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Though price pressures may ease a bit in the coming months, that’s little solace to Americans buying homes now. Home prices in the US rose for a ninth straight month, reaching a fresh record as buyers battled for a stubbornly tight supply of listings. A national gauge of prices rose 0.6% in October from September.
Buyers piled into the US Treasury’s auctions Tuesday, seeking to lock in higher yields as the market prices in an aggressive path of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts in 2024. Indirect bidders, a group that includes foreign central banks, grabbed a record 77.6% of the Treasury’s 52-week bill auction, while the same category took 71.6% of the department’s six-month offering, the third-largest share ever.
Wall Street began the final week of 2023 by extending a rally that put the market on the brink of a record. The S&P 500 on Tuesday traded less than 0.5% away from its all-time high. Despite warnings about overbought levels, equities continued to power ahead on speculation the Fed will cut rates as early as March.
Grayscale Investments, the crypto-trust manager hoping to convert the world’s biggest Bitcoin trust into an exchange-traded fund, said Barry Silbert has resigned as its chairman. Silbert is chief executive and founder of Grayscale parent Digital Currency Group, the sprawling crypto conglomerate that’s embroiled in several ongoing disputes in the wake of the 2022 industry meltdown. Mark Murphy, the president of DCG, has also resigned from the Grayscale board. The shakeup comes ahead of a Jan. 10 deadline for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to decide whether to green-light a spot Bitcoin ETF application filed by ARK Investment Management and 21Shares. The regulator could at that time also rule on other similar filings, including Grayscale’s application.
Samsung Electronics reportedly delayed to 2025 mass production plans at its new chip plant in Taylor, Texas, potentially slowing the Biden administration effort to increase domestic semiconductor supplies. Samsung previously said the factory would start production in the second half of 2024.
Apple had hoped for a holiday reprieve from the White House in its smartwatch patent dispute. But Santa did not deliver. The administration refused to overturn a sales ban in the US on some of the gadget maker’s watches following an International Trade Commission determination that Apple violated two patents. So what does Apple do now? Go to court.
The Year’s Worst Climate News You Haven’t Heard About
Carbon offsetting projects, India, and the oceans — a lot of troubling information has been drowned out by bigger stories in 2023.
Making waves.
Photographer: Paul Hanna/BloombergIt was a year when the world experienced its hottest 12 months on record. When China connected more new coal plants than ever before. US oil production hit the highest level of any country in history, while shipment volumes for LNG reached an all-time high. The annual United Nations climate meeting in Dubai left fossil fuel producers grinning, and climate campaigners fuming.
There’s been no shortage of bad climate news in 2023 — but worse still is the amount of troubling information that’s been drowned out by the bigger stories. Here are three important issues that have flown below the radar over the past 12 months.
There’s Gold in Them Forests
One of the busiest dealmakers in the global energy industry this year has been a company that didn’t exist 15 months ago. Blue Carbon, set up by a member of Dubai’s royal family last October, has been signing agreements over millions of hectares of land in Africa and elsewhere for carbon-offsetting projects.
Just as industrial equipment pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a by-product of energy production, vegetation sucks it out as fuel for its own cells. By encouraging more forest growth, polluters can in theory cancel out their environmental debts. In reality, such carbon offsetting is rife with questionable accounting, turning it into a tempting way to avoid the hard work of decarbonization.
There’s been a welter of scandals over the past year showing that offsetting projects often overstated their benefits, culminating in a peer-reviewed study finding some 94% of the credits analyzed may be bogus. That’s prompted corporate backers in rich countries — including Shell Plc, Nestle SA, easyJet Plc and Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. — to pull out. It’s not deterring oil producers.
With early-stage agreements that cover a fifth of Zimbabwe’s land mass and 10% of Liberia, Blue Carbon is starting to resemble a “carbon colonialist,” akin to mid-20th century imperialist oil majors such as Shell and BP Plc. This month, it used the COP28 meeting in its hometown as an opportunity to recruit more governments. It’s helping turn Dubai’s oil wealth into a worryingly potent — and corrupting — tool of climate diplomacy soft power.
Carbon offsetting may be full of greenwashing, but it didn’t collapse in 2023. If anything, it’s just getting started.
Brake in India
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the travails of wind energy in Europe, where high interest rates, rising costs for materials, and supply-chain bottlenecks led to failed power auctions and plunging share prices.
Far less attention has been paid to the growing evidence that India is failing to hit its ambitious targets for clean energy. That may have the bigger impact on global emissions, though. Despite some of the lowest-cost renewable power on the planet, annual connections are stuck around 10GW to 15GW, and solar connections in the nine months through September fell 47% from a year earlier, according to Mercom India Research, a consultancy. The country needs to be adding about 40GW each year to hit its target of 500GW by 2030.
Longstanding roadblocks caused by deficient grid infrastructure and land acquisition, plus the perennial financially distressed condition of state-owned electricity distribution companies, don’t show much sign of being fixed any time soon. If the world is to prevent India’s development putting further upward pressure on global emissions, the country badly needs to achieve its ambition to enjoy the world’s first green industrial revolution. That’s looking increasingly out of reach.
Sinking Hopes
You might think all the greenhouse gases spewed out by human society end up in the sky. Not quite. In fact, about three-fifths of the total is absorbed into oceans, soils, and plants. All the warming we worry about is being caused by the remainder.
These terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks are vast and little-understood, making every piece of emerging scientific research vital to the question of how much we can afford to emit without causing devastating warming. One prominent 2022 paper in the scientific journal Nature, which found that the sinks appeared to be taking up all the carbon that human activity was emitting, was retracted in September after queries about the statistical techniques used.
Just a few weeks earlier, the journal AGU Advances published further troubling news on the global carbon cycle. Force enough carbon dioxide into a bottle of water with a soda siphon, and at some point the liquid will approach saturation. Something similar may be happening to the world’s seas. Rising CO2 concentration is making the oceans more acidic, and the way water circulates is changing, too. As a result, the seas have been taking up a smaller share of our emissions with each passing decade.
That’s a worrying sign. If the oceans stop working as carbon dumps — or, worse still, start pushing their dissolved CO2 back into the atmosphere — even declining emissions from human activities might not be enough to halt the rise in global temperatures.
Silver Linings
This sounds like an unmitigatedly depressing way to end the year — but there’s been some good news as well, not all of it hitting the headlines. Tomorrow we’ll look at three reasons to be cheerful.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- Greta Was Right About COP Blah Blah Blah: Lara Williams
- Human Brains Aren't Wired to Fight Climate Change: Mark Gongloff
- China Is a Rich Country. It Can No Longer Cry Poor on Climate: David Fickling
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
David Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Andreea Papuc at apapuc1@bloomberg.net
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