Author: News Polite

Bret Stephens: Happy Easter, Gail. The news has been so depressing lately. A crazy guy opens fire in a subway in Brooklyn. The Russians are committing atrocities in Ukraine and are about to start a major offensive in the east. And my tuna melt on rye costs $21 at a not-much-to-look-at New York City diner, not including the tip.

Anything cheering you up?

Gail Collins: Happy holidays to you, Bret. This is one of the many times in recent years when I’ve appreciated the role professional sports play in our lives. You meet a friend who starts listing all the things about the world that could plunge anyone into depression, and at some point you can break in with: “But say, how about those Mets?”

Bret: The Mets are off to a strong start, but give them a few months and they’ll be depressing you as well.

Gail: Otherwise, I guess it’s reasonable to at least note that winter’s over, job openings are way up in the past year, and the subway shooting was miraculously — miraculously! — without fatalities.

I admit that the last one is not an ideal example of cheery news.

Bret: “Crazy Guy Aims, Shoots, Misses” could also be a contender for the next Russian national anthem.

Gail: Love the way you think.

Bret: The strong employment numbers are obviously good news. But let me put the dark cloud inside your silver lining: The Wall Street Journal reports that roughly three million Americans have dropped out of the work force, often for health reasons, and that that labor shortage is going to keep inflation high. This strikes me as yet another good argument for offering every Ukrainian refugee a green card.

Gail: Even before the pandemic, we were moving into an era in which our birthrate was just not providing enough future workers to keep the economy going. Immigrants shouldn’t just be tolerated; they should be welcomed with marching bands.

Bret: The other big story of last week, Gail, is Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share. Half the punditocracy seems to think this would be great; the other half thinks it’s the apocalypse. Where do you come down on this?

Gail: Am I nuts to think this is not going to happen?

Bret: You’re not nuts. The Twitter board seems determined to stop him, and Musk has been known to pull stunts like this before. Also, the 4.20 in $54.20 is an inside joke about getting high.

Gail: Lord help us. Even if Twitter tanked, wouldn’t there be some new post-Twitter communications system coming around the bend soon? You’re 10 times smarter than me about this stuff, so tell me what you think, and I’ll adopt it as my theory. At least for the spring.

Bret: Maybe in the distant future a big media company will create a platform in which non-unhinged adults can exchange ideas, air their disagreements without rancor, make a few jokes, have their claims fact-checked before they are published and then go out for a friendly drink.

Gail: Hope he’s listening.

Bret: I’m sympathetic to the idea that social-media companies should try to honor the spirit of the First Amendment, even if they aren’t legally bound by it. But the idea that Twitter is a good forum for speech is silly. Trying to communicate a thought in 240 characters isn’t speaking. It’s blurting. You don’t use Twitter for persuasion. You use it for insults and virtue signaling. A healthy free-speech environment depends on people talking with each other. Twitter is a medium for people to talk at others. The best thing that could happen to Twitter isn’t an acquisition, by Musk or anyone else. It’s bankruptcy.

Gail: Wow, I’ve always pretty much avoided Twitter, but it was mainly out of laziness. Now I’m cloaked in righteousness and am deferring to you on all Twitter topics.

Don’t suppose you’d be willing to respond by deferring to me on health care?

Bret: You’ve laid a trap, Gail. What’s on your mind?

Gail: I appreciate Joe Biden’s call for increasing government aid to those who don’t have good private coverage and putting a lid on the prices pharmaceutical companies charge for drugs people have to buy whether they want to or not. This would bring me back to my cheer for limiting the price of insulin to $35 a month.

Bret: The high cost of insulin is a national scandal. But I don’t think price controls are ever a good answer. The biggest roadblock is the dearth of so-called biosimilars, which is largely a function of regulatory and legal roadblocks, including abuse of the patent system by some of the big pharmaceutical companies, as well as insufficient pricing transparency.

Here is the moment I can almost hear our readers screaming, “Price controls are how other countries do it!” But that almost inevitably leads to health care rationing and wait lists. Would you rather us be Canada?

Gail: You know, I’ve heard that Canada threat for decades, and generally my reaction is, “That’s our worst danger?” Obamacare did a lot to make our health care system more efficient, but the system is still way too clogged with duplicative management and other administrative failings.

Bret: Obamacare’s many problems are the high road toward Medicare for all, which is why I was opposed to it in the first place.

Gail: Go, Bernie Sanders!

I guess we should move on to politics for a bit. Next month there’ll be big Senate primaries in places like Ohio — where Republicans will have to choose between the newly anointed Trump favorite J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame and a bunch of noncelebrities — and Pennsylvania, where they’ll have the option of selecting Trump’s man, Dr. Oz of Oprah fame, or a half-dozen alternatives without reality-TV careers.

Anybody you’re rooting for? And what’s the chance the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly Retired Entertainers?

Bret: My favorite Republican these days is the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who recently described Donald Trump as “crazy,” with a pungent modifier to go with it. Being able to say that out loud should be a litmus test for any serious conservative. Other litmus tests include the willingness to connect the words “evil” with “Putin,” “legitimate” with “2020 election,” “president” with “Biden” and “supercilious twerp” with “Tucker.” All the rest is commentary.

Gail: Ah, Bret. Your vision of unshackling the Republican Party from Trump is stirring and about as likely as a snark-free Twitter.

Bret: Of course it’s easy to make fun of Republicans for their insanity. But isn’t it the Democratic Party that could use a bit more introspection as it heads into what looks like a wipeout in the midterms?

Gail: Well, things certainly don’t look good. It’s ironic that the Democrats’ huge flaw is an inability to get anything serious passed in Congress — because of the, um, lack of Democrats in the Senate. Which will probably cost them several more Senate seats.

But one of the other things Republicans seem to be counting on is a right-wing revolt on social issues, especially abortion. Is there any way for the pro-choice faction of the party to combat that, or is it just way too much of the Republican brand now?

Bret: Political parties often lose when their cultural values get too extreme for the mainstream. That’s what happened to Democrats in 1972 (“amnesty, abortion and acid”) and to Republicans in 1992 (Patrick, J., Buchanan). Right now it feels as if Democrats have become the party of wokeness, which is how they got hammered in last year’s governor’s race in Virginia and why they are losing votes over antipolice posturing. But that could change if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. As we discussed last week, that decision will be bad for women but probably good for Democratic candidates, since most Americans still want abortion to remain legal.

The other big court decision will be on affirmative action. Any thoughts on how that will play out politically if affirmative action is ruled unconstitutional?

Gail: Not sure about the politics, since it’s always easy to sell the idea that the people with the top scores/grades/extracurriculars should be the top choice. But for the country, ending affirmative action would be a disaster. We have to be sure that people from all races, creeds and economic backgrounds are part of the population that’s moving up.

Bret: Agree about the importance of diversity in many walks of life. Disagree that affirmative action is the right way to get there. Looks like we’re going to have to debate this when the decision is handed down.

Gail: There’s one other huge Supreme Court decision coming around the bend: on New York City’s gun control laws. I’m terrified the conservative majority is going to declare the government has no right to prohibit people from carrying concealed weapons in public. Do you think it’ll happen?

Bret: Yeah. And I think the decision will be 5 to 4, with John Roberts joining the liberal wing in dissent on states’ rights grounds. Hey, it’s never too late to move to Canada.

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Russia’s central bank chief warned on Monday that the consequences of Western sanctions were only beginning to be felt, and Moscow’s mayor warned that 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone, stark acknowledgments that undermined President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that sanctions had failed to destabilize the Russian economy.

The diverging assessments showed how the impact of the West’s sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and their ability to weaken Mr. Putin’s grip on power — remains uncertain nearly two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.

While experts say Russia faces an economic time bomb as its inventory of imported goods and parts runs low, Mr. Putin is using the fact that the Russian economy has not yet collapsed to bolster his contention that sanctions will not deter him.

Western sanctions, Mr. Putin said on Monday in a televised videoconference with senior officials, were meant to “rapidly undermine the financial and economic situation in our country, provoke panic in the markets, the collapse of the banking system and a large-scale shortage of goods in stores.”

“But we can already confidently say that this policy toward Russia has failed,” he went on. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”

Mr. Putin was in part addressing a domestic audience, seeking to reassure Russians who have had to endure worries about cash shortages, a battered stock market and the shuttering of popular Western retailers like Ikea.

Mr. Putin said he was prepared to increase government spending to stimulate the economy, an indication that continued revenues from energy exports are giving the Kremlin the flexibility to soften the blow of sanctions.

Aggressive capital controls imposed by the central bank have helped the ruble recover from its crash in the days after the invasion. And there are few reports of major layoffs or of extensive food shortages in grocery stores.

But contrary to Mr. Putin’s optimism, two senior officials cautioned on Monday that the real economic pain was yet to come. Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow announced a $40 million program to help people laid off by foreign companies find temporary employment and new jobs; according to his office’s estimates, he said, “around 200,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs” in the city of 13 million.

And in an appearance at the lower house of Parliament, Elvia Nabiullina, the chairwoman of the Russian Central Bank, gave a more far-reaching, negative assessment. She told lawmakers that while the sanctions’ impact had largely been on the financial markets at first, they “will now begin to increasingly affect the real sectors of the economy.”

For example, she said, “practically every product” manufactured in Russia relies on imported components. Factories for now may still have them in stock. But because of new Western export restrictions, Russian companies will be forced to shift their supply chains or start making their own components.

“At the moment, perhaps this problem is not yet so strongly felt, because there are still reserves in the economy, but we see that sanctions are being tightened almost every day,” she said. “But the period during which the economy can live on reserves is finite.”

Ms. Nabiullina, an internationally respected central banker who reportedly tried to resign in the days after the war, said about half of the central bank’s $600 billion foreign currency and gold reserves remained frozen because of sanctions. Those reserves that the bank still controlled, she said, were mainly gold and yuan — of little use in trying to stabilize the ruble — forcing the bank to resort to capital controls like limiting how much foreign currency can be taken out of the country.

In his televised videoconference later in the day with Ms. Nabiullina and several other officials, Mr. Putin acknowledged that the Russian economy did face some problems, including inflation. He said he had already directed the pensions and salaries of state employees — part of Mr. Putin’s political base — to be adjusted for inflation and indicated that he supported greater government spending to stimulate the economy.

“The budget should actively support the economy, saturate the economy with financial resources, and maintain its liquidity,” Mr. Putin said. “There are opportunities for this. Of course, we need to act carefully.”

LONDON — When Jakob Bitner was 7, he left Russia for Germany with his parents and sister. Twenty-eight years later, he is set on solving a vexing green-energy problem that could help Germany end its dependency on imported energy from Russia, or anywhere.

The problem: how to make wind and solar energy available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even if the sun is not shining or the wind not blowing.

The company he co-founded in Munich in 2016, VoltStorage, found some success selling storage battery packs for solar power to homeowners in Europe. Now the company is developing much larger batteries — each about the size of a shipping container — based on a chemical process that can store and discharge electricity over days, not just hours like today’s most popular battery technology.

These ambitions to overcome the unreliable nature of renewable energy fit perfectly with Europe’s targets to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. But Mr. Bitner’s company is facing a frustrating reality that threatens to undercut Europe’s plans and poses a wider challenge in the global fight against climate change: a lack of money to finish the job.

VoltStorage needs “significantly” more money to develop its new battery technology, Mr. Bitner said. In 2020 and 2021, the company raised 11 million euros, or $12 million. Now, it is trying to raise up to €40 million more by this summer.

“Even though we had great early-stage investors from Germany and Europe that keep supporting us, it becomes very hard to raise the tickets we need right now,” Mr. Bitner said, referring to individual investments.

Europe offers a preview for the rest of the world. The European Union has aggressive targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and there is broad political support for tackling climate change. The bloc has poured public money into grants for developing new technology.

But after getting initial start-up money or grant funding, businesses are struggling to raise funds for the kind of innovative, large-scale projects needed to complete the transition from carbon-spewing sources of energy. The funding gap means Europeans face the prospect of either falling short of ambitious climate targets or further energy shortages and rising costs.

Solutions are available if given a financial boost, experts said. Almost half the reductions in emissions to meet net zero targets by 2050 will come from technologies currently in their infancy, according to the International Energy Agency. There is, in theory, plenty of capital available globally for the multitrillion-dollar task of funding this transition to greener energy.

The war in Ukraine has made Europe’s energy transition even more urgent. The European Union has said it would cut imported Russian natural gas by two-thirds this year and completely by the end of the decade. While some of that supply will be made up by imports from other countries, such as the United States and Qatar, expanding domestic renewable energy capacity is a critical pillar to this plan.

But attracting investors to projects trying to move beyond mature technologies like solar and wind power is tough. Venture capitalists, once cheerleaders of green energy, are more infatuated with cryptocurrencies and start-ups that deliver groceries and beer within minutes. Many investors are put off by capital-intensive investments. And governments have further muddied the water with inconsistent policies that undermine their bold pledges to reduce carbon emissions.

Venture capitalists’ other interests

Tony Fadell, who spent most of his career trying to turn emerging technologies into mainstream products as an executive at Apple and founder of Nest, said that even as the world faces the risks of climate change, money is flooding into less urgent developments in cryptocurrency, the so-called metaverse and the digital art collections sold as NFTs. Last year, venture capitalists invested $11.9 billion in renewable energy globally, compared with $30.1 billion in cryptocurrency and blockchain, according to PitchBook.

Of the $106 billion invested by venture capitalists in European start-ups last year, just 4 percent went into energy investments, according to PitchBook.

“We need to get real,” said Mr. Fadell, who now lives in Paris and has proposed ideas on energy policy to the French government. “Too many people are investing in the things that are not going to fix our existential problems. They are just investing in fast money.”

It has not helped that the industry has been burned before by a green tech boom. About 15 years ago, environmentally conscious start-ups were seen as the next big thing in Silicon Valley. One of the premier venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, made former Vice President Al Gore a partner and pledged that clean energy would eventually make up at least a third of its total investments. Instead, Kleiner became a cautionary tale about the risks of investing in energy-related companies as the firm missed out on early backing of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

There is evidence that these old fears are receding. Two years ago 360 Capital, a venture capital firm based in Paris and Milan dealing in early-stage investment, introduced a dedicated fund investing in clean energy and sustainability companies. The firm is now planning to open up the fund to more investors, expanding it to €150 million from a €30 million fund.

There are a growing number of dedicated funds for energy investments. But even then there is a tendency for the companies in them to be software developers, deemed less risky than builders of larger-scale energy projects. Four of the seven companies backed by 360 Capital’s new fund are artificial intelligence companies and software providers.

Still, the situation has changed completely since the company’s first major green-energy investment in 2008, Fausto Boni, the firm’s founder, said. “We see potentially lots of money coming into the sector and so many of the issues we had 15 years ago are on their way to being overcome,” he said. But the availability of bigger investments needed to help companies expand in Europe still lags behind, he added.

The funding gap

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which is backed by Bill Gates, is trying to fill the gap. It was formed in late 2021 to help move promising technology from development to commercial use. In Europe, it is a $1 billion initiative with the European Commission and European Investment Bank to support four types of technologies — long-duration energy storage, clean hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels and direct air capture of carbon dioxide — that it believes need to scale quickly.

In Europe, there are “significant difficulties with the scaling up phase,” said Ann Mettler, the vice president for Europe at Breakthrough Energy and a former director general at the European Commission. There is money for start-ups but when companies become reasonably successful and a bit larger, they are often acquired by American or Chinese companies, she said. This leaves fewer independent companies in Europe focused on the energy problems they set out to solve.

Companies that build complex — and often expensive — hardware, like Mr. Bitner’s batteries for long-duration energy storage, have an especially hard time finding investors willing to stomach the risks. After a few investment rounds, the companies are too big for early-stage investors but too small to appeal to institutional investors looking for safer places to park large amounts of cash.

“If you look at typical climate technologies, such as wind and solar and even the lithium-ion batteries, they took well over four decades to go from the early R&D to the large-scale commercialization and cost competitiveness,” Ms. Mettler said, referring to research and development. “Four decades — which obviously we don’t have.”

What investors want

There are some signs of improvement, including more funds focused on clean energy or sustainability and more companies securing larger investment rounds. But there is a sense of frustration as investors, companies and European governments agree that innovation and adoption of new technology need to happen much more quickly to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by 2030.

“You won’t find a place in the world that is more attuned to what is needed than Europe,” Ms. Mettler said. “It’s not for lack of ambition or vision — it’s difficult.”

But investors say government policy can help them more. Despite climate pledges, the regulations and laws in place haven’t created strong enough incentives for investments in new technologies.

Industries like steel and concrete have to be forced to adopt greener methods of production, Mr. Boni, the 360 Capital founder, said.

For energy storage, hydrogen, nuclear power and other large-scale projects, the government should expedite permitting, cut taxes and provide matching funds, according to Mr. Fadell, who has put his personal fortune into Future Shape, which backs start-ups addressing societal challenges.

“There are few investors willing to go all in to put up $200 million or $300 million,” Mr. Fadell said. “We need to know the government is on our side.”

HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — It was in early March when the spent warhead of a cluster munition rocket landed next to Yurii Doroshenko’s home in eastern Ukraine, having dispensed its lethal bomblets over his village.

“They were shelling and it hit the street,” he said.

These types of internationally banned weapons have been repeatedly used by the Russian military since it invaded Ukraine in February. Human rights groups have denounced their use. Western leaders have linked their presence to a bevy of war-crimes allegations leveled at Moscow.

But the cluster munition that landed to next to Mr. Doroshenko’s house was not fired by Russian forces. Based on evidence reviewed by The New York Times during a visit to the area, it is very likely to have been launched by the Ukrainian troops who were trying to retake the area.

Nobody died in that strike in Husarivka, an agricultural hamlet surrounded by wheat fields and natural-gas lines, though at least two people were killed as Ukrainian forces shelled it for the better part of month, targeting Russian forces.

As the war approaches its eighth week, both sides have relied heavily on artillery and rockets to dislodge each other. But the Ukrainians’ decision to saturate their own village with a cluster munition that has the capacity to haphazardly kill innocent people underscores their strategic calculation: This is what they needed to do to retake their country, no matter the cost.

Cluster munitions — a class of weapon comprising rockets, bombs, missiles, mortar and artillery shells — split open midair and dispense smaller bomblets over a wide area. The hazard to civilians remains significant until any unexploded munitions have been located and properly disposed of by experts.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which took effect in 2010, bans their use because of the indiscriminate harm they can cause to civilians: Humanitarian groups have noted that 20 percent or more of antipersonnel submunitions fail to detonate on impact, yet they can explode later if they are picked up or handled.

More than 100 nations have signed the pact, though the United States, Ukraine and Russia have not.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s definitely dismaying to hear that evidence has emerged indicating that Ukraine may have used cluster munitions in this current conflict,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”

An adviser to the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ministry of Defense declined to comment.

Russian troops had seized Husarivka from Ukrainian units in the first few days of March, occupying buildings on its outskirts and near its center. The 220-millimeter Uragan artillery rocket that landed near Mr. Doroshenko’s home — fired from a truck-mounted launcher many miles away — struck on either March 6 or 7, said Mr. Doroshenko, the town’s informal leader.

By that point, the village was well under Russian control.

During a visit around the property and Mr. Doroshenko’s street on Thursday, Times reporters viewed large pieces of the artillery rocket that dispensed the cluster munitions, confirming the type of weapon that had been fired. It landed near the Russian army’s makeshift headquarters in an adjacent farm workshop, residents said, meaning the Russian forces were almost certainly the target.

Throughout the occupation, Ukrainian forces incessantly shelled the Russian troops there, and at least two of the same type of cluster munition were lodged in a field by Mr. Doroshenko’s home, just a few hundred yards away from the Russians’ headquarters.

The rockets fell around a small neighborhood of a dozen or so single-story homes interspersed with small gardens.

As the rockets neared the farm, their warheads — probably carrying 30 antipersonnel bomblets apiece — would have separated from the weapons’ solid rocket motors, breaking open and casting their deadly cargo across the neighborhood.

These small munitions each contain the equivalent of about 11 ounces of TNT, slightly less than twice as much as a standard hand grenade.

The attack on the Husarivka farm appears to be the first use of a cluster munition by Ukrainian troops since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. In 2015, Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions during the opening months of their war against Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.

When confronted with the prospect that the Ukrainian military had shelled his village with cluster bombs, Mr. Doroshenko, 58, seemed indifferent.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The main thing is that after those rockets everybody comes out alive.”

The hazard posed by small undetonated munitions prevented Times reporters from closely examining all the weapons that landed. They visually verified from a distance two of the three rocket remnants as being Uragan cluster munitions, which leave behind the rocket’s nose cone followed by a long skeletal metal frame that held the bomblets together in flight.

On April 8, The Times verified that a similar kind of Uragan rocket, loaded with anti-vehicle land mines, was fired by Russian troops in a strike against the town of Bezruky, a suburb of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city.

Much has been said about the Russian shelling of Ukrainian towns — frequent artillery barrages that wound and kill residents and push the ones who remain in these contested areas into basements or shelters. The danger to civilians is no different under the barrels of Ukrainian artillery, as their forces desperately try to retake the parts of the country under Russian control.

Lubov Dvoretska, 62, lost her husband, Olexandr, during the shelling of Husarivka by Ukrainian forces at the end of March, just days before Russian troops retreated from there.

“Ones are shooting this way, others another way,” she recounted. “My God, everything is thundering. And on March 10, it was said that half of Husarivka had left for Chepelivka. Pack up and leave because it will get worse. And then I left.”

Ms. Dvoretska fled, but her husband, Olexandr, stayed behind to tend their livestock. Later, residents told her that Olexandr was injured in a mortar strike on March 22 and most likely died the next day.

“He was discovered dead in the house on the 23rd, and on the 24th they could barely reach me on the phone to notify me,” she said. “Just as he was, in the same clothes, he was buried inhumanly, like an animal.”

Another man, Volodymyr Strokov, was killed during the shelling on March 22, residents said.

Before the war, Husarivka had a population of just over 1,000. It is now down to around 400, after hundreds packed what they could and left. Ukrainian forces retook the village around March 26. Now, the village — about three miles from the front line near the eastern city of Izium — is attacked daily by both Russian artillery and aircraft, residents said.

Through tears, Ms. Dvoretska pointed to where her neighbors had buried her husband in a raised dirt grave in their backyard, marked with a homemade wooden cross.

“I never thought it would happen this way,” she yelled. “It never got in my head that I will be left alone at my old age. Alone.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Husarivka, Ukraine, and John Ismay from Washington. Natalia Yermak contributed reporting from Husarivka.