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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
STORY: Western leaders piled on military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine on Thursday with U.S. President Joe Biden calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a “brute” and Britain denouncing Moscow’s invasion of its neighbor as “barbarism.”
At an unprecedented triple summit in Brussels, NATO, G7 and European Union leaders addressed the continent’s worst conflict since the 1990s Balkans wars.
Biden stressed the importance of the Western alliances.
Biden: “This single most important thing is for us to stay unified and the world continue to focus on what a brute this guy is and all the innocent people’s lives that are being lost and ruined.”
NATO announced new battle groups for four nations in East Europe, while Washington and London increased aid and expanded sanctions to new targets.
Ahead of the summit Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he was grateful for the support Ukraine had received from individual NATO member states, but that NATO had yet to show what the alliance can do to save people.
“And I have been repeating the same thing for a month now. To save people and our cities, Ukraine needs military assistance without any restrictions.”
The European Union was set to unveil steps to wean itself off Russian energy — likely to drive up fuel costs even further around the continent.
But the measures stopped short of Zelenskiy’s calls for a full boycott of Russian energy and a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
The invasion unleashed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin has killed thousands of people, sent more than 3 million people abroad, destroyed cities, and driven more than half of Ukraine’s children from their homes, according to the United Nations. Russia calls the invasion a “special military operation.”
In the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, nearly flattened by the Russian bombardment, hundreds of thousands of people have been hiding in basements without running water, food, medicine or power.
But Moscow has failed to capture any major city. Russian troops have taken heavy casualties and are low on supplies. Ukrainian officials say they are now shifting onto the offensive and have pushed back Russian forces, including north of Kyiv.
Moscow Thursday said the West had itself to blame for the war by arming the “Kyiv regime.”
When Miyuki Hino bought a house in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2020, she checked an online map that showed the damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016 to evaluate the neighborhood.
“We wanted to know our flood risk before buying, although we’re aware that every storm is different and they can be hard to predict,” says Hino, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We had to make an offer quickly, so we looked at the map and we asked neighbors about which houses nearby had flooded. We found out that our street is on a slight hill and the homes at the bottom of the hill had more trouble from that hurricane.”
Hino purchased flood insurance, which costs about $300 annually, even though it isn’t required for her home.
“Our first concern is for the safety of everyone in the house,” says Hino. “Our second concern is about property damage in case of a storm. But we’re also concerned about the long-term impact of extreme events on the value of our property.”
Not every buyer is as diligent about evaluating the potential risk of a weather-related disaster, but that may change in the future. Violent storms, wildfires, floods, droughts and extreme heat are among the increasingly visible signs of climate change. While safety issues associated with these events are of prime importance, the frequency and intensity of dramatic natural disasters are beginning to have an impact on property values and the cost of homeownership in some locations. Researchers are analyzing data to help buyers, homeowners, lenders, insurance companies and appraisers evaluate what the future may hold and how that could impact the housing market.
“Most homeowners should care about climate change and the potential impact on their families and property,” says John Berkowitz, CEO and founder of OJO Labs, a real estate technology firm that owns the Movoto listing site in Austin. “Unfortunately, the people who are most likely to be hurt are already disadvantaged in the housing market, such as first-time buyers and minority buyers who are focused on affordability now. They don’t have the luxury of time or money to think about what their property value will be in 2050.”
Lack of knowledge about climate risk makes it difficult for buyers to recognize that their home could be more costly to maintain, more expensive to insure, and more exposed to damage and possible destruction from a storm or fire. All those possibilities could also contribute to a decline in a property’s value or the inability to sell the home in the future. Yet few consumers consider these issues when buying a home.
Fires, floods and home values
Numerous studies have recently looked at the current impact of hazards on property values. For example, Redfin researchers found that homes in areas prone to wildfires sold for an average of 3.9 percent less compared with homes in areas with lower wildfire risk in California, Oregon and Washington state in 2020. Between 2012 and 2020, the median sales price of homes in low-risk areas increased 101 percent compared with an 88 percent increase in the median sales price for homes in areas with a high risk for wildfire, according to the study.
But home values don’t always correlate with climate risks. Hino co-wrote a report with Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the department of Earth system science at Stanford University, titled “The Effect of Information About Climate Risk on Property Values,” that focused on flood risk.
“Our research looked at the impact of regulatory flood plain maps, which are used to determine whether a home needs flood insurance, on home prices,” says Hino. “We expected to see that homes that require flood insurance would be less costly than similar homes that don’t require flood insurance, but that’s not happening.”
The main culprit is lack of information, says Hino.
“I read one study that found that less than 10 percent of buyers know that a house is in a flood plain before they make an offer,” says Hino. “They find out later when their lender checks the [Federal Emergency Management Agency] map to see if flood insurance is required.”
Homes in coastal areas that are prone to flooding are desirable to many buyers for their water views, which keeps their prices high. A 2021 study by Redfin researchers found that homes with a high risk for flooding sold for a premium of 13.6 percent more than homes with a low risk for flooding during the first quarter of 2021, an increase in that premium over both 2020 and 2019.
Unfortunately, FEMA maps have been found to underestimate flood risk. A study by the nonprofit First Street Foundation found that more than 23.5 million properties are at risk of flooding over the next 30 years. First Street Foundation’s Flood Factor tool, which is available to consumers, includes flood risk from urban storm water flooding, storm surge and future conditions such as rising seas.
Mortgage lenders and insurance companies rely on FEMA maps to evaluate flood risk and to inform consumers about the requirement or recommendation for flood insurance. Flood damage is not covered by regular homeowners insurance policies and therefore requires a separate policy. The Research Institute for Housing America (RIHA) at the Mortgage Bankers Association released a study earlier this year – “The Impact of Climate Change on Housing and Housing Finance” – that concluded that the housing industry lacks an accepted indicator to assess climate risk.
“There’s lots of work to do in the industry because there’s no single test for climate projections that lenders can use for risk management,” says Eddie Seiler, executive director of RIHA in D.C. “There are private companies working to build models to understand the risks to homeowners and the financial risks to lenders. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are working to come up with climate scenarios, too.”
Seiler says he believes that eventually climate risk may become part of the mortgage underwriting process. The report found that, in addition to increased flood risk and property damage, climate change may increase mortgage default rates, increase the volatility of house prices and possibly produce climate-related migration patterns. If people choose to move away from areas with high risks from fires, floods and storms, that could reduce property values in those communities.
“After Hurricane Katrina, the mortgage industry didn’t know whether borrowers would default on their loans,” says Seiler. “The FEMA maps were way out of date, so people who were at high risk for floods didn’t know it and didn’t have flood insurance. In that case, the federal government stepped in. But we know that when people are underwater on their loans, they default more often.”
Another risk is that if insurance rates skyrocket, the cost of having a home would be so high that owners would be unable to repay their loans, Seiler says.
“Insurance companies raise rates as much as 20 or 30 percent in high-risk areas compared to low-risk areas,” says Brian O’Connell, a senior insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes.com in Bucks County, Pa. “Buyers should expect to see rates increase as we see more floods, fires and heat waves. Alternatively, some insurance companies may simply get out of the business, which could also increase costs because of the lack of competition for customers.”
Some insurance companies also raise the deductible for specific events such as hurricanes, which leaves homeowners responsible for thousands of dollars of repair costs, according to O’Connell.
Consumers and climate risk
The unpredictability of climate change makes it difficult to evaluate the risk for a specific event to occur at any particular property. Even wildfires sometimes skip over some homes. Hurricanes and tornadoes have uneven impacts on homes within the same neighborhood.
Another obstacle for home buyers is that seller disclosure rules vary by jurisdiction. Sellers are not always required to share information about risks associated with natural disasters or previous damage.
“We found that in states with stricter disclosure laws there was a higher correlation between pricing and flood insurance,” says Hino. “In states such as Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina, home prices are lower on homes that carry a risk of floods because buyers are aware of the risk.”
One solution is to provide data about possible future increases in storms and extreme heat directly to buyers and to real estate agents who can share that information with house hunters, says Berkowitz. Movoto includes information on climate risk for each listing on their site from ClimateCheck.
“Consumers can look now at listings on sites such as Redfin and Realtor.com for flood risk scores and climate scores,” says Seiler. “That helps to get people thinking earlier about the potential risk from floods, fires and storms.”
Consumers can also go directly to sites such as ClimateCheck, Flood Factor, Attom Data Solutions Home Disclosure Report and CoreLogic’s RiskMeter to review hazard risks that include storms, floods and wildfires.
“We’re working with climate scientists to develop analytics on what climate change means, such as whether there will be more hurricanes or stronger hurricanes and whether the issue will be storm surges or high winds,” says Tom Larsen, principal for insurance and spatial solutions at CoreLogic, a data analytics firm based in Irvine, Calif. “The challenge with these perils is that you don’t see identical damage to each house. So we use our spatial modeling to look on a granular level at every house. We can look at the elevation above the sea level of the first floor of a house and follow wildfire patterns property by property.”
Since CoreLogic primarily provides analytics to industry professionals such as insurance companies and lenders, its focus is on what it would cost to repair or rebuild a property. Mortgage and insurance companies need the information because of their financial commitment to the property.
“Consumers want to know if their home will lose value, but it’s tough to evaluate the market price of a property versus the physical cost of rebuilding,” says Larsen. “But consumers also need to know their total cost to live in a home. Eventually, I think predicting insurance costs based on climate risk will become part of the mortgage process because it’s part of the cost of ownership.”
For buyers today, assessing the potential cost from climate risk is one more thing to pay attention to and is challenging to evaluate, says Larsen.
“Eventually, we’ll get to the point where people can see an average score that demonstrates what the risk is now, the expected cost of possible damages and a prediction of future potential costs,” says Larsen. “That’s not necessarily to tell someone not to buy someplace, but to help them understand the risk they’re accepting by buying in certain locations.”
O’Connell recommends hiring a good buyers’ agent who will warn consumers about high insurance costs or elevated risk for natural disasters.
“Buyers should do their due diligence and check insurance premiums ahead of time for different areas, so they understand what they’re getting into if they choose to buy near water, for example,” says O’Connell. “They should also read their insurance policy, so they know what happens if there’s a weather event and to make sure they’re covered for a wildfire or wind damage. If they’re not comfortable reading it, they should ask a lawyer to review it or talk to an insurance expert.”
Buyers may want to factor in costs related to adapting their homes for climate change, says Berkowitz.
“For example, homeowners in places that are beginning to see more severe winters need to consider the cost of winterizing their homes with more insulation and better windows,” Berkowitz says. “Homeowners in traditionally cooler climates like Seattle are finding themselves investing in air conditioning now that the summers are hotter there.”
Climate awareness has received a low level of attention so far, but that won’t last forever, especially as climate risk increases, Berkowitz asserts.
However, Berkowitz acknowledges, it’s hard to predict whether climate change will decrease the desirability of homes in some areas because of safety issues or because of the higher cost of ownership. It could just mean that homes in some areas appreciate less over the next 30 years than they did over the previous 30 years.
“Home buyers and owners need to recognize the value of their house today and understand how it could change in the future,” says Berkowitz. “They need to be aware of the full cost of ownership, including maintenance and insurance and how those costs could rise.”
How to evaluate climate risk when house hunting
Check all listings on sites such as Realtor.com, Movoto and Redfin for information about climate-related risks such as floods and fires.
Ask neighbors about recent storms and damage.
Ask your real estate agent for information about floods, fires and storms in the area.
Check the address of a property on sites such as ClimateCheck, Flood Factor, Attom Data Solutions Home Disclosure Report and CoreLogic’s RiskMeter.
Depending on the local disclosure laws, ask the seller and listing agent for information about previous flood or fire damage.
Request a homeowners insurance estimate as early as possible to determine affordability.
Ask a home inspector to look for evidence of previous storm or fire damage.
Find out if storm-resistant features have been added to the house, such as hurricane shutters, stronger windows and mesh coverings for vents in fire-prone areas. If not, ask for a cost estimate to add those features.
Ask if the community is taking steps to mitigate storm risk.
15,000 civilians illegally deported from Mariupol to Moscow, officials say
March 24, 2022
A Ukrainian serviceman guards his position in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, March 12, 2022.
Ukrainian officials on Thursday charged Russia with deporting about 15,000 civilians illegally from the city of Mariupol to Russia’s capital of Moscow, Reuters reported.
“Residents of the Left Bank district are beginning to be deported en masse to Russia. In total, about 15,000 Mariupol residents have been subjected to illegal deportation,” the Mariupol city council said in a statement.
Officials also said that civilians who remained trapped in the city of Mariupol, which has been heavily bombarded by Russia, are struggling to live without access to food, water, power, or heating, according to Reuters.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said at a video briefing that authorities are still working on securing an agreement with their Russian counterparts in the hope of opening a safe corridor to and from Mariupol for remaining residents.
Authorities also said that thousands of residents were taken by Russian forces to undisclosed areas across the border, with Russian news outlets reporting that buses had carried several hundred refugees from Mariupol to Russia in the past few days, Reuters reported.
This comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that the city of Mariupol has been “reduced to ashes” by Russian airstrikes.
Russian officials have denied targeting civilians, while the Biden administration on Wednesday formally accused Russia of committing war crimes.
Related:
Reuters
Mariupol says 15,000 deported from besieged city to Russia
March 24, 2022
FILE PHOTO: Local residents queue for humanitarian aid in the besieged southern port of Mariupol
LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Ukrainian authorities in besieged Mariupol said on Thursday about 15,000 civilians had been illegally deported to Russia since Russian forces seized parts of the southern port city.
Ukrainian officials say civilians trapped in Mariupol, which is normally home to about 400,000 people, face a desperate plight without access to food, water, power or heat.
Local authorities said on Sunday that thousands of residents had been taken by force across the border but did not provide a more precise figure. Russian news agencies said at the time that buses had carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from Mariupol to Russia in recent days.
“Residents of the Left Bank district are beginning to be deported en masse to Russia. In total, about 15,000 Mariupol residents have been subjected to illegal deportation,” Mariupol city council said in a statement issued on Thursday.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told a video briefing that Ukrainian authorities were continuing efforts to secure agreement from Russia to open a safe corridor to and from Mariupol.
Each side has blamed the other for the repeated failure to agree on arrangements to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, control of which would help Russia secure a land corridor to the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address to Italy’s parliament on Tuesday that there was “nothing left” in Mariupol after weeks of Russian bombardment.
A Reuters team that reached a Russian-controlled part of Mariupol on Sunday described a wasteland of charred apartment blocks and bodies wrapped in blankets lying by a road.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Nick Macfie)
Fears of nuclear war have been exacerbated during the conflict. Shortly after the outbreak of war in February, Putin placed Moscow’s nuclear forces on “high alert” and began drills of its nuclear submarine fleet.
And today, Russia upped the rhetoric again, with Dmitry Polyanskiy, the Russian deputy ambassador to the UN, warning Moscow reserved the right to deploy nuclear weapons if “provoked”.
Asked if Putin was right to hold the prospect of nuclear war over the rest of the world, Polyanskiy told Sky News: “If Russia is provoked by Nato, if Russia is attacked by Nato, why not, we are a nuclear power.
“I don’t think it’s the right thing to be saying. But it’s not the right thing to threaten Russia, and to try to interfere.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, the Russian deputy ambassador to the UN, spoke to Sky News.(Sky News)
“So when you’re dealing with a nuclear power, of course, you have to calculate all the possible outcomes of your behaviour.”
Polyanskiy did not detail what provocation from other countries would look like.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which compiles the list of the world’s nuclear weapons, says Russia has a total inventory of 5,977 nuclear warheads. This includes stockpiled and retired warheads.
Of that figure, 1,588 are deployed strategic warheads on ballistic missiles and at bomber bases.
Another 2,889 of Russia’s warheads are non-deployed or reserve weapons. Added together, this gives a military stockpile total of 4,477 nuclear warheads.
Russia has conducted more than 25 test launches of its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can be loaded with nuclear warheads, in the past five years. It plans a further 10 test launches this year, a “significant increase in test frequency”, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports.
Polyanskiy’s warning comes as the leaders of Nato member countries gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit to discuss the latest situation a month on from the start of the Russian invasion.
The Nato meeting, which was addressed remotely by Mr Zelenskyy, signed off on the formation of four new battlegroups in eastern Europe.
Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said the battlegroups – each numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 troops – would be deployed in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria.
Is said to be angry at Ukrainians who wish to join Nato – which accounts for 80% (Getty)
The alliance already has 40,000 troops in Europe under its direct command, nearly 10 times the number it had a few months ago.
Nato has so far refused to get directly involved in military engagement with Russia, denying Ukraine’s request to enforce a no-fly zone above its airspace.
Russia began its invasion of Ukraine a month ago, and despite Western intelligence claiming Putin had expected to take over in a matter of days, they have yet to take over key cities.
A view of the aftermath of the Retroville shopping mall following a Russian shelling attack which killed Eight people on March 21, 2022 in Kyiv. (Getty)Putin’s spokesperson has admitted the invasion of Ukraine had “not achieved” anything yet.(Getty)
Dmitry Peskov also denied claims Putin was “angry” at Ukrainians, saying that sentiment only applied to Ukrainians who wished to join Nato – believed to account for 80% of the country.
Speaking to CNN, Peskov admitted the invasion of Ukraine had “not achieved” anything yet.
Peskov said: “Of course, no one would think from the very beginning about a couple of days. It’s a serious operation with serious purposes.”
He added that the “special military operation” was “going on strictly in accordance with the plans and the purposes that were established beforehand”
“TACS” is the common shorthand for smaller and “smarter” tactical nuclear weapons. Some are even equipped with a “Dial-A-Yield” function, that can regulate the size of the bomb’s destruction. For some military analysts, this makes the unthinkable prospect of nuclear war almost thinkable.
One might surmise from the euphemistic verbiage: “Tactical nukes—that couldn’t be that bad. Maybe it’s just the future of war we’d have to adjust to.” Well, think again.
“They’re more similar than you might expect in terms of their destructiveness,” Pollack told The Daily Beast. “Even this small nuke is extremely destructive depending on where you drop it. It would be a very large explosion that would generate an electro-magnetic pulse, and it would probably start fires.”
Maybe it’s just rhetoric, nuclear blackmail, but if Putin does the unthinkable, asked Pollack, “How do we respond in a way that avoids Armageddon?”
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, said, “The reason these weapons are called tactical, they’re more likely to be used on the battlefield.”
“The Russians started it,” Korb continued, referring to Russia’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, “and the argument was if we had them, they would counter-balance the Russians.” Nuclear weapons are meant to keep the enemy guessing, said Korb, and “if [Putin] goes nuclear, he doesn’t know how we will respond.” Would Biden—or the world—accept tit for tat nuclear strikes on civilian population centers?
The answer is almost certainly: No. Whatever it’s called in the moment, history will remember it as “World War III.”
“The TACs are new, they weren’t there during the Cold War,” Korb added. “We just had the big ones. In theory, the U.S. would not respond with a big one, but you don’t know that. If Putin launches one with a smaller yield, he doesn’t know if we will respond using a strategic weapon. That’s deterrence. He doesn’t know that, and we want to keep him not knowing that.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chief of staff to the late Colin Powell, said the U.S. military—prodded by a lucrative niche nuclear industry—“almost simultaneously” moved toward modernizing TACs just as the Russians did.
“Each side blamed the other,” he said. The Russians in 2013-2014 conducted military exercises to practice using small yield nukes to blunt an attack from NATO, escalating the likelihood that these weapons would eventually be used.
Wilkerson ridiculed the notion that there’s any real difference with a smaller yield TAC. “You see the plume, you don’t know whether it’s tactical or strategic,” he said, and a commander is going to hit back hard rather than wait for an after-attack assessment.
“We’re back in a time I thought we’d left behind, that we’d learned our lessons,” Wilkerson continued. “I’ve watched [Putin] for a long time. He’s a pragmatic, practical man. I don’t care what kind of a beast you think he is…he hasn’t gone from master chess player to being mad, which is what you’d have to be to do this [use nuclear weapons]. But I can’t rule it out, especially as a false flag. It shouldn’t come to this.”
Wilkerson maintains that nuclear war must be avoided at all costs, crediting President Biden with resisting the political pressure to impose a no-fly-zone over the skies of Ukraine. “If 45 million Ukrainians have to be sacrificed on the altar of no nuclear war, I’m for it. It’s not worth saving any state if it means blowing up 7 billion people” he said.
Joseph Mazur, professor emeritus at Marlboro College, wonders how much the average American knows about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a piece on “The Madness of Nuclear Threats,” published in Psychology Today’s online blog, Mazur conducted an informal (but telling) survey.
Mazur questioned 12 adults and four teenagers, none of them experts, on what happened to Hiroshima after the U.S. dropped “the bomb.” They knew what happened in broad terms, but had little inkling of the extent of human suffering and destruction. The adults guessed that the “Little Boy” bomb dropped over Hiroshima killed between 1,000 and 25,000 people. The teens guessed 5,000. In reality, the atom bomb destroyed five square miles of the city and killed between 130,000 and 225,000 people.
“Today, the tiniest tactical nuclear weapon is capable of destruction far worse than what happened in Hiroshima,” Mazur wrote. “Even if just one ‘small’ nuclear weapon were to be launched in the current conflict, there would not be enough therapists in the world to deal with the mental health trauma that would come from watching the aftermath in real-time.”
Putin announced last month he was putting Russian nuclear forces into “special combat readiness,” which set off an understandable frenzy about what Putin might do next to save himself from humiliating military losses. “As far as we can tell, they haven’t moved any systems,” said Pollack. “There are more people on duty, but more people in command centers shouldn’t be that alarming.”
Pressed on Putin’s intentions, Pollack answered, “I don’t think he’s inclined to [use TACs] while he’s busy mauling Ukraine’s cities with heavy weapons. Proponents of TACS say we have to be prepared in order to deter nuclear war, and I would say, what do we do if deterrence fails?”
“The Trump administration in 2018 wanted an extra option if the Russians used a small one against us and we would not respond because we only have the big one. I don’t buy this,” added Pollack. “Nobody will care about actual kilotons but everyone in the world would know if a nuclear weapon was used.”
Biden, as a presidential candidate in 2019, was asked about new low-yield warheads. He responded, “Bad idea,” adding that having these would make presidents “more inclined to use them.” That was the right answer for these times.
There is still hope to preserve an uneasy deterrence, and to keep Putin wondering about Biden—at least as much as Biden wonders about him.
Russian ruble loses key lifeline as US sanctions target Putin’s $140 billion gold stockpile
Carla Mozée – March 24, 2022
Vladimir Putin holds a gold bar during a January 2011 visit to the Central Depository of the Bank of Russia while serving as Russia’s prime minister.Alexsey Druginyn/AFP via Getty Images
The US Treasury Department has prohibited gold transactions with Russia under executive orders from President Joe Biden.
Any sales of Russia’s $140 billion gold stockpile could help bolster the beleaguered ruble.
The ruble dropped below a penny vs. the US dollar after Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Gold transactions between Americans and Russia are prohibited, according to a US Treasury Department notice that cited executive orders signed by President Joe Biden.
The notice marks a setback for Russia’s currency, which could be bolstered by sales of the country’s massive gold stash. The beleaguered ruble has tumbled as the US and Western allies issue economic and financial bans on Russia for launching a war against Ukraine last month.
“U.S. persons are prohibited from engaging in any transaction — including gold-related transactions — involving the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, or the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation,” the Treasury Department said Thursday in its Frequently Asked Questions section about financial sanctions on its website.
Russia holds the world’s fifth-largest gold stockpile. Its holding of roughly 2,300 tons of the precious metal was recently valued at nearly $140 billion. The country has been building its gold stockpile with the aim of it acting as an economic insurance policy for the country.
Gold demand within Russia has been strong as residents seek to protect their wealth from the sliding ruble. The Russian currency dropped below 1 cent against the US dollar after Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack after months of amassing troops on Ukraine’s border.
The ruble has dropped about 26% this year against the greenback, while gold prices have risen more than 7% during 2022.
EXPLAINER: How the US and allies can freeze Russian gold
Fatima Hussein – March 24, 2022
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, and Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan attend a bilateral meeting during a NATO summit on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. (Henry Nicholls/Pool, AP)
From left, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden arrive for a G7 leaders’ group photo during a NATO summit in Brussels, (Henry Nicholls/Pool via AP)
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, center, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, right, during an extraordinary NATO summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Thursday.
Russian gold purchases increased in 2014, after the U.S. issued sanctions on Russia for Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Now the country holds $100 billion to 140 billion in gold reserves, which is roughly 20 percent of the holdings in the Russian Central Bank, according to U.S. officials. Additionally, the Bank of Russia announced Feb. 28, shortly after several Russian banks were removed from the SWIFT bank messaging system, that it would resume the purchase of gold on the domestic precious metals market.
HOW COULD RUSSIA USE GOLD TO EVADE SANCTIONS?
The U.S. says that Russia can and has used gold to support its currency as a way to circumvent the impact of sanctions. One way to do that is by swapping the gold for a more liquid foreign exchange that is not subject to current sanctions. Another way would be to sell the bullion through gold markets and dealers. The gold could also be used to directly purchase goods and services from willing sellers.
HOW WOULD THE SANCTIONS APPLY?
The U.S. announcement to block gold transactions was done alongside Group of Seven and European Union allies that will also impose the gold reserve ban. New guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department states that American individuals, including gold dealers, distributors, wholesalers, buyers, and financial institutions are generally banned from buying, selling or facilitating gold-related transactions involving Russia and the various parties that have been sanctioned.
WHAT KIND OF IMPACT COULD THIS HAVE ON RUSSIA?
The move should further impact the country’s ability to launder money and will in effect apply secondary sanctions on people who trade in gold with Russia, experts say. “It is another way to close sanctions loopholes, and increase economic pressure on Russian entities,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The ban on gold transactions is also an attempt to prevent innovative financial transactions through other countries that continue to do business with Russia.
WHAT OTHER SANCTIONS HAVE BEEN IMPOSED?
The U.S. also took additional sanctions actions on Thursday. It sanctioned dozens of Russian defense companies, 328 members of the Russian State Duma — or state assembly — and the head of Russia’s largest financial institution. Those actions are on top of export controls and financial penalties issued in the past month on Putin, his inner circle, some of the country’s top financial institutions, along with several banking institutions’ removal from the SWIFT bank messaging system.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu resurfaced on Russian state media on Thursday after nearly two weeks out of the public eye, Reuters reported.
Shoigu was seen in a snippet of footage showing him attending a virtual meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and others on the country’s Security Council.
Russian news agency RIA broadcast the footage after some Russian news outlets noted his prolonged absence from public view.
“The defense minister has a lot on his mind right now. A special military operation is underway. Now is not really the time for media activity,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Thursday, according to Reuters.
The development comes four weeks after Russia began its invasion into Ukraine, dubbed a “special military operation” by Moscow.
A senior military official from NATO told several news outlets that, based on numbers provided by Ukrainian officials, up to 40,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, taken prisoner, are missing or are injured. As many as 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in the fighting, along with six generals.
Russia is likely to challenge those figures, however, and has not provided casualty estimates in recent weeks.
Before Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, many Western officials projected Ukraine could fall within a matter of days. However, a month into the fighting, Moscow has seized only a handful of smaller cities and Russian advances have faced fierce pushback on the ground and in the sky.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin offered a bleak assessment last week of how Russian forces were progressing in Ukraine, saying that Moscow had “struggled with logistics” and made “missteps.”
“I don’t see, you know, evidence of good employment of tactical intelligence. I don’t see integration of air capability with a ground maneuver,” Austin told CNN’s Don Lemon.
“And so there are a number of things that we would expect to have seen that we just haven’t seen, and the Russians really have had some … problems. So, many of their assumptions have not proven to be true as they entered this fight.”
U.S. and allies aiming to provide anti-ship missiles to Kyiv, official says
March 24, 2022
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States and its allies are working on supporting Ukraine with anti-ship missiles, a senior U.S. administration official said on Thursday.
“We have started consulting with allies on providing anti-ship missiles to Ukraine,” the official said on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels. “There may be some technical challenges with making that happen but that is something that we are consulting with allies and starting to work on.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy joined NATO leaders via videolink but did not repeat requests for NATO membership or the establishment of a no-fly zone, according to the official.
“The mood overall has been sober, it’s been resolute and it’s been incredibly united,” the official said of the atmosphere at the summit meeting.
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Sabine Siebold, editing by Marine Strauss)
A big rig semi truck transports boxes of pears. vitpho / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Food travels long distances – sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles – to reach our plates. Mapping the trajectory of many processed foods is to draw zig-zags across the globe, connecting faraway fields, factories, distribution centers, and store shelves.
The concept of “food miles” was created in the 1990s to warn consumers of the connection between long-distance food transportation and mounting global carbon emissions. Recent estimates figure that, in the U.S., processed food typically travels over 1,300 miles and fresh produce over 1,500 miles before it’s consumed. Ultimately, the further food travels, the more fossil fuels are needed, which in turn results in more greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
Just 10 companies – among them Nestlé, Mondolez, and Unilever – control almost all large food and beverage companies in the world. This concentration of food suppliers has left less room for small, local farmers, and means more and more of our food is transported across the country – or the globe – before being eaten. Take Iowa, for example: in 1870, 100% of all apples consumed in the state were also produced there. By the end of the 20th century, however, only 15% of apples consumed were produced by Iowa farmers.
The globalization of our food supply has also allowed consumers to become accustomed to foods grown only in other regions – think of coffee, which isn’t grown anywhere in the contiguous U.S. – or out-of-season foods that must be transported from warmer climates. Strawberries bought at a local farmers market during their summer growing season, for example, will have a lower food mileage than those shipped from California and purchased at a grocery store in December.
Different methods have been employed over time to calculate food miles. The Weighted Average Source Distance (WASD) formula was developed by Annika Carlsson-Kanyama in 1997, and considers the weight of the transported food and the distance it travels from the place of production to the place of sale. To analyze foods with multiple ingredients – including many processed foods, like bread, packaged desserts, snacks, etc. – The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture developed the Weighted Total Source Distance (WTSD) formula, which calculates the weight and distance traveled of each individual ingredient.
How Are Food Miles Calculated?
The WASD and WTSD are helpful formulas, but the Weighted Average Emissions Ratio (WAER) formula – developed in 2004 by the nonprofit LifeCycles – also takes into account the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the mode of transportation employed. So, it’s not just the literal miles traveled that matters, but the means by which it’s transported.
The Impact of Faraway Food
Both transportation and agriculture are major culprits in human-caused climate change. In the U.S., transportation accounts for the largest share of national greenhouse gas emissions, and, according to the IPCC, agriculture accounts for one-fifth of all global CO2 emissions. The U.S. food system alone consumes more energy than all of France annually.
Within the food system itself, transportation comprises 14% of all energy used, but greenhouse gas emissions are also related to where the food was produced: The Leopold Center found that conventionally-sourced food uses 4 to 17 times more fuel than local food, and produces 5 to 17 times more CO2. For processed foods, the impact is even larger. Think of a frozen lasagna: the wheat for the pasta might be grown in Kansas, the tomatoes and spinach for the sauce in California, the beef raised in Texas, and the cheese made in Wisconsin. Some of these materials might even need to be transported from the farm to another location to be processed – like the wheat to be made into sheets of lasagna noodles – then to the factory to be assembled, packaged, and finally shipped to grocery stores.
Food miles also take into account the mode of transportation used – by water, road, rail, or air, in order of efficiency – which are not all created equal; transporting food by plane creates 50% more greenhouse gas emissions than food transported by sea. A 2005 study found that while air transportation only accounts for 1% of food transportation in the UK, it is responsible for 11% of the country’s emissions.
Food mileage should also include how the food is procured by the customer. In our car-based society, where car-ownership rates by household have remained above 90% for a decade, many shoppers drive to a store to purchase their groceries. In 2015, researchers found that the median distance to the nearest food store for Americans was 0.9 miles, and that 40% of the population lived further than 1 mile from a food store, necessitating a car for many people in order to do their shopping.
Debate Over Food Miles
Climate and agricultural scientists don’t all agree on the benefits or accuracy of food miles when determining the environmental impact of food products.
Many argue that this metric doesn’t take into account the whole carbon footprint of an item, or its non-emissions-related environmental impacts during production, like pesticide use, water pollution, or farmers’ rights. “Working out carbon footprints is horribly complicated,” said African agriculture expert professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University in an interview with The Guardian. “It is not just where something is grown and how far it has to travel, but also how it is grown, how it is stored, how it is prepared.”
Local food is often espoused as the greener option, but this isn’t always true. For example, the energy needed to heat a greenhouse in the Northeast to grow tomatoes in the winter might actually be a more carbon-intensive process than shipping the tomatoes from California. A Swedish study found that tomatoes imported to Sweden from Spain were actually less energy-intensive than those grown locally in greenhouses.
Some companies and organizations have instead begun using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to analyze the impact of their product. This method takes into account all stages in the life cycle of the product, from production, to processing, to packaging, to transportation, to disposal. The analysis goes beyond carbon emissions and considers other environmental factors like air and water pollution, use of natural resources, and impacts on human health.
How to Reduce Food Miles
While the benefit of food miles might be contested, lowering your environmental impact with your food choices is always beneficial.
To find the food miles of your favorite products, use this food miles calculator, or research where the product comes from. It might be unrealistic to expunge all faraway foods from your diet – given expense and convenience – but some items might be replaceable with local alternatives. Consider joining a CSA to get fresh produce from nearby farms at regular intervals, or shopping from local producers at a farmers market. Better yet, grow your own food! The only food miles to calculate will be the distance from your backyard or front stoop to your kitchen.
Eating seasonal produce will also ensure that your produce wasn’t shipped across the country to reach your plate. While you can’t always know if something was transported by plane, many perishables that need to be eaten quickly after harvesting are – like berries – so refraining from eating these products until they’re in season will cut down on air transport.
Beyond food miles, minimize your impact by cutting down on food-related emissions in other ways. Limiting or cutting out meat and dairy is among the most impactful of changes, as 57% of emissions from food production are attributed to animal-based food (including the production of livestock feed). Going fully vegan or vegetarian is great, but not imperative; just reducing animal products in your diet makes a difference. Lastly, instead of tossing food scraps in the trash, compost them at home to keep organic waste out of landfills.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, and Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan attend a bilateral meeting during a NATO summit on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. (Henry Nicholls/Pool, AP)
From left, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden arrive for a G7 leaders’ group photo during a NATO summit in Brussels, (Henry Nicholls/Pool via AP)
