Atlanta Mortgage Resource

Faced with big penalties, carmakers are improving efficiency

THERE is nothing like high oil prices and swingeing new penalties on carbon-spewing vehicles to concentrate the minds of carmakers. The European Commission plans to impose penalties on companies by 2012 if their fleets emit over 130 grams of carbon dioxide per km (g/km). After much complaining about the technical impossibility of compliance (especially from German makers of big luxury cars), companies have got on with rolling out new technologies to improve efficiency. BMW cut its average fleet emissions by 7.3% last year by using “efficient dynamics” across its range, according to T&E, a transport think-tank. Many carmakers saw little improvement, partly because cars got 10kg heavier on average. PSA Peugeot-Citroen and Renault are best placed to meet the 2012 target.

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BP and its Russian partners appear to make up and vow to move on

LITTLE more than a week after Russia’s government had declared itself ready for a new cold war, one big foreign investor has emerged intact from a nasty dispute with its local partners and the authorities. TNK-BP, an oil company that produces 1.6m barrels a day and which is owned jointly by Britain's BP and Russian private investors, AlfaAccessRenova (AAR), was for months paralysed by war in the boardroom. The Russian investors, unhappy at the way the company has been run by Bob Dudley, an American appointed by BP, blocked the renewal of work permits for many foreign staff. This included Mr Dudley, who since late July has tried to direct TNK-BP from a secret location abroad. Despite denials, Russia’s tax and immigration inspectors seemed to be helping AAR. BP looked poised to join the ranks of foreign oil companies forced to sell stakes in big projects, on the cheap, to Kremlin-friendly concerns.

On Thursday September 4th, however, the two sides agreed to make up. BP’s 50% stake appears to be safe. Mr Dudley will go at the end of this year, to be replaced by a BP nominee who must be approved by the board. One AAR director and one BP director will also depart, making way for three independents. Much could depend on how independent these individuals really are. The squabbling management committee will be shrunk and the most disruptive members thrown out. In time, as much as 20% of the venture could be sold in an initial public offering (IPO)—if both partners, plus Russia’s regulators, agree. ...

Naming the stand-off between Russia and the West

DEFINING the beginning and end of the old cold war—let alone is the issues at stake—is tricky. Did it start with Lenin? With Stalin? Or with the Iron Curtain’s erection in Europe at the end of the second world war? And when did it end? With the Helsinki Accords of 1973, or with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika?

Historians can quibble indefinitely, but a rough definition might be that the cold war was an era of rivalry, both military and ideological, between two global superpowers. It started with the Berlin airlift of 1948, and petered out in the 1980s. ...

Ukraine’s pro-Western coalition is unravelling

Ukraine’s government, comprising the allies from the Orange Revolution, is poised to collapse after the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, allied with the opposition to strip the presidency of its powers. It is not clear whether Ms Tymoshenko has done this to pressure the president to back her policies, to boost her power as an alternative to seeking the presidency herself, or to trigger her departure from government ahead of tough economic times—and with an eye on the 2010 presidential election. The coalition could yet be saved, or a new one established; failing that, a parliamentary election must be held. With political tensions high in the wake of Russia’s attack on Georgia, the timing could hardly be worse.

On September 2nd the pro-presidential Our Ukraine-People's Self-Defence (OU-PSD) voted to leave its coalition with the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc (YTB), bringing the "Orange" government, which was only formed in late 2007 following an early parliamentary election, to the verge of collapse. ...

Daily dispatches from St Paul

THE most important feature of this year’s Republican convention is not its location, purpose or personalities. It is timing: for the first time in decades, the two parties convene in successive weeks. While most people celebrate the Labour Day holiday at home, the journalist class will arrive in St. Paul barely having recovered from Denver: the heat, the death-march-length walk from the security perimeter to the Pepsi Centre, the lack of seats, the alcohol. ...