1 A lifeline for Greece (Ian Traynor in The
Guardian) Greece’s new leftwing government faces months of fraught negotiations
with its creditors over how to ease its unsustainable debt levels and austerity
programmes after securing - but only conditionally - a eurozone lifeline on
Tuesday that wins it time until the end of June.
Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister and leader
of the Syriza movement, had to bow to German-led pressure to stick to the broad
terms of its €240bn bailout in order to obtain a four-month extension to the
rescue he repeatedly pledged to scrap.
The new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, sent a
six-page list of proposed economic reforms to Brussels which held to some of
Tsipras’s election campaign pledges, but largely diluted or abandoned them to
win the support of the other 18 governments in the eurozone, and of the troika
of bailout overseers from the European commission, the European Central Bank
(ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Despite Tsipras’s assertions, for domestic
consumption, that the hated troika is dead and that the bailout programme has
been ditched, both remain very much in play, with the troika grudgingly
blessing Tuesday’s proposals from Athens and mandated to deliver a more detailed
verdict by the end of April.
With €7.2bn remaining to be tapped from the bailout
funds, another €10bn reserved by the Europeans for recapitalising Greek banks
and Athens having to make big debt repayments by next month, it is not clear
whether any money will be disbursed before the troika verdict at the end of
April. In the meantime, Tsipras is also under pressure to make start
negotiations on a third rescue programme to take effect in July, when even bigger
debt repayments are due.
2 Shocking how vital oil still is (Kamal Ahmed on
BBC) Why is oil so important? It is so straightforward a question that it sounds
faintly ridiculous. Ryan Carlyle, the US engineer, wrote about why oil is
vital. "You can't move anything, anywhere faster than about 25mph without
oil," he said. "You can't operate a modern military, and you can't
run a modern economy. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that modern
civilisation would collapse in a matter of months if oil stopped flowing. Oil
is about as important to the developed world as agriculture."
Oil and food (and let's include water in that, to
avoid argument) are the two most important resources on the planet. The US
consumes 19 million barrels of oil a day. A barrel of oil is about a bath's
worth. China consumes 10.3 million, Japan 4.5 million and the UK 1.5 million. Every
day, the world consumes 91.2 million barrels of oil, according to the US Energy
Information Administration. That's a lot of bathfuls.
And that consumption figure will go up, not down. Every
week, 1.5 million people are added to the world's urban population. And that
tends to add to our consumption of oil as societies move from an agrarian
economy to a consumption and manufacturing economy. The growth of the
"emerging seven" countries (China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia,
Mexico and Turkey) will only add to this upward pressure on demand.
The global vehicle fleet (commercial vehicles and
passenger cars) is predicted to more than double from about 1.2 billion now to
2.4 billion by 2035. Most of that growth - 88% - is in the developing world and
nearly all of it - just under 90% - will be fuelled by oil. Of course, there
are alternatives to oil. But those developments are only slowing the increase
in demand. They are nowhere significant enough to reverse it.
Peak oil - that is the theoretical moment when oil
extraction will reach its height and inevitably decline - has been long
predicted and never arrived. In fact, you can go back to the 19th Century to
hear predictions oil would run out during the "lives of young men". More
than 100 years later, we are still waiting.
3 ‘Deforestation king’ of Amazon detained (San
Francisco Chronicle) Brazil has detained a land-grabber thought to be the
Amazon's single biggest deforester, the country's environmental protection
agency said. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural
Resources said Ezequiel Antonio Castanha, who was detained in the state of
Para, operated a network that illegally seized federal lands, clear-cut them
and sold them to cattle grazers.
The agency blames the network for 20 percent of the
deforestation in Brazil's Amazon in recent years, though the statement did not
provide the estimated scale of the devastation. Castanha will face charges
including illegal deforestation and money laundering, and could be sentenced to
up to 46 years in prison, the statement said.
Officials said late last year that 1,870 square
miles (4,848 square kilometers) of rain forest were destroyed between August
2013 and July 2014. That's a bit larger than the US state of Rhode Island. In
addition to holding around one-third of the planet's biodiversity, the Amazon
is considered one of the world's most important natural defenses against global
warming because of its capacity to absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
Rain forest clearing is responsible for about 75
percent of Brazil's emissions as vegetation is burned and felled trees rot. The
Amazon extends over 3.8 million square miles (6.1 million square kilometers),
with more than 60 percent of the forest within Brazil.
No comments:
Post a Comment