Best columns: Europe
GERMANY
Don’t fall into Russia’s oil trap
Claudia Kemfert
Wirtschafts Woche
Russia has enlisted one of Germany’s most prominent statesmen to lobby on its behalf, said Claudia Kemfert. Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor from 1998 to 2005, has long been in the pay of the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom. Now he’s been named chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company. Some have labeled Schröder a traitor, and it’s not hard to see why: Rosneft is “an arm of the Kremlin,” which “uses energy as a political weapon” against the West. Now it is hoping to use Schröder to brainwash Germans to support fossil fuels. Germany is a major investor in renewable energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines—sources that generated a record 35 percent of the nation’s power in the first six months of 2017. We have shown the world that “a highly industrialized country can secure its production power and its standard of living” without pumping carbon dioxide into the air. But “that happy news pleases neither Rosneft, nor Gazprom, nor the Kremlin,” since fossil fuels are Russia’s main export. That’s why Russia is so keen to elevate climate change deniers. From U.S. President Donald Trump to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to Schröder, “if you’re against any type of climate protections, you’ll get aid from Moscow.”
UNITED KINGDOM
What happens when you slash welfare
John Harris
The Guardian
Homelessness is soaring in Britain, said John Harris. Nearly a quarter of a million people are homeless, and thousands of them are sleeping on the streets. These numbers have doubled over the past seven years, not coincidentally during the time that the welfare-slashing Conservative Party has been in power. Anyone could have predicted that “if you cut and cap benefits, leave a snowballing housing crisis untouched, and fail to question the specious morals of the market,” people will be priced out of housing altogether. Worst hit are low-income single people under age 35, whose rent subsidies have been reduced to almost nothing. Young housing-benefit recipients who are lucky enough to live alone in a one-bedroom apartment will, starting in 2019, be forced to switch to the kind of shared housing that is increasingly hard to find. “You’d think you were looking at a policy designed specifically to increase homelessness.” Worse, the new universal credit system, which rolls six types of benefits into one monthly payment, has a lag of six weeks between application and payment. During those six weeks, people dependent on benefit money can’t pay their rent or bills, so they are getting evicted. The “obscenities of current homelessness” are a direct result of the Conservative Party’s “streak of cold cruelty.”