David Fickling
David Fickling
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I want you to imagine for a second a scenario where, instead of Ukraine having four easily-monitored nuclear power plants built to withstand attacks and accidents, it produces the same amount of power from 70-odd Small Modular Reactors filled with weapons-grade fissile material.
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David Fickling
@davidfickling
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I agree that we shouldn't worry too much about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia plant, thanks to its extensive safety protections.
I think those who argue "nuclear is only costly because of unnecessary safety protections" could do a little self-reflection, though.
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I'm excited that Europe is looking at extending the life of its ageing reactors -- an expensive but zero-carbon way of reducing fossil fuel dependence.
I welcome the high price (until a few days ago) of EU carbon, another excellent pro-nuclear price signal.
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I agree that we shouldn't worry too much about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia plant, thanks to its extensive safety protections.
I think those who argue "nuclear is only costly because of unnecessary safety protections" could do a little self-reflection, though.
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Governments aren’t as powerless to fight surging oil prices as they may seem, writes
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The
energy transition and sorta-stranded assets. A 
on this column: https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-01/switch-to-clean-energy-may-mean-subsidizing-the-dirty-kind?sref=kOk687Pk… (1/13)
on this column: https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-01/switch-to-clean-energy-may-mean-subsidizing-the-dirty-kind?sref=kOk687Pk… (1/13)
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Reminiscent not just of the 1990s Yeltsin era but (IMO more consequentially) the economic disaster of Gorbachev-era perestroika, which led to the collapse of the USSR itself.
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Dr. Ian Garner
@irgarner
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(3) This is probably the most important point. I'm seeing plenty of sharing about bank runs, ATM dashes, inflating prices, and availability of consumer goods. People in the Far East, where food prices are already sky high, aren't quite panicking, but they're not exactly happy.
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China wants to rein in the wild swings in the iron ore market. Good luck with that, writes https://trib.al/ZjDXgOx via
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President Biden imposed stiff sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine as Western nations warned that Kyiv could fall.
Tonight at 9 p.m. EST, join and live as they discuss the latest news on Russia and Ukraine:
Tonight at 9 p.m. EST, join and live as they discuss the latest news on Russia and Ukraine:Feb 25·Bloomberg Opinion·
Ukraine & Russia: Latest News and Updates
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I guess Albania was in there in the early years, but left in the 1960s. And it joined Nato way back in 2009.
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Just so we all remember, the last time a former Warsaw Pact country became a member of NATO was in 2004.
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Seriously I need some massive spreadsheet to sort this mess out once and for all. It's insane!
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Every time I write about natural gas, except all the equations are converstions between "mmbtu", "bcm", "bcf", "mtpa", "mboe", "PJ", "MWh" and now, just to make things fun, "$/kg H2" #OOTT
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The recent power crisis gives rich advocates of energy transition a chance to put their money where their mouths are, says
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With oil galloping closer to $100 a barrel, who’s going to come to the rescue?
Output from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries remains stuck around five million barrels a day below peak levels
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The autobrake system cutting out is concerning, but I feel we might be underplaying the lead here.
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Wait, what?
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Aluminum is key to technology that might save the planet. But it's also produced with a lot of dirty energy. That combination is leading to higher inflation, says https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-14/aluminum-will-intensify-the-inflationary-wave-washing-around-the-world?sref=5JzLFdzD… via
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Typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece from here. Beware political intervention in the EU carbon market just as prices are starting to send the right signal for long-term decarbonisation:
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It appears that has had *enough* of the baseless attacks on Dr. Lisa Cook, which have stemmed from EJMR and were mentioned in the Senate Banking Committee today by Sen. Hagerty of Tennessee. I am heartened to see him call out this cesspool for what it is.
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Paul Romer
@paulmromer
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Replying to @Allname50801953 and @realChrisBrunet
Bullshit. EJR is a sewer full of cowards, snowflakes, and trolls. There is no such thing as anonymous science.
By the way, which are you?
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Gas is a weapon that works only by never using it.
My column on President Vladimir Putin, the crisis in Ukraine, and why gas and nuclear weapons are 'MAD' | #Ukraine #Russia #GasPrices
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My daughter has an explanation for this but I'm not buying it
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So Bruno prophesied the man of Dolores' dreams would be "betrothed to another" but Mariano never actually finishes off proposing to Isabela so there's no betrothal help me out here I'm going insane
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Blotting out the sun to fight climate change is risky, but we might not have a choice - w and more
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Lithium reaches its "duh" moment https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-26/lithium-is-in-short-supply-but-probably-not-for-long?sref=kOk687Pk… via
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A thread about Parliament, power and photo ops.
When I was 20, I visited Parliament with a group of young women advocating for gender equality.
We were told we would meet Scott Morrison. We waited next to groups of school kids. He went around the circle posing with each group.
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New Fight Club ending just dropped
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Today paying tribute to my bloodline of the Gooreng Gooreng, Mununjali, Birrah and Kamilaroi people. All unceded land 
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With prices at their highest in almost a decade, now is not the right time to be buying up rivals, writes https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-20/bhp-picks-the-worst-moment-to-return-to-mining-megadeals?sref=5JzLFdzD… via
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Tell someone it's 2022 without telling someone it's 2022
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There's a hell of a lot going on in this paragraph:
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-17/dalio-says-thank-god-oil-is-still-pumping-amid-inflation-scare?sref=5JzLFdzD…
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Footage emerges of Downing Street pandemic planning meeting
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About three out of four cases this country has seen since the start of the pandemic are active cases right now.
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Unless it embraces new ways of predicting flight demand, the aviation sector will struggle. And passengers will pay the price, writes
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The relevant question is: Which country uses a national security law to freeze the assets of media organisations and arrest and imprison journalists?
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Hong Kong Free Press HKFP
@hkfp
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On press freedom, Lam said she cannot explain why outlets complain of a "chilling effect." She asked which country does not have a national security law.
Lam said she had "no plan" to meet the @HKJA_Official, after mentioning that she met them after taking office.
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London, NY and other financial hubs thrived for hundreds of years on direct information flows between people IRL. Now, Covid has shown just how far finance has evolved away from any need for physical interaction. Great city hubs look obsolete https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-04/bad-news-london-and-new-york-finance-hubs-are-becoming-obsolete…
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And one from the previous year about why we've never seen evidence of alien civilizations:
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David Fickling
@davidfickling
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Here's a thread about how LED lightbulbs, underexposed photos and colonialism suggest an explanation for the Fermi paradox -- the mystery of why there's no sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe:
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Thanks for reading. I like to end the year with a big tweet thread on something non-work related.
If you liked this, here is one from last year about how a ship-eating clam helped spark the Industrial Revolution:
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David Fickling
@davidfickling
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Here's a story about how a ship-eating clam helped bring about the Industrial Revolution:
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We think of France as the home of egalité, but until the 1960s and the European Common Agricultural Policy, its farm-dependent economy led to unusual, almost Latin American-style levels of inequality.
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Even now, France is the only EU country that's self-sufficient in food. And its heavily agricultural economy meant that industrialization was relatively light compared to its neighbours.
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Wood inflation in the bitter winter of 1788-9, along with the wider inflation that followed, was one reason that the people of Paris were ready for revolution by the summer of 1789.
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For most of the 18th century Paris had been trying to build canals to improve access for the wood barges, but it came too late for Louis XIV's successors.
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Amsterdam had peat dug out of its polders to provide energy for warmth and cooking, but Paris had neither.
All its energy was wood from the Morvan forest in the foothills of the Alps, barged down the Seine.
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The challenges of France's farm economy and Paris's feeble trade links didn't go away.
Take energy. London was powered from the middle ages with coal ("sea-coal") boated down from Northumbria. Some of the first air pollution laws date from 1285, banning coal-burning in London.
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Original copies are still rare for a reason any cook will recognise: chefs simply used them to death, turning pages with sticky messy fingers until the book fell to bits.
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The food fashions of a few Parisian aristocrats from the mid-17th century thus set an enduring template for the whole of Europe.
La Varenne's main work, La Cuisinier François, remains in print for nearly 200 years and is pirated across Europe.
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Colbert's policy of building up France's luxury goods industry was a victim of its own success.
The 1685 anti-Protestant revocation of the edict of Nantes drove many of the country's most skilled artisans into exile, spreading French knowhow and fashion across Europe.
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Getting vegetables in a good condition on a Parisian dining table in 1650 meant either that you had a fully-functioning kitchen garden amidst some of the costliest real estate in Europe, or you had access to the best transport money could buy.
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To this day fresh mushrooms are hard to transport. In mid-17th century Paris they'd have been an impossible luxury.
La Varenne's was the first European recipe book to include a section on vegetables. I think this isn't because they were humble, but because they were fancy.
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One of La Varenne's most famous creations is duxelles, that paste of mushrooms, herbs, shallots and butter that you find inside the crust of a Beef Wellington, named after his employer, the Marquis d'Uxelles.
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What's expensive in a Paris straining at the carrying capacity and transport networks of the Seine basin?
Fresh, local produce, delicately cooked to bring out its flavour and show off its quality.
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There's another reason for banishing spices and sugar in an aristocratic cuisine: They're *cheap*.
European dominance of ocean trade meant that the price of such delicacies was far below what it had been in the middle ages, when they were status-symbol bling.
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The same goes for sugar, controlled in this era by the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas.
(Saint-Domingue, the brutally wealthy French sugar colony that later became Haiti, was barely established in this era).
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So what is the revolution La Varenne carried out in European cookery?
First, spices are minimized and banished to the dessert course. Spices had to be bought from the Dutch and the English, so represented a loss to the royal treasury under Colbert's mercantilist economics.
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Quite a contrast to the Thames, which could float the largest oceangoing vessels of this era direct into the port of London on the daily high tides.
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Until the river was dredged and railways crossed the land in the 19th century, barges still often needed to be dragged over the shallow shoals downriver from Paris, and in Paris itself you could wade across parts of the river.
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This posed some profound logistical problems.
Cities of that size need a vast surrounding infrastructure to provide them with food, fuel and materials, but the Seine is not a very good trade artery.
It drops just 35 metres over the 450 kilometres between Paris and the sea.
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Another thing that was happening in this era was that Paris was growing into the largest city in Europe, drawn by the wealth of Louis XIV's court.
With half a million people, only London could compare to it among western European cities.
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Louis XIV's powerful first minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had an idea for how these qualities could be turned to his advantage: build up France as a centre for producing luxury goods like fabric, exporting to other nations to bring in foreign coin for the royal treasury.
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It was also singularly unsuccessful at Empire. Until the colonization of west and central Africa in the late 19th century France had never managed to match the colonial successes of smaller, poorer nations like Spain, Portugal, England and the Netherlands.
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It's easy to forget now how *anomalous* France is among European nations, but that was very visible in this era.
It was the most populous nation in the world after Ming/Qing China and Mughal India, with an endowment of fertile land far beyond any other European power.
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La Varenne was the chief cook to several prominent aristocrats in the mid-17th century, at the time when Louis XIV, the Sun King, was building up the status of France (and Paris as its capital) as a center of wealth and splendour that would set an example to the rest of Europe.
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I think this is largely down to the influence of one man, François Pierre La Varenne, the most influential chef of the 17th century and I'd argue, history.
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But who, famously, controlled the spice trade in the early modern period?
European colonial powers — the same nations that, until my lifetime, largely excluded those same ingredients from their own cuisines.
They refused to get high on their own supply.
That's weird, right?
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How did Jamaican allspice and Mexican chiles make their way into Indian cooking? How did Indonesian nutmeg and cloves get to the same places? Through the spice trade of course.
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What's more, there's the question of *where* all those spices in non-European cuisines came from. Look at the range of locations in that tweet quoted at the top of this thread. Even India and Indonesia didn't grow all these spices domestically.
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This was as highly-spiced as any Indian, Chinese or Jamaican meal. Pound upon pound of ginger, saffron, cloves, rice, sugar. Sweet dishes presented at the same time as the savoury courses, and sugar mixed into the savoury dishes.
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You can see this if you look back at medieval European cuisine, which was highly spiced, mixed the sweet and savory constantly, and in many ways resembles "Christmas cooking".
Take the banquet for the coronation of Richard III of England in 1483:
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I used to think this was just because spices from the tropics weren't much available in Europe, so only got used for special occasions, whereas in places like India they were ubiquitous and thus widely used.
In truth, I think the explanation is close to the opposite.
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Those highly-spiced, sweet-sour flavours we associate with "Christmas foods" in European cultures have always struck me as a weird anomaly.
Mostly, European cooking uses minimal spices and avoids mixing the sweet and the savoury.
That's a stark contrast to most other cuisines.
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Such a good piece, this:
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Adam Minter
@AdamMinter
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And in case you're interested in further @bopinion writers ... my favorite pieces from other columnists were, first, @shuli_ren's personal reflections on how China's views women who pursued career over family. https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-02/how-china-s-three-child-policy-affects-generations-of-independent-women…
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It's right there in the public orders that a reply-tweet is a sufficient way to disseminate updated health advice during a pandemic.
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When your public health messaging is 100% clear, you change your advice via reply-tweet to yourself
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NSW Health
@NSWHealth
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*UPDATE* If you are under 65 years of age, have had two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, do not suffer from any chronic conditions and are not pregnant you can safely manage COVID-19 at home.
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A view to 2022 by , with his best work from 2021, including La Serenissima, crypto and vaccines
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Mad Max: Fury Road
Charlize Theron
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Apocalypse Now.
Martin Sheen.
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Norwegian Wood, that adorable song about how, if you invite John Lennon to your place and don't put out, he will BURN YOUR HOME TO THE GROUND
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Pingu's Constant: Noot point noot noot noot noot recurring
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Day 21!
Hong Kong is like Shangri-la. The entrance keeps on shifting, and even if you know where it is, you still have to scale the snow mountains to reach it.
I look forward to breathing fresh air!
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Breaking: Biden signs into law a bill banning imports from Xinjiang into the United States, unless the company can prove they weren't made with forced labor. The bill passed the Senate 100-0, and the House 428-1. This could radically reshape global supply chains. Hugely important
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Another great thread, and this point is key
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Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
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I've long argued that when it comes to rebalancing income distribution and reining in debt-creation, the deepest fissure is likely to be between Beijing and the local governments.
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The famous statue in #HongKong commemorating the bloody crackdown around #Beijing’s #Tiananmen Square in 1989 has been removed.
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Mithil Aggarwal
@mithilagg
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#BREAKING: PILLAR OF SHAME IS GONE
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Aircraft passengers are twice or even three times more likely to catch Covid during a flight since the emergence of the omicron variant, according to the top medical adviser to the world’s airlines https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/omicron-at-least-doubles-risk-of-getting-infected-on-a-plane?sref=jJ5dcbrU… via
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Fun (by fun I mean insane) fact:
Europe's benchmark gas price is almost *900%* higher than at this time last year.
#ONGT #energycrisis
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This thread:
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Julie Leask
@JulieLeask
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Putting NSW's COVID-19 control down to "personal responsibility" alone is like laying down flooring with no joists.
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Nations don’t have permanent friends or enemies — only permanent interests, says for .
“Russia’s interests are export revenues, and whatever leverage it can gain...On that front, China and Europe aren’t all that different.”
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It's why America, not France, built the Panama canal — because the U.S. military discovered the mosquito vector and so U.S. engineers could use that knowledge to prevent outbreaks in the canal work camps.
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Yellow fever is why the Haitian revolutionaries managed to defeat Napoleon, why the weakened Spanish empire managed to hold the Caribbean and tropical Americas for three centuries, why Bolivar's ragtag army eventually managed to drive them out.
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Yellow fever, because of its devastating effect on epidemiologically naive expeditionary forces, is probably the most militarily important disease in history.
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The U.S. military was key to developing vaccines against yellow fever and adenovirus and crucial for eradication campaigns against yellow fever and malaria.
To this day a huge amount of vaccine basic research is funded via the Department of Defence, iirc.
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The single most powerful force in epidemic prevention in history has been the U.S. military, ever since the days Washington variolated the Continental Army.
HT
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Russia would love to make Beijing as dependent on its gas exports as Europe is. But China may have a stronger hand, says
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Carlos Tejada was a superb editor trusted to helm some of the most consequential stories to come out of Asia this century, at both the WSJ and NYT. To honor him, Nora suggested using hashtag #EditedbyCRTejada to share some of his work. Here’s one:
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