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in title, tags, annotations or urlIran and Saudi Arabia agree to restore ties after China mediation - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Saudi Arabia and Iran announced an agreement in China on Friday to resume relations more than seven years after severing ties, a major breakthrough in a bitter rivalry that has long divided the Middle East.
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part of an initiative by Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at “developing good neighborly relations” between Iran and Saudi Arabia
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Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016 after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was attacked and burned by Iranian protesters, angered by the kingdom’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr. The cleric had emerged as a leading figure in protests in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, a Shiite-majority region in the Sunni-majority nation.
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Brazil, Indonesia and DRC in talks to form 'Opec of rainforests' | Brazil | The Guardian - 0 views
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The big three tropical rainforest nations – Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – are in talks to form a strategic alliance to coordinate on their conservation, nicknamed an “Opec for rainforests”, the Guardian understands.The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, has been followed by a flurry of activity to avoid the destruction of the Amazon, which scientists have warned is dangerously close to tipping point after years of deforestation under its far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.During his first speech as president-elect, Lula pledged to fight for zero deforestation in the Amazon, while Colombia has proposed creating an Amazon bloc at Cop27, and Norway’s environment minister is moving to reinstate a billion-dollar fund to protect the rainforest after it was halted under Bolsonaro.
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The alliance could see the rainforest countries make joint proposals on carbon markets and finance, a longtime sticking point at UN climate and biodiversity talks, as part of an effort to encourage developed countries to fund their conservation
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Oscar Soria, campaign director of the activism site Avaaz, said the alliance could be an “Opec for rainforests”, akin to the oil producers’ cartel, which coordinates on the fossil fuel’s production levels and price. Before being elected, Lula said any alliance could be expanded to other rainforest countries, such as Peru and Cambodia.“This deal could be a promising step forward, as long as Indigenous peoples and local communities are fully consulted in the process and their rights and leadership respected,” Soria said.“These three ecosystems are critical for the ecological stability of the world, and the answer for these forests to thrive lies with the people that live in them.”
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Nothing will change on climate until death toll rises in west, says Gabonese minister | Cop27 | The Guardian - 0 views
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The world will only take meaningful action on the climate crisis once people in rich countries start dying in greater numbers from its effects, Gabon’s environment minister has said, while warning that broken promises on billions of dollars of adaptation finance have left a “sense of betrayal” before Cop27.
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The UN has framed Cop27, which begins next week in Sharm el-Sheikh, as “the Africa climate conference”, and loss and damage finance for countries experiencing the worst consequences of global heating will be a key issue.
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“It’s a horrible thing to say but until more people in developed nations are dying because of the climate crisis, it’s not going to change,”
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Most big coastal cities have areas sinking faster than sea level rise | New Scientist - 0 views
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Globally, sea levels are rising about 3.7 millimetres a year on average, much of which is from melting ice driven by climate change. In many places, land is also sinking due to groundwater pumping, oil and gas extraction and sediment compacted by heavy buildings – a process called land subsidence.
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used radar from satellites to measure rates of subsidence within the world’s 48 most populous coastal cities between 2014 and 2020.Advertisement In 44 cities, the most rapidly subsiding areas were sinking faster than sea levels are rising. Cities in south and South-East Asia were some of the most rapidly subsiding cities, including Tianjin in China and Ahmedabad in India, which both had areas sinking faster than 20 millimetres a year.
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In a case study of Ho Chi Minh City, researchers found that an additional 20 square kilometres would be below sea level and could be inundated if current rates of subsidence continued to 2030. About 880 square kilometres would be below sea level without subsidence. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, could see an additional 2 square kilometres inundated, representing a 16 per cent increase to inundation without subsidence.
World's first public database on fossil fuels launched | Fossil Fuels News | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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“We’re not kidding ourselves that the registry will overnight result in sort of a massive governance regime on fossil fuels,” she said. “But it sheds a light on where fossil fuel production is happening to investors and other actors to hold their governments to account.”
Energy majors exaggerating green performance: analysis - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East - 0 views
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nergy majors are exaggerating their green credentials in public messaging while continuing to allocate the majority of new investment to oil and gas projects, according to an industry analysis released Thursday.Campaigners say this "significant misalignment" between communication strategies and business plans could allow five of the biggest privately-owned energy firms to continue to delay the decarbonisation needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
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public communications were found to contrast with the five's planned capital expenditure for 2022, with just 12 percent of new investments earmarked for low-carbon activities
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the five corporations had spent $750 million on climate-related messaging last year alone
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The West's Poor Climate Track Record Is Spilling Over to Other Policy Areas - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - 0 views
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COP27, scheduled for Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November, is almost guaranteed to showcase the Global South’s frustration with Western climate hypocrisy and its impatience for the rich world’s excuses. The West’s poor climate track record is threatening to harm its interests in other policy fields and undermine any reputational advantages it has over authoritarian states like China
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Egyptian Foreign Minister and COP27 President Sameh Shoukry has called for the world to focus on implementing its commitments to cut emissions, deliver climate finance, and phase out fossil fuel subsidies, adding that he feels a responsibility as an African host to “highlight the priorities of the continent which has suffered the most, and which has contributed the least to the problem.”
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While the war in Ukraine should catalyze Europe’s energy transition in the medium term, Europe’s immediate response has been to prioritize energy security and price stability over the climate crisis
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Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990-2015 - ScienceDirect - 0 views
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Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade.
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Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.
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Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South
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Food crisis looms as Ukrainian wheat shipments grind to halt | Financial Times - 0 views
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Russia and Ukraine supply almost a third of the world’s wheat exports and since the Russian assault on its neighbour, ports on the Black Sea have come to a virtual standstill. As a result, wheat prices have soared to record highs, overtaking levels seen during the food crisis of 2007-08.
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agricultural experts and policymakers have warned of the impact of delayed shipments on countries reliant on the region for wheat, grain, sunflower oil and barley
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The surge in prices will fuel soaring food inflation — already at a seven-year high of 7.8 per cent in January — and the biggest impact will be on the food security of poorer grain importers, warned analysts and food aid organisations
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The Ukraine War: A Global Crisis? | Crisis Group - 0 views
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The Ukraine conflict may be a matter of global concern, but states’ responses to it continue to be conditioned by internal political debates and foreign policy priorities.
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China has hewed to a non-position on Russian aggression – neither condemning nor supporting the act, and declining to label it as an invasion – while lamenting the current situation as “something we do not want to see”. With an eye to the West, Beijing abstained on rather than vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, and reports indicate that two major Chinese state banks are restricting financing for Russian commodities. Beijing now emphasises the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty in its statements, a point that had either been absent from earlier statements or more ambiguously discussed as “principles of the UN Charter”.
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the worldview that major powers can and do occasionally break the rules
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'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views
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“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
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Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
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It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.
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Climate pledges built on flawed emissions data, Post investigation finds - Washington Post - 0 views
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An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.
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the data the world is relying on is inaccurate
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The gap comprises vast amounts of missing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as smaller amounts of powerful synthetic gases. It is the result of questionably drawn rules, incomplete reporting in some countries and apparently willful mistakes in others — and the fact that in some cases, humanity’s full impacts on the planet are not even required to be reported.
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China's Advance Into the Antarctic - Lawfare - 0 views
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Antarctica, the world’s “last great wilderness,” has for six decades been largely shielded from exploitation. A 1959 agreement born out of Cold War necessity and eventually joined by 54 countries reserved the continent “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” What began as a single agreement expanded into a web of interlocking rules and regulations known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The ATS applies to land and sea, existing alongside other international laws—like the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea—to prevent conflict, foster international cooperation and enable scientific development.
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Experts believe Antarctica has a trove of resources, including oil, minerals, commercial fishing, and coal and hydrocarbons. In addition, the region houses the largest freshwater reserve on Earth in large ice sheets, which could soon become attractive to drought-stricken areas.
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Among ATS signatories, China has the fastest growing presence, with four Antarctic bases and a fifth underway. Beijing has also in recent years ramped up research expenditures, signed a fueling partnership with Australia, constructed a new icebreaker, announced a permanent airfield and grown its polar tourism industry exponentially. In addition, some evidence suggests China may have already breached parts of the treaty through unreported military and development activities—mirroring a similar disregard for international law in the South China Sea.
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What the US's 'Fair Share' of Emissions Reductions Looks Like - 0 views
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the full weight of American emissions past and present are contributing to the floods, heat waves, and other disasters that disproportionately ravage the Global South. The U.S. owes it to the world to make right on the carbon pollution that allowed it to reach the pinnacle of the world as the richest nation on Earth.
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Putting meaningful resources into the Green Climate Fund, the United Nations grantmaking body that furnishes capital for international climate action, is one avenue to meet the U.S. climate debt. The new report suggests $8 billion. For context, John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate czar, promised $2 billion. That would only fulfill the nation’s existing pledges.
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Research shows that U.S. companies have reduced their emissions and pollution at home by offshoring manufacturing to poorer nations with looser regulations. In the already stifling heat in places like India and Bangladesh, that offshored pollution can become more deadly. American consumption has also created environmental crises abroad. The U.S. is responsible for more plastic pollution than any other country, which can harm marine ecosystems already under stress due to hotter waters and ocean acidification.
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The WTO 20 years after the 'battle of Seattle' | Business and Economy | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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On the 20th anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), evidence of its harm to workers, healthcare, farmers, and the environment – and particularly to developing countries – has proven its critics right.
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At the time of the protests, the WTO was less than five years old. But critics had already seen how the largest corporations in the world had succeeded in using its founding – and the good name of trade in promoting prosperity – to achieve a new set of agreements covering not just trade in goods but also trade-related investment measures, trade-related intellectual property (IP) rules, agriculture and services. These new agreements, far from the original goals of multilateralism, gave new rights to trade (which are exercised by corporations) and constrained government regulation in the public interest.
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corporate elites hijacked “trade” and rigged the rules to distribute income upwards, while reducing protections for people who work. Highly paid professionals (like doctors) are protected (by being able to regulate their own licensing) and businesses are given market access rights and predictability. Meanwhile, workers are forced into unfair competition without a minimum floor for protections, and developing country workers have been kept at the lowest levels of the global value chains
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The Ever Given is proving hard to refloat. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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the grounding of Ever Given also has exposed how the complex ownership structures in global shipping might make it difficult to hold anyone accountable. The Ever Given is operated by Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Maritime. Evergreen charters the ship from a Japanese firm; a Dubai-based company acts as the agent for the ship in ports; and the ship flies the flag of Panama
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Flags of convenience, or open registries, have more lax labor and environmental regulations, and lower thresholds for safety and insurance provisions.
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Last summer, the Wakashio, another ship owned by a Japanese firm but flagged to Panama, ran aground in Mauritius, spilling oil into the island’s sensitive marine ecosystem. The fracturing of ownership and operation across different legal jurisdictions and national boundaries also makes it much harder to assign responsibility for accidents such as the grounding of Wakashio and Ever Given.
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