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Business Recorder
02-05-2025
- Business
- Business Recorder
CASA and the World Bank
EDITORIAL: As per a Business Recorder exclusive, the World Bank is likely to extend the closing date of Central Asia South Asia 1000 (CASA-1000) electricity transmission and trade project for three years (till December 2028). The reason: delays attributed largely to a restive Afghanistan as the required infrastructure is complete in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (including the testing of the High Voltage Direct Current — HVDC — converter station) while in Pakistan the transmission line connecting the Nowshera grid to the electricity grid is 99 percent complete with 375 out of 376 towers complete and the remaining expected to be completed by June this year though the World Bank mission has submitted that (i) HVDC facilities will be tested only after the Afghanistan line is completed; (ii) additional financing will be required once the project goes into operational readiness in 2028 to meet NTDC's legal and technical obligations; and (iii) NTDC must update the information in STEP (step-by-step approach) by end of 2025. Two observations are critical. First and foremost, this project envisages export of hydroelectricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (upstream countries relative to Uzbekistan, an agricultural country, whose water supply may be negatively impacted) coupled with the worsening Afghan-Pakistan relations with rising terror attacks in Pakistan from across the border and retaliation by Pakistan armed forces as well as the decision to expel illegal Afghan refugees from Pakistan. It must be recalled that India pulled out of the Iran Pakistan gas pipeline due to its energy security concerns, and Pakistan may do well to take similar concerns on board with respect to CASA-1000, given the opposition to the project from within and outside the four CASA countries. And secondly, CASA project began in 2016, a time when the country was suffering from massive daily load-shedding and this particular project was rightly viewed as one that would solve the country's energy shortfall at the cheapest rate possible without the need to construct expensive dams that would have required external financing — dams that are increasingly being opposed by multilaterals as challenging for the environment. Nine years later the situation is different on multiple counts: (i) insurance coverage costs for the required infrastructure in Afghanistan are expected to be prohibitive; (ii) Pakistan has surplus energy reliant on more expensive fuel, furnace oil. Though contracts signed by successive administrations with Independent Power Producers (IPPs) are in the process of being renegotiated — that include capacity payments and repatriation of profits in dollars — yet any additional power supply must take a back seat to first ensuring 100 percent vacation of existing generation, barring government operated generation companies that are at the bottom of the economic merit order; and (iii) the envisaged competitive electricity market may be further delayed as CASA is a government-to-government venture that would require a pledge by the government of Pakistan to pay Afghanistan the transit fees in dollars. World Bank website indicates that since August 2001 it has provided 2 billion dollars to Afghanistan with 280 million dollars to Afghanistan Resilience Trust Fund (ARTF) — to UNICEF and the World Food Programme as Approach 1.0; it has supported the people of Afghanistan since 2022 by extending funds for health, education, food security, water services and livelihoods as Approach 2; and pledged to continue to make IDA funds to complement ARTF financing as Approach 3.0, which will include assuming CASA-1000 project in a ringfenced manner to ensure construction payments and future revenue to be managed outside Afghanistan and do not involve Interim Taliban Administration (ITA). Without active participation, the vacation of the electricity to Pakistan through CASA-1000 will remain dicey at best. To conclude, given these circumstances, Pakistan, at the tail end of the supply chain, should reconsider delaying this project's implementation. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Europe's race to rearm is pointless if its adversaries are waging war online
Europe is scrambling to remilitarise. The European Commission is raising a €150bn (£129bn) defence fund and is calling on EU countries to invest €650bn (£561bn) more. Germany has cast aside its government debt limit to invest hundreds of billions of euros in defence. Poland will train every male of fighting age for battle, and envisages an army 500,000 strong. Latvia's president has urged the rest of Europe to conscript citizens, as Latvia does. Even neutral Ireland is buying combat jets. No wonder Europe's defence industry is booming. In just a few months, the share prices of several big weapons manufacturers have nearly doubled and doubled again. But, despite this new martial pulse, the continent is still sleepwalking towards disaster. Europe can harden its shell and sharpen its claws, but it has done little to protect its soft underbelly against political manipulation. The US is capitulating to Russia over Ukraine because of political implosion at home, not military defeat. This story has been repeated many times in Europe's history. Thucydides recounted how ancient Athens and Sparta sowed discord and cultivated traitors in each other's camps. Europe's leaders must remember this lesson and confront three new realities. First, the US is turning autocratic and hostile to its allies. The Dark Enlightenment, once a dream of a few Silicon Valley types, appears to be unfolding. JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, in which he attacked Europe's political leaders' refusal to countenance far-right parties entering government, showed that Elon Musk's boosting of Germany's AfD and other far-right campaigners across the EU enjoys official US support. Ditto Donald Trump's St Patrick's Day photo op with Conor McGregor. Absent a change of US policy, the EU must protect itself against American attempts to undermine Europe's liberal democracy. Second, companies in this increasingly autocratic and hostile US control every major digital platform that Europeans use to debate and share news, with the exception of TikTok, which is Chinese. Even Europe's news organisations rely on Google and other US advertising technology companies for online revenue. Trump can humiliate or cripple the oligarchs who control these companies. For example, just two days after he brought the US Federal Trade Commission under his direct control in February, the agency started to hunt alleged anti-Maga 'censorship' by tech platforms. He has other levers, such as the power to block or grant billion-dollar government contracts, as the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, found out when his company lost a $10bn (£7.6bn) contract in Trump's first term after the president's intervention. The Trump grip is also personal: he openly threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life. It is reasonable to assume that tech oligarchs will do what he tells them. Third, big tech's manipulation machine is now a threat to Europe's democracy. Social media feeds tailored by big tech algorithms are now the primary source of information on political issues for Europeans aged 30 and under. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram all use 'recommender' algorithms to pick what each person sees in their feed. They monitor us to learn our intimate desires and fears, and use that insight to serve personalised feeds that keep us scrolling. Algorithmic feeds effortlessly suppress trustworthy journalism, amplify some voices and censor others. For more than a decade, big tech's clumsy, revenue-optimised algorithms have accidentally pushed Europeans (and everyone else) to extremism. Now, with Trump in charge, Europe faces a new intentional algorithmic assault to boost authoritarians into power across the continent. Brussels has been strangely indifferent to this moment of decision. Senior European Commission officials still speak of unhurried 'regulatory dialogues' with big tech firms. They point to investigations into the likes of Meta and X under the 2022 Digital Services Act. These are worthy but inadequate. What we do in these next few months will determine whether Europe's liberal democracy survives or is for ever lost. Investing in defence will be for naught if foreign powers – whether the US, Russia, or China – can boost authoritarian collaborators within the EU's borders. The EU must immediately switch off the tech companies' algorithms on its soil, at least until they are proven safe for democracy. Without that artificial amplification, extreme material will again have to compete with the deluge of cat videos and other things posted by people on digital platforms at that same instant. With X and other platforms upgraded to a pre-algorithm state, Musk's posts will no longer be forced in to people's feeds. We will still have digital platforms, but extremism will again be niche rather than the norm. Ursula von der Leyen last year pledged to introduce a 'democracy shield' to protect Europe from foreign electoral manipulation. Von der Leyen's first step should be to shut down recommender algorithms. One way of doing that is to put political pressure on Ireland, which is responsible for enforcing Europe's tough data law on most big tech firms but has not delivered. Instead, Dublin, according to the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, has been the tech industry's lapdog. But von der Leyen should activate the commission's decisive powers, too. The democracy shield risks becoming a hodgepodge of timid half measures. Europe's national capitals must demand immediate action both from the commission and from Ireland. Trump cannot be allowed to hold the hidden levers of Europe's internal political debate. Europeans must have the freedom to communicate with one another without foreign censorship and interference. This crisis is at least as urgent as rearmament. Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Britons advised to cut meat, air travel to reach net zero targets
Britons will have to pay more to fly and should forego two-steaks worth of meat a week if the country is to meet net zero targets, the government's advisory body said Wednesday. The UK's 2008 Climate Change Act requires the government to propose regular, legally binding milestones on the way to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is charged with advising the government on the level of those milestones, and released its seventh report on Wednesday. In it, the CCC advised that the carbon budget should be set at 535 Million Tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for the period 2038-2042, which will require UK emissions to fall to 87 percent below their 1990 levels. "This would be an ambitious target, reflecting the importance of the task. But it is deliverable, provided action is taken rapidly," said the report. Electrification and low-carbon electricity supply should make up the largest share of emissions reductions, according to the pathway set out by the CCC. The committee envisages offshore wind growing six-fold from 15GW of capacity in 2023 to 88GW by 2040 and onshore wind capacity doubling to 32GW, facilitated by "rapidly expanding the transmission grid". It also sees three-quarters of cars and vans and nearly two-thirds of heavy goods vehicles on the road being electric by 2040, up from only 2.8 percent of cars and 1.4 percent of vans in 2023. The shift will be "propelled by the falling cost of batteries", it predicted. - Less meat and dairy - Electrification of heating will be key to reducing emissions from homes, with half being heated using a heat pump by 2040, compared to around one percent in 2023, said the report, which estimated the cost of net zero to be around 0.2 percent of UK GDP per year. "The roll-out rates required for the uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and renewables are similar to those previously achieved for mass-market roll-outs of mobile phones, refrigerators, and internet connections," it added. Better infrastructure will encourage more people to choose alternatives to driving, while "relatively large changes in price" will be required to moderate demand for air travel. If airlines pass the costs of achieving emission targets onto customers, a return ticket from London to Spain could increase by around £150 ($190) by 2050, said the report. Farmers should be supported to diversify away from livestock agriculture, leading to the number of cattle and sheep falling by 27 percent by 2040. Shoppers will also be encouraged to eat less meat and dairy, with average meat consumption envisaged to decline by 25 percent by 2040. The average reduction required to hit the targets would equate to consumers eating two fewer meat mains per week, said the report. A meat main meal would be the equivalent of a large doner kebab, a 6oz steak, or a cooked breakfast. The government and parliament must now consider the advice before voting on what the legally-binding carbon budget should be. jwp/jkb/jj
Al Arabiya
16-02-2025
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
Egypt's al-Sisi discusses Mideast peace with World Jewish congress chief
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told the head of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder on Sunday that the establishment of a Palestinian state is 'the only guarantee' for lasting peace in the Middle East. During his meeting with Lauder in Cairo on Sunday, al-Sisi called for starting the reconstruction of war-battered Gaza 'without displacing its residents from their land,' according to a statement from his office. The Egyptian leader's remarks come as Arab countries are scrambling to come up with an alternative to a controversial plan floated by US President Donald Trump to take over Gaza, redevelop the coastal territory and turn it into the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' Trump's proposal envisages permanently resettling Gaza's Palestinian residents elsewhere, including Egypt and Jordan, drawing widespread condemnation from Arab and world leaders. 'The establishment of a Palestinian state... is the only guarantee to achieve lasting peace,' al-Sisi told Lauder on Sunday. According to the Egyptian presidency statement, Lauder praised Egypt's 'wise efforts' to restore stability in the region. With AFP
