BP and Shell are on course to make a combined profit of almost £40bn this year from the rocketing price of petrol and gas. Gas prices increased ninefold from a year earlier in the run-up to Christmas and remain five times higher than the level in January 2020. Oil prices have jumped from below $40 a barrel in the first lockdown to more than $80 a barrel. Several oil industry analysts have forecast oil prices continuing to rise above $100 a barrel this year, pushing oil company profits even higher.

Anti-poverty campaigners described the profits of oil producers as “obscene”.

BP, which extracts oil in the North Sea, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, is this week expected to announce annual pre-tax profits in 2021 of more than £12bn, before signalling that it is on course to make a £15.5bn profit in 2022.

Last week Shell reported annual profits of £14.3bn, which analysts believe will grow to £23.6bn by the end of its financial year in June.

Shell and BP have channelled £147bn to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks over the past decade, with rival North Sea producers and the big six energy suppliers contributing another £47bn. BP is expected to use its stronger cashflows to hand a larger dividend to shareholders and buyback shares to improve its value on the stock market.

Danni Hewson, a financial analyst at the stockbroker AJ Bell, said, “It’s hard not to paint big energy companies as villains when they and their shareholders are profiting from the rising prices that are making life miserable for many hardworking people. Both businesses have made huge pledges but the proportion of spend they apportion to green projects is still woefully tiny. Such a gesture would take the sting out of their current good fortune, while benefiting both shareholders and the general public.”

Tessa Khan, an international climate change and human rights lawyer and founder of campaign group Uplift, said it was “obscene” Shell’s shareholders were getting rich at a time when people face “real hardship”.

“In 2020, not only did Shell not pay any tax in the UK, the only country in which it operates where it didn’t, Shell picked up nearly £100m from taxpayers in rebates.”

£40bn profits for BP and Shell fuel calls for windfall tax on energy firms | Cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Awareness of Romania’s role in the Holocaust, at home and abroad, is far less than that of the Nazis’ role. But in Romanian-controlled territories under the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews, plus some 12,000 Roma, were killed during the war. 

 In Transnistria, a territory in occupied southern Ukraine that was controlled by Romania, a close ally to Nazi Germany for most of the war, there existed  150 camps and ghettos operated where hundreds of thousands of Jews were brutalized, exploited, and murdered. Many died of starvation; some succumbed to disease or exposure; some were executed. At the Pechera camp, the gates of which sported a wooden sign that read “Death Camp,” hunger was such that cases of cannibalism were reported

A late 2021 study by the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania “Elie Wiesel,” showed that 40% of respondents were not interested in the Holocaust. Nearly two-thirds of the 32% who agreed that the Holocaust took place in Romania mistakenly identified the deportation of Jews to “camps controlled by Nazi Germany.”

Stefan Cristian Ionescu, a historian and Holocaust expert at Northwestern University, said that most Romanians “think that it’s a responsibility of Nazi Germany.”

“I think a lot of Romanians still have a problem accepting that the Antonescu regime and the Romanian authorities … were involved in the Holocaust,” he said. “In the mass murder, deportation, and dispossession of Jews in Romania, and in occupied territories such as Transnistria.” 

Romanian lawmakers passed a bill last fall to add Holocaust education to the national school curriculum, a move that was applauded by many. But it was met with controversy in January when the far-right Alliance for Romanian Unity, which holds seats in parliament, called it a “minor topic” and an “ideological experiment.”

Book aims to shine light on Romanian role in the Holocaust | AP News

British households face the worst squeeze on record, as chancellor Rishi Sunak warned that even middle earners will “feel the pinch” in the months ahead.

“The price rise is so significant that it’s not just those families who are on benefits that are going to feel the pinch, it’s actually middle-income families as well. Families that are working hard, they’re not on welfare; this will be a significant increase for them,” Mr Sunak told reporters.

 The Bank of England  Andrew Bailey said inflation was not expected to return to normal levels until early 2024, with pay rise struggling to keep up.

Bailey told BBC Radio’s Today programme: “It is going to be a difficult period ahead, I readily admit, because we all get we are already seeing and we’re going to see a reduction in real income. 

With workers’ pay rises averaging below 5 per cent and taxes set to rise in April too, it means households here face the biggest fall in their real incomes since comparable records began 30 years ago.

 Woodside is a wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb.  It is home to some tech oligarchs such as Scott Cook and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. 

The median home price in the town is $5.5m, and the median household income is more than $250,000. The landscape is scattered with sizable mansions.

The wealthy have said it cannot approve the development of new duplexes or fourplexes to ease the statewide housing shortage. As California pushes to expand housing amid a crisis of housing affordability and homelessness, communities across the state have resisted efforts to build more densely, often using the state’s strict environmental laws as a shield. With SB 9 taking effect this year, cities across the state also sought to pass design restrictions, or designate historic districts and sites in a scramble to find loopholes in the law.

SB 9 is a a new California measure that makes it easier to build multi-unit housing in neighborhoods previously reserved for single-family homes. But a clause in the measure exempts areas that are considered habitat for protected species. “Given that Woodside – in its entirety” is habitat for mountain lions that environmental groups are petitioning to list as threatened or endangered under the state’s Endangered Species Act, “no parcel within Woodside is currently eligible for an SB 9 project”, the town’s planning director wrote. 

Housing advocates, have accused the town of cynically using environmental concerns to avoid compliance with state law. “This is nimbyism disguised as environmentalism,” said Scott Wiener, a California senator who co-authored SB 9. “The notion that building duplexes hurts mountain lions – it’s just ridiculous.”

Winston Vickers, director of the Mountain Lion Project at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, explained, “Any development should be done with careful consideration of whether it is going to impact a nearby travel corridor, green belt or large adjacent habitat area for mountain lions,” Vickers said. “But to say that any expansion of housing, anywhere in a given city, would likely impact mountain lions is likely a bit of a stretch.”

Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing | California | The Guardian

 10% of the 8 billion people on earth are already undernourished with 3 billion lacking healthy diets, and the land and water resources farmers rely on stressed to “a breaking point.” And by 2050 there will be 2 billion more mouths to feed, warns a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

 “Human-induced degradation affects 34% (1,660 million hectares) of agricultural land, the FAO reports. “The treatment of soils with inorganic fertilizers to increase or sustain yields has had significant adverse effects on soil health, and has contributed to freshwater pollution induced by run-off and drainage.”

The FAO reports also that globally, agriculture accounts for 72 percent of all surface and groundwater withdrawals, mainly for irrigation, which is depleting groundwater aquifers in many regions. 

Climate change exacerbates farmers’ challenges by making weather more extreme and less reliable. The FAO reports that 31% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agri-food systems. Extreme heat can stress crops and farm workers while increasing evaporation of water from soil and transpiration from plants, thus amplifying agricultural water demands. Here too, it’s not all bad news: Agricultural productivity is expected to increase in regions that are currently relatively cold, but decrease in places that are hotter and drier, especially as climate change exacerbates droughts.

For example, as the primary or sole producer of many of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, California effectively acts as America’s garden. But climate change is exacerbating droughts and water shortages in the state, and farmers are struggling to adapt. About 80% of all almonds in the world are grown in California, generating $6 billion in annual revenue, but almonds are a very water-intensive crop. As a result, some farmers have been forced to tear up their lucrative almond orchards. It’s a stark reminder that “adaptation” can sound easy on paper, but in practice can sometimes be painful and costly.

Regenerative agriculture is a simple idea, instead of using pesticides, irrigation systems, and heavy tilling machinery, cover crops are used during the off season to keep the moisture and nutrients in the soil. That also controls the weeds. Rotations of crops and livestock from season to season, allows worms do the work that machines do elsewhere. 

The state of the world’s land and water resources for food and agriculture | Land & Water | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations | Land & Water | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org)

 Each year on average more than 3 million people die from zoonotic diseases, those that spill over from wildlife into humans. The analysis assesses every zoonotic virus over the last century known to have killed more than 10 people, including the Spanish flu, repeated bird flu outbreaks, Marburg virus, Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, Nipah, West Nile, Sars, Chikungunya, Zika and Covid-19.

Wildlife is known to harbour vast numbers of viruses, and outbreaks are increasing in frequency and severity. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, experts have repeatedly warned that the root causes must be tackled. Inaction has left the world playing an “ill-fated game of Russian roulette with pathogens”, they have said, and protecting nature is vital to escape an “era of pandemics”.

  Scientists heavily criticise approaches by global bodies and governments that focus only on preventing the spread of new viruses once they have infected humans, rather than tackling the root causes as well. “That premise is one of the greatest pieces of folly of modern times,” said Prof Aaron Bernstein, of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. 

“Our salvation comes cheap because prevention is much cheaper than cures,” Bernstein said. “If Covid-19 taught us anything, it is that we absolutely cannot rely on post-spillover strategies alone to protect us. Spending only five cents on the dollar can help prevent the next tsunami of lives lost to pandemics by stopping the wave from ever emerging, instead of paying trillions to pick up the pieces.”

Bernstein said action to stop pandemics at source had been ignored because “ this primary prevention does not result in profits for corporations,” he said.

Failure to prevent pandemics at source is ‘greatest folly’, say scientists | Conservation | The Guardian

The Bank of England boss urged workers not to ask for big pay rises, to help stop prices rising out of control.

 Wealthy people have disproportionately large carbon footprints and the percentage of the world’s emissions they are responsible for is growing, a study has found.

In 2010, the most affluent 10% of households emitted 34% of global CO2, while the 50% of the global population in lower-income brackets accounted for just 15%. By 2015, the richest 10% were responsible for 49% of emissions against 7% produced by the poorest half of the world’s population.

In terms of energy demand in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes.

Aimee Ambrose, a professor of energy policy at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the study published in the journal Science Direct, says, the cost of living crisis was likely to make those on middle to low incomes reduce their carbon consumption by holidaying in the UK, if at all, and by using less fuel. However, those who consume the most are unlikely to have to make such changes.

“It is much easier for richer consumers to absorb these increases in costs without changing their behaviour. In many ways, the rich are being largely insulated from the spike in energy costs.”

‘Carbon footprint gap’ between rich and poor expanding, study finds | Carbon footprints | The Guardian

Two days after the Grenfell Tower fire, the UK government mounted a public relations rebuttal operation to counter potentially damaging reports that building regulations had allowed the use of combustible cladding. 

Brian Martin, the official in charge of fire safety building regulations at the Ministry of Housing, Local Government and Communities, rebutted press claims that the plastic-filled panels that fuelled the inferno were allowed in the UK but not abroad. Martin contacted Diane Marshall, now operations director at the National House Building Council (NHBC), which provides building control services, asking her to “say this (or something similar) in public” to counter critical reporting that the government’s building control system had allowed the west London council block to be wrapped in combustible materials.

Housing ministry ‘started rebuttal operation two days after Grenfell fire’ | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further raise its prices this year. 

Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021.

Starbucks employees are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.

Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”

Starbucks Profits Soar by 31%—But It’s Raising Prices Anyway (commondreams.org)