This image was posted on The Conversation website today. It shows the status of the global spread of the coronovirus identified now as Covid 19 as of 10 February 2020.
This post on The Conversation website sets out the current situation on the global pandemic thus:
In the final weeks of 2019, a virus slipped furtively from animal to human somewhere in the Chinese city of Wuhan. This inauspicious moment marked the sounding of a starting pistol, unheard at first but now echoing deafeningly across the globe. The race to stop a pandemic had begun.
We have been trying to keep up with the novel coronavirus ever since. Each day, we are faced with worrying headlines reporting the latest twists and turns of this outbreak. We have seen the virus spill over China’s borders and spread to at least 25 countries worldwide, and watched with mounting anxiety as the number of cases creeps ever higher. We wait apprehensively to see where the virus shows up next.
At the time of writing, there have been 43,036 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus and the death toll stands at 1,018. Both of these numbers will be out of date by the time you read this.
In isolation, the daily headlines can be difficult to interpret, offering a static snapshot of a moving target. It is hard, for instance, to tell if the situation is getting better or worse, and to what extent control efforts are having any effect.
To provide a clearer picture of this evolving story, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, we have developed a new outbreak mapping tool.
The site is updated daily based on figures published by the World Health Organization (WHO). While other live trackers developed by Johns Hopkins University and the WHO are updated more frequently, our tool enables users to wind back the clock and view the global situation on any given day of the coronavirus outbreak. It also enables the unfolding situation to be compared with other recent outbreaks, including the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in 2003 (also caused by a coronavirus), the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Frontiers are NOT barriers. When it comes to national borders, frontiers . . .
. . . and geographical boundaries, they do NOT function as barriers, either to a global pandemic or the environmental impact of billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, past and present!
Our planet is an integral and total system . . .
On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency's EPIC camera on NOAA's DSCOVR satellite. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit at Lagrange point 1, approximately 1 million miles from Earth, where it is balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun.
EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.
The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, is to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.
Life. It's the one thing that, so far, makes Earth unique among the thousands of other planets we've discovered. Since the fall of 1997, NASA satellites have continuously and globally observed all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.
Boundaries and the LODE and Re:LODE projects
For the LODE and Re:LODE project, boundaries were a key concept in establishing locations along the LODE Zone Line.
Geographic, political, language and cultural borders and boundaries were identified in the LODE project of 1992 as locations for the creation of the LODE cargo.
This YouTube video documents the physical geographic boundaries where cargo was assembled along the LODE Zone Line.
This video is part of the Re:LODE Radio Project that identifies a number
of shoreline location along the LODE Zone Line along a "great circle"
that links the maritime cities of Hull and Liverpool. The animated
imagery shows the zone along this "great circle" The video imagery
includes unedited Super 8 clips of the shoreline locations where the
LODE cargo of questions was created in 1992.
The sequence begins with
Friedrichskoog in Germany, and is followed by Puri in India: Glodok in
Java; Pangandaran in Java; Port Hedland in Western Australia; Port
Adelaide in South Australia; Port Melbourne and Port Albert in Victoria,
Australia; Buenaventura and Santa Marta in Colombia; Slea Head, Dingle
and Wicklow in Eire.
The physical geographic boundaries between land and sea are zones where human social realities are to be found in these places, including cities, ports and smaller harbour based communities. And these places have gained their present and past reason for existence by virtue of their location upon such boundaries.
This is human geography!
The LODE and Re:LODE art projects of 1992 and 2017
point to the way increases in productive power presses upon populations,
and the way that capitalism, as a system, is the key stumbling block to taking
effective action against global heating.
This edge of land and sea has contributed to a myriad of cultural forms, as in Antony Gormley's Another Place, Crosby, Merseyside.
The cities, ports and communities, and their hinterlands, along the LODE Zone Line do not contribute to barriers of any kind. Quite the reverse. These places are nodal points in systems of communication, transportation and exchange in a globalised setting. As Rudyard Kipling said:
"transportation is civilization"
The LODE project of 1992 included an information reference base revealing some of the consequences of the globalisation of a capitalist system where increases in productive power result in social loss and private profit.
The objective, but invisible forces at work in an economic system, a capitalistic system, not only impact upon populations in myriad, but generalized ways, but also on the condition of the entire global biosphere . . .
. . . and neither physical geographic boundaries, or national frontiers function as barriers to either capitalism or climate change.
The
conduits for the transmission of the coronavirus Covid 19 are between
the nodes of commerce, the centres of the globalised capitalist system.
These conduits overleap all boundaries. Capitalism functions through the
expansion of frontiers!
Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak today include:
Markets fall sharply on global recession fears as crisis intensifies
The UK’s index of top blue-chip shares slumped by 8.5%, falling more than 500 points to below 6000, as trading got under way. Oil giants led the rout, with BP down 27% and Royal Dutch Shell losing 20%. The German and French stock exchanges also both fell by over 5% on opening.
The numbers of new deaths and infections continued to fall in China
The country reported 22 new deaths, the lowest new cases on record. There were 40 new cases nationwide, with most in Hubei.
Italy was plunged into chaos
Fatalities increased more than 50% to 366 and government plans to lockdown large parts of the country’s north, or about 25% of the population, were leaked to the media on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia cordoned off the oil-rich, predominantly Shia region of Qatif
The country suspended air and sea travel to nine countries and closed schools and universities as the number of cases in the kingdom continued to increase.
California is preparing to receive the Grand Princess cruise ship
There are 21 confirmed cases on board. Governor Gavin Newsom and the mayor of Oakland sought on Sunday to reassure the public that none of the passengers from a ship carrying people with the virus will be released into the public before undergoing a 14-day quarantine.
Organisers said there was ‘no chance’ the Australian Grand Prix would be called off
The pledge came despite rising concerns about the event’s large crowds facilitating the spread of the disease. The race is set to kick off the Formula One season in Melbourne on Sunday.
Business as usual?
The impact and ongoing threat of Covid 19 are global, but responses to the crisis are national . . .
Given the scale and nature of this crisis governments are taking extreme measures, but not quickly enough, and nation by nation rather than taking an international approach. Part of the reason these national responses have been slowly ramped up, especially in Europe and North America, is because the centre right, and right wing political classes in government have an ideological aversion to maintaining capacity in the state to respond to crises. They prefer a "just in time" minimal capacity model, that is highly functional in maximizing profit.
Addressing criticism that the NHS is unprepared for the extra costs and resources needed to combat the next potential virus, Sunak promised to boost a planned £34bn increase in NHS spending to more than £40bn.
Sunak said the government would invest in “world-class infrastructure” at a cost of £175bn over the next five years.
The chancellor claimed the OBR had calculated that this extra spending on roads, rail, hospitals and digital infrastructure would increase Britain’s long-term productivity by 2.5% and add 0.5% a year to GDP growth.
Yes! But! It is about infrastructure supporting business productivity. Investing in the globalized supply chain still comes before tackling the health crisis and ongoing climate emergency.
This budget takes infrastructure planning forward in a context where the government has been found to have acted illegally in allowing plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport to go ahead.
For the first time judges have said that plans for a major infrastructure project are illegal because they breach the UK's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle the climate crisis. This is a groundbreaking legal decision that could effect future infrastructure developments and puts the UK’s commitment to cut emission to net zero by 2050 at the forefront of future policymaking.
A fresh legal challenge to HS2 has been launched by the naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham, arguing that the UK government’s decision to approve the high-speed rail network failed to take account of its carbon emissions and climate impact.
Packham and the law firm Leigh Day said the Oakervee review, whose advice to proceed with HS2 in full was followed by Boris Johnson last month, was “compromised, incomplete and flawed”.
The crowdfunded legal challenge comes in the wake of a court of appeal ruling on Heathrow, which declared that the government’s planning statement allowing a third runway at the London airport was unlawful for not referencing the Paris climate agreement.
Big brother . . .
China, with its big state, has nevertheless adopted similar business models, but has the capacity for mobilizing resources, and control mechanisms, to address the challenge of the recent coronavirus epidemic. This has included the increasing use of surveillance technology.
To this extent it is "business as usual" across the planet . . .
In the United States Donald Trump will need the media he despises to fight coronavirus according to Emily Bell in her opinion piece for the Guardian (Sun 8 Mar 2020):
In his first Covid-19 press conference last month, Trump rambled around the subject, suggesting the infection was like the flu, that the administration was doing “an incredible job” and that one day the virus “was going to disappear”. A week later, 11 people were dead, a hundred more cases confirmed, more than 2,700 people were quarantined in New York and entire school districts in the Pacific north-west had been closed, at least in part because of the government’s unpreparedness.
The trail of incompetence includes a lack of testing at ports of entry, a bungled quarantine operation for infected cruise passengers, a shortage of testing kits, and an epidemic task force that had been assembled by Barack Obama’s government only to be disbanded and fired by Trump.
The national US press now has a duty to deliver consistent, accurate information, in a fractured media landscape, to many different audiences – and where it matters most, at the local level, on limited resources. What threatens to be an “infodemic” of incorrect or partial information, hoaxes and panic-inducing coverage adds to the burden of responsible reporters in both correcting and quashing the mass of misconceptions.
Epidemiologists traditionally relied on news reporting to help identify and model how cases spread during epidemics, and for the most part this means local news. News organisations such as the Seattle Times dropped their paywall and went into overdrive reporting on the centre of the west coast outbreak; but for other communities where there are fewer or no local reporting organisations, relaying timely and detailed messages will be more challenging.
Coronavirus is not a political issue in itself, but the handling and messaging of the disease very much is.
David Smith in Washington in a Guardian Analysis report (Tue 10 March 2020) reveals the depth of denial and incompetence of a US government administration under Donald Trump. He writes:
It has killed thousands, sown widespread fear and disruption and caused the worst day for Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis. One man, however, is not panicking about the coronavirus. Donald Trump just spent two successive days on the golf course.
Even for a US president who has made a habit of denialism – from global heating to the size of Barack Obama’s inauguration crowd – the current crisis is raising the bar. One headline on Monday described it as “Trump’s Chernobyl”, a reference to the Soviet nuclear disaster that authorities could not censor away.
The commander-in-chief’s past attempts to bend reality to his will have often been met with derision or mirth. But this time it is hardly an exaggeration to say thousands of lives are at stake. The international crisis that many feared would test his norm-busting presidency has arrived.
“Denial, accusation, distraction, lies – these are his four principal responses to any rival,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. “Only this time it’s not a person. When you think of that model, it doesn’t work with germs. A tweet doesn’t knock over a potential global pandemic.”
And it doesn't work to keep denying the fact that the continued emission of billions of tons of greenhouse gases will cause a global catastrophe. That is unless they are reduced significantly in the next twelve years.
David Smith continues:
At a Fox News town hall last week, Trump was reminded that he is a “self-proclaimed germaphobe”. Blair added: “He’s been quite the germaphobe for many decades. One time I interviewed him he said: ‘You’re lucky I shook your hand.’ In the election campaign and Oval Office, it was hard for him to not shake hands but we can be sure there was a bottle of Purell nearby.”
Trump has contradicted experts to downplay the coronavirus threat, perhaps not least because it could hurt him in a presidential election year. He has inaccurately claimed that a vaccine will be available soon, that anyone who wants a test can get one and that the virus will be killed off by the spring weather. “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat – as the heat comes in,” he said last month. “Typically, that will go away in April.”
And despite years of warnings from scientists that a pandemic would come someday, Trump has reduced the the White House national security staff and cut jobs addressing global pandemics. He has sought to portray the coronavirus as a bolt from the blue. “Who would have thought?” he asked during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. “Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?’”
When reality does not fit, Trump tries to find a workaround. Visiting the CDC while wearing a red “Keep America Great” cap, he suggested he would prefer that people exposed to the virus on a cruise ship be left aboard so they would not inflate the national total. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault ... I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”
The blasé president spent the weekend playing golf in Florida, then began Monday fundraising for his re-election before making a fleeting appearance at a White House briefing. On Twitter, he continued to deny the impact of the virus on tumbling stocks: “Saudi Arabia and Russia are arguing over the price and flow of oil. That, and the Fake News, is the reason for the market drop!”
He also continued to express “nothing to see here” views out of step with the public mood. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” he wrote. “It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
Trump has also accused Democrats of seeking to exploit the virus for political gain. Such comments have caused dismay among public health officials. Critics say the president is clearly out of his depth.
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, said: “When Trump is confronted with something that doesn’t follow him on Twitter, that doesn’t watch him on Fox News and doesn’t come to his rallies, he’s lost.
“Trump is a day trader. He runs out every morning and throws whatever he’s got in his head against the wall. It does not do the country a service when he is strongly inclined to believe his own bullshit.”
Wilson, who has experience in crisis management, described the president’s response so far as “the usual Trumpian irresponsibility and mendacity in one package”. He added: “Presidents get judged not on the easy stuff but the hard stuff. He’s going to have people judging him on how he’s handled this. He has not inspired confidence.”
Trump previously appeared blasé and uncaring when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. He memorably tossed paper towels into a crowd. But the coronavirus is on another scale altogether.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Trump has had a history of defying political conventions but the game is up. He has made a colossal mistake with how he’s handling the coronavirus. He has put himself front and centre.
“He has belittled experts, his administration has not made adequate preparations and he undermined existing precautions and steps that had been taken for just this emergency. His fingerprints are all over this.”
Jacobs added: “Trump appears disconnected from reality. While every American is thinking about precautions and wondering about keeping their children home from school, Trump, by underplaying what’s going on, is detached from the reality that middle America is struggling with.”
Investors are expected to rush to safehaven assets this week after reports of further deaths across the world related to the coronavirus and Italy’s move to quarantine a large part of the country.
Gold and US treasury bonds were expected to rise in value while stock markets were poised to tumble as investors seek a safe place to put funds amid concern about a global recession.
Stock markets fell sharply on Friday with the FTSE 100 plunging 3.5%, down 234 points to 6,471, its lowest point since immediately after the EU referendum in June 2016. US stocks staged a late rally before the weekend, but the S&P 500 index still fell 1.7%.
The Vix index, which measures share market volatility and is known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, closed at 42, a nine-year high.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said last week that a severe outbreak of the Covid-19 virus could cut global growth by half, to 1.5%.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank said they were setting aside billions for developing countries, to support health systems and offset the impact of falling commodity prices.
Washington DC-based bank grants funds to redraft south American state’s oil laws by lawyers linked to oil giant
So runs the story under this headline and subheading by Jasper Jolly for the Guardian (Sun 8 March 2020):
The World Bank is to pay for Guyana’s oil laws to be rewritten by a legal firm that has regularly worked for ExxonMobil, just as the US producer prepares to extract as much as 8bn barrels of oil off the country’s coast.
The World Bank has pledged not to fund fossil fuel extraction directly, but it is giving Guyana millions of dollars to develop governance in its burgeoning oil sector, as the south American country prepares for an oil rush led by ExxonMobil and its partners.
Guyana’s government was in charge of hiring US law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth to revise its Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act, the environment and rights campaign group Urgewald found.
The World Bank reviewed the procurement and found no problems with the process. The Washington-based bank will fund the work with a grant worth $1.96m (£1.5m)
Hunton Andrews Kurth has acted for ExxonMobil for 40 years, including multiple cases involved in climate impacts, such as an action by native Americans in the Alaskan village of Kivalina who argued that the climate crisis was threatening their way of life.
“The World Bank claims to be striving for ‘good governance’ in revising Guyana’s legal framework for oil development,” said Heike Mainhardt, senior advisor on multilateral financial institutions at Urgewald. “However, they are hiring the law firm who counts among their major clients ExxonMobil – the company leading the oilfield development in Guyana.
“This is ‘good governance’ for the oil companies, not for the people of Guyana or the global climate. The World Bank is causing a conflict of interest, in effect undermining good governance.”
The World Bank has already faced criticism over its involvement in the oil sector. It garnered praise from environmental campaign groups in 2017 when it pledged to stop investment in “upstream oil and gas”. However, the Guardian previously reported it had earmarked $55m to improve governance in the oil and gas sector in Guyana.
ExxonMobil, based in Irving, Texas, announced in December it had started production off Guyana’s coast, less than five years after oil was first discovered there. At the end of January, ExxonMobil increased its estimates of the size of the discovery to 8bn barrels of oil equivalent. That made it one of the world’s biggest finds in recent years and a key part of ExxonMobil’s plans to extract more fossil fuels, even as other oil producers look at reducing their environmental impacts.
It's business as usual . . .
For those nations where governments of the right have stripped away the capacity of the state and healthcare systems to meet the challenge of a global pandemic, and struggling to cope, will mean national governments requirement to address the climate crisis is less likely to happen.
Acting across national boundaries, in a pan-national, international and cooperative way is the only means available to tackle both the pandemic and the climate crisis!
Here are some excerpts from this briefing that are particularly relevant to this post:
Will the green deal make a difference? It needs to. Europe has cut emissions by roughly one quarter since 1990 – good but nowhere near enough to put the bloc on track to net zero by mid-century. Current measures will not suffice for that – disruptive change is required, which is why the green deal targets are key.
Why does the green deal matter internationally? This year – coronavirus permitting – will see the most important international climate meeting since the landmark Paris agreement was signed in 2015. Then, all of the world’s functioning states signed up to hold global temperature rises to no more than 2C, and preferably to below 1.5C, beyond which the ravages of climate breakdown become catastrophic and irreversible.
But the national pledges made at Paris on curbing greenhouse gases fell short of what is required to stay below 2C, and since 2015 the world’s carbon output has risen by 4%. At the Cop26 climate talks, to be held in Glasgow this November, nations are supposed to come up with tougher targets for 2030, and preferably also with goals for reaching net zero emissions by mid-century, or soon after.
But enthusiasm has ebbed since Paris, from Donald Trump’s US, to Brazil, India and big oil producers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
The key player will be China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and second biggest economy. At Paris, a pact between the US and China was the core of the deal. This time, the EU must bring China to the table alone.
“EU climate leadership [in the form of] the green deal is crucial to putting pressure on China and other major emitters to make more ambitious climate commitments,” says Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House, who has attended more than a dozen climate negotiations since the 1990s. “In the face of Trump’s climate nihilism, only the EU can show that the world’s largest economy can decarbonise while continuing to provide a high standard of living for its 500 million people.”
What do critics say? The EU will face a backlash from its citizens, fuelled by populist politicians, for persisting with green policies, predicts Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform thinktank.
He points to the gilets jaunes protests in France, which took off after rises in fuel taxes intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and the rise of the AFD in Germany. “The AFD is fuelled partly by climate scepticism. Populists are keen to promote anti-greenery, as they listen to voters,” he says.
“The green agenda will meet more and more opposition as voters start to realise it will make them poorer and affect their lifestyles, and they will worry about Europe becoming less competitive than, say, India and China, which won’t be going carbon-neutral,” says Grant. “This will increase the electoral strength of populists.”
Some leftwing campaigners have also attacked the plans. Taking issue with the “just transition” mechanism, Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, wrote in the Guardian: “Will there be justice for the communities across Germany and France that have been asked to shoulder the costs of the climate transition? Does it speak to the swathes of Greek or Portuguese people who cannot afford to care about carbon emissions in 2050, preoccupied as they are with making ends meet this week? The stark answer is no.”
Who’s in favour, who’s against? It’s a bit like world peace: everyone backs the European Green Deal, in theory. But there is a big hole in the ambition to be net-zero by 2050: Poland, which says it will reach climate neutrality at “its own pace”.
And beneath the surface, tensions over Europe’s green ambitions are not hard to find. At least eight countries, including Spain, Sweden and Latvia, want the EU to increase its 2030 emissions reduction target. Poland and Hungary think that is too much. Divisions will also come when hard choices have to be made: from closing coal mines, demanding more from farmers, to tougher emissions standards for the car industry.
What role will the European parliament play in the green deal? EU governments agree environmental laws with the European parliament. That gives MEPs a weighty role across a swathe of new laws expected to flow from the European Green Deal: a revision of the EU’s heavily criticised carbon trading scheme, new performance standards for cars and vans, an overhaul of farm policy, changes to EU rules on state subsidies that will phase out support for fossil fuels.
Typically, the parliament tends to raise the bar on green action – it last year declared a climate emergency. But MEPs often lose the battle against EU ministers, who usually get the upper hand in EU negotiations.
"At the climate conference in Glasgow, Britain can build coalitions that would lead to cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels"
The author of this opinion piece Mike Mason is a fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. This piece was written in collaboration with Cameron Hepburn, director of the Smith School, and Chris Llewellyn Smith, of the department of physics:
The good news is that there are now real grounds for optimism that we can slow and ultimately stop greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable energy currently outcompetes fossil fuels in many areas and continues to become cheaper every year. New energy storage options, ranging from cheaper batteries to green ammonia, are emerging. New ways to produce proteins at scale without destroying rainforests are being developed.
When these solutions become so good, and so cheap, that they routinely outcompete their fossil fuel and biodiversity-destroying counterparts, greenhouse gas emissions will decline to near zero. Getting there, though, needs some serious focus on green technologies supported by policies that will get them rolled out.
A research group in Oxford, led by my co-authors and myself has been identifying groups of “unicorn” technologies, named by analogy with “unicorn” startups valued at over $1bn, that can each deliver a reduction of at least a billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Unicorns don’t depend on fundamental new discoveries so should be ready for large-scale deployment within a decade. With a moderate investment in research and development or other support, they could in combination unlock multiple benefits across whole “energy ecosystems”.
One example of such an ecosystem centres on converting cheap renewable energy – either from sunny places with few people, or spare wind from the North Sea – into hydrogen and ammonia, to provide zero-carbon fuel for shipping, heavy goods vehicles and even potentially aviation. They could provide the energy storage needed to complement variable wind and solar energy, process heat for industry, and turn iron ore into steel. The technologies that would unlock this ecosystem are the next generation of high-efficiency solar cells, low-cost electrolysers, and hydrogen and ammonia fuel cells and engines. All are proven technologies that simply need to be cheaper – further development could rapidly unlock a virtuous circle of falling costs and increased deployment.
Another example is exceptionally water-efficient plants that can grow in semi-arid areas or on degraded land – prickly pear, pineapples and euphorbias are examples. Such plants could sequester carbon in soil on a large scale, and be fermented to proteins in place of soya beans, whose growth causes widespread deforestation and huge greenhouse gas emissions; they could even be used to make plastics. The unicorn technologies in this case include learning how to grow plants that we have historically ignored, along with precision separation and fermentation of the biomass.
Getting a bold, unanimous agreement to ratchet up global ambition to act on climate at Cop26 will be very hard at this stage of the game, with the usual cabal of petro-states and coal producers doing their utmost to dilute any decisions of consequence. However, an approach focused around “coalitions of the willing” in the bottom-up spirit of the Paris climate agreement, could enable substantial progress without being stymied by vested interests.
Each of these coalitions, built from nation states but also regions and even corporates, could focus on one or more of the unicorns. They would support research and development, advance demonstrators, or provide lower-cost finance or performance guarantees to encourage rollout and help the technologies become cheaper. They would allow least-developed and developed nations to share ambitions and interests in technologies where they have comparative advantages, such as solar resources, land or skills. Management and licensing of intellectual property could encourage coalitions to form and accelerate technology deployment.
The formation of these coalitions could be seen as evolution of an earlier UK initiative called Mission Innovation. It targeted sectors or problems, rather than – as we are proposing – selected technology areas that underwrite whole energy ecosystems, which we believe would be a very much more productive approach.
This should not be seen as “picking winners”, but rather as “picking runners”. Funders should be prepared to see failures as well as successes.
As co-chair with Italy of Cop26, the UK has an excellent opportunity to build coalitions that would lead to cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels. The UK is home to several companies and world experts in both the “hydrammonia” economy and semi-arid plants, and British businesses could be leading players in these two examples of ecosystems.
In parallel with preparing for Cop26, the government should also change the UK’s broad approach. Neither academia nor industry on their own has the principal objective of solving the climate crisis. They have neither skills nor funding to develop technologies that are (nearly) out of the laboratory, build demonstrators when necessary, and create the technical and financial conditions needed to enable large-scale rollout. We believe the UK needs something like the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, created in the US, which “advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment”.
By fostering coalitions of the willing, which would focus on clusters of unicorn technologies, the UK could make a major contribution to solving the climate crisis. Cop26 could indeed be a turning point – but it cannot simply be more of the same.
Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent for the Guardian writes (Thu 13 Feb 2020):
Alok Sharma, the former international development secretary, is the surprise choice to take on the role of president of the crunch UN climate talks to be hosted by the UK this November. He has also been made business secretary as part of Boris Johnson’s cabinet reshuffle.
Sharma has a mixed record on voting on green issues in parliament. The Guardian’s Polluters project scored MPs on how they swung on a range of key votes. Sharma scored only 15%, a poor showing, as he was present for 13 votes affecting climate and environmental issues, but voted positively on only two of them.
Since 2010 he has been MP for Reading West, to the west of London and just over 20 miles from Heathrow, and he has both opposed and publicly favoured Heathrow expansion.
TheyWorkForYou, which rates MPs on their voting records, found he “generally voted against measures to prevent climate change”.
In the record of MPs’ interests, he has received a donation of £15,000 from Offshore Group Newcastle, which makes platforms for oil, gas and wind energy companies.
However, he has used his role at DfID to promote action on the climate crisis, by assisting developing countries to improve their resilience to the impacts of extreme weather, and tackling issues such as deforestation and clean energy. Last October, he urged the World Bank to focus more of its funding on the climate crisis.
Mohamed Adow, director of energy and climate at thinktank Power Shift Africa, said: “It’s a relief to finally have a Cop president in post. But now the hard work must start. For such a crucial summit it’s worrying that Alok Sharma takes up the reins with only nine months to go. He will need all the resources of government and the diplomatic service to ensure the UK Cop is not a failure.
“This is the UK’s first real test post-Brexit and so far Britain has not looked like a serious player on the global stage. The eyes of the world are watching and the UK’s Commonwealth allies in Africa and around the world will be demanding an outcome that sees those of us on the front lines of the climate crisis protected.”
Sharma will be expected to combine the Cop26 role with the job of business secretary, one of the key roles in cabinet, especially as the government wrestles with Brexit. Rachel Kennerley, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, asked whether they were compatible. “Can Alok Sharma serve as both business secretary and president of the UK’s biggest global climate summit? The presidency isn’t like a student picking up a few extra bar shifts, it’s about leading the world’s climate ambition during a crucial time for the environment,” she told the Guardian. “We cannot afford a part-time president.”
Kat Kramer, global climate lead at the charity Christian Aid, said Sharma faced a “grave and delicate” task but could take advantage of his business secretary role to ensure the UK presented itself as a credible leader in the climate fight, through a national plan of action for reaching net zero emissions.
She said: “It would have been a big task had Alok Sharma been in post from the beginning, rather than coming in late in the process. It’s now vital [he] work very closely with the backing of the prime minister to both get other countries to commit to new pledges to tackle the climate crisis but also put the UK’s own house in order and enact policies to accelerate UK decarbonisation. As secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, Sharma will be well placed to oversee this.”
Several ministers had been mooted for the role, including Michael Gove, who told a conference on Tuesday there were “many, many, many, many” people who would do better as Cop26 president, such as Zac Goldsmith and Kwasi Kwarteng, the clean energy minister.
Gove hesitated when asked what would make the summit a success, before answering that success would be for countries to “accept the need to change and that leads to irreversible, accelerating and inclusive action” on the climate crisis.
That falls well short of requiring governments to come forward with concrete new plans on cutting carbon in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement, which is what activists and supportive countries such as the EU are hoping for.
The job was turned down by former prime minister Cameron, who is said to have been too busy, and former foreign secretary Hague, who is believed to have had concerns about the role. Their reluctance suggests a perceived low standing for the role, which will not help the new incumbent.
Previous Cop summits have tended to be led by the host government’s most prominent minister with a relevant portfolio, usually the environment minister.
France signalled its determination to forge a new global agreement in Paris by appointing Laurent Fabius, then foreign secretary, who led a tireless round of visits to foreign capitals in his military jet, while also getting other major figures such as Ségolène Royal closely involved in the intensive diplomacy. The then French president, François Hollande, also played a leading role.
If Cop26 is to be a success – and so far the government has promised success but set a low bar for what that might look like – then Sharma will need to be able to call on the international firepower of the whole government, and Johnson will have to shake up every major department to come forward with domestic plans to prove the UK is on the road to net zero.
"For What It's Worth (Stop, Hey What's That Sound)" (often referred to as simply "For What It's Worth") is a song written by Stephen Stills. Performed by Buffalo Springfield, it was recorded on December 5, 1966; released as a single on Atco Records on December 23, 1966; and peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the spring of 1967.
It was later added to the March 1967 second pressing of their first album, Buffalo Springfield. The title was added after the song was written, and does not appear in the lyrics.
Although "For What It's Worth" is often considered an anti-war song, Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in November 1966—a series of early counterculture-era clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California, beginning in mid-1966, the same year Buffalo Springfield had become the house band at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip.
Local residents and businesses had become annoyed by how crowds of young people going to clubs and music venues along the Strip had caused late-night traffic congestion. In response, they lobbied the city to pass local ordinances stopping loitering, and enforced a strict curfew on the Strip after 10 p.m. The young music fans, however, felt the new laws infringed upon their civil rights.
On Saturday, November 12, 1966, fliers were distributed on the Sunset Strip inviting people to join demonstrations later that day. Several of Los Angeles' rock radio stations also announced a rally outside the Pandora's Box club on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. That evening, as many as 1,000 young demonstrators, including future celebrities such as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda (who was handcuffed by police) gathered to protest against the curfew's enforcement. Although the rallies began peacefully, trouble eventually broke out. The unrest continued the next night, and periodically throughout the rest of November and December, forcing some clubs to shut down within weeks. It was against the background of these civil disturbances that Stills recorded "For What It's Worth" on December 5, 1966.
Stills said in an interview that the name of the song came about when he presented it to the record company executive Ahmet Ertegun (who signed Buffalo Springfield to the Atlantic Records-owned ATCO label). Stills said: "I have this song here, for what it's worth, if you want it." Another producer, Charlie Greene, claims that Stills first said the above line to him, but credits Ahmet Ertegun with giving the single the parenthetical subtitle "Stop, Hey What's That Sound" in order that the song would be more easily recognized.
"For What It's Worth" quickly became a well-known protest song. In 2006, when interviewed on Tom Kent's radio show Into the '70s, Stills pointed out that many people think the song is about the Kent State shootings of 1970, even though its release predates that event by over three years. Neil Young—Stills' bandmate in both Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY)—would later write "Ohio" in response to the events at Kent State.
An all-star version of "For What It's Worth" with Tom Petty and 'Crosby, Stills and Nash', was played at Buffalo Springfield's induction by Petty to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997
Civil rights . . .
The selection of this track by Buffalo Springfield is a reminder that the freedom to protest is often curtailed by political and/or cultural interests, or as a result of unavoidable circumstances.
In the current coronavirus emergency large scale demonstrations, as for instance Extinction Rebellion's demonstrations, or the gathering in Bristol that came to hear Greta Thunberg speak at the event organised by young School Strike for Climate activists, are no longer possible until the pandemic has passed.
Unlike the late 1960's in Los Angeles, California, activists have access to the internet and social media platforms.
Perhaps it is in the context of the information environment that national governments are held accountable to the inhabitants of planet Earth?
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