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☆ Why a Huge Coal Power Plant in Bangladesh Keeps Running Out of Coal
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-18 | by ( Somini Sengupta | Julfikar Ali Manik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

One of the world’s newest, most contested coal-burning power plants began operation in December. The troubles facing the Maitree power plant are a glimpse into the risks that other new coal plants around the world could face in coming years, for a variety of reasons. Maitree shut down temporarily because of a shortage of foreign currency to import coal from Indonesia. That happened because the value of the Bangladeshi taka shrank, while commodity prices, including coal, rose sharply. Other coal plants elsewhere are at risk of sitting idle in coming years because coal could soon lose its appeal as the cheapest source of electricity.

Persons: Maitree, taka Locations: Indonesia

☆ How Africa Can Help the World
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-16 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Next week in Paris, a critical diplomatic meeting begins on how to enable low-income, climate-vulnerable countries to grow their economies while reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. It reminds me of my recent conversation with Wanjira Mathai, managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute, and Rebekah Shirley, the Africa deputy director. “Can Africa leapfrog?” I asked them. We spoke for two hours over lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in Nairobi as marabou storks squawked and flew across the sky. Our conversation made me think in fresh ways, which is what I hope Climate Forward occasionally does for you.

Persons: Wanjira Mathai, Rebekah Shirley, “, ” Organizations: World Resources Institute Locations: Paris, Africa, Nairobi

☆ Americans and Their Cars
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-13 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Summertime is road trip time for many of us in the United States. That makes it a good time to look at what our relationship with the road has meant for global warming. The data crunchers at the Frontier Group, a research organization focused on sustainability, sought to answer that question by looking at gasoline consumption since 1949, the year the United States started tracking transportation data. They estimated that if American cars, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks were their own country, they would be the sixth-largest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions since 1949, putting them behind the total national carbon dioxide emissions produced by the United States, China, Russia, Germany and Japan. Add other forms of transportation, including heavy trucks, trains and planes, and U.S. transportation would be the fourth-largest carbon emitter, producing around 6.5 percent of the carbon dioxide that’s accumulated in the atmosphere over the last seven decades.

Organizations: Frontier Group Locations: United States, China, Russia, Germany, Japan, U.S

☆ Will Wildfires Like These Become the New Normal?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-09 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

That has created the conditions for more frequent and intense heat waves. That extra heat in the atmosphere has created a greater likelihood of extreme, sometimes catastrophic, weather all over the world. While that doesn’t mean the same extremes in the same places all the time, certain places are more susceptible to certain disasters, by virtue of geography. In places that become hot and dry, wildfires can become more prevalent or intense. The unifying fact is that more heat is the new normal.

Organizations: Eastern Locations: Eastern United States, Australia

Rey Steve Mabiala and his wife, Liz Gouari, taking refuge at the Roberval emergency center after being ordered to evacuate Chibougamau, Quebec, as a fire approached. Of the more than 400 fires now burning in Canada, more than one-third are in Quebec, which has already registered its worst wildfire season on record. Credit... Carlos Osorio/Reuters“We are facing some unprecedented events, including droughts, accelerated fires and heat waves, and there will be more over time, especially forest fires,” Ms. Mohsin said. But perhaps most surprised were newcomers to Chibougamau, like Mr. Mabiala, from the Republic of Congo, who came to work in logging. “They were asking, “Oh, is there such a thing in Canada?’ ’’ Ms. Cabrera said.

Persons: Rey Steve Mabiala, Liz Gouari, Gouari, Mabiala, Prince Edward Island, ” Mr, “ It’s, ”, Josée Poitras, Tanzina Mohsin, Carlos Osorio, Ms, Mohsin, Poitras, “ I’ve, I’ve, Francis Côté, “, Chibougamau, Renaud Philippe, Côté, Guy Boisvert, Winters, Boisvert, Shirley, Jonathan Mattson, Mr, Mattson, Ruth Cabrera, Anna Huerte, —, Cabrera, Huerte Organizations: Wildfire, University of Toronto, ., Reuters, The New York Times, “, Credit Locations: Chibougamau, Quebec, Africa, Canada, North America, Republic of Congo, Prince, Nunavut, Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Toronto, Val, Montreal, Roberval, East Coast, United States, Philippines

☆ Record Pollution and Heat Herald a Season of Climate Extremes
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-08 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Fires are burning across the breadth of Canada, blanketing parts of the eastern United States with choking, orange-gray smoke. Puerto Rico is under a severe heat alert as are other parts of the world. Human-caused climate change is a force behind extremes like these. Scientists are also warning that before the end of the year a global weather pattern known as El Niño could arrive, potentially setting new heat records. Taken together, the week’s extremes offer one clear takeaway: The world’s richest continent remains unprepared for the hazards of the not-too-distant future.

Persons: It’s, El Niño, Justin Trudeau, ” Organizations: Northern Locations: Canada, United States, Puerto Rico, North America, El

☆ Rice. Half of Humanity Eats It. And Climate Change Is Wrecking It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +12 min

Sometimes there’s not enough rain when seedlings need water, or too much when the plants need to keep their heads above water. Rice farmers are shifting their planting calendars. On top of that, there’s climate change: It has upended the rhythm of sunshine and rain that rice depends on. That’s a fraction of the emissions from coal, oil and gas, which together account for 35 percent of methane emissions. His experiment, carried out over seven years, concluded that by not flooding the fields continuously, farmers can reduce rice methane emissions by more than 60 percent.

☆ Ideas, and Coffee, Robust Enough for the Climate Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As a climate journalist, I get asked a perennial question by my fellow Americans: What do I do in the face of a crisis so big and complicated? The answer I witnessed on a recent reporting trip to East and Southern Africa: everything. In Uganda, coffee farmers are beginning to switch away from robusta, the coffee species they’ve grown and shipped abroad for decades but that is falling prey to droughts and diseases aggravated by climate change. Instead, they’re growing a totally different and tougher coffee called excelsa, a variety of the native species Liberica. They were trying to be less poor, because being less poor is the best way to be more resilient to climate shocks.

☆ Looking for a Climate Career? They Might Have the Answer.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

She became intrigued by land use changes, and then, gradually, by the links between climate change and sustainable food systems. Kolman, who grew up in Savannah, Ga., majored in physics and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I spent my time in undergrad searching for a career where I could use my analytical skills to improve society,” he told me. A trip to South Africa, which has dealt with successive droughts exacerbated by climate change, brought home “the impacts of water insecurity.”He considered working in public policy but those plans changed after the 2016 election. Kossoff, who calls herself the “most recent climate convert,” grew up mostly in southwest Florida and studied business and chemistry at Emory University.

☆ African Farmers May Have a Coffee Robust Enough for the Climate Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The two coffee species that most of us drink — Arabica and robusta — are at grave risk in the era of climate change. Farmers in one of Africa’s biggest coffee exporting countries are growing a whole other coffee species that better withstands the heat, drought and disease supersized by global warming. This year, they’re trying to sell it to the world under its own true name: Liberica excelsa. “Even if there’s too much heat, it does fine,” said Golooba John, a coffee farmer near the town of Zirobwe in central Uganda. For the past several years, as his robusta trees have succumbed to pests and disease, he has replaced them with Liberica trees.

☆ Meet the Climate Hackers of Malawi
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When it comes to growing food, some of the smallest farmers in the world are becoming some of the most creative farmers in the world. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, they are sowing pigeon peas to shade their soils from a hotter, more scorching sun. A few are turning away from one legacy of European colonialism, the practice of planting rows and rows of maize, or corn, and saturating the fields with chemical fertilizers. “That might save your season.”It’s not just Ms. Harry and her neighbors in Malawi, a largely agrarian nation of 19 million on the front lines of climate hazards. Their scrappy, throw-everything-at-the-wall array of innovations is multiplied by small subsistence farmers elsewhere in the world.

☆ AI and the future of work: Everything is about to change
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-19 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

Suddenly, AI tools, which have long operated in the background of many services, are now more powerful and more visible across a wide and growing range of workplace tools. Google’s new features, for example, promise to help “brainstorm” and “proofread” written work in Docs. A long list of startups are also developing AI writing assistants and image generators. The pitch from tech companies is clear: AI can make you more productive and eliminate the grunt work. Curran said just how much these AI-powered tools will change work depends on the application.

☆ The Next Frontier in Farming? The Ocean.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-15 | by ( Somini Sengupta | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +10 min

For centuries, it’s been treasured in kitchens in Asia and neglected almost everywhere else: Those glistening ribbons of seaweed that bend and bloom in cold ocean waves. Far beyond South Korea, new farms have cropped up in Maine, the Faroe Islands, Australia, even the North Sea. But even as its champions see it as a miracle crop for a hotter planet, others worry that the zeal to farm the ocean could replicate some of the same damages of farming on land. “Seaweed is not going to replace all plastic, but seaweed combined with other things can tackle single use plastic,” he said. Seaweed farms are a far cry from the rows of corn and wheat that make up monoculture farming on land.

☆ President Zelenskyy among large crowds mourning 'Da Vinci,' a celebrated 27-year-old battalion commander killed near Bakhmut
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-12 | by ( Isobel Van Hagen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy attended the funeral of a celebrated soldier who was killed earlier this week. Dmytro Kotsiubailo's call sign was "Da Vinci," and he was 27 years old when he died. Kotsiubailo's call sign was "Da Vinci" — as the soldier gave up on his dream of becoming an artist to fight for Ukraine, according to NPR. He led a battalion called the "Da Vinci Wolves." "I handed over to Oksana Kotsiubailo, Da Vinci's mother, the Cross of Military Merit, which her son was posthumously awarded.

REUTERS/Anushree FadnavisJan 24 (Reuters) - India is likely to peg its nominal gross domestic product (GDP) growth at around 11% in the annual budget next week, marking a slowdown from its estimate for the current fiscal year due to the prospect of weak exports, two government officials said. Nominal GDP growth — which includes inflation and is the benchmark used to estimate tax collections — could be pressured by suppressed external demand next year due to a likely U.S. recession, said the sources, who declined to be named as discussions are not yet public. The government expects nominal growth of 15.4% for the current fiscal year that ends on March 31. With nominal GDP of 10.6%-11%, India's gross tax collection growth rate is likely to be around 8% in 2023/24, compared with 14.5% in the current year, due to base effect, said Gaura Sengupta, an economist at IDFC First Bank. The real GDP growth is expected to be pegged at 6.0%-6.5% in the Economic Survey of 2022/23, one of the officials said.

Austin Johnson in August 2019 when his eyes and skin had turned yellow from liver disease caused by years of heavy drinking. Courtesy Austin JohnsonCirrhosis or severe liver disease used to be something that mostly struck people in middle age, or older. “We’re definitely seeing younger and younger patients coming in with what we previously thought was advanced liver disease seen in patients only in their middle age, 50s and 60s,” said Mellinger. Since 2018, Mellinger, and doctors at the Michigan Alcohol Improvement program provide psychiatrists and addiction specialists to patients with liver disease. The yellow color in his skin and eyes — a symptom of severe liver disease — has disappeared.

☆ India's growth to slow in 2023 on fading reopening impact-Goldman Sachs
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

MUMBAI, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs expects India's economic growth to slow to 5.9% next year, from an estimated 6.9% growth in 2022, as the boost from the post-COVID reopening fades and monetary tightening weighs on domestic demand. "In the second half, we expect growth to re-accelerate as global growth recovers, the net export drag declines, and the investment cycle picks up," Sengupta said. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), last week, pegged the domestic growth rate at 7% for 2022-23. Goldman Sachs expects headline inflation to drop to 6.1% in 2023, from 6.8% in 2022, saying government intervention was likely to cap food prices and that core goods inflation had probably peaked. "But upside risks to services inflation are likely to keep core inflation sticky around 6% year-on-year," Sengupta added.

How Putin and Friends Stalled Climate Progress A handful of powerful world leaders rallied around Russia and undercut global cooperation. Mr. Putin has gained from this as the increasingly autocratic Mr. Xi finds common cause with the Kremlin. “Much depends on whether authoritarian leaders perceive climate action to be in their self-interest.”Though their actions help Mr. Putin, their track records on climate are mixed. Mr. Xi called Mr. Putin his “best friend.”He was returning the favor from a year earlier, when Mr. Putin hosted Mr. Xi at the Grand Kremlin Palace and awarded him one of Russia’s highest medals for foreign dignitaries. At a news conference with Mr. Putin, Mr. Bolsonaro thanked his “dear friend,” saying that Mr. Putin had offered him support when other world leaders were criticizing his Amazon policy.

☆ A survey of first-year investment bank analysts could indicate a shift in how future junior bankers are trained up
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-03 | by ( Dan Defrancesco | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Would you like to get inside the mind of Wall Street's junior bankers? Insider's Emmalyse Brownstein got her hands on recruitment firm Odyssey Search Partners' survey of first-year investment banking analysts. Click here to check out 13 of the most interesting data points from a survey of first-year investment banking analysts. 3. Business students don't want to work on Wall Street. Almost 90,000 business students from around the globe were surveyed on the top employers they would most want to work for.

☆ Google's former payments chief just unveiled his plans for a digital family office that relies on AI and already has $90 million in funding from backers like Ribbit Capital and Coatue
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Asia Martin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Caesar Sengupta spent 15 years at Google and was its payments chief before leaving in 2021. Arta is backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital India and Ribbit Capital. Sengupta left Google in April of last year with seven other Google employees to start Arta: Charles Dong, Chirag Yagnik, David Shapiro, Edward Chiang, Felix Lin, Mark Striebeck, and Zelidrag Hornung. "This is so different from what Google does, we left and Google was extremely supportive," said Sengupta. Sengupta and other former Google executives on the Arta team left in the midst of a series of exits of high-ranking Google employees.

☆ Google veteran launches 'digital family office' backed by Betsy Cohen, Eric Schmidt
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Hannah Lang | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Nov 2 (Reuters) - Arta Finance, a fintech that aims to replicate the family office experience for a wider audience through artificial intelligence, debuted on Wednesday with $90 million in funding from investors who include Betsy Cohen and former Google (GOOGL.O) chief Eric Schmidt. While family offices cater to those with hundreds of millions in assets, Arta is targeting those with $100,000 to several million dollars in investable assets, Sengupta said. BNY Mellon's (BK.N) Pershing will serve as Arta's broker and custodian and offer credit lines to eligible investors. "We're actually really trying hard to scale as much as we can to get to as many people who we can serve," said Sengupta. Reporting by Hannah Lang in Washington; Editing by Lananh Nguyen and Cynthia OstermanOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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