cjchivers:

Killed by the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi while working in the eastern Libyan desert. The Libyan government knew for weeks about the actions of its soldiers. Not only did it not admit to what they had done, it lied repeatedly, misleading Anton’s family throughout. He leaves a wife and two young children.

Anton’s friends and colleagues will be setting up accounts to help support his family. More on them as soon as details become available.

2:37 pm  •  20 May 2011  •  36 notes

Here’s the map that went with my piece on Libya’s oil in this week’s Economist. 

11:50 am  •  20 May 2011  •  3 notes

cjchivers:

Rebels had been saying that the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been trying to hit it. Tonight, something did. Details remain unclear or contradictory, but the obvious can be seen city-wide: part of the depot is ablaze. What all of this burning fuel and lost infrastructure means for the…

oil.

2:15 pm  •  7 May 2011  •  26 notes

cjchivers:

Rebels had been saying that the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been trying to hit it. Tonight, something did. Details remain unclear or contradictory, but the obvious can be seen city-wide: part of the depot is ablaze. What all of this burning fuel and lost infrastructure means for the…

2:14 pm  •  7 May 2011  •  26 notes

4:32 pm  •  5 May 2011

My long magazine piece from the rebel-held east of Libya is now live here.

It’s for subscribers only, but here’s the nutgraf:

The rebels say they are fighting to liberate the country from Qadhafi’s tyranny. The loyalists say they are quashing a rebellion led by al-Qaeda and other outsiders. Nato says it is bombing Libya to defend civilians. But the conflict is a war for the country’s oil.

Whichever side controls Libya’s petroleum industry – its fields, pipelines, refineries and ports – will triumph. And whichever side triumphs will determine Libya’s future as an oil exporter. To the victors and their international allies will go the spoils of the war: 44bn barrels of Libya’s highly prized light, sweet, paraffin-rich crude.

5:11 pm  •  27 April 2011  •  31 notes

 

Rich countries are outsourcing carbon-dioxide emissions

WHEN a country reports its carbon emissions to the United Nations, it is the carbon dioxide that goes out of chimneys, exhaust pipes and forest fires of the country’s own territory that gets counted. But what about the carbon emitted elsewhere by people making goods that the country imports? A paper just published in PNAS by Glen Peters and colleagues from Cicero, a research group, looks at how the world’s carbon emissions get reapportioned when the carbon used to make traded goods and services is charged against the account of the ultimate consumer, not the initial producer. So while Europe may pride itself on emitting less carbon from its own territory than it did in 1990, from a consumption point of view the carbon embodied in imports from China alone all but cancels out the gain. In general the study finds that net embodied carbon imports into developed countries grew from 400m tonnes in 1990 to 1.6 billion tonnes in 2008—a growth rate faster than that of the world economy or global carbon emissions.

2:20 pm  •  27 April 2011

christianpurefoy:

… humble hero in story of Nigeria’s struggling democracy…

2:08 pm  •  27 April 2011  •  5 notes

9:41 am  •  26 April 2011

aljazeera:

An anti-Gaddafi fighter stands on a tank destroyed near Ajdabiya’s western gate [Picture: Reuters]

11:54 pm  •  25 April 2011  •  67 notes