It’s clear, when energy becomes short in supply, free market forces can’t look after all of society. Just the wealthy. That’s why governments are having to step in, propping up an industry that is raking in massive profits. But could free market forces drive a more efficient delivery of energy, by making lower cost renewable energy able to compete on a more level playing field. Whilst there’s no doubt pricing is distorted in favour of fossil fuel provides, Steve tells Phil there’s still no option but to nationalise the provision of energy, something we know will never happen.

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The post Steve Keen, Phil Dobbie – Energy, a free market failure appeared first on Brave New Europe.

After a half-century of research and development, carbon capture and storage projects are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and nearly three-quarters of the carbon dioxide they manage to capture each year is sold off to fossil companies and used to extract more oil, according to a sweeping industry assessment released today by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

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Photo: Climate Group/flickr

The post The Energy Mix: 10 of 13 ‘Flagship’ CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes appeared first on Brave New Europe.

Italy is extremely exposed to climate breakdown, and it is already being badly affected, but with elections upcoming on 25 September it is not part of the debate

Cross-posted from the Green European Journal
Picture of Italy’s Po Valley, by European Space Agency
The Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned on 21 July 2022, prompting the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to dissolve Parliament and call an early election to be held on 25 September.

It is the first time since 1919 that there has been a summer election campaign in Italy. In the brief time available, the parties are busy creating alliances and defining programmes. However, the one subject entirely absent from the electoral campaign is the climate crisis. Its absence is even more surprising considering the profound effects of global warming that Italy is already going through.

For several months, the Po Basin has been gripped in an unprecedented drought. The complete absence of snow in the Alps last winter and no rain for the last six months has transformed the largest Italian river into a small stream. In some areas, you can walk on large sandy beaches that have emerged from the riverbeds.

The lack of water could have catastrophic effects. The Po Basin is home to a third of the Italian population lives, generates 40 per cent of Italian gross domestic product, 35 per cent of agricultural production, and 55 per cent of its hydroelectricity. More than one hundred communes in Piedmont and Lombardy have begun to ration water for civilian use. Its use for irrigation is limited in several areas and hydroelectricity energy production has been interrupted. According to estimates by Coldiretti, the main Italian agricultural confederation, a third of the national production in maize, soya, wheat, rice, and fruit has already been lost. In the Po Delta, where the Po flows out into the sea, the minimal flow of the river has resulted in a sharp increase in the so-called “salt wedge”, that is to say, sea water at the mouth of the river. The increase compromises the availability of fresh water for irrigation and puts supplies of drinking water at risk in the area.

The drought in the Po Basin is not the only palpable manifestation of the effects of the climate crisis in Italy. On 3 July, an enormous serac broke off the Marmolada glacier killing 11 hikers. The clearly higher average seasonal temperatures are causing glaciers throughout the Alps to melt and hiking has been banned from several areas.

Downstream, the Mediterranean Sea has recorded extremely high temperatures. According to ENEA, the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development, the water is between 4 to 5 degrees above the seasonal average. This spike substantially changes marine ecosystems. Invasive alien species appear and find habitats well suited to their survival, while native species disappear.

An inept political class

These facts are not subject to public debate, nor are they analysed in the programmes of the political parties standing for elections. The climate impacts recorded this year are still generally considered to be an anomaly. As the Minister of Ecological Transition in Draghi’s cabinet, Roberto Cingolani, said, “We hope that the drought is a one-off occurrence”. The statement by the minister who should have been guiding the ecological transition is a clear example of the Italian political class inability to confront a crisis even as it hits the country so significantly.

This year is not an anomaly but a confirmation of a trend. Italy is the hub of what the scientists call a “climate hot spot”, an area of the planet where the effects of global heating are more obvious than elsewhere. The geographic position of the country, in the centre of the Mediterranean, particularly exposes Italy to rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

There were 2061 of these last year in Italy according to the European Severe Weather Database that monitors Europe every day. This means that on average, in five or six areas of the country, winds with a speed of over 80 kilometres an hour, flooding, or hailstorms with hail over two centimetres in diameter were recorded every day. These increasingly common extreme events cause material damage and victims, exposing the fragility of a country whose territory underwent intense urbanisation and overdevelopment during the last 60 years.

Land consumption in Italy is clearly above the European average. According to data recently published by Ispra, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, in 2021 more than 2 metres squared were lost per second, the highest rate in the last 10 years. When land is consumed, ecosystem services are lost and territories become less able to absorb specific climatic shocks such as extreme events and heatwaves. According to Ispra, the damage caused by land consumption in the last 10 years is between 81 and 99 billion euros.

It is precisely this inability to understand the extent of the climate crisis that makes it difficult to put prevention policies in place. While Italy is one of the European countries most affected by global heating, it is one of the few that has failed to develop a serious adaptation policy.

The national climate change adaptation plan (PNACC), a document written by a group of experts in 2017, has been gathering dust in the ministerial archives for five years. The government has yet to produce an environmental evaluation. Evidently, the government does not consider it as a priority.

Draghi’s failures

Upon taking office, now-departed Prime Minister Draghi had announced incisive action to combat the climate crisis. “The warming of the planet has direct effects on our lives and on our health due to pollution, hydrogeological fragility, and rising sea levels which could make many areas of some coastal cities uninhabitable” said Mario Draghi in his inaugural speech on 17 February 2021. Immediately afterwards he announced policies to help companies become more sustainable. He then created, for the first time in Italy, the Ministry of Ecological Transition to guide the green conversion of the production, transport, and energy supply systems.

One and a half years later, the government’s performance in this aspect is disappointing. Not only has the adaptation plan not been approved, but all the policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions have been weakened. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia exposed Italy’s dependence on Moscow for 40 per cent of its gas imports. This dependence should have stimulated a change in the country’s energy model. Instead of accelerating the transition to renewable, the Draghi government frenetically searched for new gas suppliers such as Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The contracts concluded, as well as investments in gas transport and regasification infrastructure, demonstrate the will to remain anchored to a system built on the combustion of fossil fuels.

As for the enormous amount of resources allocated to Italy by Next Generation EU, the EU post-pandemic recovery fund, the money will only partially go to combatting the climate crisis. Only 13 per cent of the 234.8 billion euros earmarked for Italy are allocated for specifically “green” actions according to an analysis by Green Recovery Tracker, well below the 37 per cent threshold established by Europe.

The election campaign that has just begun does not seem likely to break with this trend of minimising the problem. How best to combat the climate crisis through both mitigation and adaptation policies is absent from the political debate. This is not surprising for parties of the centre-right coalition, the favourites in the polls. They have always tended to ignore the severity of the emergency, at times openly denying climate change. However, even the centre-left currently limits itself to vague proclamations about the need to address the environmental crisis without offering any more detail.

While politics ignores the problem, there are many voices in civil society who want swift action now. Significant from this point of view is the open letter that a group of scientists and climatologists have recently written to the political class.

“Climate science has shown us for some time that Italy, inserted in the context of a climate change hot spot like the Mediterranean, is more affected than other areas of the world by the recent anthropic climate change and its effects,” starts the letter, published on 3 August and also signed by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Giorgio Parisi. “So we hope for the development of political programmes on these subjects and prompt action by the next government to combat the climate crisis and its impacts.”

If scientists have felt it necessary to go against their usual reluctance and make this public appeal, it means that they consider continued political inaction to be a serious problem. For the moment, the call to action has not had much effect but it is also true that the electoral campaign has just begun.

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The post Stefano Liberti: The Climate Won’t Wait for Italian Politics appeared first on Brave New Europe.

Bernie got it right again.

Read the article here.

The post Ben Burgis: We should have listened to Bernie Sanders about Ukraine appeared first on Brave New Europe.

Vaccine apartheid is not in the news anymore but it is still live and well.

This article was produced by Globetrotter
Picture by Public Services International
The UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima had appealed before the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. At a press conference, Byanyima had said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” During the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place from June 12 to 17, the rich countries did precisely that. They blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. After two years of the WTO “postponing”—or blocking—the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the club of the rich countries—the European Union, the United States and the UK—ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. The profits of Big Pharma once again trumped the lives and health of the people. This is also what happened during the AIDS epidemic.

The so-called “concessions” accepted at the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) do simplify some of the cumbersome procedures that were agreed to under the Doha Declaration for issuing compulsory licenses for medicines. But it makes it much more difficult for countries like India and China, which have considerable manufacturing capacity, to supply vaccines under such compulsory licenses. So yes, countries wanting vaccines can issue compulsory licenses more easily—but to whom, if not the countries with manufacturing capacity?

In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters. Unlike many medicines, which are small molecule drugs and therefore easy to patent, vaccines are large molecules and belong to the group of medicines that are called biologics. The key to manufacturing biologics is not the formula of the compound but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicating the complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action, including by the WTO. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.

The upshot is that Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic. Less than 20 percent of people in Africa, which has a population of about 700 million, have been fully vaccinated, while millions of vaccine doses are going unused and are going to waste in the United States. We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.

Just to put it in perspective, Pfizer’s profits roughly doubled in 2021 from 2020, with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contributing to a significant part of those profits. If Pfizer were a country, its earnings of $81 billion last year would have placed it ahead of the GDP of countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya, according to an analysis of World Bank data by the organization Global Justice Now. Apart from vaccines, the monopoly over diagnostics and antiviral drugs also pushes up the costs for the people constantly battling the virus, while generating windfall profits for Big Pharma.

The only waiver in the MC12 was on compulsory licenses for vaccines. It did not address patents on diagnostics and antiviral drugs. It also did not address the other issue that had been raised that the WTO includes in its waiver other intellectual property rights such as trade secrets, which are essential to the mass production of vaccines.

The MC12 kicked the ball six months down the line on making a decision about doing away with patents for diagnostics and antiviral drugs, with very little chance that the rich countries would have a sudden change of heart on these issues, considering their continued stance on these matters over the course of the pandemic that has already killed millions.

Why is immunizing the global population important? Simply put, the more people that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infects, the more the chance of new variants emerging. There is a misguided belief among some people that the more the virus mutates, the more benign it is likely to become. This used to be a common opinion among a section of the medical community. However, today evolutionary biologists hold that there is no evidence that viruses mutate to become more benign. And even if it is held to be true in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes, the economist, put it, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

The longer we live with a pandemic that continues to infect around half a million to a million people every day, the more we are dicing with the possibility of a new variant emerging that can be as transmissible as omicron and can also lead to larger case fatalities than we have seen before. The transmissibility of the virus is maximum when the infected patient has only mild symptoms, is physically and socially mobile, and can therefore infect others. This is the window in which the virus spreads. Whether the patient subsequently recovers or dies has little impact on the replication of the disease in other people the patient might have infected. It may have an impact on our social behavior, but that has little to do with the virus becoming more benign with time.

Over time, people do tend to generate more immunity to the virus, but that is what then drives the future evolutionary path of the virus. If delta showed higher transmissibility, then omicron has a much higher immune escape. This means that omicron can bypass our immunity derived from earlier infections or vaccines. Of course, if the evolution of the virus leads to the patient being so sick right from the beginning that the person cannot move around at all, that will halt or lower the transmission of the virus. But that is not how the SARS-CoV-2 virus behaves.

How is SARS-CoV-2 likely to evolve over the next few years? As immunologists tell us, the evolutionary trajectory of the virus depends on the complex interplay of a number of factors that shape the response of our immune system to the evolution of the virus.

Waiting for the virus to turn more benign or a mythical herd immunity cannot be an answer to the current pandemic. The vaccines are crucial to any public health response to the pandemic as countries across the world fight to cut down the number of new infections and, therefore, the roots of new transmissions. And yes, for the foreseeable future, we will have to live with repeating our vaccine booster doses as we fine-tune the vaccines to newer variants.

While the patents on antiviral drugs as a cure for COVID-19 are important, and they will certainly help to cut down the deaths and complications of long COVID, again, patents come in the way of their use. The antiviral drugs are effective only within a small window of the first few days of the disease, which means that they have to be made available cheaply for the people so that they can buy them from a pharmacy. The high cost and the control over the patents of these drugs do not provide a large enough market. A small market and high prices lead to a Catch-22 situation: the prices are high because the market is small; the market is small since the prices are high.

Again, open licensing of the antiviral drugs might make it possible to create a large market for them. But this is what the WTO does not allow. The route of compulsory licensing under the WTO is cumbersome, and its relaxation in the MC12 means that countries like India, which were crucial in fighting the AIDS epidemic, are supposed to opt out as suppliers. They then cannot become antiviral suppliers for COVID-19 as they had been for AIDS antiviral drugs.

Why don’t countries that have the capacity to manufacture advanced vaccines—India, China, Russia and South Africa—come together to offer technology and supplies to the rest of the world? Why don’t countries collaborate with Cuba, a biologic powerhouse, to produce vaccines locally? Cuba has developed five such vaccines, two of which are already under large-scale production.

The answer lies in the “rules-based international order” propagated by the club of the rich. The rules include sanctions on many countries, including Russia, Cuba and China. For those not yet under sanctions, there is the threat of future sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK—the gang of three that teamed up in the WTO to defeat the India-South Africa patent waiver initiative. The United States also has its domestic law, the U.S. Trade Act, Section 301, for “protecting” its intellectual property under which it threatens countries with U.S. sanctions. India and China figure prominently every year in the list of countries whose laws and actions do not conform to U.S. domestic laws. If the United States and its allies do not win in the WTO, they then use their “rules-based order” where they get to make the rules.

Welcome to our brave new world, where, to paraphrase Winnie Byanyima, death triumphs over life.

Support us and become part of a media that takes responsibility for society

BRAVE NEW EUROPE is a not-for-profit educational platform for economics, politics, and climate change that brings authors at the cutting edge of progressive thought together with activists and others with articles like this. If you would like to support our work and want to see more writing free of state or corporate media bias and free of charge. To maintain the impetus and impartiality we need fresh funds every month. Three hundred donors, giving £5 or 5 euros a month would bring us close to £1,500 monthly, which is enough to keep us ticking over.

The post Prabir Purkayastha: The WTO Opts for Greed and Profits Over Providing Vaccinations for All People Worldwide appeared first on Brave New Europe.

It’s just a matter of decision. A decision that Europe has to make.

And the opportunity is now.

peertube.european-pirates.eu/w…