One Sentence News / August 17, 2023
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Occidental to buy Canadian startup Carbon Engineering for $1.1 billion
Summary: Fossil fuel giant Occidental Petroleum has agreed to purchase Canadian direct air capture startup Carbon Engineering for about $1.1 billion in cash; the deal is expected to close before the end of the year if regulators allow it to proceed.
Context: Occidental has been partnering with Carbon Engineering for the past four years to build a direct air capture facility in West Texas, which is primed to become the largest of its kind in the world by 2025; direct air capture is a method of removing CO2 from the atmosphere by sucking up air and filtering CO2 from it, and this is currently an energy-intensive and expensive approach to carbon-drawdown that has been popular with fossil fuel companies of late, in part because—if scaled-up—it could allow these companies to continue operating as usual for longer, capturing some of the CO2 they emit rather than reducing or halting emissions.
—Bloomberg
Libyan factions pause Tripoli battle with 27 dead
Summary: Fighting broke out between two armed factions in Tripoli, the capitol of Libya, on Monday, marking the city’s worst violence so far this year.
Context: The Special Deterrence Force and the 444 Brigade both backed the interim Government of National Unity during a would-be usurpation last year, and the city has seen relative calm since a ceasefire between regional factions in 2020, but political tensions remain and sporadic fighting has continued in other cities since then; these new clashes were sparked by the detainment of a 444 Brigade commander by the Special Deterrence Force, and the release of that commander seems to have calmed things a bit, though locals are still nervous and there’s concern that this relatively minor outbreak of fighting could spiral into something bigger.
—Reuters
Russia’s central bank makes huge interest rate hike to try to prop up falling ruble
Summary: Russia’s central bank has hiked the country’s key interest rate by 3.5 percentage points, up to 12%, as part of a larger effort to halt their currency’s collapse in value.
Context: The ruble has lost about a third of its value so far in 2023, and though this doesn’t indicate the Russian economy is seriously under threat, this type of currency value-depletion can nudge things in that direction, so the government is keen to shore the ruble up before further damage is done; for context, it took the US Fed about a year to hike its interest rate by about 3.5 percentage points, up to its current 5.25 to 5.5% level, so this hike at this speed to this level of 12% is pretty significant, economically, and could have substantial knock-on effects beyond what the Russian central bank is aiming for.
—The Associated Press
New numbers from the Solar Energy Industries Association suggest that the Inflation Reduction Act will significantly increase the deployment of solar power infrastructure across the US for the next decade, in large part because of the availability of subsidies and other incentives within the sector.
—Axios
11%
Increase in homeless people across the US from 2022—the largest recorded increases since the government started tracking such data in 2007.
It’s suspected that this jump is the consequence of pandemic-era social programs disappearing, rising housing costs across the country, and a harsh period of high inflation that has increased the cost of fundamentals like food and fuel.
—The Wall Street Journal
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