Word: petroleum
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Suppose you won the lottery. What would you do with the money? Countries have faced similar questions. The most common example is a price commodity boom. A country exports a great deal of petroleum or copper or similar commodities. The price of this commodity zooms; the country’s revenues do as well. From Caracas to Lagos to Moscow and Tehran, governments whose countries have benefited from commodity price booms have rarely spent such a bonanza well. Chile witnessed a commodity price boom during this past decade, and it has set an admirable example for others...
...idea of blocking refined gas to Iran was raised several times during last year's U.S. presidential campaign. Barack Obama described the plan in a debate with John McCain as "putting the squeeze" on Ahmadinejad. In April the U.S. Senate introduced the bipartisan Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would expand sanctions imposed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and give the White House the authority to sanction companies that export gas to Iran. Senator Joe Lieberman told reporters at the time that the law would "target Iran's Achilles' economic heel, which is its dependence on imports of petroleum ... most...
...most firms. "They have bigger fish to fry [than Iran]," says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department official and now director of Nuclear Nonproliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "They all have bigger markets elsewhere, including in the U.S." Indeed, even talk of a refined-petroleum blockade convinced British Petroleum to halt its exports to Iran last year. Oil analysts believe Reliance has suspended sales to Iran too. (See pictures of terror in Tehran...
...levels by 2020. But the bloc's Emission Trading Scheme only covers around 40% of its emissions. The U.S. plan, by comparison, will cover roughly double that portion, says Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London. (Unlike the U.S., Europe, didn't include the petroleum sector in its own scheme, preferring to more heavily tax the industry instead.) Extending the "fiendishly complicated" system, as Tilford calls it, would be enormously difficult. Brussels "is worried that this system is not yet fully perfect," says Egenhofer of the Centre for European Policy Studies, "that...
Human-rights groups also accuse these new militias of working hand-in-glove with legitimate businesses to take control of large swaths of land to mine gold, drill for petroleum and produce palm oil for Colombia's booming biofuels industry. Says Jorge Rojas, who heads Codhes, "In almost every case where there is a big palm-oil development, there is widespread forced displacement." Adding to the confusion, members of the Colombian Army have been accused of killing civilians and dressing them up as rebels and of driving farmers off their land in guerrilla strongholds...