Month: October 2021

While EU officials have argued in Brussels this month over the relative merits of nuclear energy and gas, residents of a small town 60km east of the Belgian capital had a more pressing concern: if Belgium gets rid of nuclear power, where will it get its gas from?

“Everyone around us is stopping gas. Where are we going to get ours from? Putin? What will we do if he switches the tap off?” said Heidi Haesevoets at a protest this month against a planned gas-fired power plant in her home town of Tessenderlo.

Belgium, sandwiched between pro-nuclear France and pro-gas

There are worse havens from history than the Pacific Palisades. We are meant to be stunned, even tickled, that Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and other Weimar stars made their lives among the groomed pets and extortionate chocolatiers of West LA.

But see it from their angle. On one side: an invincible ocean. On the other: a screen of mountains. To the north and south: much weaker countries. Europe’s claustrophobia, its overlapping nationalisms, were a physical impossibility here. So was the attendant violence. Versions of the same refuge can be found in Sydney or, with the protective Channel, London.

Even after

Chinese coal futures are on track for their biggest weekly rise on record, driven by a worsening energy crisis that threatens to pile further pressure on the country’s property developers as they grapple with looming debt payments.

Thermal coal futures traded on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange rose more than 5 per cent on Friday to Rmb1,647 ($256) a tonne, taking them more than 30 per cent higher over the past five sessions and marking the biggest weekly gain since they began trading in Zhengzhou in 2013. China’s coal futures have closed every trading day this week at a record.