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For years, Gazprom offered successive Ukrainian governments what it called discounts on the fuel, only to continue charging Naftogaz more than other European utilities.

Even with the rent for the Sevastopol naval base deducted from the price of gas, Gazprom had charged Naftogaz $395 to $410 for every 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas, for most of 2013. By comparison, Gazprom’s average price in Western Europe for the first nine months of last year was $380 for the same volume.

In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.

Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.

Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.

On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.

“If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.

The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.

When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.

In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.

While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”

Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired.

Microsoft Research just announced the opening of a skunk-works group called Special Projects.

All of their parent companies, however, are determined to learn from the mistakes that Xerox and AT&T made, namely failing to capitalize on their own research. It’s Valley lore, after all, that companies like Apple and Fairchild Semiconductor built their fame and fortune on research done at Xerox and Bell.

Astro Teller

Google X does the inverse: It picks products to make, then hires people specifically to build them: artists and philosophers and designers, many of whom don’t even know what they’ll be working on until they join.

The word ‘basic’ implies ‘unguided,’ and ‘unguided’ is probably best put in government-funded universities rather than industry.”

Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.

Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.

Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.

The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.

Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.

Still, Europe is in a stronger position now than in 2009. Five years ago, 80 per cent of Russian gas was piped across Ukraine, whereas now less than 50 per cent takes that route, thanks to the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic sea.

Total executives have predicted that Russia will be the largest contributor to the group’s oil production by 2020.

Total has also indicated that it intends to increase its stake in Novatek, one of whose major shareholders, Gennady Timchenko, is on the US blacklist.

“Novatek is not subject to sanctions. So we work with Novatek as before and we will continue.”

There is even talk of Russia and China creating an alternative international payment system to replace the SWIFT system, which the US and Europe can use to impose financial sanctions against Russia.

But Putin is ambitious, and – like other autocrats in Central Asian nations – he may remain in power for decades to come. And, like it or not, even a Russia that lacks the dynamism needed to succeed in manufacturing and the industries of the future will remain a commodity-producing

superpower.

US President Barack Obama says that this is not the beginning of a new Cold War; current trends may soon suggest otherwise.

Some countries in Central Europe — such as Austria and the Czech Republic — and the Balkans would run out of gas they import through Ukraine.

that Russia cuts supplies of gas through Ukraine but continues pumping it through its other two pipelines to the West — one through the Baltic and the other through Poland.

In such a scenario,

The European Union also responded to the 2009 shutdown by building “interconnectors” between different countries. As a result, it is easier to shunt gas and electricity from countries that have excess energy to those that face a shortage — though these connections are still patchy and need to be built up.

n the short run, European Union countries can use more coal and less gas in their electricity generation.

The European Union can also increase imports of liquefied natural gas, mainly from Qatar. But there are problems. First, most of the Union’s L.N.G. terminals are in Western Europe, whereas it is the eastern part of the Union that is most vulnerable to a cutoff of Russian gas. So more terminals need to be built, which takes time. What’s more, L.N.G. is expensive — partly because Japan is buying lots of it after closing its nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

Longer term, European Union nations should embrace shale gas. It is cheap and local. Britain and Poland have the most potential.

Meanwhile, countries such as Germany should abandon their knee-jerk aversion to nuclear energy.

The problem is not the carbon goal, said Raoul Ruparel of Open Europe, a research institute. Rather it is the renewable target, which results in uneconomic wind and solar power being built across the Union.

They were in charge of the regulatory leniency that permitted the banks in their jurisdictions to engage in lender forbearance (extend and pretend/delay and pray) and to overstate the fair value of their assets.

To avoid the cyclical stagnation in the eurozone turning into secular stagnation, four policies are required.

The second measure is a temporary fiscal stimulus (say 1 per cent of eurozone GDP per year for two years, concentrated in the countries with the largest output gaps, that is, in the periphery), which is permanently funded and monetised by the ECB.

this will be a reminder that the most important asset of central banks – the present value of future seigniorage profits – is off-balance sheet.

Finally, to achieve debt sustainability for the eurozone sovereigns, radical supply side reforms are required that boost the growth rate of potential output to at least 1.5 per cent in Italy, Portugal and other sclerotic countries.

The country accounts for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Even assuming that China’s population does not grow at all over the next 30 years, that the energy efficiency of its economy increases at a faster pace than most developed and developing countries and that it manages to decarbonize its energy sources faster than pretty much anybody else, China would still be emitting a lot more carbon in 2040 than it does today, according to E.I.A. calculations.

Can the United States or anybody else do anything to speed China down a low-carbon path?

The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, suggested several ways to allot responsibilities. If one starts counting in the 18th century and counts only emissions from industry and energy generation, the United States is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gases that humanity has put into the air. China, by contrast, is responsible for 10 percent.But if one starts counting in 1990, when the world first became aware that CO2 was a problem, and includes greenhouse gases emitted from changes in land use, the United States is responsible for only 18 percent, and China’s share rises to 15 percent. Rich and poor countries, unsurprisingly, disagree on the proper measure. Photo

Not everybody will meet their Copenhagen pledges. Japan, which unplugged its nuclear energy after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, will fall behind. So will Canada and Australia, whose new conservative governments have lost interest in the pledges of their predecessors.

Exchanges of goods such as aircraft and automobiles, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and microelectronics, as well as professional services and foreign direct investment flows, are growing faster than others.

Digital technologies, which reduce the cost of production and distribution, are transforming flows in three ways: through the creation of purely digital goods and services, “digital wrappers” that enhance the value of physical flows, and digital platforms that facilitate cross-border production and exchange.

Developing economies now account for 38 percent of global flows, nearly triple their share in 1990. S

oday, digital technologies enable even the smallest company or solo entrepreneur to be a “micromultinational,” selling and sourcing products, services, and ideas across borders. Individuals can work remotely through online platforms, creating a virtual people flow. Microfinance platforms enable entrepreneurs and social innovators to raise money globally in ever-smaller amounts.

A new energy corridor has just been sanctioned that will bring Caspian gas being developed by a BP-led consortium into the heart of Europe.

And countries such as the UK are moving ahead with developing their substantial reserves of shale gas.

There are 20 operational LNG regasification plants in the EU, with a combined import capacity of about 198 bcm of gas per year. A further 30 bcm/y are under construction. But Europe’s terminals are conspicuously underused. Imports of LNG have fallen sharply, partly because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which prompted Japan to switch to gas-fired generation and diverted LNG cargoes from Europe.

The question is: are European customers prepared to pay Japanese prices for LNG?” says one Brussels-based European gas industry official.

Arguably a more urgent task is to improve energy security by unifying the EU market – in particular, linking up the countries of eastern Europe.

If Europe is serious about reducing its dependence on Russian gas, it will have to take radical measures. Bernstein’s Mr Clint lists some: switching from gas to diesel power, closing gas-intensive industries such as oil refining, reducing gas consumption in heating and adding more coal-fired generation – which would inevitably increase carbon emissions.

Europe accounts for half of Gazprom’s gas revenues, according to the company, and 71 per cent of Russia’s crude oil exports, according to the International Energy Agency.

A growing share of oil, largely from Rosneft, is flowing directly to China by pipeline. Lukoil last week started commercial production at its enormous West Qurna field in Iraq – much of whose production is likely to be sold in Asian markets, analysts say. And Novatek, together with CNPC of China, is building an LNG terminal that will help shift gas exports towards Asia.

To do so, CO2 emissions from industry and energy use would have to fall to at most 1.6 tons a year for every person on the planet by midcentury.

That is less than a tenth of annual American emissions per person today and less than a third of the world average

Lacking any understanding of the feasibility of the exercise, governments postured and jockeyed over which country should be responsible for what

This is not achievable by going after low-hanging fruit, such as replacing coal with natural gas in power plants.

The decarbonization paths rely on aggressive assumptions about our ability to deploy new technologies on a commercial scale economically.

Russia, for instance, hit the target. But Oleg Lugovoy of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked on the Russian plan, observed that “if we don’t have carbon capture and storage we would have to reconsider.”

After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that (1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 percent official estimate; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites.

Heckman, Lochner, and Todd (2008) show that in recent decades, the internal rate of return to graduating high school compared to dropping out has increased dramatically and is now over 50 percent

These trends are for persons born in the United States and exclude immigrants. The recent growth in unskilled migration to the U.S. further increases the proportion of unskilled Americans in the workforce apart from the growth due to a rising high school dropout rate.

The most significant source of bias in the official statistics comes from including GED (General Educational Development) recipients as high school graduates.

A substantial body of scholarship summarised in Heckman and LaFontaine (2008) shows that the GED program does not benefit most participants, and that GEDs perform at the level of dropouts in the U.S. labour market.

Men now graduate from high school at significantly lower rates than women

Evidence suggests a powerful role of the family in shaping educational and adult outcomes. A growing proportion of American children are being raised in disadvantaged families.