US: Cruel Laws Must Still be Enforced??

Posted on April 26, 2022 by climatechangefork

Two weeks ago (April 12th), I wrote about how busy we all are this April, both with personal and global events: “COVID-19 is still with us and continues to have an impact on most of us. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also had major impacts, and its end cannot yet be seen. Additionally, the IPCC issued the third part of its 6th report (AR6). Its last report (AR5) was issued in 2013-2014.”

Last week (April 19th), in my blog, “Fighting Russian Aggression & Learning How to Fight Global Wars in the Nuclear Age,” I made an attempt to learn how to use the lesson from the hopefully short-term crisis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to fight the much longer-term crisis of climate change. This week, I had hoped to continue this line of thinking by expanding upon the advantages and disadvantages of globalization. In addition, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has started a short series within its “Frontline” program, focused on oil companies and their role in attempts to mitigate climate change. The first episode in this series was titled “The Power of Big Oil (Part One: Denial).” This is a topic that I have covered extensively in the ten years that this blog has been up, and I was happy to try to figure out where the oil companies stand right now on this issue.

However, in a routine, Google scan of current, relevant, media activities, I encountered a piece in Vox that required my immediate attention:

The Supreme Court rules that cruel laws must still be enforced: The Court’s decision is a tremendous, if not unexpected, blow to poor Puerto Ricans.

 By Ian Millhiser  Apr 21, 2022, 3:00pm EDT

United States v. Vaello Madero, which the Supreme Court decided on Thursday, is a heartbreaking case. It asks whether many of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans can be cut off by their own government simply because they live in the wrong part of the United States.

But Vaello Madero is also a case about democracy, and whether democratic governments can enact policies that are needlessly cruel. In an 8-1 decision joined by every justice but Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Court effectively answered that question in the affirmative.

The content of the issue that this article addresses is specific and complex and should be of great concern to Puerto Rico and other US territories. However, it was not the subject matter that made me feel the need to immediately address the article; it was the title. I will try to explain.

Among my activities this month will be a talk to a Brooklyn high school about my Holocaust experiences. I have given many such talks over the last 15 years, especially during this time of the year. During such talks, I am often asked what I think about the arguments that many of the Germans who murdered Jews during this period were just obeying orders—and that the commanders who issued those orders were only following the state laws of the time. The laws in question were called the Nuremberg Race Laws, and have since been denounced. Ultimately, the Germans who gave the orders were prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials.  Case closed? Not exactly. The issue of military obedience still occupies the attention of many. An example of the current thinking is given below:

To understand why this is the case, it is important to recognize that the law of obedience sits at the intersection of two fundamental interests – the need for good order and discipline in the military, which requires service members to obey superior orders; and the supremacy of the law, which requires service members to be responsible for their illegal acts.  Because these interests can conflict – a superior can issue an unlawful order – the law must mediate between them.

To that end, it is clear that neither extreme can work. On the one hand, the Nuremberg Tribunals and a large body of military jurisprudence rejects the notion that members of the military should be insulated from liability for following orders.  On the other hand, there is broad recognition that holding subordinates liable for all infractions, whether they were conducted pursuant to superior orders or not, would threaten good order and discipline by encouraging legal debate at every stage of the chain of command.

The issue gains special urgency within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the remnants that the Russian army is leaving in places that are under their control, such as Bucha and Mariupol.

Figure 1 shows an example of a mass grave that was left in Bucha. In my Holocaust talks, depending on the age of the audience, I show the mass graves that the British army found after they liberated Bergen-Belson, the camp where I spent two years of my childhood. The only difference that I can see is that the corpses in Bergen-Belsen were not buried with plastic bags.

Mass grave in Bucha

Figure 1 – Mass grave in Bucha (Source: Andriy Levkivsky via BBC)

By some accounts, Russia is now planning to expand its invasion even beyond Ukraine.

I hope that in coming blogs I will be able to return to more relevant abstract topics.

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Fighting Russian Aggression & Learning How to Fight Global Wars in the Nuclear Age

Posted on April 19, 2022 by climatechangefork

graphic of globe made up of flags shattering

Figure 1 – Source: Interest.co.nz

The world is busy right now with several simultaneous global transitions that will leave an impact long after they are over. I have mentioned these transitions in earlier blogs. They include climate change, demographic saturation, COVID-19, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The first two are “long term,” meaning they will peak around the end of the century, while the last two are considered “short term,” meaning they are either past their peak (COVID) or approaching their peak (Russia-Ukraine). They all involve all aspects of global life and are interconnected.

Biden and NATO want to avoid any direct confrontation with the Russians to eliminate escalation to a nuclear conflict (The Fog of Peace and the Online Revolution). After all, WWI started with a “small” incident – assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist.  The threat of direct nuclear confrontation is not symmetrical; “the West” is trying to avoid it by replacing direct military confrontations with massive, broad economic sanctions. Meanwhile, some Russian voices are loudly making nuclear threats at any opportunity that they have.

Because of the interdependence of these global crises, it will be useful to hear voices from far ends of the world that are not directly involved in most of these crises. This piece by David Skilling from New Zealand, from which the opening picture was taken, can serve as a good example. I’m citing a few paragraphs below:

Russia’s invasion & the aggressive economic sanctions in a deeply globalized world will lead to massive global economic disruption & structural change

This is the first meaningful conflict being (partly) fought using economic instruments in a deeply integrated global economy: it is perhaps the ‘first world economic war’, with effects stretching from New Zealand and Singapore to the Middle East and Europe.  We are in uncharted waters.

Whereas the physical conflict in Ukraine will eventually end, this economic war will be very long-lived – it has its own political logic.  The formal sanctions will be in place for a long time – at a minimum, until the Russian invasion is reversed, and perhaps Mr Putin is gone.  But even if/when sanctions are lifted, the drive for economic independence from Russia (notably in energy) will continue.  And many companies will be reluctant to return rapidly to the Russian market due to stakeholder pressure.

More broadly, precedent has been set for the use of sweeping economic sanctions.  The US, Europe, and others will increasingly use trade, investment, and technology instruments, in strategic competition with their rivals.

The question that I would like to raise in this blog is this: Is it feasible to expand tactics from the “first world economic war” to fight the other global threats that we are facing? This is a complicated question that I will be likely to revisit in future blogs. In this blog, I would like to focus on the difficulties associated with the data in which these global crises overlap.

Figure 2 shows some of the recent economic indicators over the last few years. The COVID-19 pandemic started toward the end of 2019. Shortly after its start, we saw a sharp decline in energy prices because of the sharp decline in demand. As we approached the end of 2021, most people (in developed nations) got vaccinated. The pandemic is still around with different variants; however, most people and countries have learned how to live with it and a relatively quick return to “normal” life started to take place. Overall demand for everyday supplies started to outpace supply and issues with supply triggered relatively sharp, global increases in inflation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine took place at the end of February 2022. However, the Russian army’s encirclement of Ukraine started a few months earlier. The outcry against the move rather quickly triggered major economic sanctions. As I have mentioned, Russia is a petrostate that contributes to the global supply of fossil fuels. European countries are especially vulnerable to disruptions in this supply and the energy prices are determined globally. Energy drives much of our economic activity. One can see sharp inflationary spikes as we start 2022 but these started before the invasion.

Graphs showing changing prices for commodities

Figure 2 – Global impact of selected indicators

As I have mentioned, it is too early to separate the COVID-19-based impact on prices that have to do with supply chain issues from those related to the economic sanctions that were imposed on Russia. Similar issues can be traced to the anthropogenic impacts on climate change that I discussed in an earlier blog (January 9, 2018 – “Natural” or “Anthropogenic”? – Climate Change). The original figure and references from that blog are shown in Figure 3.

Graph of carbon emissions and carbon-14 atmospheric tracing in Mauna Loa, Antarctica, tree rings

Figure 3 – Carbon emissions and 14C atmospheric tracing

As I explained then, the atmospheric decline in carbon-14 is probably the strongest indicator of the anthropogenic origin of climate change that comes from the burning of fossil fuels. However, early atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons completely masked such impacts. Some data before the beginning of nuclear testing and more data after the 1960s strongly confirmed the decline of 14C related to the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels as shown in Figure 4. More time is needed to isolate the impacts of the sanctions on the supply chain.

Figure 4 – More recent measurements of 14C

More time is also needed to judge the effectiveness of the sanctions on Russian behavior in Ukraine. Hopefully, we will be able to figure out if such sanctions can expand to be a global governing tool to minimize global harm such as anthropogenic climate change. More on that in the next blogs.

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April 2022

Posted on April 12, 2022 by climatechangefork

Monument of the liberation of Farsleben, GermanyMonument for our April 13, 1945 liberation in Farsleben, Germany

The “official” start of spring this year was on March 20th. However, this month started with April Fool’s Day and it seems that if the world’s events were divided among the months in the Gregorian calendar, the fool has gotten more than its share over the 10 years (!) that I have been writing this blog (see previous blogs: April 8 – April 22, 2014; April 21, 2015; April 26, 2016; March 17, 2020; March 31, 2020).

These include personal events that I have covered in one way or another in previous blogs, including Passover, the beginning of the end of the spring semester, my wife’s birthday, and my liberation from the Nazi camp on April 13, 1945. They also include global events such as Earth Day. However, this year the April fool was very busy. COVID-19 is still with us and continues to have an impact on most of us. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also had major impacts, and its end cannot yet be seen. Additionally, the IPCC issued the third part of its 6th report (AR6). Its last report (AR5) was issued in 2013-2014.

Most of us have private lives that are interwoven with the global reality and none of us can stay untouched. The opening picture shows the monument to my liberation from Bergen-Belsen by the American army, as I described in earlier blogs. The March 24, 2020 blog described the last stages of erecting this monument. It was scheduled to be unveiled on April 13 that year but the pandemic prevented the official unveiling, so it went up without much fanfare. Everybody was hoping that the ceremony could take place this April but the pandemic didn’t cooperate, so it has now been postponed until the end of August in a modified form. I hope to be able to travel to Europe this summer but we are constantly assessing mitigation strategies so we can minimize risk. As I mentioned in that March 24, 2020 blog, three sides of the monument are engraved with “Liberation – April 13, 1945” in German, Hebrew, and English, while the fourth side shows the emblem of the American army’s 30th Infantry Division, which saved us in Farsleben on April 13, 1945. In the meantime, I am busy finishing the semester, trying to enable my students to follow the IPCC report, giving a talk to a high school about my Holocaust experiences, and giving a talk to a different audience attempting to connect the two.

Being a Holocaust survivor ages me. I cannot hide my age. Advanced age has consequences that apply to me like to everybody else, and one of my priorities this month is to take care of various health issues. These are serious and time-consuming issues (fortunately, I have good health insurance so the financial burden is not too serious), but they are manageable—up to now, I haven’t missed any classes or blog posts.

Right now, the most pressing global issue is to try to stop the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The West (a term I am using for nearly every country that openly opposes the Russian invasion) doesn’t want to get into a direct conflict with Russia for fear of escalation to a nuclear confrontation. So, the West is substituting an economic confrontation for a direct military one. Here is how Janet Yellen summarizes the major economic repercussions of the Ukraine invasion:

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen plans on Wednesday to warn of major consequences for the global economy as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both the conflict and global sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s aggression disrupting the flow of food and energy around the world.

The comments by Ms. Yellen, who will appear before a House committee on Wednesday, come as the United States and the European Union are poised to announce another round of sanctions on Russian financial institutions, government officials and state-owned enterprises as the war in Ukraine shows no sign of abating.

Wars usually victimize both aggressors and defenders. Economic wars are no different. Since, as I have mentioned in earlier blogs, Europe is much more vulnerable to fluctuations in Russia’s energy export than other countries, it suffers the most from the economic sanctions. A good example of this vulnerability is Germany:

Last year, Russia supplied more than half of the natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germany burned to heat homes, power factories and fuel cars, buses and trucks. Roughly half of Germany’s coal imports, which are essential to its steel manufacturing, came from Russia.

Today, those entanglements loom large as European leaders debate whether energy should be included in more sanctions on Russia amid growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians. Officials in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, are caught between outrage at Russia’s aggression and their continuing need for the country’s essential commodities.

“It was a mistake that Germany became so heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia,” Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister, said Tuesday, heading into talks with his European Union colleagues in Luxembourg.

A few days after that last article was written, the Russian atrocities around Kyiv were revealed, and—in spite of its vulnerability—Europe decided to escalate the energy sanctions by banning coal imports:

European leaders, seeking to punish Russia for reports of atrocities carried out in Ukraine, on Thursday approved a ban on Russian coal, the imported energy source that would be the easiest to replace.

And there were concerns that cutting off coal supplies could cause more harm to the European Union than to Russia. Though the European Union depends on Russian coal, the bloc could replace it more easily with imports from other countries than it could replace natural gas and oil. But banning coal from Russia could send energy prices soaring for European consumers, given the existing shortages in the bloc, according to Rystad Energy, a consulting firm. Carlos Torres Diaz, a senior vice president at Rystad, called the potential sanctions “a double-edged sword.”

All of this has had major impacts on the global energy transition and on all of us. Obviously, none of this was anticipated in the just-released AR6 IPCC reports. The publication of the four components of the report is detailed below:

  • AR6 – WGI – Physical Science – 3949 pages – August 21, 2021
  • AR6 – WGII – Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability – 3675 pages – February 27, 2022
  • AR6 – WGIII – Mitigation 2913 pages – April 4, 2022
  • AR6 – Synthesis – September 22, 2022

WGI was published at the end of summer 2021, just before the start of the fall semester. WGII and WGIII were published during the last few weeks and the synthesis report will be published at the start of the next semester. The previous report, AR5, was published almost 10 years ago, shortly after I started this blog (see October 15, 2013). The published parts of the AR6 report contain more than 10,000 pages. Each part of the report starts with a “Summary for Policy Makers” (About 40 pages each). The reports are considered by many to be the last word on climate change but the question is: who is their intended audience? The news media has no problem with this. They cherry-pick (September 17, 2019) to suit whatever mood they want to capture by quoting the parts of the report that might help with the message that they want to convey. You can find a few examples of this below.

The first example comes from the IPCC itself, whose objective is to amplify its point. The last example comes from the World Nuclear Association, which is mobilizing the IPCC to try to shift the energy transition in its direction.

The other examples come from press samples:

IPCC climate report 2022 summary: The key findings

Climate change: IPCC scientists report five ways to save the planet

Climate change: Scientists race to finish key IPCC report

The latest IPCC report argues that stabilising the climate will require fast action

Response from World Nuclear Association to the release of the IPCC Working Group III report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of climate change

Even the relatively short parts of the “Summaries for Policy Makers” are loaded with references to the other parts of the AR6 report and to AR5. Chances are that most current policymakers were not yet in positions of power when AR5 was published, however, so the references are not necessarily very useful. No matter who you are, if you decide to read the full report, chances are that by the time you finish, it will be irrelevant.

The main question that I have right now is how to teach such a reality. As usual with fast-changing realities, we experiment. In future blogs, I will report the results.

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Single-Use Plastic and Decarbonization

Posted on April 5, 2022 by climatechangefork

Source: Advanced Waste Solutions

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I will temporarily leave the topic of the devastating Russian aggression against Ukraine and shift back to the impending global environmental threats connected to climate change. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is not ending anytime soon. The destruction of cities and random killings have had the devastating consequence of making more than 10% of the population refugees: 4 million—mainly women, children, and the elderly— have had to leave their country for refuge in neighboring states. However, as I have mentioned in earlier blogs, the state of any possible settlement or end of the conflict and the state of the fighting are still in a fog. The important impacts of this conflict on the global energy transition are still too recent to monitor with numbers that will help us measure the long-term impacts. I will return to these issues as soon as that changes.

The title of this blog, with the supporting opening figure, was designed to attract the attention of my students and the administrators of my university—to help address long-term environmental threats that are already mandated by political authorities that govern us and which implementations of their decisions are left to us. The emphasis in this blog will be on mitigating our use of single-use plastics (SUP) and decarbonizing our energy use.

Efforts to minimize the use of SUP are now starting to advance from the general to the global scale:

Against the backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) shows multilateral cooperation at its best,” said President of the Assembly, and Norway’s Minister for Climate and the Environment, Espen Barth Eide. “Plastic pollution has grown into an epidemic. With today’s resolution we are officially on track for a cure.”

The resolution, based on three initial draft resolutions from various nations, establishes an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) which will begin its work this year, aiming to complete a draft legally binding agreement by the end of 2024.

That in turn, is expected to present a legally binding instrument, which would reflect diverse alternatives to address the full lifecycle of plastics, the design of reusable and recyclable products and materials, and the need for enhanced international collaboration to facilitate access to technology, to allow the revolutionary plan to be realized.

The list of sovereign countries and states that have already instituted, in various forms, a ban on the use of SUP includes Canada, Kenya, Zimbabwe, the UK, the US (NY, California, and Hawaii individually but no federal ban), the EU, China (to be announced this year), and India.

Down to my own state, the specific legislation that recently was signed by the NY state governor to encourage the two largest public universities—SUNY and CUNY—is given below:

AN ACT to amend the education law, in relation to encouraging the elimination of the use of certain single use plastic items at state university of New York and city university of New York campuses The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:

  1. Section 1. Section 355 of the education law is amended by adding a new
  2. subdivision 21 to read as follows:
  3. The state university trustees shall adopt a policy requiring that
  4. each institution of the state university of New York collaborate with
  5. students, faculty and staff to encourage campuses to eliminate the use
  6. of certain plastic items generally recognized by the public as being
  7. designed for single use. Such plastic items may include, but shall not
  8. be limited to, tableware, straws, stirrers, cups and food service
  9. In establishing such a policy, the trustees shall consider
  10. the following:
  11. the availability of affordable alternatives;
  12. the accessibility of alternatives to all students, faculty, and
  13. staff;
  14. an evaluation of the effectiveness of reusable alternatives; and
  15. benchmarks for assessing progress.
  16. 2. Section 6206 of the education law is amended by adding a new
  17. subdivision 21 to read as follows:
  18. The board of trustees shall adopt a policy requiring that each
  19. institution of the city university of New York collaborate with
  20. students, faculty and staff to encourage campuses to eliminate the use
  21. of certain plastic items generally recognized by the public as being
  22. designed for single use. Such plastic items may include, but shall not
  23. be limited to, tableware, straws, stirrers, cups and food service containers.
  24. In establishing such a policy, the trustees shall consider
  25. the following:
  26. the availability of affordable alternatives;
  27. the accessibility of alternatives to all students, faculty, and
  28. staff;
  29. an evaluation of the effectiveness of reusable alternatives; and
  30. benchmarks for assessing progress.
  31. 3. This act shall take effect on the ninetieth day after it shall
  32. have become a law.

Other colleges and universities in the US are following a similar path.

The CUNY Board of Trustees requires that campus councils draft a plan to eliminate single-use plastics on campus by April 15th of this year. I am involved in the efforts to follow this mandate.

The multi-level global effort to mitigate the excessive use of SUP has some similarities to the longer effort to mitigate the excessive use of fossil fuels to power our economies.

On a campus level, similar to global carbonization of the atmosphere, SUP can be sorted into four groups that I described in an earlier blog (June 18, 2019):

Scope 1 – direct use on campus.

Scope 2 – indirect use through suppliers or services such as the cafeteria.

Scope 3 – all other indirect use (use by campus personnel away from the campus).

Scope 4 – incorporate minimizing local use in the college curriculum through using college efforts as a lab (see the same June 18, 2019 blog for similar use for decarbonization).

For both decarbonizing energy use and minimizing the use of SUP that results from Scope 2 activities, one needs dedicated administrators that will go through all our delivery contacts to find out if there are alternatives that are committed to delivering their services with zero SEP and using zero-carbon energy.

To address Scopes 1 and 3, we need strong cooperation from students—something that organizations such as NYPIRG can help with. To address Scope 4, we need faculty cooperation to change the curriculum.

Both CUNY and SUNY are multi-campus organizations in which some of the functions are led by the central authority of the university and some are administered by the local campus. The complexities that arise from such a setting will be discussed in a separate blog.

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Fogs and Clear Skies

Posted on March 29, 2022 by climatechangefork

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Source: BBC)

Previous blogs emphasized the fog of the Ukrainian-Russian war (March 8th) and the fog of the peace attempts (March 22nd) but even the combination doesn’t cover the reality of the Russian aggression. Many more aspects of this conflict are covered with fog, even as some important aspects remain clear. One of the clearest aspects of this conflict is the extent to which this aggression is viewed as a global event. A quarter of the Ukrainian population (of 44 million) have been forced to leave their homes, out of which 3.6 million have been forced to leave the country.

The number of dead and injured, whether civilian or military, is still under fog. The economic impacts—both to Russia and the rest of the world—have become more transparent. The complete destruction of the Ukrainian economy doesn’t need numbers to be transparent.

There is no question (at least in my mind) that the transparent parts of the conflict owe a great deal to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian President. His constant communication with the Ukrainian people, combined with major appearances before parliaments of important states and regions, has united most of the world in support of Ukraine. He has directly addressed the governing bodies or parliaments of the US, England, Germany, Israel, France, and the European Union. He has also addressed the Russian people in their own language (and his), drawing a lot of support from that country’s citizens. In terms of communication, he will be known as one of the most effective wartime leaders in recent history. His background in entertainment is helping him in his role as the leader of the underdog country in a wartime conflict.

However, the supporting world is not willing to help Ukraine with direct military involvement to confront Russia. As I mentioned in the last blog, Russia is home to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Fear of escalating this war to WWIII, which might involve the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, is on everybody’s mind.

Instead, most of the countries that openly support Ukraine have stuck to using major economic sanctions on Russia in an attempt to shift the balance of power.

There is no question in my mind that the endgame of this conflict will leave major impacts on the global balance of powers but the nature of these impacts is still largely in a thick fog.

Meanwhile, we can clearly see major economic impacts on both Russia and the countries that are trying to punish its aggression. Below are a few of the echoes of these impacts:

Impacts on Russia:

Live Updates as Business, Lawmakers and Stocks Respond to Ukraine-Russia War

After shutting down for almost a month, the Russian stock market reopened for limited trading on Thursday. Just 33 companies, all listed in the benchmark MOEX index, were allowed to trade on the Moscow Exchange for four hours and ten minutes.

The MOEX index rose 4.4 percent, but it was probably buoyed by significant government policies intended to avoid a sell-off, including a measure to bar foreigners from selling stocks.

The Russian central bank said on Wednesday there would be a ban on short selling the stocks, a type of trade involving a bet that a company’s share price will fall. Previously, the government had said it would instruct its sovereign wealth fund to channel up to $10 billion into local stocks to stop their prices from plummeting. And in late February, the central bank barred brokers from executing sell orders by foreigners.

Putin to Charge in Rubles for Russian Oil Purchases by ‘Unfriendly Countries’

Economic sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe and their allies have shaken the Russian economy and caused the value of the ruble to plunge.

On Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came up with a way to get his opponents to help prop up his currency, by demanding that “unfriendly countries” use rubles to buy the Russian oil and gas still flowing.

“I have made a decision to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to switch payments for … our natural gas supplied to the so-called unfriendly countries to Russian rubles,” Mr. Putin said.

Sanctions aimed at the Russian central bank effectively froze hundreds of billions of dollars of assets. The actions immediately drove down the value of the ruble as people frantically rushed to turn their rubles into a more stable currency, like the dollar or the euro.

“If you’re invoiced in rubles, you’ve got to go out and buy rubles,” he said. “I don’t know if there is a workaround.”

The German response to this demand was a direct refusal to do so: Germany Won’t Pay Russia in Rubles for Natural Gas, Defying Putin Request.

Total Energies Will Stop Buying Oil From Russia

Total Energies, the French oil and gas company, said on Tuesday that it would stop buying Russian oil by the end of the year and halt further investment in projects in the country.

At the same time, the company warned of the risks and potential negative consequences — for itself and Europe — of a headlong flight from Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Paris-based company said it had “initiated the gradual suspension of its activities in Russia, while assuring its teams’ safety.” Total Energies had said on March 1 that it would halt new Russian investment.

Tuesday’s announcement expanded on that initial statement, describing how the company would no longer enter into or renew contracts to purchase Russian oil and petroleum products, and saying that would it would halt all such purchases by the end of this year. Total Energies also said it would stop providing capital for new projects in Russia, including a large planned liquefied natural gas installation called Arctic LNG 2.

To what extent other companies will follow is still unknown.

Impacts on the parties that imposed the sanctions:

German Chancellor Says Boycott of Russian Energy Would Cost Jobs

BERLIN — A boycott of Russian oil and gas would have severe economic and social consequences in Germany and the rest of Europe, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told lawmakers on Wednesday.

Conceding that Germany has grown dependent on Russia for its energy, Mr. Scholz vowed to end its reliance as quickly as possible, but said: “To do so from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and all of Europe into recession.”

“Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be at risk,” he added, speaking on the floor of the Bundestag, the German legislature.

The United States and some eastern European Union countries, such as Poland and the Baltic States, have been pressuring the bloc to boycott Russian energy exports.

Will War Make Europe’s Switch to Clean Energy Even Harder?

Smoothly managing Europe’s energy switch was always going to be difficult. Now, as economies stagger back from the second year of the pandemic, Russia’s attack on Ukraine grinds on and energy prices soar, the painful trade-offs have crystallized like never before.

Moving investments away from oil, gas and coal to sustainable sources like wind and solar, limiting and taxing carbon emissions, and building a new energy infrastructure to transmit electricity are crucial to weaning Europe off fossil fuels. But they are all likely to raise costs during the transition, an extremely difficult pill for the public and politicians to swallow.

Communication channels are now saturated with the impacts of the Ukrainian conflict, to the exclusion of longer-term threats such as climate change. I will start to return my focus to climate change and related global environmental issues soon. As we saw in the last few blogs, there is no way to completely separate the two but there is a way to shift the emphasis, with the hope that some semblance of peace will return to this corner of the world.

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The Fog of Peace and the Online Revolution

Posted on March 22, 2022 by climatechangefork

Right now, peace in Ukraine is the top priority for all of us. Both sides are talking compromise, however, the reports are anything but clear. The fog of peace adds to the fog of war, amplifying confusion.

While there seems to be progress in the peace talks, Russia is simultaneously continuing its attack on Ukrainian urban centers, specifically in locations that target civilian populations. The expansion of online communication that has resulted from the global COVID pandemic facilitates talking and shooting at the same time. The fear of escalation hasn’t subsided, either. Below is a section of Thomas Friedman’s piece in the NYT on the topic:

If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.

I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks will radiate from Russia — this country that is the world’s third-largest oil producer and possesses some 6,000 nuclear warheads — when it loses a war of choice that was spearheaded by one man, who can never afford to admit defeat.

Why not? Because Putin surely knows that “the Russian national tradition is unforgiving of military setbacks,” observed Leon Aron, a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who is writing a book about Putin’s road to Ukraine.

“Virtually every major defeat has resulted in radical change,” added Aron, writing in The Washington Post. “The Crimean War (1853-1856) precipitated Emperor Alexander II’s liberal revolution from above. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) brought about the First Russian Revolution. The catastrophe of World War I resulted in Emperor Nicholas II’s abdication and the Bolshevik Revolution. And the war in Afghanistan became a key factor in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.” Also, retreating from Cuba contributed significantly to Nikita Khrushchev’s removal two years later.

Bloomberg presents another endgame scenario:

President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is barely two weeks old, but this time it’s starting to look like an act of retribution that has no obviously achievable endgame. As Russia’s generals shift to ever-more-brutal tactics, it isn’t clear how Putin can marry Ukraine’s devastation with the goals he’s set out: namely, to create a neighbor that’s no longer “anti-Russian” and, in the process, to change Europe’s post-Cold War security order in Moscow’s favor.

nuclear weapons inventory around the world

Figure 1 – Who owns the world’s nuclear weapons

Nor has the risk of escalation to a suicidal nuclear war disappeared:

  • Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov he doesn’t think there will be nuclear war over Ukraine.

  • The remark on Thursday came amid high tensions over the West giving Ukraine military support.

  • Putin has made allusions to nuclear attacks and put his country’s nuclear forces on high alert.

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that he does not think nuclear war is a likelihood in connection with the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

In comments made to press on Thursday in Antalya, Turkey, he said: “I do not want to believe in it and do not believe it,” as Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Lavrov had just concluded a meeting with the Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Dmytro Kuleba, in which the sides failed to make any progress towards ending their conflict.

Most likely, a decision to go nuclear wouldn’t  be a rational choice but a move of desperation. Below are two “rational” scenarios for such a development:

  1. Ukrainian pilots, sick of absorbing the killings in their country’s urban centers, decide with whatever equipment they still have, to expand the war across the Ukrainian borders.

Figure 2 – Russian urban centers beyond the Ukrainian border

Volgograd and Rostov-on-the-Don are likely targets for such attacks. For those of us who are weak on the history of WWII, Volgograd is the renamed city of Stalingrad. The battle of Stalingrad during the second half of 1942, was the turning point in WWII. Now, the city has more than 1 million inhabitants. While Rostov-on-the-Don has a similarly sized population, it is Volgograd that holds a special, justifiably proud corner in every Russian’s heart. Nobody wishes to contemplate the official reaction to any attacks to the city that plays such a large part in Russian identity.

I have no idea (fog of war) of the present status of the Ukrainian air force beyond the fact that it was decimated by the Russians in the opening acts of the invasion but I am sure that enough was left to create havoc on Russia. Ukraine is pushing Poland, which is willing under certain conditions, to provide it with some of the MiG fighter jets left over from the time that Poland was at the center of the Warsaw Pact (more than 30 years ago). One of these conditions was that Washington replenish Poland’s air force with modern fighter jets, however Washington is afraid that doing so would be an act of escalation and has declined the deal.

  1. NATO’s supply chain of non-air force armaments to the Ukraine will provoke a direct Russian attack that NATO will consider as an act of war.

There is a lot of activity now trying to label the situation as the start of WWIII. Indeed, there are some parallels to World Wars I and II. However, the global nuclear arsenal shown in Figure 1 should convince everybody that if such a conflict were to escalate to a nuclear WWIII, it would be the last global conflict between humans and would guarantee the extinction of our (and most other) species.

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“Peak” Oil:  Self-Limiting or Open-Ended?

Posted on March 15, 2022 by climatechangefork

The Age of Oil started around 1800, when drilling techniques started to become available to extract oil from the ground. Figure 1 shows the oil price changes normalized to a constant US$ (2014) from the American Civil War until 2015. Global events that had direct impact on the price are superimposed on the graph. Figure 2 shows the changes in the price of oil over the last year and the impacts of two such global events: COVID-19, and Russia’s attack on  Ukraine. Figure 1 also shows oscillatory behavior of peaks and valleys and stable periods when prices stay relatively low. The fluctuations in oil prices are a constant topic on this blog. (Just put “peak oil” in the search box to examine the issue). The title of this blog asks the question – is today’s behavior any different?

Figure 1 – Oil prices in constant US$ (2014), from the civil war to 2015 (Source: World Economic Forum)

As Figure 2 shows, the recent rise in oil prices started well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and even before the threat of invasion started around November of last year. It was driven first by the COVID-19-related difficulties of adjusting global supply and demand, then strongly accelerated after the invasion.

Figure 2 – Oil prices over the last year (Source: Bloomberg)

Below is a piece written on the issue before the invasion that basically raises the same question that I am asking in this bog: are the increases self-limiting or open-ended?

“The only way to balance this market over the medium term remains high oil prices to slow demand growth,” analysts at Energy Aspects wrote in a note to clients this week cited by Bloomberg.

Bringing more supply, on the other hand, is now more challenging than before the pandemic. ESG issues and the energy transition for the international majors, as well as the new-found and still-largely-holding capital discipline of U.S. shale producers, combine with supply chain bottlenecks, labor shortages, and cost inflation. $100 oil could unleash a lot more U.S. oil production, in theory, but supply chain constraints and record-high frac sand prices are likely to temper growth, analysts at Rystad Energy say.

However, a few days after the invasion, it became clear that the present increase is not only driven by COVID-19 difficulties in the supply chain. Rather, they relate to a strong attempt by most of the world’s countries to slow the Russian attack on Ukraine. As I mentioned in a blog last month (February 8, 2022), Russia is a petrostate with an economy strongly dependent on energy exports. Meanwhile, Europe’s economy relies heavily on energy supply from Russia. Boycotting Russian energy exports is bound to have a strong and complex impact on the global economy.

There are a few options for mitigating the major changes that are now taking place in the global energy supply:

  1. Major increase in drilling and distilling outside of Russia.
  2. Decrease in the energy intensity (energy/GDP) and increase in energy efficiency in various uses of energy.
  3. Increase the use of non-fossil energy sources.

Options 2 and 3 are consistent with ongoing attempts to mitigate climate change, but option 1 is not.

Price increases are the natural economic way to shift the energy use in all three directions without policy interventions. It looks like all three mechanisms are now playing a role, with price increases probably dominant among them.

Hopefully, in future blogs, we will be better able to answer the title question of this blog and I will examine in some detail the present disruption’s impacts on our energy use. In this blog, I will mostly refer to early comments of some published opinions on these issues.

Accelerated Shift to Renewables

Europe:

MILAN, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Shares in European renewables companies rallied in turbulent markets on Monday on bets that the region would accelerate transition towards alternative sources of energy as governments seek ways to reduce reliance on Russian gas imports.

Shares in Nordex (NDXG.DE), Vestas Wind (VWS.CO), Siemens Gamesa (SGREN.MC), Orsted (ORSTED.CO) and EDP Renovaveis (EDPR.LS) rose by between 5% and 12% as investors sought bigger exposure to the sector ahead of top-level discussions in Europe on energy security.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday called for faster expansion of renewable energy after his country halted the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. read more

“Policy changes in Germany and the spike in natural gas prices following recent events could now lead to a step change in how Europe, especially Germany, accelerates renewable energy plans that are currently behind schedule in many countries,” Citi analysts wrote in a note on Monday.

Effect of Renewables on Grid Stability:

Contemporary proliferation of renewable power generation is causing an overhaul in the topology, composition, and dynamics of electrical grids. These low-output, intermittent generators are widely distributed throughout the grid, including at the household level. It is critical for the function of modern power infrastructure to understand how this increasingly distributed layout affects network stability and resilience. This paper uses dynamical models, household power consumption, and photovoltaic generation data to show how these characteristics vary with the level of distribution. It is shown that resilience exhibits daily oscillations as the grid’s effective structure and the power demand fluctuate. This can lead to a substantial decrease in grid resilience, explained by periods of highly clustered generator output. Moreover, the addition of batteries, while enabling consumer self-sufficiency, fails to ameliorate these problems. The methodology identifies a grid’s susceptibility to disruption resulting from its network structure and modes of operation.

However, not everyone agrees that the shifts accelerate the energy transition away from fossil fuels:

The surge in crude oil prices past $100 a barrel has raised a big question: Will this latest spike in the notoriously volatile oil market help to speed the global transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources to fight climate change?

The answer is probably not.

On the one hand, energy analysts say, soaring prices for gasoline, diesel and other products made from crude oil will drive cost-conscious consumers more quickly into electric vehicles and boost investment in competing clean technologies like hydrogen.

But at the same time, these high prices will also drive more drilling of oil and gas around the globe, as fossil fuel companies rush to cash in, sowing the seeds for the boom to turn to bust. That will make oil abundant and affordable again.

That is a pattern that the world has seen repeatedly in the oil age, and one that has punished clean energy investors harshly in the past.

More Drilling Outside Russia:

US to Push More Drilling at Home:

“As crisis looms in Ukraine, U.S. energy leadership is more important than ever,” the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful industry lobby group, wrote on Twitter with a photo that read: “Let’s unleash American energy. Protect our energy security.”

The crux of the industry’s argument is that any effort to restrain drilling in America makes a world already reeling from high oil prices more dependent on oil and gas from Russia, a rival and belligerent fossil fuel superpower.

The industry’s demands have focused on reversing steps the Biden administration has taken to start reining in the production of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.

Arguments in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC):

With the price of a barrel of oil soaring, the group of oil producers known as OPEC Plus declined to take steps to cool the market at its monthly meeting on Wednesday.

In a statement that had surreal qualities given the surging prices in recent weeks, the group, which includes Russia, said current fundamentals and the outlook for the future pointed “to a well-balanced market.”

It blamed “volatility” on “geopolitical developments” — in other words, Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine.

Some analysts were not impressed. “Such an argument will increasingly strain credulity,” Helima Croft, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank, wrote in a note to clients.

Adjustments in the European Unionw

EU to Phase Out Russian Gas, Oil, Coal Imports – Leaders’ Draft

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union is seeking to fully phase out its dependency on Russian energy “well before 2030” to ensure the 27-nation bloc no longer faces difficult decisions about hurting their own economies in geopolitical crises like the invasion of Ukraine.

The EU leaders meet in Versailles outside Paris for a two-day summit starting Thursday and will be working on ways to reduce their dependency on Moscow for fossil fuels.

“We agreed to phase out our dependency on Russian gas, oil and coal imports,” said a draft of the summit declaration seen by The Associated Press.

At the same time, the European Commission already has proposals to make it happen. The EU’s executive arm said its measures “can reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two-thirds before the end of the year” as a first

To summarize:

I will go back to the title, where I ask whether “peak oil” is self-limiting or open-ended. Answering this involves trying to predict the future and the future now is complicated. We can predict some of the components: climate change is not self-limiting but it can be limited by our collective mitigation efforts to de-carbonize the atmosphere. The timing depends on our mitigation efforts, as measured in generations. COVID-19 is on its way out. The big unknown is the endgame of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which is now having major impacts on energy availability. My next blog will try to come up with some answers.

However, with a nation of 45 million being destroyed by its more powerful neighbor that has, so far, resulted in more than 2.5 million (and growing) mostly women and children, forced to escape the country and flooding into the rest of Europe, we shouldn’t worry too much about the price increase of gasoline.

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Fog of War: A Dark Sky

Posted on March 8, 2022 by climatechangefork

 (Source: EverEdge)

Unsurprisingly, this blog will be a continuation of last week’s post, focusing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As with almost all wars (I took part in a few) the “fog of war” has already taken over and it is not easy to discern the truth. The rattle of nuclear escalation continues and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks that the country has a nuclear doctrine and is not run by insane people was not very convincing to many outside Russia. The belief in the Russian command and control system is shaky and it includes doubts about how much Lavrov actually knows President Putin’s thinking.

One example of the fog has to do with the state of Ukraine’s power reactors. We see some coverage that focuses on those that have stopped working and indicates a correlation with the Russian invasion:

Six of Ukraine’s 15 working nuclear reactors have stopped sending power into the nation’s electrical grid — a high rate of disconnection compared with routine operations before the Russian invasion. The reduction in output might result from the war’s interference with operation of the plants, which require a wealth of industrial supplies and care. The cutbacks, Western experts say, may spiral into rolling blackouts that could further cripple the beleaguered country.

However, we see the same issue presented in a way that stresses the safe, stable condition of the reactors that are functioning:

The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine, in its update at 08:00 local time (06:00 GMT) on Monday 28 February said, there have been “no violations” of nuclear power plants’ “safe operation limits and conditions”.

The brief update from the regulator also said: “Radioactive situation meets established norms. Systems of NPP physical protection work in normal mode. NPP security divisions and physical protection services are on high alert.”

It said nine of the country’s 15 nuclear units were connected to the grid on Monday.

One day later we saw some “light” (fire) through the fog! Again, various news outlets presented different perspectives.

Reuters:

LVIV, Ukraine/KYIV, March 4 (Reuters) – Russian invasion forces seized Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant on Friday in what Washington called a reckless assault that risked catastrophe, although a blaze in a training building was extinguished and officials said the facility was now safe.

The New York Times:

LVIV, Ukraine — In darkness, Russia captured Europe’s largest nuclear power plant on Friday in Ukraine, prompting questions about the reasons it invaded the sprawling reactor site as well as the health risks to Ukrainians fighting desperately for their lives and freedom.

And it’s not the only power plant in Ukraine that could face attack by Russian forces. Some troops already appear to be marching toward another facility west of the Zaporizhzhia power plant, a Ukrainian energy official said.

For the moment, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex appears safe, with the plant’s array of sensitive detectors finding no releases of radioactivity above the usual background levels.

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Russia is experiencing heavy global penalties for its un-provoked invasion. I am not referring to direct fighting back with guns and bullets; that has so far only involved Ukrainians and a few brave volunteers. However, the fog that is associated with the impact of the global sanctions on Russia is even thicker than the one that hangs over Ukraine. I addressed some of the impacts, such as the catastrophic fall in the stock market, the value of the ruble, and the country’s creditworthiness in last week’s blog. Since then, its stock market was closed for a week, and communication from Russia has been heavily censored. However, what is happening to Russian properties outside Russia has been much more transparent.

Stocks

Market Watch:

The dollar-denominated secondary listings of Russian companies continued to plunge on the London Stock Exchange on Wednesday, as the local Russian stock market remained shut for a third day. Lukoil LKOD, shares dropped 93%, Novatek NVTK, dropped 77% and Rosneft Oil ROSN, collapsed by 58%. X5 Retail FIVE, , [sic] however, surged 58%. Sberbank SBER, , Russia’s number-one lender, traded as low as a penny.

The Guardian:

The London Stock Exchange has suspended trading in 27 companies with strong links to Russia, including the energy and banking firms Gazprom and Sberbank.

The LSE said it was moving to block trading in the companies that include Severstal, Russia’s largest steel and mining company run by Alexei Mordashov, the country’s richest man.

Also barred are the aluminium company EN+, whose owners include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer, Rosneft and VK, the parent company of social networking sites including VKontakte, which is bigger than Facebook in Russia.

The list also includes the fertiliser company PhosAgro, which is chaired by former LSE chief Xavier Rolet and has shareholders including the billionaire Andrei Guriev, who owns Witanhurst in London’s Highgate, the largest private house in the capital and second in size only to Buckingham Palace.

Also barred are the energy firm Lukoil, Russia’s largest gold producer Polyus, which is controlled by the family of Suleiman Kerimov, as well as Sberbank, the country’s biggest lender, and Novolipetsk Steel, one of the four largest steel companies in Russia.

Oil Trade

Reuters:

LONDON, March 1 (Reuters) – Russian oil trade was in disarray on Tuesday as producers postponed sales, importers rejected Russian ships and buyers worldwide searched elsewhere for needed crude after a raft of sanctions imposed on Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

Numerous nations imposed sweeping sanctions against Russian companies, banks and individuals following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week and global majors announced plans to leave multi-million-dollar positions in Russia.

In addition, the price of oil has risen above $110/barrel—a 10 year high (As Oil Soars, OPEC and Its Allies Are Not Likely to Offer Relief). We still don’t know what the full impact of the soaring prices will be. Next week’s blog will try to explore whether such a peak in oil price is self-limiting or open-ended.

To add to our collective miseries, the second of the IPCC AR6 reports on the state of climate change became available at the end of last month: “Climate Change 2022 – Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability.” The report contains 3675 pages, so I seriously doubt that anybody will read it cover to cover. Newspapers around the world have started to cherry-pick pieces relevant to the readers that they serve. I will do the same and ask my students to go over a few sections that I deem important, then elaborate on some of the cherry-picking in future blogs.

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Russia: The Large Gas Station With Nuclear Weapons

Posted on February 28, 2022 by climatechangefork

The current situation between Russia and Ukraine started in November 2021, when the Russian army began encircling Ukraine. It was about two months before the Winter Olympics were scheduled to start, and President Putin had promised President Xi that he would attend. All of this was a huge hint to the world that—while an invasion was being planned, it would take place after the closing. Indeed, only a few days after the Sunday, February 20th closing, the Russian army started a massive Ukrainian invasion from all possible directions.

A few days before the invasion, a Harvard economist gave a succinct description of the aggressor:

Russia’s economy is “incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former advisor to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times.

“It’s basically a big gas station,” he said.

I was on the same wavelength but less precise with my February 8, 2022 blog, where I described Russia as one of the petrostates: a country whose oil & gas constitute more than 50% of all its exports. It secures about 40% of its total fiscal revenue from fossil fuels.

However, President Putin was not satisfied with surrounding Ukraine with 200,000 soldiers. He also wanted to remind the world that Russia is a major nuclear power—with probably the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. He did so by demonstrating showy nuclear exercises:

MOSCOW, Feb 19 (Reuters) – Russian leader Vladimir Putin oversaw strategic nuclear exercises involving the launch of hypersonic ballistic missiles and other weapons on Saturday, the latest show of strength at a time of acute tension with the West over Ukraine.

Putin watched the drills from a “situation centre” in the Kremlin, sitting alongside his close ally, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

The drills involved launches from warships, submarines and warplanes as well as from land that struck targets on land and at sea, the Kremlin said.

On Sunday we were informed that Russia has put its nuclear forces on high alert.

So now we have a big gas station that is being less than subtle about threatening the world with its nuclear power.

My reaction was to go and re-read The Cold and the Dark, the 1984 book by Paul Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts about the world after a nuclear war. The book is not fiction; it is essentially a summary of a conference where scientists presented peer-reviewed pieces about the consequences of nuclear war. The main message that radiates from the book is that there is no “limited nuclear war.” The only reason our single nuclear war was so short and one-sided is that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 were the only nuclear weapons available at the time, meaning they marked a definitive end to WWII.

Those of us who studied or experienced WWII find many parallels between the dynamics of then and now—starting with the Treaty of Versailles and ending with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. After all, the end of the Cold War and resulting breakup of the Soviet Union echoes the humiliation of Germany at the end of WWI. I was born in Warsaw three months prior to the Nazi invasion. The nuclear weapon was not available to anybody until July 1945.

It is obvious to me that with the present availability of nuclear power, no sane leader would start such a war but I can see how a miscalculation and/or miscommunication that confused a first strike with a second could lead to mutually assured destruction.

The press has been full of attempts to analyze President Putin’s psychology: what does he actually want? He came to power about eight years after the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union that left the US as the only functioning superpower and it is clear that he wants to reverse the clock. This is problematic because the West has used its power to admit most of the Eastern European countries into NATO. Many of these countries used to be part of the Warsaw Pact, a counterpart to NATO dominated by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now that the Warsaw Pact is no longer in play, most of the European countries that border Russia are members of NATO, with the exceptions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Finland. NATO’s Article 5 states flatly that it considers an attack on one of its members as an attack on all of them and will respond accordingly. Russia’s attack on Ukraine is clearly designed to prevent Ukraine from entering NATO.

This crisis comes on top of the three existing global crises the world is already facing (see the February 1, 2022 blog): the COVID-19 pandemic, the worldwide population decline, and the global energy transition driven by climate change. The fertility rates of both Russia and Ukraine are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and both countries are still COVID hot spots. The only one of these transitions in which Russia has any power is in the last one, because of the statistics that I mentioned earlier. Its position in the energy transition and control over other countries’ energy supplies will have a strong impact on how the transition proceeds.

Europe is especially vulnerable to any energy disruption from Russia. The EU depends on Russia for 40% of its gas and 20% of its oil supply. However, this dependence varies sharply among the EU members. The Netherlands and France are the least reliant on it, while the “illiberal” countries of Hungary and Poland depend on Russian export for almost all their supply.

Figures 1 through 4 show some of the complex dynamics of the global energy supply within the last few years. The global rise in the price of oil and natural gas started way before the Russian preparation to attack Ukraine became visible. There is a correlation between the consumption and production of oil (and everything else) and as we are slowly emerging out of the COVID-19 restrictions, we are also dealing with a ton of supply chain difficulties. The Russian attack is of course not helping. More than that, since the West has decided not to put any of its soldiers on the ground in Ukraine, it has instead adopted a policy that aims to inflict economic pain on Russia. On this score, there might be a sign of success. Figure 5 shows what happened to the Moscow stock market on Thursday. It lost 50% of its value at one moment and got back half of it later on. I stopped following after that but things are changing very quickly.

Figure 1 – Daily oil price (WTI) over the past two years

Figure 2 – Recent prices of natural gas

Figure 3 – Recent changes in production and consumption of liquid fuels.

Figure 4 – US regular gasoline price

Figure 5 – Recent Moscow stock market prices

Meanwhile, in other positive news (for the US): “Russia’s credit rating cut to junk by S&P as other agencies mull or take downgrade action.” The exchange rate of the ruble (Russia’s currency) against the US dollar faced a similar demotion. All of us will stay tuned.

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Power and Politics in Education

Posted on February 22, 2022 by climatechangefork

The theme of the blog may look familiar to longtime readers of this blog, even if the exact title is new. If you put the title in the search box without quotation marks, you will get many related entries. The term “power and politics in academia” (again, without quotation marks) yields one entry: a blog from July 18, 2017, that discusses the driving forces of the Anthropocene. I also discussed the role of internal politics in academic institutions recently (December 28, 2021):

This observation is routinely attributed to Henry Kissinger who in a 1997 speech at the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University, said: “I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject they’re discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.”

My focus today is on the role that politics play in teaching and learning, as it directly impacts students. As I have mentioned in earlier blogs (see January 19, 2022, where I discuss cherry-picking and bias), there is a large power differential between teachers and students; bias on the part of teachers has a strong impact on student learning and needs to be discussed.

This issue of bias in student-teacher interaction has been covered extensively but mostly in terms of preferential treatment or neglect of certain students over others, based on characteristics such as gender, race, voluntary class participation, past performance, etc. Here, I want to cover biases that can be associated with an outlook on reality, including political biases.

This image is from https://whatiseducationhq.com which has some really interesting things to say on this same topic.

The first driving force that made me return to this issue is the mix of sex and power—something we hear about almost daily. The issue is institutional but not confined to academic institutions. However, when we speak of it in terms of academic institutions, we usually limit it to higher education because students in high schools and elementary schools are generally too young for consent, and our laws governing such behavior are anchored on the student’s age. In colleges and universities, most students are old enough for consent, so the laws and rules of behavior anchor instead on power differentials. Presently, every institution has its own set of regulations about the sexual behavior of its employees. My own institution (City University of New York) has a 23-page document. Here’s a key paragraph:

Amorous, dating or sexual activity or relationships (“intimate relationships”), even when apparently consensual, are inappropriate when they occur between a faculty member or employee and any student for whom he or she has a professional responsibility. Those relationships are inappropriate because of the unequal power dynamic between students and faculty members and between students and employees who advise or evaluate them, such as athletic coaches or workplace supervisors. Such relationships necessarily involve issues of student vulnerability and have the potential for coercion. In addition, conflicts of interest or perceived conflicts of interest may arise when a faculty member or employee is required to evaluate the work or make personnel or academic decisions with respect to a student with whom he or she is having an intimate relationship. Finally, if the relationship ends in a way that is not amicable, the relationship may lead to charges of and possible liability for sexual harassment.

As I said, the restrictions are strictly based on power differentials rather than age.

Since I mostly teach courses that focus on environmental issues, my thinking is as follows: Society puts so much attention on the role of power in personal relationships but gives relatively less attention to the role of power in teaching. At least in the US, however, the latter role has become highly politicized, especially recently. Here are a few examples:

When it came out, The New York Times’ “1619 Project”  became quite controversial, and remains so:

long-form journalism endeavor developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”

Additionally, some states have made a popular activity of banning certain books in schools. This includes Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust.

Many of us learned, with some horror—whether through the “Inherit the Wind” movie or otherwise—about the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1935, in which segments of society tried to censor teachers from teaching about evolution.

We are now moving through three major global transitions that impact us all: COVID-19, climate change, and the massive reduction in population growth that in many countries is manifesting as population decline (February 1, 2022). The adaptive steps that society is taking to live with these changes are a precious learning opportunity. They can be a laboratory for our students, where they can learn how to use their knowledge in practical settings that will benefit them long after they finish school. Two out of the three transitions will affect my students for much longer than they will me (just in terms of age). However, all three have become highly political.

My climate change classes best demonstrate the related societal impacts and responsibilities of various scenarios. When I ask students about the possible personal impact, I get the response (almost always from female students) that they have decided not to bring kids into this kind of world. These are big decisions, which are politically loaded. We often describe the opinions of climate deniers, but since these are science courses, the arguments must be data-based. Aside from uncertainties in predictions of the future, there is not much science to support climate deniers (according to my data-based bias).

Talks with my colleagues in different departments expose a variety of attitudes regarding how to address similar problems. A Jewish friend was teaching a course on the recent history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with a number of Muslim students taking the course. Both of us (the teacher and I) know that the version of this conflict many Muslim students know often differs from the version known to their Jewish peers. I asked him how he handles the bias disparity.  His answer was that he bases his teaching on original documents. I kept quiet. We both know that he is the one who selects which original documents his class discusses. His cherry-picking of documents might not be such a big issue because his class is an advanced elective, and it is easy for the students to research his background.

When I discussed these issues with another colleague who teaches political science and told him that I am trying to leave my politics out of the classroom, he responded that, in his opinion, everything is driven by politics.

In all these cases, none of us addressed the inherent power asymmetry between teachers and students.

Often, we are not fully aware of our biases. Even if our biases are pointed out to us, if we try to correct for them, we may end up with biases in the opposite direction. In my opinion, we cannot eliminate biases, but we can make them more transparent, such that students can normalize their analysis as part of their learning experience. One good way to accomplish this is by basing more of the course material on class conversation and group teaching: Team-Based Learning (TBL).

Occasionally, students complain about biased teachers. These complaints can go through various routes, including family, press, courts, etc. but most complaints end up with the administration of the institution. Some faculty (in the US now about 20%) has tenure for life—a measure designed to protect their academic freedom but which is conditional on following certain codes of conduct (see for various aspects of these issues:

https://www.aaup.org/article/academic-freedom-online-education

 

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/the-role-of-tenure?aceid=&gclid=CjwKCAiAx8KQBhAGEiwAD3EiP4r2jbuhLqZM-D_aV_Yl6jWX5Ns_mspUR8qT6YXt4IoREbl_sLlgjxoCvMQQAvD_BwE )

Lifetime job tenure is not restricted to academia but without its protection, bias complaints can result in job termination.

The COVID-19 pandemic that triggered such advancement in remote learning offers one way to address these issues. Like many others, during the last two years, I have been teaching online. In one of the climate change courses that I taught, I used the TBL system. I divided the class into groups, which, during class time, I put into separate “rooms” where they could discuss the issues. Outside of class, I opened a Discussion Board on BlackBoard (A commonly used application) where they could communicate, letting them know I would visit periodically to monitor their discussions and add comments or answer questions as needed. A few students commented that opening a separate WhatsApp group might help. I agreed but I told them that group would be totally their own. The results were interesting.

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