Politically, the G7 and likeminded countries around the world have adopted a war footing to stop Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin violated the most fundamental principle of international law by launching an unprovoked attack on another member of the United Nations – an institution created explicitly to prevent such aggression. The dangers of appeasement should be obvious. Even a little empathy should make us shudder in horror at the prospect of having to live under Putin’s rule.
It is a peculiar war. While Putin has described his project as a confrontation with the entire West, Ukrainians alone are doing all the fighting and bearing the full brunt of Russian attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, Europe and America have provided economic and military assistance, and the rest of the world has been dealing with the war’s fallout, including higher energy and food prices.
But it is a mistake to think that the war can be won with a peacetime economy. No country has ever prevailed in a serious war by leaving markets alone. Markets simply move too slowly for the kind of major structural changes that are required. That’s why the United States has the Defence Production Act, which was enacted in 1950 and invoked recently in the “war” against Covid-19, and again to address a critical shortage of baby formula.
Wars inevitably cause shortages and generate windfall gains for some at the expense of others. Historically, war profiteers have typically been executed. But today, they include many energy producers and traders who, rather than being marched to the gallows, should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. The European Union has proposed such a measure, but it would come too late, and it is too weak and too narrow for the challenge at hand. Similarly, while several members of Congress have put forward bills to tax Big Oil’s superprofits, the Biden administration has so far failed to move on the issue.
That is understandable, given that US President Joe Biden has been busy enlisting support for signal achievements like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. Moreover, in seeking the private sector’s cooperation in limiting price increases, he has been at pains not to appear “anti-business.” But taxing windfall profits and using the proceeds to finance the necessary war spending and support for those hurt by high prices is not anti-business; it is responsible wartime governance, which is necessary to maintain popular support for the war effort. Such temporary taxes hurt neither investment nor employment, and there is nothing unjust about taxing exceptional gains that companies did nothing to deserve. (Besides, more generally, taxes on corporate profits are not distortionary, because costs, including capital, are deductible.)
Even more comprehensive measures are needed in Europe, where today’s electricity market was not designed to deal with wartime conditions. Instead, it follows the principle of marginal-cost pricing. That means the electricity price reflects the highest-cost source of production needed to meet current demand. As gas prices have soared, marginal costs have risen far above average costs. The cost of renewable energy has, for instance, changed little.
As such, many sellers of low-cost electricity are making a killing, as are the traders who bought energy at the lower pre-war prices. While these market players reap billions of euros in profits, consumers’ electricity bills are soaring. Electricity prices in energy-rich Norway, with its enormous gas and oil reserves and hydro capacity, have increased nearly tenfold.
Meanwhile, households and small businesses are being pushed to the brink, and even some big companies have already gone bankrupt. Last month, Uniper, a large company supplying one-third of Germany’s gas, was “nationalised,” effectively socialising its massive losses. The European principle of “no state aid” has been thrown aside, mainly because European leaders moved too slowly in changing a market structure that was not designed for war.
Economists love marginal-cost pricing because it provides appropriate incentives, and because its distributive consequences tend to be small and easily manageable in normal times. But now, the system’s incentive effects are small and its distributive effects are enormous. In the short run, consumers and small businesses will have to turn down their thermostat in the winter and turn it up in the summer, but comprehensive energy-saving investments take time to plan and implement.
Fortunately, there is a simpler system (already under discussion in some countries, and already being partly implemented in others) that would retain most of marginal-cost pricing’s incentive effects without the distributive effects. Under a non-linear pricing framework, households and firms could be allowed to purchase 90% of their previous year’s supply at the previous year’s price, and 91-110% of supply at, say, 150% of the previous year’s price, before the marginal-cost price kicks in.
While non-linear pricing can’t be used in many markets – owing to the possibility of “arbitrage” (buying a good at a low price and immediately reselling it at a much higher price) – electricity is not one of them. That is why some economists (like me) have long advocated its use in cases where large market failures are having important distributive effects. It is a powerful tool that governments can and should use, especially when confronting wartime conditions.
Something also must be done about soaring food prices. After a half-century of paying US farmers not to farm (an old method of agricultural price support), we now should pay them to produce more.
Such changes have become imperative. As the Vietnamese understood, wars are won as much on the political front as on the battlefield. The purpose of the 1968 Tet Offensive was not to gain territory but to change the political calculus of the war, and it worked. Defeating Russia obviously will require more help for Ukraine. But it also will require a better economic response on the part of the West more broadly. That starts with sharing more of the burden through windfall profit taxes, controlling key prices – such as those for electricity and food – and encouraging government interventions where necessary to alleviate critical shortages.
Neoliberalism, based on simplistic ideas about how markets should operate that fail to comprehend how they actually operate, didn’t work even in peacetime. It must not be allowed to stop us from winning this war. – Project Syndicate

* Joseph E Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is University Professor at Columbia University and a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.

أكد الوسيط الأميركي لترسيم الحدود البحرية بين لبنان وإسرائيل آموس هوكشتاين، أن “الاتفاق البحري بين الجانبين مفيد لأمن إسرائيل”.

وأضاف في تصريحات لقناة 13 الإسرائيلية، نقلتها “روسيا اليوم”، “لم تحصل إسرائيل على كل ما تريده، ولم يحصل لبنان على كل ما يريده. هكذا تجري المفاوضات عادة”، متابعاً “كانت مفاوضات استمرت لما يقرب من 11 عاماً، وقررت تغيير المعادلة. غيرنا المحادثة حتى يخرج الجميع منتصرين”.

وأشار إلى أن “إسرائيل تريد حصتها الاقتصادية بالطبع، لكنها تريد حقا استقرارا في البحر الأبيض المتوسط، وهيمنة إسرائيل على البحر الأبيض المتوسط ​​هي نتيجة لنجاحها الهائل في تطوير مثل هذه الكمية الكبيرة من الغاز الطبيعي”.

وتابع “خط الحماية لم يكن الحدود الرسمية بين إسرائيل ولبنان، والآن وافق لبنان على الاعتراف به كوضع قائم بينه وبين إسرائيل، وهذا يتيح لإسرائيل القيام بدوريات على طول هذا الخط وإمكانية الإشراف عليه. هذا أمر عظيم بالنسبة لإسرائيل”.

وعن تأثير تهديدات حزب الله على المفاوضات البحرية، قال هوكشتاين، “أوضحت لي إسرائيل أنه لن تكون هناك مفاوضات تحت التهديد”.

وفي إشارته إلى انتقاد إسرائيل لتوقيت الاتفاق قبل الانتخابات مباشرة، علق هوكشتاين قائلاً، “كانت لدينا فترة زمنية حرجة، لو انتظرنا لما تم الاتفاق”.​

عقد رئيس الحكومة نجيب ميقاتي اجتماعا مع وزير الطاقة والمياه وليد فياض واعضاء هيئة ادارة قطاع البترول التي تضم وسام شباط،وسام الذهبي، غابي دعبول ووليد نصر .
وأعلن الوزير فياض بعد الاجتماع: عقدنا لقاء اليوم مع دولة الرئيس ميقاتي بمعية أعضاء هيئة إدارة البترول، بعد زيارة قمت بها لفخامة رئيس الجمهورية لتهنئته بالإنجاز التاريخي بشأن ترسيم الحدود وترسيخ حق لبنان بالمباشرة منذ الآن، بأعمال الاستكشاف في حقل قانا وسائر البلوكات في مياه البحر عندنا.
وكشف الوزير فياض عن رغبة قطرية في الدخول إلى التحالف للتنقيب عن النفط في البلوكين 4 و9. وقال:” لقد وردت الرغبة القطرية عبر رسالة من معالي وزير النفط القطري سعد الكعبي أعلن فيها نوايا دولة قطر الشقيقة بمشاركة لبنان بالدخول الى التحالف الذي سينقب في البلوكين 4 و9 لتصبح قطر الشريك الثالث لشركتي ” توتال” “وأيني” في هذين الحقلين، وهذا أمر مهم جدا، لأننا نعرف قدرة قطر الاستثمارية ورغبتها التي أعلنت عنها عبر زيارات مختلفة لسفيرها للوزارة للاستثمار في النهوض الاقتصادي للبنان في قطاع النفط والغاز ، في التنقيب وانتاج الطاقة.
وقال: لقد ارسلوا الى الوزارة المدراء العامين للشركة المملوكة من الدولة القطرية، وهي مهتمة بالاستثمار في قطاع الطاقة وانتاج الطاقة في شكل عام. ونحن نشكر دولة قطر على رغبتها في مشاركة لبنان باستثمار موارده والاستثمار في بناء الاقتصاد اللبناني. لقد عهدنا دائما وقوف قطر الى جانب الشعب اللبناني.
اضاف: أما الموضوع الثاني فهو ضرورة دعم هيئة إدارة البترول بالكادر البشري لمواكبة هذه المرحلة وادارتها وخصوصا العلاقة مع الشركاء، اي العلاقة التحالفية وإدارة العقد الذي يسمح بإدارة أعمال الاستخراج والاستكشاف التي ستبدأ قريبا ان شاء الله، ووضع الجدول الزمني المحدد للانجازات المتوقعة بالنسبة إلى الأمور اللوجستية وأمور الحفر والمنصة التي ستنشأ لإنتاج الغاز والنفط.ومن الضروري أن يكون لدى الهيئة الموارد اللازمة والكادر البشري المناسب لإدارة هذه المرحلة، وكان دولة الرئيس متجاوبا في هذا الشأن.

إجتماع تربوي
ورأس الرئيس ميقاتي اجتماعا شارك فيه وزير التربية والتعليم العالي القاضي عباس الحلبي، الوزير المفوض في سفارة العراق في لبنان أمين النصراوي، المستشارة الثقافية بان الموسوي، القنصل الأول مهند يحيى، مدير عام وزارة التربية في لبنان الدكتور عماد الاشقر، ومدير عام التعليم العالي الدكتور مازن الخطيب، ورئيسة دائرة المعادلات والامتحانات الرسمية أمل شعبان. وتم خلال الاجتماع بحث شؤون الطلبة العراقيين في لبنان.
الوزير الحلبي
بعد الاجتماع قال وزير التربية: عرضنا الموضوع المتعلق بالمعادلات الذي تقدم به الطلاب العراقيون الذين يتابعون دراستهم في بعض الجامعات في لبنان، والمشاكل التي انعكست سلبا على سير المعاملات، وتم الاتفاق على وضع آليات محددة تسهل على هؤلاء الطلاب من جهة مراعاة القوانين العراقية المطبقة، وكذلك القوانين اللبنانية المطبقة على موضوع المصادقات والمعادلات، واتفقنا على متابعة البحث في اجتماعات متتالية كل أسبوعين مرة بيننا وبين فريق السفارة لوضع حد لاي إشكالات قد تصيب أوضاع هؤلاء الطلاب في لبنان. نحن نعمل على تسهيل الموضوع مع مراعاة القوانين المطبقة، وعلى الجامعات المعنية التي سببت هذه المشكلة ان تساعدنا على ضبط الأعداد التي توافدت إليها من الطلاب العراقيين، لان هناك أخطاء ارتكبتها بعض هذه الجامعات كما ان هناك أخطاء ارتكبها بعض الطلاب، ولا نريد ان يتم دفع الثمن من قبل وزارة التربية التي تقوم بما عليها في تسهيل مهمة هؤلاء الطلاب. هذا الاتفاق سيسري في الأيام القليلة المقبلة ونأمل ان نتوصل الى حل هذه الإشكالات.
النصراوي
بدوره قال الوزير المفوض في سفارة العراق في لبنان أمين النصراوي بعد الاجتماع:” التقينا دولة رئيس الوزراء ميقاتي بحضور وزير التربية اللبناني والوفد الفني المرافق له، تحدثنا في كثير من الأمور التي تخص الطلبة العراقيين في لبنان، ونقلنا له تحيات دولة رئيس الوزراء مصطفى الكاظمي، وتوجيهاته بشأن ضرورة تسهيل أمور الطلبة الدارسين في لبنان. تطرقنا الى بعض المواضيع الفنية التي تواجه الأخوان الطلبة في بيروت، وتم الإتفاق على وضع ألية جديدة، وعلى تحديد اجتماعات دورية بين السفارة والملحقية الثقافية في بيروت ووزارة التربية لتذليل أي عقبة او مشكلة تواجه الطلبة العراقيين في لبنان.
أضاف: تداولنا مع الرئيس ميقاتي في بعض القضايا المتعلقة بالساحة اللبنانية واستمعنا الى رأيه في الكثير من المواضيع التي تدور حاليا، وكانت فرصة للإضاءة على العلاقة المميزة بين العراق ولبنان.

وإجتمع رئيس الحكومة مع وزير الدفاع الوطني موريس سليم، ثم مع وزير السياحة وليد نصار  .

In July, CIA Director William Burns gave a 45-minute interview at the Aspen Security Forum. Only at the very end, following questions about the Russia-Ukraine war, China, Taiwan, Iran, and Afghanistan, was Burns asked what the CIA can do to identify where climate change is most likely to cause conflicts to erupt.
Burns’s answer was unequivocal. First, he noted that climate change is “an important priority for the CIA and the US intelligence community.” He then said that while he considers China “the biggest geopolitical challenge that our country faces in the 21st century,” he also views climate change as the “biggest existential threat” to the United States.
Existential risk, as the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative defines it, is a risk that “could cause the collapse of human civilisation or even the extinction of the human species.” Burns probably had something less extreme in mind – perhaps a catastrophic event that would wreak irreparable harm and change life as we know it. But still, in this week-long forum dedicated to national and international security discussions, no panel focused specifically and entirely on climate change.
That’s not unusual. As Burns pointed out, climate change does not fit the traditional definition of a national-security threat. As such, it falls within the jurisdiction of other government departments.
Yet if climate change poses an existential threat to the US, then the US defence apparatus must participate in the fight against it. Under Burns’s leadership, the CIA has established a mission focused on helping “policymakers in the US government understand the consequences of climate change in already fragile societies.” The National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon all have units that focus on climate-change-related conflicts abroad. Still, what about the direct impact of climate change on the US? Generals, after all, do not stop fighting wars when the fighting spreads from foreign to American soil.
Science-fiction writers have no trouble bringing the future home to the present. For example, Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel American War opens with a map of the US in 2075: Florida, New Orleans, New York City, Long Island, and Los Angeles are all underwater. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future begins with a heatwave in India that overwhelms the power grid and kills 20mn people.
In the scenario Robinson imagines, temperatures in Uttar Pradesh reach a “wet bulb temperature of 42 degrees centigrade.” An extreme scenario? Consider that in California’s recent heatwave, temperatures in the Bay area and Sacramento Valley reached 46.6C (115.9F) and that California prepared for brownouts and blackouts. As the thermometer breaks records, the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a heatwave does not seem far-fetched.
Perhaps the problem is that an existential “risk” is not yet an existential “threat,” whereas the war in Ukraine, Chinese militarism, and Iranian nuclear aspirations demand immediate attention. But tell that to the hurricane, fire, and flood victims who have suffered the consequences of catastrophic weather over the past decade. The Colorado River, Lake Mead, and the Great Salt Lake are disappearing now. Sea-level rise is already making itself felt in Norfolk and Miami. The future, as scientists keep telling us, is already here.
To be fair, Congress and President Joe Biden have done more than any previous administration. With the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has secured a historic legislative victory that will enable the US to meet its international obligations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the most recent United Nations climate change conference, Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry negotiated a crucial deal with the Chinese to allow the world to move forward with its climate commitments.
Moreover, US national-security officials have their hands full. The risk that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is real and rising, and violating the nuclear taboo could draw Nato countries into a nuclear great-power war that could wipe out all of humanity. A nuclear conflict with China would be equally deadly, and Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would also lead to nuclear proliferation across the Middle East, effectively gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and significantly increasing the risk of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism.
Still, the real measure of how much importance the American government attaches to a particular threat is the amount of time and money it invests in addressing it, and I doubt that Biden and his advisers spend more than 10% of their time on preparing for the impact of climate change. The issue is one of perspective: national-security officials operate in a world of geopolitics, competition, and co-operation among countries. They are trained to deter, prevent, and fight wars or to negotiate peace with other governments, not to deal with global threats that transcend national borders. As the adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Bill Burns got it right. Climate change is an existential threat, and the Biden administration and the US national-security establishment must treat it like one. Doing so would require reallocating substantial funds from the military to government agencies that focus on building domestic resilience and civil protection. It would also require creating new security agencies whose mandate would be to address global threats.
Minimising the risk of climate change will not be easy, but we have no choice. To paraphrase Game of Thrones, a long and deadly summer is coming. If we do not rise to the challenge, many Americans will not survive. – Project Syndicate

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department, is CEO of the think tank New America, Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Economists are supposed to be good at understanding risk. Decision-making in the face of uncertainty, after all, is the discipline’s bread and butter. Yet at a time when real-world risks – geopolitical, macroeconomic, financial, public-health, and environmental – are piling up, many economists seem to be at a loss.
Although businesses and investors stand to make a lot of money if they can properly assess and navigate the current risk environment, no one seems to have a good explanation for why we are where we are. This is especially true in the case of climate change: It is now clear that the risks have been systematically underestimated, and thus mispriced, all along.
One explanation for this is that market participants have failed to understand the size and the probability of the risk, because they have been thinking about the issue in the wrong way. The climate system is not like a casino with well-defined outcomes and probabilities. As a 1987 comment in Nature put it, changes within our planet’s systems may bring all kinds of “unpleasant surprises.” It is as if we were playing with decks of cards that include some unknown number of jokers. Moreover, one also must account for the inherent conservatism of the science. Climate researchers, especially, tend to err on the side of caution.
A classic case is the quantification of sea-level rise. Broadly speaking, sea levels rise for three reasons: melting polar ice caps, melting inland glaciers, and the fact that warmer water takes up more space. But in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports in the early 2000s, the headline figures fully accounted only for melting glaciers and thermal expansion. Scientists of course knew that global warming would melt polar ice, and that this effect might be the most consequential of the three. But because the estimates for how much faster the poles would melt differed by so much at the time, they were excluded from the headline figures.
That omission has long since been corrected. But it is now economists who are lagging behind in quantifying the economic damages associated with rising seas and the many other interlinked risks and uncertainties accompanying climate change. Quantifying climate-related damage is painstaking work; and in an academic environment that prizes new ideas over what might seem like a mere “accounting” exercise, it is not the kind of work that brings much reward or recognition.
Nonetheless, economists going back to Simon Kuznets, the “father” of the gross domestic product, have been some of the leading critics of economic metrics that purport to represent overall well-being. GDP is central to macroeconomic analysis, but it leaves out many other important indicators, such as those measuring human and planetary health. Standing forests and clean air and water have no value in national-income accounting unless they enter the economy directly as factors of production.
Fortunately, an initiative by US President Joe Biden’s administration aims to correct this shortcoming by developing a new set of “statistics for environmental-economic decisions.” While this effort is not the first of its kind in the world, it is among the most ambitious. The goal is to supplement GDP with a far more comprehensive set of accounts, and then to use this new metric to guide policy decisions.
Such a change is long overdue. Climate change might not have grown into the problem that it has become if its damages had been incorporated into national accounts all along.
This points to a second, equally important reason why climate and other risks have been mispriced. It is one thing for scientists, economists, and informed members of the public to recognise that many risks and uncertainties are not priced; it is quite another to adopt policies that discourage businesses from pushing those risks onto society.
For business leaders, the top climate risk, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco survey, is that climate change will influence “rules and regulations related to our business.” Executives correctly anticipate that policymakers will want them to pay for greenhouse-gas emissions and other negative externalities instead of being permitted to socialise those costs.
Such measures inevitably will fall into the realm of politics, but economists must not confuse their political preferences with sound policy. Those who are ideologically inclined to look to the “free” market as a guiding principle for organising society must recognise that a market can function well only when no externality is left unaccounted and unpaid for.
Another Biden administration accounting initiative could help here. The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rules for climate-related disclosures would compel companies to standardise and report both the impact of their operations on the climate and the risks that climate change poses to those operations. The SEC’s effort stops short of asking all polluters to pay for their own pollution; instead, it leaves it up to investors to decide what to do with the new information.
Economists must defend the pivotal role their advice plays in policymaking. The political forces and special interests that bear on this issue will skew their advice and skewer the advisers. But that must not become an excuse for inaction. Intellectual honesty demands that economists and policymakers grapple with how new risks and uncertainties can and will affect outcomes.
Tallying what’s known is hard enough. Accounting for hard-to-price risks and uncertainties like climatic tipping points is harder still. But recognising those risks and uncertainties makes clear that political action must come sooner rather than later. – Project Syndicate

• Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, is the author, most recently, of Geoengineering: The Gamble (Polity, 2021). Tom Brookes is Executive Director of Strategic Communications at the European Climate Foundation.

TRIPOLI, Oct 3 (Reuters) – Libya’s Tripoli government signed a preliminary deal on energy exploration on Monday, prompting Greece and Egypt to say they would oppose any activity in disputed areas of the eastern Mediterranean.

Libya’s eastern-based parliament, which backs an alternative administration, also rejected the deal.

Speaking at a ceremony in Tripoli, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Libyan Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush said the deal was one of several in a memorandum of understanding on economic issues aimed at benefiting both countries.