One Sentence News / May 16, 2024

One Sentence News

Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

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US consumer prices increased 3.4% in April from year earlier

Summary: For the first time in six months, core CPI inflation numbers have cooled, marking an increase of 3.4% in April of 2024 compared to April of 2023, which is the smallest increase since April of 2021.

Context: This is being seen as an overall good sign, as it suggests that stubborn inflation numbers over the past half-year or so may be slowly tempering, and the US Fed might still implement its first key interest rate reduction in September, which had, until this announcement, been in question.

—The Wall Street Journal

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Climeworks opens world's largest plant to extract CO2 from air in Iceland

Summary: The world’s largest direct air capture plant, with the capacity to pull 36,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year, has officially started operating in Iceland.

Context: This is Climateworks’ second direct air capture facility in Iceland, the first, which was previously the world’s largest, has a capacity of just 4,000 tons a year, and both were built in Iceland in part because of the country’s abundant geothermal energy, which allows these facilities’ enormous fans, which suck up air and then filter CO2 from it, to operate without generating new emissions; Climeworks hopes to build a plant capable of pulling a million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year in the US, next, though to put this all in context, most estimates say we need to be pulling something like 10 billion tons of CO2 from the air each year to reach our climate goals by 2050, and around 20 billion tons each year to cancel out our emissions—so these are still very early efforts, and not everyone is convinced they’re the way to go in terms of addressing these issues.

—Reuters

US gives Saudis green light to try to revive peace deal with Houthis

Summary: The US government has reportedly given the Saudi government an informal go-ahead to revive peace deal negotiations with the Houthis who have been fighting a long-term civil war with the government of Yemen, and recently have been attacking commercial vessels passing through the Red Sea.

Context: Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war since 2014, the Houthis backed by Iran, the country’s government backed by Saudi Arabia, and though that conflict has been stuck in a practical stalemate most of that time, the Houthis were able to grab global attention beginning last November by launching attacks on cargo ships headed to and from the Suez Canal, severely disrupting global trade as a consequence; the Saudi government, with the backing of the US and the UN, have decided to push ahead with a peace talks roadmap that could result in a bunch of money being handed over to the Houthis, and their leadership being granted a permanent spot in Yemen’s unity government, but that’s apparently being seen as a sacrifice worth making, at this point, as the Saudi government is keen to refocus on other irons it has in the regional fire, like what’s happening in Gaza, and getting things settled in neighboring Yemen would help it do that.

—The Guardian

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Chinese fishing boats, often accompanied by light naval vessels, have increasingly swept in to claim and “claim” portions of the South China Sea (and surrounding area) that contain valuable resources, denying those resources to their neighbors (who also claim them) and reinforcing the country’s practical hold on the area.

—Bloomberg

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$1.66 billion

Value of loan guarantees conditionally committed to hydrogen producer Plug Power by the US government.

These loan guarantees are earmarked for the construction of up to six facilities that would allow the company to upscale its hydrogen-producing efforts, and this is being seen as a bit of a lifeline, as the company has been short on cash for about a year, which has made further scaling difficult.

Hydrogen is seen by some as a vital component of shifting away from fossil fuels, as it can be subbed-in for some of those fuels, can be manufactured using clean power, and is currently more practical for some use-cases than battery-stored electricity.

—Bloomberg

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