- France Working at UN to Unblock Rebel Access to Libya
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
France is working with other countries at the United Nations to unblock access for Libya's rebel-led Transitional National Council (TNC) to the country's resources, the French foreign ministry confirmed Wednesday.
The United Nations in a resolution in March blacklisted five Libyan companies, including the National Oil Corporation, as part of a series sanctions against Moamer Gaddafi's regime.
Traders have since been wary of buying Libyan oil.
Libya's rebels have been campaigning to have the oil sanctions lifted.
Ahead of a meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and rebel leader Mahmoud Jibril in Paris, a foreign ministry spokesman said France considered the TNC should be able to "dispose of the financial resources that have been frozen by the UN Security Council sanctions resolutions."
"We are currently working towards that goal in New York, in close concertation with our partners," the spokesman said.
France, along with several other countries, recognize the TNC as a legitimate representative of the Libyan people.
- Israel Seeking UN Opinion on Maritime Border Dispute with Lebanon
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
OilPrice.com
by Joao Peixe
According to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Tel Aviv will shortly seek a UN opinion on its Mediterranean maritime borders with Lebanon.
The Israeli’s governmental request would be an extraordinary move, giving its constant complaining about UN arbitrariness over the past five decades.
At issue are recently discovered offshore gas fields, the frontiers of which Lebanon heatedly disputes.
Lieberman told the Israeli media, "We will soon be presenting the United Nations headquarters in New York with our position on our maritime borders. We have already concluded an agreement on this issue with Cyprus... Lebanon, under pressure from Hezbollah, is looking for friction, but we will not give up any part of what is rightfully ours."
Lebanon argues the offshore gas fields are inside its territorial waters as delineated by the 1982 United Nations conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS convention) and, as Israel does not have officially demarcated maritime borders with Lebanon, the two countries technically remain at war, NOW Lebanon news agency reported.
The two biggest known offshore natural gas fields prospected so far, Tamar and Leviathan, lie off Israel's northern city of Haifa.
The fiscal implications of the dispute are immense, as the Tamar field is believed to hold at least 238 billion cubic meters of extractable natural gas reserves, while Leviathan site is believed to have reserves of 450 billion cubic meters.
Lebanon has warned Israel against taking "unilateral steps" on its maritime borders, with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman cautioning the Israeli government against taking unilateral actions of "the kind that Israel commonly makes in violation of international law."
(Joao Peixe is Deputy Editor with OilPrice.com. The original article appears here.)
The UAE has become the first nation in the GCC to earn credits from the UN for reducing carbon emissions.
The power-production efficiency project developed by Masdar, Abu Dhabi's clean-energy company, is expected each year to generate more than €1.5 million (Dh7.8m) of carbon credits at current market prices.
"It's a good start," said Shibu Davies, the regional general manager for TUV, the German company that audited the project for Masdar. "This will be a lead model for most organisations to follow."
ABU DHABI - 16JAN2011 - The Masdar Institute building at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Ravindranath K / The National
The UAE has become the first nation in the GCC to earn credits from the UN for reducing carbon emissions.
The power-production efficiency project developed by Masdar, Abu Dhabi's clean-energy company, is expected each year to generate more than €1.5 million (Dh7.8m) of carbon credits at current market prices.
"It's a good start," said Shibu Davies, the regional general manager for TUV, the German company that audited the project for Masdar. "This will be a lead model for most organisations to follow."
The project, based 80km from the capital at a gas-burning power plant in Taweelah, uses waste heat to produce extra power and desalinated water, increasing the plant's production for every tonne of carbon dioxide that it releases.
Vitol, one of the world's largest energy trading companies, has entered into a contract to buy those credits to use in Switzerland and is awaiting the approval of the Swiss government.
Earning carbon credits is key to Abu Dhabi's aim to become a centre of clean energy and to diversify its economy away from oil.
Masdar has a pipeline of other such projects awaiting approval from the UN, which awards the credits to developing economies for confirmed reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.
The developing countries can sell those credits to a set of developed nations - Japan, Canada, New Zealand and the EU countries - which can use the credits to offset emissions from their own industrial processes.
Masdar developed the project over several years and at an estimated cost of more than US$300,000 (Dh1.1 million) to file the paperwork and to verify the carbon emissions reductions, a burden difficult for smaller companies to bear.
"The whole process is too bureaucratic," said Shezan Amiji, the managing director of Ecoventures, a consultancy in Dubai that was involved in applying for such credits. "You have to make it more time-efficient, as well as from a cost perspective."
The credits are issued under a UN framework known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the future of which is uncertain after the expiration next year of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Government officials and environmentalists from around the world are meeting this week in Bangkok to work on the details of a replacement agreement.
The lack of certainty about the CDM's future has slowed Masdar's ambitions of developing other carbon-reduction projects.
"It's great to see the pipeline actually realised now, but I don't think it's going to kick-start investment in the region at all," Mr Amiji said. "You don't know what's going to happen post-2012, so how are you going to make that investment today?"
