EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 13/03/2024

Financial Times - Laura Dubois, Henry Foy and Paola Tamma / Brussels prepares €7.4bn aid package for Egypt

• The EU is readying a €7.4bn aid package for Egypt aimed at shoring up its economy, amid fears that the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan risk exacerbating financial troubles in the north African nation and raising immigration pressure on Europe. 
• European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will travel to Cairo on Sunday with the Greek, Italian and Belgian prime ministers to finalise and announce the agreement. 
• The proposed deal is the latest in a series of EU pacts with northern African countries aimed at avoiding economic instability around Europe’s neighbourhood and halting irregular migration from Africa. 

• It follows other agreements with Tunisia and Mauritania that pledged money and other incentives in return for better policing of the countries’ borders, despite concerns from politicians and NGOs over human rights and the effectiveness of such arrangements.

   

Al-Jazeera / Energy industry methane emissions rise close to record in 2023

• Methane emissions from the energy sector approached record highs last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned. 
• In a report released on Wednesday, the global watchdog said the fossil fuel industry’s emissions of the potent greenhouse gas, responsible for about 30 percent of global warming, reached more than 120 million metric tonnes in 2023. That put emissions close to the record set in 2019, despite the sector having promised to use freely available technology to reduce their levels. 
• Despite pledges made by the oil and gas industry to bring down large-scale emission spikes by plugging infrastructure leaks, they jumped by 50 percent last year compared with 2022. One disastrous well blowout in Kazakhstan, recorded by satellites, lasted more than 200 days. 

• The increase also came despite the availability of technology capable of curbing pollution at virtually no cost, said the Paris-based agency. Some 40 percent of the emissions recorded in 2023 “could have been avoided at no net cost” using tried and tested methods, said IEA energy expert Christophe McGlade.

   

The New York Times - David C. Adams, Abdi Latif Dahir and Frances Robles / Kenya Hits Pause on Police Deployment to Haiti

• A deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers to Haiti to help quell gang-fueled lawlessness is on hold until a new government is formed in the Caribbean nation, officials in Kenya said Tuesday, as leaders tried to figure out a difficult question: Who is going to run Haiti? 
• Kenya had agreed to send a security force to Haiti, but that deal had been reached with Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who on Monday night agreed to step down once a new transitional government is formed. 
• Haiti’s embattled prime minister announced his intention to resign after being stranded for days in Puerto Rico following a gang takeover of much of the Haitian capital that made it impossible for him to return. 

• His decision followed several days of violent attacks on police stations, hospitals, prisons, the main airport, seaport and other state institutions and brought more uncertainty to an already chaotic situation in the Caribbean country, which has been convulsed in recent months by an extraordinary wave of gang violence.

   

Euractiv - Nikolaus J. Kurmayer / Europe’s high-voltage grid investment gap worse than feared

• EU countries systematically underestimate the speed at which renewables will be added to grids in their development plans – making the investment gap larger than thought, new research made available to Euractiv has shown. 
• Europe’s got a grid problem. While the EU is rapidly adding new solar panels and wind turbines, investments into high-voltage long-distance electricity lines and lower-voltage distribution networks are lagging behind. A 2023 report put the gap at €583 billion by 2030 – but new research exclusively shared with Euractiv suggests that it could be even bigger. 
• Eleven EU countries are not sufficiently accounting for renewables targets in their grid plans, which “risks holding Europe’s supercharged energy transition back if plans aren’t updated,” said Elisabeth Cremona, an analyst at the clean-energy think-tank Ember, who conducted the study. 
• With solar booming, and wind on the mend, Ember found that 19 grid plans underestimate expected solar panel additions by 205 GW – while ten countries underestimate wind power for a total of 17 GW.

Our opinion reads for today:

• Project Syndicate - Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg / What Economics Was Missing 
• Foreign Policy - Tony Frangie-Mawad / Why the Maduro Regime Has Turned on Its Former Allies