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(Bloomberg) — It’s been a decade since unwise social media posts began destroying political candidates’ fledgling careers, but the evidence in Britain is that the lesson hasn’t yet been learned.Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s snap general election has …
November 13, 2019Read More
These lawmakers are poised to take center stage in televised impeachment hearings that begin Wednesday.
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(Bloomberg Opinion) — The International Energy Agency would like you to know it is not in the business of making predictions:The WEO [World Energy Outlook] analyses the choices that will shape our energy use, our environment and our wellbeing. It is not, and has never been, a forecast of where the energy world will end up.That the IEA feels the need to put that high in the foreword to its latest long-term energy outlook gets at the problem: To a large degree, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t prophesying. Because of the IEA’s stature and the fact that not many institutions have the inclination or funding to maintain detailed models of global energy supply and demand — plus our species’ preference to just reach for ready-made statistics — the World Energy Outlook tends to be treated as a reference work rather than a mere thinking aid. That isn’t the IEA’s fault; it’s just what happens.Hence, back in April, a group of investment funds, scientific institutions and think tanks wrote a letter to the IEA demanding the WEO more explicitly map out scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the rise in temperature associated with climate change (see this). The IEA has met them partway. The old central scenario called “New Policies” has been renamed “Stated Policies,” capturing the impact of policy makers’ plans rather than assumed improvements. The more ambitious “Sustainable Development Scenario,” or SDS, gets more weighting in this edition, while the “Current Policies Scenario” — the embrace-the-fires-and-floods scenario — gets demoted.The central criticism of the WEO is that it doesn’t make a scenario with a good chance of limiting the world’s temperature increase from pre-industrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) its central case. The secondary SDS, which the IEA characterizes as being in line with the Paris Agreement, comes much closer than the Stated Policies case. However, while it is consistent with modeled pathways that limit warming below 2 degrees Celsius, it still implies overshooting the 1.5 degree target. Avoiding that would mean getting to net-zero emissions by 2050, according to last year’s special report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The SDS instead effectively relies on the deployment of carbon sequestration beyond 2050 to correct the overshoot, with the IEA pointing out that many of the pathways surveyed by the IPCC do the same thing. As for getting to net-zero emissions by 2050 without relying on sequestration, the IEA’s language is skeptical, to say the least:The additional changes involved would pose challenges that would be very difficult and very expensive to surmount. This is not something that is within the power of the energy sector alone to deliver. It would be a task for society as a whole, and likely involve widespread behavioural changes.The IEA is correct: Getting to a net-zero energy system without sucking enormous quantities of carbon dioxide out of the air within the next 30 years is a gargantuan task. Given this, however, surely it would be worthwhile spelling that out in detail rather than condensing it into a qualitative statement?As I wrote here, we should reframe the way we think about dealing with climate change, away from pure “cost” toward a holistic view of investments and rewards — just as we do, in a flawed way, with our current energy systems. After all, the Stated Policies — and, especially, the Current Policies — scenarios would come with enormous costs of their own, in the form of a degraded environment. And both the IEA and the IPCC acknowledge that carbon sequestration technologies are, at scale, both unproven and potentially unsustainable in their own ways in terms of, for example, land requirements. Scenarios are, as the IEA reminds us up front, just that, so showing one that may seem unrealistic in a different way from the lack of realism informing our current path couldn’t hurt.It is tempting to view the WEO as a comfort blanket for fossil-fuel interests, but it would be shallow indeed for energy’s incumbents to see it that way. Yes, the Stated Policies Scenario foresees continued dominance by fossil fuels through 2040 at least. However, the SDS effectively upends the current, growth-driven economic model of the coal and oil businesses in the 2020s and does the same to the natural gas business in the 2030s. Investment in oil and gas production stalls almost immediately and then declines, kicking away the central pillar for a broad-based recovery from the crash.And this, after all, isn’t even the more drastic scenario demanded by the IEA’s critics. It shouldn’t be lost on today’s energy incumbents that the latest edition of the WEO represents a shift prompted by demands from a wide range of institutions, including those representing capital markets, to map out more-rapid pathways to slashing carbon emissions.Even if it leaves some unsatisfied, the very fact that this document, of all things, has become a battleground speaks to the urgency of dealing with climate change and the way in which that sense of urgency is spreading beyond the confines of think tanks and laboratories — with all the potential that holds for sudden, disruptive changes in policy. As a metaphor for where we’re at on dealing with climate change, an 800-odd-page report filled with tables populated by data nerds doesn’t seem the obvious choice, but I’ll take it.To contact the author of this story: Liam Denning at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Gongloff at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities. He previously was editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote for the Financial Times’ Lex column. He was also an investment banker.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 13, 2019Read More
Mr. Taylor was sent to Ukraine to provide stability at the embassy. He ended up fighting to preserve American security aid from administration appointees who saw it as a political bargaining chip.
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Read House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s prepared opening remarks below. In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire. Ea…
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The U.S. State Department says it’s “deeply concerned” by a new EU requirement for businesses to label products from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The statement came in response to Tuesday’s ruling by the EU Court of Justice that sett…
November 13, 2019Read More
Brasília (AFP) – Supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido exited the country’s embassy in Brazil on Wednesday, an official said, ending a standoff with rival backers of President Nicolas Maduro. An advisor to Guaido’s appointed ambassado…
November 13, 2019Read More
Justin Powell, a top candidate for Kentucky’s 2020 Mr. Basketball award, made his decision official on Wednesday. Here’s why he chose Auburn.
November 13, 2019Read More
The Broadway production of “A Christmas Carol,” following the lead from London, answers a strong yes. Other theaters may follow suit.
November 13, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Elon Musk’s announcement that Tesla Inc. will build a factory and a research center near Berlin makes perfect sense as a loud statement. Berlin isn’t known as a car city but it does have a vigorous tech scene and Tesla isn’t so much a car company as a tech one. But it’s also reasonable from other points of view.Musk, who has spent some time deciding on a European factory location, has decided on Gruenheide in Brandenburg, the German state that surrounds Berlin, and the research facility is to be located near Berlin’s yet-to-open new international airport.That the new factory should be in Germany is logical. Germany is Europe’s biggest market for electric vehicles and the one with the biggest potential. Germany is Europe’s most populous country, Germans are in love with cars and worried about the environment, as evidenced by the recent electoral successes of the Greens.It also matters that Germany is a country with some of Europe’s strongest incentives for electric car buyers. It recently decided to increase the maximum subsidy for buyers of battery vehicles to 6,000 euros ($6,600) from 4,000 euros and extend it until 2025. France, Italy and Slovenia offer roughly as much. One could regard Musk’s move as a cheeky foray into the land of its top competitors. Volkswagen AG has launched an all-out electrification strategy that pits it directly against Musk’s mass-market hope, the Model 3 (which apparently won’t be made at the new Berlin factory, at least to start with). In September, the German giant launched the ID.3, the first car on its new platform meant for electric vehicles. Berlin is flooded with electric Golfs that VW made available this year for WeShare, the company’s nascent car-sharing operation. And even before VW starts turning out tens of thousands of cars especially developed as EVs, the e-Golf is already among the Model 3’s strong competitors in Germany, along with Bayerische Motorenwerke AG’s somewhat clunkier i3 and some other European electric cars.But then, it makes sense to keep close to the competition, work with the same suppliers and be able to poach star managers, engineers and designers. Tesla isn’t the cheeky challenger here — the German automakers are, when it comes to EVs. Musk, in a sense, is buying insurance against being overtaken technologically. That could even justify the large differential in workers’ wages: While the average Tesla assembly worker at in California makes $18 per hour, the lowest-paid German auto worker makes about 27 euros per hour, almost $30. There’s also some symbolism to Tesla’s move into Berlin in particular. The capital city was the first German location for Ford, which started assembling Model T’s there in 1926, not fearing competition from German automakers who were slower to catch on to mass production. And yet Berlin and its surrounding area aren’t obvious locations for an auto industry operation. Though BMW makes motorcycles in Berlin, Daimler AG has production sites both in and outside the city and VW has a design center in Potsdam, most of Germany’s car production, engineering and design take place elsewhere. Instead, Berlin has a flourishing startup culture. According to Deutscher Startup Monitor, 16% of Germany’s startup companies are located in Berlin. Only the country’s most populous state, North Rhein-Westphalia, has a bigger share. And when it comes to the number of tech workers, Berlin has more of them per 100,000 residents than any German state except Hamburg and Hesse. Arguably, as a European tech hub the German capital ranks second only to London and possibly Paris. Musk said Brexit ruled out the U.K. as a potential site, and France has such restrictive labor laws that it’s difficult to imagine Tesla opening a 10,000-job operation there when there are other choices.“Berlin rocks,” Musk said as he announced Tesla’s plans.On the other hand, it could be argued that the heart of the automotive industry is shifting east, and it won’t be beating too far from Berlin in the near future. Zwickau in Saxony, three hours’ drive from the capital, is where VW has started production of the ID.3. Saxony is an emerging auto-industry hub that includes BMW and Porsche factories; IG Metall, the labor union that represents many auto workers, counts Saxony as part of the same area as Berlin and Brandenburg. In other words, Musk’s choice of Tesla’s next production and development site is a considered one, even if an impulse to take the battle to Tesla’s deep-pocketed German challengers on their home turf has played an obvious role.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 13, 2019Read More
Hundreds of objects from a collection of almost one million artifacts will go on public display for the first time when new galleries open this week.
November 13, 2019Read More
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