H5N1 EPIDEMIC
Bird flu spreads throughout Europe, other regions

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control reported the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has been found in poultry, wild birds and captive birds in 27 European Union countries and Britain. Photo by stux/Pixabay

Dec. 30 (UPI) -- German health officials said Thursday that Europe is experiencing a devastating avian bird flu outbreak affecting wild birds and poultry farms as humans continue to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Friedrich Loeffler Institute, Germany's Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, said cases have been found in Canada, across Europe and into India and East Asia.
"We are currently experiencing the strongest avian flu epidemic ever in Germany and Europe," the institute told Germany's news outlet DPA. "There is no end in sight -- the countries affected range from Finland to the Faroe Islands to Ireland, from Russia to Portugal."

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control reported on Dec. 22 that 867 cases of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus detections had been found in 27 European Union countries and Britain, which had been expanding since October.

RELATED China reports first human patient of H10N3 bird flu strain

"The observed persistence and continuous circulation of HPAI viruses in migratory and resident wild birds will continue to pose a risk for the poultry industry in Europe for the coming months," the report said. "The frequent occurrence of HPAI A(H5) incursions in commercial farms raises concern about the capacity of the applied biosecurity measures to prevent virus introduction."

In northern Israel, officials said 5,200 cranes have died of the H5N1 avian flu while hundreds of thousands of chickens had to be culled to stop it from spreading.

Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg said Sunday the H5N1 outbreak was "the most serious damage to wildlife in the history of the country," according to the Washington Post.

HINDU IMPERIALISM, RELIGIOUS HEGEMONY

India: Activists slam 'witch hunt' of foreign-funded NGOs

Rights groups say New Delhi's move to deny permission for a charity founded by Mother Teresa to receive foreign funding is an attempt to silence organizations critical of government policies.


Missionaries of Charity was founded in 1950 by Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who devoted most of her life to helping the poor in Kolkata city

The Indian government's recent decision to cut off foreign funding for a charity founded by Mother Teresa has drawn sharp criticism from NGOs and rights activists.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government refused permission to the Missionaries of Charity (MoC) under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) after it received some "adverse inputs," a statement issued by the Home Ministry said on December 25.

"While considering the MoC's renewal application, some adverse inputs were noticed," the ministry noted, without providing details.

The charity — founded in 1950 by the late Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who devoted most of her life to helping poor people in the eastern city of Kolkata — has more than 3,000 nuns worldwide who run hospices, community kitchens, schools, leper colonies and homes for abandoned children.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work and was later declared a saint.

The MoC, which runs shelter homes across India, received about $750 million (€660 million) from abroad in the 2020-21 financial year, according to The Hindu newspaper.
Activists criticize Modi's government

The MoC said in a statement that it had instructed its centers not to use any foreign currency account "until the matter is resolved."

The organization, however, rejected reports that its bank accounts had been frozen.

The government's move came just two weeks after police in Gujarat state began investigating the charity for "forceful conversion" of Hindus to Christianity.

Hard-line adherents of Hinduism, India's majority religion, often accuse the MoC and other Christian charities of engaging in religious conversions.

Activists say religious minorities in India have faced increased levels of discrimination and violence since Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014.

Modi's government rejects reports that officials have a radical "Hindutva" (Hindu hegemony) agenda and insists that people of all religions have equal rights.

"While FCRA permissions are largely denied to these organizations, other outfits that are aligned to the Hindu right wing are allowed to receive funds with little or no scrutiny," renowned criminal lawyer Rebecca John told DW.

"FCRA has now become weaponized to compel organizations and trusts which work in the NGO sector to close their foreign accounts and thereby minimize their work in India," John said.

Henri Tiphagne, executive director of People's Watch, called the government's actions "a complete witch hunt."

His organization's foreign funding was suspended in 2012, and he is still contesting the matter in the courts.
Many NGOs hit by restrictions

This is not the first time the Indian government has denied permission for an NGO to receive foreign funding.

In 2020, the rights group Amnesty International announced that it was halting operations in India, citing a "continuing crackdown" and "harassment" by PM Modi's government.

Amnesty's bank accounts had been frozen by India's Enforcement Directorate, a governmental investigative agency, forcing it to lay off its 150 staff members and stop campaign and research work.

Other organizations — including Sabrang India, Lawyers Collective and Navsarjan Trust — were also targeted under the FCRA.

These organizations criticized infrastructure and mining projects, sought justice for the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 and exposed violations against Dalit people. In response, they faced repeated questions about their work, threats of investigations and blocked foreign funding.

Groups such as Greenpeace India and the Ford Foundation have also been hit with restrictions.

With the bulk of the NGOs' funding cut, many have found it difficult operate and decided to shut shop.
'Extremely concerning'

Six months ago, authorities stopped the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a civil liberties group, from receiving foreign contributions.

People working for the organization say they were surprised by the decision as CHRI works with stakeholders in the government.

They challenged the move at the Delhi High Court and are awaiting its verdict.

"The National Human Rights Commission, state police and prison departments, and legal aid institutions recognize CHRI as a resource partner and expert in the domains of police and prison reform and transparency in governance," CHRI director Sanjoy Hazarika told DW.

"We are an acknowledged specialist in the field of right to information," Hazarika said.

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told DW that it's "extremely concerning" that authorities are targeting rights groups.

"It unfortunately indicates a lack of confidence when a proud democracy cannot tolerate either criticism or the ability of groups to address entrenched social inequity," she said.

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru

In Kashmir, closed mosque raises questions about India's religious freedom

December 16, 2021
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kashmir's Jamia Masjid, or the grand mosque is seen through its gate that remains locked on Fridays in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir.

Mukhtar Khan/AP

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Jamia Masjid, the grand mosque of Srinagar, dominates its neighborhood with an imposing main gate and massive turrets. It can hold 33,000 worshippers, and on special occasions over the years hundreds of thousands of Muslims have filled nearby lanes and roads to offer prayers led from the mosque.

But Indian authorities see the mosque as a trouble spot — a nerve center for protests and clashes that challenge India's sovereignty over the disputed Kashmir region.

For Kashmiri Muslims it is a sacred venue for Friday prayers and a place they can raise their voices for political rights.

In this bitter dispute, the mosque in Kashmir's main city has largely remained closed for the past two years. The mosque's chief priest has been detained in his home almost nonstop throughout that time, and the mosque's main gate is padlocked and blocked with corrugated tin sheets on Fridays.

The closure of the mosque, which is revered by Kashmir's mostly Muslim population, has deepened their anger.

"There is a constant feeling that something is missing in my life," said Bashir Ahmed, 65, a retired government employee who has offered prayers at the mosque over five decades.

Indian authorities refused to comment on the mosque restrictions despite repeated queries from The Associated Press. In the past, officials have said the government was forced to close the mosque because its management committee was unable to stop anti-India protests on the premises.

The shutting of the 600-year-old mosque came amid a clampdown that began in 2019 after the government stripped Kashmir of its long-held semiautonomous status.

ASIA
Kashmir Internet Restrictions Impede Fight Against Coronavirus

In the past two years, some of the region's other mosques and shrines — also closed for months due to the security crackdown and the subsequent pandemic — have been allowed to offer religious services.

Jamia Masjid has remained out of bounds to worshippers for prayers on Friday – the main day of congregational worship in Islam. Authorities allow the mosque to remain open the other six days, but only a few hundred worshippers assemble there on those occasions, compared to the tens of thousands that often gathered on Fridays.

"This is the central mosque where our ancestors, scholars and spiritual masters have prayed and meditated for centuries," said Altaf Ahmad Bhat, one of the officials at the grand mosque.

He dismissed the law-and-order reasons cited by the authorities as "absurd," adding that discussions about social, economic and political issues affecting Muslims were a core religious function of any grand mosque.

The grand mosque is mainly reserved for mandatory Friday congregational prayers and special services. Obligatory daily prayers are usually held in smaller neighborhood mosques.

For the region's Muslims, the mosque's closure brings painful memories of the past. In 1819, Sikh rulers closed it for 21 years. Over the past 15 years, it has been subject to periodic bans and lockdowns by successive Indian governments.

But the current restrictions are the most severe since the region was divided between India and Pakistan after the two nations gained independence from British colonialism in 1947. Both claim the Himalayan territory in its entirety.

The Indian government initially grappled with largely peaceful public protests seeking a united Kashmir, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent entity. But a crackdown on dissent led to Kashmir's eruption into an armed rebellion against India in 1989. India has depicted the insurgency as Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, a charge Pakistan has denied.

Indian forces largely crushed the rebellion about 10 years ago, though popular demands for "Azadi," or freedom, remained ingrained in the Kashmiri psyche.

The region made a transition from the armed struggle to unarmed uprisings, with tens of thousands of civilians repeatedly taking to the streets to protest Indian rule, often leading to deadly clashes between stone-throwing residents and Indian troops. The grand mosque and its surrounding areas in Srinagar's heart emerged as central to these protests.

Sermons at the Jamia Masjid would often address the long-simmering conflict, with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chief priest and one of the region's top separatist leaders, giving fiery speeches highlighting Kashmir's political struggle.

Authorities often clamped down, banning prayers at the mosque for extended periods. According to official data, the mosque was closed for at least 250 days in 2008, 2010 and 2016 combined.

The armed conflict again intensified after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 and won a landslide re-election in 2019. Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government toughened its stance both against Pakistan and Kashmiri separatists amid rising attacks by Hindu hard-liners against minorities in India, further deepening frustrations among Kashmir's Muslims.

Soon a new wave of rebels revived Kashmir's militancy and challenged India's rule with guns and effective use of social media. India responded with sometimes deadly counterinsurgency operations.

Freedom of religion is enshrined in India's constitution, allowing citizens to follow and freely practice religion. The constitution also says the state will not "discriminate, patronize or meddle in the profession of any religion."

But even before the current security operation in Kashmir, experts say conditions for India's Muslims under Modi have worsened.

In Kashmir, the clampdown on the most revered mosque has aggravated these fears.

"Jamia Masjid represents the soul of Kashmiri Muslims' faith and has remained at the center of demands for social and political rights since its foundation some six centuries back," said Zareef Ahmed Zareef, a poet and an oral historian. "Its closure is an attack on our faith."

On special occasions like the last Friday in the fasting month of Ramadan, hundreds of thousands of faithful pray in the mosque, filling its neighborhood's winding lanes and roads.

For the last two years, such scenes have remained missing. Muslims say the gag is undermining their constitutional right to religious freedom.

Ahmed, the worshipper, on a recent Saturday afternoon sat inside the mosque, a wood and brick architectural marvel with 378 wooden pillars. He said he has never seen the mosque shut and desolate for such an extended period.

"I feel deprived and violated," Ahmed said as he raised his hands in supplication. "We have been subjected to extreme spiritual suffering."

Many Kashmiri Muslims have long said New Delhi curbs their religious freedom on the pretext of law and order while promoting and patronizing the annual Hindu pilgrimage to an icy Himalayan cave visited by hundreds of thousands of Hindus from across India.

The Amarnath pilgrimage lasts for nearly two months, although it was canceled for the last two years due to the pandemic.

On a recent Friday, as the mosque remained closed, its sprawling marketplace, an otherwise vibrant and bustling neighborhood, wore a deserted look.

Babull, a mentally challenged man in his 40s who inhabits the place in and around the grand mosque, whirled around the neighborhood. He cautioned shopkeepers of imminent danger from police raiding the place, as they have done in the past.

Nearby, a gaggle of Indian tourists went about clicking selfies in the backdrop of the mosque's barricaded and locked main gate.

Kashmiri onlookers watched them in silence.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Libor Banks Subject to U.S. Conspiracy Jurisdiction, Court Says

Bob Van Voris
Thu, December 30, 2021



(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., UBS Group AG and other global banks are subject to U.S. jurisdiction for allegedly manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, the federal appeals court in New York ruled.

A three-judge panel ruled Thursday that U.S. courts can exercise “conspiracy jurisdiction” over the banks if other members of the conspiracy took steps to advance the scheme from within the U.S. The appeals court reversed a 2016 ruling by U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, who dismissed claims on the ground that her court lacked jurisdiction over the bank defendants.

Buchwald is overseeing a multidistrict litigation that includes dozens of antitrust suits by institutional investors, including municipalities and public pension funds, alleging Libor manipulation. Though many of the 16 defendant banks are headquartered in the U.S., they participated in setting Libor routes through their membership on a panel of the British Bankers’ Association.

But the appeals court pointed to evidence that senior executives based in the U.S. directed employees involved in alleged Libor manipulation. The judges cited an email in which a New York-based JPMorgan Chase executive allegedly told the bank’s Libor submitter to “err on the low side” when setting the rate and stressed the importance of staying in “the pack.”

In another email cited by the appeals court, a U.S.‐based employee of Citibank allegedly told the bank’s Libor submitter that “we should take a leadership [role] in bringing these Libors back to more sensible levels.”

“Plaintiffs have alleged overt acts taken in the United States to advance the suppression conspiracy; at this stage of the litigation, that is enough to establish personal jurisdiction,” U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Sullivan wrote on behalf of the three judges.

The jurisdiction decision is a win for plaintiffs, but the appeals court ruled against the investors in upholding Judge Buchwald’s decision that Charles Schwab Corp. and a group of bondholders who purchased Libor-related bonds from third parties lacked the legal standing to pursue antitrust claims against the banks.

The case is In re LIBOR-Based Fin. Instruments Antitrust Litig., 17-1569, Second U.S. Court of Appeals (Manhattan).

Explainer-The Libor era nears its end

John McCrank and Karen Brettell
Tue., December 28, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Views of the City of London Financial District, Britain

By John McCrank and Karen Brettell

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, will no longer be used for new derivatives and loans as of Jan. 1. The benchmark and reference rate, which had $265 trillion linked to it globally at the start of 2021, is being scrapped in the biggest shake-up to markets since the introduction of the euro in 1999.

WHAT IS LIBOR AND WHY IS IT BEING REPLACED?

Libor, once dubbed the world's most important number, is a rate based on quotes from banks on how much it would cost to borrow short-term funds from one another. Although it dates to 1969, it was formalized in 1986 and has been used as a reference rate for a vast array of financial products, including student loans, credit cards, corporate loans and mortgages.

Libor was discredited after the 2008 financial crisis when authorities found traders had manipulated it, prompting calls to reform and eventually replace the tarnished rate. Several global banks were fined.

WHAT IS REPLACING LIBOR?

Regulators have said no new business can be done after Dec. 31 using Libor, which has 35 permutations across five currencies, the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the euro, Swiss franc and Japanese yen. Some Libor tenors - the length of time remaining before a contract expires - linked to the U.S. dollar, however, will continue until the end of June 2023 to allow most "legacy" or outstanding contracts to mature.

Libor is being replaced by alternative rates, with a preference toward those recommended by central banks that are based on actual transactions, making them harder to rig. [L1N2TC0XL]

WHAT ARE THE RISKS GOING FORWARD?

The vast majority of Libor tenors will not be published after Jan. 1. But a few U.S.-dollar tenors will continue through June 2023, which could create legal problems for companies with debt still tied to the rate, analysts said.

To help minimize disruptions, New York state passed a law allowing "tough legacy" contracts - those that expire after June 2023 and do not have fallback language specifying an alternative rate and thus cannot be amended - to use the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, recommended by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Congress is working on a similar bill.

In the UK, regulators also said six sterling and yen Libor rates will continue in "synthetic" form - the Bank of England's Sterling Overnight Index Average, or SONIA, combined with a fixed spread - for a year, giving market participants more time to shift to alternative rates for existing contracts.

LIBOR LIQUIDITY

Much of the U.S. dollar derivatives market has already shifted to SOFR. Relatively large exposures based on Libor remain, however, in the Eurodollar space, for short-term contracts used to speculate or hedge against interest rate moves. (For a graphic on CME SOFR futures volumes

Liquidity in these contracts is expected to dwindle, which will likely make it harder for investors to hedge existing Libor-based exposures. Investors will also need to adjust to using alternative instruments when making bets on future rate moves.

LOAN PRICING CHALLENGES

The shift to SOFR from Libor also brings pricing challenges for borrowers and loan issuers, who prefer exposure to credit benchmarks that will adjust to shifts in credit market conditions.

SOFR is based on the U.S. repurchase agreement market, which has no credit risk and may fall during times of stress. Libor, by contrast, measures bank borrowing costs and rises during periods of stress.

Lenders are adapting by pricing loans with a spread to SOFR. However, there are risks that this spread could underprice risks if there are unexpected periods of credit stress.

(Reporting by John McCrank and Karen Brettell; Editing by Dan Grebler)



The plumbing of the world's financial system has been replaced — and almost nobody noticed



Felix Salmon
Tue, December 28, 2021

Banks and regulators around the world have managed to replace the plumbing of the entire financial system, even as almost nobody has noticed.

Driving the news: As of Monday, Libor — the interest rate that once underpinned some $300 trillion in financial contracts from derivatives to corporate credit lines — will effectively be dead.

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Why it matters: The easily-manipulable Libor was at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the history of finance, which came to light back in 2012.

Banks racked up some $9 billion in fines and a number of traders received prison sentences.

Libor has now been replaced with much more solid and reliable benchmarks.

How it works: Banks make money from lending money out at a higher interest rate than their own cost of funds. Libor was supposed to be a measure of banks' cost of funds, so if a bank priced a loan at, say, 1 percentage point over Libor, then it knew its profit margin would be 1 percentage point.

Trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives were traded based off Libor, which meant that if traders could — illegally— push it up or down by even a few hundredths of a percentage point, they could make enormous sums of money.

Because Libor was generated by surveying banks and asking them what their interbank lending rates were, it was easy for the banks to lie in the direction that would make their traders the most money.

Where it stands: Libor is being replaced by a suite of new products — Sonia for British pounds, Tona for Japanese yen, Saron for Swiss francs, and so on.

The U.S. dollar is the only currency that will still continue to publish an official Libor rate, but even that will only be used for legacy loan products. All new loans will have to be priced off something else. A long-standing but less famous benchmark called SOFR, which is published by the New York Fed, is the leading replacement.

Between the lines: Switching over from Libor to the new benchmarks was a massive undertaking. The world's financial markets couldn't just shut down for planned maintenance and come back refreshed on Monday morning.

Instead, deeply embedded infrastructure needed to be replaced while it was still being used intensively.

Even the Federal Reserve, which led the charge to end Libor in the U.S., ended up using the old benchmark for its pandemic-era Main Street Lending Program.

The bottom line: The Libor days are over. It's a testament to hard work at thousands of companies — exacerbated greatly by the pandemic — that nothing broke during the transition.

GM heralded this plant as a model for its electric car future. Then its batteries started exploding.





LONG READ

Faiz Siddiqui
Thu, December 30, 2021

ORION TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Before General Motors recalled the entire fleet of its most popular electric car because of fire dangers, before her factory was stilled, assembly line worker Carol McConkey stood in the middle of a teeming factory floor and marveled at how seamlessly the Chevrolet Bolt is manufactured.

The nine-year GM employee ducked under a car frame on an orange vehicle carrier, swung a mechanical arm out and drove five bolts into a nearly 1,000-pound battery pack with roughly the footprint of a bathtub.

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"It does a lot of it by itself," she said, describing the automation-heavy process at a GM plant that has gone from building gasoline-powered cars to making electric vehicles - the first such GM plant, which was soon followed by a second, a 30-minute drive down Interstate 75. "To me, it's just a battery we plug in."

But there is no mistaking its significance. "It's the heart of the car," McConkey said one day this summer.

Little did she know that soon, the same section of the car she works on would garner worldwide attention for another reason: exploding lithium-ion batteries. She and hundreds of other workers were sent home to wait out an extended assembly line closure.

The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable - a technical fait accompli - significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future.

"It's a terrible thing that has happened," Tim Grewe, GM's general director for electrification strategy and cell engineering, said in an interview in September.

It's the kind of disruption GM can ill afford as it aims to scale up its production of electric vehicles to 1 million units per year by 2025. The company wants to have a global lineup of 30 EVs by that year. And it plans to shift production away from gasoline-powered cars entirely in the next decade and a half.

Carmakers including Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and Ford also have announced plans to go all or mostly electric - chasing ambitions similar to GM's deadline of 2035.

Today, electric cars - plug-in hybrids, battery-powered vehicles and hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles - make up less than 5% of U.S. new vehicle sales. But policymakers and automakers hope that by 2030, EVs will make up at least 40% of U.S. new car sales. That would be a critical development in the nation's strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced stricter fuel-efficiency standards this month aimed at propelling the nation closer to that goal by 2026, estimating that the new standard will result in electric vehicles gaining around one-fifth of market share by then.

But first, automakers have to show they can manufacture safe and reliable cars - at scale.

"I don't want to minimize this point, but it also lets us build confidence that we're going to be transparent, we're going to take action," Grewe said.

- - -

Late this summer, Chevy Bolt owners received a notice from GM: They were not to park their cars within 50 feet of other vehicles. They shouldn't charge their cars overnight. Fully charged vehicles, GM said, should not be kept in garages.

The recall of the Bolt covered all of the roughly 141,000 units GM had ever built. The company identified the issue as dual defects that led battery materials to make contact with one another and the components to combust spontaneously.

It's a danger that comes directly from the core challenge of creating electric-vehicle batteries: the competition to pack more and more energy into them.

Car buyers want their electric cars to mirror the convenience of gasoline-powered vehicles, with around 400 miles of range so they can minimize visits to charging stations or plug-ins at home - even if long road trips represent only a sliver of their driving.

That has carmakers in a 21st-century space race to pack as much energy density as possible into their battery cells, maximizing range and performance.

Even as automakers seek to phase out gasoline engines en masse, high-voltage car batteries remain in their early stages of mass production. Many manufacturers are experimenting with new technologies and battery chemistries. While they do so, they are discovering defects - some of which can prove catastrophic.

Late in 2020, a Tesla Model S fire in a San Francisco Bay area residential garage blew the metal garage doors off and spread from one Tesla to another, causing more than $1 million of damage. Instances of fire with no apparent external cause have been documented in at least five Tesla Model S vehicles.

Electric-car-battery explosions can release massive amounts of energy - and the fires can burn for hours, stretching longer and registering hotter than fires in cars with internal-combustion engines.

"Battery fires can take up to 24 hours to extinguish," according to an emergency response guide for the Model S on Tesla's website. "Consider allowing the battery to burn while protecting exposures."

GM's recall, despite its scale and significance to the company, arose from a dozen isolated instances of fire with no external cause. It was a worst-case scenario for the company, which has partnered with an experienced battery maker, South Korea-based LG, to power its electric fleet. GM says LG has instituted new controls to ensure the fiasco doesn't happen again. LG, which has made batteries for the Bolt's entire run, is reimbursing GM for nearly $2 billion of costs associated with the recall.

Electric-vehicle fires can erupt from an electrical short within a single cell - a cylinder or a pouch that stores energy to be consumed by the car. A car's battery pack consists of hundreds or even thousands of cells, which might look to the untrained eye like AA batteries or laptop batteries. The cells carry a charge because of interactions between the highly reactive materials inside them.

Inside the cell, there are three main components: the cathode, or positively charged electrode that stores lithium; the anode, or negatively charged electrode that stores lithium; and a highly flammable electrolyte, which helps lithium ions travel through the cell. As the lithium ions go from one side to another, through charging or discharging, electrons are released to an external circuit, powering the car.

In the middle of the cell, a porous physical separator "acts as an electrical barrier," allowing the "selective transport" of lithium ions and preventing the anode and cathode from touching, said Jeff Sakamoto, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. When those components make contact, the consequences can be extreme.

"Both surfaces are electrically conductive," Sakamoto said. If they physically touch, "then they short-circuit."

When that happens, it is cause for concern but isn't yet a catastrophe.

In the densely packed cell, a short-circuit leads to the release of heat. A large release of heat from a cell can ignite another, and the combined heat can ignite others in a chain reaction known as "thermal runaway."

In GM's case, "cooling pillows" surround the pouch-shaped cells to prevent too much heat from being released between them. But they're not meant to fend against thermal events so far outside of normal operating conditions.

"If there's enough heat it creates, it starts to boil the electrolyte," Sakamoto said, adding that a puncture in the seal can lead to ignition. "So now you have a recipe for combustion when you have heat, you have a combustible liquid and then some kind of puncture to the cell or packaging - now you have exposure to the air, oxygen."

GM says there were two defects in Chevy Bolt batteries, which probably aided the spread of heat and the sudden release of energy: a torn anode tab and a folded separator. Essentially there was no longer a reliable barrier preventing the cathode and anode materials from interacting.

"The battery explodes," Sakamoto said. "The adjacent cells explode, too."

GM has been hit hardest by fire concerns - but Audi and Hyundai also have recalled EVs over fire risks.

As GM addresses the issues with the Bolt, it has shut down the factory here. And the future of the Bolt, the first realization of GM's vision for the coming decade, has been thrust into uncertainty.

- - -

Before they are able to install the batteries, GM, Tesla and their battery suppliers have to solve another challenging task: obtaining the raw materials to make them.

It's a problem likely to grow even harder in the years to come.

The raw materials used in electric cars are heavily concentrated in only a few regions of the world.

According to an International Energy Agency report, a conventional car uses around 75 pounds of two minerals - copper and manganese. By comparison, an electric car uses more than 440 pounds of minerals, including cobalt, lithium, nickel and graphite.

The report noted that around 70% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and around 60% of rare earth elements, needed for EV motors, are sourced in China. The majority of lithium - the core ingredient in batteries - is obtained in Australia, China and Chile, but China controls most of the world's supply of lithium via its refining businesses. Getting new mines online can take 15 years or longer.

"One of the constraints on the success and pace in the electric-vehicle business will be the supply chain - the development of raw materials and supplies," said Keith Phillips, president of Piedmont Lithium, which previously struck a deal with Tesla to produce certain battery materials in North Carolina. "I think the fundamental view . . . is that it won't be very hard for them to sell electric vehicles, but it might be very challenging for them to make the electric vehicles."

As companies push 2025 and 2030 deadlines to shift much of their production to electric cars, he said, "There's a very low likelihood the world can supply enough lithium to make that happen."

GM acknowledges the challenge.

"Categorically, you're making all of this huge investment in the material supply," Grewe said. "Let's say we hit 2035: You've got to convert all that investment" into usable material for the battery.

The U.S. government says the market for batteries is expected to grow by five to 10 times over the next decade. Some estimates say the amount of lithium produced must quadruple by 2030 to meet the demand.

"China is the largest global EV market and dominates the supply chain for the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries, including the processing of minerals and raw materials," says a federal report issued in June. "China relies on massive incentives to support domestic EV manufacturing, retail-level subsidies to create demand for domestic products, and a battery certification program to limit market access for foreign products."

Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn said on the company's recent earnings call that the appetite for electric vehicles has grown significantly, creating short-term bottlenecks.

"There appears to just be quite a profound awakening of the desirability for electric vehicles," he said. "And, I mean, to be totally frank, it's caught us a little bit off guard."

Kirkhorn said Tesla has seen a rise in prices for raw battery materials such as cobalt and nickel. The company is weathering the increases through a combination of existing contracts and cost controls, he said, but he expects more cost increases "outside of our control."

As automakers seek breakthroughs that could power an electric future, lithium-ion might not win out.

Sakamoto, the University of Michigan professor - who also is the chief technology officer for the solid-state battery company Zakuro - said he thinks incremental improvements in lithium-ion technology will plateau. Solid-state batteries have solid electrolytes that are not combustible, maximizing capacity and significantly reducing the fire risk.

That would address a core concern: the ability to make larger and larger battery packs with more energy density without compromising vehicle performance by adding weight. But many companies, including GM, are in the early stages of exploring solid-state, and it will take significant time for the technology to reach parity with lithium-ion.

"Two things: It's the simultaneous improvement in performance and improvement in safety," Sakamoto said. "If one can make a battery that has those two criteria satisfied, then one can supplant lithium-ion."

- - -

The plant here in Orion Township is a testament to GM's electric future - and to the things that can go wrong. Ever since the closure, which took place in August, there has been hope that the plant will fully reopen; GM now says it will be closed through February. The company said it has decommissioned old equipment for internal-combustion engines at the plant, rendering the facility capable only of making electric and autonomous vehicles.

"GM is in the initial stages of considering the business case for a potential future investment at several locations, including the Orion Township area," GM manufacturing spokesman Tom Wickham said. "We are not going to speculate or disclose the details of the projects under consideration."

The energy of the factory floor this summer, before the shutdown, suggested a recognition that EVs were coming but an unease about what it might mean for workers.

Near the battery installation area, Joel Newsom, team leader of a chassis "marriage line," bonded a Bolt together with four bolts.

In his free time, Newsom likes to race trucks, specifically his Chevrolet Colorado with a "big block," shorthand for a type of larger displacement engine. He has few qualms about GM's strategy.

"GM is preaching the future for us; we can't always base it on fossil fuels," he said.

But he's not so certain he'd partake.

"For me, it doesn't fit for what my family does," he said. "If I lived in the city and I didn't have far to go and I can just plug it in, it would work out good for me. For a daily driver just to drive around, it wouldn't be terrible."

With the Orion plant, GM believes it has proved that the shift to electric vehicles is possible. It can take an existing workforce and train it on new skills while making use of millions of square feet of repurposed factory space and much of its existing machinery to build cars the way it always has.

The plant's hourly employees - usually more than 1,000 when the facility is fully staffed - have been laid off temporarily, GM said. Those workers are receiving benefits in accordance with their union-negotiated contracts. That means they are receiving unemployment and supplemental pay translating to about 75 to 80% of their usual pay, according to GM, figures first reported by the Detroit Free Press.

While the plant shutdown continues through February, the longer-term question for workers is how many will be needed for GM's shift to electric vehicles. Union leaders expressed confidence that the shift won't mean fewer jobs, at least at GM - but acknowledged the challenge for the industry.

"There's less physical parts that have to be manufactured to go into this vehicle," said David Michael, United Auto Workers' spokesman for the plant's UAW chapter, Local 5960. "If you take away a muffler and a catalytic converter and all the things, what do you replace it with? We know technology is getting smaller, more compact and it's less than it used to be."

"The traditional labor concern is always fewer jobs: fewer American jobs because a lot of our parts come from many places around the globe," he added.

At the end of the line this summer, where gasoline-powered cars once roared to life, Kim Fuhr stood with an electric-vehicle charger in hand.

Fuhr doesn't have to handle gasoline or deal with the exhaust fumes that preceded her work on the Bolt.

She plugs the charging cable into the car for 30 seconds, gives herself five seconds to remove it, and ensures the car has 21% of its possible juice. It's a highly repetitive process that might happen 262 times over the course of a nine-hour shift, that day's production output.

"I'm in [a] retirement home now," joked Fuhr, a nearly 25-year veteran of General Motors.

Apple puts Foxconn India plant on probation after protests over food and accommodation conditions

Manish Singh
Wed, December 29, 2021


Apple has put the southern India factory of Foxconn on probation following protests from workers over subpar food and accommodation conditions, a concern both the firms acknowledged and pledged to address.

The iPhone maker didn’t say how long the probation will last, but an Apple spokesperson in India told TechCrunch that the firm “will ensure our strict standards are met before the facility reopens.”

Foxconn's factory in the state of Tamil Nadu employs about 17,000 people. Protests erupted in the factory last week after hundreds of women who work at the plant and live in one of the hostels had to be treated for food poisoning and more than 100 were hospitalized, according to earlier local media reports.

The state government also intervened, and had asked Foxconn to review services provided to the workers.

Apple said it dispatched independent auditors to assess the situation after concerns about food safety and accommodation conditions were raised.

“We found that some of the remote dormitory accommodations and dining rooms being used for employees do not meet our requirements and we are working with the supplier to ensure a comprehensive set of corrective actions are rapidly implemented,” the spokesperson said.

Foxconn said it is investigating the recent issues and has found that "some offsite dormitory facilities do not meet the required standards." A spokesperson told TechCrunch: "We are very sorry for the issue our employees experienced and are taking immediate steps to enhance the facilities and services we provide at the remote dormitory accommodations.”

The Taiwanese giant, a key assembly partner for Apple, said it is also restructuring its local management team and management systems "to ensure we can achieve and maintain the high standards that are needed."

"All employees will continue to be paid while we make the necessary improvements before restarting our operations and we will continue to provide support for our employees as they return to work," the spokesperson added.

This isn’t the first time Apple, which has expanded its local manufacturing efforts in India in recent years, has had to grapple with an issue of this kind in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. Last year, it placed Wistron, another key assembly partner, on probation following worker riots over poor working conditions and unpaid wages.

Senator Warren urges crackdown on Wall Street over climate change

“The volume of greenhouse gas emitted by the financial-services industry is outrageous,” the US Senator said in a tweet.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, cited a study by the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress, which showed that eight of the biggest US banks and 10 of its largest asset managers combined, finance about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions [Bloomberg]

By Kasia Klimasinska

Bloomberg

Published On 27 Dec 2021

Senator Elizabeth Warren accused the financial services industry of being a major contributor to climate change and urged U.S. regulators to hold it to account.

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, cited a study by the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress, which shows that eight of the biggest U.S. banks and 10 of its largest asset managers combined finance about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s about 1% less than what Russia produced.

“The volume of greenhouse gas emitted by the financial-services industry is outrageous,” she said in a tweet. “If it were a country it would rank as the fifth-largest emitter in the world.”

“Regulators,” she added, “need to crack down.”

As part of the Biden administration’s effort to confront climate change, the Securities and Exchange Commission is planning to propose rules that will require corporations to publicly disclose their climate risks.

Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry mean that deadly wildfires, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods and other extreme weather events will only become worse, and “efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly,” according to the report.

The report’s authors urged the Biden administration to take several steps, including implementing stress tests to gauge banks’ potential losses from climate change.

Warren Buffett Refuses Bernie Sanders Request to Intervene in Labor Dispute

(Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett is not going to get involved in labor disputes of any company he owns, despite a request from Senator Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont independent asked Buffett to support a group in a labor strike within Precision Castparts Corp., a company Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. purchased in 2016 that makes equipment for aerospace and energy industries.

“I am personally requesting that you intervene in the negotiations between Steelworkers Local 40 and Precision Castparts to make sure that the workers are treated with dignity and respect and receive a fair contract that rewards the hard work and sacrifices they have made,” Sanders wrote to Buffett in a letter dated Dec. 28.

Buffett responded saying Berkshire’s companies deal with their labor and personnel decisions individually, enclosing a copy of the company’s 10-K explaining its operating businesses are managed on an “unusually decentralized basis.”

“I’m passing along your letter to the CEO of Precision Castparts but making no recommendation to him as to any action. He is responsible for his business,” Buffett, who is worth about $109 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, wrote back to Sanders.

U.S. board impounds ballots in union-removal vote at Exxon refinery


FILE PHOTO: An Exxon gas station is seen in Houston

Wed, December 29, 2021
By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) -The U.S. National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday impounded ballots that will decide whether the United Steelworkers (USW) continues to represent workers at an Exxon Mobil oil refinery in southeast Texas.

The NLRB said it sequestered the ballots while it reviews unfair labor practice complaints filed by the union representing workers at Exxon's Beaumont, Texas, complex. The USW alleged that a worker lockout, after contract talks failed to produce a new agreement, was an attempt to break the union and that Exxon improperly aided a union-removal campaign.

It may be several weeks "before we have the results or know what the next steps are," NLRB spokeswoman Kayla Blado told Reuters.

Exxon expects the allegations will be dismissed once the investigation is completed, said company spokesperson Julie King. "Exxon Mobil remains confident that it has acted in accordance with the law at all times."

The union charges "not only prevented our employees' voice from being heard but also denied them an opportunity to end the lockout," she said.

USW International Representative Bryan Gross said the union has provided the NLRB with information and affidavits to support its stance. "We hope this lets the company know they need to get back to the bargaining table," Gross said.

Exxon locked out union members from the 2,700-acre refinery and lubricant oil packaging plant on May 1. The facility produces fuels and Mobil 1 motor oil, and has continued to run with managers and replacement workers.

The eight-month-long lockout will end if union-represented workers sign a petition to remove USW local 13-243 or accept the company's last contract offer, Exxon said. Union members rejected the contract offer in October.

The refinery has continued to operate with managers and supervisors from around the nation at its controls. Exxon has said the 369,024 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery is operating at maximum capacity.

Ousting the union would require a 50%-plus-one share of votes cast.

Exxon proposed a contract with terms it said would allow the plant to be competitive in low-margin environments. The union has said it wants to keep provisions that give workers a say in job assignments.

Negotiators have agreed to some parts of a possible contract, including a six-year term and pay increases that would match those to be set by national USW contract talks that begin in January.

Workers were locked out at Beaumont because of a strike notice issued by Local 13-243 that could not allow for safe, continuous operations, Exxon has said.

The union said Exxon was preparing to lock out workers before the strike notice, pointing to portable housing for replacement workers installed inside the Beaumont complex in the weeks prior to the lockout.

During the lockout, the number of workers at the refinery represented by the USW has dwindled from 650 to about 580, as workers took jobs at other refineries or chemical plants in the region, people familiar with plant operations said.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Chris Reese and Richard Chang)

U.S. can get to 100% clean energy with wind, water, solar and zero nuclear, Stanford professor says

WED, DEC 22 2021
Catherine Clifford@IN/CATCLIFFORD/@CATCLIFFORD

KEY POINTS

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson sees a way for the U.S. to meet its energy demands by 2050 with 100% wind, water and solar.

His models use no fossil fuels, carbon capture, direct air capture, bioenergy, blue hydrogen or nuclear power.

Jacobson’s roadmap is different from many clean-energy proposals, which advocate using all technologies possible.


LADWPs Pine Tree Wind Farm and Solar Power Plant in the Tehachapi Mountains Tehachapi Mountains on Tuesday, March 23, 2021 in Kern County, CA.
Irfan Khan | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images


A prominent Stanford University professor has outlined a roadmap for the United States to meet its total energy needs using 100% wind, water and solar by 2050.

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, has been promoting the idea of all renewable energy as the best way forward for more than a decade. His latest calculations toward this ambitious goal were recently published in the scientific journal Renewable Energy.


Transitioning to a clean-energy grid should happen by 2035, the study advises, with at least 80% of that adjustment completed by 2030. For the purposes of Jacobson’s study, his team factored in presumed population growth and efficiency improvements in energy to envision what that would look like in 2050.

Jacobson first published a roadmap of renewable energy for all 50 states in 2015.

This recent update of that 2015 work has a couple of notable improvements.

First, Jacobson and his colleagues had access to more granular data for how much heat will be needed in buildings in every state for the coming two years in 30-second increments. “Before we didn’t have that type of data available,” Jacobson told CNBC.

Also, the updated data makes use of battery storage while the first set of calculations he did relied on adding turbines to hydropower plants to meet peak demand, an assumption that turned out to be impractical and without political support for that technology, Jacobson said.

Reliability of four-hour batteries

In the analysis, Jacobson and his team used battery-storage technology to compensate for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind power generation — those times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

The Achilles’ heel of a completely renewable grid, many argue, is that it is not stable enough to be reliable. Blackouts have become a particular concern, notably in Texas this year and during the summer of 2020 in California.

That’s where four-hour batteries come in as a way to generate grid stability. “I discovered this all just because I have batteries in my own home,” Jacobson told CNBC. “And I figured, oh, my God, this is so basic. So obvious. I can’t believe nobody has figured this out.”

Mark Jacobson’s garage where his four batteries are located. 

Two cars are currently charging, too.
Photo courtesy Mark Jacobson

Jacobson said that he observed his batteries stayed charged if they weren’t plugged in when they are off.

To get more than four hours of charge, multiple four-hour batteries can be stacked to discharge sequentially. If a battery needs more charge output at one time than the battery can provide, then the batteries need to be used simultaneously, Jacobson told CNBC.

With this observation, Jacobson and his colleagues at Stanford produced scenarios showing it is possible to transition to a fully renewable system without any blackouts or batteries with ultra-long-duration battery technology.

That’s key because technology for ultra-long-duration batteries that would hold energy for several days have yet to be commercialized. Start-ups like Form Energy are working to bring such batteries to market.

Planning, of course, is also key to keeping the grid stable. “Wind is variable, solar is variable,” Jacobson said. “But it turns out, first of all, when you interconnect wind and solar over large areas, which is currently done, you smooth out the supply quite a bit. So it’s because, you know, when the wind is not blowing in one place, it’s usually blowing somewhere else. So over a large region, you have a smoother supply of energy.”

Similarly, wind and solar power are complimentary. And hydropower “is perfect backup, because you can turn it on and off instantaneously,” he said.

Also, there needs to be changes in pricing structures to motivate customers to do high energy demand activities at off-peak times.

“Demand response is a very big component of keeping the grid stable,” Jacobson said. “It’s used some today. But a lot of places a lot of states in the US right now, the electricity price is constant all day ... and that’s a problem.”

Calculating the breakdowns

So far, Jacobson and his team have run simulations for the all renewable, four-hour battery roadmaps for six individual states – Alaska, Hawaii, California, Texas, New York and Florida, and the contiguous 48 states taken together. (For the rest of the states, Jacobson has approximate simulations, which are available here.)

According to his models, California’s energy mix would include 14.72% on-shore wind energy, 18.28% off-shore wind, 21.86% solar panels on roofs, 34.66% solar panels operated by a utility, 5.32% hydropower, 2.91% geothermal electricity and 0.25% wave energy.

Texas would be 37.66 on-shore wind, 14.77% off-shore wind, 20.87% roof solar, 23.85% solar panels operated by a utility, 0.1% hydropower and 0.19% wave energy.

Jacobson and his colleagues use three types of models for the calculations.

First, they use a spreadsheet model to project business-as-usual energy demand in each sector in each state to 2050 and then to convert the business-as-usual energy demand in 2050 to electricity provided by wind, water and solar.

Second, they use a weather model to predict the wind and solar fields in each state every 30 seconds. This weather-prediction model runs on a supercomputer and is written in Fortran computing language.

And the third component of his modeling matches the 2050 energy demand with the weather modeling of energy that can be supplied from wind, water and solar every 30 seconds. The third component is also written in Fortran, but this portion of the process can run on virtually any computer.

The resulting models use no fossil fuels, carbon capture, direct air capture, bioenergy, blue hydrogen or nuclear power.

And in that, Jacobson’s roadmaps are different from many clean-energy proposals, which advocate for using all technologies possible.

“So we’re trying to eliminate air pollution and global warming, and provide energy security. So those are the three purposes of our studies,” Jacobson told CNBC. And that “is a little different than a lot of studies that only focus on greenhouse gases. So we’re trying to eliminate air pollution as well, and also provides energy security.”

Addressing all three issues has been Jacobson’s focus for more than a decade. His first major work in the area was published in 2009 in Scientific American magazine, and four years later he appeared on NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman” to promote his renewable-only approach. Jacobson and longtime progressive political candidate Bernie Sanders co-authored a clean-energy op-ed in The Guardian in 2017.

Combating fears of blackouts

Jacobson knows that his viewpoint is not the loudest. The promise of next-generation nuclear power plants, for example, has gotten government and private funding of late.

Nuclear innovation is “pushed mostly by the industry people, people like Bill Gates, who has a huge investment in small modular reactors,” Jacobson said. “He has a financial interest. And he wants to be known as somebody who tries to help solve the problem.”

Gates addressed the criticism that he’s a “technocrat” looking to solve climate change with new innovations, instead of with political legislation supporting technology like wind and solar which already exists, in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier in the year. “I wish all this funding of these companies wasn’t necessary at all. Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won’t even come close,” Gates said.

Also, the timeline for getting some of these technologies to commercialization is too long to be useful. Gates’ advanced reactor company, TerraPower, announced in November that it has chosen the frontier-era coal town Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor, which it aims to build by 2028.

“Even if it’s seven years, that’s just a demonstration plant,” Jacobson said. “That’s not even close to a commercial plant and on the scale we need.”

TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque said the technology, specifically the Natrium nuclear reactor, will make a meaningful difference in combating climate change.

“The Natrium technology was chosen as the first mover of TerraPower’s technologies because we believe it will be operational in time to offer significant benefit toward the country’s decarbonization goals,” Levesque said in a statement.

Winning over clean-energy skeptics afraid of blackouts is a challenge, but Jacobson believes he can convince people to accept that a future like he has modeled is possible.

Renewable solutions for long-distance ships and aircraft are not available yet, he said. “But those are on the drawing board. And we know technically it can be done just as those haven’t been commercialized.”

Education is a key hurdle, as Jacobson sees it. “I am optimistic. But the thing I find that’s the biggest difficulty is the fact that it is an information issue, because most people are not aware, most people are not aware of what’s possible,” he said.

Europe ‘can eradicate energy poverty’ by quitting fossil fuels: EU official

By Frédéric Simon | EURACTIV.com
Dec 22, 2021

With clean energy and climate policy reforms, the EU "can actually address energy poverty at the core and get rid of it once and forever," said Adela Tesarova, an official at the European Commission’s energy department. [EURACTIV / YouTube]

While EU member states provide financial support to poor households affected by rising energy bills, the European Commission is focusing on long term solutions like energy efficiency and renewables, which have the potential to “eradicate energy poverty” once and for all, an EU official dealing with the issue has said.

Energy poverty is “a pre-existing problem” to the current energy price hike, which is linked to the inability of people to pay their fossil fuel bills, said Adela Tesarova, an official at the Commission’s energy department.

“We want to avoid that decarbonisation makes this problem worse,” she told a EURACTIV event held earlier this month, saying this is why the EU executive proposed creating a social climate fund worth €72.2 billion for the 2025-2035 period.

The ongoing energy price crisis has put energy poverty in the spotlight, with EU governments scrambling to alleviate the burden on the most vulnerable households with short-term measures such as direct income support.

Around 31 million Europeans are living in energy poverty and are unable to keep their homes adequately warm, according to Eurostat figures.

Direct income support schemes, such as France’s energy vouchers, are supported by the European Commission, which put forward a “toolbox” of measures in October to address rising energy prices in the short term.

For the long term, the Commission tabled “structural measures” to boost energy efficiency and renewables, which will reduce Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels, Tesarova said.

“Moving away from fossil fuels is a way to eradicate energy poverty,” the official said, citing EU programmes helping people to insulate their homes and other initiatives to boost renewables.

“Because if people are not dependent on fossil fuels, we will not have energy poverty,” she said.

EU outlines short and long-term answer to global energy price surge

The European Commission unveiled on Wednesday (13 October) a “toolbox” of measures EU countries will be able to draw from when responding to rising energy prices in the short term, while pointing to an upcoming gas market reform for measures to be considered in the long term.

Despite this, the EU’s response to rising energy prices is creating divisions among EU member states.

EU leaders discussed the topic at a summit earlier this month but could not reach a common position because of disagreements over the bloc’s carbon market, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Spain and Poland have urged the EU to curb volatile prices on the carbon market by limiting speculative activity, a stance at odds with that of other countries, including Germany.

“The ETS doesn’t work,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said after last week’s EU summit, adding that higher carbon costs “are very dangerous” because they push up manufacturing costs and consumer prices.

Pawel Cioch, vice-president of Polish state-owned electricity company PGE, said high energy prices are a major driver of energy poverty.

“This is why the ‘Fit for 55’ package should not only enable the achievement of new European climate targets but also mitigate the negative effect that proposed changes will have on consumer bills,” Cioch said, referring to the EU’s package of clean energy and climate laws tabled earlier this year, which aims for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

In the case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, energy expenditure already exceeds 20% of the average household budget, Cioch pointed out. And in the case of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, the share of energy expenditure is around 15%, he told participants at the EURACTIV event.

If green reforms at the EU level are not accompanied by financial support, he said, energy companies will have no choice but to increase prices in order to secure funding for new investment in clean energy.

“The price increases must take into account the social impacts and should be introduced gradually,” Cioch said. “This is why a reasonable pace towards a climate neutrality which reflects national conditions is of crucial importance, especially now when electricity and gas prices in the EU are very, very high”.

EU energy talks dissolve over carbon, green finance fights

Talks between European Union country leaders on energy policy ended with no agreement on Thursday (16 December), as states squabbled over how to respond to record-high carbon prices and upcoming green investment rules

Niels Fuglsang, a Danish lawmaker from the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament, agrees that something must be done to prevent the green transition from pushing up energy prices.

“I believe also as a social democrat that if you don’t do it in a socially just way you will have no green transition at all,” he told participants at the EURACTIV event. “We’ve seen examples of that in France most prominently, with the Yellow Vests protesting against climate policies” which pushed up petrol and diesel prices at the pump, he reminded.

Baiba Miltovica, a rapporteur on the EU Renovation Wave for the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), an EU consultative body, warned against pushing green policies without at the same time providing financial assistance for people to insulate their homes and switch to clean heating systems.

“Of course we need to exit from fossil fuels,” she said. “But on the other side, there is society” and people who “already faced energy poverty before the energy price crisis,” she cautioned.

Planned EU carbon market reform is 'politically suicidal', warns French MEP

Plans to extend the EU’s carbon market to transport and buildings would be “politically suicidal” and risk triggering social unrest similar to the 2018 Yellow Vests movement in France, warned French MEP Pascal Canfin last week. EURACTIV France reports.

Energy poverty: a systemic issue

According to Dimitri Vergne from consumer organisation BEUC, the whole discussion on energy poverty needs to be reframed.

“Too often the problem of energy poverty is approached as a social policy issue and our point as a consumer group is that it is first and foremost a systemic problem” involving the whole energy system and its infrastructure.

By focusing only on social policy, the EU will mitigate the social impact of rising energy prices on poor consumers but it “will never really tackle the root causes of energy poverty” and give a long-term perspective to solve the problem at its roots, he said.

According to Vergne, the Commission’s proposed ‘Fit for 55’ package of energy and climate laws is the right way forward to achieve that.

“We don’t think that the ‘Fit for 55’ package is a risk to increase energy poverty. What we think is rather the opposite – the ‘Fit for 55’ package is the best opportunity we have to tackle the causes of energy poverty” with ambitious programmes to renovate buildings and switch to clean heating systems.

Speaking on behalf of the European Commission, Adela Tesarova could not agree more.

“We cannot resolve the underlying social issues with energy policy but we can actually address energy poverty at the core and we can get rid of it once and forever,” Tesarova said.

“So let’s do it and let’s use this opportunity we have now when everybody talks about it,” she concluded.


> Watch the full EURACTIV debate on YouTube: