I'm from Hanoi, Viet Nam.
I'm an author of Dot Chuoi Non (dotchuoinon.com/author/hangbelu/), a blog on Positive thinking, founded by Dr. Tran Dinh Hoanh, an attorney in Washington DC.
I'm a co-founder of Conversations on Vietnam Development - cvdvn.net, a virtual think tank. I am a co-founder of two companies in Viet Nam working on children education services. I advise companies on STEAM education, English language education for children and students in Vietnam.
I'm studying the Buddha's teaching and the teaching of Jesus. I practice mindful living including meditation.
I hold a PhD on Sustainable Energy Systems from University of Lisbon and Aalto University.
I graduated from Hanoi University of Technology on Environmental Engineering. I obtained a Master degree of the same major from Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University.
My English-language blog at: hangbelu.wordpress/.
I play table tennis as a hobby.
Debt-for-climate swaps allow countries to reduce their debt obligations in exchange for a commitment to finance domestic climate projects with the freed-up financial resources.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley spoke passionately to the United Nations General Assembly in September about the mounting debt many developing countries are shouldering and its increasing impact on their ability to thrive.
The average debt for low- and middle-income countries, excluding China, reached 42% of their gross national income in 2020, up from 26% in 2011. For countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the annual payments just to service that debt averaged 30% of their total exports.
At the same time, these countries are facing a “triple crisis of climate change, of pandemic and indeed now the conflict that is leading to the inflationary pressures that lead regrettably to people taking circumstances into their own hands,” Mottley said.
Rising borrowing costs coupled with high inflation and slow economic growth have left developing countries like hers in a difficult position when it comes to climate change. High debt payments mean countries have fewer resources for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Yet climate change is increasing their vulnerability, and that can raise their sovereign risk, increasing the cost of borrowing. Declining productive capacity and tax base can lead to higher debt risks. It’s a vicious cycle.
Ngày 19/6 vừa qua, một nhóm phóng viên của Thuỵ Điển đã phát hiện nhiều nghi vấn và đặt ra các câu hỏi về chiến dịch tái chế quần áo cũ của hãng thời trang H&M nước này.
Để thể hiện thiện chí phát triển bền vững với môi trường, H&M đã bắt đầu thực hiện chiến dịch quyên góp quần áo cũ và tái chế vào năm 2013 tại 40 thị trường trên toàn thế giới, trong đó có Việt Nam.
Những khách hàng đem quần áo cũ của hãng đến bỏ vào thùng sẽ nhận được phiếu giảm giá cho lần mua hàng sau. Tuy nhiên các cáo buộc đã chỉ ra, đa phần quần áo cũ bị bán lại sang Châu Phi hoặc những nước nghèo, để rồi phần lớn trong số đó bị vứt bỏ hoặc đốt.
Những lời nói dối hoa mỹ vừa bị phát giác của hãng này sẽ làm cho người tiêu dùng sẽ càng dè dặt hơn khi mua sắm quần áo, đồng thời mất niềm tin vào những cam kết bền vững của các hãng thời trang khác.
2. Bê bối của H&M đã được phát hiện từ đâu?
Cụ thể, nhóm phóng viên của báo Borsen đã giấu thiết bị theo dõi gắn chip GPS vào trong 10 sản phẩm còn dùng tốt và bỏ vào thùng thu gom tại các cửa hàng của H&M. Dữ liệu thu được cho thấy quần áo cũ được đưa tới 3 cơ sở phân loại tại Đức, sau đó 3 trong số 10 sản phẩm đã theo tàu biển tới Beni – quốc gia ở Tây Phi.
Bên cạnh đó, tờ Vasterbottens cũng cho hay từ đầu năm 2023 cho tới nay, 3 công ty nhận quần áo cũ của H&M đã xuất khẩu 5.711 kiện quần áo sang châu Phi, tương đương hơn một triệu sản phẩm may mặc. Tuy nhiên, một nửa trong số đó đã bị vứt bỏ vì nhiều lý do như rách hỏng, không phù hợp với khí hậu châu Phi, quá rộng, quá chật hoặc màu sắc, kiểu dáng không phù hợp với văn hóa địa phương.
Kết quả là thay vì bị bỏ đi ở châu Âu, số quần áo cũ của H&M đã di chuyển tổng cộng 60.000 km bằng tàu biển và xe tải, tương đương với một lần rưỡi vòng quanh thế giới, để bị vứt bỏ ở châu Phi.
Thêm nữa, lượng chất thải cho việc chuyên chở số sản phẩm này sang các nước châu Phi và nước nghèo, để rồi sau đó một nửa bị vứt bỏ bừa bãi ra môi trường mà không được xử lý khiến cho các “chiến dịch xanh” của H&M trở nên khó chấp nhận trong mắt công chúng.
3. Các chiến dịch vì môi trường của H&M từng gây tiếng vang thế nào?
Registrations of anonymous corporations in Panama have dropped by more than half in the last decade, according to a new investigation by Bloomberg Línea.
These corporations, known as sociedades anónimas, pay minimal to no tax and have served as the backbone of Panama’s offshore industry for decades.
A Bloomberg analysis based on data extracted from the Panamanian public registry shows a 63% decrease in registrations from 2012 to 2022, ICIJ member Mary Triny Zea reported. Similarly, the number of dissolutions of companies and private-interest funds per year has also increased; in 2013, there were seven. In 2022, that number had jumped to 5,575.
Bloomberg’s analysis also included data on Delaware and the British Virgin Islands – two other secrecy jurisdictions long considered competitors to Panama. While the British Virgin Islands also saw a decrease in company registrations over the last decade, registrations in Delaware have steadily risen over the past decade, with 62,510 new ones in 2021. The U.S. currently tops the Financial Secrecy Index, the Tax Justice Network’s ranking of jurisdictions most complicit in helping people hide their finances.
Panama Bar Association president Juan Carlos Araúz attributes this change in the country to its poor reputation after the ICIJ’s Panama Papers investigation. That investigation, based on 11.5 million leaked records from the now defunct Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, blew open a system of offshore banking that enabled tax avoidance, money laundering and corruption.
ICIJ accepts information about wrongdoing by corporate, government or public services around the world. We do our utmost to guarantee the confidentiality of our sources.
“Despite the efforts Panama has made to set a standard of control at a higher level than any other jurisdiction in the world, it’s still impacted by the country’s reputation,” Araúz told Bloomberg.
The same year ICIJ published the Panama Papers, 2016, Panama saw its highest number of anonymous corporation dissolutions in the last decade: 14,172. More recently, the Panamanian government has cracked down on the industry, suspending – and then dissolving – hundreds of thousands of companies, mostly for not paying fees.
Mayra Rodríguez, a Panama-based lawyer, also credited ICIJ’s investigation but argued the decline could be due to increased regulations implemented as a result. These regulations impose higher obligations on law firms, which Rodríguez says increases risk and potentially drives down demand.
Similarly, pressure from international entities such as the Financial Action Task Force may have also contributed to the change. Panama is currently on the FATF’s “greylist” – a list of jurisdictions that the organization monitors closely and which have agreed to resolve certain financial loopholes within a specific time frame.
FATF has tasked Panama with ensuring “adequate verification of up-to-date beneficial ownership information by obliged entities and timely access by competent authorities.” And the window of time to do so is closing soon. The FATF has issued a warning to Panama to complete the country’s action plan by June 2023, or face further censure by the organization and its members.
EVN mua điện từ nhiều nguồn như thủy điện, nhiệt điện than, điện gió, điện mặt trời, tuabin khí, nhập khẩu. Trong đó, thủy điện đang có giá rẻ nhất, còn nhiệt điện than lại rất đắt do giá than cao.
Điện than đang đắt lên
Thông tin từ Tập đoàn Điện lực Việt Nam (EVN) cho thấy, giá mua điện bình quân các loại hình nguồn trong 3 tháng đầu năm 2023 là 1.844,9 đồng/kWh. Đây là thời điểm giá bán điện vẫn ở mức 1.864,44 đồng/kWh. Như vậy, giá mua điện của EVN gần ngang bằng với giá bán điện của tập đoàn này khi chưa được điều chỉnh tăng.
Nếu cộng thêm các chi phí khác như phân phối, truyền tải, dịch vụ phụ trợ, điều độ… thì giá điện mua vào sẽ cao hơn giá bán ra.
Biểu đồ dưới đây cho thấy nhiệt điện than có giá lên tới gần 2.000 đồng/kWh. Nguyên nhân là giá than vẫn duy trì ở mức cao.
Ngoài ra, EVN còn mua gián tiếp trên thị trường điện. Mức giá cụ thể như biểu đồ dưới đây cho thấy giá điện than cũng lên tới hơn 2.100 đồng/kWh.
An opinion piece in Bloomberg titled ‘Trying to Replace China’s Supply Chains? Don’t Bother?’, published March 1, 2023, claims that ‘Vietnamese factories were supposed to save globalization’ but that they cannot. This is incorrect and here’s why, writes Dezan Shira and Associates, Head of Business Intelligence, Pritesh Samuel.
Vietnam’s factories were never supposed to save globalization. They offer businesses an alternate location for manufacturing – in line with a China+1 strategy that myriad companies now pursue due to rising costs in China.
Globalization is shaped by several factors, including geopolitics, national interests of governments, regional trade and investment initiatives, public policymaking directives by key trade bodies, and so on. It cannot be trivialized into the assumption that a single country can save it.
China’s advanced supply chain and supplier network, driven by the government’s long-term national policies, make it a manufacturing giant. At present, no single country, including Vietnam, can fully replace China’s manufacturing capacity.
China is on track to massively expand its nuclear arsenal, just as Russia suspends the last major arms control treaty. It augurs a new world in which Beijing, Moscow and Washington will likely be atomic peers.
By David E. Sanger, William J. Broad and Chris Buckley David E. Sanger and William J. Broad have covered nuclear weapons for The Times for four decades. Chris Buckley reports on China’s military from Taiwan.
WASHINGTON — On the Chinese coast, just 135 miles from Taiwan, Beijing is preparing to start a new reactor the Pentagon sees as delivering fuel for a vast expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, potentially making it an atomic peer of the United States and Russia. The reactor, known as a fast breeder, excels at making plutonium, a top fuel of atom bombs.
The nuclear material for the reactor is being supplied by Russia, whose Rosatom nuclear giant has in the past few months completed the delivery of 25 tons of highly enriched uranium to get production started. That deal means that Russia and China are now cooperating on a project that will aid their own nuclear modernizations and, by the Pentagon’s estimates, produce arsenals whose combined size could dwarf that of the United States.
This new reality is prompting a broad rethinking of American nuclear strategy that few anticipated a dozen years ago, when President Barack Obama envisioned a world that was inexorably moving toward eliminating all nuclear weapons. Instead, the United States is now facing questions about how to manage a three-way nuclear rivalry, which upends much of the deterrence strategy that has successfully avoided nuclear war.
China’s expansion, at a moment when Russia is deploying new types of arms and threatening to use battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukraine, is just the latest example of what American strategists see as a new, far more complex era compared to what the United States lived through during the Cold War.
China insists the breeder reactors on the coast will be purely for civilian purposes, and there is no evidence that China and Russia are working together on the weapons themselves, or a coordinated nuclear strategy to confront their common adversary.
But John F. Plumb, a senior Pentagon official, told Congress recently: “There’s no getting around the fact that breeder reactors are plutonium, and plutonium is for weapons.”
It may only be the beginning. In a little-noticed announcement when President Xi Jinping of China met President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month, Rosatom and the China Atomic Energy Authority signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years, if not decades.
When President Xi Jinping of China met President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month, Russia and China’s nuclear authorities signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years.Credit…Grigory Sysoyev/Agence France-Presse, via Sputnik
One of the major investors in Australian LNG, INPEX, has recently suggested that the country is quietly
quitting the LNG business. This is in the context of increasing government regulation, including the
possibility of gas intended for LNG projects being diverted into the domestic market. The federal
government has responded by reassuring major buyers that Australia will continue to be a reliable LNG
supplier.
However, there are a number of fundamental challenges for the government in living up to its promise.
First, Australian gas reserves are not being replaced, with some important legacy gas fields reaching
the end of their lives. This includes both LNG and domestic gas fields. This leads to the possibility that
shortfalls in the domestic market will have to be met by diversions from LNG projects that also face gas
supply challenges. Second, the LNG projects are significant CO2 emitters and many Australian gas
fields, including those with the potential to backfill LNG, contain significant volumes of CO2. The new
federal government has adopted more ambitious emissions reduction targets. Third, coal-fired
generation is being closed faster than it can be replaced with renewables, increasing demand for gas
in key periods such as winter and pushing up gas prices.
Một học sinh cấp 3 tại Hà Nội sau khi được một huấn luyện viên thể hình (PT) cho một chiếc “bánh lười” – loại bánh trộn cần sa đã mang về… chia cho các bạn cùng sử dụng. Hậu quả, một nhóm học sinh đã bị ngộ độc ngay sau đó.
Thứ sáu, ngày 07/04/2023
“Nước vui”, “bùa lưỡi”, “bột dâu”, “bột xoài” với hình thức bắt mắt dễ dàng qua mặt lực lượng chức năng. (Ảnh: Cơ quan chức năng cung cấp)
Đây chỉ là một trong những thí dụ không hề hiếm gặp cho thấy ma túy “thế hệ mới” đã và đang xâm nhập vào học đường hiện nay.
Nguy hiểm rình rập học đường
Theo thống kê của Bộ Công an vào tháng 6/2022, 60% số người sử dụng trái phép chất ma túy lần đầu ở độ tuổi từ 15-25 tuổi, trong đó nhiều người đang là học sinh, sinh viên. Người nghiện ma túy đang có xu hướng ngày càng trẻ hóa đặt ra không ít thách thức cho công tác phòng, chống ma túy cũng như cai nghiện.
Một điều tra viên lâu năm trong lĩnh vực phòng, chống tội phạm ma túy chia sẻ, bản thân anh đã từng chứng kiến nhiều vụ việc “dở khóc, dở cười”.
“Chúng tôi từng nhận được thông tin về việc một nữ học sinh cấp 3 được huấn luyện viên thể hình đưa cho một chiếc bánh lười (loại bánh tẩm cần sa-PV). Tuy nhiên, cô bé không sử dụng ngay mà mang về… chia cho các bạn cùng lớp ăn cùng. Kết quả, cả nhóm học sinh đều bị ngộ độc và phải đưa đi cấp cứu”, điều tra viên kể lại.
Ma túy tổng hợp cơ quan chức năng thu giữ. (Ảnh: Cơ quan công an cung cấp)
Các đối tượng tội phạm về ma túy thường lợi dụng tâm sinh lý của học sinh, sinh viên nói riêng; giới trẻ nói chung để lôi kéo, dụ dỗ.
Recently your social media feed may have been flooded with headlines on the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or even AI-generated images. Text-to-image algorithms such as Dall-E2 and Stable Diffusion are becoming hugely popular. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is now the world’s best-performing large language model, reaching 1 million users in its first week – a rate of growth much faster than Twitter, Facebook or TikTok.
As AI demonstrates its ability to craft poetry, write code and even pollinate crops by imitating bees, the governance community is waking up to the impact of artificial intelligence on the knotty problem of corruption. Policy institutes and academics have pointed to the potential use of AI to detect fraud and corruption, with some commentators heralding these technologies as the “next frontier in anti-corruption.”
European power markets are in the midst of unprecedented changes, with a record-breaking surge in energy prices.This paper investigates the impact of green power resources on the level and volatility of wholesale electricity prices at a granular level, using monthly observations for a panel of 24 European countries over the period 2014–2021 and alternative estimation methods including a panel quantile regression approach. We find that renewable energy is associated with a significant reduction in wholesale electricity prices in Europe, with an average impact of 0.6 percent for each 1 percentage points increase in renewable share. We also find evidence for a nonlinear effect—that is, higher the share of renewables, the greater its effect on electricity prices. On the other hand, while quantile estimation results are mixed with regards to the impact of renewables on the volatility of electricity prices, we obtain evidence that renewable energy has a negative effect on volatility at the highest quantiles. Overall, our analysis indicates that policy reforms can help accelerate the green transition while minimizing the volatility in electricity prices.
By Ryan Wiser, Andrew Mills, Todd Levin, Audun Botterud
The impacts of wind and solar on wholesale power markets in the United States have been limited so far. However, the impact will change as the penetration of variable renewable energy (VRE) increases.
Wholesale power prices and the composition and operation of the bulk power system in the United States have witnessed changes in recent years, and concern has grown in some quarters about the effects of VRE on these trends. The U.S. Department of Energy’s “Staff Report to the Secretary on Electricity Markets and Reliability” addressed this concern, but within a much broader context. The study focused on thermal-plant retirements and reliability, and placed a spotlight not only on growth in VRE but also on the effects of other contemporaneous trends such as declining natural gas prices, limited load growth, and regulatory pressures.
As input into the DOE Staff Report, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory prepared a study (recently made available publicly, here) that focused on the degree to which growth in VRE has impacted wholesale power prices and bulk power system assets to date and how this may change in the future. In the noted report, we did not analyze impacts on specific power plants, instead focusing on national and regional trends. The issues addressed are highly context-dependent, and analyzing the impacts of VRE is complex. Nonetheless, while more analysis is warranted—including additional location-specific assessments—several high-level findings emerged from our study.
Forest elephant extinction would exacerbate climate change. That’s according to a new study in Nature Geoscience which links feeding by elephants with an increase in the amount of carbon that forests are able to store.
The bad news is that African forest elephants – smaller and more vulnerable relatives of the better known African bush elephant – are fast going extinct. If we allow their ongoing extermination to continue, we will be also worsening climate change. The good news is that if we protect and conserve these elephants, we will simultaneously fight climate change.
Elephants are fascinating animals, and I have studied them for more than 15 years. They are intelligent, sentient, and highly social. But their single most remarkable feature is their size. Evolutionarily, elephants gambled on becoming massive enough to deter predators like lions and tigers.
African forest elephant range is highlighted in light green. The largest surviving population is in Gabon, on the coast of central Africa. IUCN / u/DarreToBe, CC BY-SA
In exchange, they became slaves to their appetite. Elephants need huge amounts of food everyday, something like 5-10% of their body mass. A typical three-tonne female could eat 200 kg of plant material in one day. Her family may need to consume more than a tonne of food per day.
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ZHENGZHOU, China, April 20 (Reuters) – Severe power shortages in China’s southwestern Yunnan province are likely to cut aluminium production in the country’s fourth-largest producing province, analysts and producers said, but weak demand will cap price rises.
Yunnan, which accounts for about 12% of China’s aluminium capacity, has forced electrolytic aluminium producers to reduce their power usage since September last year after unusually low rainfall reduced hydropower generation.
Hydropower generates about 80% of the province’s electricity, and had attracted investment by energy-intensive aluminium smelters keen to lower their emissions.
The output of the metal in Yunnan jumped by 37% in 2022 from the prior year to 4.2 million tonnes.
Now, however, about 2 million tonnes of capacity, or 20% of the provincial total, is offline, Li Jiahui, an analyst at consultancy Shanghai Metals Market, told a conference in Zhengzhou.
Average rainfall in Yunnan during the first quarter of 2023 was 60% lower than the same period in typical years, the provincial government’s emergency management department said.
CVD 