LyrArc Article Gist
The different views on Ukraine of the Republican party in the US are shown here in this WSJ report. The views range from Rand Paul, Donald Trump to Republican leadership in the Senate under Mitch McConnell. Mr. Trump is also seen as representing an older view of relations with Russia that may no longer exist after the full scale invasion of Ukraine. In this sense Russian tanks invading Ukraine is a watershed event like that of Prague in 1968 and Hungary in 1956. Old views no longer hold. The Cold War began with the Berlin Blockade in 1948- the response of president Harry Truman was the Berlin Airlift supplying the city of Berlin, and some such response is taking shape with the $350 million immediate aid to Ukraine that Biden promised on Feb. 26, within 48 hours of the invasion. The Hungarian revolution in 1956 set the stage for the Cold War after Soviet tanks entered Budapest. The West and the entire free world rallied in 1956 and again in 1968. Some such change is happening now throughout the free world. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The need for a global response to a global problems not a lot of local solutions is the subject of this article by Dr. Larry Brilliant, who for 7 years 1973-80 worked with the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox globally. 1. Action for a global response-The WHO can act as the vehicle for action globally-  restructure it and empower it to do the job. Put the right people in place who have the confidence globally. Set a new pandemic treaty and put it in place. 2.  Get a more advanced version of the mRNA vaccine which does not need a cold chain. India is reportedly working on one. Put funds and people in place for vaccine drives in poor countries.  Other action needed is learning from the situation in South Africa where the HIV patients are reported by Stephanie Nolan in NYT to have been more susceptible to mutations of the new variant. How can resources be put in place in poor countries so that patients in vulnerable populations get their medicines regularly, and are vaccinated. Overall how can these populations have the vaccine supplies needed- including ones without cold chain suggested by Larry Brilliant, potentially through vaccine work in India. Can international teams be developed with developed countries in Europe and US financing the effort and India offering its manpower and knowhow?   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Russia faces future losses from the loss of the German and European natural gas and energy markets. Germany is pushing forward to free itself from Russian gas supplies, and supplies of other energy from Russia. This will be a market hard to replace for Russia. New renewable energy scientific and manufacturing advances could replace the dependence on coal, natural gas, oil leaving Russia without the earnings it makes now on energy supplies.

LyrArc Article Gist
After the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement, China and the European Union sought to fill the leadership on this issue. Yet the reality now looks to be different. China decreased coal consumption between 2014-2016. Now China is ramping up coal generation as it needs to provide stimulus to a slowing economy as trade relations with the U.S. worsening.  In 2017 the trend reversed with state backed loans to help economic growth and surge in provincial permits.  China is now moving forward with plans to add coal fired power equal to almost the total U.S. capacity, according to Coalswarm, which tracks power plants worldwide for coal use. This would push coal fired production to above the cap of 1,100 gigawatts China has set and its current cap. Its current production is already about half of the world's total coal fired generation and quadruple that of the U.S. In 2017 China made up one fourth of total CO2 productions.  Canada is missing its emissions targets and is not likely to meet 2020 targets say experts. In the EU members reliant on coal power energy oppose EU parliament efforts to end subsidies to the most polluting plants by 2025, seeking delay of one decade. At the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland, these changes are facing opposition. As a sign of how the situation is changing since the 2015 Paris Accords, the protests in France by yellow vest protestors started in opposition to a carbon tax intended to meet France's climate change targets. That tax increase is being withdrawn by president Macron. Families struggling financially had a different perception of the increase in the fuel tax and even young people who support meeting emissions reduction joined the protests, as reported in the New York Times and The Times. This tells a lot about how the issue of climate change has changed in the public perception in three years. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Commodity prices are surging worldwide. Shortages of potash with cutoff of supplies from Russia and Belarus is affecting fertilizer supplies and agriculture  worldwide. New mines for commodities in much demand will take years to begin production. A mine in the Canadian prairies is expected to be the largest potash mine in the world, yet production will not begin till 2027. The situation is the same for coal  copper, nickel, and other commodities.

LyrArc Article Gist
In this video DW.com looks at China with its CO2 emissions making up 30% of the global total and addition of coal power capacity. Yet China is also the country with a huge effort to build solar energy and is at the forefront in electric cars. What does this mean and how does it affect the search for reaching a limit to the use of fossil fuels? DW.com's Christian Pricelius takes a look.

LyrArc Article Gist
A sensational last stroke victory for womens 4 person quad scull rowing team to get gold at Paris Olympics 2024. The team includes Lola Anderson shown in article alongside this and Georgina Brayshaw also alongside. Georgina was paralyzed on one side after a horse riding accident and still took up rowing just on her lack of fear of what she could or could not do, willing to try even on a bad day, bad year.

LyrArc Article Gist
Kamala Harris returns to Zambia after a visit to that country to meet her grandfather Gopalan almost 50 years earlier. At that time Gopalan, from the Indian Civil Service, was given as as an advisor to Zambian president Kenneth Kuanda, helping organize the settling refugees from Southern Rhodesia. This was the period of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Kamala as a young girl learned about democracy and political participation from these visits to both Zambia and India. During this visit Kamala Harris visits Zambia, Tanzania, and Ghana, parts of British West and East Africa. Not only is this visit a way to revive relations with these countries, it also marks the end of a period after the Cold War ended in 1990, when the US did not engage with Africa and South East Asia in the way it had done during the Cold War when democratic institutions modeled on the British parliamentary system competed with Soviet Bloc Marxist systems.

LyrArc Article Gist
The torrential rain and floods in Australia have disrupted coal mining and are likely to lead to higher coal and steel prices. About 98 million tons of annual steel making coal capacity, equal to 73% of coal exported from Queensland is affected according to analysts at Macquarie Capital. This is 37% of the annual, global seaborne supply of coal for steelmakers. Prices for steelmaking coal have gone up by 10% on the spot market to about $250 a metric ton, according to analysts.

LyrArc Article Gist
A federal committee in the U.S. now recommends no more than 6% of calories come from daily sugar intake not the 10% that is is the current guideline. It is smart to be wary of guidelines set in a different period when Americans and people in other parts of the world were not enough health conscious as they should have been. Artificially high limits set in guidelines serve as a danger to health, particularly as experts say obesity is like pouring gasoline on fire in fighting the coronavirus. Take a look at mean consumption today and it is not even the 10%, it is 13% double of what it should be. Nearly two thirds of Americans aged 1 years or older consumed more than 10% of daily calories in added sugar. And 70% of U.S. adults over 20 years are obese or overweight according to 2015-2016 figures from CDC. Today the figures from Europe and Asia, Latin America are also alarmingly high for obesity rates. Added sugar comes from processed foods from soda and pasta sauce to cereal and yogurt, and honey, sugar itself. Sugar sweetened beverages are common and dangerous. A 16 ounce grande pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks has 50 grams of sugar or 10% of a 2000 calories diet. The committee in the U.S. wants to see people eat healthy diets and does not want to discourage healthy foods like fruit and milk which people are not eating enough. It wants to see a shift away from processed foods to foods that have good health outcomes such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meat and poultry. The beverage producers such as Coca Cola and Pepsi are a major source of resistance , as are Confectioners association, and other producers that benefit from setting the guidelines at 10%. It is not that for 3 decades as the obesity levels rose to the shocking and dismal health levels of today that the ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet were not known. It was just that we as a people did not care enough to fight for what is safe and healthy against whatever resistance was put up by producers with their vested interests, just as we as a people did not care enough to to fight to keep local manufacturing in place and the jobs and healthy communities across our land. A gram of sugar equals 4 calories. For a 2000 calories a day diet that is 120 calories to stay within the 6% that we should not exceed. Make a habit of looking at each packaged product and add up the added sugar grams and calories. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Indian regulators, the Commission for Air Quality Management, closed 6 of the 11 coal fired electricity plants within 100 kilometers radius of New Delhi, as it battles toxic smog that has covered the city for about 2 weeks. Schools and colleges are closed till further notice, and entry of trucks is restricted till November 21. 

LyrArc Article Gist
What is California's position in nuclear and renewables and does the substance the facts justify the image it promotes of being energy friendly and using renewables? Answer is NO  because only 9% of its total end use energy consumption according to EIA figures (2023) comes from renewables. It uses no coal yet about 60% of its energy is from crude oil. During the current crisis in the war with Iran is California an example to follow? The answer is No because it has not used renewable energy the way Germany has or EU has, and it has not managed its crude oil well by not using domestic crude oil instead relying on imports, which only burden the global needs for crude oil coming from a state with capacity to do lot better. By comparison Germany gets 23% of its total energy consumption from renewables compared to 9% for California, and for Germany 60% of its total electricity production is from renewables compared to 46% for California. EIA data shown here from US government data does not paint a very energy friendly picture. California's imports of crude oil at 75% of consumption and drop in refineries from 48 to 3 shows it has not managed the oil refining side of energy in the best way possible. How does it rate in making good use of energy? Here it uses 174 million BTU's per capita no different than New York at 174 and about the same as Florida and Washington DC, Massachusetts, Maryland.  And Germany has achieved 122 million BTU per capita showing California far behind. How does it rate in using renewables and nuclear? As it is a state with urban and suburban sprawl with large driving distances it uses a lot of crude oil for transportation. Petroleum or crude oil use is 58% of total energy use, Natural gas 25, Renewables are only 3%, electricity generation is 14% of which only 46% is from renewables. California is NOT the model for the US. We have to look elsewhere for answers.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Germany generated 45% of its energy from coal and 25% from renewable energy sources in 2013, according to AG Energiebilanzen. Chancellor Merkel, who as environment minister supported the Kyoto agreement in 1997, announced a plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an additional 62 to 78 million tons by 2020. The cuts will rest largely on improving energy efficiency, and with a third of the cuts in the power industry. With the drive to close 17 nuclear plants in Germany, the power industry has increasingly relied on coal generated energy. This is an effort to change this situation. It is supported by German public opinion.

LyrArc Article Gist
Cold air moves to the east coast of the U.S. bringing minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures to New York on February 1, 2019. Parts of western New York will see about 2 feet of snow.

LyrArc Article Gist
Wellsville is 80 miles south of Rochester, New York. The town of 7000 made parts for coal fired power plants for 100 years till the impact of climate change led to decline. Today it is recovering from the loss of jobs as it is building parts for wind turbines. It is a very Republican area and one resident says Republicans were quick to say that anything renewable, wind or solar was bad. Gradually there is a sense that the town can thrive once more.

LyrArc Article Gist
This report on Danish wind energy company Orsted, looks at the journey of the largest developer of wind energy in the world from a company sending natural gas from North Sea to Europe to a joint developer with Denmark's Vestas of offshore wind farms. Last year Orsted, pronounced Ehrr-sted in Danish for the O and named after a Danish scientist, decided to invest $57 billion in offshore wind farms by 2027. It was not easy and the path required a bold vision and bold action to invest in wind energy for the long term even as debt piled up from losses in natural gas competing with coal, climate change committments were not yet strong, subsidies were required to make wind energy competitive, and debt was piling up. It would take a decade of hard work and technological innovation to produce wind energy that could outcompete coal and natural gas on cost without subsidies. The year is 2009 with the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The predecessor company to Orsted was losing money in natural gas with lower cost coal energy generation in Europe at the time. Yet the mood was changing governments were willing to invest in renewables. In 2012 a new CEO Paulsen did a review of 12 businesses of this Danish energy company and decided wind energy was the only one with long term prospects. The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference created new awareness for the need to come up with a long term solution for energy that has no negative health effects and is renewable. That Conference set a goal of 20% for renewable energy by 2020 in the total mix for Europe up from 14%. Paulsen saw an opportunity in the crisis at the company then called Danish Oil and Natural Gas. The new company was called Orsted and the old divisions in fossil energy were sold to invest in wind farms offshore. The way Paulsen saw the situation was that the company had to take radical action whether it wanted to do so or not. By 2012 Danish pension funds were investing in large offshore wind farms of Orsted, taking a stake of as much as 50% in the Nysted wind farm. The Danish government which owned 80% of Orsted thought its projects were risky. Hard work with Vestas which builds the turbines in Denmark paid off in developing a huge new turbine that would bring costs down 65% comparing 2020 with 2012.  In 2018 the European Union was spending about 92 billion euros or $112 billion on energy subsidies including to wind farms. Britain also heavily subsidized offshore wind farms such as Hornsea 1 at about $198 a megawatt hour for 15 years double the electricity price in recent years. Windy conditions and shallow waters in the North Sea were favorable. Technology was being developed with Vestas which would reduce the cost each year. By 2016 Orsted was listed in Copenhagen. The remaining oil and gas business was then sold for $1 billion. The returns are less in wind than coal and natural gas- about 7-8% a year but the big thing is that there is certainty in this compared to coal and natural gas which are volatile and uncertain. The lesson companies are learning in renewables is that with solar and wind technology can. bring down costs, a lot of hard work and creative work lies ahead, that crisis can be turned into opportunity for companies that can be focussed enough to produce results. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Indian Finance Minister Sitharaman gives the following remarks in parliament on the White Paper presented to the 18th Lok Sabha in January 2024, describing the dire condition of the Indian economy by 2013 with mismanagement and "big ticket" corruption. India's Finance Minister Sitharaman describes the situation in three key areas by 2013 that left the economy of India in a fragile state, with projects stalled, development delayed, and capital investment not taking place. She gives as 3 main points of focus- the state of affairs at Defense Ministry, at the Environment Ministry, and for Energy supplies. At the outset she says PM Modi had suggested the need for such White Paper by 2015 so that future generations would know what had happened in India that failed the country at a time when China had already joined the community of developed nations. The issues go back to the coal scandal when coal auctions had to be cancelled by the Supreme Court for irregularities, the misuse of state owned banks leading to a large increase in non performing loans, and the mismanaged Commonwealth Games under government before 2014.  Sitharaman told parliament this had the effect of national security being compromised, Environment as a Ministry becoming a bottleneck, and the leadership failing the country. In the military there was a critical shortage of ammunition and equipment. She cites the Defense Minister at the time having the attitude that independent India has had a policy for many years not to develop the border areas, as an undeveloped border was better than a developed border. She also says Ministry stated that 92% of the Defense Budget was used up and major acquisitions have to wait for the military. Following this Sitharaman cited the scandals of that period and leakages of funds that weakend the country and failed its people. She compared capital expenditures today of 6.22 lakh crores in 2024 thre times the number in 2013 of 2.53 crores. HAL now makes Tejas jets and helicopters in Made in India production. At the Environment Ministry the delays that were 86 days reached a high of 316 days by 2013 for approval of development projects, with 355 projects pending, the nation brought to a standstill with the effects of the coal supplies to thermal power plants being wholly inadequate and Coal India in poor shape. The root of this was said Sitharaman- what everyone in Indian business knew, the term "genteel facts," as the cost of business going up. She cites the changes since then of aiming for Balance and Development- Transparency, Online Green Clearance, Standardized Environment Impact Studies, A new Department of Climate change, International Solar Alliance 2015, Mission Life 2022, Green Hydrogen, Namami Gange, Rooftop Solar. India set ambitious goals at the last Climate change Conference.    ...

LyrArc Article Gist
China's breakneck growth was enabled by housing construction, and coal in a way that created problems of climate change. Now China's largest housing developers Evergrande and Country Garden together have a staggering $500 billion in debt and in serious financial trouble in or near default. How will China's government respond? It let Evergrande who had defaulted on debt payments build 300,000 apartments last year, just to protect home buyers. Now it's founder Mr. Xu is taken in for questioning and "illegal crimes." Making sure that the apartments on which people made deposits are built would cost another $72 billion, says Nomura. Yet suppliers, painters, builders and brokers are owed another $390 billion, in one estimate. And foreign creditors are getting together for complicated restructurings. Evergrande had entered wealth management promising 8 or 9% returns and has stopped making payments. All this is affecting public confidence in the future and China's growth story. For decades China depended on housing construction for high growth rates. Now the process is unwinding with both in financial difficulties. This NYT report says that after Evergrande's default, Country Garden failed to make a payment on $200 billion in debt last week and has 400,000 apartments that it sold but has not finished building. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Seantor Dan Sullivan and the WSJ say Alaska's economic potential and its standard of living was ignored with blanket blocking of any development of its resources. WSJ says under the Biden administration the state was turned into a nature museum.  WSJ says the state's leaders know that spoiling the environment would be mistake. Yet developing some of the state's resources would help the US in sourcing natural gas and rare earth minerals for renewable energy products. This would achieve a policy balance. One of the arguments North Dakota Governor Borghum and new US Interior Secretary makes is that China is building a coal plant every 2 weeks with 12 built in the first 6 months of 2024. As of July 2024 Statista shows China with 1161 coal plants operational, 6 times the 204 US coal plants and 4 times the 295 coal plants in India, 89 in Japan- and 90% of new coal power capacity added. This means climate change issues remain no matter what the US does. By using natural gas fired electricity the US gets transition time for the shift to renewables and can attack the cost of living, export to the EU.  ...

LyrArc Article Gist
With the 15% mandated cuts to energy use in the European Union countries and the shutoff of Russian gas supplies, three remaining German nuclear plants can be run for an extended period to take off some of the strain on the German economy. Sentiment for nuclear power is changing in Germany. A Spiegel opinion poll is cited in this WSJ editorial that shows 78% of Germans favor keeping the three remaining nuclear plants operating till summer 2023, and 67% say it is a good idea to keep them running for 5 years.  The issues of nuclear vs solar, or coal and gas vs solar is not a yes or no proposition anymore as shown in the negotiated measures to allow some coal and gas operations in the US in the Biden Climate Change bill that passed the US Senate on August 7, 2022. This is not merely a concession to a fossil fuel dependent state (West Virginia) and Senator Manchin, this is a realization that the transition can be better managed economically and the same results for renewable energy and climate change emissions goals can be met with a carefully planned  strategy that allows for LNG exports to Europe, and fossil fuel production flexibility in the face of the embargo on Russian fossil fuel supplies. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Greg Ip of the WSj points out that Britain is in a weaker position to tackle Brexit than it was when Boris Johnson called for supporting the Yes vote to Leave the EU three years ago in the referendum. Business investment is lower than France, Germany and even Italy. And today protectionism, nationalism, hostility to globalization mean that its not so easy to increase exports by signing free trade agreements with other nations. Even a treaty with a friendly Trump administration  is not certain as Mr. Trump favors looking at how he can get the best deal and reverse any advantages of other trading nations, Britain being no exception. A trade agreement with the U.S. could mean the U.S. barring Britain from signing one with China as a condition of Mr. Trump. Greg Ip also points out that it was precisely joining the EU that helped Britain catch up with German and French standards of living after a period of low growth, inflation, and balance of payments crises in the 1970's. Joining the European Economic Community was as prime minister Heath stated would " enable us to be more efficient and more competitive in gaining more markets not only in Europe but in the rest of the world."   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The European Union plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, based on 1990 levels. The 21 hour summit of EU leaders met in Brussels. It was a constant worry about climate proposals said Angela Merkel. After a 21 hour debate agreement was reached including overcoming concerns of coal dependent countries. Merkel says "it was worth a sleepless night."