China Warns US Businesses

Vice-foreign minister Xie Feng tells industry figures to push US government toward a ‘rational’ China policy and end ‘ideological’ conflicts

Comments to American businesses with interests in China come amid simmering tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Beijing has urged US business groups with interests in China to “speak out” and lobby the US government in its defence, warning that as bilateral relations deteriorate they cannot make money “in silence”.

The vice-foreign minister Xie Feng, in charge of managing China’s relationship with the US, also urged against political boycotts of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics, saying it harms the interests of athletes and was “unpopular”.

Key business groups including the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the US-China Business Council, met Xie at a virtual forum on Tuesday, according to a transcript of his address.

In his address, published by the ministry of foreign affairs, Xie urged the US business representatives to “speak up and speak out, and push the US government to pursue a rational and pragmatic policy towards China, stop conducting wars in trade, industry and technology, and stop creating … ideological and geopolitical confrontations and conflicts”.

The meeting’s warning added to letters sent by China’s embassy in Washington directly to US businesses last month, making similar threats and urging them to lobby against US bills that would affect Chinese interests.

Xie praised the recent meeting between the US president, Joe Biden, and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in seeking to restore the relationship, and said that when bilateral relations were good, economic and trade cooperation was smoother.  READ MORE...

Doris Day

 

Fossil Fuels

24 November 2021
Fossil Fuels: Stranded Assets and Fire Sales
By Gwynne Dyer


An article with the innocuous title ‘Reframing Incentives for Climate Policy Action’ slipped out in the scientific journal ‘Nature Energy’ three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because of the hopeless title. But it’s not innocuous at all. It’s explosive.


It explains why about half of the world’s oil and gas industry will die in the next 15 years, while the other half enjoys one last frenzied round of growth. Listen carefully, and you can already hear the smart money starting to move.


As the lead author of the article, Jean-François Mercure of Exeter University, told The Guardian: “People will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise what they own is worthless.” Stranded assets, in other words. But that won’t happen everywhere in fifteen years’ time; just in some places.


The authors of the article took the national pledges of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ that have proliferated across the planet recently, worked out what that implies in terms of declining demand for oil and gas, and identified which oil- and gas-exporting countries will still be in the game by the mid-2030s.


Not all the Net Zero pledges will be kept in full, of course, but there will be still enough cuts in fossil fuel use, soon enough, to create a nightmare of falling global demand for all the fossil-fuel producers of the world. Anybody can see that. It takes a little more work to calculate who goes under and who doesn’t – or at least not right away.


What they foresee is that the lowest-cost producers, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, will go for broke. Nobody can compete with them on price (they can make a profit even when oil costs only $20 a barrel), so they will flood the world market with cheap oil.


They haven’t done that in the past because they could make much more per barrel if the supply stayed tight. But that’s a long-term perspective, and there is no long term for fossil fuels any more.


If it is clear that a lot of oil and gas assets are going to stay in the ground forever, then it is your patriotic duty to make sure that the stranded assets belong to other countries, not to yours.


So drop your price to $20 a barrel, drive all the higher cost competitors out of the market, and sell as much you can before demand collapses entirely.


The authors of the paper calculate that Saudi Arabia, for example, could earn $1.7 trillion before demand completely dries up if it goes the ‘fire sale’ route, compared to only $1.3 trillion if it cooperates with all the non-Arab members of OPEC and tries to hold oil and gas prices up. $400 billion is a big difference, so which way do you think they’ll jump?


Who goes to the wall first in this scenario? High-cost producers working in tar sands, oil shales, deep water and Arctic areas, so Canada, the United States, Latin America (mostly Mexico and Brazil), and Russia. But even the lowest-cost producers go broke by 2050, if all those ‘Net Zero by 2050' pledges come true.


Maybe all these changes can happen without grave impacts on other parts of the global economy, but history suggests otherwise. If too many players realise their assets are stranded at the same time, we could get the mother of all market crashes out of this.


Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’.

Skull Mountain

A Medieval Solution

In a world of more frequent and more intense flooding, one way to protect against the worst can trace its roots back to the Netherlands, nearly 1,000 years ago.

This July, gorged by days of rain, the Meuse River broke its banks, and the Belgian town of Liège was its victim. Waters the colour of old gravy raced through town, leaving residents floating in canoes as their homes vanished about them. In the city and its province, over 20 died, one man drowning in his basement.

Nor was this corner of Eastern Belgium alone. In nearby Germany, around 200 perished, with journalists describing the flooding as a once-in-a-century event. The financial impact of the disaster was shocking too. Near Liège, a single chocolate factory sustained damages worth around €12m (£10m/$13.5m).

Yet as the mayhem unfolded, one corner of Northern Europe suffered far less. In the Netherlands, the summer flooding was also described as the worst in a century and property damage was severe, but the country survived the floods without a single fatality. There are many reasons for this: quick evacuations, strong dikes and robust communication among them. But what underpins these varied forms of flood defence is an institution: the so-called "water boards" that have protected this waterlogged land for nearly a millennium.  READ MORE...

Santorini

 

World's Most Expensive City

REUTERS...Tel Aviv's climb to the top of rankings was attributed mainly to the soaring value of Israel's currency


Tel Aviv has been named as the most expensive city in the world to live in, as soaring inflation and supply-chain problems push up prices globally.


The Israeli city came top for the first time in a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), climbing from fifth place last year and pushing Paris down to joint second with Singapore.


Damascus, in war-torn Syria, retained its place as the cheapest in the world.  The survey compares costs in US dollars for goods and services in 173 cities.


The EIU said the data it collected in August and September showed that on average prices had risen 3.5% in local currency terms - the fastest inflation rate recorded over the past five years.


Transport has seen the biggest price increases, with the cost of a litre of petrol up by 21% on average in the cities studied.


Tel Aviv's climb to the top of the EIU's World Cost of Living rankings mainly reflected the soaring value of Israel's currency, the shekel, against the dollar. The local prices of around 10% of goods also increased significantly, especially for groceries.  READ MORE...

Doberman Dancing

 

Diverless Cars

Self-driving vehicles are steadily becoming a reality despite the many hurdles still to be overcome – and they could change our world in some unexpected ways.

It's a late night in the Metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. Under the artificial glare of street lamps, a car can be seen slowly approaching. Active sensors on the vehicle radiate a low hum. A green and blue 'W' glows from the windscreen, giving off just enough light to see inside – to a completely empty driver seat.

The wheel navigates the curb steadily, parking as an arrival notification pings on the phone of the person waiting for it. When they open the door to climb inside, a voice greets them over the vehicle's sound system. "Good evening, this car is all yours – with no one upfront," it says.

This is a Waymo One robotaxi, hailed just 10 minutes ago using an app. The open use of this service to the public, slowly expanding across the US, is one of the many developments signalling that driverless technology is truly becoming a part of our lives.

The promise of driverless technology has long been enticing. It has the potential to transform our experience of commuting and long journeys, take people out of high-risk working environments and streamline our industries. It's key to helping us build the cities of the future, where our reliance and relationship with cars are redefined – lowering carbon emissions and paving the way for more sustainable ways of living. 

And it could make our travel safer. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. "We want safer roads and less fatalities. Automation ultimately could provide that," says Camilla Fowler, head of automated transport for the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).  READ MORE...

Nightmare

 

Swirling

Ocean's Tiniest Orgasms Helped

Without an explosion in ocean life more than 2 billion years ago, many of Earth's mountains might never have formed, according to new research.

When tiny organisms in the shallows of the sea, like plankton, die and sink to the bottom, they can add organic carbon to Earth's crust, making it weaker and more pliable.

A case study of 20 mountain ranges around the world, including those in the Rockies, the Andes, Svalbard, central Europe, Indonesia, and Japan, has now linked the timing of high carbon burial in the ocean with the very generation of our planet's peaks.

"The additional carbon allowed easier deformation of the crust, in a manner that built mountain belts, and thereby plate margins characteristic of modern plate tectonics," the researchers write.

The changes seem to have begun roughly 2 billion years ago, in the middle of the Paleoproterozoic Era, when biological carbon from plankton and bacteria began to add exceptionally high concentrations of graphite to the ocean floor's shale. This made the rock brittle and more likely to stack.

Within 100 million years, most mountain ranges began to form in these weakened slices of crust. Mountain ranges that emerged more recently follow the same pattern.

In the Himalayas, for instance, tectonic thrusting around 50 million years ago was focused on Paleoproterozoic sediments with the most organic-rich beds.

The timing and location implies that biological carbon in graphite continues to shape the geology of our planet.  READ MORE... 

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Getting In Touch With Women Technologists

Dropboxers love a lot of things: posting pictures of their pets, bonding over coffee, helping each other protect their mental health, solving complicated tech puzzles, and everything in between. 

But one of the things they love most is showing up, making connections, and even recruiting new Dropboxers at tech conferences across the U.S. — or more recently, virtually from their homes!

One of the biggest conferences we attend each year is the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC for short) — the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, where women from around the world learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. 

During the four-day event, attendees have nearly limitless opportunities to connect with one another.

One standout part of the conference is the Career Fair, during which attendees can swing by the virtual booths of various companies to meet employees and explore job opportunities. 

During the course of the conference, we had over 800 individuals “check in” at our Dropbox booth! We never had less than 10 people present at our virtual booth at a time, getting to know each other through chat messages or video.  READ MORE...

Expensive

 

The Future for US Aircraft Carriers

The United States has decided to spend many billions of dollars on the CVN-78 (“Ford”) class of aircraft carriers to replace the venerable Nimitz class. 

The latter has served the U.S. Navy since 1975, with the last ship (USS George H. W. Bush) entering service in 2009. The Fords could be in service, in one configuration or another, until the end of the 21st century.

Just as the U.S. government has determined to make this investment, numerous analysts have argued that the increasing lethality of anti-access/area denial systems (especially China’s, but also Russia and Iran) has made the aircraft carrier obsolete.  

If so, investing in a class of ships intended to serve for 90 years might look like a colossal waste of money.

As with any difficult debate, we should take time to define our terms, and clarify the stakes. The anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems around the world may indeed curb the effectiveness of the Ford class, but the U.S. will still find uses for this ships.  READ MORE...

Unsteady

Dan Bongino

 

Fish

 

Wild