Despite pressure from the UK’s climate change advisors, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office says it will not intervene in Cumbria County Council’s decision to approve the country’s first new deep coal mine in 30 years.

The government interrupted the development of West Cumbria Mining’s Woodhouse Colliery project in north-west England in October while it decided whether to call in the application or hand the decision back to local authorities.

Cumbria’s council announced in January it had received confirmation that the decision to allow the coal mine would not be reversed.

Since first proposed, the project has faced steep opposition from environmental groups urging the government to intervene and block it. They claim the new coal mine would emit 8 million tonnes of carbon annually, undermining the country’s pledge to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.

As the UK prepares to host the COP26 climate summit in November, considered the most important climate negotiations since the Paris agreement in 2015, the chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) has called planning minister Robert Jenrick to reconsider the project’s approval.

CCC’s chair Lord Deben said in a letter to Jenrick that while it was not the council’s role to act as a regulator or a planning authority, he would urge the minister to consider further the UK’s policy towards all new coal developments.

“The Johnson administration’s difficult position echoes a bigger conundrum,” writes Bloomberg‘s columnist Akshat Rathi. “Many countries are trying to balance their desire to contribute to the global fight against climate change against domestic pressures to exploit their own natural resources.”

“Net-zero” goal questioned

The planned mine is expected to produce as much as 3.1 million tonnes of metallurgical coal a year until 2049, one year before the country must have net zero emissions. While the UK will use some of that coal in its steel industry, 85% of it is marked for export to Europe.

In that period, the mine will provide 500 jobs, but the CCC also expects it to add about 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent of emissions each year.

“Of course, job creation is absolutely vital to communities but we must look forward to the jobs of 21st century, not back to those in declining industries,” Greenpeace UK’s policy director Doug Parr said in a statement.

“If we want to avoid dangerous climate change, giving the go-ahead to a new coal mine takes us in completely the wrong direction,” Friends of the Earth said in a separate statement.

A study by the center-right think tank Bright Blue, published in October, shows that most in the UK are skeptical about achieving the net-zero target by 2050.

England’s last operating deep coal mine, Kellingley, closed in 2015, and the Bradley coal mine closed last year, after almost 200 years in operation.

The British Columbia Council for International Education and the Metropolitan Education Department of Mongolia have announced a new partnership that will promote exchange between students and educators in Canada and Mongolia.

Callan first began her media career in China with the expat magazine City Weekend. After travelling around Australia and New Zealand, she went on to launch an NGO-focused magazine in Somaliland and later worked as a freelance editor for China Daily. She has also lectured at Frantz Fanon University and Tianjin Polytechnic on academic English and cross-cultural communication. Get in touch with Callan at callan@thepienews.com

"This MOU... create[s] opportunities for students, teachers, and instructors"

The MOU, which was signed at a virtual ceremony on January 27, was a first between the two groups and will “help facilitate the cultural and academic exchange of BC, Canadian, and Mongolian educational institutions, students, and educators, and strengthen the internationalisation efforts of BCCIE and MED”.

“With a vision to provide equitable and fair access to quality education for all and to prepare educated human resources, the government of Mongolia attaches great importance to its foreign relations with our partner countries,” said Gantulga Jigjidsuren, head of the Metropolitan Education Department of Mongolia, which oversees early childhood to K-12 education in Ulaanbaatar.

“The government of Mongolia attaches great importance to its foreign relations with our partner countries”

“The signing of this MOU cements the foundation for mutual cooperation to explore and create opportunities for students, teachers, and instructors and I believe it marks the beginning of an effective collaboration that enriches the education relations of our two countries.”

Mongolia’s education system has seen investment from and cooperation with many countries over the last few years, including Japan, China and Russia.

While a high proportion of university-aged citizens go on to higher education, graduate unemployment remains an issue.

For Mongolian international students, popular destinations include South Korea, Japan, the US, Australia and Turkey. The vast majority of its incoming students come from China, including from Inner Mongolia.

“Mongolia is a great and important country, a major trading partner of Canada especially in mining, and importantly an emerging market for BC’s education system,” said Randall Martin, executive director of BCCIE.

“Our agreement with MED represents another step towards advancing study abroad opportunities for students and teachers in BC and Mongolia and signifies the commitment both share in fostering global citizenship.”

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ Regarding with the decision to impose strict quarantine in the capital city on February 11-23, Deputy Prime Minister S.Amarsaikhan presented the types of businesses and services that are allowed to run their operations normally during this period. These services include:

Electric heating, water supply, decontamination and sewerage activities

Healthcare organizations, pharmacies, medical equipment distribution organizations

Gas and fuel supply

Food production, trade, distribution, supermarkets, hypermarkets, minimarkets, grocery stores, wholesale trade, reserve meat and livestock fodder trade

Sterilization, disinfection and cleaning services

Loading and transport services

Online banking services, ATM

Refined coal factories, supply, distribution and sales points

Post office, communications, media

Funeral services

Repairs and other services

Special purpose agencies

Higher legislative body

Public and local self-governing organizations / 15 percent of the staff will work at workplace under time restriction/

State-owned organizations of particular and strategic importance /Ulaanbaatar Railways, Chinggis Khaan airport/

Livestock hay and fodder distribution and transportation

Outdoor maintenance service

Special duty vehicles for production and distribution

Furthermore, public transport will serve for limited number of passengers between 08 am and 18 pm. Traffic movement in and out of the capital city will also be restricted and only vehicles for providing health, emergency, special duty services and funeral services will be allowed.

In addition, “One door-one testing” measure will be implemented during the period of the strict quarantine. 280 medical teams will work to perform diagnosis and testing on 420 thousand households in 10 days. 38 PCR machines will be used alongside establishing 73 testing points in the capital city. It is planned to operate over 90 mobile points if necessary.

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. On January 29, 2021, the last day of its autumn session, State Great Khural of Mongolia approved a bill on Supporting the Oil Refinery.

The bill is aimed at ensuring realization of the construction project of an oil refinery underway with the loan agreement between the government of Mongolia and the Exim Bank of India within its scheduled date, intensify the project implementation, define the Mongolian government’s support to the project and create the legal framework.

The bill was co-developed by the Ministries of Justice and Home Affairs, Finance and Mining and Heavy Industry, Mineral Resources and Petroleum Authority and Mongolian Oil Refinery state owned company.

The approved law creates legal foundation for actions and activities related to the oil refinery under construction in Dornogobi aimag as well as its facilities and infrastructures, including the usage of international norms, standards and regulations, control, facilitation and approval of the oil refinery’s blueprint and designs and commissioning of the factory and the establishment of a product sharing agreement on the oil field and ensuring of stable supply of raw products, reports the Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry.

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Bogd Bank, the youngest bank in Mongolia’s banking industry, has announced that it would launch an initial public offering and list 20 percent of its shares on the Mongolian Stock Exchange to raise funds from public.

In compliance with recent amendments to the Banking Law of Mongolia, approved on January 28, 2021, which obliges some commercial banks to become available for public trading prior to June 30, 2022, and all commercial banks to reduce its ownership concentration before December 31, 2023, the Bogd Bank now becomes the first bank to trade its shares on the stock exchange and transition from private to public.

Established in 2014, the Bogd Bank is owned by Bodi Capital LLC (91,32 percent) and Bogd Capital Investment (8.68 percent). Saruul Ganbaatar, CEO and Board Director at the Bogd Bank, said “The stock market launch of the Bogd Bank is expected to bring about increased transparency and improve the corporate governance of the bank, enabling the bank to fulfill its goal to grow into the best bank in the modern era.”

The total assets held by the Bogd Bank, which has more than 45,000 customers, were increased by around 5 times, from MNT 44.2 billion in 2015 up to MNT 248.8 billion in 2019, and its net operating profit was estimated at MNT 2.9 billion as of 2019.

Ard Securities LLC, a subsidiary of Ard Financial Group - a diversified financial services holding company, will serve as a primary underwriter to lead the Bogd Bank’s IPO process. With 23-year of history in the banking industry by holding broker, dealer, underwriter, investment consultant and forex trade licenses, Ard Securities offers variety of services including securities trading, monitoring of portfolio performance and trading activities, etc.

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ At 11 a.m., today, the Ministry of Health provided updates on the coronavirus situation in Mongolia.

According to the Health Ministry, 31 people were detected with coronavirus after testing 16,960 people nationwide on February 3. The newly detected cases were all registered in Ulaanbaatar city and two new infection clusters have been reported in the capital city.

Specifically, an employee of “Mongol Shir” Company tested positive for coronavirus on the night of February 1 and brought to the National Center for Communicable Diseases. Afterwards, 18 people were diagnosed with coronavirus when 72 employees of the company were tested. Moreover, two infection cases were confirmed at “Amgalan” maternity hospital of the capital city during a surveillance testing at high-risk sites performed by the National Center for Public Health. One of the two cases is a staff of the maternity hospital and another one is a pregnant woman.

As of today, confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Mongolia have reached 1,890. Of whom 1,398 have made recovery and 479 are under treatment. Six people have recovered in the last 24 hours and discharged from hospital. Thus, 74 percent of the total reported cases or 1,398 people have recovered.

Since coming into power in 2017, President Khaltmaa Battulga has plunged Mongolia’s democracy into a downward spiral of authoritarianism, abuses of anti-corruption law, and politically motivated persecutions of the president’s opponents, argues a new white paper published by Robert Amsterdam of Amsterdam & Partners LLP.

The report, titled “Poisoned Oasis: The Political Persecution of Chimed Saikhanbileg and the Future of Democracy in Mongolia,” has been released in English and Mongolian and is being distributed to a wide audience and stakeholders as well as the general public.

Mr. Amsterdam, who was retained to represent Mr. Saikhanbileg one year ago, says that the purpose of the white paper is not only to prove that the 2018 arrest and subsequent charges against Ch.Saikhanbileg were entirely without merit, but also show how this case highlights the attempt to destroy judicial independence taking place under the Kh.Battulga regime.

“This is a classic example of a despot trying to convert anti-corruption laws into political weapons to take down his opponents,” says Amsterdam. “But in fact what ends up happening is that the president’s credibility collapses and Mongolia’s country risk shoots through the roof. And now he must deal with the consequences.”

The Ch.Saikhanbileg case is far from an isolated example, says Amsterdam. Mongolia’s Prime Minister Ukhnaa Khürelsükh recently resigned and called for Battulga’s impeachment, citing the use of the anti-corruption authority to jail innocent people. He was joined by the former Justice Minister Khishgee Nyambaatar, who revealed the president had repeatedly pressured him to repeal laws protecting judicial independence.

“With this white paper we are bringing attention to the judicial corruption behind the false charges against the former Prime Minister Ch.Saikhanbileg and others. We are now calling on US members of congress and leadership of relevant federal agencies to take action and respond to the worrying backsliding under President Kh.Battulga,” says Amsterdam.

The full white paper can be downloaded in English and Mongolian at https://saikhanbileg.com. More information about Amsterdam & Partners LLP can be found at https://amsterdamandpartners.com.

Dairy is a staple in the diets of Mongolian people, who rely on the milk from all seven livestock species in their country—cows, sheep, goats, horses, yak, reindeer, and camels. Up until recently, the sale of milk products was not a prominent source of income for local herders—there was almost no local market for dairy products, and their remote locations made it difficult to sell milk to other villages before it spoiled. Raising and selling their livestock for various other purposes, including for meat, wool, and hair, however, is a main livelihood for many Mongolians. The more livestock they sell, the more income they generate.

But these animals need land to graze on, and larger livestock herds means herders have to move further into snow leopard habitat to find enough land to graze them. This leads to livestock outcompeting the snow leopard’s native prey species, which can then result in human-wildlife conflict when snow leopards prey on livestock instead. These events can result in significant financial losses for herders.

But there’s good news. Local communities can play an important role in preventing such conflict and improving their livelihoods while also helping to further snow leopard conservation.

In his home village in Bayan-ulgii province, Serik T. was looking for a way to support and improve the livelihoods of his community. He recognized a particularly undermarketed product: yak milk. After graduating from university, Serik returned to his village where he helped create a small-scale locally run dairy initiative. He was nominated to lead the newly established Jasil Alhap cooperative in his village that now, along with another local cooperative, supports the community’s first two dairy plants.

This project provides another livelihood option for the community and a local place for herders to directly sell their livestock milk. Both the local government and the cooperative invested in the project, contributing around 70 percent of the total cost needed to conduct the pilot (approximately $124,000 USD), and WWF-Mongolia funded the remainder by providing dairy processing equipment and training for dairy plant staff.

In September 2019, the two dairy plants began producing five products, including butter and yogurt, under the brand name “Guyemkhen”, meaning “baby snow leopard.” More than 950 gallons of milk were collected between the two plants in just the first two months production. Today, Guyemkhen is the selected vendor for 43 grocery shops in the village, as well as provincial centers and schools—a significant distribution achievement for small manufacturers.

A group of people wearing blue or pink aprons and hair nets stand in a row smiling at the camera behind a row of metal milk jugs

Members of the cooperative gather for a photo, with Serik on the far right.

This project has provided an alternative way for herders to earn a living beyond their existing livestock husbandry, thus protecting community livelihoods. It also promotes the conservation of snow leopards and their habitat by reducing the need for herders to increase their livestock numbers to make money, and reducing instances of human-wildlife conflict in the process. Now that the herders are able to directly sell the milk through the cooperative, they can keep fewer livestock for income and require less land for grazing. In addition, the project has increased public awareness and positive attitudes around the importance of snow leopard conservation, both within and beyond local communities, through sustainable livelihoods support.

Within the first six months of launch, the Guyemkhen line of dairy was awarded “Best Product” during the autumn fair by the Bayan-Ulgii province government. Both cooperatives donate 10% of their total income to conservation initiatives—particularly those that work to conserve snow leopards and their habitats—in their respective regions. With all this success, they have no plans to slow down and aim to increase the range of products they offer, including traditional curds and bite-sized frozen yogurt, in the future.

Talon Petroleum (TPD) has secured an option to earn a 35 per cent interest in the proposed Gurvantes XXXV Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) in Mongolia.

The company signed the agreement with Telman Resources, which holds a coal bed methane (CBM) prospecting contract over the area of the proposed PSA. Notably, Telman has already completed initial prospecting work to help better understand the site’s potential.

Following the initial work, Telman finalised negotiations with the Mineral Resources and Petroleum Authority of Mongolia on the commercial terms of the PSA, which will now need approval from the Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry and the Cabinet of Mongolia.

Gurvantes XXXV covers an area of 8400 square kilometres, along the Chinese-Mongolian border, in what is considered one of the most prospective basins for CBM globally.

Importantly, the future project is in an ideal place for future gas sales in Mongolia and China.

Talon already has the funds to acquire the interest and has received firm commitments from new and existing institutional and sophisticated investors to raise a minimum $4 million with $1 million accepted in oversubscription.

Once the PSA gets the green tick, work for the interest will include drilling of at least four coreholes.

"Talon is very pleased to be entering into this farm-in transaction with Telmen," Managing Director David Casey said.

"This is one of the best CBM/CSG opportunities I have seen and Gurvantes XXXV represents an exceptional opportunity for the company and its shareholders, with Talon to be at the forefront of what is an exciting emerging CBM industry in Mongolia,"he added.

Talon is up 11.1 per cent on the market this morning and is trading at 0.5 cents per share at 11:24 am AEDT.

I first saw Mongolia from the windows of a train. I was crossing Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Moscow to Beijing. East of the Urals, there are quite a lot of trees. By the fourth day, the Siberian forests had lulled me into a stupor. Slumped in compartment 69A, I had been hypnotised by tree trunks.

And then one morning, I woke to Mongolia. After the claustrophobic forests of Siberia, the steppes were a revelation. The train seemed to ride like a ship on waves of grass. The horizons were boundless. The skies went on forever. In all that space, there was a sudden sense of possibilities. Mongolia looked like some vast vacant lot grown wild on the edge of the world.

At first, from my train, I saw nothing — no towns, no roads, no fields, no fences, no people. Then suddenly I glimpsed a distant cluster of tents, the round white tents of Central Asia, known in Mongolia as gers, which seemed to sprout in these virginal grasslands as mysteriously as mushrooms. And then horsemen, the heirs of Genghis Khan, three of them silhouetted on a skyline as pure as a drawn line, gazing down with disinterest at the train, before wheeling and galloping away into their medieval world.

For anyone with a passing interest in nomads, Mongolia represents the zenith of pastoral culture. Here in the spacious obscurity of the Central Asian steppes, the country survives as one of the last great nomadic domains, a world of tents and migration, of horses and flocks of sheep. For me, it was love at first sight. This was a world where movement and migration were still the central facts of life.

Wish I were there . . .

Perhaps I had been reading too much Bruce Chatwin. I was taken with his ideas about the nomadic imperative, that migrations were Man’s original state, that journeys were the answer to our unease. People with wandering in their genes, Chatwin wrote, understand “that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”. It was a pretty notion, this romance of nomads, this idea of a freewheeling independence, of a life untethered. I conceived a desire to cross Mongolia by horse; here in a land where horses were still more common than vehicles.

It was some years before I got back to Mongolia. I travelled widely in Asia in that time. And curiously, the vacant lot that had stolen my heart loomed large in the history of almost every country I passed through. Few nations had escaped the attentions of the nomadic “barbarians” who inhabited the grassy heart of Asia. China built a wall to try to keep the nomads at bay. Russia still tries to explain itself by pointing to the long centuries under the Tartar yoke. India’s greatest dynasty, the Mughals, traced their roots to nomadic invaders, their very name a corruption of Mongol.

At the start of the 13th century, the unification of several nomadic tribes under Genghis Khan led to the creation of the Mongol Empire, which rapidly expanded until it stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. When it fell, a kind of curious historical silence seemed to descend over Mongolia. The Mongol hordes went home, and we never heard from them again. Mongolia may once have ruled the world, but most of the world would now find it difficult to point to the country on a map with any degree of accuracy.

I felt a sense of proprietorial elation when I finally got back to Mongolia, the country I had only ever seen from a train. I had decided to ride from Olgii in the west to Dadal in the east, over a thousand miles as the crow flies and god know how many miles as I meandered through mountains and valleys. It would take over five months. It may have been an act of carefree innocence, or perhaps just an act of madness. But it proved the very best of journeys, and though two decades have passed since, a week hardly goes by that I do not think of it.

I travelled like the envoys of Genghis Khan, in relays, changing horses and local guides every few days, to ferry me on the next stage of the ride. A baggage horse carried the gear — tents, cooking equipment, food — though most evenings I found myself the guest of nomads in their gers. The present-day Mongol hordes proved to be shy, gentle, hospitable and, occasionally, very drunk shepherds. Either the world’s most feared conquerors have mellowed or history has treated them unfairly. From one end of Mongolia to the other I was welcomed, warmed, and fed by complete strangers who saw nothing remarkable in their own generosity. Some made inquiries about what I was doing and where I was going, and then, realising my motives were beyond comprehension, moved on politely to other subjects.

The glimpses from the train window had not betrayed me. Mongolian landscapes were stunning. Smoothed to elemental simplicities, they seemed to have been sculpted by winds. Undulating hills, soft as felt, rolled away into grassy infinities, traversed by horses and cloud shadows. Mongolia made the sky, with its baroque clouds, seem crowded and fussy. When I arrived at day’s end in a wide valley of encamped gers, it might have been a tableau of the American plains before the arrival of Europeans: white tents, tethered horses, grazing flocks, pillars of camp smoke. The only sounds were those of nomadic domesticity — children’s voices, dogs barking, the bleating of sheep, neighbours calling to one another across the pastures.

There were towns, scattered across the steppes, usually several days ride apart. They were as dismal as they were unexpected. Built by the communist governments that ruled Mongolia until 1990, they tried to offer the promise of urban life to sceptical herdsmen. Unfamiliar with towns, officials seemed to be working to a checklist — a barren central square, where weeds proliferated, a battered looking school, a health clinic, a shuttered sports arena. Mix in potholes, one or two Russian style tenements, remarkable for the broken windows, and the carcasses of several abandoned jeeps, and you have an air of desolation that bordered on apocalyptic. In summer the towns were empty. In winter, the nomads camped close to them to allow their children to attend the school and their wives to have the benefit of the clinic for childbirth.

In Batshireet, a remote town in the east, there was even a library. A plain room of pine planks, it was full of autumn sunlight and Russian classics — Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov. There was an iron stove, a high counter for reading three-month-old newspapers, and always a couple of boys peering in through the windows with cupped hands. English literature was not well represented. The librarian proudly fetched the single example from a top shelf — Stress Factors in Reinforced Concrete Structures.

I became friends with the librarian. He spent his afternoons outside on a bench in the faltering sunshine, reading Turgenev as autumn leaves gathered about his feet. A willowy young man with a soft voice and a delicate manner, it was impossible to fit him into the ruddy life of the steppes, to picture him squatting in a ger over the sheep bones, or to imagine him on a horse. The librarian’s post had offered him some sanctuary from the nomadic world around him. Among the birch trees, he seemed an ethereal figure.

The librarian was bemused by my journey. He did not understand why I should want to visit Mongolia. What was there to see, he said, except landscape.

“Landscape is a great pleasure,” I said. “Particularly in Mongolia.”

“You do not have to travel a thousand miles to understand that the sky is blue everywhere.” He was quoting Goethe. It occurred to me, in that remote place, that I would need to travel a thousand miles to find anyone else who had heard of Goethe.

“I wanted to see nomadic life,” I said simply.

“What is interesting about nomads?” he asked. His questions were polite but pointed.

“Nomads do not feel the need to settle and to put down roots,” I said. “Their only commitment is to movement. The security that settled people find in building — a wall, a field, a storage barn — nomads seek in migration.”

“But their movement is only physical,” the librarian said. He had folded his book into his lap, the long fingers entwined in the pages, marking his place. He looked across towards the river where the trees were showering delicate squalls of leaves onto the grey water. “Nothing changes here. In Mongolia the only real movement is escape.”

I had been long enough in Mongolia to understand that he was right. It is the irony of nomads, people whose lives were wedded to movement, that their world is so static. It is a society without diversity and without ferment, as if a life of migration had exhausted their quota of restlessness. When I talked of those first horsemen, seen from the train, as riding away into their medieval world, it was not a literary fancy. The world described by William of Rubruck, who visited Mongolia in the 13th century, could be the Mongolian steppes today, right down to the traditional layout of the gers. Since my trip Ulan Bator, the capital, has become a modern bustling city, and many former nomads have been drawn there to settle. But out there across thousands of miles of grassy steppes, almost nothing has changed in the past 20 years because almost nothing has changed in seven centuries.

In Asia, the old divide between nomads and sedentary people, between Cain and Abel, is marked by China’s Great Wall. Traditionally the Chinese have dreaded the Mongols. In turn, the Mongols have pitied the Chinese. They are everything the Mongols are not. The Chinese are communal, self-conscious, reserved, deferential. They fear chaos and long for order. Their attachment to settlement is almost religious, wedded as they are to walled cities of methodical symmetries and rice paddies carefully forged over generations. But while the nomadic steppes have created almost nothing, these ordered Chinese cities have bubbled with invention and creativity and change.

But of course I don’t long for China, the way I long for Mongolia. I miss Mongolia as one misses any great love. Robert Frost said that love is like a poem. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. I hope there is some wisdom, but it is the delight that lingers. I miss the landscape unfolding long languorous limbs. I miss the aroma, some mixture of dung fires and mutton fat. I miss the unpredictable moods of each day, the random encounters, figures on horseback. And most of all, I miss the Mongols themselves. They did not own or fence an inch of land but they crossed the open steppes as if it were their private estate. When the pasturage grew low, they struck camp and disappeared into the hills, carrying their world with them, leaving behind only the worn circles of flattened grass where their gers had stood. In a month or so, even those would be gone. I admire that, their insouciant indifference, the way they feel no need to mark their place or their passage.

BY:Stanley Stewart