Tag Archives: europe

Greece Surrenders to Europe — For Now

by SebastiHussey Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Well, it appears that Greece has accepted the European deal. This means austerity as far as the eye can see, and no guarantees from Europe except that negotiations over the real agreement will begin soon. Greek opinion on the street was mixed:

Miltiades Macrygiannis, proprietor of an antiques store in Athens, Art and Craft Interiors, said he was hopeful and relieved that a so-called Grexit — a Greek exit from the eurozone — appeared to have been avoided. But he was also disgusted.

“It’s simple: We wasted five months,” Mr. Macrygiannis said. In the end, he added, the austerity measures that had to be taken appeared to be worse than what the creditors had been willing to give five months ago, when the new Greek government took office.

All true. And banks will remain closed for at least another week until Greece passes legislation implementing the preconditions just to get talks started. After that, who know? But Grexit is still a live possibility. Alexis Tsipras has chosen against it for now, but there’s no telling if he’ll remain opposed once the Europeans really start twisting the knife.

In any case, if he’s smart he’ll start up all the plans for Grexit so he’s ready to go if that’s the way things turn out. There’s not much point in keeping it secret, either. Everyone knows it’s a real option now, so he might as well have drachmas and government IOUs ready to go if the day comes. Grexit may never come, but if it does, there’s no point in making it even more chaotic than it has to be.

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Greece Surrenders to Europe — For Now

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Alexis Tsipras’ Secret Plan for Bailing Out Greece Has Been Brilliant

by StaciAndersen Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

Some anonymous drone at Free Exchange notes the damage done by the Greek decision to call a referendum on the European austerity proposals:

A lamentable feature of the Greek crisis of the past few months is the extent to which it has restoked national antipathies, on the part of both the Greeks and the Germans….But it is not just political damage that the referendum has done to Greece’s cause. The decision to call it and the extraordinary uncertainty that generated at home as well as abroad inflicted a body blow to the economy by causing the banks to be closed now for two weeks as the ECB capped the emergency central-bank lending that was allowing cash to be withdrawn by anxious Greeks fearing a return to the drachma that would slash the value of their deposits. As a result Greece now needs more money and over a longer period — €53.5 billion ($60 billion) until 2018.

Such is the bad blood on both sides, particularly the Greeks and the Germans, that there is still scepticism about whether they can come together at this latest eleventh hour.

Hmmm. Here’s a Slatepitchy suggestion. Maybe it’s all going according to plan. Consider this. It’s late June and prime minister Alexis Tsipras is trying to negotiate an agreement with the Europeans. It doesn’t go well, but he knows he has no choice but to swallow hard and accept their terms. As galling as it is, it’s the only way to save Greece. But he knows that if he simply signs off on the agreement, his party will revolt and parliament will reject it. So he comes up with a cunning plan.

The plan is this: piss off the Germans beyond the bounds of reason. Step 1: denounce the European proposal and call a referendum. Step 2: Go home and campaign loudly for a No vote on the proposal. Step 3: The Germans, now so angry they’re practically shaking with rage, press the ECB to cut off Greek banks, causing economic chaos. Step 4: Tsipras wins the referendum, thus getting the backing of his people. Step 5: Tsipras cools his heels for a day or two to let the economic chaos really sink in. Step 6: Tsipras heads to Brussels. After making everyone wait a few more days just to show that he can’t be pushed around, he tables an austerity plan that essentially caves in completely to the European proposal that he knew he’d have to accept eventually. Step 7: Tsipras returns home to Athens, where economic chaos has become so severe that no one cares anymore what’s in the damn proposal he just agreed to. They just want the banks to open and the local pharmacies to have stocks of insulin. Step 8: He signs the proposal. Step 9: The ECB opens the spigots, life gets back to normal, and Tsipras is a hero.

Not likely, you say? Tsipras isn’t that smart? Probably so. Still, it’s quite likely that Tsipras isn’t as stupid as some people are making out. He knew perfectly well that defaulting would lead to economic chaos and an exit from the euro, but he also knew that Greeks didn’t really believe this in their guts. They needed a demonstration. So he gave them one. If his goal all along wasn’t Grexit, but (a) an agreement with Europe that (b) would be accepted by the Greek population, he did a pretty good job.

Very clever, Mr. Tsipras!

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Alexis Tsipras’ Secret Plan for Bailing Out Greece Has Been Brilliant

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Greece Caves In

by DenisBolt94 Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: On June 22nd, Greece proposed an austerity package of spending cuts and tax increases worth about €8 billion over two years. European leaders called it a credible proposal, the first they had ever seen from Greece. By June 24th, they had changed their tune. They were roughly OK with the €8 billion figure, but didn’t like the Greek tax and spending plans for getting there. Later in the day, the Europeans responded by making substantial changes to the Greek proposal and sending back a heavily red-lined revision.

The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was apoplectic, arguing that what mattered was meeting the deficit target, not meeting it in specific ways. “This odd stance seems to indicate that either there is no interest in an agreement or that special interests are being backed,” he said. Two days later he abandoned the talks and called a referendum on the European proposal. Last Sunday the Greek population overwhelmingly rejected the European plan 61-38 percent.

So how did that work out for Greece? Not so well:

Under a 10-page blueprint completed late Thursday, the country said it would undertake austerity measures worth between 12 billion and 13 billion euros ($13 billion to $14 billion), including raising taxes on cafes, bars and restaurants.

The amount is significantly higher than the package of cuts that Greek voters rejected in a hastily called referendum on the bailout Sunday. But nearly two weeks of a banking shutdown that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill have left this Mediterranean nation with few other options to avoid sliding into bankruptcy.

The Greek blueprint for pension cuts and VAT increases is essentially copied word-for-word from the June 24 European proposal. There may still be sticking points elsewhere (I haven’t done an exhaustive line-by-line comparison of the two documents), but VAT and pensions were always the key areas of difference. Combine those concessions with the higher deficit target in the new blueprint and Greece hasn’t just caved in to the Europeans, it’s all but prostrated itself and begged not to be kicked out of the eurozone.

Or so it seems. There’s always the possibility of gotchas hidden away in a stray word or two. But at a first glance, it looks like total capitulation. Two weeks of bank closings and import stoppages has given the Greeks a vivid taste of what life would be like if Europe forced it to abandon the euro—as it seemed they were all too willing to do—and that short taste was quite enough, thank you very much. Viewed through that lens, apparently another few years of German-enforced austerity didn’t look so bad after all.

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Greece Caves In

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The New York Stock Exchange Has a Long History of Shutdowns

by KelleKYUxqg Posted on July 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Just after 11:32 am on Wednesday, the New York Stock Exchange experienced an extremely rare halt in all trading. NYSE leadership cited “an internal technical issue” and not, as many feared, a cyber attack.

It’s not the first time a random event has interrupted the 223-year-old stock exchange. Most memorably, the NYSE closed following V-J Day, when troops returned at the end of World War II, and for three full days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But the NYSE has closed for everything from the funerals of major world figures—such as Queen Victoria of England (1901), Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), and Richard Nixon (1994)—to extreme heat (August 4, 1917).

Here is a brief history of events that halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange.

September 1873: The collapse of the Jay Cooke & Company, a major financial institution, caused the New York Stock Exchange’s first closure, for 10 days, due to market calamity.

July 1914: The start of World War I in Europe shuttered the exchange for four months, the longest closure on record.

May 25, 1946: The NYSE shut down due to a railroad strike, part of one of the largest waves of strikes in US history.

1967 – 1996: Over this span of 29 years, eight ferocious blizzards either delayed the opening bell or closed the exchange early.

February 10, 1969: A snowstorm dubbed the “Lindsay Storm” shuttered the stock exchange for a day and a half amid 15.3 inches of snow.

July 21, 1969: This closure was planned, to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing.

July 14, 1977: The NYSE closed due to a major blackout across New York City.

October 27, 1997: A failsafe instantaneously stopped all trading for 30 minutes after the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 350 points.

May 6, 2010: The same circuit breaker that closed the NYSE in 1997 halted trading after a “flash crash” caused by automated high-frequency trading.

September 11, 2001: Terrorist attacks closed the exchange through September 14. The exchange also closed exactly a year later to mark the anniversary of the attacks.

October 29 – 30, 2012: The NYSE shut down while Hurricane Sandy battered the Eastern Seaboard. It was the first time a weather event closed the market for two full days in 124 years, after a snowstorm that dumped more than 40 feet of snow closed the exchange in 1888.

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The New York Stock Exchange Has a Long History of Shutdowns

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Greece Is Just a Few Days Away From Unconditional Surrender to Germany

by AnnX48qpyih Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Apparently the Greek prime minister is blinking:

In a letter sent on Tuesday to the creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other eurozone countries — Mr. Tsipras said Greece was “prepared to accept” a deal set out publicly over the weekend by the creditors, with small modifications to some of the central points of contention: pension cuts and tax increases. In the letter, released publicly on Wednesday, Mr. Tsipras linked Greece’s acceptance of the terms to a new package of bailout aid that would need to be negotiated.

The development initially raised the prospect of progress in resolving a financial crisis that has sent shudders through global markets and deeply strained European unity. President François Hollande of France called for talks in the hopes of getting a deal by the weekend, saying, according to Agence-France Presse: “We need to be clear. The time for a deal is now.”

But other European leaders, fed up with Mr. Tsipras and in no mood for quick compromise, dashed any hopes of an immediate breakthrough.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany responded by repeating her position that there should be no further negotiations until Greece holds the referendum on Sunday.

In other words, Merkel is not even willing to grant Tsipras a few meaningless face-saving concessions. Why? I think Merkel believes she now holds all the cards and has no reason to make any concessions at all, no matter how small. And I suspect she’s right. In the end, the Greek public will be unwilling to back Tsipras in Sunday’s referendum and will vote to accept the European deal as is. The potential catastrophe of default and leaving the euro is just too scary for most of them to contemplate.

So Tsipras will be out and Europe will effectively have total control of Greek finances. After six months of cage rattling, the Greek revolt will be over and future governments will simply have to accept whatever pain Merkel wants to deal out. At that point, with Tsipras gone, it’s actually possible she’ll agree to a few concessions here and there. Policy issues aside, there’s little doubt that Merkel’s personal contempt for Tsipras has done a lot to cement her hard line toward Greece.

So that’s my prediction. Unless Tsipras caves completely beforehand, the referendum will be held on Sunday and Greeks will vote to stay in the euro and accept Germany’s terms. It will basically be an unconditional surrender.

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Greece Is Just a Few Days Away From Unconditional Surrender to Germany

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Ikea is putting more than a billion bucks into the climate fight

by JeannieSheean Posted on June 4, 2015

Ikea is putting more than a billion bucks into the climate fight

By on 4 Jun 2015 3:14 pmcommentsShare

Ikea announced today that it plans to put 1 billion euros toward fighting climate change — more than $1.12 billion. Sixty percent of that will go to build renewable energy capacity, especially wind, moving the company toward its goal of using 100 percent clean energy. The remaining 40 percent will go toward helping poor countries adapt to climate change.

The furniture superstore’s business is booming as people across North America, Europe, and Asia flock to Ikea stores to purchase cheap, supposedly easy-to-assemble furniture and, sometimes, solar panels. And to watch couples fight. Last year the company made more than $32 billion.

But all of those sales take an environmental toll: Fortune magazine reported last year that Ikea consumes 1 percent of the world’s commercially logged wood, turning it into things like stylish laundry baskets and unobtrusive bedframes. And, according to the company’s own statistics, only 41 percent of Ikea’s customers see the company as one that “takes social and environmental responsibility.” Ikea wants to get that figure up to 70 percent this year.

Still, Ikea’s CEO told Reuters that the company’s primary motivation was fighting climate change, not PR. “Getting that message out to the customers is secondary,” he said.

The money for renewable energy investment will add to the $1.7 billion the company has already invested in wind and solar, including 700,000 solar panels on its buildings and more than 300 off-site wind turbines.

“I am heartened to see corporate leadership in this area,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator on the U.N. climate agreement for the Alliance of Small Island States, which stand to be hit particularly hard by climate change.

Green-minded Ikea customers will also likely be heartened by the news, which is at least as exciting as the vegan Swedish meatballs that started showing up in store restaurants a few months ago.

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Ikea is putting more than a billion bucks into the climate fight

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Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

by SusanaPvzbtr Posted on June 3, 2015

Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

By on 3 Jun 2015 2:42 pmcommentsShare

As the world moves toward a climate change deal this December, the oil industry has dived into an all-out campaign to rebrand itself as the climate-friendly natural gas industry.

On Monday, six of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies wrote to the U.N., saying they stand ready to accept a price on carbon. This kind of market mechanism, they noted, could encourage “the use of natural gas in place of coal.” And if that were to happen, well, they wouldn’t complain.

In fact, most major oil companies have been focusing more on natural gas in recent years in anticipation of a global response to climate change — and they want us to know. “Total is gas, and gas is good,” the CEO of the French oil company said Monday. And on Tuesday, Shell’s CFO argued for leaving coal in the ground but not oil and gas. Both companies produce more gas than oil.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil and Chevron, two American companies that didn’t sign on to the European companies’ letter calling for a price on carbon, are also pushing gas as the future fossil fuel in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S.

But there’s a big problem with this rebranding effort: Many scientists and economists have found that a switch to natural gas won’t necessarily decrease our carbon footprint. It may, in fact, make it bigger. There are two reasons for this: the methane leaks that come hand-in-hand with natural gas drilling and transportation, and economics.

First, the methane leaks. The gas is 84 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame, but data on how much of it is leaking into the atmosphere from gas drilling operations remains sketchy. In the U.S., the EPA estimated in 2012 that 30 million metric tons were seeping out of pipelines and pumps annually. That accounts for a full 9 percent of the U.S.’s total climate change–causing emissions.

And even if the industry were to completely deal with its methane-leakage problem, a number of studies — some looking at the U.S., some looking at the entire world — have found that the economics of natural gas make it unlikely that the fuel would help the world cut emissions. Natural gas is cheap right now. As oil companies are eagerly pointing out, it’s often even cheaper (and always much cleaner) than coal, which currently accounts for 40 percent of the world’s energy. But natural gas is so cheap that it would also likely undercut the cleanest options, renewables. The low price would also encourage people to use more energy. We would essentially shift from burning coal and oil to burning natural gas — and investment in natural gas infrastructure would displace investment in clean energy and efficiency.

Meanwhile, world population will continue to grow and developing countries will continue to hook more of their citizens up to the grid. Energy production will balloon. And we’d be relying on a fuel that is, yes, cleaner than coal and oil, but that still generates a significant amount of CO2. In the end, many studies show, our carbon footprint wouldn’t be much different than if we just stuck with the less-than-great track we’re on.

So if these oil companies truly “stand ready to play [their] part” in stopping climate change, as they stated in their letter to the U.N., pushing natural gas is not the way to go about it. If they just want to knock their coal industry competitors out of the energy market — well, that’s something a bit different from addressing the climate crisis.

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Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

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Elevated paths give San Francisco cyclists the high ground

by JesusMoorcdss Posted on May 6, 2015

Elevated paths give San Francisco cyclists the high ground

By on 6 May 2015commentsShare

Pretty soon, bikers in San Francisco won’t just have the moral high ground over cars: They’ll literally ride on higher ground.

The city plans to install new elevated bike lanes that will not only keep cyclists safe from speeding cars, but also give them a better vantage point from which to flip off the drivers of said cars. Here’s CityLab with the details:

The city’s Municipal Transportation Agency will oversee the construction of an elevated pathway on Valencia Street in the southern Mission District. The curb-hugging lane will be raised about 2 inches above the road surface, and will measure 6-feet wide with an additional 5-foot “buffer zone.” The city will follow up with a handful of other raised lanes next year, all planned for areas with high rates of bicycle injuries.

Of course, this is already a thing in Europe, where cyclists rule and drivers drool:

Raised lanes are a relatively new concept in the United States, though they’ve been around for a while in Europe. The idea is that by jacking up the path a bit, motorists will be less likely to stray into cyclist space. Cyclists, meanwhile, won’t feel as compelled to ride on the sidewalk in heavy-traffic corridors. It’s a minimalist form of what’s known as a protected bike lane, and one that’s not as in-your-face as, say, defensive lines of bollards or planters.

You can imagine the city of San Francisco is a lot like a mom (let’s call her Fran) with three kids: the jerky eldest (Auto), the quiet middle child (Walker), and the quirky and rebellious younger one (…Bike? Wheeler?), and this is Fran’s way of saying “Auto, Bike — stop hitting each other! And leave your poor brother Walker alone; if he just wants to sit by himself and read, let him!”

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San Francisco Wants to Lower Bike Injuries by Raising Bike Lanes

, CityLab.

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

by IvoryT33yv Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tom Steyer’s climate-focused political group is already gearing up for the 2016 presidential race, announcing on Monday a new effort that will focus on putting Republican candidates on the defense when it comes to global warming.

NextGen Climate’s chief strategist, Chris Lehane, said in a call with reporters that the group’s mission heading into 2016 is to “disqualify” candidates who deny that climate change is real or caused by human activity by proving that “they don’t have what it takes to be president.” The effort will be called Hot Seat, and NextGen Climate says it will involve media and on-the-ground campaigns in key electoral states aimed at linking Republican deniers to the Koch brothers and other interests that seek to undermine climate science.

The idea, NextGen says, is to force Republican candidates who are skeptical of climate change to defend their views right out of the gate.

“If you’re in a position that is different from 97 percent of scientists, that does raise basic competency questions in terms of whether people are going to want to give you the keys to the White House,” said Lehane.

Their first target, Lehane said, is Rand Paul, who is expected to announce his candidacy Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky. The group is planning to hit Paul with a stunt involving a “lie detector test” to force him to go on the record about his views on climate change, and will also follow the candidate to Iowa. Paul has previously questioned the consensus view among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the climate, but has also tried to moderate his stance somewhat in recent months.

The group intends to portray Republican candidates who deny climate change as being subservient to the will of major donors like the Koch brothers, the conservative fossil-fuel billionaires. “The Kochs have acquired the Republican Party and purposed it,” said Lehane. “Now they have these various Republican candidates saying they don’t believe in the science.”

Through his NextGen Climate project, billionaire investor Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. The group’s effort had decidedly mixed results: Of the seven races it targeted, NextGen’s endorsed candidates won in only three. But the group has maintained that 2014 was a success, since Republican candidates were forced to go on the record about their views on climate change.

“Climate really is playing a significant role in the national election and in battleground states,” said Lehane. He noted that 2014 was the “first time that climate had really been elevated to that level in the election, where folks who believe the science were able to use it offensively, and deniers were on defense.”

In 2014, NextGen’s efforts included major television and online ad buys, as well as in-state spectacles such as following Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown’s campaign around New Hampshire in a truck loaded with oil barrels and rolling a replica of Noah’s Ark into Florida to confront Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

The group thinks that 2016 will be an even bigger year for climate, given the higher turnouts in presidential election years and the role young voters will play in the debate. Polls have found that 80 percent of voters under the age of 35 support the actions the Obama administration has taken to address climate change, and even 52 percent of young Republican voters said they were more inclined to back a candidate who supported those climate efforts.

Lehane was coy about how much Steyer intends to spend this time around, stating only that “he’s made pretty clear he will spend what it takes.” It was strongly implied that the dollar figure would be higher than it was in 2014, as the group believes that 2016 is “the defining election of our time.”

Hot Seat will include an “aggressive, state-of-the-art social media” element as well as “highly targeted” radio, television and online advertising, Lehane said. The group also plans to have a strong presence on college campuses and to engage in targeted outreach to young voters. The effort will be run from a “high-tech war room” in San Francisco.

NextGen is already planning to follow Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a potential 2016 candidate, as he travels to Europe later this month. Lehane didn’t elaborate on the group’s intentions for Walker’s trip, but said, “I can at the minimum guarantee it will be highly entertaining.”

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

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The coal industry is so totally screwed

by RamonitaStoate1 Posted on March 26, 2015

The coal industry is so totally screwed

By on 25 Mar 2015commentsShare

The American coal industry is terminally ill — and that should serve as a warning to investors who might be tempted to put their money into other fossil fuels.

That’s the gist of a new report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which warns that oil and natural gas could also wind up becoming stranded assets — property that under other scenarios could be worth a lot of money, but not in the real situation we face as the climate warms and the market shifts in response.

Coal use has been decoupled from America’s economic growth for a number of reasons, the report finds. The biggest is the availability of other cheap sources of energy — since 2008, the abundance of shale gas from America’s fracking boom has played a big role in driving that trend, but so have renewable energies like solar and wind. Increasingly strict regulations on air pollution and the energy sector from the Obama administration’s EPA have also played a role.

“Cheap gas has knocked coal off its feet, and the need to improve air quality and ever-lower renewables costs has kept coal down for the count,” said Luke Sussams, co-author of the report and a Carbon Tracker senior researcher. He and his colleagues posit that investors in oil, and eventually even natural gas, could see a similar trend. The Carbon Tracker Initiative was one of the first groups to promote the idea of a “carbon bubble,” in which, as the world confronts global warming, fossil fuel investors would see the value of their assets collapse. Companies stand to lose billions, the think tank said.

This week’s Carbon Tracker report comes on the heels of a separate report from CoalSwarm and the Sierra Club that looks at international coal use. That picture, too, does not look good for fossil fuel investors. From “Boom and Bust: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline”:

In India, projects shelved or cancelled since 2012 outnumber project completions by six to one, and new construction initiations are at a near-standstill. In both Europe and the U.S., the coal fleet is shrinking, with retirements outnumbering new plants. China faces a looming glut in coal-fired generating capacity, with plant utilization rates at a 35-year low.

The report also finds that more than two dozen U.S. coal companies have gone bankrupt in the past three years, and those that haven’t lost more than 80 percent of their share value.

The coal industry, of course, disputes these gloomy assessments. Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the U.S., recently predicted that U.S. coal usage would increase 10 million to 30 million tons by 2017, and global demand could grow by 500 million metric tons during the same period.

The company and its coal-loving friends are also making every effort to challenge forthcoming EPA regulations that could hasten coal’s collapse. The company is paying well-respected constitutional scholar and former Obama mentor Laurence Tribe to argue that the administration’s Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional. And coal’s allies in Congress are trying to undermine the EPA plan with, among other things, an amendment to a big budget bill that would allow states to opt out. If the amendment passes, it will likely face a presidential veto, spurring yet another budget standoff.

But, as the Carbon Tracker report shows, the EPA’s efforts are just one factor among many that have weakened coal’s prospects. Ultimately, the industry is up against a global energy economy in which coal, with its huge environmental and health costs, increasingly just doesn’t make sense. And no amount of lobbying Congress or arguing in court will slow that trend.

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The coal industry is so totally screwed

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