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Gene Ellis

Wind Industry's New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Wind Industry’s New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price
Gene Ellis

Trade: More homework, please | The Economist - 0 views

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  • Trade More homework, please
Gene Ellis

Senate Report Says Caterpillar Used Swiss Subsidiary to Reduce Taxes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Senate Report Says Caterpillar Used Swiss Subsidiary to Reduce Taxes
Gene Ellis

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taming-the-climate-crisis.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis
  • Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.
  • “This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The teams, one in each of the 15 countries, looked at what would be necessary to keep the atmosphere from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the preindustrial average of the late 19th century, a target that most of the world committed to at the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen five years ago.
  • 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.”
  • it does not do away with the main hitch that has stumped progress for decades: How much will this all cost and who will pay for it?
Gene Ellis

Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fter-currency-devaluation.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation
  • The country’s high inflation — currently around 60 percent a year — has also meant that the prices in bolívares that companies charge for many goods and services have risen sharply.
  • Now companies are feeling the pain from a series of currency devaluations over the last year and a half. Photo
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  • But the rosy outlook changed in late March, when Brink’s started calculating its sales using the recently created exchange rate of about 50 bolívares to the dollar
  • Further complicating the picture, the Venezuelan government has not allowed companies to repatriate profits for the last five years.
  • Companies have ways of chipping away at the locked-up profits, including charging higher fees to Venezuelan subsidiaries for goods and services provided by the parent corporation. But many foreign companies are stuck holding vast troves of bolívares that shrink in value each time there is a devaluation.
  • Procter & Gamble said in April that it had the equivalent of about $900 million in cash in this country and that it was taking a $275 million write-down as a result of applying the government’s intermediate exchange rate to its Venezuelan balance sheet. Colgate-Palmolive wrote down $174 million, while Ford wrote down about $316 million.
  • “All the companies knew there would be a loss because everyone knew there wouldn’t be dollars” available at the fixed exchange rate, said an executive with an American company in Venezuela who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were trapped because the law here did not give you a way out.”
  • The government has also failed to pay companies the hard currency it had promised them for imports bought on credit from suppliers, and in many cases suppliers are now refusing to ship more goods to Venezuela until they receive payment.
  • Stores are often out of basic products such as dish soap or corn flour. DirecTV has stopped taking on new customers because it cannot get the dollars to import more dish antennas.
  • Without dollars, car companies cannot import the parts needed to assemble vehicles; Ford and Toyota were forced to temporarily close their factories.
  • In yet another reflection of the currency restrictions, the government has refused to let airlines operating in Venezuela trade the bolívares they receive for ticket sales and other services here for dollars. The International Air Transport Association says that the airlines have more than $4 billion in revenues held up in the country, based on the government’s base exchange rate at the time the tickets were sold.
  • American Airlines says that it is owed $750 million by the country’s government.
Gene Ellis

Aluminum and Icelandic GDP | Askja Energy - The Independent Icelandic Energy Portal - 1 views

askjaenergy.org/...aluminum-and-icelandic-gdp

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Aluminum and Icelandic GDP
  • The aluminum sector now consumes almost 75 per cent of electricity generated in Iceland. When taking this part of the Icelandic energy industry into account, the total contribution of the aluminum industry to the Icelandic GDP is somewhat larger than the direct contribution, and the total contribution can be said to be 5.4-6.3 per cent annually (on average in the period 2007-2010). In 2010 this number was approximately 7.7-8.6 per cent.
  • n her thesis, Ms. Ragnarsdóttir explains how aluminum production first began in Iceland in the year 1969, with an output of barely 11 thousand tons annually. In the early 1990s the rate of production grew rapidly and today it is around 820 thousand tons annually. Two of the largest hydroelectric power stations in Iceland were constructed mainly to serve the aluminium industry.
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  • 4,000 jobs
  • Today, the aluminum products have approximately a 40 percent  share in the total export of goods from Iceland (which is more or less the same proportion as that of fish products).
Gene Ellis

Why Europe can't think strategically | The World - 0 views

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  • All international crises elicit predictions that, this time, the EU will finally be forced to grow up, and develop a real foreign policy strategy. Such expectations are usually disappointed. I don’t see why it should be any different, this time.
Gene Ellis

Daniel Gros calls for a broad array of EU measures to revive output growth and strength... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...d-strengthen-regional-cohesion

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  • Restarting Ukraine’s Economy
  • the price of gas must be increased substantially to reflect its cost,
  • governance of the country’s pipelines, which still earn huge royalties for carrying Russian gas to Western Europe, must be overhauled.
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  • subsidies for domestic coal production must be stopped
  • Ever since these pipelines were effectively handed over to nominally private companies in murky deals, earnings from transit fees have gone missing, along with vast amounts of gas, while little maintenance has been carried out.
  • An energy ministry that decides who can obtain gas at one-fifth of its cost and who cannot is obviously subject to irresistible pressures to distribute its favors to whomever offers the largest bribes or kickbacks. The same applies to coal subsidies, except that the subsidies go to the most inefficient producers.
  • these steps also risk hitting eastern Ukraine, which contains a substantial Russophone minority, particularly hard. Some there might be tempted by the allure of a better life in “Mother Russia,” with its vast resources of cheap energy.
  • And it should open its markets, not only by abolishing its import tariffs on Ukrainian products, which has already been decided, but also by granting a temporary exemption from the need to meet all of the EU’s complicated technical standards and regulations.
  • At the same time, the EU should help to address the cause of extraordinary heating costs: the woeful energy inefficiency of most of the existing housing stock.
  • Experience in Eastern Europe, where energy prices had to be increased substantially in the 1990’s, demonstrated that simple measures – such as better insulation, together with maintenance and repair of the region’s many long-neglected central heating systems – yield a quick and substantial payoff in reducing energy intensity.
  • Even a slight improvement in Ukraine’s energy efficiency would contribute more to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions than the vast sums currently being spent to develop renewable energy sources.
Gene Ellis

UAE's Mubadala, Guinea sign $5 billion bauxite, alumina deal | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...a-guinea-idUSBRE9AO0BS20131125

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  • The agreement includes $1 billion for extraction and exports of bauxite to the UAE as well as a $4 billion aluminium refinery and a port, Mohamed Lamine Fofana, Guinea's minister for mines and geology told Reuters at a Guinea investors' conference in Abu Dhabi.The investment forms part of the UAE's expansion plans for its Emirates Global Aluminium business, set to become the world's fifth largest aluminium company by output next year.Emirates Global Aluminium was created from the merger of DUBAL and Emirates Aluminium (EMAL). The merged group has two aluminium plants in the UAE, one in Dubai and a second at Taweelah near Abu Dhabi.
  • In May 2013, Mubadala and DUBAL said they would jointly take over a Guinea Alumina Corp project in Guinea, acquiring 66.6 percent from BHP Billiton (BHP.AX) and Global Alumina.
Gene Ellis

IRIN Africa | GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea's bauxite industry | Guine... - 0 views

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  • GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea’s bauxite industry
  • “Rather than making people richer, mining has made them poorer,” said Akoumba Diallo, a mining sector researcher. “It polluted their environments so they can’t grow crops or let animals feed near mining sites. And it is hard to get water anywhere because it’s contaminated.” With mining contributing to 85 percent of the country’s external revenue, and the World Bank estimating investments of up to US$20 billion in bauxite mining in Guinea over the next decade, the government is currently rewriting and renegotiating its mining contracts - unchanged for 25 years - with 15 companies to ensure Guineans are more likely to benefit from the wealth they spawn.
  • Mining companies are legally obliged to pay taxes to owners of the land they mine,
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  • “We have been paying US$100,000 in annual taxes directly to the Kindia prefecture,” he told IRIN. “The distribution of the money rests with them according to the needs they have identified in Mambia.”
  • Seeing this for themselves, the CBK became concerned that the money was not being well spent, according to Cirra Dieng, communications officer at the CBK, and withdrew its payments in 2007 awaiting some explanation. They are still waiting.
  • The EITI has set up a monitoring committee made up of government representatives, mining companies and civil society to push mining companies to publish what they pay and the government to disclose what it receives at the state, prefecture and CRD level. So far it has done so for six mining companies, including the CBK.
Gene Ellis

Vimetco begins direct operation of its bauxite mines in Sierra Leone | Bauxite - 1 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The estimated annual bauxite output of 1.4 million tonnes will mostly go to the alumina refinery in Romania, ensuring the necessary raw material for aluminium production in Slatina.
  • Most of the bauxite output will be supplied to the Vimetco's alumina refinery, Alum Tulcea, which reopened in 4Q 2009 following a complex upgrading programme, during which the Company replaced part of the existing equipment, to make production processes more efficient and to comply with European regulations for environment protection.
Gene Ellis

Aluminium value chain - Norsk Hydro ASA - YouTube - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Aluminium value chain - Norsk Hydro ASA
Gene Ellis

Mario Draghi's 'whatever it takes' may not be enough for the euro - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...3d-11e3-b44a-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Last updated: April 7, 2014 7:11 pm Mario Draghi’s ‘whatever it takes’ may not be enough for the euro
Gene Ellis

Automation Alone Isn't Killing Jobs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-alone-isnt-killing-jobs.html

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  • Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs
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