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On Thursday, 3 December 2015, 14:19, VeryPDF-Email-Service <noreply@verymailer.com> wrote:
3 December 2015, 12:16 pm
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) -- The Islamic State can be defeated within "months" of a ceasefire between Syria's government and moderate rebels, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday, urging the world to come together behind a peace strategy recently hashed out by the United States, Russia and other countries.
Kerry said air power alone won't be enough. The campaign will require ground forces, too, he said at a European security conference. He later specified those would be local Syrian and Arab boots on the ground, not Western troops.
Kerry has been spearheading international efforts to broker an end to fighting between Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and non-terrorist opposition forces, and a political transition process involving elements of each side. The thinking is that peace between the government and moderates would allow the international community to focus military efforts exclusively on defeating IS, al-Qaida's Syria affiliate and other extremist groups.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have endorsed the process. Iran, along with Russia, is Assad's biggest backer. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni monarchies in the Persian Gulf have provided much of the assistance to the rebels.
Diplomats hope to start direct discussions between Syria's government and the opposition in the next few weeks. December talks in New York have been mooted.
Kerry said a political transition would be a boon for everyone, allowing the Islamic State to be "eliminated within a matter of months."
The U.S. has spoken generally of degrading and eventually destroying the group. It has tried to avoid timelines.
On the sidelines of the Organization for Security and Cooperation event in Belgrade, Serbia, Kerry met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a bid to smooth out tensions that have simmered since Turkey downed a Russian warplane last week. Turkey and the U.S. say the plane crossed into Turkish territory from Syria.
Lavrov was to meet later Thursday in Belgrade with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. It will be the first such face-to-face conversation between high-ranking Russian and Turkish officials since the Nov. 24 incident.
Cooperation between Turkey and Russia is seen as critical for any international effort in Syria.
Underscoring the difficulty of restoring previously warm ties, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Turkey of buying oil from the Islamic State group on Thursday. He said Turkey's downing of the jet was a "treacherous war crime."
'Like Family' Rewards The Patient Reader
3 December 2015, 12:03 pm
There are books you need to slow down for in order to appreciate fully. Like Family, Italian physicist-turned-writer Paolo Giordano's third novel, demands to be savored. Race through this short meditation on family, marriage, and devotion – set in motion by the death of a beloved housekeeper — and you'll miss its point: The importance, in our numbingly busy, propulsive lives, of pausing to fully experience the present.
Giordano's beautiful first novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, published in 2008 when he was 26, remains a hard act to follow. It opened with a double bang – childhood traumas that shaped his two protagonists. These loners break our hearts repeatedly as they fall in love but discover they're better suited to solitude. His second novel, The Human Body, was set on a forward operating base in Afghanistan and was concerned with the wars we wage publicly and privately.
With Like Family, Giordano returns to the domestic front. Once again, he explores loneliness so pervasive that it persists even when one loves someone. But while we feel for these characters, we don't ache for them.
The narrator is a socially awkward physicist and academic married to an exuberant, vivacious decorator, Nora, who "flushed" him out of his "hidey-hole." He worries that his neediness "might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite."
The couple hire the woman they call Mrs. A. or Babette — after the Isak Dinesen story and the movie based on it — during Nora's difficult first pregnancy, when she is confined to bed. Long widowed after a happy marriage cut short by her husband's kidney failure, Mrs. A. is sensible, robust, and sometimes exasperatingly intransigent. She quickly takes over their household; her employers, more docile charges than bosses, find this comforting. Although she has no experience with children, they keep her on to become their son Emanuele's nanny.
It isn't necessary to have experienced the 'defection' of a cherished, trusted caregiver to relate to Giordano's story, but it helps. Still, I'm with the narrator's therapist, who gets tired of hearing about Mrs. A.
The book opens with Mrs. A's death, then circles back in time through her 16-month medical ordeal and the happier days when the couple considered her part of their little family, even though they realized this wasn't exactly accurate. When she gives notice after eight years, claiming fatigue, the narrator and his wife are hurt and distraught. Their son is baffled: "Of the three of us, Emanuele is the only one who has not yet learned that nothing lasts forever when it comes to human relationships," the narrator comments, before adding significantly, "He is also the only one who doesn't know that this is not necessarily a disadvantage."
Mrs. A. not only spared them the most tedious household chores, she was their cheering section and the glue that held them together, "a steady element, a haven, an ancient tree with a trunk so massive that even three pairs of arms could not encircle it," Giordano writes. "Mrs. A. was the only real witness of the enterprise we embarked on day after day, the sole observer of the bond that held us together ... In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk."
It isn't necessary to have experienced the "defection" of a cherished, trusted caregiver to relate to Giordano's story, but it helps. Still, I'm with the narrator's therapist, who gets tired of hearing about Mrs. A. "Now let's forget about the housekeeper. Let's talk about your wife instead," he interrupts impatiently.
The therapist is right, of course. What's really eating his patient is the new unobstructed view of his marriage, now that Mrs. A. is gone – and his newfound understanding of just how short on time we all really are. "Nora and I are always so busy, so distracted, so tired," he says. "If these really are our best years, I'm not satisfied with how we're using them."
Still in his early 30s, Giordano sure seems to be using his time well. With Like Family, he has created another sober book – his third — about the difficulties of bridging our essential solitude. His vision is more melancholy than mirthful and demands a thoughtful, patient read. But Giordano's emphasis on the pressing importance of how we choose to live and love offers subtle hope that our decisions actually matter.
'Clean coal' technology fails to capture world's attention
3 December 2015, 11:13 am
DEKALB, Miss. (AP) -- The Kemper County power plant was supposed to be up and running by now, showing the world how to burn coal without spewing climate-warming carbon pollution into the air.
Instead, the coal plant towering over pine trees and pastures in rural Mississippi is looking like another monument to the unfulfilled promise of carbon capture technology.
Construction costs have ballooned to $6.5 billion, at least three times the original estimate, making Kemper one of the most expensive power plants ever built and pushing up electric bills for Mississippi Power's 186,000 customers. After repeated delays, the project now has a completion date of June 30, or two years behind schedule, and there are doubts even that deadline will be met.
Even some of those who supported the plant have turned against it, advising others to think long and hard before trying something similar.
"I can't imagine that a regulator would approve this. I can't imagine that a company would approve this," said Cecil Brown, a Democrat recently elected to the Mississippi Public Service Commission. As a state legislator, he voted in ways that aided construction of the Kemper plant.
Carbon capture entails catching the carbon emissions from a power plant or cement or steel factory and injecting them underground for permanent storage. It's a proven technology that would allow the world to keep burning coal, oil and gas for energy while releasing little of the heat-trapping gas that scientists say is the main cause of global warming.
Despite decades of research and pilot projects, however, carbon capture is still waiting for its breakthrough, illustrating how hard it is for the world to do something about global warming even when the tools are there.
In 2013, Norway pulled the plug on a major carbon capture project it had likened to the moon landing, citing spiraling costs. Another big setback came on Nov. 25, just days ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, when Britain abruptly canceled 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) in funding for carbon capture technology, raising doubts about the fate of two projects competing for the money.
While high costs are the main problem, carbon capture also faces opposition from environmentalists. Groups like Greenpeace and WWF say climate action should be geared toward 100 percent renewable energy such as wind and solar power, not toward throwing a lifeline to fossil fuels.
But authoritative bodies like the International Energy Agency and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that without deploying carbon capture technology on a large scale, the world may not be able to reach the U.N. goal of keeping man-made warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which governments hope will stave off some of the worst floods, droughts and heat waves associated with rising temperatures.
Still, the costly technology is likely to get little attention in the Paris talks. Of the more than 170 countries that submitted action plans ahead of the conference, only eight explicitly mentioned carbon capture as a potential mitigation measure, according to an analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Bill Hare, who heads the Climate Analytics institute in Berlin, said carbon capture may have missed its moment when investments didn't take off despite a lot of "hype" a decade ago. Now, he said, the falling costs of renewable energy mean carbon capture has a lot of catching up to do.
"It's probably harder to get this moving now than 10 years ago," Hare said.
There are 13 large-scale carbon capture projects in the world, collecting 26 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the International Energy Agency. But that's less than one one-thousandth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
"There's activity out there, but it's not what various organizations would have hoped for," said Juho Lipponen, who heads the IEA's carbon capture unit.
Like most carbon capture advocates, he called for stronger incentives, including a carbon price that makes it more expensive to release the pollutant into the atmosphere than to put it back in the ground.
The IEA says about $12 billion has been invested in large-scale carbon capture projects in the past 10 years. About 80 percent of it came from the private sector, mostly oil and gas companies. The coal industry, however, is "still not going beyond the nice words," despite years of praising carbon capture as a promising clean coal technology, Lipponen said.
Benjamin Sporton, CEO of the World Coal Association, said the industry is investing in carbon-capture projects, including a power plant under construction in Tianjin, China. But he added that the technology will struggle unless it gets the same support from governments as renewable energy, which "has been driven by policy that provides $100 billion in subsidies every year."
While the world's thousands of coal-fired power plants are the single biggest source of man-made carbon emissions, only one of them is equipped with carbon capture technology: the Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan, Canada. Kemper County could become the second.
Launched with fanfare last year, the Boundary Dam unit was designed to capture 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. However, plant operator SaskPower ran into a series of glitches and captured less than half that amount in the first year of operation.
"These challenges are not uncommon in a large-scale industrial project during the early stages of operation, particularly a project that is the first of its kind in the world," SaskPower said in an email.
The project was initially estimated to cost 1.2 billion Canadian dollars ($900 million), but the bill rose to 1.47 billion ($1.10 billion), including a federal grant of 240 million ($180 million).
For Kemper County, Mississippi Power initially estimated a price tag of $1.8 billion when the plant was announced it in 2006. By the time construction began in 2010, the price had risen to $2.9 billion, including improved carbon capture technology and an adjoining coal mine.
In a sprint to grab federal tax credits, Mississippi Power started construction with only 10 percent of the design completed. The company underestimated how much concrete, steel, pipe and cable and how many workers it would need to build the plant. Some parts had to be torn out and rebuilt because of design changes associated with constructing a first-of-its-kind plant.
Mississippi Power officials say they are wrapping up work now. But an engineer hired by state regulators testified in October that it is highly unlikely the utility will meet its June 30 deadline. The project is likely to forfeit $372 million in tax credits because of delays, and shareholders of Southern Co., owner of Mississippi Power, have absorbed $2.3 billion in losses.
Southern, the third-largest private electric utility in the U.S., stands by the project. It co-owns its key technology and would like to sell it to others.
"I know we're taking a long time, and I know we're taking some pain for taking the right amount of time," Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning told investors on a Nov. 6 conference call. "But what you're getting out of Kemper, and you've seen it already, is that what we have built and tested is working beautifully."
Right now, though, Southern isn't planning any more such projects. Bruce Harrington, plant manager at Kemper County, said the price will come down as more are built. But he understands the concern.
"I think any thoughtful person would say you really have to look at the cost," he said.
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Ritter reported from Stockholm.
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