Americans hosting Ukrainian refugees encounter ‘unbelievably difficult’ process

Mary Pflum
Sat, May 21, 2022

TAMPA, Florida — When Roaya and Tony Tyson saw the images in March of Ukrainian families fleeing their homeland, the couple looked around their three-bedroom home in Tampa, Florida, and knew they had to do something.

“Some people were sending money,” Roaya said. “But we wanted to do more.”

After researching online, the Tysons, who have no children, came across the website for Spring of Life, a Ukrainian church based in California’s Sacramento County that’s paired hundreds of Ukrainian families with American hosts.

“We told them we had room in our home for two or three people,” Roaya said. “They told us they had a family of four. We said all righty then — bring them on!”


Two days later, Yuliia Venhlinska and her husband, Serhii Donet, arrived, along with their two sons, Max, 11, and Mark, 3, transforming the Tysons’ once-quiet house of two adults into a bustling home of six.

John and Lisa Monaco, self-described

A 10-minute drive from the Tysons, another Tampa household was also growing. John and Lisa Monaco, both doctors, decided to open the second floor of their home to a Ukrainian family.

Spring of Life Church paired them with Masha and Vladimir Halytska and their three children, Vasilisa, 11, Lev, 7, and Danylo, 3.

“Two weeks ago our house was empty and quiet,” said John, whose youngest child is in college. “Now we have toys and strollers and shoes all over the place. I love it!”

The Tysons and the Monacos opening their homes to Ukrainian refugees are examples of not only strangers helping strangers but also of American hosts and Ukrainian refugees learning to navigate a complicated system of resettlement. Their experiences have in some proved more difficult than recent refugee resettlements in the U.S. and more challenging than many anticipated.

On one hand, the American host families say there have been ample rewards.

“I love having a loud, laughter-filled home,” Lisa Monaco said, noting she has enjoyed teaching Vasilisa to make crafts, and transforming the family’s yard into a soccer pitch for Lev.

“Every night we have a family dinner, all seven of us.

On the other hand, there’s been a mountain of often formidable paperwork.

“It’s not an easy process,” said Roaya Tyson of the experience of helping Venhlinska, Donet, and their children settle into the United States. “It’s been unbelievably difficult. In so many cases, you can’t get one document if you don’t have other documents, so it’s been a catch-22.”

The challenges are not unique, said Chris George, executive director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, a Connecticut-based refugee resettlement agency.

“Welcoming and resettling refugees or humanitarian parolees is not easy. I can’t imagine an individual or couple doing this without help.”

‘They don’t know what they’re in for’

Under the Uniting for Ukraine program, run by the Department of Homeland Security, up to 100,000 Ukrainians will be able to resettle in the U.S. unders humanitarian parole, which is separate from the State Department’s Refugee Admissions program. Unlike that program, Ukrainians admitted under humanitarian parole will not receive the benefits of refugee status, which include work authorization, health care and housing assistance.

In the fall, 78,000 Afghans came to the U.S. as humanitarian parolees. Congress provided emergency funding for the Afghans to receive medical care, housing allotments and work visas. That kind of assistance has not been provided to Ukrainian refugees.

That means, George said, there is considerable burden placed on individual American sponsors and families who raise their hands to host Ukrainian refugees because they lack the resources of the relief organizations that the government typically calls on to resettle refugees.

“The current system puts too much pressure on the sponsors,” said George. “They’re accepting the pressure willingly, but honestly they don’t know what they’re in for. It’s very time-consuming, all of these necessary tasks, like enrolling kids in school, finding health care, helping somebody find a job, helping them integrate into the community.”

In the case of Venhlinska and Masha Halytska and their families, Susan Morgan, a Florida social worker, volunteered to help. Morgan is serving as a point person for several Ukrainian families resettling in the U.S.

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Morgan said.

The laundry list of things Ukrainians need to do to get settled is considerable, according to Morgan. Besides state IDs, Ukrainians coming to the U.S. need help in getting driver’s licenses, applying for work visas, seeking out affordable housing, finding schools for children and undergoing physical exams.

Host families and sponsors also need to be mindful, Morgan said, of the trauma the Ukrainians have endured.

“You’re bringing a family in that has left their home, their family,” Morgan said. “They have losses. So as many times people are happy to get here, they’re still experiencing trauma.”

A complicated and unequal process

In the case of the Halytskas, the family was forced to flee their home in Dnipro in the middle of the night, when Russian bombs hit their neighborhood.

Masha and Vladimir Halytska fled their home in Dnipro, Ukraine, with their three young children after Russian bombs destroyed buildings in their neighborhood. (Masha Halytska)

“The kids were really afraid,” Masha said. “They could hear the sirens all around them, see the smoke and buildings on fire.”

The family fled with just a pair of bags and a ukulele. They slept in the car for days before making it out of Ukraine.

Even the smallest of children have experienced trauma, said Morgan, who noted Venhlinska’s 3-year-old, Mark, spent his first weeks with the Tysons hiding under furniture, still fearful of Russian shelling.

Ukrainian refugees Danylo, age 3, Lev, 7, and Vasilisa Halytska, 11, slept in the car for several days, as their family tried to make their way out of Ukraine. (Masha Halytska)

As challenging as it will be for Ukrainians to resettle in the U.S. in the coming weeks and months, critics have noted they’ve received better treatment in some instances than other refugees seeking asylum here, particularly those at the U.S.-Mexico border. Ukrainians were in many cases able to move to the front of the line.

“It’s not the fault of the Ukrainians that they’ve been at times getting preferential treatment,” George said, noting they’ve received better treatment in many cases than refugees from El Salvador, Honduras and Syria. “We shouldn’t blame them but we should blame people at the border for the way they are forcing other people fleeing dangerous conditions to wait many months under dangerous situations.”

George hopes the United for Ukraine program will implement an orientation and coaching program in the coming weeks to help Ukrainian refugees and host families navigate the resettlement process more smoothly.

“We’ve always believed in the ability of an ordinary American to step forward and welcome refugees, but ordinary Americans need help.”

Roaya and Tony Tyson say their three-bedroom house was quiet before they welcomed Ukrainian refugees Yuliia Venhlinska and Serhii Donet and the couple's two children, Max, 11, and Mark, 3. (Mary Pflum)

While they feel overwhelmed at times, for now, Venhlinska and Masha Halytska say they’re happy to have found their way to the U.S.

“We feel safe now,” Halytska said. “Now we can breathe.”

Both mothers are enrolling their children in Tampa-area public schools in the fall and both families are awaiting work visas, which is likely to take months.

“We want to work,” said Venhlinska, who was a chemist in Ukraine.

“We don’t want to be dependent on anybody’s support, even if it’s very helpful,” said Halytska, who worked as a nutritionist in Ukraine and whose husband owned and operated his own trucking company.

Their hosts — one-time strangers they now call family — say, no matter how daunting the resettlement process may be at times, they’re happy to have opened their homes and their hearts.

“I now consider Yuliia a daughter,” Roaya Tyson said.

“It’s really a gift,” agreed John Monaco. “They get to be in a safe home, and we get to feel like we’re doing something in what I consider to be a world war of good versus evil. We feel like we’re the grandparents and the kids and the grandkids have come home.”

Large solar array means 2 Northwest Alaska villages can turn off diesel power for hours a dayAlex DeMarban, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Sun, May 22, 2022, 

May 22—A new $2.2 million solar farm is generating power in two Alaska villages above the Arctic Circle, where energy costs are among the highest in the state.

The 225-kilowatt project in Shungnak, in Northwest Alaska, is unusual because the tribal government in that village and in nearby Kobuk own the farm and will sell the power to the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, the largest electric utility in rural Alaska.

"This is the first time we entered into a power purchase agreement with anyone," said Bill Stamm, the chief executive for the utility. "We buy the power from the community and it's putting money back into the community."

The power is used in Shungnak and in Kobuk, connected with an electrical intertie about 10 miles away. The communities have a total population of about 450 residents. They're about 450 miles northwest of Anchorage.

The solar array was completed last fall, just as winter darkness was setting in.

Now, with long spring days afoot, it's getting its first real test. The solar farm has been producing so much power that it has allowed the diesel-fed power plant to shut down for several hours a day, said Billy Lee, a Shungnak resident who serves on the energy committee for the Northwest Arctic Borough, the regional government.

"The diesel generators were off for about seven hours yesterday and the other day, with no burning of fossil fuels," Lee said on Friday. "It's great for us."

[Solar power heats up in Alaska]

Not many communities in Alaska have the ability to shut down their diesel power plants and use only renewable power, Stamm said. The opportunity to do so should grow in the coming weeks as power demand falls, as temperatures warm and village residents travel to subsistence camps for fishing and hunting, he said.

The project is expected to reduce diesel costs in the village by about $200,000 annually, eliminating the need for about 25,000 gallons of fuel, Stamm said.

It's expected to lead to slightly lower electricity prices and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by burning less diesel fuel, he said.

In another first for the utility, which operates close to 50 power plants in rural Alaska, the project includes large batteries to store the solar power for one to two hours after the sun goes down, he said.

The system uses a sophisticated controller to smoothly manage the differing sources of power on the system: battery, solar or diesel, he said.

"Those are the two components that have made this type of project more affordable and manageable," he said, referring to advances in battery power and the power-management system.

The solar array in Shungnak is just one of several large commercial solar projects underway in Alaska, said Chris Rose with Renewable Energy Alaska Project, which advocates for more renewable power.

Natural gas and diesel fuel are used to make most of the electricity in Alaska's communities, but they are very expensive compared to the Lower 48, Rose said.

"People are looking at the alternatives and realizing they can generate power cheaper than utilities," he said.

Along the Alaska Railbelt in the state's most populated region, private entities are pursuing large commercial solar projects in both Houston in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and on the Kenai Peninsula, he said.

[Breakup Bash: Bethel celebrates as river ice moves on the Kuskokwim River]

The Shungnak solar array can produce about one-fifth of the power of a privately owned solar farm installed in Willow in 2019, Stamm said.

Shungnak and Kobuk have some of the highest electricity prices in Northwest Alaska and in the U.S., said Ingemar Mathiasson, the energy manager for the borough.

A gallon of diesel fuel easily exceeds $10 a gallon when water levels drop on the Kobuk River and prevent fuel barges from reaching the villages. When that happens, planes must fly in relatively small loads of diesel, adding to costs.

The new solar array will offset annual diesel fuel use by more than 10%, possibly much higher, Mathiasson said.

"We'll see if we can get to 30%," Mathiasson said.

The project is a partnership made up of many entities, including NANA Regional Corp., representing Alaska Natives from the Northwest region, as well as the villages, officials involved in the project said.

The Department of Agriculture and the Denali Commission, a federal agency created to improve infrastructure in Alaska, provided much of the funding.

The borough contributed about $400,000 through the village improvement fund supported by a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with Teck, the operator of the Red Dog zinc mine in the region, Mathiasson said.

Mathiasson said the borough has set a goal of building solar installations for the 10 villages in the region outside Kotzebue. The hub city for the region is home to rural Alaska's largest solar array, owned by the Kotzebue Electric Association.

Next up to receive a solar array is Noatak, another village with high fuel prices, Mathiasson said.

Plans are underway to build a 275-kilowatt solar array in that Northwest Alaska community of 420, larger than the one in Shungnak, he said.

The projects are important in part because they create local jobs, Mathiasson said.

Construction for the Noatak array should begin soon, he said, and it should be operating next summer.

"The idea is to harvest energy when it's there, like we do with our other resources, caribou and berries and everything else out there," Mathiasson said.

Lara Logan, Once a Star at CBS News, Is Now One for the Far Right

Jeremy W. Peters

Sun, May 22, 2022, 

When Lara Logan reached the heights of American journalism more than a decade ago, as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, her bosses didn’t think twice about sending her to cover the biggest stories in the world. Producers clamored to work with her as she landed interviews with a Taliban commander, chronicled the Arab Spring and tracked the Ebola outbreak. Former President Barack Obama called her to wish her well after the most traumatic event of what seemed like a limitless career: She was sexually assaulted while covering a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.

But today Logan cuts a far different figure in American media. Instead of on national news broadcasts, she can be found as a guest on right-wing podcasts or speaking at a rally for fringe causes, promoting falsehoods about deaths from COVID vaccines and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Recently, she downplayed the seriousness of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol on one of those shows. “This is now the crime of the century?” she asked sarcastically. She has echoed pro-Kremlin attacks on the United States, accusing Americans of “arming the Nazis of Ukraine.” And she has compared Dr. Anthony Fauci and Hillary Rodham Clinton to some of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.

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Her latest project is a forthcoming documentary on voting machines called “Selection Code” that is being financed by Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, who has helped spread some of the most outrageous myths about the 2020 presidential election.

From the outside, Logan’s path has been one of the most puzzling in the modern history of television news. Her reporting for “60 Minutes” and the “CBS Evening News” helped inform the nation’s understanding of the toll that a decade of military conflict was taking on U.S. forces. CBS News executives envisioned her as a next-generation star in the mold of a Mike Wallace or Dan Rather.

But her transformation, into a star of far-right media, is one that former colleagues who worked closely with her said did not come out of nowhere.

More than a half-dozen journalists and executives who worked with Logan at “60 Minutes,” most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss private interactions with her, said she sometimes revealed political leanings that made them question whether she could objectively cover the Obama administration’s military and foreign policy moves. She appeared increasingly conservative in her politics over the years, they said, and more outspoken about her suspicions of the White House’s motives and war strategy.

Some said her opinions started to dovetail with the views of Obama critics she relied on as sources then who have since become close allies of former President Donald Trump, including Lindsey Graham, the hawkish Republican senator from South Carolina, and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who aided efforts to attempt to overturn the 2020 election and has embraced numerous other conspiracy theories.

Still, Logan’s turn has disappointed many who considered her bright and fearless and admired her for returning again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan despite nearly losing her life in 2003, when a U.S. military vehicle she was in was hit by Taliban fire. She lay unconscious while her crew and military personnel scrambled to drag her to safety, thinking she was dead.

“She was extraordinarily courageous in her war reporting,” said Ira Rosen, a former “60 Minutes” producer who wrote a book about his years with the network, “Ticking Clock.”

“When I think of Lara,” Rosen added, “I want to remember the Lara who put her life on the line reporting for CBS News in Afghanistan and Egypt. The one now I almost don’t even want to know about.”

When reached for comment, Logan said she wouldn’t participate in “a hit piece,” and added, “I’m not interested,” before abruptly hanging up. But today she speaks often to conservative talk show hosts about her days at CBS, describing what she views as a culture of conformity in the mainstream media.

“The moment I wasn’t toeing the line, then I was, ‘Oh, she used to be great, what happened to her?’” Logan said on a recent episode of Lindell’s web show, “The Lindell Report.”

“‘Oh, she’s unhinged and disgraced,’” Logan added, referring to the criticism and ostracism she has faced in recent months after making disparaging comments about public health officials like Fauci, among others.

In November, after she compared Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed inhumane experiments on concentration camp prisoners, Logan was dumped by the production company that made a show she starred in on Fox Nation, the streaming service for Fox News. Her longtime talent agency also severed ties with her, according to one news executive.

Since then, she has been relegated even further into the periphery of conservative media, where vaccine skeptics and election deniers host her and hail her as a whistleblower who, in their telling, is exposing mainstream media cover-ups. In interviews in recent weeks, she has taken aim at a range of seemingly unrelated targets — railing against “open border ideologues” and the United Nations bureaucrats she accuses of supporting them, so-called smart meters that record energy consumption in homes, and activists working to reverse climate change, which she has called “another load of B.S.”

Although she expresses views that are hard right today, some former CBS News colleagues recalled that her politics were not always easy to pigeonhole as conservative when they worked together. One said that Logan, who was raised in South Africa, once expressed dismay at the prevalence of guns in the United States and said she did not understand the affinity that many Americans have for the Second Amendment. She spoke with pride about her family when she described them as dedicated opponents of apartheid, they said.

Several who worked alongside her said her fearlessness in war zones was double-edged — it produced some good television but also sometimes made them question her judgment. On occasion, they said, she led her producers and crew into situations that they thought were not worth the risk. Some cameramen refused to work with her, one of the former colleagues added, and she could be dismissive of the security teams the network hired to keep its journalists safe.

One former CBS producer who worked with her, Peter Klein, said in an interview that the structure of a large newsroom was a moderating influence. “There’s a system in place in newsrooms that offer checks and balances,” said Klein, founder of the Global Reporting Centre in British Columbia, a nonprofit. “Most of us need that system — but she really needed that system. And we knew that from the beginning,” he said.

“Now she’s just unfiltered,” Klein added.

The former CBS journalists said that spending more than a decade reporting from war zones started to take its toll on her emotionally, as it would on almost anyone repeatedly subjected to the trauma of combat. And they said they noticed a considerable change in her demeanor — seemingly more paranoid at times, erratic and deferential to her military sources — after she was sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. In that attack, a mob of men grabbed her, separated her from her crew and tore off her clothes in what she described as a “merciless” attack. She was hospitalized for several days.

The next year, Logan gave a speech that would presage her downfall at CBS. The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had just been attacked, killing four Americans and igniting a firestorm among Republicans who accused Obama and Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, of underestimating the threat terrorists posed to Americans.

Sounding more like an advocate for the military than a reporter, Logan told her audience in Chicago that she hoped the government was getting ready to deploy its “best clandestine warriors” to “exact revenge.” The world should know, she added, that the United States would not be attacked and then “stand by and do nothing about it.” And she accused the Obama administration of playing down the threat from the Taliban, and of lying “about who they really are.”

Then, about a year later, she began telling people she was working on a story that “was going to blow the lid off Benghazi,” according to one person’s recollection.

The story she came up with was the kind of work known inside “60 Minutes” somewhat dismissively as a “book report” because it was based in part on a forthcoming book. Logan interviewed the author, a security contractor stationed in Libya, who said in a segment that aired on Oct. 27, 2013, that he had helped defend the compound on the night of the attack. He described in harrowing detail how he came face to face with the enemy.

The New York Times reported several weeks later that the contractor had, in fact, told the FBI that he was not inside the compound that night. After initially defending Logan and the report, CBS News retracted it and apologized. Logan and her producer were placed on a leave of absence, and she acknowledged having made a “disappointing” mistake.

The network’s chief and executive producer of “60 Minutes” at the time, Jeffrey Fager, later called the story “the worst mistake on my 10-year watch.”

Logan quietly left the network in 2018 after her contract expired. In a defamation lawsuit she filed in 2019 against New York magazine over a 2014 profile she claimed had harmed her ability to find other work, she said CBS cut her salary to $750,000 in 2015 from $2.15 million in 2014. (A federal judge dismissed the case.) She moved from Washington to the Hill Country of Texas with her husband and children, a relocation she told People magazine in 2016 allowed her to focus more on being a mother, especially to her son with a learning disability.

Logan’s banishment from mainstream media has hardly restricted her access to the center of gravity in the Republican Party.

This month, she made a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, for a screening of a new film by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. Other guests included Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Kyle Rittenhouse, the man acquitted of murdering two people during a political demonstration that turned violent in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. As guests mingled on the grounds, Rittenhouse stopped to have his picture taken with Logan.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Crude oil is selling for over $100 per barrel, but 200 years ago it was a plentiful resource used in medicine and cosmetics. Here are 15 surprising facts about the history of oil and gas.

Dominick Reuter

Sun, May 22, 2022

The first century of the oil industry was a wild and unregulated time, with fortunes made and lost almost overnight.Library of Congress

• For the past century, crude oil has been the lifeblood of the global economy.

• Before that, the oil industry was marked by wild swings in the usefulness and market value of the resource.

• Here are 15 surprising facts about the history of oil, according to Daniel Yergin's 1991 book "The Prize."

Commonly called "rock oil," crude oil was found in many places around the world seeping out of the ground or floating on the surface of ponds or streams.

A natural oil seep.USGS

Source: Yergin, p. 19

Indigenous peoples in North America and Asia commonly used "rock oil" for both medicinal and cosmetic purposes, including treating headaches, toothaches, upset stomachs, and even straightening eyelashes.

Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 19

People would typically collect the oil using rags or blankets to soak it up and wring it out into a container.

An oil tank in Pennsylvania.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 19

One 19th century banker, when asked for funding for the novel idea of drilling for oil, famously scoffed at the idea: "Oil coming out of the ground, pumping oil out of the earth as you pump water? Nonsense! You're crazy."

Pumping oil in western Pennsylvania.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 26

Soon, pumped oil was worth half as much as the whiskey barrels that were repurposed to hold it. To this day, the 42-gallon whiskey barrel remains the unit of measure for the industry, even when no actual barrels are used.

Woodford oil well with whiskey barrels in 1861.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 28

Drillers set off the first-ever gusher in April 1861, sending 3,000 barrels per day up into the air before an explosion and fire killed 19 people and burned for three days.

An oil rig in Titusville, Pennsylvania.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 30

When the Civil War disrupted the supply of camphene illuminating oil from the South, a market for kerosene derived from Pennsylvania oil emerged. The Union also began exporting crude oil to Europe's growing market.

Pennsylvania oil rigs.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 30

After the war, the rush to produce outpaced demand so much that a price crash in the 1870s made oil cheaper than drinking water for households in the oil regions.

Oil refining in Erie, Pennsylvania.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 42

Kerosene was the dominant petroleum product prior to 1905, while gasoline was a small byproduct that was often poured off into rivers. Gasoline sold for as low as 2 cents a gallon in 1892.

The interior of the Pennsylvania Oil Exchange.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 14

That began to change in 1905 with the invention of the automobile, which led gasoline sales to overtake kerosene sales by 1911.

Ford Model T assembly line.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 95

In the early years of the automobile, gasoline was sold at hardware stores and general stores by shopkeepers who kept it in unbranded cans under the counter or outside behind the store. Some entrepreneurs even attempted to deliver via gasoline wagons, which had a tendency to explode.

General store.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 209

World War I ushered in the modern oil era, when combustion engines demonstrated their reliability and superior versatility over coal- and horse-powered modes of transportation.

A German car towing a plane in WWI.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, ch. 9

By 1920, the concept of a service station had taken root, with roughly 12,000 drive-in gas stations in 1921, rocketing up to more than 140,000 in 1929.

1920s gas station.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 209

By 1929, once-dominant kerosene was basically negligible, due to the heightened demand for gasoline and fuel oil, which represented 85% of oil consumption.

Hartford Oil and Gas Co. workers.Library of Congress

The 1920s also forged the bond that would tether politics and oil prices for the next century. One Wisconsin Senator railed against corporate price manipulation, warning that if it were to continue "the people of this country must be prepared, before long, to pay at least $1 a gallon for gasoline."

Oil rigs in Oklahoma.Library of Congress

Source: Yergin, p. 211

Read the original article on Business Insider

CAPITALI$M WITH CHINESE CHATACTERISTICS
Tencent Billionaire Airs Frustration During China’s Slowdown



Bloomberg News
Mon, May 23, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s billionaire co-founder Pony Ma shared a viral opinion piece on the economic costs of China’s strict Covid Zero measures, in a rare show of frustration after his company struggled to grow during the first quarter.

Ma, usually reluctant to step into the spotlight, re-posted the column on his semi-public WeChat feed over the weekend. From the long piece -- which called out economists, academics and even average internet users for dismissing the economic impact of Beijing’s harsh Covid measures -- Ma extracted a short segment that accused Chinese internet users of taking online service providers like Tencent for granted, saying netizens would rather see those businesses go bankrupt than conduct layoffs or let their staff work overtime.

“This is a really vivid description,” the Tencent chief commented, according to a screengrab of a WeChat post that Bloomberg News verified with people in Ma’s WeChat circle. He went on to quote the article: “But of course, if their meal orders come 10 minutes late, they would be cursing the delivery guys.”

Ma lifted that quote from a long opinion piece originally posted May 20 by history author Zhang Mingyang, entitled “Apart from Hu Xijin, no one else cares about the economy.” That column referred to comments by Hu, the influential former editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times. Hu had previously suggested that the economic costs of containing the virus shouldn’t exceed the public-health benefits.

Ironically, the former newspaper editor had also commented on Zhang’s column after it was widely shared across the Chinese social media sphere -- he called it sensationalist clickbait.

Read More: Xi Moves to Silence Covid Zero Critics in Sign of Brewing Tumult

China’s top leaders this month warned against questioning President Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero strategy. The Politburo’s supreme seven-member Standing Committee pledged to “fight against any speech that distorts, questions or rejects our country’s Covid-control policy,” state broadcaster China Central Television said.

Ma expressed no further judgment on the overall article himself. But the fact that the boss of China’s most valuable company shared the post made waves on the Chinese internet. Representatives for Tencent didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Tencent reported revenue growth all but evaporated in the three months ended March, walloped by sweeping government restrictions as well as lockdowns across the country. Executives warned that the current quarter could be even worse, as a quarantine covering much of Shanghai -- China’s media and finance hub -- hammered commercial payments and ad spending.

The country’s largest tech corporations have resigned themselves to a new era of low growth, more than a year into a Chinese government crackdown that’s engulfed every internet arena from e-commerce to gaming and online education. Companies from Tencent to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have reduced headcount and streamlined laggard businesses, among other measures, to improve margins and control costs.

Why China Is Sticking With Its Covid Zero Strategy: QuickTake

(Updates with more detail from the opinion piece in the second paragraph)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

A CHEATER & A KIILLER
A Utah hunting guide is facing felony charges for 'illegally baiting' a bear for Donald Trump Jr.


LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 21: Donald Trump Jr. speaks before an appearance by his father, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, during the Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel's 16th annual Outdoor Sportsman Awards at The Venetian Las Vegas during the 2016 National Shooting Sports Foundation's Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show on January 21, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The SHOT Show, the world's largest annual trade show for shooting, hunting and law enforcement professionals, runs through January 23 and features 1,600 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to more than 62,000 attendees.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Sarah Al-Arshani
Sat, May 21, 2022, 

Donald Trump Jr. went on a guided hunt and killed a bear in Utah in 2018.

The hunting guide who took him is facing felony charges for illegally baiting the bear.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Wade Lemons used "a pile of grain, oil, and pastries" to bait the bear.

A hunting guide in Utah is facing felony charges after being accused of illegally baiting a bear for Donald Trump Jr. to hunt in May 2018, The Salt Lake Tribune reported on Saturday.

The outlet reported that Wade Lemon faces up to five years in state prison for the fatal shooting of the bear on May 18, 2018.

Trump Jr. is not named in the criminal complaint, but the Utah Department of Natural Resources confirmed to The Tribune that Trump Jr. was Lemon's "client."

Lemon is accused of using "a pile of grain, oil, and pastries" to bait the bear that Trump Jr. would shoot. The Tribune reported that prosecutors said there's no evidence to suggest that Trump Jr. knew the bear was illegally baited.

Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings said the hunting client was "a victim and now a possible witness in a fraudulent scheme," The Tribune reported.

Environmental activists focus on debt and equity

todayuknews

10 hours ago

At Lothian Pension Fund, caring about the climate involves an approach it calls “engage your equities, deny your debt”.

Lothian, one of Scotland’s largest public-sector pension funds with £8bn in assets under management, is not alone in seeking to engage with the companies in which it holds shares, on behalf of its investors and sponsors.

However, the idea of a dual approach — in which you deny new debt funding to companies with poor climate policies but do not sell shares in companies you can influence — is relatively novel. It liberates investors from the hotly debated but binary choice of: divest or engage?

Unlike divestment or engagement, denying companies the debt financing they need — in Lothian’s case by buying new bonds only if issuers’ strategies are aligned with the Paris climate agreement — has immediate consequences. “That has a genuine impact on the financial position of the corporate in question,” explains David Hickey, portfolio manager at Lothian, which holds about 60 per cent of its assets in equities and 20 per cent in debt.

On the equities side, the debate is still whether it is more effective to sell carbon-intensive stocks or retain them and push the companies — through discussions with management or shareholder resolutions — to work harder at emissions reduction.

Some investors have tried both. “Fossil fuel divestment has been a big topic of conversation over the years and we’ve done quite a bit of that,” says Brad Harrison, managing director at US wealth manager Tiedemann Advisors. “We’ve seen success with our third-party fund managers who are very active with the concept of shareholder engagement.”

Those backing engagement are now increasing in number. For example, investor group Climate Action 100+, which presses companies on carbon reduction, climate-related financial disclosures and governance, now represents 700 investors with more than $68tn in assets. Its members include Amundi, BlackRock, Fidelity International and Legal & General Investment Management.

They, and others, argue that divestment deprives investors of influence and transfers shares to owners who may care little about climate change. “By simply divesting from a company with a high carbon footprint, you’re decarbonising your portfolio but you’re not decarbonising the economy,” points out Fionna Ross, senior ESG analyst for US equities at asset manager Abrdn.

Added to this, fund managers also argue that mandatory divestment risks damaging the direct interests of their clients. This is among the reasons that the $319bn California State Teachers’ Retirement System (Calstrs) is pushing back against a California Senate bill that would prevent the pension fund from owning stakes in oil and gas producers.
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Those favouring engagement point to a range of tools that can be used to push companies in a more sustainable direction — from dialogue with corporate leaders to using shareholder votes to replace company managers or board members. In 2021, for example, activist fund Engine No. 1, which is focused on climate change, won three board seats at oil major ExxonMobil.

By contrast, the fossil fuel divestment movement argues that divestment is a more powerful strategy than engagement since it sends an important and highly public signal.

Divestment at scale stigmatises the fossil fuel sector and so makes it easier, politically, for legislators to introduce tough climate regulations, argues Richard Brooks, climate finance director at Canada-based campaign group Stand.earth. It is, he says, creating “the political space to pass climate policy, which is urgently needed”.

And the movement is achieving scale. In February, Stand.earth announced that investors committing to fossil fuel divestment represented $40tn of assets under management, up from $15tn a year earlier. The group tracks AUM, rather than amounts actually divested, since institutions’ divestment schedule is hard to follow. By citing AUM, the group is also speaking the language of the capital markets.

But, while arguments on how to coax business into curbing fossil fuel consumption and production continue, tangible results remain elusive. In fact, in 2021, energy-related carbon emissions reached historic highs, according to the International Energy Agency, bringing the world closer to the “point of no return” warned of by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2019.



How should investors clean up the world’s dirtiest companies?

Coming on May 31: The Moral Money Forum digs deeper into the arguments for divestment, engagement or new approaches that combine elements of both strategies

Those hoping for progress on political action to halt climate change have also been disappointed. The Climate Action Tracker project sees policy implementation advancing “at a snail’s pace” and describes national net zero targets for 2030 as “totally inadequate”.

Meanwhile, CA 100+ recently revealed that only 17 per cent of its “focus companies” — which include steel producers such as ArcelorMittal, cement producers such as Holcim and Cemex, oil and gas companies such as BP and Chevron and airlines such as Delta and American Airlines — had set medium-term targets consistent with keeping global warming to 1.5C.

Likewise, only 17 per cent had developed quantifiable strategies to reach their goals.

“I keep challenging people to show me an example where institutional investors engaging a fossil fuel company to reduce their emissions has actually led to a reduction,” says Brooks. “There isn’t yet an example of that.”

Catherine Howarth, chief executive of ShareAction, a responsible investment campaign group, believes that, for engagement to work, investors must stiffen their spines. “There’s still too little willingness among institutional investors to be challenging,” she says.

Howarth is among those who see debt denial as an effective strategy. “That could have a meaningful impact on the capital for these companies,” she argues.

There’s still too little willingness among institutional investors to be challenging

In 2019, for example, NatWest removed investment grade oil and gas debt from its portfolios as part of a policy of not funding the debt of companies not aligned with the bank’s net zero goals.

Debt is also a tool of influence when sustainability targets are built into financing facilities, says Jennifer Motles, chief sustainability officer at Philip Morris International.

She cites PMI’s issuance last year of a $2.5bn revolving credit facility that ties interest payments to targets for phasing cigarettes out of the business and penalises investors for missed milestones.

Fossil fuel companies, she suggests, could follow suit. “It’s the same idea as the decarbonisation of the value chain,” she says. “This the ‘decigarettisation’ of our company.”

Debt denial has yet to be widely adopted, though.

“There’s a little bit of it going on,” says Howarth. “But it’s not having either signalling power or much in the way of actual impact on the decision-making of finance directors of large high-carbon companies because it’s not happening at scale.”

Similarly, sustainability-linked bonds do not always include penalties or tough timeframes for companies to meet. “It’s a conceptual idea and has sounded nice but hasn’t really worked so far,” says Gillian de Candole, portfolio manager at Lothian.

However, de Candole and Hickey argue that, if designed with appropriate rigour, debt instruments could give investors powerful new sticks to wield. “We need sustainability-linked bonds with tie-ins to specific KPIs [key performance indicators] and penalties for missing them,” says Hickey. “If those are big enough to be meaningful for the company, that’s how we fund the transition.”

How debt cancellation could help poor countries prepare for climate change

A new report calls on rich countries to provide immediate relief.

A sandstorm in Somalia, where severe drought has plunged 6 million people into crisis levels of food insecurity. Sally Hayden / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images


Joseph Winters

GRIST

Newsletter Reporter
Published May 13, 2022

As the planet warms, compounding crises are pushing poor countries toward a humanitarian catastrophe. Global warming disproportionately threatens the developing world with rising sea levels, more intense storms, and scorching heat waves. At the same time, crippling debt is making it harder for many of these countries to prepare for and recover from these disasters.

A prime example is Eritrea, whose gross public debt is projected to exceed 160 percent of its GDP this year, causing the African Development Bank Group to label the country “in debt distress.” This debt may sap funds away from much-needed measures to adapt to temperature increases above the global average, extreme drought, and famine conditions like those that are currently wreaking havoc on the Horn of Africa.

Without urgent action, experts warn of a “doom loop” of deepening debt and deteriorating environmental conditions. A new report from the Climate and Community Project — a coalition of academics and policy experts working to advance climate justice — urges the United States and European countries to provide immediate relief through a program of “climate reparations,” including through large-scale debt cancellation and restructuring. Even though the least developed countries have only contributed about 8 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1850, they are poised to bear the brunt of climate change’s devastating impacts.

According to the report, written by Georgetown University philosophy professor Olufemi Táíwò and the Climate and Community Project’s research director, Patrick Bigger, the developing world’s current debt crisis has its roots in colonialism and slavery. These practices funneled labor and resources away from the Global South — countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania — and gave the Global North a head start on economic development that left the rest of the world behind. As a result, Global South countries have had little choice but to borrow money in order to meet basic needs. This money — which may be provided in the form of interest-bearing loans or bonds — comes from governments like the United States, multilateral lenders like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, or private lenders, like a wealthy individual or company.

Borrowing money gives poor countries access to funds needed to avert an immediate disaster, such as famine, or to import enough oil to keep homes warm. But in the long term, these arrangements can straddle borrowers with a debt burden that shackles them to their creditors.

In coastal Liberia, rising sea levels have forced residents to leave Monrovia’s biggest slum.

 Zoom Dosso / AFP via Getty Images

The report’s top priority is for wealthy governments and multilateral organizations to cancel poor countries’ publicly held debt — a proposal that Táíwò and Bigger say is relatively simple and politically possible. According to their analysis, 19 of the world’s 20 most climate-vulnerable countries owe most of their debt to public or multilateral lenders that can easily choose to write off debts. Doing so could quickly free up fiscal space for the developing world to invest in climate adaptation and fossil fuel-free development — especially as many countries’ capacity to make those kinds of investments has been strained during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, low- and middle-income countries’ public and private long-term debt swelled 12 percent to a record $860 billion, and some climate-vulnerable countries such as Jamaica and Cabo Verde saw their long-term debt-to-GDP ratio balloon to as much as 96 percent.

There have been efforts from the G20 — an intergovernmental forum of 19 wealthy countries and the European Union — to suspend some of this debt, but the Climate and Community Project report calls them “catastrophically insufficient,” arguing that they have not gone far enough and have sometimes included austerity stipulations — for example, requiring that countries cut public sector wages.

A better policy, Táíwò and Bigger argue, should include the immediate cancellation of all publicly held debt with no strings attached, giving debtor countries the agency to choose how they might allocate their newly available resources.

As a good example, the report points to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, an effort that began in 1996. The International Monetary Fund and a group of wealthy creditor countries eventually wrote off more than $70 billion of debt for 37 countries in the developing world, reducing their required debt repayments by 1.5 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2015. An independent analysis for the World Bank found that the write-offs allowed 28 of the participating countries — including Burkina Faso, Niger, and Ghana — to increase “poverty-reducing expenditures” from 6.4 percent of GDP in 1999 to 8.1 percent in 2004.

According to Bigger, this is a sign that debt cancellation works. “Every dollar spent servicing debt is a dollar not spent on other public policy priorities,” he said.

Canceling publicly held debt wouldn’t solve the entire problem, though, since private lenders hold a large and growing fraction of the developing world’s debt claims. As of 2020, private creditor-owed debt stood at an eye-watering $2.2 trillion, compared to just $792 billion owed to multilateral development banks like the World Bank. Because private lenders are often loath to participate in debt cancellation programs, many privately held debts would need to be acquired by sovereign and multilateral lenders in order to be written off.

A man collects water in the parched Afghan village of Bala Murghab. 

Hoshang Hashimi / AFP via Getty Images

Bigger also noted that debt cancellation is less politically visible today than it was in the late 1990s, when a number of high-profile activist campaigns were centered around the Global South’s simmering debt crisis.

Some of today’s largest debt relief programs are spearheaded by big environmental nonprofits and involve conservation stipulations. The Nature Conservancy’s Blue Bonds for Conservation program, for example, helped negotiate a sovereign debt restructuring for Belize in 2020 that reduced the country’s total debt burden by $250 million and allowed it to repay its remaining debt at a lower interest rate — as long as the savings would be used to protect 30 percent of its ocean territory. A similar but larger effort was negotiated in 2016 for the Seychelles.

Lee Buchheit, a lawyer who has represented several countries in sovereign debt restructurings, including Belize, said this model allows countries to contribute to the “global conservation project” despite being in financial straits. While these programs are meant to ensure the savings are put to good use, some say that so-called “debt-for-nature” swaps can undermine a country’s agency to make their own choices about what they need.

“If an organization really takes seriously the idea that environmental decline is interwoven with global inequities … they might not want to put all their efforts in the basket of restructuring and look instead toward reparations,” said Jennifer Silver, an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

In addition to debt cancellation, Táíwò and Bigger call for a rapid increase in climate finance from the Global North. Currently, rich countries have pledged to provide the developing world with $100 billion for climate projects annually, but they really only give about $80 billion. The Climate and Community Project report argues that the number should be closer to $1 trillion a year. It also calls for fines extracted from the fossil fuel industry in courtrooms around the world to be deposited in a trust fund that can be used by vulnerable communities in the Global South.

According to Bigger, these actions should be viewed not only as an opportunity for rich countries to redress previous harms, but to ensure that the developing world can pursue low-carbon and climate-resilient development, girding itself for a climate crisis it had little role in causing. “We need to think about the ramifications of how we decarbonize and what we owe to the rest of the world,” he said.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M GREEWASHING

UPDATE 2-BNY Mellon unit pays $1.5 mln over ESG fund misstatements -U.S. SEC

Mon, May 23, 2022
By Katanga Johnson

WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday said BNY Mellon Investment Adviser had paid $1.5 million to resolve charges it misstated environmental, social and governance (ESG)investment policies for some mutual funds it managed.

The SEC said that from July 2018 to September 2021, BNY Mellon Investment Adviser represented or implied in various statements that all investments in the funds had undergone an ESG quality review, even though that was not always the case.

"Registered investment advisers and funds are increasingly offering and evaluating investments that employ ESG strategies or incorporate certain ESG criteria, in part to meet investor demand for such strategies and investments," said Sanjay Wadhwa, Deputy Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement and head of its Climate and ESG Task Force.

"Here, we allege that BNY Mellon Investment Adviser did not always perform the ESG quality review that it disclosed using as part of its investment selection process for certain mutual funds it advised."

The firm did not admit or deny the SEC's findings, the SEC said, but agreed to a cease-and-desist order, a censure, and to pay the penalty, the agency said.

"BNY Mellon Investment Adviser is pleased to resolve this matter concerning certain statements it made about the ESG review process for six U.S. mutual funds," a spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the firm takes seriously its regulatory and compliance responsibilities.

BNY Mellon Investment Adviser also "promptly undertook remedial acts and cooperated with Commission staff in its investigation," the SEC said. (Reporting by Michelle Price and Katanga Johnson; Editing by Mark Porter and David Gregorio)

Renewables Remain ‘Cheap’ Despite Supply Chain Chaos

Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, May 22, 2022

With the energy transition in full swing, new energy research provider BloombergNEF estimates that the global transition will require ~$173 trillion in energy supply and infrastructure investment over the next three decades, with renewable energy expected to provide 85% of our energy needs by 2050.

BNEF projects that by 2030, consumption of lithium and nickel by the battery sector will be at least 5x current levels. Meanwhile, demand for cobalt, used in many battery types, will jump by about 70%. Diverse EV and battery commodities such as copper, manganese, iron, phosphorus, and graphite--all of which are needed in clean energy technologies and are required to expand electricity grids--will see sharp spikes in demand.

Unfortunately, rising prices of the commodities needed for renewable energy as well as massive supply chain disruptions have been increasing the costs of setting up new green power projects, which could slow down the pace of the transition.

This trend is problematic for the simple reason that falling costs have been the major driving force for the clean energy boom.

Over the past decade, the price of solar electricity dropped 89%, while the price of onshore wind fell by 70%.

Meanwhile, rapidly falling EV battery prices have played a big role in helping electric vehicles go mainstream. As per Bloomberg, over the past decade, EV battery prices have fallen from almost $1,200 per kilowatt-hour to just $137/kWh in 2020. For an EV with a 50 kWh battery pack, that adds up to savings of more than $43,000 in real terms.

But here’s the kicker: today’s stratospheric gas and coal prices have helped renewables retain their crown as the cheapest option for new power generation across the globe--despite rising equipment and materials costs.

Related: World Sees First Global Energy Shock: World Energy Council


According to Spanish developer Acciona Energia via Energy Intelligence, ‘‘the appetite for renewables remains strong as they are "massively" more competitive than fossil fuels.’’

Cheaper than oil and gas

In its lowest Energy Cost Report, Energy Intelligence’s senior reporter Philippe Roos has analyzed the the cost of generating electricity, also known as levelized cost of energy (LCOE), of conventional and renewable forms of electricity generation in five regions: the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, the Mideast and developing Asia. The data, which also include break-even prices for oil, gas and coal in the Mideast and developing Asia, is based on Energy Intelligence’s proprietary LCOE model.

The EI study reveals that renewables have probably overtaken gas permanently on cost-effectiveness, with the race for lowest cost remaining mostly between solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind. This trend rings true even in Japan, where the scarcity of real estate handicaps land-intensive renewables, onshore wind beats coal and PV displaces gas.


Legend:

CCGT: combined-cycle gas turbines

OCGT: open-cycle gas-turbine

CSP: concentrated solar power

According to the LCOE report, “wind and PV generation costs remain lower than fossil fuel alternatives, especially with current high gas and coal prices”, and with supply chain issues troubling both sectors equally, renewable technologies are still the cheapest.

And even if gas prices fall, it will at this point only partly bring fossil fuels closer to par with renewables. That scenario, however, doesn’t look likely at this time.

But current indications are that high fossil fuel prices are here for the long-haul: TotalEnergies (NYSE:TTE) CEO Patrick Pouyanne recently said that the company might change its long-term gas price assumption in Europe from around $5/MMBtu to around $10/MMBtu.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com