal have been boosted by a decision by President George W Bush for the United State to take part beyond 2012. Bush opposes Kyoto as a threat to US economic growth and said it unfairly excluded goals for poor nations. ""We'd like to see consensus on the launch of negotiations. We want to see a Bali roadmap,"" said Paula Dobriansky, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs. ""We will go to Bali with openness, flexibility."" The United Nations wants a new global pact to be agreed at U.N. talks in 2009 in Copenhagen. Many countries are likely to want to see the policies of the next US president taking office in Jan 2009 and want assurances of aid. De Boer said Bali's goal was to agree to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, leaving details for later. ""Millions of people around the world...will be focusing their attention on what is going to be the response of the politicians,"" he said. Senior Beijing officials told Reuters last week that China would do more to strengthen its existing domestic targets to improve energy efficiency, and thereby curb greenhouse gas emissions, if the West shared relevant technologies. ""If help is forthcoming, if international cooperation is as it should be ... we will definitely do more,"" climate change negotiator Yu Qingtai said. Rich nations want developing nations at least to brake the rise of their emissions -- China is opening a new coal-fired power plant at the rate of more than one a week. And developing countries will push for a new system of credits to help slow the rate of deforestation. Trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when they grow. Kyoto's first period will run out in 2012 but the United Nations says that a new accord needs to be in place by the end of 2009 to give time for parliaments to ratify.",0
" A survey of some of Britain's biggest pension schemes published on Saturday said only a small share of them disclosed investment views on controversies such as climate change and company governance. A survey of the 20 largest occupational pension funds, together worth more than 250 billion pounds ($479 billion), showed only five of them disclosed policies for engaging firms on environmental, social and governance issues, according to FairPensions, an investment campaigning group. Big investors such as pension plans, insurance funds and asset managers have been encouraged by environmental lobbyists and other campaigners to use their economic muscle to change the practices of the firms they invest in. Among the survey's findings, it said organisations like the BBC and the Royal Mail gave little transparency on their investments. Only the pension scheme of BT Group disclosed how votes had been cast on its members' behalf, while the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) and pension fund of the UK rail industry gave partial voting data, the report said. The survey showed that 15 of the respondents disclosed their biggest shareholdings. ""Pension scheme members will have concerns about how their pensions will be affected by issues such as climate change, but most are not given reassuring information on such issues,"" Alex van der Velden, Executive Director of FairPensions, said.",0
"The commitment, published at the end of three days of Group of Seven (G7) talks in Berlin, was weaker than a previous draft of the final communique seen by Reuters, which had included a target to end unabated coal power generation by 2030. Sources familiar with the discussions said Japan and the United States had both indicated they could not support that date. But the pledge still marked the first commitment from the G7 countries to quit coal-fuelled power. Coal is the most CO2-emitting fossil fuel and use of it needs to plummet if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The group met against the backdrop of spiralling energy costs and fuel supply worries due to the war in Ukraine. The conflict has triggered a scramble among some countries to buy more non-Russian fossil fuels and burn coal to cut their reliance on Russian supplies. ""Replacing fossil fuels from Russia has dominated the political debate and the actions of the government in the past weeks and months,"" German economy minister Robert Habeck said at a news conference. ""But it must be clear to us that the challenges of our political generation, limiting global warming, won't go away if we just concentrate on the present,"" he said. ""Time is literally running out."" The G7 also agreed to largely decarbonise their power sectors by 2035, and to stop public financing for ""unabated"" fossil fuel projects abroad by the end of this year, except in limited circumstances. ""Unabated"" refers to power plants that do not use technology to capture their emissions. The communique made a commitment to a highly decarbonised road sector by 2030, including significantly increasing the sale, share and uptake of zero emission light duty vehicles. The G7 also aimed to start reporting publicly next year on how the countries are delivering on a past commitment to end ""inefficient"" fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. SIGNIFICANT SHIFT All G7 countries except for Japan had made the finance pledge at the COP26 climate summit last year, and campaigners said it would be a significant shift if Japan - one of the world's biggest providers of finance for fossil fuel projects abroad - came on board. Japan provided $10.9 billion for such projects on average per year from 2018 to 2020, with most of that spent on oil and gas, according to analysis by non-profit Oil Change International. ""If Japan implements this commitment with integrity, it will directly shift $11 billion a year from fossil fuels to clean energy and have a much larger indirect impact given Japan’s influence on other financiers in Asia and around the world,"" said Susanne Wong, Asia program manager at Oil Change. By covering all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, the agreement goes further than a pledge made by G20 countries last year to halt overseas financing for just coal. The G7 also pledged to take ambitious action against plastic pollution and to increase national efforts to conserve or protect at least 30% of their own coastal and marine areas by 2030.",0
"But four years later, Begum, now 28, became supervisor of a team of 30 workers that checks the quality of clothes made by DBL Group, one of Bangladesh's largest garment suppliers to global fashion retailers like H&M and Walmart. More than half the country's sewing machine operators are women, but over 90% of their supervisors are men - a gender imbalance that hurts workers and productivity, researchers say. A series of training programmes in the last decade, run by nonprofits, development groups and factory owners, has aimed to tackle this contrast in an industry that employs about 4 million workers in the South Asian nation. Giving women more responsibility and higher-paying jobs could also help protect their livelihoods as the industry starts shifting to greener and more high-tech business models, corporate and development bank officials believe. Begum's promotion was the result of one such training project. A couple of years after joining the DBL factory, she noticed the male supervisors of her team were changed regularly due to their poor performance. She took a leap of faith and asked factory officials if she could step in. Following a few weeks of training, she got the job and has been at the helm ever since. ""I think it's good if a woman leads the team, because most workers at the sewing lines are women and they will be more open to sharing their problems,"" Begum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. ""For instance, if a woman has stomach pain (period cramps), she may not want to share this with a man and just be absent, which hurts production. In these cases, I tell workers to leave early or take a break, which doesn't hurt our target,"" she said. 'CLEAR BUSINESS CASE' A 2017 study conducted by DBL Group, based on 42 teams led by women, found they were about 3% more efficient than those run by men, yielding an annual benefit of nearly $1.5 million. Today, one in five sewing lines in the factory are managed by women, up from zero in 2013. ""This (study) motivated us further as there is a clear business case,"" said Mohammed Zahidullah, DBL Group's chief sustainability officer. So far the factory has trained just over 100 women supervisors, of whom two-thirds are still working there. ""The migration of the (remaining) supervisors has shown the rise in demand for them within our industry,"" added Zahidullah. A separate donor-backed initiative working to boost garment workers' skills in 60 factories, called the Gender Equality and Returns (GEAR) Program, has seen a 5% increase in productivity on sewing lines led by female supervisors it trained. ""With productivity up, turnover and absenteeism down, it is a win-win for both workers and factories,"" said Nabeera Rahman, head of the programme run by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the International Labour Organization. GEAR's six-month course helps women workers gain confidence, manage stress and learn how to communicate effectively with colleagues. It also offers technical skills like solving production bottlenecks and calculating efficiency. Kulsum Bibi became a supervisor this year after working as a machine operator for 10 years at a Dhaka garment factory. She said the training she received on a women's leadership programme run by Bangladesh-based development organisation BRAC helped her recognise the mistakes her supervisors made. ""I learned that when someone commits an error, you need to stay calm and talk to that person with a cool head. Some male supervisors I worked under just shout when something goes wrong,"" she explained. SOCIAL TABOOS While the programmes have led to a small rise in the number of women supervisors in the garment sector, the change has not come without challenges. In another study carried out at DBL in 2018, some women workers said they felt more comfortable with female supervisors but added they were more likely to listen to male bosses. Machine operators interviewed said male supervisors were more likely to take an independent decision to solve a problem in the line while women tended to consult with management first. ""While the transition to female management as a norm has its challenges, promoting female leadership roles on production floors matters. With the correct training and support for female workers, positive change is possible,"" the study concluded. Jenefa Jabbar, head of social compliance and safeguarding at BRAC, said a more conducive environment was needed to encourage women supervisors. Labour leaders like Kalpona Akter, who heads the Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity, want the government to ask factory owners to introduce a fixed quota for women supervisors. ""We shouldn't be needing special training programmes to promote women. They should be automatically promoted within the factories just like the male workers,"" said Akter. EQUIPPED FOR THE FUTURE? But some experts said the training programmes could also help pave the way for a just transition for women workers, some of whom risk losing their jobs as garment factories invest in high-tech, low-carbon machinery to meet broader climate goals. Wendy Werner, IFC country manager for Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, said that if women learn to manage teams of 30 or more workers, those skills are transferable to other sectors. ""(GEAR) is a program which prepares women for leadership positions that go well beyond the factory where they are trained and also beyond the ready-made garments sector,"" she added. DBL Group Managing Director M. A. Jabbar said the shift to more sustainable business models in the industry could lead to some layoffs but skills training could significantly reduce the impact. Bibi's promotion, for example, increased her monthly salary from $135 to $235, helping her family of four - which lived in a single room until last year - rent an extra room. Importantly, it has given the 35-year-old hope to dream big. ""Despite my poor education, I became a supervisor after 10 years. Now my goal is to move even higher,"" she said. ""I want to become a controller or a line manager. If men can do it, why can't I?""",0
" A 190-nation UN climate meeting in Bali edged towards a deal on Saturday, after two weeks of talks to launch two-year negotiations on a broad pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol from Jan 1, 2013. Following are contents of the final draft text, still to be approved by the full conference of ministers and delegates on Saturday, describing the agenda for those negotiations. LAUNCH OF NEW TALKS A new U.N. group would supervise work on a new climate deal, to begin ""without delay"", not later than April 2008, and ""complete its work in 2009"". HOW AMBITIOUS? The level of ambition to guide rich countries' efforts to fight climate change was one of the most contentious issues at the Bali talks. The United States opposed a European Union-backed range for greenhouse gas emissions cuts by 2020. Earlier drafts had mentioned a goal for rich countries to cut emissions by 25-40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. The EU backed down and the final draft relegated the emissions range to a footnote, which cited 2 pages in a report on fighting climate change published this year by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those pages do not specify which one of six emissions-reduction targets countries should aim for. Those goals range from peaking global greenhouse gas emissions in 8 to 80 years time, resulting in long-term global temperature increases after 2100 of between 2 and 6.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. RICH AND POOR Another contentious item was how far developing countries should match rich nations' efforts to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The final draft called on all developed countries to consider ""quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives"", and ""nationally appropriate mitigation commitments or actions"". Meanwhile, developing countries should consider ""measureable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation actions"", with support for efforts to curb deforestation. The text said ""deep cuts in global emissions will be required"" to avoid dangerous climate change. ADAPTATION, TECHNOLOGY, FINANCING Many countries worldwide are already suffering from climate change, many delegates said. The final text called for ""urgent implementation of adaptation actions"" including the ""immediate needs"" of small island states. The text asked countries to accelerate efforts to transfer technologies which would help developing countries cut their contribution to and adapt to climate change. The final draft called for more financial resources and investment for developing countries on adaptation, mitigation and technology cooperation, especially for the most vulnerable.",0
" Indonesia can achieve a similar growth rate to Asia's economic powerhouses, China and India, provided it fixes its ailing infrastructure and attracts more foreign investment, Vice President Jusuf Kalla said on Wednesday. Southeast Asia's biggest economy is set to expand 6.3 percent this year, its fastest growth in 11 years, but still lags far behind China, which is set to grow 11.5 percent this year, and India, which is heading for 9 percent growth in its fiscal year. ""We can achieve that"" kind of growth rate, Kalla told Reuters in an interview, as Indonesia plans to improve infrastructure such as roads, ports, and transportation, and provide ""good regulation for investors"". President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected in 2004 on the back of promises to tackle corruption, boost growth, and create jobs. Kalla said the government was tackling impediments to growth such as corruption and investor-unfriendly labour laws. ""This is a transition period,"" said the wealthy businessman, who comes from Indonesia's Sulawesi island. With a presidential election due in 2009, Kalla is already seen as a potential opponent to Yudhoyono rather than his running mate. When asked whether he would run with or against Yudhoyono, Kalla said: ""this question will be answered in 2009. It is not my personal decision only but this is a party decision."" But Kalla, who heads the dominant Golkar party in parliament, did not rule out standing for president. ""Anything is possible."" Kalla gave an upbeat assessment of the economy, shrugging off recent weakness in the rupiah currency which has been partly blamed on concerns about the impact of high oil prices on the economy and the high cost of government fuel subsidies. The rupiah fell as low as 9,422 per dollar on Wednesday, from around 9,100 at the beginning of November. ""The central bank will take care of it,"" he said. ""Between 9,300 and 9,500 they usually intervene."" WORLD RESPONSIBLE FOR FORESTS Kalla, who expressed confidence the economy could meet a government growth target of 6.8 percent next year, said there was no plan to cut or reduce fuel subsidies, politically sensitive in Indonesia. Cuts in the level of subsidy have led to riots in the past, and analysts say that with elections slated for 2009, it is unlikely the government will cut subsidies. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said on Tuesday that energy subsidies could hit 88.2 trillion rupiah ($9.37 billion) this year, well above the 55.6 trillion rupiah allocated in the 2007 budget. On nuclear energy, Kalla it was not a ""not a big issue for us"", citing a lack of budget, safety worries, and Indonesia's preference for other energy sources such as geothermal and hydropower. Indonesia has said it wants to build its first nuclear plant by 2016, drawing ire from environmentalists worried about a nuclear accident given the country's frequent earthquakes. Kalla said that it was right for Indonesia, which has about 10 percent of the world's tropical rain forests, to press richer nations to help pay to retain forests to reduce global warming. Indonesia, which will host a UN climate change meeting in Bali next month of about 190 nations, is backing a scheme that aims to make emission cuts from forests eligible for carbon trading. Experts estimate Indonesia could earn more than $13 billion by preserving its forests if the plan gets support in Bali. ""All the people of the world should be responsible,"" said Kalla, referring to the exploitation of Indonesian timber by richer countries around the world.",0
"The report
said pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing
widespread human rights violations as well as at least 9 million premature
deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked. The
coronavirus pandemic has caused close to 5.9 million deaths, according to data
aggregator Worldometer. ""Current
approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are
clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean,
healthy and sustainable environment,"" the report's author, UN Special
Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded. Due to be
presented next month to the UN Human Rights Council, which has declared a clean
environment a human right, the document was posted on the Council's website on
Tuesday. It urges a
ban on polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl, man-made substances used in
household products such as non-stick cookware that have been linked to cancer
and dubbed ""forever chemicals"" because they don't break down easily. It also
recommends the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, the possible
relocations of affected communities - many of them poor, marginalised and
indigenous - from so-called ""sacrifice zones"". That term,
originally used to describe nuclear test zones, was expanded in the report to
include any heavily contaminated site or place rendered uninhabitable by
climate change. UN rights
chief Michelle Bachelet has called environmental threats the biggest global
rights challenge, and a growing number of climate and environmental justice
cases are invoking human rights with success.",0
" Food and Agricultural Organisation director general Jacques Diouf has lauded the achievements of Bangladesh in enhancing food production in recent months in the face of adverse conditions. Diouf said Bangladesh's experience and expertise were appreciated and that it was in a position to share them with others in facilitating the sustainable food security, the UN organisation said in a press statetement on Friday. His comments came from a meeting with agriculture adviser CS Karim who is leading a Bangladesh delegation to the 35th special session of the FAO conference at FAO headquarters in the Italian capital of Rome. Diouf assured Karim of continued FAO support to bolster the efforts of Bangladesh in the coming months. During the meeting Karim appreciated the role of the FAO in meeting the challenges of global food security. He hoped a renewed and revitalised FAO would be able to cope with the emerging challenges including those emanating from climate change. Karim was accompanied by the Bangladesh ambassador in Rome and permanent representative to the FAO, Masud Bin Momen, and other members of the delegation. Karim also held talks with heads of delegations of other member states including the Netherlands to discuss enhancing the bilateral cooperation in the agriculture sector.",1
" Time may be running out for polar bears as global warming melts the ice beneath their paws. Restrictions or bans on hunting in recent decades have helped protect many populations of the iconic Arctic carnivore, but many experts say the long-term outlook is bleak. An estimated 20,000-25,000 bears live around the Arctic -- in Canada, Russia, Alaska, Greenland and Norway -- and countries are struggling to work out ways to protect them amid forecasts of an accelerating thaw. ""There will be big reductions in numbers if the ice melts,"" Jon Aars, a polar bear expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said by the fjord in Longyearbyen on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole. Unusually for this time of year, the fjord is ice free. Many restaurants and shops in Longyearbyen, a settlement of 1,800 people, have a stuffed polar bear or pelt -- often shot before a hunting ban from the early 1970s. Self-defense is now the only excuse for killing a bear. Many scientific studies project that warming, widely blamed on emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, could melt the polar ice cap in summer, with estimates of the break-up ranging from decades to sometime beyond 2100. Bears' favorite hunting ground is the edge of the ice where they use white fur as camouflage to catch seals. ""If there's no ice, there's no way they can catch the seal,"" said Sarah James of the Gwich'in Council International who lives in Alaska. 'Gwich'in' means 'people of the caribou', which is the main source of food for about 7,000 indigenous people in Alaska and Canada. THREATENED US President George W Bush's administration is due to decide in January 2008 whether to list polar bears as 'threatenend' under the Endangered Species Act. That would bar the government from taking any action jeopardizing the animals' existence and environmentalists say it would spur debate about tougher US measures to curb industrial emissions. The World Conservation Union last year listed the polar bear as 'vulnerable' and said the population might fall by 30 percent over the next 45 years. Bears also suffer from chemical contaminants that lodge in their fat. Some indigenous peoples, who rely on hunts, say many bear populations seem robust. ""The Russians thought there's more polar bears that they're seeing in their communities, so they felt that it's not an endangered species,"" said Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Youth Council, of an area of Arctic Russia. ""But if we're talking about the future and there's no ice, then they are,"" she said. And some reports say the melt may be quickening. ""Arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by most computer models,"" the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said in a report on April 30. It said it could thaw earlier than projected by the UN climate panel, whose scenarios say the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summers any time between about 2050 to well beyond 2100. An eight-nation report by 250 experts in 2004 said ""polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there is an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice cover."" Paal Prestrud, head of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo who was a vice-chair of that study, said there was no Arctic-wide sign of a fall in numbers. But there were declines in population and reduced weights among females in the Western Hudson Bay area in Canada, at the southern end of the bears' range where summer ice has been breaking up earlier. Mitchell Taylor, manager of wildlife research at the Inuit-sponsored environmental research department in Nunavut, Canada, said some bears in region had simply moved north. HUNTERS ""Hunters in many regions say they are seeing increases,"" he said. ""It's clear that the ice is changing but it's not at all clear that the trend will continue."" Prestrud said the fate of polar bears may hinge on whether they adapt to survive longer on land in summers. In the Hudson Bay, bears often go for months without food, scavenging on birds' eggs or even on berries and roots. ""Otherwise they will end up in zoos,"" he said. Aars, however, said the bears had survived temperature swings in the past: ""I hear far too often that within 100 years polar bears could be extinct,"" he told a group of climate students in Longyearbyen. ""You will still have bays with ice for many months a year where polar bears can live,"" he said. On Svalbard, bears may have become less scared of people since the hunting ban, and are more likely to see them as a meal. Aars' recommendation: don't show you are scared. ""You start shouting, or use flare shots to make a noise. Most polar bears get scared if you behave in the right way. But you have to act from the start. If you show weakeness you are in trouble.""",0
"The first day of the Rome summit - the leaders' first face-to-face gathering since the start of the COVID pandemic - focused mainly on health and the economy, while climate and the environment is front and centre of Sunday's agenda. Climate scientists and activists are likely to be disappointed unless late breakthroughs are made, with drafts of the G20's final communique showing little progress in terms of new commitments to curb pollution. The G20 bloc, which includes Brazil, China, India, Germany and the United States, accounts for an estimated 80% of the global greenhouse gas emissions which scientists say must be steeply reduced to avoid climate catastrophe. For that reason, this weekend's gathering is seen as an important stepping stone to the UN's ""COP26"" climate summit attended by almost 200 countries, in Glasgow, Scotland, where most of the G20 leaders will fly directly from Rome. ""The latest reports are disappointing, with little sense of urgency in the face of an existential emergency,"" said Oscar Soria of the activist network Avaaz. ""There is no more time for vague wish-lists, we need concrete commitments and action."" A fifth draft of the G20's final statement seen by Reuters on Saturday did not toughen the language on climate action compared with previous versions, and in some key areas, such as the need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, it softened it. This mid-century target date is a goal that United Nations experts say is needed to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, seen as the limit to avoid a dramatic acceleration of extreme events such as droughts, storms and floods. UN experts say even if current national plans to curb emissions are fully implemented, the world is headed for global warming of 2.7C. The planet's largest carbon emitter China, is aiming for net zero in 2060, while other major polluters such as India and Russia have also not committed to the mid-century deadline. G20 energy and environment ministers who met in Naples in July failed to reach agreement on setting a date to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and end coal power, asking the leaders to find a resolution at this weekend's summit. Based on the latest draft, they have made little progress, pledging to ""do our utmost"" to stop building new coal power plants before the end of the 2030s and saying they will phase out fossil fuel subsidies ""over the medium term."" On the other hand, they do pledge to halt financing of overseas coal-fired power generation by the end of this year. Some developing countries are reluctant to commit to steep emission cuts until rich nations make good on a pledge made 12 years ago to provide $100 billion per year from 2020 to help them tackle the effects of global warming. That promise has still not been kept, contributing to the ""mistrust"" which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Friday was blighting progress in climate negotiations.  The draft stresses the importance of meeting the goal and doing so in a transparent way.",1
" Farmers who lost their homes and crops when the devastating Cyclone Sidr battered Bangladesh's low-lying southern coasts on Nov 15 face a new problem from migratory birds that swarm into the country by the thousands every winter. ""They are welcome guests and we do usually enjoy their presence,"" said Mohammad Shahabuddin, a local council chairman in the Bhola district on the coast. ""But this year the birds are making our struggle to survive following the cyclone more difficult,"" he said. ""The birds are destroying our seedbeds by eating the soft and tender saplings before we can replant them in the croplands."" As the winter that started late last month gets chillier by the day, the number of migratory fowl is increasing. ""We really don't know what to do and how to drive them away,"" Shahabuddin said. Tens of thousands of birds of various species fly from as far as Siberia to escape bitter cold and bask in a warmer climate in Bangladesh. Species include hawks, swallows, shrikes, loons, ducks and geese. They take temporary refuge in the country's vast rivers, lakes and marshes, and feed on fish, green leaves and grasses. But Cyclone Sidr, which struck Bangladesh with winds of 255 kph (150 mph) and a 5-metre surge had washed away almost everything, including rice and other crops in the fields. It also killed more than 3,300 people, made millions homeless and left a trail of devastation that officials and aid agencies say will need months or a year to be healed. Cyclone survivors on the islands and in riverside villages said they faced an immediate problem of food and were losing hope for an early harvest as the migratory birds were eating their seedbeds. Fishermen said fish were depleted in the waters along the coasts following the cyclone and surge, forcing many fish-eating fowl to change their diets for survival. The farmers say they cannot kill the birds as Bangladesh law prohibits killing or capturing ""guest birds."" ""It's really a big problem for us,"" said Mohammad Belayet Hossain, deputy commissioner (administrator) of Bhola, about 250 km (155 miles) from the capital Dhaka. ""We suggested farmers to guard their fields as we have no technology to protect them."" Mohammad Dastagir, another local council official in the district, said farmers try to scare away the birds by shouting and beating tin-containers, and sometimes by making fires. In some places, farmers also put up scarecrows made with straw and bamboo, but it does not work after a few days as the fowl get used to the scene, said the islanders. ""Migratory birds also damaged rice plants in the previous years, but this time we are more concerned as we really need to yield rice in the shortest possible time, so that our families are not hungry,"" said Abdul Malek, a farmer. Rice is the main staple in Bangladesh, home of more than 140 million people.",6
"The region, where power demand is expected to double by 2040, is striving to expand the share of renewable sources as developing nations seek affordable electricity while battling climate change. Southeast Asia's cumulative solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity could nearly triple to 35.8 gigawatt (GW) in 2024 from an estimated 12.6 GW this year, consultancy Wood Mackenzie says. Vietnam leads the pack with a cumulative solar PV installation of 5.5 GW by this year, or 44% of the total capacity in the region, said Rishab Shrestha, Woodmac's power and renewables analyst. This compares with 134 MW last year. Among the encouraging signs for the solar industry was a recent auction for a 500 megawatt (MW) solar project in Malaysia of which 365 MW were bid at a price lower than the country's average gas-powered electricity, said Yeo Bee Yin, minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change. ""For the first time in the history of Malaysia we have a large-scale solar energy costs that is less than gas, Yeo said at the Singapore International Energy Week. ""We now finally have an alternative energy that is cheaper than gas to replace our peak energy demand at midday."" Malaysia has set a target to increase its renewable energy in electricity generation from current 6% to 20% by 2025, and a majority of this would be driven by solar. The country also plans to open at least another 500 MW tender in the second quarter next year, Yeo said. Singapore has also targeted at least 2 gigawatt (GW) peak of solar power capacity by 2030, or more than 10% of current peak electricity demand, potentially replacing natural gas which generates 95% of the country's power now. ""This being presented by the (Singaporean) authorities is very interesting as this points towards firm political determination to go towards a low-carbon economy in a constrained world,"" said Francesco La Camera, Director-General of International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Keisuke Sadamori, the International Energy Agency (IEA) director for energy markets and security said: ""There needs to be some good measures to ensure that investors feel confident that their money could be returned in a relatively reasonable period."" Still, the mushrooming of solar PV in Vietnam has exceeded its grid capacity by 18%, Woodmac's Shrestha said, underscoring the need for further investments across power sector. ""The approved capacity for the Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan provinces amounts to 5 GW, more than double the grid usable capacity,"" he said.",0
"VIENNA (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Global use of nuclear energy could increase by as much as 100 percent in the next two decades on the back of growth in Asia, even though groundbreakings for new reactors fell last year after the Fukushima disaster, a UN report says. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has not yet been made public but has been seen by Reuters, said a somewhat slower capacity expansion than previously forecast is likely after the world's worst nuclear accident in a quarter of a century. But, it said: ""Significant growth in the use of nuclear energy worldwide is still anticipated - between 35 percent and 100 percent by 2030 - although the Agency projections for 2030 are 7-8 percent lower than projections made in 2010."" Japan's reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant triggered by a deadly earthquake and tsunami on March 11 last year shook the nuclear world and raised a question mark over whether atomic energy is safe. Germany, Switzerland and Belgium decided to move away from nuclear power to grow reliance on renewable energy instead. The IAEA document, obtained by Reuters on Friday, said the number of new reactor construction starts fell to only three last year - two in Pakistan and one in India - from 16 in 2010. Also last year, 13 reactors were officially declared as permanently shut down, including the four units at Fukushima as well as eight in Germany. ""This represents the highest number of shutdowns since 1990, when the Chernobyl accident had a similar effect,"" the Vienna-based UN agency said in its annual Nuclear Technology Review. ""As a comparison, 2010 saw only one shutdown and 2009 three."" In 1986, a reactor exploded and caught fire at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union, sending radiation billowing across Europe. TEMPORARY DELAYS? At Fukushima one year ago, fires and explosions caused a full meltdown in three reactors while a fourth was also damaged. Today, the four reactors are in a stable, cold shutdown state and clean-up of the site continues, but the final phase of decommissioning will not happen for 30 or 40 years. Almost all of Japan's 54 reactors sit idle, awaiting approvals to restart. ""The 7-8 percent drop in projected growth for 2030 reflects an accelerated phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, some immediate shutdowns and a government review of the planned expansion in Japan, as well as temporary delays in expansion in several other countries,"" the IAEA report said. But many countries are still pushing ahead with nuclear energy, with 64 reactors under construction at the end of 2011, most of them in Asia, said the document prepared for a closed-door meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation board last week. Factors that had contributed to growing interest in nuclear energy before Fukushima - increasing demand for energy, concerns about climate change, energy security and uncertainty about fossil fuel supplies - had not changed, it said. ""In countries considering the introduction of nuclear power, interest remained strong. Although some countries indicated that they would delay decisions to start nuclear power programmes, others continued with their plans to introduce nuclear energy."" China and India are expected to remain the main centres of expansion in Asia and Russia is also forecast to see strong growth, it said.",0
" Governments should focus more on generating returns and reducing risk for investors to attract the $100 billion in aid needed by developing countries to cope with climate change, a panel of experts said on Wednesday. Rich countries are being urged to adhere to key elements of a climate accord signed in Copenhagen last year, including a promise of $10 billion a year in quick-start aid from 2010-12 for poor countries, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. ""$100 billion sounds like a lot of money ... (but) raising large amounts of money in the private sector is actually very easy,"" said Martin Lawless, head of environmental financial products at Deutsche Bank. ""Too much attention is focussed on who will provide the money. Instead it should be on the other side, how to increase returns and reduce risks. Once that is established, the finance will follow."" The United Nations urged rich nations on Tuesday to keep their pledge to give $30 billion to poor nations by 2012, saying it was ""not an impossible call"" despite budget cuts in Europe. But with worries over sovereign debt also growing, the private sector may be asked to help fill more of the funding gap. ""When you have the right proposition, the financing will come,"" said Mohsen Khalil, global head of the International Financial Corporation's new Climate Business Solutions Group. ""We're at a transition phase where the public and private sectors have to align their interests because heavy subsidies will be required initially until costs come down and we can have a large-scale sustainable business."" The panel agreed that the role of carbon markets in directing funds to financing clean energy and climate change adaptation in developing countries was shrinking. Another panel of analysts said earlier on Wednesday that market mechanisms will survive beyond 2012, but their exact shape remains unclear as international climate talks now bypass their role in favour of the wider policy picture. ""Carbon credits were good for a time, but is it the only instrument (to engage the private sector)? I don't think so,"" said Khalil. ""Against the background of recent economic turmoil, investors are particularly risk averse, so the private sector needs TLC: transparency, longevity and consistency,"" Lawless said. He cited a unilateral carbon price floor set by China in 2007 and growing uncertainty over the $144 billion global carbon market's future post-2012, when the first five-year leg of the Kyoto Protocol expires, as deterrents to investors. Key ministers and climate negotiators from China to Norway have said governments are unlikely to agree a successor to Kyoto at UN talks in Cancun, Mexico later this year.",4
" The United Nations said on Monday that a climate change deal in Copenhagen next month is crucial to fighting global hunger, which Brazil's president described as ""the most devastating weapon of mass destruction"". Government leaders and officials met in Rome for a three-day U.N. summit on how to help developing countries feed themselves, but anti-poverty campaigners were already writing off the event as a missed opportunity. The sense of scepticism deepened at the weekend, when U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, though European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action. ""Hunger is the most devastating weapon of mass destruction on our planet, it doesn't kill soldiers, it kills innocent children who are not even one-year old,"" Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told the summit. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said there could be ""no food security without climate security"". ""Next month in Copenhagen, we need a comprehensive agreement that will provide a firm foundation for a legally binding treaty on climate change,"" he said. Africa, Asia and Latin America could see a decline of between 20 and 40 percent in potential agricultural productivity if temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, the U.N. says. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the hardest hit from global warming as its agriculture is almost entirely rain-fed. With the number of hungry people in the world topping 1 billion for the first time, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation called the summit in the hope leaders would commit to raising the share of official aid spent on agriculture to 17 percent of the total -- its 1980 level -- from 5 percent now. That would amount to $44 billion a year against $7.9 billion now. Farmers in rich countries receive $365 billion of support every year.  WHERE'S THE MONEY? But the summit declaration adopted on Monday included only a general promise to pour more money into agricultural aid, with no target or timeframe for action. A pledge to eliminate malnutrition by 2025, one of the early aims of the summit, was also missing from the statement, which merely stated that world leaders commit to eradicate hunger ""at the earliest possible date"". Last year's spike in the price of food staples such as rice and wheat sparked riots in as many as 60 countries. Rich food importers have rushed to buy foreign farmland, pushing food shortages and hunger up the political agenda -- but also raising fears of a new colonialism in poor countries. ""We should fight against this new feudalism, we should put an end to this land grab in African countries,"" Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi told the summit. Food prices have fallen back since their 2008 record highs but remain high in poor countries. The FAO says sudden price rises are still very likely. A summit of the Group of Eight leading powers in July pledged $20 billion over the next three years to boost agricultural development, in a big policy shift towards long-term strategies and away from emergency food aid. But FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said those were ""still promises that need to materialise"". Apart from Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, G8 leaders skipped the summit, which looked more like a gathering of Latin American and African heads of state.",0