New bailout talks to begin in Greece
ATHENS, Greece — Representatives of Greece’s bailout creditors are due in Athens to restart talks on further cutbacks, European officials said Monday, as they confirmed that the country last year vastly exceeded its budget targets.
Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said the negotiations are expected to start Tuesday and should last several days, with the objective of reaching an agreement “as soon as possible.”
That would clear the way for further talks on easing Greece’s debt burden, currently at 179 per cent of GDP.
Following long delays in the negotiations, Greece has already agreed to further slash pensions in 2019 and drastically expand the tax base in 2020 by reducing the current taxfree threshold.
The forthcoming talks are expected to focus on the final details of these measures, which will be worth about $3.85 billion.
Schinas also noted that Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical authority, has confirmed Greece’s 2016 budget figures, which far exceeded forecasts.
The primary budget surplus — which excludes debt servicing costs — reached 3.9 per cent of annual output, according to the system of calculations used by Greece’s statistical authority. According to the terms of the country’s bailout, the surplus was 4.2 per cent. Either way, it far overshot the initial target of 0.5 per cent of GDP.
Schinas said the surplus, which is subject to final verification, “confirms the trends which we at the Commission have been reporting for a while,” and expressed confidence the country can meet its budget targets in 2017 and 2018.
Greeks have suffered seven years ofrepeatedincomecutsandtaxhikes after the public finances imploded in 2010, forcing the country to rely on international bailouts.
To secure the rescue loans, successive governments imposed harsh cutbacks, amid a rapidly shrinking economy that has lost a quarter of its pre-crisis value, and record-high unemployment. The current, third bailout signed by the left-led government in 2015 runs until mid-2018 — after which the country is expected to be in a position to start borrowing again from international bond markets. The Associated Press
CALGARY — Federal government scientists say they have devised an accurate way to directly measure air pollutants from oilsands mines and suggest industry estimates for certain harmful emissions have been much too low.
The research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on volatile organic compounds, or VOCs — carbon-based substances that can be damaging to the environment and human health.
Oilsands companies have indirect ways of calculating their mines’ estimated VOC emissions. Methods include extrapolating from other substances they measure from smokestacks or from emissions associated with a specific activity, said lead author ShaoMeng Li, a senior research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Li and his team set out to compare those figures against direct readings they took from the air above the mines.
Their experiment took measurements from a plane flown at various altitudes in a box-like pattern above oilsands mines in northeastern Alberta.
That created a virtual wall of sorts around developments as big as 275 sq. km.
“Most of these instruments are very bulky, so they cannot be mounted on the outside,” said Li.
The interior of the aircraft looks like a cargo plane with a dozen or so seats for the scientists and racks of gadgets along the wall. Li said the air was brought into containers inside the cabin through special tubing and samples were taken back to the lab for analysis.
The amount of overall VOCs measured on the flights wound up being two to four-and-a-half times higher than figures companies reported to Environment Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory.
“It’s quite a powerful mechanism to make those kind of measurements,” said Stewart Cober, coauthor of the paper and manager in Environment Canada’s Air Quality Research Division.
“It’s a mechanism we wouldn’t have been able to do 15 years ago because the technology didn’t exist.”
The flights were made in the late summer of 2013. The team is planning another go-round in 2018 to see how the method works in different weather conditions.
Cober said the technique has the potential to be applied to other oil and gas projects, such as hydraulic fracturing sites and in situ oilsands developments, in which steam is used to extract bitumen from deep underground.
“What we’ve done is demonstrated that there is a way to make more accurate measurements,” he said.
Cober hopes the research means emissions can be estimated more accurately in the future, perhaps with industry players doing their own airborne readings.
“It is a game changer,” he said. “Certainly we’re very excited about it.”