Some of us have been pointing out for a time that the money Russia earned while oil and gas prices were particularly high was not invested properly. The economy has not been diversified and the infrastructure has been ignored and, in the case of the various fire-fighting services as the article in Der Spiegel points out, actually dismantled.
For almost 10 days fires have been burning in forests across much of Russia and, particularly in the region surrounding Mosow, in dried-out peat bogs. The fires have been increasingly impossible to contain.Read the whole article.
On Wednesday night, around 172,000 hectares were still in flames; and by Thursday morning, the authorities announced that the area had increased to 190,000. The official death toll is at 50 people, and at least 500 people have been injured. Seven Russian regions have declared a state of emergency, and over 200,000 people are battling the fires -- most of them volunteers alongside a few thousand fire fighters and 10,000 soldiers. They are using heavy equipment to cut huge troughs into the ground in an attempt to stop the creeping fire.
For almost 10 days fires have been burning in forests across much of Russia and, particularly in the region surrounding Mosow, in dried-out peat bogs. The fires have been increasingly impossible to contain.
On Wednesday night, around 172,000 hectares were still in flames; and by Thursday morning, the authorities announced that the area had increased to 190,000. The official death toll is at 50 people, and at least 500 people have been injured. Seven Russian regions have declared a state of emergency, and over 200,000 people are battling the fires -- most of them volunteers alongside a few thousand fire fighters and 10,000 soldiers. They are using heavy equipment to cut huge troughs into the ground in an attempt to stop the creeping fire.
In the meantime, Russia will have to stop grain exports and, indeed, hope that this year's harvest will be enough for domestic consumption.
Forecasts for the Russian grain crop have been falling daily, with the agriculture ministry’s most recent projection at 70m-75m tonnes, down from 85m tonnes a fortnight ago. Some private sector analysts, however, believe the harvest will be as low as 63m tonnes. Traders at Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, on Tuesday warned the crop could fall to about 65m tonnes.The news sent grain prices up on the world market.
Poor Russia.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1972 there was an "extreme weather event" in the opposite direction. Severe frosts destroyed the whole of the Autumn-sown wheat crop. We did not hear much about it at the time but the effects hit us, as corn merchants and millers, some months later.
In January 1973 we had just negotiated the bureaucratic assault course of entering the EEC, as a result of which grain prices had more or less doubled. We woke up one morning to find that they had doubled again. The Soviets had conducted a massive buying operation on the Chicago exchange and there was very little wheat to be had. Grain and other commodity prices rocketed. It was a reverse of the 1930s Soviet policy of grain confiscation which starved millions in the Ukraine.
At this time the "scientific consensus" was that we were in for rapid, catastrophic, man-made, global cooling and this was very strong evidence for the hypothesis. Some of today's keenest and most influential warmists were in the opposite camp then. In 1974 the CIA produced a report, saying that the whole of Canada, European Russia and Northern China would be covered by 100 - 200 feet of snow and ice unless there was human intervention to prevent it. (But, of course, we didn't hear about that report until recently).
Either the scare machine was not so effective in those days, politicians and newspaper reporters were better educated or the public had not been so indoctrinated into its role of victimhood , so there was nothing like today's hype about global warming.
Yet by 1975, the great conference "The Atmosphere, endangered and endangering" had launched the CO2/global warming campaign with a demand that presentation of scientific evidence should "avoid internal contradictions" as far as possible.