EsadeGeo - EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 20/11/2023

Bloomberg - Manuela Tobias, Patrick Gillespie, and Ignacio Olivera Doll / Argentina Takes Leap Into Unknown With Javier Milei as President

• Libertarian outsider Javier Milei won Argentina’s presidency promising a radical shakeup to fix decades of policy mismanagement, a strategy that resonated with a populace suffering under a nosediving economy and one of the world’s fastest inflation rates.
• With 99% of ballots counted after Sunday’s runoff election, Milei took 56% of the votes to 44% for Economy Minister Sergio Massa of the incumbent left-wing Peronist coalition, according to the official electoral authority. The scale of his victory was unexpected, and Massa conceded before the results were released.
• The result hands Milei a mandate to pursue campaign pledges including ditching the peso for the US dollar and shuttering the central bank, while undertaking drastic cuts to public spending in an attempt to jolt the country of 46 million out of its malaise.
• Yet Milei’s brand of shock therapy sets Argentina on a path of deep uncertainty, with some economists warning that dollarizing the $622 billion economy at a time when international reserves are depleted could tip the South American nation into another bout of hyperinflation.

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts / Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says

• The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.
• The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO2 emissions in 2019 – enough to cause more than a million excess deaths due to heat, according to the report.
• For the past six months, the Guardian has worked with Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other experts on an exclusive basis to produce a special investigation, The Great Carbon Divide. It explores the causes and consequences of carbon inequality and the disproportionate impact of super-rich individuals, who have been termed “the polluter elite”. Climate justice will be high on the agenda of this month’s UN Cop28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates.
• The Oxfam report shows that while the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated, air-conditioned lives, their emissions – 5.9bn tonnes of CO2 in 2019 – are responsible for immense suffering.

Politico - Karl Mathiesen, Charlie Cooper and Zack Colman / Anti-green backlash hovers over COP climate talks

• World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.
• The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.
• The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.
• But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.

Financial Times - Andrew England / US confident Arab states will not weaponise oil, says Biden adviser

• The White House’s chief energy adviser has said he is confident that Arab oil producers will not weaponise energy, despite mounting anger across the Middle East over Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza.
• Amos Hochstein told the Financial Times that the level of collaboration between the US and Gulf producers, including Saudi Arabia, had been “very strong” over the past two years.
• “Oil has been weaponised from time-to-time since it became a traded commodity, so we’re always worried about that, working against that, but I think so far it hasn’t,” he said in an interview. “We have two active wars in the world, one involving the world’s third-largest producer [Russia], the other in the Middle East where missiles are flying near where oil is produced, and yet prices are near the lower point of the year.”
• That showed “we are managing it fairly well, but we can never rest and it’s an evolving situation”, Hochstein said.

Our opinion reads for today:

• Project Syndicate - Laura Tyson and John Zysman / The New Industrial Policy and Its Critics
• Bloomberg - John Authers / Don’t Cry for Milei’s Argentina