Picture taken on May 3, 2022 shows a general view of Slovakia’s largest mineral oil refinery Slovnaft in Bratislava, Slovakia. (Photo by JOE KLAMAR / AFP)
Joe Klamar | Afp | Getty Images
The Group of 7 nations are in talks to cap Russian oil at $65 and $70 a barrel — but analysts say it likely won’t have a significant impact on Moscow’s oil revenues even if it’s approved.
Prices at those levels are close to what Asian markets are currently paying Russia, which are at a “big discount,” said Wood Mackenzie’s vice president of gas and LNG research, Massimo Di Odoardo.
“Those levels of discounts are certainly in line with what the discounts already are in the market … It’s something that doesn’t seem, as it is placed, like it’sgoing to have any effect [on Moscow] whatsoever if the price is so high.”
Russia has threatened to it will not supply oil to countries setting and endorsing the price cap.
“Given Russian oil (Urals) is trading at $60‑65/bbl, the proposed price cap is already compliant under prevailing market conditions,” said Vivek Dhar, Director of Mining and Energy Commodities research from Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
In a note on Thursday, he said that current Russian oil shipments face minimal disruption from the European Union denying shipping and insurance services.
He agreed that the discussed price cap won’t make much of a dent or deter Moscow in its war against Ukraine.
“Russia’s seaborne oil exports have increased to China, India and Turkey at the expense of advanced economies following the Ukraine war,” he added.
In fact, he said the price cap discussed was higher than markets were expecting.
“Oil prices finished lower overnight after the EU discussed a price cap on Russian oil between $US65‑70/bbl, a higher price range than markets expected and at levels that will reduce the risk of disruptions of EU sanctions on Russian oil shipments,” Dhar said.
There was similar skepticism over the EU’s proposed cap on natural gas prices. Several EU member states locked horns over the effectiveness of capping prices at 275 euros per megawatt hour, with some saying it’s not realistic to keep gas prices at such high levels for so long.
The bloc is seeking to stop gas prices from soaring sky-high as consumers are already struggling with rising cost-of-living.
G-7 policymakers have a tough balancing act to tread.
It seems to me like [the G-7] will err on the side of caution — setting it high rather than low to avoid worsening the inflationary spiral.
Pavel Molchanov
Energy analyst at Raymond James
If prices are set too high, they will be meaningless and risk having no impact on Russia — but if the price cap is too low, it could lead to a physical reduction in the supply of Russian oil onto the global market, said Raymond James’ energy analyst Pavel Molchanov.
A lower price cap “means more inflation, more consumer unhappiness, and more monetary tightening,” Molchanov pointed out.
“It seems to me like [the G-7] will err on the side of caution — setting it high rather than low to avoid worsening the inflationary spiral.”
If EU members agree to the proposed cap, Dhar expects the price of oil to fall below $95 per barrel for the last quarter of 2022.
Oil prices were fractionally higher on Friday afternoon Asia time. Brent crude futures inched higher by 0.35% to stand at $85.64 per barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures climbed 0.55% to $78.37 per barrel.
“Our price forecast assumes EU sanctions accompanied by a price cap on Russian oil will result in enough supply disruption to offset ongoing global growth concerns.”
Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs lowered its oil price forecast by $10 to $100 per barrel for the fourth quarter of 2022,citing rising Covid concerns in China and lack of clarity over the Group of Seven nations’ plan to cap Russian oil prices.
The West’s biggest economies agreed earlier this year to cap the price of Russia’s most valuable export and vowed to hash out the details by early December. The move is aimed at reducing inflows to President Vladimir Putin’s war chest without adding to stress on the global economy by further reducing the supply of energy.
But as the deadline approaches, countries are still haggling over where the cap should be set.
Media reports this week from a gathering of European diplomats indicated that Russian oil could be capped at between $65 and $70 per barrel. Yet this range is controversial, since it’s close to the current market price of Russian crude. That would mean limited disruption to supply, but also limited pain for Russia.
“At this price point, it’s about inflation reduction instead of Russian revenue reduction,” said Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
At the beginning of the month, a barrel of Russia’s Urals crude cost just over$70, about $24 below Brent, the international benchmark.
Setting the price lower, meanwhile, could exacerbate the global energy crisis — particularly if Russia retaliates. If it were to slash production by more than expected, it would drive up fuel prices just as countries like the United States, Germany and Japan are eager to get inflation under control.
Putin said Thursday that Western plans to introduce oil price caps would have “grave consequences” for energy markets.
Is the price right?
European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said Thursday that she was “confident that we will very soon approve a global price cap on Russian oil with the G7 and other major partners.” US President Joe Biden said oil price cap talks are “in play.”
But debate over the policy is dragging on, highlighting the complexity of the effort.
Countries want to reach an agreement ahead of December 5, when Europe’s embargo on Russian crude traveling by sea takes effect. That’s because the EU sanctions package also includes a ban on providing insurance and other services to ships carrying Russian crude.
This would make it harder for Russian customers like China and India to continue importing millions of barrels per day. Most insurers that cover crude transport are based in Europe or the United Kingdom, which is cooperating with Brussels.
The oil price cap aims to amend that policy. Shipping services and insurance could be provided to tankers transporting Russian oil — so long as it’s purchased at or below the price cap established by Western nations.
“This will help to further reduce Russia’s revenues, while keeping global energy markets stable through continued supplies,” the European Commission has explained. “It will thus also help address inflation and keep energy costs stable at a time when high costs — particularly elevated fuel prices — are a great concern.”
Yet actually setting a price has proved tricky. Poland and other eastern European countries want a lower cap, noting that it costs Russia much less than $65 to $70 to pump each barrel of oil. A cap between those prices would therefore allow Moscow to continue to reap profits from its crude sales.
The consultancy Rystad Energy estimates that the cost of production for Russia is between $20 a barrel and $50, depending on how the numbers are crunched.
Plus, Russia’s budget includes a forecast that oil will be exported at an average price of about $70 per barrel in 2023. If it can get that price in the market, it could continue spending mostly as planned.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that the cap should be set at $30 instead.
“We hear about [proposals to set the cap per barrel at] $60 or $70. Such words sound more like a concession [to Russia],” he said via a video link at a conference in Lithuania.
If the price is too low, however, Russia could lash out and curtail its production. That could rattle markets, given that Russia’s 2022 exports stand at an estimated 9.7 million barrels per day, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s higher than in 2021.
Disruption inevitable
The price level isn’t the only issue at hand. Setting a static range for the price cap — as opposed to establishing a floating discount for Russian crude pegged to where Brent is trading — could pose logistical problems, since it would need to be frequently adjusted.
There’s also skepticism among oil traders that the measure can be enforced, according to Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS. He expects parties to transactions will simply hunt for loopholes.
“There is a strong desire to do something,” he said. “But reality will be different.”
Some analysts think the price cap will ultimately be less important than Europe’s oil embargo. The bloc has been buying about 2.4 million barrels per day of Russian crude, and Moscow will soon be forced to hunt for new customers.
To limit spare barrels, it’s likely to reduce output. That could push oil prices higher no matter what.
“Due to the EU oil embargo and the planned price cap on oil from Russia, oil production there is likely to be significantly curtailed,” Commerzbank said in a note to clients. “This should cause the price of Brent oil to rise in the coming weeks.”
ACCRA, Nov 24 (Reuters) – Ghana’s government is working on a new policy to buy oil products with gold rather than U.S. dollar reserves, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia said on Facebook on Thursday.
The move is meant to tackle dwindling foreign currency reserves coupled with demand for dollars by oil importers, which is weakening the local cedi and increasing living costs.
Ghana’s Gross International Reserves stood at around $6.6 billion at the end of September 2022, equating to less than three months of imports cover. That is down from around $9.7 billion at the end of last year, according to the government.
If implemented as planned for the first quarter of 2023, the new policy “will fundamentally change our balance of payments and significantly reduce the persistent depreciation of our currency,” Bawumia said.
Using gold would prevent the exchange rate from directly impacting fuel or utility prices as domestic sellers would no longer need foreign exchange to import oil products, he explained.
“The barter of gold for oil represents a major structural change,” he added.
The proposed policy is uncommon. While countries sometimes trade oil for other goods or commodities, such deals typically involve an oil-producing nation receiving non-oil goods rather than the opposite.
Ghana produces crude oil but it has relied on imports for refined oil products since its only refinery shut down after an explosion in 2017.
Bawumia’s announcement was posted as Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta announced measures to cut spending and boost revenues in a bid to tackle a spiraling debt crisis.
In a 2023 budget presentation to parliament on Thursday, Ofori-Atta warned the West African nation was at high risk of debt distress and that the cedi’s depreciation was seriously affecting Ghana’s ability to manage its public debt.
The government is negotiating a relief package with the International Monetary Fund as the cocoa, gold and oil-producing nation faces its worst economic crisis in a generation.
Reporting by Cooper Inveen and Christian Akorlie
Writing by Sofia Christensen
Editing by Estelle Shirbon and Elaine Hardcastle
Newswise — Every day, about 8.6 million lightning strikes occur worldwide, each strike travelling at more than 320,000 kilometres per hour, generating a massive amount of electricity.
Ever wondered about lightning? For the past 50 years, scientists have debated why lightning zig-zags and how it is connected to the thunder cloud above.
There hasn’t been a definitive explanation until now, with a University of South Australia plasma physicist publishing a landmark paper that solves both mysteries.
Dr John Lowke, former CSIRO scientist and now UniSA Adjunct Research Professor, says the physics of lightning has stumped the best scientific minds for decades.
“There are a few textbooks on lightning, but none have explained how the zig-zags (called steps) form, why the electrically conducting column connecting the steps with the cloud remains dark, and how lightning can travel over kilometres,” Dr Lowke says.
The answer? Singlet-delta metastable oxygen molecules.
Basically, lightning happens when electrons hit oxygen molecules with enough energy to create high energy singlet delta oxygen molecules. After colliding with the molecules, the “detached” electrons form a highly conducting step – initially luminous – that redistributes the electric field, causing successive steps.
The conducting column connecting the step to the cloud remains dark when electrons attach to neutral oxygen molecules, followed by immediate detachment of the electrons by singlet delta molecules.
Why is this important?
“We need to understand how lightning is initiated so we can work out how to better protect buildings, aeroplanes, skyscrapers, valuable churches, and people,” Dr Lowke says.
While it is rare for humans to be hit by lightning, buildings are hit many times, especially tall and isolated ones (the Empire State Building is hit about 25 times each year).
The solution to protect structures from lightning strikes has remained the same for hundreds of years.
A lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 is basically a thick fencing wire that is attached to the top of a building and connected to the ground. It is designed to attract lightning and earth the electric charge, saving the building from being damaged.
“These Franklin rods are required for all buildings and churches today, but the uncertain factor is how many are needed on each structure,” Dr Lowke says.
There are also hundreds of structures that are currently not protected, including shelter sheds in parks, often made from galvanized iron, and supported by wooden posts.
This could change with new Australian lightning protection standards recommending that these roofs be earthed. Dr Lowke was a committee member of Standards Australia recommending this change.
“Improving lightning protection is so important now due to more extreme weather events from climate change. Also, while the development of environmentally-friendly composite materials in aircraft is improving fuel efficiency, these materials significantly increase the risk of damage from lightning, so we need to look at additional protection measures.
“The more we know about how lightning occurs, the better informed we will be in designing our built environment,” Dr Lowke says.
Notes for editors
The paper, “Toward a theory of stepped leaders in lightning” is published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. It is authored by Dr John Lowke and Dr Endre Szili from the Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia.
Newswise — A ‘simple’ tweak to perovskite solar cells during the fabrication stage could help to unlock the untold potential of the renewable energy source, claims research from the University of Surrey.
Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) has demonstrated that by precisely controlling the fabrication process, it is possible to regulate and reduce unwanted energy loss in perovskite solar panels.
“The future of perovskite solar panels is incredibly exciting, with the promise of not only improving the performance of solar farms and roof panels but many opportunities in powering spacecraft and interstellar probes.
“We hope the relatively straightforward approach demonstrated in our study, which tackles recombination losses, can improve the reproducibility, efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells.”
Perovskite solar cells are widely considered the natural successor to silicon-based solar devices because of their high energy conversion efficiency, low development cost, and lightweight nature. Named after a naturally occurring mineral with a structurally similar chemical formula, perovskites are synthetic composites with three-dimensional lattice crystal structures.
The University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute is a global leader in research into perovskite solar cells and their contribution to boosting global clean energy generation.
Dr Wei Zhang, the primary supervisor of the research from the University of Surrey, said:
“Perovskites are wonderful semiconductor materials enabling the revolution of next-generation photovoltaic technologies. However, despite unprecedented success in many emerging applications, their full potential has yet to be unlocked.
“Our work will foster the understanding of the complex interplay between the passivators and perovskites at the material interfaces and take the perovskite photovoltaics to new heights.”
Professor Ravi Silva, the co-supervisor of the research programme and Director of the ATI at the University of Surrey, said:
“Net-Zero is impossible if solar energy isn’t a crucial component of the mix. Solar energy is currently the leading technology for large-scale inexpensive green energy harvesting worldwide.
“The ATI, and indeed the University of Surrey, is dedicated to making sure that this perovskite technology complements conventional solar modules and is central to the sustainability requirements for tomorrow’s world.”
The research has been published by Advanced Energy Materials. It is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Swansea University, University of Sheffield, University of Toronto, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
###
Notes to editors
Reference: Bowei Li et al; Suppressing Interfacial Recombination with a Strong-Interaction Surface Modulator for Efficient Inverted Perovskite Solar Cells; Adv. Energy Mater. 2022, 2202868. https://doi.org/10.1002/aenm.202202868
Professor Ravi Silva is available for interview upon request.
This image, from March 2021, shows a worker with car batteries at a facility in China.
STR | AFP | Getty Images
China is leading the way when it comes to lithium — and the rest of the world has not been quick enough to respond to its dominance, according to the CEO of American Lithium.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Monday, Simon Clarke discussed how China had secured its position of strength within the industry.
“I just think the Chinese have — I mean you have to take your hat off, they’ve played a great game,” he said.
“For decades, they’ve been locking up some of the best assets across the world and quietly going about their business and developing knowledge on building lithium-ion technology, soup to nuts,” he added. “And we’ve been very slow to react to that.”
He added that the U.S.’ Inflation Reduction Act, and a number of other measures, meant people were “starting to wake up to it.”
Alongside its use in cell phones, computers, tablets and a host of other gadgets synonymous with modern life, lithium — which some have dubbed “white gold” — is crucial to the batteries that power electric vehicles.
Read more about China from CNBC Pro
China is certainly a dominant force within the sector.
In its World Energy Outlook 2022 report, the International Energy Agency said the country accounted for roughly 60% of the world’s lithium chemical supply. China also produces three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries, according to the IEA.
With demand for lithium rising, major economies are attempting to shore up their own supplies and reduce dependency on other parts of the world, including China.
The stakes are high. In a translation of her State of the Union speech, delivered in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said “lithium and rare earths will soon be more important than oil and gas.”
As well as addressing security of supply, von der Leyen also stressed the importance of processing.
“Today, China controls the global processing industry,” she said. “Almost 90% … of rare earth[s] and 60% of lithium are processed in China.”
Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro
With the above in mind, a number of companies in Europe are looking to develop projects centered around securing supply.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Ndongo Samba Sylla (dakar and kuala lumpur)
Inter Press Service
DAKAR and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 22 (IPS) – The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past.
With much less foreign exchange, tax revenue, and policy space to face external shocks, many African governments believe they have little choice but to spend less, or borrow more in foreign currencies.
Ndongo Samba Sylla
Most Africans are struggling to cope with food and energy crises, inflation, higher interest rates, adverse climate events, less health and social provisioning. Unrest is mounting due to deteriorating conditions despite some commodity price increases.
Economic haemorrhage
After ‘lost decades’ from the late 1970s, Africa became one of the world’s fastest growing regions early in the 21st century. Debt relief, a commodity boom and other factors seemed to support the deceptive ‘Africa rising’ narrative.
According to the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, the continent was losing over $50 billion annually. This was mainly due to ‘trade mis-invoicing’ – under-invoicing exports and over-invoicing imports – and fraudulent commercial arrangements.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) and criminal networks account for much of this African economic surplus drain. Resource-rich countries are more vulnerable to plunder, especially where capital accounts have been liberalized.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Externally imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs), after the early 1980s’ sovereign debt crises, have forced African economies to be even more open – at great economic cost. SAPs have made them more (food) import-dependent while increasing their vulnerability to commodity price shocks and global liquidity flows.
Leonce Ndikumana and his colleagues estimate over 55% of capital flight – defined as illegally acquired or transferred assets – from Africa is from oil-rich nations, with Nigeria alone losing $467 billion during 1970-2018.
Over the same period, Angola lost $103 billion. Its poverty rate rose from 34% to 52% over the past decade, as the poor more than doubled from 7.5 to 16 million.
Oil proceeds have been embezzled by TNCs and Angola’s elite. Abusing her influence, the former president’s daughter, Isabel dos Santos acquired massive wealth. A report found over 400 companies in her business empire, including many in tax havens.
From 1970 to 2018, Côte d’Ivoire lost $55 billion to capital flight. Growing 40% of the world’s cocoa, it gets only 5–7% of global cocoa profits, with farmers getting little. Most cocoa income goes to TNCs, politicians and their collaborators.
Mining giant South Africa (SA) has lost $329 billion to capital flight over the last five decades. Mis-invoicing, other modes of embezzling public resources, and tax evasion augment private wealth hidden in offshore financial centres and tax havens.
Fiscal austerity has slowed job growth and poverty reduction in ‘the most unequal country in the world’. In SA, the richest 10% own over half the nation’s wealth, while the poorest 10% have under 1%!
Resource theft and debt
With this pattern of plunder, resource-rich African countries – that could have accelerated development during the commodity boom – now face debt distress, depreciating currencies and imported inflation, as interest rates are pushed up.
Zambia’s default on its foreign debt obligations in late 2020 has made headlines. But foreign capture of most Zambian copper export proceeds is not acknowledged.
During 2000-2020, total foreign direct investment income from Zambia was twice total debt servicing for external government and government-guaranteed loans. In 2021, the deficit in the ‘primary income’ account (mainly returns to capital) of Zambia’s balance of payments was 12.5% of GDP.
As interest payments on public external debt came to ‘only’ 3.5% of GDP, most of this deficit (9% of GDP) was due to profit and dividend remittances, as well as interest payments on private external debt.
For the IMF, World Bank and ‘creditor nations’, debt ‘restructuring’ is conditional on continuing such plunder! African countries’ worsening foreign indebtedness is partly due to lack of control over export earnings controlled by TNCs, with African elite support.
Resource pillage, involving capital flight, inevitably leads to external debt distress. Invariably, the IMF demands government austerity and opening African economies to TNC interests. Thus, we come full circle, and indeed, it is vicious!
Africa’s wealth plunder dates back to colonial times, and even before, with the Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans. Now, this is enabled by transnational interests crafting international rules, loopholes and all.
Such enablers include various bankers, accountants, lawyers, investment managers, auditors and other wheeler dealers. Thus, the origins of the wealth of ‘high net-worth individuals’, corporations and politicians are disguised, and its transfer abroad ‘laundered’.
What can be done?
Capital flight is not mainly due to ‘normal’ portfolio choices by African investors. Hence, raising returns to investment, e.g., with higher interest rates, is unlikely to stem it. Worse, such policy measures discourage needed domestic investments.
Besides enforcing efficient capital controls, strengthening the capabilities of specialized national agencies – such as customs, financial supervision and anti-corruption bodies – is important.
African governments need stronger rules, legal frameworks and institutions to curb corruption and ensure more effective natural resource management, e.g., by revising bilateral investment treaties and investment codes, besides renegotiating oil, gas, mining and infrastructure contracts.
Records of all investments in extractive industries, tax payments by all involved, and public prosecution should be open, transparent and accountable. Punishment of economic crimes should be strictly enforced with deterrent penalties.
The broader public – especially civil society organizations, local authorities and impacted communities – must also know who and what are involved in extractive industries.
Only an informed public who knows how much is extracted and exported, by whom, what revenue governments get, and their social and environmental effects, can keep corporations and governments in check.
Improving international trade and finance transparency is essential. This requires ending banking secrecy and better regulation of TNCs to curb trade mis-invoicing and transfer pricing, still enabling resource theft and pillage.
OECD rhetoric has long blamed capital flight on offshore tax havens on remote tropical islands. But those in rich countries – such as the UK, US, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore and others – are the biggest culprits.
Stopping haemorrhage of African resource plunder by denying refuge for illicit transfers should be a rich country obligation. Automatic exchange of tax-related information should become truly universal to stop trade mis-invoicing, transfer pricing abuses and hiding stolen wealth abroad.
Unitary taxation of transnational corporations can help end tax abuses, including evasion and avoidance. But the OECD’s Inclusive Framework proposals favour their own governments and corporate interests.
Africa is not inherently ‘poor’. Rather, it has been impoverished by fraud and pillage leading to resource transfers abroad. An earnest effort to end this requires recognizing all responsibilities and culpabilities, national and international.
Africa’s veins have been slit open. The centuries-long bleeding must stop.
Dr Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist working at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Dakar. He authored The Fair Trade Scandal. Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich and co-authored Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story. He also edited Economic and Monetary Sovereignty for 21st century Africa, Revolutionary Movements in Africa and Imperialism and the Political Economy of Global South’s Debt. He tweets at @nssylla
Once you have some new knowledge on who you were in a past life, you can begin to reflect on how it could be impacting you now in this lifetime. As Gaia explains, there is likely a particular lesson or lessons that are asking to be learned through you and your experiences.
“So we look at what it is you need to break and use that information to your advantage rather than using it to fuel your ego,” she explains, adding whether you were a princess or a peasant in a past life, it comes down to how you use this information to fulfill your purpose.
“Looking at the reoccurring patterns and knowing your soul’s blueprint are really important for the foundation of figuring out who you are and why you are the way that you are in this lifetime,” she adds.
Or as Barham puts it, understanding past lives “really broadens people’s perspective on what we’re doing on the planet, why we’re here, and the connections we have—so it’s just a great way to explore: What is this existence all about?”
Whether you’re experiencing repeated patterns in your relationships, your health, or your career, Gaia notes, once you understand what’s been carried over from other lifetimes, you can “make adjustments in your life and be more conscious about what’s repeating.”
Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon, the only operational nuclear plant left in California, due to be shutdown in 2024 despite safely producing nearly 15% of the state’s green electrical energy power, is viewed in these aerial photos taken on December 1, 2021, near Avila Beach, California.
George Rose | Getty Images
The Biden administration on Monday said it’s providing Pacific Gas & Electric Co. with a $1.1 billion grant to help the company prevent the closure of Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear power plant.
Diablo Canyon was originally scheduled to be decommissioned in two phases in 2024 and 2025, but state lawmakers in September voted to keep it open for five more years. PG&E applied for funding in the Department of Energy’s initial phase of the $6 billion Civil Nuclear Credit program aimed to keep U.S. nuclear power reactors open.
The conditional funding, which comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed by Congress last year, creates a path forward for Diablo Canyon to remain open and could allow PG&E to pay back some of the $1.4-billion loan for the plant that lawmakers approved.
Diablo Canyon is California’s single largest source of power and provides 8.6% of the state’s total electricity and 17% of the state’s zero-carbon electricity. Diablo Canyon has helped the state grapple with power shortages as temperatures in California continue to rise and heat waves grow more intense with climate change.
“This is a critical step toward ensuring that our domestic nuclear fleet will continue providing reliable and affordable power to Americans as the nation’s largest source of clean electricity,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
However, critics of Diablo Canyon have pointed out that the plant, which is located next to the Pacific Ocean in San Luis Obispo County, is vulnerable to earthquakes and there is no permanent waste disposal solution.
Final terms of the grant are subject to negotiation and finalization, the Energy Department said, but the funding is designed to cover PG&E’s anticipated losses from keeping Diablo Canyon open. Not every plant that applied to the Energy Department’s program is receiving funding in this initial phase.
The administration has argued that nuclear power is a vital way to combat climate change and achieve the president’s commitment to 100% clean electricity by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
“Nuclear energy will help us meet President Biden’s climate goals, and with these historic investments in clean energy, we can protect these facilities and the communities they serve,” Granholm said.
Nuclear power provides 50% of the country’s carbon-free electricity, but shifting energy markets and other economic factors have resulted in the early closures of 13 commercial reactors since 2013, the Energy Department said.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement that keeping the Diablo Canyon open is necessary for the state to meet its clean energy goals while continuing to supply reliable power. Feinstein said she would monitor the funding process to ensure strict safety and environmental reviews are undertaken at the federal and state levels.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement that the grant will provide a limited-term extension of the Diablo Canyon and “support reliability statewide and provide an onramp for more clean energy projects to come online.”
For the first time ever, rich nations, including a top-polluting U.S., will pay for the climate-change damage inflicted upon poorer nations.
These smaller economies are often the source of the fossil fuels CL00, +0.19%,
minerals PICK, -0.20%
and other raw materials behind the developed world’s modern conveniences and technologicial advancement, including many practices responsible for the Earth-warming emisisons. And yet the developing world shoulders the worst of the droughts, deadly heat, ruined crops and eroding coastlines that take lives and eat into economic growth.
The deal, called “loss and damage” in summit shorthand, was struck as the U.N.’s Conference of Parties, or COP27, gaveled to a close near dawn Sunday in Egypt. Official talks ended Friday, but negotiations extended into the weekend.
It was a big win for poorer nations which have long sought money — sometimes viewed as reparations — because they are often the victims of climate-worsened floods, famines and storms despite contributing little directly to the pollution that heats up the globe. It took last-minute, pre-summit negotiations to even get the topic on the official agenda.
“Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice,” said Seve Paeniu, the finance minister of island nation Tuvalu, according to the Associated Press. “We have finally responded to the call of hundreds of millions of people across the world to help them address loss and damage.”
“ ‘Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice.’ ”
— Seve Paeniu, finance minister for Tuvalu
Pakistan’s environment minister, Sherry Rehman, said the establishment of the fund “is not about dispensing charity.” Pakistan, hit by devastating drought and more, dominated climate-change headlines this year.
“It is clearly a down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures,” she said, speaking for a coalition of the world’s poorest nations.
How does COP27 ‘loss and damage’ work? And where’s China?
According to the agreement, the fund would initially draw on contributions from developed countries and other private and public sources such as international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
While major emerging economies such as China wouldn’t automatically have to contribute, that option remains on the table. This is a key demand by the European Union and the U.S., who argue that China and other large polluters currently classified as “developing” countries have the financial clout and responsibility to pay their way.
The fund would be largely aimed at the most vulnerable nations, though there would be room for middle-income countries that are severely battered by climate disasters to get aid.
Getting serious about methane
Attention on methane, a more-potent but shorter-lasting greenhouse gas than carbon, was considered a major win at the summit. Some 150 countries have now signed on to the voluntary Global Methane Pledge, an official effort to cap the release of the GHG whose reduction presents perhaps the easiest way to reduce the global warming.
With the pledge, countries representing 45% of global methane emissions have vowed to reduce their emissions by 30% by 2030. If methane-reduction pledges are met, the result would be equivalent to eliminating the GHG emissions from all of the world’s cars, trucks, buses and all two- and three-wheeled vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency.
COP27 talks wrapped without concrete progress on the contentious issue of shifting an overall 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limit from a voluntary marker to an established requirement of nations. Most voluntary pacts among nations and private entities, including a vow by Amazon.com AMZN, -0.75%,
Ford Motor F, +0.58%,
Apple AAPL, +0.38%
and others signing on to a “First Movers” pledge, loosly use the 1.5-degree limit set in 2015 when talks took place in Paris.
Private banks, insurers and institutional investors representing $130 trillion said they would align their investments with the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, toward a pledge to net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. Advocacy groups cheer the pledge and its expanding roster but are also keeping up pressure on the signatories to speed up progress toward this goal and to stop undermining the pledge with fossil-fuel investment.
The Egypt pact was also void of firmer language on emissions cutting and the desire by some officials to target all fossil fuels NG00, +1.16%
for a phase-down.
Natural gas, which is relatively cheaper to produce than other fossil fuels, has been the major alternative to more-polluting coal in electricity generation. Still, it has its own emissions risk.
In the U.S., for example, electricity is the most common energy source used for cooking — electricity often powered by gas. Still, about 38% of U.S. households use natural gas directly for cooking, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Natural gas providers also own an established pipeline infrastructure that may serve alternative energy, and is pushed by the industry as a viable alternative alongside solar, wind ICLN, -0.15%
and other means. The industry also promotes its efforts to cap methane leaks.
“ ‘It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers.’”
— Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock
With fossil fuels in their sight, the European Union and other nations fought back at what they considered backsliding in the Egyptian presidency’s overarching cover agreement and threatened to scuttle the rest of the process, while advancing their own draft. The package was revised again, removing most of the elements Europeans had objected to but adding none of the heightened ambition they were hoping for, the AP said.
Egypt has played a unique role as host, representative of Africa, which sits at the front lines of those hurt by climate change and yet, remaining loyal to its own fossil-fuel ambitions and those of OPEC nations.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock voiced frustration.
“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers XOM, -0.87%
The agreement includes a veiled reference to the benefits of natural gas as low- emission energy, despite many nations calling for a phase down of natural gas, which does contribute to climate change.
Fossil-fuel industry’s presence
At least 636 representatives of the fossil fuel industry registered to attend the summit, a 25% increase over the industry’s presence last year, according to an analysis released by three advocacy groups.
More fossil fuel lobbyists are on the roster than any single national delegation, besides the UAE who has registered 1,070 delegates compared to 176 last year, according to a report from Corporate Accountability, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Global Witness (GW).
Frances Colón, senior director for International Climate Policy at the Center for American Progress, found plenty of fault with this round of talks.
“The final text reflects the outsized and corrupting presence of fossil fuel and big agricultural lobbyists at COP27, compounded by a lack of ambition from key, high-emitting countries,” she said, in a statement. “The agreement makes only a passing reference to the 1.5-degree Celsius warming goal and does not include any new language on phasing down or phasing out all fossil fuels RB00, -0.09%
— the only way to reach emissions reduction goals and secure a livable future.”
Colón also worried that the official statement did not adequately advance efforts. World leaders failed to reference the twin, interlocking crises of nature loss and climate change, and declined to link COP27 to next month’s U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal.
“ ‘The agreement makes only a passing reference to the 1.5-degree Celsius warming goal and does not include any new language on phasing down or phasing out all fossil fuels — the only way to reach emissions reduction goals and secure a livable future.’”
— Frances Colón of the Center for American Progress
While the new agreement doesn’t ratchet up calls for reducing emissions, it does retain language to keep alive the voluntary global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Egyptian presidency kept offering proposals that harkened back to 2015 Paris language which also mentioned a looser goal of 2 degrees.
This year’s pact also neglected to toughen the main sticking point from the previous COP, in Glasgow last year. At that time, China and India united to dig in unless coal language was softened. Nations this year did not expand on last year’s call to phase down global use of “unabated coal” even though India and other countries pushed to include oil and natural gas in language from Glasgow.
“We joined with many parties to propose a number of measures that would have contributed to this emissions peaking before 2025, as the science tells us is necessary. Not in this text,” the United Kingdom’s Alok Sharma said.
Climate campaigners are concerned that pushing for strong action to end fossil fuel use will be even harder at next year’s meeting, which will be hosted in Dubai, located in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
FTX’s new CEO said on Saturday that the bankrupt crypto exchange is looking to sell or restructure its global empire, even as Bahamian regulators and FTX squabble in court filings and press releases about whether the bankruptcy filing should proceed in New York or in Delaware.
“Based on our review over the past week, we are pleased to learn that many regulated or licensed subsidiaries of FTX, within and outside of the United States, have solvent balance sheets, responsible management and valuable franchises,” FTX chief John Ray, said in a statement.
Ray, who replaced FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11, added that it is “a priority” in the coming weeks to “explore sales, recapitalizations or other strategic transactions with respect to these subsidiaries, and others that we identify as our work continues.”
Ray’s statement came with a flurry of Saturday morning filings in Delaware bankruptcy court. In those filings, FTX asked for permission to pay outside vendors, consolidate bank accounts, and establish new ones.
The exact timing of a possible sale is unclear. FTX indicated that it has not set a specific timetable for the completion of this process and said that it “does not intend to disclose further developments unless and until it determines that further disclosure is appropriate or necessary.”
Both FTX and Bahamas securities regulators are seeking jurisdiction over the bankruptcy process in two different U.S. courts. Last week, Bahamian regulators moved potentially hundreds of millions of “digital assets” from FTX custody into their own, acknowledging the deed in a press release after FTX attorneys accused them of doing so in an emergency court filing.
Ray singled out some of the company’s healthier subsidiaries for praise. One example was LedgerX, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated derivatives platform. LedgerX was one of the few FTX-related properties that are not a part of its bankruptcy proceedings and remains operational today. The platform, which FTX acquired in 2021, lets traders buy options, swaps and futures on bitcoin and ethereum.
The new FTX CEO asked that employees, vendors, customers, regulators and government stakeholders “be patient” with them.
FTX and its accountants had identified 216 bank accounts, across 36 banks, with positive balances globally. Cash balances across all entities totaled some $564 million, with $265.6 million of that in the custody of LedgerX on a restricted basis.
FTX attorneys also want to employ a “cash pooling system,” merging all the cash assets of each disparate FTX entity into one consolidated balance statement and in new bank accounts, which FTX is currently in the process of opening.
Notably, FTX attorneys wrote that they were “working, and will continue to work, closely with [existing FTX banks] to ensure that prior authorized signatories do not have access” to any prior FTX accounts that will continue to be used. Prior reporting and court filings have indicated that Sam Bankman-Fried held nearly absolute control over cash management and account access.
FTX’s bank accounts reflect the global influence of the crypto-asset empire. Institutions in Cyprus, Dubai, Japan and Germany held a wide array of global currencies. FTX subsidiaries held more than a dozen accounts at Signature Bank, an American institution that made an aggressive foray into servicing crypto customers in 2021. With the exception of one Bank of America account for Blockfolio, major American banks are unaccounted for on the list. Blockfolio was acquired by FTX in the summer of 2020.
In another petition, FTX lawyers moved to access $9.3 million for vendor payments that FTX called “critical.” No list was provided, but the FTX motion established criteria for “critical vendor” status.
In welcome news for customers, FTX attorneys applied to the court for permission to redact “certain confidential information,” including the names and “all associated identifying information” of FTX’s customers. “Public dissemination of [FTX’s] customer list could give […] competitors an unfair advantage to contact and poach their customers,” the filing read, potentially jeopardizing FTX’s ability to sell off assets or businesses.
FTX lawyers want the proceedings to continue in Delaware. Bahamas regulators, on the other hand, claim they do not recognize the authority of those Chapter 11 proceedings and want to hold a Chapter 15 process in New York.
Chapter 15 bankruptcy is the route that the defunct hedge fund Three Arrows Capital has pursued. The implosion of Three Arrows launched a spiraling crisis that has taken down Voyager, Celsius, and ultimately FTX.
The Chapter 11 process that FTX seeks would allow for restructuring or sale of the company to the highest bidder, although it isn’t clear who that might be. Rival exchange Binance initially made an offer before pulling it. That turnaround deepened a liquidity crisis at FTX and revealed a multibillion-dollar hole.
FTX’s first hearing in its bankruptcy court case is set for Tuesday in Delaware.
LVIV, Ukraine — Russia’s missile barrages on Ukraine are having much less impact than Vladimir Putin might have wanted, thanks to Ukrainian improvisation and ingenuity.
The Russian military targeted Ukraine’s power grid last week, firing an estimated billion-euros worth of missiles at the country’s energy infrastructure — but for all that money the net result was to cause blackouts only for a day.
“We are very well prepared, and we think out of the box to coordinate after missile attacks,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, chairman of Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state-owned electricity company, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.
Engineers game-plan possible scenarios to be ready with “re-routing schemes” to compensate for the loss of a transmission station or — even worse — damage to a generating station. “So even with catastrophic damage, even during these hard times, we are still able to reconnect and deliver energy. Of course, we must curtail consumption to maintain the system’s stability,” he added.
Kudrytskyi says: “We can switch on the lights for 80 to 90 percent of Ukrainians within a day of an attack — although you must understand that’s not precise because it largely depends on the nature of the damage. It takes a few more days after restoring basic delivery to fully stabilize the system.”
That’s remarkable considering Ukraine has lost around 50 percent of its electricity capacity, he said, because of the damage caused by the Russian attacks — part of the Kremlin’s strategy to enlist “General Winter” to wear down Ukrainians and break their spirit. “In my humble opinion, we are doing quite well. This kind of assault, the scale of it, on a power grid has never been seen before in the modern world and therefore we must invent solutions. We don’t have anyone else to consult because simply nobody has ever experienced anything even close to this before,” Kudrytskyi said.
Ukrainians now joke that the country’s notoriously poor public services have improved since Russia’s invasion — instead of waiting weeks for electrical or water repairs, things get fixed in a matter of hours, they quip. And while the missile attack is deepening their anger toward Russia, they are also taking some solace and pride in the ingenuity behind the restoration of power and resumption of the water supply, which relies on Ukrenergo energy for pumping purposes, after missile and drone strikes.
The joke is not lost on Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who told POLITICO that improvisation is part of the secret behind switching the lights back on.
“The power system wasn’t built with the idea that it would have to withstand attack,” Sadovyi said with a chuckle.
‘Coded to be ingenious’
He said Ukrainians have shaken off a debilitating Soviet mentality, one that says nothing is possible when a problem emerges. “We have discovered we’re coded to be ingenious, to improvise, to come up with solutions, to use what’s available and what’s at hand,” he said.
Last week, as with previous Russian assaults on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure — notably on October 10 — the country’s electrical engineers swung quickly into action to re-program computer systems to re-route power from undamaged transmission stations. The improvised patch-ups take time; and repairing physical damage — when possible — takes even longer.
Foreign experts working in the country also highlight Ukrainian improvisation — and not just in the energy sector.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. They are doing some amazing things,” says Terry Taylor, a 75-year-old British water engineer who left a comfortable retirement in Oxford to bring his decades of experience working in Asia and Africa to Ukraine.
Taylor’s been overseeing a project for a Danish charity in Mykolaiv, the southern coastal city which has withstood a months-long Russian siege. Thanks to Russia’s sabotaging a pipeline in April, Mykolaiv has been without potable water for half-a-year. “There’s a stunning unity of purpose and passion here; it really is remarkable,” Taylor said. “People just get on with it; clean away debris and repair as best they can,” he told POLITICO.
When it comes to the power grid, the Ukrainians were also prepared — even before Russia’s invasion in February. They had been storing up stocks of spare parts, switches and cabling. “We accumulated significant stock of materials and equipment, probably one of the largest in the world,” Ukrenergo’s Kudrytskyi said.
Until October, when Russian targeting of energy infrastructure started in earnest, Ukraine had even been able to export electricity to the EU, but it is now in need of imports. Kadri Simson, the EU energy commissioner, visited Kyiv on November 1 and expressed the bloc’s readiness to help replenish stocks amid the latest waves of Russian attacks. And it’s a big job.
Strong message
The huge stocks of equipment and material that Ukraine has laid by are running out fast, Kudrytskyi said.
Mayor Sadovyi in Lviv admits that if the attacks continue and the winter is a harsh one, improvisation will have its limits. Sadovyi said that in last week’s attack the Russians managed to cause some damage to the interconnection with neighboring Poland.
“Today my message must be strong. We must be ready to survive without electricity and heating for one, two, maybe three weeks,” he said.
He said Lviv and Ukraine are going to need tens of thousands of diesel- and thermal-power generators.
How many exactly? He pulls a face when asked indicating that it is almost incalculable. Lviv bought three huge diesel generators six months before the war, and they have been used three times to maintain the hot water system for 50 percent of the city’s population, he said.
One of his biggest worries is how to keep Lviv’s main hospital going, which has been expanded enormously to rehabilitate both military and civilian war wounded and to manufacture and fit prosthetics. Sadovyi and other city mayors in Ukraine are in frequent contact to compare notes and to offer each other advice and assistance when they can.
But as the first snows of the season fall and with temperatures already dropping below zero Celsius, he’s in no doubt his city, where he has been mayor for 16 years, could soon be in a perilous position — a sentiment echoed by Kudrytskyi for the whole of Ukraine.
“We are preparing as best we can to build up resilience and we have to be ready for worst-case scenarios,” Kurdrytskyi said. “So, outages may be longer than the standard current five hours, but we are doing everything we can to try to prevent that happening.”
“But our stock is being exhausted,” he said. “We need spare parts, cabling relays for sure, but also some quite large items,” such as transformers and switching equipment. “We need them quickly and we can’t wait for them to be manufactured — we must find them somewhere soon,” Kudrytskyi said.
Aside from that, the energy boss makes a plea — echoed by city mayors like Sadovyi and national Ukrainian political leaders — for the West to supply more air-defense systems to shield the power grid from Russian missiles and air strikes.
“We are fighting on an energy front. More air-defense systems would increase our chances to avoid massive damage to our grid. So the more air-defense systems, the less damage,” he said.
“Because even if you look at the last big onslaught last Tuesday, we managed to knock out 70 or so of the 100 missiles launched at us, giving us a better bet to keep the system integrated, keep it running and to repair [it] than might otherwise have been the case,” Kudrytskyi said.
The EU is under immense pressure to cap the price of imported natural gas to contain energy costs — but many of the companies making a fortune selling cheap U.S. gas to the Continent at eye-watering markups are European.
The liquefied natural gas (LNG) loaded on to tankers at U.S. ports costs nearly four times more on the other side of the Atlantic, largely due to the market disruption caused by a near-total loss of Russian deliveries following the invasion of Ukraine.
The European Commission has come under fierce pressure to sketch out a gas price cap plan, but some countries, led by Germany, worry such a measure could prompt shippers to send gas cargoes elsewhere. The Commission is also reluctant, and its proposal issued Tuesday sets such demanding requirements that they weren’t met even during this summer’s price emergency.
But a large part of the trade is in European hands, according to America’s biggest LNG exporter.
“Ninety percent of everything we produce is sold to third parties, and most of our customers are utilities — the Enels, the Endesas, the Naturgys, the Centricas and the Engies of the world,” said Corey Grindal, executive vice president for worldwide trading at Cheniere Energy, rattling off the names of big-name European energy providers.
Cheniere, which this year saw 70 percent of its exported LNG sail to Europe, sells its gas on a fix-priced scheme based on the American benchmark price, dubbed Henry Hub, which is currently at about $6 per million British thermal units.
On average, the price across all Cheniere contracts is 115 percent of Henry Hub plus $3, Grindal said. That works out to about €33 per megawatt-hour. For comparison, the current EU benchmark rate, dubbed TTF, is €119 per MWh.
It’s a big markup for whoever is reselling those LNG cargoes into Europe’s wholesale market, profiting from fears that there may not be enough gas to last the winter.
Despite fears that any EU cap will send gas to higher bidders in Asia and result in bloc-wide shortages, Grindal gave a resounding “no” when asked if a cap would have any impact on how Cheniere does business with European companies.
“Our balance sheet is underpinned by those long-term contracts,” he added.
Translation: If buyers choose to trade their precious cargoes away for higher profits beyond Europe once they receive them, that’s their decision.
Blame game
“The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling us at a high price … I don’t think that’s friendly,” said French President Emmanuel Macron | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
The difference between U.S. and EU gas prices hasn’t gone unnoticed by European politicians — but most of the finger-pointing has been at American producers rather than the resellers closer to home.
“In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a group of industrial players last week. “The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling us at a high price … I don’t think that’s friendly.”
Macron’s dig conveniently ignored that the largest European holder of long-term U.S. gas contracts is none other than France’s own TotalEnergies.
At the company’s latest earnings call last month, TotalEnergies CFO Jean-Pierre Sbraire trumpeted the fact that the firm’s access to more than 10 million tons of U.S. LNG annually “is a huge advantage for our traders, who can arbitrage between the U.S. and Europe.”
“And now, given the price of LNG, each cargo represents something like $80 million, even $100 million. So, when we are able reroute or to arbitrage between the different markets, of course, it’s a very efficient way to maximize the value coming from that business,” Sbaire added. “Cash flow generation of this order of magnitude marks the start of a new era for the company.”
Spain’s Naturgy — which has some 5 million tons of U.S. LNG a year from Cheniere under contract — has also earned nearly five times more trading gas so far this year compared with 2021 thanks to “the increased spread between [Henry Hub] and TTF,” it wrote in its half-year report.
Long-term contracts with the U.S. weren’t always so profitable. In fact, from 2016 to at least 2018, buyers were mostly losing money on the fixed deals, leading some to sell them off.
In 2019 Spain’s Iberdrola, for example, pawned off its 20-year Cheniere contract to Asian trader Pavilion Energy, which is now benefiting from selling into a high-priced global market.
In the U.K, Centrica tried — and failed — to sell off its LNG portfolio in 2020 when government-ordered lockdowns drove real-time prices through the floor. That included a 20-year fixed Cheniere contract set to run through 2038.
Now that real-time prices have shot back up, Centrica — part of Shell-owned British Gas — is reaping the rewards and eagerly snapping up more long-term contracts, most recently a 15-year deal with U.S. LNG exporter Delfin beginning in 2026.
“This is a really important profit stream for us,” Centrica CFO Chris O’Shea told investors on a Friday trading update call.
Unlike some producers — for example in the Middle East — which restrict the final destination of the LNG to consumers in Asia and prevent it being sold onward at a higher price, American gas changes ownership the minute it’s loaded onto a ship and comes with no strings attached.
That leaves buyers free to redirect the precious supply wherever it’s most profitable — sometimes at the expense of their downstream clients, if it’s cheaper to break those pre-existing domestic delivery commitments.
“We can only control what we can control,” said Cheniere’s Grindal. “U.S. LNG is destination-free.”
But as far as getting it on the ship at previously agreed prices, “our focus is being that reliable supplier, being committed to the obligations that we’ve made to our customers, and we’re committed to doing everything that we can to help the EU in this situation.”
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
LVIV, Ukraine — Inna missed her father’s funeral.
The grieving 36-year-old Ukrainian lawyer learned of his death as she and her two young daughters — one aged seven, the other five — boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport in London to Poland.
It was at the mist-shrouded railway station at Przemyśl, 16 kilometers from the Poland-Ukraine border, that her plan to pay her graveside respects unraveled, as salvoes of Russian missiles slammed into Ukraine’s power grid, also impacting Inna’s hometown of Vinnytsia.
The barrage on the country’s energy infrastructure — the worst it’s experienced since October 10 — not only threw major cities and small villages into darkness and cold, but it’s also wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s railways, grinding trains to a halt and leaving them powerless at stations.
Away from the front lines of battle, this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine looks like — a slight, dignified blond-haired woman, with two young children in tow, trying to mourn her father and reach her 72-year-old mother to comfort her.
Knowing the journey back home would be arduous, Inna had tried to persuade her daughters to stay in Clapham, south London, where the three have been living with an English family for the past six months. “They have been very kind to us,” she explained.
Inna’s studying business administration now. Her daughters are in school. “Six months ago, they knew no English; it was hard at first for them,” she told me. Now, the kids chatter away in English, with the elder explaining her favorite thing to do at school is drawing; and the younger chiming in to announce she loves swimming.
But that calm, predictable life they’ve been living in England seemed far away right now.
The girls had insisted on accompanying their mother to Ukraine because they wanted to see their grandparents … and their cats. “When is the train coming?” the oldest demanded several times.
And as the night drew in, and the cold settled along the crowded platform at Przemyśl’s train station, other flagging, bundled-up kids started asking the same question, while parents — mainly mothers — tried to work out how to complete their journeys across the border.
As they did so and debated their options, a Polish policewoman insisted that smoking wasn’t allowed on the platform, and volunteers wearing orange or yellow vests offered hot tea, apples and fruit juice. Still, there was no sign of the scheduled train, and no information about it either.
While we waited on the platform, through the windows of a small apartment block across the road, Polish families could be seen glued to their television sets — no doubt absorbing the news that a missile had hit a grain silo in a Polish village just 100 kilometers north of Przemyśl.
As the news added to the disquiet among the Ukrainians at the station, the worry became palpable up and down the platform. Daryna, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman, was heading to see her 21-year-old son. “I’ve been living in Scotland with my daughter,” she said. “But he’s studying in Kyiv, and I want to make sure he’s OK.”
Some families are attempting to return to Ukraine to visit or mourn with family, but Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure left many asking “When is the train coming?” | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“Going home now is like being transported from the normal to the abnormal,” she added.
Galina, the director of a small clothing company, was impatient to see her 10-year-old daughter, whom she left in the care of her grandmother in Kyiv while making a quick business trip to Poland. She kept texting them to make sure they were safe, but reassuring replies didn’t assuage her, as both she and the others kept scrolling on social media for news about their hometowns — Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Rivne and Lviv, all affected by the nationwide missile bombardment.
My destination, Lviv, was badly impacted by the recent blasts. Several explosions were heard from the city on Tuesday, prompting Mayor Andriy Sadovyi to warn on his Telegram channel that everyone should “stay in shelter!” However, many won’t have received that message, as neither the internet nor the cellular networks were working in parts of the city. Officials said missiles and drones caused severe damage to the power grid and energy infrastructure, despite reports of successful missile interceptions too.
Some 95 kilometers from Przemyśl, Lviv was cold and damp when we arrived shortly after dawn on Wednesday. After giving up on the train, we’d crossed the border by foot and cadged a lift to the city.
As we made our way there, the city was largely without power, the traffic lights weren’t working, and the air raid sirens were clamoring. The only lights we could see were from buildings equipped with generators.
At my hotel, the manager, Andriy, told me it takes 37 gallons of diesel an hour to keep the electricity flowing, but he cautioned the water might not be that hot. “When the all-clear sounds, we will serve breakfast for another hour,” he added helpfully.
By the time I finished breakfast, electric trains were already up and running again in Lviv, less than a day after the city’s generation and transmission infrastructure was hit, and by evening, the lights were on all across the city — yet further testament to Ukrainian resilience, improvisation and refusal to be cowed.
And elsewhere, too, electrical engineers — the new heroes of Ukrainian resistance — managed to patch up the damage to get trains running and homes lit. “We had a blackout yesterday [Tuesday],” friends in Ternopil, a two-hour drive east of Lviv, told me by text. “The whole city was without electricity and water for several hours. But eventually everything returned to normal,” they added.
But with winter approaching and Russia planning to seemingly try to wear down Ukrainian resistance not so much on the battlefield but by targeting its civilian energy and water infrastructure, there are questions about how the country can ride out the pummeling.
In July and August, tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled overseas started returning home. Manned by a colorful variety of NGOs and charities at the border crossings into Poland, the tent camps thus became largely redundant as the refugee flood leaving Ukraine turned to a trickle, and the tents eventually came down. But now they may well be needed again.
“A lot of Ukrainians will leave if there’s no heat and no electricity,” predicted Inna. She’s now in a quandary, torn between planning for a life in England — if she can get her mother a visa — or seeing her future in Ukraine.
“I was a property lawyer in Odesa, I had a good life, and things were going well. But that’s all lost,” she said, trailing off, lost in her thoughts.
The European Union’s ban on seaborne imports of Russian oil, along with the Group of Seven’s plan to cap prices of oil from Russia early next month won’t guarantee that prices for the commodity will see a lasting rally, or that supplies will tighten further in the days ahead.
“In isolation, the sanctions on Russia should be bullish for prices,” says Matt Smith, lead oil analyst, Americas, at Kpler. However, they may have a limited effect, as Russian barrels get “rerouted and not taken off the market,” while a price cap still has so much uncertainty surrounding it that its impact may be “muted due to workarounds or may simply be ineffective.”
One of the many activities held on Energy Day (Nov. 15) at COP27, where discussions are taking place for two weeks on how to make further progress on global climate action. The consensus among observers is that the energy transition away from fossil fuels will accelerate in the wake of the war in Ukraine and its impact on oil and gas supply and prices. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
by Daniel Gutman (sharm el sheikh, egypt)
Inter Press Service
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 16 (IPS) – COP27 is unlikely to produce new commitments to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases, but the global energy crisis will eventually prompt more action by countries to move away from fossil fuels. That is the positive feeling that many observers are taking away from the annual climate summit being held in Egypt.
“The rise in energy prices due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set back many countries in the transition to renewable energies in 2022,” Manuel Pulgar Vidal, global leader of Climate & Energy at WWF, told IPS. “But this is not going to last, because developed nations have proven that the best path to energy security is to accelerate the abandonment of fossil fuels.”
The issue is seen from the same point of view in some countries of the developing South.
Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy Franz Tattenbach Capra was emphatic in an interview with IPS: “Countries like ours, which don’t have oil or gas, are appalled by the price increases. This will lead us to try to become less dependent on imports.”
This link goes far beyond the negotiations between the 193 States Parties on climate change mitigation and adaptation, which this year focuses on climate action, as highlighted by the summit’s slogan: “Together for Implementation”.
A demonstration is held at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center at COP27 to remind the world of the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals aimed at boosting global peace and prosperity, fighting climate change and making the transition to clean energy by 2030. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
Global fair
COP27 is very much like a trade fair and a multitudinous meeting place, with an overwhelming number of talks, activities and document sharing, where the task of choosing where to be is very difficult and everyone constantly feels they are missing out on something more interesting happening at the same time.
While world leaders give speeches and technical officials discuss the next steps for climate action, countries, organizations and companies seek and offer financing, in public and private meetings, for all kinds of projects, ranging from energy, agriculture and infrastructure to the empowerment of indigenous communities.
“This process has been very skillful in connecting climate change and economics. We all know that countries that do not act responsibly with regard to the climate are going to slide backwards in the coming years,” said Pulgar Vidal, who co-organized and chaired COP20, held in Lima in 2014, when he was Peru’s environment minister.
The energy sector is definitely the master key to finding solutions to climate change, as it is responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions and is still primarily fossil-fuel based.
According to a report presented here by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), only 29 percent of generation comes from alternative sources and carbon emissions continue to rise.
And the past year “frankly, has been a year of climate procrastination,” said United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) executive director Inger Andersen on Nov. 15, the day dedicated to energy in the never-ending agenda of side events taking place at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Center.
In the official negotiations, however, the energy discussion appears to be in the background, behind the debate on the creation of a fund to compensate for loss and damage in the countries of the South that have suffered the most from droughts, floods, hurricanes, forest fires and other phenomena that have accelerated in recent years.
COP26, held a year ago in Glasgow, Scotland, ended with a bitter taste with respect to energy when, following an intervention by India, a commitment was made to reduce, rather than eliminate, the use of coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.
For now, there is no indication that this summit will end with a better agreement in this area.
Manuel Pulgar Vidal, a former Peruvian environment minister and the chair of COP20 on climate change, held in Lima in 2014, poses for photos in one of the corridors of COP27 at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center in Egypt, where he is participating as global leader of Climate & Energy at WWF. CREDIT: WWF
Effects of the war
Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, chair of the largest multilateral fund for financing climate action in developing countries, is also convinced that the energy crisis generated by the war in Ukraine will, in the medium and long term, trigger a faster transition.
“The conflict made many people understand how vulnerable the global energy system is and how harmful dependence on fossil fuels is,” the CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) told IPS in one of the wide corridors of the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center, where the heavy traffic of people does not stop between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM.
Rodríguez, the former Costa Rican environment minister, said that “With an energy mix based more on renewable sources, there would have been more resilience to the impact of the events in Ukraine. European countries have already understood this and I am confident that they are understanding it in other regions.”
Reports circulating in Sharm El Sheikh support the theory that the impact of the crisis could be beneficial for the energy transition in the long run.
In the four largest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and India – public and private investment in transport electrification and renewable energy is growing due to market mechanisms and concerns about energy security, says a paper presented by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), an independent advisory organization based in the United Kingdom.
“The pace at which the green transition is speeding up…is remarkable….no-one who genuinely understands the interconnected crises facing the world believes that more oil and gas represent anything more than a very short-term solution,” Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU, said at the climate summit.
Harjeet Singh, of the Climate Action Network International, which brings together more than 1,800 environmental organizations, takes part in a demonstration at the Sharm El Sheikh International Convention Center. The demand is to ensure that the necessary efforts are made so that global temperature does not increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
Pressure from civil society
A broad spectrum of organizations are taking part in COP27, aiming to influence the negotiation process and seek funding.
Harjeet Singh of the Climate Action Network International (CAN-I), an umbrella group of more than 1,800 organizations in 130 countries, told IPS that “the war in Ukraine shifted the focus of many developed countries from climate action to energy security.”
Singh has called for a commitment to halt the expansion of fossil fuels to be included in the outcome document of COP27, which is due to end on Nov. 18 if it is not extended by one day as is customary at these summits.
At the same time, he lamented that, because of the impact of the war, “we see the fossil fuel industry taking advantage of this space to sell itself as sustainable, which is unacceptable.”
Evidence of the need to appear as part of the oil sector’s climate action is everywhere in this gigantic Convention Center, where the organization Global Witness denounced that 636 lobbyists for oil interests and companies are registered as participants.
One of the hundreds of organizations with booths at Sharm El Sheikh is the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) Fund for International Development.
“We came here to make ourselves visible, as we want to contribute to making the energy transition in all countries inclusive,” Nadia Benamara, Head of Outreach & Multimedia for the Vienna-based Fund, told IPS.
Benamara said the Fund pledged 24 billion dollars up to 2030 to finance climate action because “oil producing and exporting countries are also victims of climate change and want to contribute to the solution.”
Republicans will take over the U.S. House of Representatives two years into President Joe Biden’s term, though their narrow majority looks set to cause headaches for GOP leaders.
Republican hopes for a strong red wave have been dashed, but the Associated Press said Wednesday that the party won enough House seats — 218 — to control that chamber of Congress, as results from the midterm elections continue to be tabulated.
The battle for the U.S. Senate went to the Democrats late Saturday. Democrats will retain their hold on the Senate after winning a key race in Nevada, giving Biden’s party control of at least one chamber of Congress for the next two years.
“Republicans have officially flipped the People’s House!” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the front-runner to become House Speaker, tweeted late Wednesday. “Americans are ready for a new direction, and House Republicans are ready to deliver.”
While Republicans will control just one chamber of Congress, they now are expected to deliver a check on Biden’s policy priorities, such as by potentially using a debt-ceiling showdown to force spending cuts.
In a statement late Wednesday, President Joe Biden called for bipartisanship: “The American people want us to get things done for them. They want us to focus on the issues that matter to them and on making their lives better. And I will work with anyone — Republican or Democrat — willing to work with me to deliver results.”
The Republican House majority has yet to be finalized but could be the narrowest of the 21st century, even less than in 2001, when the GOP had a nine-seat majority with two independents.
Washington is likely to face new periods of gridlock, with Democrats also keeping their hold on the White House since Biden still has two years to serve before the 2024 presidential election. That’s after Democrats in the past two years used party-line votes to push through measures such as March 2021’s stimulus law and this past summer’s package targeting healthcare, climate change and taxes.
The House switching to red from blue fits the historical pattern in which a first-term president’s party tends to lose congressional ground in the midterms. The GOP highlighted raging inflation in its effort to win over American voters.
The House seats to flip to the GOP included one held by Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, who lost to Republican challenger Jen Kiggans, as well as two seats in Florida. But Democrats also flipped House seats and won re-elections in bellwether races, with Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger and Indiana Rep. Frank Mrvan notching victories.
Democrats have had a grip on the House since the 2018 midterms. They’ve run the Senate for two years, controlling the 50-50 chamber only because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.
Betting markets since late on Election Day have been seeing Democrats staying in charge of the Senate and Republicans winning the House. Ahead of last Tuesday’s voting, betting markets had signaled confidence in GOP prospects for taking over both the Senate and House.
Analysts had said voters last month appeared increasingly focused on Republican issues such as high prices for gasoline RB00, -0.35%
and other essentials, at the expense of Democrats’ agenda items such as climate change and abortion rights.
But exit polls suggested that Republicans performed worse than expected because many Democrats and independents voted partly to show their disapproval of former President Donald Trump — and those voters were energized by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
The former president announced his 2024 White House run late Tuesday. Earlier Tuesday, House Republicans chose Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the current minority leader, as their candidate for speaker. Thirty-one Republicans voted against McCarthy, signaling that he must shore up his support before the vote on the speakership takes place in January. It’s an early sign of how Republicans’ narrow majority is creating turbulence for the House GOP leadership.
STOCKHOLM, Nov 16 (IPS) – The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William FaulknerLike most armed conflicts the Ukrainian war intends to establish hegemony over a certain area, in rivalry with other usurpers. Russian propaganda pinpoints the US and EU as Russia’s main adversaries, while Ukraine is portrayed as a pawn in these nations’ international yearnings. Such a scenario is not new.
The Great Game was a political and diplomatic confrontation between British – and Russian Empires, which continued for most of the 19th and parts of the 20th centuries. Britain’s role was eventually taken over by the US. The Great Game mainly affected Mesopotamia (Iraq), Persia (Iran), and Afghanistan, though it had, and still has, repercussions on a wide range of neighboring territories.
Britain originally feared that the Russian Empire’s ultimate goal was to dominate Central Asia and reach the Indian Ocean through Persia, thus threatening Britain’s Asian trade links and its domination of India.
Britain posed as the World’s first free society, declaring its adherence to Christian values, respect for private property, and democratic institutions. Claims bolstered by an advanced industry, fueled by steam power and iron, as well as an ever increasing use of oil. English leaders assumed their nation had a God-given task to spread “civilization” and that such a worthy cause permitted them to exploit the earth’s natural resources, as well as the world’s labor force. Similarly to the Brits, the Russians, the Yankees, and the French considered themselves to be “civilizing forces”.
The quest for dominion was carried out in a traditional manner – pitching internal fractions against each other and let them do most of the fighting. Nevertheless, this strategy eventually led to direct clashes between “world powers”. Britain strived to convince the Russian army that it did not have a chance against the British war machine. The UK, France and Italy felt threatened by a growing influence of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Accordingly, these nations supported an increasingly weakened Ottoman Empire, intending it to remain a buffer zone blocking Russia’s expanding war fleet from the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
As part of this policy, Britain and France provided arms and money to anti-Russian insurgents in Chechnya, thus contributing to an enduring tradition of Chechen terrorism against Russia. After a minor scuffle between the Russian – and Ottoman Empires, Russia occupied the Principate of Wallachia (Romania), prompting France and Great Britain to attack Crimea with a huge military force.
The Crimean War (1853-56) proved that the Tsar’s army was no match for the allied forces. Russia was humiliated and its expansion towards the European mainland and meddling in Persia and Afghanistan were halted. Instead people living on the steppes of Central Asia and Siberia continued to be subdued and forced to join the Russian Tsardom.
The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state of war against industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.
The meddling of imperialists in other nations’ affairs was gradually worsened by efforts to secure fossil fuels for their own benefit. Refined petrol was originally used to fuel kerosene lamps and became increasingly important when street lighting was introduced. After 1857, oil wells drilled in Wallachia became very profitable, inspiring a search for new oilfields in the east. In 1873, the Swede Robert Nobel established an oil refinery in Azerbaijan, adding Russia’s first pipeline system, pumping stations, storage depots, and railway tank cars. At the same time, Calouste Gulbenkian assisted the Ottoman government to establish the oil industry in Mesopotamia. Gulbenkian eventually became the world’s wealthiest man.
Profit from these endeavors increased through assembly-line mass production of motor vehicles, introduced by Henry Ford in 1914. However, the main reason for gaining control of oil was belligerent. The English First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, realized that if the British navy was fuelled by oil, instead of coal, it would be irresistible: “We must become the owners or at any rate the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require.” In 1914, Churchill feared that this could be too late – the Germans were already on their way to conquer the Middle Eastern oil fields. Together with the Ottomans they were finishing the Berlin-Baghdad railway line, which would it make possible for the German army to transport troops to the Persian Gulf and onwards to Persian oilfields.
Germany and its allied Ottoman Empire lost World War I and the Berlin-Baghdad railway never reached the Persian Gulf. In accordance with the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement Arab territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divided into French and British “spheres of influence”. In 1929, the newly formed Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), a joint endeavor of British, French and American oil interests, brokered by Gulbenkian, received a 75-year concession to exploit crude oil reserves in Iraq and Persia, and eventually in what would become the United Emirates.
Access to oil continued to be a major factor in World War II. The German invasion of USSR included the goal to capture the Baku oilfields, which had been nationalized during the Bolshevik Revolution. However, the German Army was defeated before it reached the oil fields.
The Germans had pursued a relatively benign policy towards the USSR’s Muslim population of Caucasus and neighboring areas. This was after the war taken as an excuse for Stalin’s treatment of “treacherous ethnic elements”. Forced internal migration had begun already before the war and eventually affected at least 6 million people. Among them 1.8 million kulaks, mainly from Ukraine, who were deported from 1930 to 1931, one million peasants and ethnic minorities were driven from Caucasus between 1932 to 1939, and from 1940 to 1952, a further 3.5 million ethnic minorities were resettled.
Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during these deportations, while tens of thousands perished subsequently due to the harsh exile conditions. The Crimean Tatar deportations resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 households and 360,000 acres of land. From 1967 to 1978, some 15,000 Tatars succeeded in returning legally to Crimea, less than 2 percent of the pre-war Tatar population. This remission was followed by a ban on further Tatar settlements.
In 1944, almost all Chechens were deported to the Kazakh and Kirgiz Soviet republics. Accordingly, the Russian presence in Caucasus and Ukraine increased and so was Russian control of these areas’ natural resources, including wheat, coal, oil and gas.
After World War I, Britain had first tried to halt the Bolshevik penetration of Iran and did in 1921 support a coup d’état placing the UK-friendly general Reza Shah as leader of the nation. When Britain and USSR eventually became allies against Nazi Germany they did together attack Iran and replaced Reza Shah with his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Reza Shah had become “far too Nazi-friendly.”
Following a 1950 election, Mohammad Mosaddegh became president of Iran. He was committed to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, AIOC (successor of the IPC mentioned above). In a joint effort the Secret Intelligence Services of the UK and the US, MI6 and CIA, organized and paid for a “popular” uprising against Mosaddegh, though it backfired and their co-conspirator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled the country. However, he did after a brief exile return and this time a coup d’état was successful. The deposed Mosaddegh was arrested and condemned to life in internal exile.
Mosaddegh’s internally popular effort to remove oil revenues from foreign claws inspired other Middle East leaders to oppose Britain and France. In 1956, the Egyptian president Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, primarily owned by British and French shareholders. An ensuing invasion by Israel, followed by UK and France, aimed at regaining control of the Canal, ended in a humiliating withdrawal by the three invaders, signifying the end of UK’s role as one of the world’s major powers. The same year, USSR was emboldened to invade Hungary, quenching a popular uprising.
In 1960, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded in Baghdad. This was a turning point toward national sovereignty over natural resources. The US Iranian protégé, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, eventually came to play a leading role in OPEC where he promoted increased prices, proclaiming that the West’s “wealth based on cheap oil is finished.” The US was losing its ability to influence Iranian foreign and economic policy and discretely began to support the religous extremist Khomeini, who initially claimed that American presence was necessary as a counterbalance to Soviet influence. However, after coming to power in 1979 Khomeini revealed himself as a fierce opponent to the US. The US and some European governments thus ended up supporting the brutal Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran. The Iraqui leader, heavily financed by Arab Gulf states, suddenly became a ”defender of the Arab world against a revolutionary Iran.” The war ended in a stalemate,with approximately 500,000 killed.
Ukraine is one last example of how a country has ended up in a siutaion where a superpower use its military force to impose its will upon it, while implying that other nations have similar intentions. Times are constantly changing and hopefully Russia will realise, like the UK once did, that it cannot maintain its might and strength through armed invasions, but instead have to rely on diplomacy and peaceful negotiations.
Russia seems to be stuck in a time capsule where foreign greed and meddling in other nations’ internal affairs resulted in ruthless wars and immense human suffering. As the German philosopher Hegel stated in 1832:
What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
BALI, Indonesia — Every European leader at this week’s G20 summit in Bali wanted a one-on-one meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Not everyone got one.
The Europeans’ desire to meet Xi was driven by the fact that this week was the first opportunity to meet the Chinese leader at a major diplomatic jamboree since the lockdowns of early 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic started in China and spread to the world.
The Europeans always had to accept that they were going to be fighting for the crumbs in terms of the timetable. U.S. President Joe Biden spent three and a half hours with Xi, while France’s President Emmanuel Macron had to be content with (a still perfectly respectable) 43 minutes.
China conspicuously revived its long-established tactic of courting specific EU countries and their national interests, something it has often used to destabilize Brussels. (When Brussels threatened an all-out trade war in 2013 over China undercutting the EU market in solar panels and telecoms equipment, China expertly shattered EU unity by threatening retaliatory action against French and Spanish wine, playing Paris and Madrid against EU trade officials.)
Once again in Bali, China took the canny nation-to-nation approach, meeting Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte, while avoiding European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel. A meeting with Michel, at least, had been widely expected in diplomatic circles.
China bristles at the EU designation that it is a “systemic rival” to Brussels, and instead decided to leverage its influence with individual European countries.
Take the meeting with Rutte. The Chinese leader’s main interest was that the Netherlands, home to chipmaker ASML, a company that makes key equipment for microchip manufacturing, should not join any EU-U.S. trade coalition seeking to box China out of new technologies.
“It is hoped that the Netherlands would enhance Europe’s commitment to openness and cooperation,” Xi noted in a readout of the Dutch meeting. Translation: Don’t make trade trouble over microchips.
With Sánchez, Xi played up the importance of China as a motor for tourism in Spain, a sector where Madrid is particularly interested in high-rolling visitors from Asia. “The two sides need to make good preparations for the China-Spain Year of Culture and Tourism to build greater popular support for China-Spain friendship,” Xi said.
Similarly, the Xinhua state news agency quoted Macron saying he wanted more cooperation on business, specifically in the aviation and civil nuclear energy sectors. The Chinese account of the Xi-Meloni meeting was that Beijing would import more “high-quality” goods — presumably of the luxury and gourmet variety — and would cooperate in manufacturing, energy and aerospace.
Macron cozies up to Xi
In a sign that Xi’s diplomatic strategy was paying dividends, Macron took a non-confrontational approach to Xi, even massaging the Chinese leader’s ego.
The Chinese embassy to Paris promoted a video by TikTok’s domestic Chinese equivalent Douyin, in which Macron passed his best wishes to China after Xi secured a norm-breaking new mandate. (Xi was appointed for a third term as Communist Party general secretary in a highly choreographed party congress.)
Macron also hailed Xi as a “sincere” figure who should “play the role of a mediator over the next few months” in stopping further Russian aggression against Ukraine — even though Beijing has shown no sign of being a good fit for such a role since the war broke out in February.
Ignoring China’s deadly Himalayan tensions with India, escalating tension with Taiwan or military adventurism in the South China Sea, Macron declared: “China calls for peace … [There is] a deep and I know sincere attachment to … the U.N. charter.”
Macron also told reporters he planned to visit China early next year. That looks like a riposte to the visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who visited China earlier this month. Scholz reportedly rejected Paris’ suggestion for a joint Macron-Scholz visit and decided to go alone with a delegation of big businesses.
“Macron needed this air-time with Xi enormously as he couldn’t be seen to be left out by China when the Americans and the Germans have dominated the headlines,” a Western diplomat said.
While Macron claimed that Xi agreed with him on a “call for respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” China’s own readout made no such mention, saying only: “China stands for a ceasefire, cessation of the conflict and peace talks.”
Brussels boxed out
In stark contrast to the French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian leaders, the Brussels-based EU chiefs didn’t get a look-in.
In a show of Beijing’s continually negative view of the European Union, Xi decided not to go ahead with what POLITICO understood to be a near-certain plan for Michel, the one representing all 27 countries, to meet Xi.
That event, had it been allowed to take place, would have been significant in showcasing the possibility for the bloc’s smaller economies to also make their voice heard, since Xi would otherwise be busy dealing with the bigger players.
Xi’s change of heart over a meeting with Michel came shortly after the EU Council president’s prerecorded speech at a Shanghai trade expo was dropped.According to Reuters, he tried to call out Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the speech, a message that was deemed too sensitive to Chinese ears.
In a thinly veiled criticism of China’s approach to the new Silk Road, von der Leyen said: “The [West’s] Partnership Global for Infrastructure and Investment is an important geostrategic initiative in era of strategic competition.
“Together with leading democracies we offer values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnerships for low- and middle-income countries,” she said.
Her tone, though, proved to be a minority among European leaders during the G20 engagement with China.
“There’s no common message from the EU on China,” according to another EU diplomat in Bali. “But then there never was one.”
To the relief of European diplomats, at least Xi did not handle their bosses in the same way he treated Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Everything we discuss has been leaked to the paper; that’s not appropriate,” Xi told Trudeau through an interpreter in a clip recorded by Canadian media.
“That’s not … the way the conversation was conducted. If there is sincerity on your part …” Xi said, before Trudeau interrupted him, defending his country’s interest in working “constructively” with Beijing.
Xi took his turn to interrupt. “Let’s create the conditions first,” Xi said.
U.K. inflation accelerated in October, reaching a fresh four-decade high, as higher wholesale energy prices fed through households’ utility bills.
The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics said Wednesday that consumer prices were 11.1% higher in October than a year earlier, more than the 10.1% rise registered in September.
This is the highest rate of inflation since February 1982, and beats the 10.9% consensus forecast from economists in a poll by The Wall Street Journal.
The jump in inflation was mainly due to higher energy prices, which increased for most households even as the U.K. government implemented an energy price cap from Oct. 1. Electricity prices rose 65.7% on year, up from the 54% increase registered in September. Gas prices soared 128.9% compared to a year earlier, outstripping the 95.7% the prior month.
The core price index–which excludes volatile categories such as food and energy–increased 6.5% in October on year, unchanged from September.
The Bank of England expects inflation to remain around 11% in the fourth quarter, and to moderate slightly toward 10% in 2023’s first quarter.
Write to Xavier Fontdegloria at xavier.fontdegloria@wsj.com
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