Global food prices on the downslide, UN agency says

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Today we’ll get ahead of the extreme cold that’s overtaking the northeastern U.S. and also look at House Republicans’ new move to combat environment-minded investing. Plus: Chess players face off with air pollution.

But first: How global first prices dropped in January.

UN food agency reports January drop in global prices

Food prices in January dropped worldwide for the 10th consecutive month, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced on Friday. 

Price indices for vegetable oils, dairy products and sugar fueled last month’s decline, the U.N. food agency stated, while releasing new reports on food product forecasts.   

The FAO’s Food Price Index dropped 17.9 percent below its all-time high — achieved in March 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the agency.

This downward trend was fueled in part by an agreement signed in the summer to enable Ukrainian grain exports amid the ongoing war, the FAO explained.

Some highlights:

• Sugar dropped 1.1 percent from December, marking the first decline after two consecutive months of sharp increases.
  
• Dairy fell 1.4 percent, reaching its lowest level in a year, largely spurred by lower prices of butter and milk powders worldwide.
  
• Vegetable oil plunged 2.9 percent from December to January — or 25 percent below its levels a year ago.

The FAO also raised its forecast for global cereal production, while warning that supplies are still likely to tighten this year. 

“Looking ahead to 2023, early indications point to likely area expansions for winter wheat cropping in the northern hemisphere, especially in the United States,” the agency stated. 

The FAO attributed that expansion to elevated wheat prices but cautioned that high fertilizer costs could negatively impact yield.   

New England bundles up for historic Arctic front

New England is bracing for monumental cold this weekend as a severe Arctic front rolls in this weekend, our colleague Julia Shapero reported for The Hill.  

“This is an epic, generational Arctic outbreak,” a branch of the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, Maine, said, according to CNN.

Fears of frostbite: The cold blast is expected to bring wind chills of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit and colder, according to the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center.   

• The NWS Caribou branch warned on Twitter that frostbite on bare skin can occur in just two to five minutes in such conditions. 
  
• Temperatures 15 to 35 degrees below average in the upper Midwest and Northeast.  

Record-setting cold: Wind chills this weekend could approach record-low levels, with cold temperatures already settling in Friday morning in parts of New England, Axios reported. 

• Wind chill warnings are in effect in areas of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. 
  
• As of mid-afternoon Friday, a wind chill of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit had already been recorded in northern Maine.  

Why is it so frigid? The extreme cold is a result of a weather system known as a “tropospheric polar vortex,” according to Axios. 

• This pocket of extreme cold will rotate south from Hudson Bay and will be escorted by snow squalls and heavy winds.  
  
• New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., will avoid the worst of storm system but will still likely be unusually cold through Saturday. 
  
  

House GOP forms group to challenge ESG investing

House Republicans on Friday announced they are launching a working group to combat environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, our colleague Rachel Frazin reported for The Hill.  

GOP vs ‘rogue regulators’: A House Financial Services Committee press release said the group would battle what it deemed a “threat to our capital markets.” 

• Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) will helm the group.
  
• Members will seek to “develop a comprehensive approach” to ESG and “hold Biden’s rogue regulators accountable,” said Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.).

What’s at issue? ESG investing is a broad characterization of attempts to invest ethically.

• Such investing can include actions by the government, investment firms, banks and individuals. 
  
• Huizenga specifically called out a proposal from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that would require companies to disclose contributions to climate change.  

Why is Huizenga against the SEC proposal? Both these rules and ESG in general have received significant opposition from Republicans, Frazin noted. 

• GOP politicians have raised concerns about associated impacts on the fossil fuel industry.  
  
• Republicans have also voiced fears that ESG could drive managers to choose social issues over profits for their clients.
  
  

SEC MAY BE EASING UP CLIMATE-DISCLOSURE RULES

The SEC may be weighing the idea of easing its proposed climate-disclosure rules following pushback from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported.  

The regulator is reevaluating the financial reporting parts of the plan, which would require companies to disclose costs related to global warming, people close to the agency told the newspaper.

Will disclosure be scrapped entirely? The final version of the SEC rules will likely still require some such disclosures in financial statements, the Journal reported.

Nonetheless, the SEC is considering making these mandates less burdensome than initially proposed, according to the report.

• One such change could involve increasing the threshold at which firms must divulge climate costs. 
  
• The final version of the SEC rules is expected to be released this year.  
  
  

Climate change put into Harvard Medical curriculum 

Harvard Medical School will now be including climate change in its curriculum, affirming a student-led campaign on environmental health, The Harvard Crimson reported.

Unanimous approval: The Harvard Medical School Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee voted unanimously last month to officially integrate climate change and health into the official curriculum, according to the Crimson. 

Championing the effort was Gaurab Basu, who will direct the new program, and a cohort of students from Harvard’s Students for Environmental Awareness in Medicine organization, the Crimson reported.

What’s in the new curriculum? The program will explore the impact of climate change on health and health inequality, according to the Crimson. 

• The curriculum will also look at how these effects apply to clinic care and the role of health care providers in solving climate issues.
  
• Faculty members and course directors will be integrating climate-related issues into existing lectures, without adding new courses, the Boston Globe reported.  

Disproportionate impacts: Basu, the new curriculum director, stressed that the effects of climate change on health equity must be taught and understood.

• “People are not impacted equally by climate change, and what’s hard about it is that the wealthy countries disproportionately cause the problem,” Basu, who is also an instructor in medicine, said in a statement.  
  
• “Climate change is a manifestation of how we haven’t built things with health and equity in mind,” he added. 

How does Harvard compare to other schools? The percentage of medical schools integrating the health impacts of climate change has doubled over the past three years, the Globe reported.

• That percentage surged from 27 percent in 2019 to 55 percent in 2022, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. 
  
• Scientists have credited student-led efforts as one of the primary inspirations for this shift. 
  
  

MIT researchers call checkmate on air pollution 

Chess player performance declines considerably when more particulate matter is polluting the air, a recent study has found. 

Harnessing a ‘chess engine’: When contending with such conditions, players tend to make more suboptimal moves, according to the study, published this week in Management Science. 

• The researchers explored both the probability of making an error and the magnitude of that error — the likelihood that the mistake is “meaningful.”  
  
• An artificial intelligence-based “chess engine” deemed such errors to be meaningful if they weakened a player’s chances of winning. 

What did the chess engine reveal? “We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” co-author Juan Palacios, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.  

A bit of pollution goes a long way: With just a modest rise in pollution levels, the researchers saw that a player’s probability of making an error increased by 2.1 percentage points. 

• The magnitude of those errors rose by 10.8 percent.  
  
• Cleaner air, they determined, helps sharpen thinking and clear brain space.  

Worse air quality means worse play: When air pollution levels climbed further, chess players performed even more poorly when under time constrains.  

• A particular tournament included in the study required 40 moves to be made in 110 minutes. 
  
• For moves 31 through 40, an air pollution increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter led to an increased probability of error of 3.2 percent.  
  
• Meanwhile, the magnitude of those errors surged by 17.3 percent. 

Space to breathe and time to think: “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality,” Palacios said. 

• The MIT economist also emphasized the dual dangers of air pollution and time pressure.  
  
• In such cases, players cannot compensate for lower cognitive performance with greater deliberation, he explained. 
  
  

Follow-up Friday

In which we revisit some issues we’ve covered this week.  

Treasury broadens definition of SUVs that qualify for EV tax credit  

• California districts with higher rates of electric vehicle (EV) adoption are seeing improvements in public health. On Friday, the Treasury Department expanded the definition of electric SUVs — to include Tesla’s Model Y, the Volkswagen ID.4 and GM’s Cadillac Lyriq — making these crossovers eligible for a $7,500 tax credit under a $80,000 price cap for SUVs, our colleague Zack Budryk reported.     

Biden administration to settle tribal water rights claims 

• California released a proposal for allocating Colorado River water earlier this week — a day after nearby states issued a plan of their own. The Biden administration has announced that it will distribute $580 million to 15 Native American tribes toward settling historic water rights claims, Budryk reported.   

China’s air quality improvements spilling over into South Korea 

• China’s ‘clean heating’ policies may have saved thousands of lives, researchers revealed this week. The country’s pollution policies have improved air quality so much that benefits may now be spilling over into neighboring South Korea, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.  
  

Note: This newsletter will transition to a weekly publication schedule next week. You can expect it in your inbox every Wednesday. We believe this new format will help us bring you more hard-hitting work and reporting on a variety of sustainability issues.

As always, you can keep tabs on our work throughout the week by visiting the sustainability section of The Hill or our individual author pages (Saul’s and Sharon’s).

Have a good weekend and we’ll see you next week!