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Amid Pressure And Threats, Iran’s Isolation Grows With Cooled Brazil Relations

By Ali Gharib on Jan 24, 2012 at 1:19 pm

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff

As the Europeans passed a de facto embargo on Iranian oil and U.S. ships defied threats (since walked back) to shut down the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, Iran faces heightened diplomatic and economic isolation as another rift became apparent this week when an Iranian presidential adviser complained of cooling relations with Brazil. The report comes only four days after China voiced opposition to a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Brazil, a member of a bloc of emerging economies know and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), built a strong trade relationship with Iran and involved itself in Middle East diplomacy under its last president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, as he is widely known, attempted to broker a confidence-building deal between the West and Iran to diffuse tension over the latter’s nuclear program. But the 2010 deal came just as the Obama administration had rallied international support for another round of U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at the nuclear program. The U.S. objected to Iran’s condition that the sanctions — since shown to be effective in slowing Iran’s progress — be scuttled.

Now, the New York Times reports, a sometime media adviser to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed anger that Iran was also losing Brazil:

After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran took a four-country tour of Latin America this month, during which he met with several outspoken critics of the United States but was notably not invited to stop in Brazil, one of his top advisers took a public swipe at Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, saying she had “destroyed years of good relations” between the two nations.

“The Brazilian president has been striking against everything that Lula accomplished,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, who has worked as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s top media adviser, said in an interview published Monday by Folha de São Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, in which he compared Ms. Rousseff to her predecessor and political mentor.

In a New Yorker profile of Brazilian president Rousseff late last year, Nicholas Lemann wrote:

After taking office, Rousseff began to distance herself from Lula’s more exotic foreign-policy initiatives. She declared that, as someone who had been tortured, she had special concerns about a government that tortures, and that would influence Brazil’s diplomatic partnership with Iran.

Indeed, quickly after coming to office, Rousseff supported the Obama administration initiative of a U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, whose eventual report condemned Iranian rights abuses.

In addition to diplomatic fallout, the Times also noted that Iran’s robust trade relations with Brazil have recently cooled.

The report about the Iranian adviser’s comments on Brazil came on the heels of a report last week that another BRICS country spoke out forcefully against suspected Iranian designs on nuclear weapons. China’s premier Wen Jiabao said that, while trade with Iran would be maintained for the meantime, China “adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.”

Green

Dam Breaks In Brazil: 13,000 Homeless, At Least Eight Dead

By Rebecca Leber on Jan 6, 2012 at 10:55 am

Water burst through a Brazil dam yesterday, in northern Rio de Janeiro, causing a declared state of emergency in 66 towns as they try to evacuate citizens from the floods and landslides. Local media report nine dead, and some 13,000 displaced by the disaster. Flooding, a common threat from the increasingly heavy rainfall in southeast Brazil, has affected 2 million people nationwide this year.

A Reuters video shows flooding up to homes’ rooftops:

The disaster comes almost a year-to-date after one of Brazil’s worst floods in its history, which killed more than 900 people and left 31,000 displaced.

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Wind Makes Up 80% of Contracts in Brazil’s Latest Power Auction

By Stephen Lacey on Dec 22, 2011 at 10:25 am

In Brazil’s latest power auction earlier this week — a process in which developers bid for contracts with the country’s national electricity agency — more than 80% of contracts were for wind projects. This follows an auction in August that brought in power contracts for wind that were below the bidding price of natural gas plants.

The National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) signed contracts with 42 new power plants worth 1,200 MW — including 39 wind projects totaling more than 976 MW that agreed to an average selling price of US $55 per megawatt-hour, or 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s a 1.2 cent per kWh decrease over the average selling price in the August auction.

A combination of resources and policy have helped grow Brazil’s domestic wind market by more than 50% since 2009. With an import on foreign wind turbines, major manufacturers have set up operations within the country that have helped bring down the cost of developing projects. Brazil’s estimated exploitable wind resources are about 143,000 MW of capacity — far surpassing the roughly 100,000 MW of total installed electricity capacity today.

However, wind still only plays a small role in Brazil’s electricity mix, representing only 0.5% of generation. The country has historically focused on large hydropower projects, which make up roughly 80% of generation.

But things are picking up. After a slow start to Brazil’s wind procurement program, the country has proven itself as a reliable growth market in the last few years. The Global Wind Energy Council projects that an additional 3,300 MW of wind projects will be built in Brazil over the next two years.

Related Posts:

Climate Progress

December 19 News: U.S. Lightbulb Industry Slams GOP, Saying Repeal of Efficiency Law Will “Undermine Investments”

By Stephen Lacey on Dec 19, 2011 at 9:14 am

AP Photo

Industry: Light bulb war a dim idea

Big Business usually loves it when the GOP goes to war over federal rules.

But not when it comes to light bulbs.

This year, House Republicans made it a top priority to roll back regulations they say are too costly for business. Last week, the GOP won a long-fought battle to kill new energy efficiency rules for bulbs when House and Senate negotiators included a rider to block enforcement of the regulations in the $1 trillion-plus, year-end spending bill.

The rider may have advanced GOP talking points about light bulb “freedom of choice,” but it didn’t win them many friends in the industry, who are more interested in their bottom line than political rhetoric.

Big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania spent big bucks preparing for the standards, and the industry is fuming over the GOP bid to undercut them.

After spending four years and millions of dollars prepping for the new rules, businesses say pulling the plug now could cost them. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association has waged a lobbying campaign for more than a year to persuade the GOP to abandon the effort.

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Climate Progress

In Brazil Auction, Wind Power is Cheaper than Natural Gas

By Stephen Lacey on Aug 23, 2011 at 11:28 am

Brazil’s national electric company just wrapped up an auction for contracts with wind, biomass, hydro and natural gas developers. And for the first time ever, the price per megawatt-hour from the wind plants came in below the price for natural gas.

The auctions covered 44 new wind projects worth 2 GW of capacity. The owners of those wind farms signed contracts to sell electricity for 99.58 reais ($61.93) a megawatt-hour — about 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. The prices for natural gas projects came in at 103 reais per MWh ($64.48). The price difference isn’t staggering, but it marks a major downward pricing trend for wind, which was priced 19% higher on average in auctions last year.

The Brazilian government issued a press release after the auctions:

These energy auctions were the first in Brazil for 2011. [The President and CEO of Brazil’s Energy Research Company (EPE), Mauricio] Tolmasquim noted that they were significant for two key reasons:  they reflect a new feasibility of market competition between wind and natural gas sources – something unheard of internationally; and they demonstrate that wind prices continue to fall in Brazil.

“That wind power plants have been contracted at two digit prices, below R$ 100/MWh, showcases the energy market competition through auctions.  That wind power could reach these lows vs. natural gas was unimaginable until recently,” said Mr. Tolmasquim.

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Climate Progress

One Billion Cars Now on World’s Roads, Driven by Exploding Demand from China

By Stephen Lacey on Aug 22, 2011 at 9:40 am

Driven by demand from countries like China, India and Brazil, the global market for automobiles is accelerating faster than ever. According to an analysis from the auto trade journal Ward’s, there are now over one billion cars, light-, medium- and heavy-duty trucks on roads around the world, up from 980 million at the end of 2009.

In just half a year, the global auto fleet expanded by around 35 million vehicles. That’s the second-biggest increase ever.

The U.S. is still has the biggest population of cars and trucks – one for every 1.3 people in the country. But the American fleet is not growing much, only about 1% a year. The explosion in automobile deployments is coming from China, where registrations grew by 27.5%, bringing the country’s vehicle population to 78 million. That increase was more than half of the total global expansion, according to Ward’s.

The leap in registrations gave China the world’s second-largest vehicle population, pushing it ahead of Japan, with 73.9 million units, for the first time.

India’s vehicle population underwent the second-largest growth rate, up 8.9% to 20.8 million units, compared with 19.1 million in 2009.

Brazil experienced the second largest volume increase after China, with 2.5 million additional vehicle registrations in 2010.

China put 16.8 million vehicles on the road in 2010. Industry analysts were forecasting another 15% jump in sales in 2011, but the market slumped after the government stopped providing subsidies for car buyers in order to temper the market. Even so, China’s vehicle population could surpass America’s in just a few years.

According to the International Transport Forum, the global vehicle fleet could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. No doubt that those cars and trucks will be much more efficient than today’s vehicles, especially with China and America setting tighter fuel standards.  And many of them will be electric-drive vehicles.  But another doubling of the global market — even with an increase in efficiency — means massive increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Auto industry executives everywhere are giddy with joy; meanwhile, those concerned about climate change wonder if we have the wisdom to take our foot off the fossil-fuel accelerator.

NEWS FLASH

Brazil’s Largest City May Host ‘Straight Pride’ Day | Lawmakers in São Paulo, Brazil have “advanced a measure that would establish a “Straight Pride’ Day” in the country’s largest city. The bill, which seeks to address some of the “privileges” afforded to the gay community, is currently “awaiting the approval from Gilberto Kassab, the city’s mayor.” Brazil offers same-sex couples many of the same benefits as opposite-sex couples, but does not recognize marriage equality. Last month, however, a judge allowed a same sex-couple to wed.

Yglesias

Counterinsurgency in Rio

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 10, 2010 at 3:45 pm

Brazil’s recently mounted an ambitious combined military/police effort to bring a particularly notorious gang-dominated slum under effective government control. Initially, the incoming troops were greeted as liberators. A week later, Alexei Barrionuevo reports:

Residents watched stone-faced as Mr. Beltrame passed. No one applauded or rushed to shake the hand of the man who had orchestrated the program to “pacify” Rio’s slums ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. Instead, a 54-year-old mother confronted him for several minutes, telling him that a Military Police officer had entered her home, pinned her against her kitchen sink and demanded her son’s money. [...]

After a week of searching here and in another slum, the police said they had recovered about 34 tons of marijuana; 692 pounds of cocaine; well over 400 pistols, rifles, machine guns and grenades; but comparatively little cash: about $68,000. All of the money, moreover, was recovered by the army and the federal police — Rio’s own forces turned in none — raising broad suspicions of police corruption. [...]

Even military officials have expressed concern that their soldiers would be “contaminated” by the “culture of corruption” inside Alemão, a high-ranking military officer acknowledged. And despite the community being surrounded by about 2,600 personnel from the police and the military, most of the traffickers somehow escaped, fueling an investigation into whether officers helped some of them.

My thoughts naturally turned to Afghanistan. Think of the drug dealers as the Taliban, the Brazilian military as the US military, and the Rio police as the Afghan security forces. Obviously, the parallels aren’t perfect but I think the comparison is instructive especially because there’s no “ideological” or “ethnic conflict” element here and yet a somewhat similar underlying dynamic can clearly exist.

Yglesias

The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Woman

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 1, 2010 at 2:19 pm

Having secured election as the first woman president in the history of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff said she wants “fathers and mothers to look their daughters in the eyes and say, ‘Yes, a woman can.’”

Irin Carmon is a bit dubious:

Perhaps it would be more accurate in this case to say, “She can, with the most powerful man in Brazil backing her,” in this case term-limited president Lula, for whom Rousseff served as chief of staff and energy minister. Just about every man/woman on the street interview yielded a mention that the voter hoped it would mean another term for the wildly popular Lula. (In the AP: “If Lula ran for president 10 times, I would vote for him 10 times…I’m voting for Dilma, of course, but the truth is it will still be Lula who will lead us.”) Rousseff has never run for office and just about every story about her refers to her lack of charisma, despite a dramatic past as a guerrilla fighting Brazil’s dictatorship.

I think this is a bit unfair to Rousseff and her very real achievement. Successions of this sort in which a popular term-limited leader tries to hand power off to a less-charismatic subordinate happen in politics all the time. Think of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush or Bill Clinton and Al Gore. And the point in all cases is that attaining the status of “heir apparent to hugely successful politician” is itself a pretty impressive achievement. Here in the United States, after all, the appointment of a woman chief of staff would be something of a milestone all its own. Nobody gets ahead in politics without patrons, and Rousseff is no exception, but she had a very substantive role in Lula’s administration and there’s no reason not to point to her accomplishments in the general spirit of “yes, a woman can do it.”

Yglesias

Tomorrow’s Credit Bust

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 5, 2010 at 8:31 am

money 1

Chana Joffe-Walt’s main focus is on how Brazil tamed inflation, but read this lede and I think you’ll see Brazil next big financial problem:

I met a 19 year-old girl in a mall in São Paulo who had financed nearly every item she was wearing.

Célia de Resende paid for her red t-shirt in 3 monthly installments. Her sneakers were on a six-installment plan. She couldn’t remember how many more payments she owed on her black pants but she’s sure they were bought on credit.

This is the way Brazilians now shop. Consumer credit is a brand new concept and it’s wildly popular. Three Brazilian banks are among the world’s top 10 credit card issuers.

I can’t prove it, but dollars to doughnuts says Brazilians are taking advantage of their newfound creditworthiness to blow up a consumer debt bubble. This, rather than the allegation that it’s totally useless, strikes me as being the real problem with financial innovation. New products come in and blossom like invasive species with no natural predators. It’s an environment where unscrupulous sellers, thoughtless buyers, and all kinds of fraud and stupidity run amok. Once the cycle’s burned out it becomes very unlikely that the exact same problem will recur in the near future. But the problem is that the same kind of thing is extremely likely to happen again, just with some new instrument.

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