Thursday, April 07, 2022

Canadian government ducks fight with oil and gas industry

The Trudeau Administration is delaying delivery of a promised cap on emissions from the fossil fuel sector, insisting there is no need to curb production

A reclaimed tar sands waste pond in Alberta, Canada (Pic: Suncor/Flickr)

By Joe Lo, Chloé Farand and Isabelle Gerretsen
Published on 31/03/2022

The Canadian government has delayed announcing a cap on the production emissions of its huge oil and gas sector, saying it needs more time to consult with the industry.

Justin Trudeau’s government announced its emissions reduction plan on Tuesday, outlining how it plans to meet its target to reduce emissions by 40-45% between 2005 and 2030.

It predicts that oil production will continue to grow while emissions from oil production fall. Campaigners said this “doesn’t add up” and “bets too heavily on [carbon capture technology]”.

At Cop26, Trudeau told world leaders that the town of Lytton had burned down because of climate change and promised “we’ll cap oil and gas sector emissions today and ensure they decrease tomorrow at a pace and scale needed to reach net zero by 2050”.

“That’s no small task for a major oil and gas producing country,” he said. “It’s a big step that’s absolutely necessary.”

But Tuesday’s plan did not include a cap on production emissions from oil and gas. Environment minister Steven Guilbeault said earlier this month that this policy will be deferred to late 2022 or early 2023.

Announcing the plan in Vancouver, natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson explained: “We committed to the [oil and gas] sector that we would work with them in a collaborative basis to establish the cap”.

He added: “We will be working with them over the coming months to ensure we put in place an appropriate cap that’s going to work in a manner that will continue to employ people but that will allow us to get at those emissions”.

The way in which the cap is implemented is still up for debate. Guilbeault has said that a cap and trade system is one of the options. This is when a limited number of pollution permits are issued in key sectors and companies that cut their emissions faster can sell unused allowances to those emitting more.

The government projects that emissions from oil and gas production will decline 42% on 2019 levels, while oil production will rise 22% between 2020 and 2030.

The emissions reduction plan states: “The intent of the cap is not to bring reductions in production that are not driven by declines in global demand”.

Catherine Abreu, director of Destination Zero, told Climate Home it was good that Canada is “finally moving to address the glaring gap in all of its previous climate plans – the oil and gas sector”.

But, she said: “Increasing oil production while trying to reduce oil and gas emissions doesn’t add up… Canadian governments need to ask whether it makes sense to keep ramping up extraction in this critical decade of decarbonisation.”

Measures to reduce emissions without reducing production include tax credits for carbon capture technology and potentially domestic and international carbon offsets for “a small portion of the reductions”, the plan says.

Julia Levin, from the Environmental Defence Canada, said the plan “bets much too heavily on [carbon capture]”.

Jan Gorski, from the Pembina Institute think tank said that the projected oil and gas emissions reductions for 2030 were not ambitious enough. He said that the industry’s fair share was a 45% reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 not the plan’s 31% projection.

His analysis suggests this can be achieved through stopping methane leaks and venting, electrification, carbon capture, facilities reaching their end of life and “other decarbonisation activities for which we do not yet have adequate information”.

While campaigners criticised it, the oil and gas industry welcomed the plan. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said that it “acknowledges that global demand for natural gas and oil will continue for decades and Canada has a role to play in providing lower emission resources to the world’s energy mix”.

According to the International Energy Agency, if the world is to reach net zero by 2050 then oil demand should fall by 75% between 2021 and 2050. Gas demand should decline by 55% over the same period.

Guilbeault said last November that the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional right to cap oil and gas production – that’s in the power of Canada’s provinces. But the federal government can cap production emissions.

Canada is the only G7 country whose emissions are still growing. This is largely because of the growing emissions from its oil and gas production and growth in polluting forms of transport like SUVs.

Canada’s Greenhouse gas emissions (kt of co2e) since 2005, compared with G7 European countries. Japan and the US have not been included for visual clarity but their emissions have also fallen. (Source: World Bank)

The emissions reduction plan includes C$9bn ($7bn) of new green investments in electric vehicles, green buildings, farming, restoring nature and a community air pollution fund. This is in addition to Canada’s rising carbon price on pollution.

The plan set interim targets for phasing out the sale of new internal combustion engine passenger vehicles. By 2026, 20% of new vehicle sales should be zero-emission. By 2030, this should be 60% and by 2035 it should be 100%.

The world’s poorest have the strongest resilience, yet their voices remain unheard

Comment: Those on the frontline of the climate crisis have something to teach the world about climate resilience if they are given a meaningful seat at the table

Students and their teacher stand outside a boat school in Bangladesh

(Photo: Abir Abdullah / Climate Visuals Countdown)

By Sheela Patel and Sohanur Rahman
Published on 01/04/2022

Historically, the UN’s Conferences of the Parties (Cops) on climate change have been overwhelmingly focused on cutting emissions, but Cop26 felt different.

As Cop president, the UK made adaptation a priority, establishing a two-year Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on a global adaptation goal and a target to balance adaptation financing with mitigation financing by 2025. There was substantial participation on behalf of the adaptation community, albeit largely online and outside the negotiating rooms.

These conversations have carried on, for example at this week’s online Gobeshona Global Conference, creating opportunities to make progress before Cop27 in Egypt.

The rising significance of adaptation is underpinned by one key fact: the impacts of climate change are here now and set to escalate. However, despite feeling hopeful at times, the most recent climate negotiations still failed to match words about loss and damage, resilience, and adaptation with actions to actually protect the most affected people and areas.

After US fails to pay its debt, UN’s flagship climate fund warns of austerity

While negotiators have only belatedly started thinking about how best to create the conditions to build greater climate resilience, communities, including our own, have already been doing this for decades.

In Bangladesh, we have been forced to build our resilience by enduring yearly cyclones among other natural disasters and to develop survival techniques like growing vegetables on water, rainwater harvesting, water ambulances, floating schools, and procedures for early warning and evacuation.

Similarly, shack-dwellers globally have learned to build and rebuild their homes in the face of climate disasters. For many the question is not whether the roof over their heads will blow away, but rather when, and how often.

The injustice of climate impacts means the strongest resilience – ‘survival resilience’ built on compound crises – is developed by the world’s poorest communities. It is often informal and deeply local. Crucially, it is not fixed or static, due to the unpredictability of climate change impacts. International agreements require mechanisms that reflect this uncertainty.

They must also ensure that practical, local techniques and indigenous practices are coupled with external intervention. With only 10% of climate finance currently supporting locally-led adaptation, and just 2% reaching the most affected communities, we remain a long way from giving those experiencing the most significant climate-related disruption what they need.

Yet, the voices of those with the most knowledge to contribute to the discussion on adaptation and resilience continue to be pushed to the fringes of the Cop process and often go unheard worldwide. How can negotiations about the future remain inaccessible to those with the biggest stake?

A summit cannot truly deliver positive outcomes for youth, women, and indigenous people without their meaningful participation, yet at Cop26 they were outside being pushed back by police while big corporations were in the delegations.

The current system, based on the burning of carbon, resource extraction, exploitation of people in informal work and settlements, and concentration of vast amounts of capital, operates by locking out those who need the system itself to change for their survival. If the voices of those people had been given as much importance as those of 500+ fossil fuel lobbyists, Cop26 might have had a very different result.

But the UN’s daily subsistence allowance for delegates from poorer countries is provided only until the official final day of negotiations, forcing many to leave before talks conclude. Covid-19 further compounds the inaccessibility of climate talks for people from the global south: most of our colleagues have yet to be vaccinated and none of us could afford to be stuck for weeks if we test positive at a conference.

While the media may have labelled Cop26 ‘the most inclusive Cop yet’, that does not mean it was meaningfully inclusive. Recent reports of Egyptian hotels raising their prices for Cop27 suggest the same mistakes risk being repeated.

Finally, the lack of progress since Cop26 indicates still too little sense of urgency. The latest IPCC report reinforced the need for urgent, transformative adaptive action, yet Cop26 concluded with more delay, more long-term targets, and more climate finance directed towards mitigation than adaptation efforts.

We – the global south – have been forced into adapting now, not in a year or two. Delays of even one year mean more people lose their homes and livelihoods, fewer children go to school and more girls end up in child marriage.

Developed nations and the media must change how they talk about climate change and the people it affects. It is not just a scientific issue. It is about jobs, homes, health, and survival. It is about people fleeing their countries as climate refugees.

If there is one thing Covid-19 has demonstrated, it is that the world is capable of rapid and widespread change in the face of a crisis and that solutions start with the community. If we take this approach with climate change, we might just start moving forwards.

Sheela Patel is the founder and director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (Sparc) and Sohanur Rahman is a youth activist from Bangladesh.

Global hub launched to help countries slash methane emissions

Chilean ex-minister Marcelo Mena will lead the hub, urging governments to tackle methane from fossil fuel, waste and farming sectors in updated national plans

The Global Methane Hub is led by Marcelo Mena, Chile's former environment minister. (Photo: Comision de Medio Ambiente/Flickr)

By Isabelle Gerretsen
Published on 05/04/2022

A global hub to slash methane emissions was launched this week as leading scientists advised that reducing the short-lived gas is essential to limit dangerous levels of warming.

Set up with $340 million of philanthropic funding, the Global Methane Hub will offer grants and technical support to implement the Global Methane Pledge.

Launched by the US and EU at Cop26 climate talks in November, 110 countries have signed up to the pledge to date, committing to collectively reduce their methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. That is roughly in line with what is needed to keep a 1.5C warming limit within reach, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report on Monday.

Marcelo Mena, the former environment minister of Chile and director of the Climate Action Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, will lead the hub.

The first 10% of funds is earmarked for the UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which will work with 30 developed and developing countries to establish plans over the next three years to achieve the 2030 target.

“We’ll be helping all countries who’d like to develop national methane reduction plans, sharing the scientific, technical and regulatory expertise,” Drew Shindell, CCAC’s special advisor for action on methane, told Climate Home News.

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating

Methane contributes significantly to global warming. Although it only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period.

A paper in Environmental Research Letters last year found an all-out, rapid effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of current warming by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century.

Tackling methane provides a “short-term climate win,” Shindell said. “Actions to reduce it can rapidly slow warming whereas decarbonisation provides needed long-term, but not near-term, climate relief.”

The aim is for all these countries to set specific methane targets in their national climate plans, in updates ahead of Cop27 in Egypt this year, Mena told Climate Home News.

“The quick wins are in the oil and gas sector,” Mena said, while emissions from farming and waste also need attention.

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. And it need not be expensive: the IPCC estimates 50-80% of methane emissions from fossil fuel operations could be slashed at a cost of less than $50 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

“Inaction on methane is not a technology or science problem, it is very much a political and organisational problem,” said energy analyst Poppy Kalesi.

Saudi Arabia dilutes fossil fuel phase out language with techno fixes in IPCC report

Rubbish tips are an enormous problem and must be addressed, Mena said. Satellite images show that landfill sites in the US have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times higher than estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The other major source of methane emissions, responsible for almost 40%, is farming. A cow produces an average of 250-500 litres of methane a day from digesting grass.

The IPCC report said that behaviour and lifestyle changes, such as reducing meat consumption and shifting to plant-based diets, are an important part of the solution.

“We have a food system that is not healthy for people or the planet,” said Mena. “We need to build the groundwork for transformational change in our food system.”

Better livestock manure management and changing the diet of livestock could help curb methane emissions from agriculture. There are a host of methane-busting products being trialed, ranging from laboratory-made probiotics to natural additives such as seaweed and charcoal.

Research from the University of California, Davis, for example, has found that feeding seaweed to cows significantly reduced the amount of methane from their burps and farts.

“We need to tackle the neglected sectors of waste management and the food system to reduce methane emissions,” said Mena.

Ukrainian expert: Hundreds of Russian troops received lethal dose of radiation in Chernobyl

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Ukraine’s Vice Minister for Protection of the Environment and Natural Resources, Ruslan Strelets, said hundreds of Russian troops were subjected to high levels of radiation after withdrawing from Ukraine’s Chernobyl exclusion zone.

During a TV news marathon, Strelets said his agency has uncovered hundreds of bunkers and dugouts in the exclusion zone, including in the infamous Red Forest, which is among the most contaminated area around Chernobyl and gets its name from the pine trees in the forest which turned red due to high levels of radiation.

“Our specialists say that if one spends 48 hours in the Red Forest he will receive a radiation dose similar to a radiation one receives over the course of year. That is, factually anyone who was stationed there– they are the walking dead, they are people who have no chances of a future life,” Strelets exclaimed.

The Russian forces stationed around Chernobyl are believed to have been there from February 25th through March 31st, far longer than the recommended time frame.

Reports surfaced in late March claiming that Russian forces in the Red Forest area eschewed radiation protection and kicked up clouds of radioactive dust by driving armored vehicles through the area. One Chernobyl employee told Reuters that such actions were “suicidal” for Russian soldiers.

Valery Seida, acting general director of the Chernobyl plant, said of the Red Forest, "Nobody goes there ... for God's sake. There is no one there… They [Russian soldiers] drove wherever they needed to.” Seida said Russian soldiers had been warned above the radiation levels but that there is no evidence to suggest that they heeded such warnings.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense released drone footage on Wednesday showing what appeared to be trenches dug by Russian soldiers in the exclusion zone.

Hundreds of Russian soldiers were reportedly taken to a medical facility in the Belarusian city of Gomel to be treated for radiation poisoning, according to an employee at the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management.

Captured Technologies and Radiation Victims: What Does Russia Leave in Chernobyl?

Ekaterina Maksimova

April 3, 2022

The Russian military gained access to unique materials, databases and equipment after the seizure of Ukrainian nuclear facilities and scientific laboratories. This was told to The Insider by Ukrainian nuclear scientists. The troops took control of the Zaporozhye and Chernobyl nuclear power plants, as well as their satellite cities: Enerhodar and Slavutych. In Chernobyl itself, it was reported about the looting of the "Ecocenter" - an enterprise engaged in radiation and environmental control in the exclusion zone. Equipment worth more than 6 million euros was supplied there by the European Union and Japan in the framework of joint projects with Kiev. It could be of the greatest interest to the Russian military.

On March 31, Russia withdrew its troops from the territory of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which was captured on the first day of the war. This was told in "Energoatom" - the operator of all nuclear power plants in Ukraine. After a 36-day occupation, Russian troops moved towards Belarus. By Thursday evening, "not a single outsider remained on the territory of the Chernobyl NPP."

The invaders took with them the Ukrainian National Guardsmen, who had been held captive since February 24. And before leaving, the Employees of the Chernobyl NPP were forced to sign a document on the absence of claims to the Russian side - the so-called "Act of Reception and Transfer of Protection of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant".

This document was forced by the Russian military under pressure to sign the employees of the Chernobyl NPP
Photo: Facebook / State Agency of Ukraine for the Management of the Exclusion Zone

"These 'official' documents were signed by the station's staff under pressure to complete the process. The withdrawal of troops was accompanied by the looting of premises, as well as the theft of equipment and other valuable things," the State Agency of Ukraine for the Management of the Exclusion Zone reported.

Robbery of know-how of foreign companies

The fact that the main interest of the Russian military could be unique equipment, The Insider told An independent expert in the field of nuclear energy Olga Kosharnaya, in the past - a member of the Board of the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine.

On March 26, the Russian military took control of the town of Slavutych, located about 50 km from Chernobyl. Many employees of the station live there. There are several enterprises of interest to Russia in the city, the expert noted. The main one is Atomremontservice, which is a division of the operator of all nuclear power plants in Ukraine. The structure is engaged in the organization of repairs at the nuclear power plant. It uses equipment to restore equipment that does not exist in Russia and the countries of the former socialist camp.

"There is a special stand of the American company Westinghouse Electric to control the geometry of the dismantling of damaged fuel elements (fuel elements) and cassettes of nuclear fuel of this manufacturer," Kosharnaya said. "The use of the stand makes it possible to identify and remove leaky elements and repair them, after which the assembly can again be operated in the reactor core before the deadline."

Westinghouse Electric fuel assembly. Photo: energyland.info

Every year, due to the depressurization of fuel elements, fuel assemblies (FUEL) fail, in Russia in this case they are prematurely unloaded from the reactors and disposed of. And the use of special equipment allows you to extend their service life, which means that you can significantly save money, as well as increase radiation safety.

It became known that during the retreat of the Russian military, at least five containers with equipment that is used in the repair of equipment disappeared. Also in the city there are unique training facilities for personnel training, devices for welding, commissioning, equipment for turbines, pumps, ventilation mechanisms, heat exchange equipment for fittings. "There is a suspicion that this will end with the robbery of the know-how of foreign companies, their intellectual property," Olga Kosharnaya noted.

What happened at Ecocenter?

The Russian military also looted the Ecocenter in Chernobyl, a unique enterprise that carried out the largest volume of radioecological research in Ukraine and accumulated a huge database. It appeared in 1986 after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, when work began to eliminate the consequences of the disaster. Now "Ecocenter" belongs to the State Agency for the Management of the Exclusion Zone, which announced the seizure and looting of the enterprise on March 23.

View of the "Ecocenter". Photo by Facebook / Denis Vishnevsky

The key object of ecocenter is the Central Analytical Laboratory. The interlocutors of The Insider agree that, judging by the picture, the Russian military ruled here. Servers and hard drives have been ripped from computers. Olga Kosharnaya, an independent expert on nuclear energy, believes that the unique database on radiology and dosimetry, which have been collected here since the Chernobyl accident, is of particular value to Russia. All this volume of observations can now be destroyed.

Of particular value to Russia is the unique database on radiology and dosimetry collected since the Chernobyl accident: now it can be destroyed

"During the year, the laboratory collected about 5 thousand samples on a rigid system - air, water, soil, hydrobionts and much more. All this in the laboratory turned into 12 thousand results that showed the content of the main radionuclides (cesium, strontium and transuranic elements) in the selected samples. A key element in this process was the laboratory. Radiochemistry and spectrometry are very expensive and complex. Expensive equipment and consumables, expensive personnel who need to be prepared for this work for a long time, "writes Denis Vishnevsky, head of the scientific department of the Chernobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve.

Footage of the looted laboratory was also shown by the Russian media. They accused the Ukrainian side of "staging with the aim of discrediting the Russian military in the eyes of the public." In a story on Russia's state television channel Zvezda, one of the servicemen called the presence of radioactive samples in the laboratory a "crime," although the storage of samples is usually provided for in radioecological laboratories in Russia, Ukraine and other countries. Professor of the Institute of Radioecology of the University of Fukushima (Japan) Mark Zheleznyak told The Insider - the samples appeared in the course of research in the framework of the Japanese-Ukrainian project, in which he took part.

"There are a lot of dirty places in the zone. According to the rules, the samples were stored in special cabinets in the premises of the Ecocenter. We collected a lot of samples. After the study, the sample is still stored for further study, perhaps already other indicators. Each such laboratory has premises for the storage of samples, for that it is a laboratory. All sorts of IAEA commissions came there a hundred times, which checked this, and everything was in perfect order there, "said Professor Zheleznyak.

The laboratory of the "Ecocenter" before the invasion of the Russian military.

Photo: Facebook / Denis Vishnevsky

Radioactive isotopes, which are used to calibrate instruments, have disappeared from the laboratory of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants. It is also located in Chernobyl. In addition, samples of radioactive waste have also disappeared, including those remaining after the meltdown of the reactor contents of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the head of the Institute, Anatoly Nosovsky, notes in an interview with science magazine. He fears that these highly radioactive substances can be used for provocations with a "dirty bomb". This does not exclude Mark Zheleznyak. It is enough to add to the explosives the radioactive contents of the 4th power unit, taken from under the sarcophagus. You can put this into action anywhere.

"In the wagon of the Russian army"

Speaking about the Russian military, experts note their unpreparedness for being in a polluted territory. The entire zone is a huge burial ground for radioactive waste. Right in the contaminated areas in the immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Russians deployed a command post and placed military equipment. Including old or unusable. According to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 165th artillery brigade from the Amur Region operated in Chernobyl. She received permission to use the equipment in a substandard condition. This increased the risk of detonation of ammunition during loading and unloading.

And according to Olga Kosharnaya, Russian soldiers were not provided even with individual dosimeters. Radioactive contamination is spotty, that is, at one point there may be a low dose rate, and in a few meters - tens of times higher. Moving in such conditions without a radiometer is extremely dangerous. You can easily get not only a high dose of radiation, but also inhale alpha-active particles, which, apparently, happened in the Red Forest, adjacent to the Chernobyl NPP.

Gamma radiation dose rate in the Red Forest area. The maximum level in the photo is 102 μSv / h with a norm of not more than 0.2 μSv / h. 2019. Heat map made with Atom Fast 8816 scintillation dosimeter

"Without dosimetric reconnaissance with their radiochemical defense troops, they began to dig trenches in the most polluted place of the zone – the Red Forest. There was a deposition of long-lived isotopes: plutonium, uranium, americium, which emit alpha radiation. When alpha particles enter the body, damage to the kidneys, lungs and other organs begins, very quickly this can lead to cancer, "the expert believes.

On March 30, Yaroslav Emelianenko, a member of the Public Council under the State Agency of Ukraine for the Management of the Exclusion Zone, reported that several Russian servicemen had been brought from Chernobyl to the Belarusian Center for Radiation Medicine in Gomel. It was reported that these soldiers received radiation. The data was confirmed by the State Agency of Ukraine for the Management of the Exclusion Zone, but the exact number of injured soldiers was not specified, and nothing is known about their condition. The Russian Defense Ministry did not comment on the data. The IAEA said it could not confirm the information and was waiting for additional data.

Why did the military eventually leave Chernobyl?

In addition to the interest in equipment and data, the exclusion zone could be of interest to Russian troops as a springboard for a rapid offensive on Kiev, some experts say. In principle, a nuclear power plant is an ideal test site for the deployment of military equipment, since the enemy is highly likely not to conduct combat operations at a nuclear facility. Therefore, it was very easy to gain a foothold there, although unsafe in terms of radiation exposure - but the question of the well-being of soldiers, apparently, worries the Russian military leadership in the last place. From this point of view, it becomes clear that they decided to withdraw troops from Chernobyl against the background of abandoning plans to take Kiev. At the same time, the Russian military is not going to leave the territory of the ZNPP yet.

Restoring sensor operation

After the departure of Russian troops, Ukrainian specialists will first of all have to establish the operation of sensor systems that were turned off by the invaders. In particular, the Automatic Radiation Monitoring System (ASCRO). This is a system of dosimeters in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which in real time on the site show the level of dose rate of gamma radiation at different points of the zone.

Disabling the sensors created a dangerous situation. Fighting in the ChZO provoked forest fires in radiation-contaminated places. More than 10 hectares of forest were burning, Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova reported. This could be fraught with an increase in radiation levels, but without ASCRO it would not have been possible to find out about it.

Professor of the Institute of Environmental Radiology of the University of Fukushima Mark Zheleznyak told The Insider that specialists had to focus on the indicators of devices located at a distance of 100 km and further from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. These data showed only a rough picture.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CHERNOBYL

EP Report Launch: Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide

On March 16, 2021, CEP hosted a launch event for the new report, "Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide".

As Western states face an ongoing dilemma over the fate of their stranded and captured “foreign fighters”, award-winning historian and author, Tom Holland, and President of YAZDA, Haider Elias, joined CEP to discuss the role of foreign fighters in the Yazidi genocide and the search for justice.

In August 2014, ISIS launched an assault on Sinjar, home to Iraq’s vulnerable Yazidi religious minority. More than 3,000 Yazidis are thought to have been killed in the initial assault, many in mass executions, with almost 7,000 Yazidi women and children kidnapped and enslaved throughout ISIS’s so-called caliphate.

So far, justice for these crimes has not been delivered. This discussion aims to highlight Yazidi survivors’ ongoing fight for justice and the underexplored role of Westerners in the atrocities.

Speakers:
-Tom Holland, award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster
-Haider Elias, president, YAZDA, the leading Yazidi human rights NGO
-Liam Duffy, London-based CEP strategic advisor, author of CEP’s latest report: Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide

Moderated by:
-Lucinda Creighton, CEP senior advisor in Europe, former Irish Minister of State for European Affairs

Download the report here: https://bit.ly/3rTc4oH

College Grads Got Lion’s Share of Pandemic Wealth Gains in U.S.

Alex Tanzi, Bloomberg News

BC-College-Grads-Got-Lion’s-Share-of-Pandemic-Wealth-Gains-in-US , Alex Tanzi

(Bloomberg) -- The extra wealth created in the U.S. during the pandemic flowed overwhelmingly to households headed by a college graduate, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.

Those households have seen their net worth surge by $23.4 trillion since the end of 2019, Fed data show. That’s almost three times as much as the wealth accumulated by households headed by someone without a college degree -- which make up a majority of the country’s population.

Wealth gaps linked to education levels have become increasingly prominent in the U.S. as the labor market skewed toward higher-skilled work, exacerbating political divisions and complicating policy debates.

The share of adult Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher has risen sharply in the past few decades. Still, only 38% of all households are headed by someone who completed a college degree. They held a total of $101 trillion in wealth at the end of 2021, compared with $41 trillion for the larger non-college segment.

As of the end of 2021, 9.6% of U.S. households were headed by someone lacking a high-school degree -- and those households saw their share of the national wealth shrink to a record low of 1.5%, down from about 10% in the late 1980s.

The initial impact of the pandemic on labor markets tended to reinforce such trends. Over the last two years, payrolls in professional and business services, for example, have increased by more than 800,000 and in finance by 60,000. Meanwhile there are 736,000 fewer jobs in leisure and hospitality.

The latest employment report, though, suggests that less-educated and lower-income workers are seeing faster wage gains in a tight labor market. In leisure and hospitality, pay was up by 11.8% on average in March, compared with a year earlier.

Gaming’s ‘Das Kapitalist’ Sees A Lot of Hype in NFTs, DAOs, And the Metaverse

Yueqi Yang and Max Abelson, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg Markets) -- Sam Peurifoy sits at the forefront of financial innovation, but he doesn’t move around a lot. The chemistry Ph.D. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. alum, who turns 28 in May, spends most of his days at his computer in an apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District. He’s the chief executive officer of Playground Labs, a company that blends video gaming and cryptocurrency, and the head of interactive for Hivemind Capital Partners, a $1.5 billion venture firm focused on crypto investments, where he leads a strategy called play-to-earn.

Peurifoy spoke with Bloomberg Markets in early March about how skeptical he is of Big Tech’s definition of the metaverse, the nonfungible token fad, and some of the groups that call themselves decentralized autonomous organizations. While he remains on guard against crypto poseurs, he does believe crypto could help reshape the world—from Russia to gaming to payday. Peurifoy, who’s known in gaming circles as “Das Kapitalist,” says he eats the same meal every day and is lucky if he plays a few hours on the weekends these days. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

BLOOMBERG MARKETS: Your wife’s family is Russian. Do you see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changing crypto?

SAM PEURIFOY: It’s going to boil down to two competing forces. Are government bodies evading sanctions using these tokens? The other force is: With a local currency that’s being devalued by the hour, almost, at what point do citizens turn to more stable digital currencies? Citizens using a more stable currency is obviously a plus, but sanctioned countries evading sanctions is obviously a minus. It’s a very difficult line to tread. Maybe we run know-your-customer on every single person who installs a crypto wallet.

BM: You left Goldman Sachs last year. When do you think bankers will warm up to crypto?

SP: When the market was superfrothy, I was having financial professionals reach out to me on a daily basis asking me how to get into crypto. And these were not people from low-ranking firms, either. They were very serious financial professionals, with genuine interest from across the board. Perhaps they feel like they’re not making enough in their current position, but I actually think that’s not really what’s going on. I think they’re genuinely just bored.

BM: Do you see a pattern among these financial professionals in terms of work history or demographics?

SP: You have managing directors to portfolio managers, vice presidents, analysts, equity analysts, investment bankers. It’s everything.

BM: What does Hivemind do?

SP: We provide capital and specific blockchain expertise to projects building in the crypto space. We aspire to being the Blackstone of crypto.

BM: How many people are there?

SP: We aim to have more than 30 employees by the end of the year. We’ve just ramped up hiring extremely substantially.

BM: What do your returns look like?

SP: The recent market downturn provided a large number of excellent buying opportunities for coins and companies. I don’t think I can give you anything more specific than that.

BM: The idea of Playground Labs, and your “Das Kapitalist” gaming identity, is that you seed other players with money. How?

SP: If they have joined with the intention of trying to play these play-to-earn games, then what happens next—assuming there’s no waitlist, because there’s usually a gigantic list of people trying to play these things—we basically issue them assets, they play the assets, and if they do a good job they can continue playing the assets and keep half of what they make. There’s no risk to the player, no capital responsibility on the player at all. There’s only upside. It’s constrained by how much cash we can deploy into it, which is partially determined by private investors and partially by the earnings of the ecosystem itself.

BM: How many hours of video games are you playing these days?

SP: I need to be playing more, because I need to go interact with my community more. If I do two to four hours generally on the weekend, I’m doing a good job.

BM: Do you network through video games?

SP: You’re playing World of Warcraft, you engage in a certain activity with other people, you realize you’ve enjoyed playing with them, probably because they’ve done a good job, you message them, you talk about the game, you talk about life, you get to be friends, you start calling, and now they’re in your Discord. And that’s the cycle of life right there.

BM : The crypto industry has been dominated by men. Is that changing?

SP : It begs the question, OK, if it’s so fair and open, why is it not more diverse? And ultimately it hasn’t reached an education threshold whereby most of the world could really see and know what to engage with next. We’re getting there. You’re seeing builders come online from all different parts of the world, but it’s not this tsunami.

BM : Besides inclusion, what are your biggest worries about the industry?

SP : I don’t think you can talk about crypto right now without bringing up NFTs, which are the elephant in the room. It is undeniable that NFTs have caused a lot of commotion. There have been a ton of scams. People poorly understand the technology. People are throwing money and FOMO-ing into things that they don’t understand. They think all pictures of monkeys are going to go to the moon. It’s not a good situation. It’s a mess.

BM: What are the use cases that excite you the most?

SP: You can reduce the friction on micropayments down to such a low amount that you can imagine streaming Netflix in real time and paying for each individual megabyte of data. That’s the level of granularity. Instead of waiting two weeks for my paycheck, maybe my salary is streamed to me in real time, and then I can immediately go down and buy a coffee.

BM: Where do you see decentralized autonomous organizations going as organization structures and fundraising mechanisms?

SP: A lot of people are coming out with DAOs that are not DAOs. There is a difference between governing a community using smart contracts vs. governing a community by using what basically is a Facebook poll. Unfortunately, the end user cannot read the smart contract and cannot vet the tokens. The issue is, people are basically being told they have control over some organization when, in truth, they don’t.

BM: Are there real use cases with wide appeal for the metaverse, in the current iteration of the internet or the decentralized version called web3?

SP: A lot of people sitting on both sides of the fence, web2 and web3, have completely different conceptions of what the metaverse will look like. The web3 side, the crypto builders, they see a metaverse as an area where economics and utility are fairly distributed among the users and the platforms are ultimately owned by the users. In web2, the core thesis is virtual reality is the metaverse. And it’s not! Virtual reality has been around for a long time. It’s not a huge game changer.

BM: You mentioned that you were recently diagnosed with Covid again and that you only went out twice during the pandemic and got sick both times. Is that true?

SP: I really don’t go outside very much. That’s not a joke. Two times is probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but I really don’t leave this desk. That’s partially because I enjoy it—I love being here. I’m attached to this screen for 16 to 18 hours a day. I do my one hour of exercise each day, and that’s it.

BM: How often do you sleep?

SP: I sleep at exactly 10:30 p.m. every single night, I wake up somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning, and then I do take a 15-minute nap at almost exactly 12:30 almost every single day.

BM: You seem very disciplined.

SP: I eat here. I really like these chicken cordon bleus, that’s usually what I eat. I eat two chicken cordon bleus a day. They’re really good. It’s like two little logs. Don’t worry, I’m having tons of fun.

Yang covers crypto market structure and Abelson covers finance for Bloomberg News in New York.

OPINION

Deepening Stagflation: Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 5 2022 (IPS) - The world is sailing into a perfect storm as key leaders seem intent on threatening more war, albeit while proclaiming the noblest of intentions. By doing so, they block international cooperation to create conditions for sustainable peace and shared prosperity for all.

Anis Chowdhury

Monetarist counter-revolution
The 1970s saw Milton Friedman disciples’ monetarist counter revolution blaming stagflation on ostensibly Keynesian economic policies. In 1974, Nixon replacement President Gerald Ford declared inflation “public enemy number one” and US “determination to whip inflation”.

Monetarists wanted tighter monetary policies to fight inflation. Curbing rising prices was deemed urgent, even though it would increase joblessness. They advocated abandoning expansionary fiscal measures for more growth and jobs.

But US Federal Reserve Bank chair Arthur Burns still considered ensuring full employment his top priority. For Burns, addressing inflation ‘head-on’ – as urged by his detractors – was too costly for the economy and people’s wellbeing.

Nevertheless, the monetarist ascendance was confirmed when the 1946 Employment Act was replaced. The successor 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act is better known as the Humphrey-Hawkins Act for its sponsors, including the Democrats’ 1968 presidential nominee.

In early 1980, Burns’ Fed chair successor, Paul Volcker insisted, “[M]y basic philosophy is over time we have no choice but to deal with the inflationary situation because over time inflation and the unemployment rate go together.… Isn’t that the lesson of the 1970s?”

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Thus, ‘fight inflation first’ became the clarion call in 1980. This was the pretext for sharply raising US interest rates, while claiming that reducing inflation would somehow eventually create many more jobs. The UK and many other industrial countries followed, deepening recessions and raising unemployment.

By post-1950s’ Western standards, the 1980s saw very high unemployment. Unemployment in rich developed OECD countries averaged 7.3% during 1980-89, compared to just under 5% during 1974-79, and under 3% during the 1960s.

Debt crises, lost decades
The sharp US interest rate spike triggered debt crises in Poland, Latin America and elsewhere in the early 1980s. Earlier, US commercial banks had enjoyed windfall gains following the two oil price spikes in the 1970s.

The US government had long provided concessional low interest rate loans to allies to secure support during the Cold War. Flush with deposits from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members in the 1970s, they pushed loans to borrowing governments, many in Latin America.

With the interest rate spikes, borrowing countries suddenly faced liquidity crises, also creating systemic risks for their US and UK bankers. Successive US Treasury Secretaries, James Baker and Nicholas Brady, came up with various debt restructuring schemes to contain the problem, with the latter adopted.

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Thursday, April 07, 2022

Deepening Stagflation: Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire

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