Democracy and Climate Politics Are Set to Collide Next Year - Bloomberg   

As the dust settles on the COP28 climate summit that concluded last week in Dubai, a sobering reality is looming. After the legalistic niceties of environmental diplomacy, the dirtier business of political maneuvering is going to consume the world’s democracies over the next 12 months. In 2024, climate will be on the ballot in a way we’ve rarely seen.

Voters in countries representing more than 40% of the world’s population — and roughly the same share of emissions — will go to the polls between now and the end of next year. In places, that offers the prospect to break gridlocks on climate and energy policies. In others, it may offer an opportunity for a climate-denying backlash. Far too few places show a decent chance of accelerating the transition to clean energy in the way advocated by the COP28 agreement. Here’s a review of some of the key events.

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A $1.3 Trillion Debt-Fueled Boom in Deals Faces a Grim New Reality - Bloomberg   

When a Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. affiliate bought Summit Health-CityMD around a year ago, the pharmacy group’s management hailed the deal as transformational for its push into primary health care.

Twelve months later, the $8.9 billion takeover has struggled to deliver cost synergies and Walgreens’s creditworthiness has just been cut to junk for the first time since its formation.

The travails highlight a problem facing companies that relied on cheap credit to fund big mergers and acquisitions during the boom times: how to keep lofty M&A promises while servicing large debt loads in a new environment of higher rates and fading consumer demand.

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Give us our homes! The angry victims of China’s property crisis - The Economist   

Gu Lin chose the apartment at One Riviera because of its location: a quiet residential neighbourhood just a few kilometres south of Shanghai’s financial district and a short bike ride from the Huangpu river, which bisects the city into east and west. Although Gu had to pay a premium for such an area, he reckoned it made the flat more likely to hold its value if the property market, as he suspected it would, eventually ran out of steam.

He made a 70% downpayment on the 20m yuan ($2.8m) flat in March 2020. His wife and their child, along with Gu’s parents, were due to move into the three-bedroom home in spring 2022. Gu, who is from Shanghai and has a well-paid, management-level job, imagined strolling with his family beneath the 300 cherry trees the developer planned to plant next to the two residential towers. But almost two years after the family were meant to get the keys, One Riviera is still a building site.

Gu Lin is one of millions of Chinese people who ploughed their life savings into a property that may never get built. An unprecedented crisis in the real-estate sector, caused by a mix of rapacious developers, covid-19 lockdowns and misguided government policies, has left firms bankrupt and investors out of pocket.

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Why the West needs to stop the global rise of revisionism - The Economist   

IN RECENT WEEKS pessimism about the war in Ukraine has gripped Western media and opinion-makers. The Ukrainian counter-offensive over the summer and autumn yielded disillusionment. Leaks suggest that Western officials have broached the subject of possible peace talks with Russia with Ukrainian counterparts. Trumpian Republicans are blocking American military assistance to Ukraine.

That a stalemate on the battlefield would feed pessimism is not surprising. But the argument for scaling back support for Ukraine is premised on framing the war there as fairly isolated, and its loss of territory as tragic and unfair but neither existential for the West nor unique in modern times. This perspective gives the West an option on when and how to administer its help to Ukraine, and when to scale it back or stop. This logic is wrong and the perspective—convenient as it may be—leaves out a bigger and more disturbing picture.

Far from being an isolated conflict, Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has led to a wave of revisionism in international politics. Azerbaijan’s lightning war against the ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and Hamas’s attack on Israel may be different in scale, but they have the same cause: the weakening of guarantees and provisions that maintained the balance of power, encouraging previously constrained players to challenge this balance. The logic of revisionism suggests that each failure by the West to establish deterrence and each tactical retreat—in Ukraine, Syria, Azerbaijan or the Middle East—is another step on the way to dismantling its geopolitical dominance.

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