Giorgia Meloni and Coldiretti put the brakes on the development of solar energy in Italy

The government, on energy, is in a huge conflict of interest, which is why prices do not fall: Snam, Italgas and Terna beat Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Italy’s publicly controlled companies that transport or distribute gas and electricity to citizens and businesses are more profitable than some of the world’s largest, most technologically advanced and important companies in the business of the future: cloud, data centres and artificial intelligence. In short, Big Energy beats Big Tech

Food, environment and health: what could happen with the Mercosur-EU agreement

Mercosur: it is obvious that the ‘invasion’ risk of uncontrolled products, without the safeguard clauses, is likely to exacerbate the risks to our health. But the real problem is that in the European Union there are ‘derogation’ authorisations that allow prohibited substances to be used by member countries to compete unfairly with their neighbours. So before lashing out at Mercosur, perhaps we need to put things in order in Europe

Quick Take — Coffee producing countries are getting too hot to grow beans, according to an analysis

Five countries responsible for 75 per cent of the world’s coffee supply record an average of 57 extra days of coffee-damaging heat per year…

The plants, particularly the most valuable Arabica variety, suffer from temperatures above 30°C…

The worst affected coffee producing country was El Salvador, which recorded 99 extra days of plant-damaging heat. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, accounting for 37% of global production, recorded 70 additional days [days added, in dark red below in The Guardian table] with temperatures above 30°C. Ethiopia, which accounts for 6.4 per cent of coffee production, recorded 34… and there small farmers produce 60 per cent to 80 per cent of their coffee, but received only 0.36 per cent of the funds needed to adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.

Quick Take — Flood revives concerns over rising food prices in Europe

The winter larder is depleted as rains devastate crops in Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco…

“It is very difficult to replace some parts of the winter vegetable basket, especially those from Spain and Morocco, so I think we will see the effects very soon, and later on, we will probably also see effects on fruit, and then also on meat, dairy… and olive oil.” Central banks have begun to recognise the influence of extreme weather on inflation dynamics… Financial Times

Of course Sicily should also be considered.

Quick Take — USA: a judge against Trump’s climate denialism

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Department of Energy violated the law when Secretary Chris Wright selected five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a large government report on global warming.

The Department of Energy released the report, which downplayed the dangers of warming, in late July without having held any public meetings or made the records available to the public. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, later cited the report to justify a plan to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark scientific determination that serves as the legal basis for regulating climate pollution.

But the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 does not allow agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups for decision-making purposes. Judge William Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts affirmed that the Department of Energy did not deny that it did not hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group…

Excerpt from the New York Times

Below: an article from The Wall Street Journal correlating food prices and climate extremes

Quick Take — European rice at risk: 60% of consumption from imports also because the European safeguard clause has expired

These days in Brussels a decision on the preferential duty system on arrivals from South East Asia. Rice industries: the already processed product costs the same as the raw product in the EU

Facilitated (and cheap) imports, global surpluses, together with the devaluation of the dollar, reduced freight rates and the impact of the climate crisis on producers are putting a strain on the resilience of the Italian rice supply chain.

The latest alarm for a concomitance of factors ‘that are not manageable by the supply chain’ comes from Airi, the Association of Rice Industries, which for some years now, with the expiry of the European safeguard clause that Italy had painstakingly managed to activate in Brussels, has been facing the resumption of duty-free imports from large producers, which have come to cover over 60% of total European purchases.

Rice that is largely ready-packed and packaged, sold at prices that are unsustainable for continental producers: today, via Rotterdam, milled white rice arrives at 400 euro per tonne; competing European varieties cost at least twice as much, 800-1,000 euro. In Italy, 400 euros buys a tonne of paddy rice, an agricultural raw material that then has to be transported, stored, processed and packaged… Il Sole 24 ore

On the safeguard clauses read here.