UN to Take First Step towards 'Historic' Plastic Treaty

Varieties

March 2nd, 7:20am

Asharq Al-Awsat

The amount of plastic trash entering the oceans is forecast to triple by 2040. Lakruwan WANNIARACHCHI AFP/File

The United Nations is to launch formal negotiations on Wednesday for a global treaty to address a plastic trash "epidemic" that supporters say is a historic moment for the planet. The UN Environment Assembly (UNEA), convening in Nairobi, is poised to adopt a resolution creating an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding agreement by 2024, AFP said. The amount of plastic trash entering the oceans is forecast to triple by 2040, and governments have been under pressure to unite behind a global response to the crisis. The framework for a comprehensive treaty has been approved by UN member states, including major plastic producers like the US and China, according to sources close to the negotiations. Officials say it gives negotiators a broad and robust mandate to consider new rules that target plastic pollution from its birth as a raw material to its design, use and safe disposal. This could include limits on making new plastic, which is derived from oil and gas, though policy specifics will only be determined during later talks. The mandate provides for the negotiation of binding global targets with monitoring mechanisms, the development of national plans and financing for poorer countries. Negotiators also have the scope to consider all aspects of pollution -- not just plastic in the ocean but tiny particles in the air, soil and food chain -- a key demand of many countries. - 'One for the history books' - "We are 100-percent happy with the outcome," said Ana Teresa Lecaros, director of environment in the foreign ministry of Peru, a country that co-signed one of the draft resolutions. Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Program, said a plastics treaty would be "one for the history books" and the most important pact for the planet since the Paris climate agreement. The rate of plastic production has grown faster than any other material and is expected to double within two decades, the UN says. But less than 10 percent is recycled, with most winding up in landfill or oceans. By some estimates, a garbage truck's worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute. "Plastic pollution has grown into an epidemic of its own," said Norway's climate and environment minister, Espen Barth Eide, who chairs UNEA. He said he was "quite optimistic" about bringing down the gavel on a strong resolution in Nairobi. Environment groups are also buoyed by the outcome of the talks but like officials and diplomats, caution that the strength of any treaty will only be determined by rigorous negotiations to come. The first round of discussions is set for May, according to sources involved in the process. Big corporations have expressed support for a treaty that creates a common set of rules around plastic and a level playing field for competition. Big plastic makers have underscored the importance of plastic in construction, medicine and other vital industries and warned that banning certain materials would cause supply chain disruptions.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3506106/un-take-first-step-towards-historic-plastic-treaty

Oil Tops $110, Equities Sink on Rising Ukraine War Fears

Business

March 2nd, 6:26am

Asharq Al-Awsat

A oil pump is seen at sunset outside Scheibenhard, near Strasbourg, France, October 6, 2017. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann/File Photo

Crude surged past $110 a barrel Wednesday and equities sank with investors growing increasingly fearful about the Ukraine war's impact on global energy supplies and the economic recovery. Vladimir Putin's invasion of his neighbor has sent world markets into a spiral over the past week, further fraying nerves on trading floors caused by runaway inflation and tighter central bank monetary policies, AFP reported. The crisis has seen numerous countries hammer Moscow with a series of wide-ranging sanctions that have isolated Russia and threaten to crash its economy. The measures have injected a huge amount of uncertainty into markets with supplies of crucial commodities including metals and grains soaring. The price of global staple wheat is sitting at a 14-year high -- having risen 30 percent in the past month. But the main source of unease on trading floors is crude, which has rocketed since Russia began preparing to invade. On Wednesday Brent topped $110 for the first time since 2014, while WTI moved closer to that figure. Incoming sanctions have fueled worries that exports will be cut off from Russia, the world's third-biggest producer of the commodity. The conflict in eastern Europe comes with prices already elevated owing to tight supplies and a strong recovery in global demand as economies reopen from pandemic-induced lockdowns. Traders will be keeping a close eye on a meeting of OPEC and other major producers, including Russia, later in the day where they will discuss whether to ramp up output to temper the price rises, which are helping fan inflation. In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said the United States would join a 30-country deal to release 60 million barrels to help temper the surge in prices, though analysts have warned such moves would likely only have a limited impact. The oil price surge has compounded fears about inflation as it sits at a 40-year high in the United States and hurts Americans in the pocket even as the economy rebounds from the pandemic shock. However, the Ukraine crisis has given the Fed another headache as it is forced to rethink its plans to hike interest rates to get consumer prices under control. It had been widely expected to lift this month and then up to seven times more before the end of the year, but commentators say it will likely tone down its hawkishness for fear of damaging the recovery. "The supply chain issues and inflationary pressures will be top of mind for many investors globally," Andy McCormick at T. Rowe Price said. "These things will almost certainly complicate the already difficult task that central banks were facing trying to battle inflation." And Uma Pattarkine, of CenterSquare Investment Management, told Bloomberg Television: "The market was looking at anywhere up to seven rate hikes this year -- I think it will be closer to maybe the three or four we were anticipating at the very beginning of this conversation." Fed boss Jerome Powell's two days of congressional testimony will be closely watched this week for an idea about the bank's thinking. Wall Street and European markets tumbled Tuesday and the losses largely flowed through to Asia, which had enjoyed two days of relative calm though the selling was not as severe. Tokyo led losses, falling 1.9 percent, while Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Manila and Wellington also dropped. However, Sydney, Seoul, Jakarta and Bangkok eked out marginal gains. - Key figures around 0300 GMT - Brent North Sea crude: UP 5.6 percent at $110.87 per barrel West Texas Intermediate: UP 5.7 percent at $109.22 per barrel Tokyo - Nikkei 225: DOWN 1.9 percent at 26,341.95 (break) Hong Kong - Hang Seng Index: DOWN 0.9 percent at 22,556.91 Shanghai - Composite: DOWN 0.3 percent at 3,479.16 Euro/dollar: DOWN at $1.1124 from $1.1126 late Tuesday Pound/dollar: DOWN at $1.3320 from $1.3326 Euro/pound: UP at 83.50 pence from 83.46 pence Dollar/yen: UP at 115.00 yen from 114.90 yen New York - Dow: DOWN 1.8 percent 33,294.95 (close) London - FTSE 100: DOWN 1.7 percent at 7,330.20 (close)

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3506041/oil-tops-110-equities-sink-rising-ukraine-war-fears

Tunisian President, Saudi Interior Minister Discuss Security Cooperation

Gulf

March 2nd, 5:31am

Tunis - Asharq Al-Awsat

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Naif meets with Tunisian President Kais Saied in Tunis. (Saudi Interior Ministry via Twitter)

Tunisian President Kais Saied received in Tunis on Tuesday Saudi Interior Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Naif. Talks focused on bilateral relations and the ongoing security cooperation between Riyadh and Tunis. Prince Abdulaziz conveyed the greetings of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. The Saudi minister also met with Tunisian Prime Minister Najla Bouden for talks on bilateral ties. Prince Abdulaziz had arrived in Tunis on Monday where he held talks with his Tunisian counterpart Taoufik Charfeddine.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3505921/tunisian-president-saudi-interior-minister-discuss-security-cooperation

How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get It Back

Opinion

March 2nd, 5:24am

Tim Urban

Tim Urban -

I have good news and bad news for you. Let’s start with the bad: a concept I call Depressing Math. Check this out: That’s one box for every week of a 90-year life. It often feels like we have countless weeks ahead of us. But actually, it’s just a few thousand — a small-enough number to fit neatly in a single image. Once you visualize the human life span, it becomes clear that so many parts of life we think of as “countless” are in fact quite countable. I love going to the American Museum of Natural History, and I’ve been three times since I moved to New York in 2009. If that rate continues, I’ll step into the museum 12 more times. For an activity I think of as “something I like to do,” that number seems shockingly low. I also love going to the movies, but ever since it became effortless to stream everything at home, I’ve been averaging one or two movie theater trips a year. In my head, I’ll go out for hundreds more movies in my life, but the real amount is probably some weirdly small number like 53. Depressing Math is especially depressing when you’re living through a pandemic. Covid hasn’t taken away our weeks, but it has robbed us of our favorite activities — experiences that are already in short supply. But perhaps the hardest math to process — and, in turn, the hardest Covid pill to swallow — has to do with our relationships. I grew up spending some time with my parents almost every day. Since turning 19 and moving away for good, I’ve averaged about 10 to 15 days a year with them. If I’m one of the lucky ones, I’ll have quality time with my parents until I’m 60. That means that the day I headed off to college, I had something like 350 remaining parent days total — the amount of time I had with them every year of my childhood. What it boils down to is this: My life, in the best-case scenario, will consist of around 20 years of in-person parent time. The first 19 happened over the course of my first 19 years. The final year is spread out over the rest of my life. When I left for college, I had many decades left with living parents, but only about one year of time left to spend with them. It’s the same story with childhood friends. I spent high school sitting around with the same four friends, notching somewhere around 1,000 hangouts by the time we scattered off to different cities. Since then, our text thread keeps us in touch, but we’ve only managed to get the whole group together for a weekend every few years — about 10 total days each decade. It feels like we’re smack in the middle of our lives together, but like me and my parents, the high school group is currently enjoying its final 5 percent of in-person time together. Depressing Math reveals a cold truth: While you may not be anywhere near the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time spent with some of the most important people in your life. The pandemic has only added to the sting. In my family, Thanksgiving is the ultimate unskippable event, but over the past two years, we’ve skipped it twice because of Covid. Considering that there may only be 10 or 15 more Thanksgivings for us to be all together, two is a pretty big piece of that pie. In the months ahead, as you prepare to make plans — or to cancel them — I encourage you to do some Depressing Math of your own. Because whatever your situation, delusion about the time we have left serves no one. Now for the good news: We think a lot about those black lines: the roads not taken, the opportunities missed, the ones that got away. But most of us greatly underestimate the size of the lush green tree of possibilities that lie ahead of us. We underestimate future possibilities for the same reason we overestimate the time we have left with those we love: our intuition is not very imaginative. It’s a human instinct to believe the life we’re used to is how things will always be, both the good parts and the bad. Wallowing in regret carries an implicit assumption that we had agency in the past — that we could have had those other life paths if only we had made better decisions. When we think about the future, though, that feeling of agency often disappears, which can leave us feeling resigned and even hopeless. But the life we’ll be living 10 years from now will largely be determined not by our past selves but by our present and future selves. If we imagine what we might regret down the road, it’s very much in our hands to do something about it now. This is the good news about being a human. The time we have left with family and friends is not a law of nature like the weeks we have left to live. It’s a function of priorities and decisions. At our current pace of 10 to 15 days per year, my parents and I have at best a couple of hundred days left to hang out. But there’s nothing stopping us from changing that equation. Agreeing upon an additional annual family week each summer would almost double our remaining time together, while moving to the same city could multiply it by 10. Getting together with my friends one weekend a year would triple our pace and leave us with 15 percent of our total hangout time ahead, instead of just 5 percent. If the thought of only 12 more Museum of Natural History visits makes me sad, I can start going once a year and magically transform that number to 50. That big green tree is a reminder that we have the power to change so much of what seems set in stone. These two delusions — that we have countless time ahead of us and that we can’t change our course — are a recipe for complacency. Shedding them can wake us up and inspire us to live more wisely. The past couple of years has left us with a joy deficit. When we picture a post-Covid world, we imagine having our old lives back. But we can actually go a step further and make up for the missed experiences, flipping the deficit into a surplus. If Covid has given us anything, it’s a rare chance for a reset. Let’s take it. The New York Times

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3505916/tim-urban/how-covid-stole-our-time-and-how-we-can-get-it-back

Bodies of 6 People Found on Shore of Eastern Greek Island

World

March 1st, 9:19am

Asharq Al-Awsat

Migrants sit on a Turkish coast guard vessel after they were pulled off life rafts, during a rescue operation in the Aegean Sea, between Turkey and Greece, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Greece’s coast guard says six bodies have been recovered from the shore of the eastern island of Lesbos, and authorities suspect the people were migrants who died in their attempt to make it to Greece from the nearby Turkish coast. The coast guard said the bodies of the three men and three women were found early Tuesday morning near the island’s main town of Mytilene, The Associated Press reported. There were no signs of a shipwreck and the discovery of the bodies was not preceded by any call to emergency numbers about a boat in distress near the island, the coast guard said. None of the six had been wearing life jackets. A search and rescue operation was launched in the area with three coast guard patrol boats, a helicopter and nearby ships to look for potential survivors, while authorities were also searching the coastline. Thousands of people fleeing conflict and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia attempt to reach the European Union through Greece, with many making the short but often perilous journey in unseaworthy dinghies from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3504291/bodies-6-people-found-shore-eastern-greek-island

‘Finger-Like Solar Flares’ Explained in New Study

Varieties

March 1st, 7:38am

Cairo - Hazem Bader

A solar flare is a term that denotes sudden flashes of brightness, caused by high-energy radiation, on the sun's surface. (Goddard Space Flight Center/AP)

In January 1999, scientists observed mysterious motions within a solar flare. Unlike typical flares that showed bright energy erupting outwards from the Sun, this solar flare also displayed a downward flow of motion, as if material was falling back towards the Sun. Astronomers wondered what exactly they were seeing. Now, in a study published Jan. 27 in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) offer a new explanation for the poorly understood downflows. "We wanted to know how these dark finger-like structures occur. What's driving them and are they truly tied to magnetic reconnection?" said lead author astronomer Chengcai Shen. Scientists have assumed that structures are tied to magnetic reconnection since their discovery in the 90s. The process occurs when magnetic fields break, releasing fast moving and extremely energetic radiation, and then reform. "On the Sun, what happens is you have a lot of magnetic fields that are pointing in all different directions. Eventually the magnetic fields are pushed together to the point where they reconfigure and release a lot of energy in the form of a solar flare," said study co-author astronomer Kathy Reeves. Reeves added: "It's like stretching out a rubber band and snipping it in the middle, so it's going to snap back." Scientists assumed the dark downflows were signs of the broken magnetic fields "snapping back" to the Sun after a solar flare eruption. Most of the downflows observed by scientists are "puzzlingly slow." This is not predicted by classic reconnection models, which show the downflows should be much quicker. It's a conflict that requires some other explanation, said co-author Bin Chen, an astronomer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. To find out what was happening, the team analyzed downflow images captured by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The AIA takes images of the Sun every 12 seconds in seven different wavelengths of light to measure variations in the Sun's atmosphere. They then made 3D simulations of solar flares and compared them to the observations. The results show that most SADs are not generated by magnetic reconnection after all. Instead, they form on their own in the turbulent environment and are the result of two fluids with different densities interacting. Reeves said scientists are essentially seeing the same thing that happens when water and oil are mixed together: the two different fluid densities are unstable and ultimately separate. "Those dark, finger-like voids are actually an absence of plasma. The density is much lower there than the surrounding plasma," Reeves explained. The team plans to continue their studies using 3D simulations to better understand magnetic reconnection. By understanding the processes that drive solar flares and eruptions from the Sun, they may ultimately help develop tools to forecast space weather and mitigate its impacts.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3504036/%E2%80%98finger-solar-flares%E2%80%99-explained-new-study

State Department: US Would Walk Away From Iran Talks if Tehran Displays Intransigence

Iran

March 1st, 7:31am

Asharq Al-Awsat

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price speaks at the daily briefing, at the State Department in Washington, DC, US, February 25, 2022. Nicholas Kamm/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Washington is prepared to walk away from the effort to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if Iran displays intransigence, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Monday. “We are prepared to walk away if Iran displays an intransigence to making progress,” Price told reporters. Price was speaking at a regular press briefing of the indirect talks taking place in Vienna, according to Reuters. The United States and its allies and partners will pursue “alternatives” if Iran is “unwilling to engage in good faith,” he noted, without detailing those alternatives.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3504031/state-department-us-would-walk-away-iran-talks-if-tehran-displays-intransigence