It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, April 17, 2021
UK University study into the impact the pandemic has had on nurses
For over a year, Covid-19 has placed significant pressure on the NHS.
And now a team from an Aberdeen university are going to explore the experiences of nurses working in hospitals during the pandemic.
Nurses make up more than 40% of the NHS workforce and are likely to require support to help avoid burnout, so the Robert Gordon University will look at their support systems.
Led by senior research fellow and medical sociologist Dr Aileen Grant, the team will examine the impact the pandemic has had on their wellbeing.
Dr Grant, from the nursing and midwifery school, said: “Our NHS has battled the pandemic for a prolonged period and under extraordinary circumstances. While its staff continue their heroic efforts to ensure patient care, the pandemic has heightened shortages where nurses not only have to respond expediently to changes in delivery but to accommodate for absences caused by the disease, having to self-isolate, shield, or from stress.
“Nurses working in hospitals have very much been in the frontline of the traumas caused by the pandemic and little is known about the effectiveness of measures taken to help them cope.”
The study will focus on those working the acute sector of NHS Grampian.
Messages of support for medical staff were beamed on to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary buildings earlier this year by Grampian Hospital Arts Trust
Fit for purpose support
Dr Grant hopes the research will ensure that support being provided to nurses is fit for purpose. It will also help to retain experienced registered nurses, new graduates and students helping to avoid staff shortages.
The research team also includes RGU’s Professor Catriona Kennedy, Dr Nicola Torrance, Dr Flora Douglas, Professor Angela Kydd, Dr Neil Johnson and Dr Rosaleen O’Brien.
Nurses participating in the study are required to complete a short questionnaire. They can take part in an online interview if they are interested in sharing more with the research team.
For more
Public trust in the CDC falls during coronavirus pandemic
Public trust in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen during the coronavirus pandemic, with the decline bringing overall population-level trust in the agency to the same lower level of trust long held by Black Americans about the agency, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Surveys done among a representative group of Americans in May and October of 2020 show about a 10% decline in trust of the CDC over that period.
In contrast, the same research found that public trust in the U.S. Postal Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency increased significantly over the period, despite those agencies facing their own challenges.
"The Biden administration will have an uphill battle in rehabilitating trust in the CDC at this critical junction in the coronavirus pandemic," said Michael Pollard, lead author of the study and a senior social scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "A key challenge in the months ahead will be to identify who will be viewed as trusted messengers regarding vaccines and public health policies."
The study found that non-Hispanic white and Hispanic respondents reported significant declines in trust in the CDC, while the changes were not statistically significant for non-Hispanic Black or "other race" respondents.
"There is remarkable consistency and convergence in reported levels of trust in the CDC across these subgroups after the declines," Pollard said. "Lack of trust among Black Americans has been a well-publicized concern regarding the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, and the convergence in lower levels of trust across race/ethnicity highlights a key challenge that the CDC now faces."
Black Americans have historically held a low level of trust in the CDC and other health institutions, widely seen as a legacy of past racism in the nation's health system.
RAND researchers surveyed a representative sample of more than 2,000 Americans in May 2020, asking to rate their trust of the CDC, the USPS and FEMA on a scale of 0 to 10. Most of the participants were surveyed again in October 2020. All participants were part of the RAND American Life Panel, a nationally representative internet panel.
The survey found that trust in the CDC fell from 7.6 in May to 7 in October. Meanwhile, trust in the Postal Service rose from 6.9 in May to 7.7 in October; trust in FEMA rose from 6.4 in May to 6.7 in October.
Drop in trust of the CDC was particularly significant among people who intended to vote for a candidate other than Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election or did not intend to vote at all, suggesting that views of the CDC are now strongly politicized. Similar politicization was not observed for FEMA or the USPS.
"The public trust in federal government agencies has never been as important as during the current COVID-19 pandemic, yet public suspicions of scientific experts and distrust of government institutions are increasing for a variety of reasons," said Lois Davis, co-author of the report and a senior policy researcher at RAND. "Reasons for this include a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, and access to more sources of conflicting information."
Researchers say one strategy that may help the CDC rebuild trust and depoliticize the public's views of the agency is to ensure that the public understands the scientific rationale for policy changes and guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The report, "Decline in Trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic," is available at http://www.rand.org.
RAND Health Care promotes healthier societies by improving health care systems in the United States and other countries.
The RAND Social and Economic Well-Being division seeks to actively improve the health, social and economic well-being of populations and communities throughout the world.
Bizarre neck bones helped pterosaurs support their giraffe-size necks and huge heads
"It is unlike anything seen previously in a vertebra of any animal."
An illustration of the giant pterosaur, Alanqa saharica, whose remains were found in Morocco. (Image credit: Davide Bonadonna)
During the dinosaur age, azhdarchid pterosaurs — soaring reptiles that could grow as large as airplanes — supported their absurdly long necks and large heads during flight thanks to a never-before-seen internal bone structure in their neck vertebrae, a new study finds.
This unique structure, which looks like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, allowed the largest pterosaurs such as Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which had a wingspan of more than 30 feet (10 meters), to fly with necks that were longer than a giraffe's neck, the researchers found.
"One of our most important findings is the arrangement of cross-struts within the vertebral centrum [the inner wall of the vertebrae]," study co-researcher Dave Martill, a professor of paleobiology of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "It is unlike anything seen previously in a vertebra of any animal."
The team found that in pterosaurs in the family Azhdarchidae, these rod-like structures connected the interior walls of the largely hollow neck vertebrae. These slender rods had an average diameter of 0.04 inches (1.16 millimeters), and they were "helically arranged along the length of the vertebra," Martill said. "Evolution shaped these creatures into awesome, breathtakingly efficient flyers."
Evolution shaped these creatures into awesome, breathtakingly efficient flyers.Dave Martill, professor of paleobiology
Pterosaurs aren't dinosaurs, but lived alongside them after emerging during the late Triassic period, about 225 million years ago, until they vanished from the fossil record at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65.5 million years ago.
Until now, researchers suspected that a pterosaur's neck bones had only a simple tube-within-a-tube structure, Martill said. But this proposed structure likely wouldn't have provided the long neck enough support for the pterosaur's head — which could be longer than 5 feet (1.5 m) — especially when it grabbed and carried heavy prey through the air while hunting.
"These animals have ridiculously long necks," study first author Cariad Williams, who majored in paleontology at the University of Portsmouth and is now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in the statement. In some pterosaur species, the fifth neck vertebra from the head is as long as the rest of the animal's body.
"We wanted to know a bit about how this incredibly long neck functioned, as it seems to have very little mobility between each vertebra," Williams said.
To investigate, they did X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans of a well-preserved Cretaceous-age pterosaur specimen (Alanqa saharica) discovered in Morocco. The results showed the helically arranged supportive spider web-like lines crisscrossing the insides of the neck vertebrae.
Load-bearing calculations of the neck vertebra showed that as few as 50 of these spoke-like supports increased the amount of weight the neck could carry, without buckling, by up to 90%, the researchers said. These spokes, together with the tube-within-a-tube structure, show how pterosaurs could have captured and carried heavy prey without injuring their own long necks.
The finding, which shows how "fantastically complex and sophisticated" pterosaur necks were, Martill said, was published online Wednesday (April 14) in the journal iScience.
Originally published on Live Science.
Mercedes rolls out luxury electric car in duel with Tesla
Mercedes-Benz has a new luxury car and it's electric powered
ByThe Associated Press
15 April 2021, 11:09
• 2 min read
FRANKFURT, Germany -- Daimler AG on Thursday unveiled a battery-powered counterpart to its top Mercedes-Benz luxury sedan as German carmakers ramp up their challenge to electric upstart Tesla.
The EQS is the first Mercedes-Benz vehicle to be built on a framework designed from the start as an electric car, rather than using components from an internal-combustion vehicle.
Mercedes underscored the car's technological features by equipping it with a sweeping touchscreen panel that stretches across the entire front of the car's interior in place of a conventional dashboard. Tesla and other carmakers are also adding large screens to their interiors.
The EQS is the sibling to the company's S-Class large internal-combustion sedan, the luxury brands flagship model that sells for $110,000 and up. The two cars aim at the same upper end of the market, though the EQS is set apart by being build on the company's electric-vehicle architecture, or EVA. Mercedes isn't saying yet how much the EQS will cost when it reaches customers later this year.
Daimler said the vehicle will get 770 kilometers (478 miles) on a full charge under testing standard used in the European Union. The company is offering a year's free charging through Ionity, a network of highway charging stations built by a group of major automakers.
German carmakers were slower to develop all-electric models until tougher environmental regulations and sales lost to California-based Tesla pushed them to ramp up their efforts. Volkswagen sold 422,000 electric vehicles last year and developed the ID.3, a compact it hopes will win over mass-market buyers, while its Porsche division has come out with the Taycan sports car. BMW launched the iX3 electric SUV.
Another bout of power supply shortages hit Texas this week amid power plant maintenance season, prompting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to call on Texans to conserve energy
However, unlike during the February Freeze, this time, the shortage was a lot more temporary, with things returning to normal within a day, the Houston Chronicle reports.
Power supplies tightened on Tuesday afternoon, the daily reports, causing electricity prices on the wholesale market to reach up to $2,000 per megawatt-hour. That was up from about $25 per kWh earlier in the day. By the evening, however, supply had ramped up.
Unfortunately, there is a chance for a repeat of yesterday's power supply situation, at least according to ERCOT's vice president in charge of grid planning and operations.
"These (power plants) are big complicated machines," Woody Rickerson said, as quoted by the Chronicle. "They require maintenance. You can't run them continuously. There may be days like today where (power) margins are tighter than we like," the ERCOT official added. "We could be in the same situation in the next few weeks."
Massive power plant outages were among the worst effects of the February Freeze, which left millions of Texans without light and power, and saddled some with huge bills. The Freeze—and the outages—also led to a slew of lawsuits as utilities and gas distributors pointed fingers at each other as the culprits behind the crisis.
Warren Buffet, meanwhile, offered to build 10 GW in new gas-fired generation capacity to boost Texas' energy security.
"We really want to make sure that this never happens again. So we're really wanting to partner with the state," Chris Brown, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy Infrastructure Group, told Bloomberg in an interview last month. "The proposal is simple: state residents should have a reliable source of backup power."
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
Big Oil Is Dead Set On Exploiting The Wind Power Boom
Lately, the solar sector has been hogging the renewable energy limelight, and for good reason. Experts such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) have predicted that solar energy will lead to a surge in renewable power supply in the next decade, with IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol tipping solar to become the “new king of the world’s electricity markets”.
But make no mistake about it: Wind energy will play an equally critical role in the shift to clean energy, with the IEA saying that wind and solar will make up a staggering 80% of the electric energy market by the end of the decade.
Wind power is not only the easiest to tap and most efficient renewable fuel for electricity generation. Still, it is also one of the lowest carbon emitters. Offshore wind, in particular, has been enjoying its moment in the sun, with investments quadrupling to $35 billion in the first half of 2020, representing the most growth by any energy sector during the Covid-19 crisis.
Not surprisingly, Big Oil has been one of the investors making a mad dash into offshore wind.
As per a Reuters report, Europe’s top oil firms, including Total SA (NYSE:TOT), BP Inc. (NYSE:BP), and Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) are looking to quickly ramp up their renewable power portfolios and lower their reliance on oil and gas to satisfy governments and investors are among the leading investors in offshore wind.
Indeed, governments worldwide are expected to offer a record of more than 30 gigawatts (GW) in tenders for offshore wind sites and capacity this year alone. For perspective, that is almost as much as the total existing UK wind capacity of 35 GW.Related: Investors Rush To Oil Stocks Despite ESG Push
But some experts are now warning that Big Oil’s love affair with offshore wind could come with undesirable consequences, especially for the consumer.
High option fees
Deep-pocketed oil majors are increasingly willing--and able--to part with huge sums of money to gain a foothold in the offshore wind market, even though margins there are much smaller than their legacy oil and gas businesses.
A good case in point is a leasing round held by the Crown Estate earlier this year for seabed options around the coast of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland whereby BP and German utility EnBW paid around 1 billion pounds ($1.38 billion) to secure two offshore sites representing 3 GW.
Interestingly, traditional offshore wind developers, Orsted, Iberdrola, and SSE were all unsuccessful in the leasing round.
But, perhaps, the biggest revelation: Zero option fees were paid at the last previous Crown Estate offshore round that was held more than a decade ago.
High energy costs
Obviously, option fees are a huge cost component that adds to the overall cost of onshore wind development.
In fact, Mark Lewis, Chief Sustainability Strategist at BNP Paribas, has estimated that the Crown Estate option fee could add as much as 35% to project development costs, at today’s building costs.
The worst part: The consumer could end up bearing the brunt of it all.
“Someone is going to have to pay and it’s probably, at least in part, the consumer,” Duncan Clark, Orsted’s UK head, has warned.
The high fees now threaten to erode the massive cost reductions the wind sector has realized over the past decade and helped it to become cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Ali Lloyd, Senior Principal, Renewables, AFRY Management, has estimated that the option fees could increase the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of an electricity generation project as a measure of the total lifetime cost of energy, by 4-8%.
Source: AFRY Management
On a brighter note, Lloyd notes that the developers could end up paying the increased cost since many of the winning bidders are relatively new entrants into the UK offshore wind development sector and might be willing to accept lower returns as they look to gain a foothold into the industry.
In other words, we will probably have to wait a bit before we can accurately tell who is paying these massive costs.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Executives' Pay Deters Big Oil From Acting On Climate Change
The way executives at large oil companies are paid encourages these companies to extract more fossil fuels, a study has suggested, as reported by The Guardian, who said it was given exclusive access to the findings.
The study came from the Climate Accountability Institute, an organization that says about itself that it "engages in research and education on anthropogenic climate change, dangerous interference with the climate system, and the contribution of fossil fuel producers' carbon production to atmospheric carbon dioxide content."
According to it, the remuneration packages for Big Oil CEOs are tied to metrics that are mutually exclusive with climate action, or, as one of the authors, Richard Heede, puts it:
"We show that executives have personal ownership of tens or hundreds of thousands of shares, which creates an unacknowledged personal desire to explore, extract and sell fossil fuels," Heede said. "That carbon mindset needs to be revised by realigning compensation towards success in lowering absolute emissions."
The study focused on the four biggest oil companies globally: BP, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron. According to the Guardian, it has been tracking these companies since 1990, and until 2019, the four had made combined profits of $2 trillion, only a tiny portion of which was invested in low-carbon energy.
In all fairness, however, at least one of the four has started untying its remuneration scheme from oil and gas production. Back in 2018, Shell said, under pressure from several institutional shareholders, that it would link executive pay to emission reduction targets with reports estimating that some 1,300 senior executives could be affected by the change.
Now, Shell has said it would tie the bonuses for its top executive directors more closely to the group's performance in reaching its net-zero goals, if shareholders approve the plan at the annual general meeting in May.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
Shell To Put Energy Transition Plan To Shareholder Vote
Shell has pledged to become a net-zero energy company by 2050, and said eits oil production peaked in 2019 and was set for a continual decline over the next three decades.
Oil supermajor Shell will put its Energy Transition Strategy to a non-binding shareholder vote at its annual general meeting next month, the first time an energy firm will be seeking an advisory approval of its plan to go to net zero.
Shell has pledged to become a net-zero energy company by 2050, and said earlier this year that its oil production peaked in 2019 and was set for a continual decline over the next three decades.
“As we transform our business, it is more important than ever for shareholders to understand and support our approach,” Shell’s chief executive officer Ben van Beurden said in the preface of the company’s Energy Transition Strategy.
“We are asking our shareholders to vote for an energy transition strategy that is designed to bring our energy products, our services, and our investments in line with the goal of the Paris Agreement and the global drive to combat climate change,” van Beurden added.
According to Shell’s strategy, the target for carbon intensity reduction is
6-8 percent by 2023 for the short term, 20 percent by 2030, and 45 percent by 2035, until reaching carbon intensity reduction of 100 percent by 2050.
“The vote is purely advisory and will not be binding. Shell’s Board and Executive Committee remain responsible and accountable for setting and approving Shell’s energy transition strategy,” Shell said in a statement today.
The supermajor will also seek every year, beginning in 2022, an advisory vote from shareholders on its progress in achieving its energy transition strategy.
The Church of England Pensions Board, a shareholder in Shell, will likely support the energy strategy, Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer, told The Wall Street Journal.
Shell is also set to tie the bonuses for its top executive directors more closely to the group’s performance in reaching its net-zero goals, if shareholders approve the plan at the annual general meeting in May. The weighting of the progress in the energy transition performance measures in the long-term incentive plans (LTIP) for executive directors is set to grow to 15 percent from 10 percent.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
Shell To Exhaust Dwindling Oil & Gas Reserves By 2040
Shell expects to have produced 75 percent of its current proved oil and gas reserves by 2030, and only around 3 percent after 2040, the supermajor said in its Energy Transition Strategy that it will put to a non-binding shareholder vote next month.
Discussing the risk of stranded assets in the energy transition, Shell said that every year it tests its oil and gas portfolio under different scenarios, including prolonged low oil prices, and cross-references assets with break-even prices to assess if they would still be viable in case of low oil and gas prices.
At December 31, 2020, Shell estimated that around 70 percent of its proved plus probable oil and gas reserves, known as 2P, will be produced by 2030, and only 5 percent after 2040.
In 2020, Shell’s proved reserves—taking production into account—decreased by 1.972 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) to 9.124 billion boe at December 31, 2020, the firm’s annual report showed.
That’s reserves for just seven years of production, lower than most peers.
The declining reserves life is not unique for Shell. The largest international oil companies have seen their average crude reserves drop by 25 percent over the past five years, which could be a challenge for Big Oil’s production and earnings in the coming years, Citi said earlier this month.
The supermajors reported lower reserves in their most recent reports, also due to the 2020 oil price and oil demand collapse, which forced all of them to write off billions of U.S. dollars off the value of assets.
In Shell’s case, the declining reserves life is not in contradiction to its assessment from earlier this year that its oil production peaked in 2019 and is set for a continual decline over the next three decades.
Fracking crews are increasing their activity in U.S. shale basins, finishing off a slew of DUC wells, according to the EIA’s latest Monthly Drilling Report. As oil and gas companies focus on finishing off wells they’ve already drilled, on the sidelines, observers are wondering whether this is a fluke or whether the industry has really learned its lesson about drilling rigs that they do not intend to complete.
Are we seeing typical industry behavior, which may indicate that we are in for another DUC increase now that drilling activity has picked up?
Tackling the Fracklog
The way to describe the DUC count is a “fracklog” because it measures the number of wells that have been drilled but not yet completed—essentially creating a backlog of half-finished wells that are not producing oil or gas. The higher the DUC count, the more money oil companies have spent drilling wells that are not yet working—ostensibly while drilling more wells, which they also may not complete.
For the U.S. shale industry, the DUC count has been a bellwether for the oil industry; the higher the DUC count, the more money oil and gas companies are sinking into wells that are stuck in limbo and not producing. This could either mean fiscal irresponsibility or a rapidly changing shift in the markets that too quickly rendered wells once deemed wise as obsolete.
Of course, there are always DUCs. The logistics behind scheduling drilling and completion crews necessitate a certain number of drilled wells be made available to later complete. Companies often like to keep several months of drilled wells in inventory. And most wells that are drilled are finished within a year.
But an excessive number of DUCs could signify that something is amiss in the industry.
The Whole Story
The true fracklog didn’t boom during the pandemic. The DUC counts started climbing ever higher sometime in 2017—around the time the U.S. shale industry was catching flack for out of control debt loads.
True, during the pandemic, there were certainly a high number of DUCs. But the EIA reported DUC count of 7,685 in July 2020—after oil demand crashed, rendering foolish the process of spending more money to complete a well that a company didn’t need for production—is just par for the course, according to earlier EIA data. According to the EIA, the DUC count has been over 7,500, for the most part anyway, since mid-2018.
The Dead DUC is Still a DUC
But there are some, like Raymond James analyst John Freeman, who claimed this year in a note to clients that the United States’ true DUC count is much lower, given that many of the wells included in the EIA’s DUC count are dead in the water and many years old, likely never to be completed. According to Freeman, this figure is as much as 22% too high.
A 2019 Federal Reserve of Dallas survey of oil and gas company executives suggests that half of the respondents agree that the EIA is overestimating the number of DUCs.Related: Investors Rush To Oil Stocks Despite ESG Push
In a low oil price environment, oil and gas companies may spend money on finishing off an already drilled well, rather than on drilling a new well. But companies will continue to strive to keep that DUC inventory in their back pocket should the market call for it. But when oil prices have been low for a long time—and demand for crude or gas remains low, those low oil prices may never justify completing a well, resulting in another dead DUC.
Still, those DUCs are counted.
Where We Are Now
In 2014, the number of wells being drilled exceeded the DUC count. When drilling slowed at the end of that year, the number of DUCs continued to rise. There was a period leading up to 2017 that saw a dip in the DUC count. But before too long, DUCs were again on the rise.
The latest data suggests that the number of DUCs began to fall in July 2020 as oil inventories boomed, oil prices were ultra-low, and drilling and fracking activity had slowed to levels not seen in years. The DUC count has continued to fall since then, while drilling and completion activities have started to pick up. The gap between drilling and completion activity has closed over the last few years, while the gap between drilling activity and DUCs has inverted.
But there is an unmistakable correlation between drilling activity and DUCs, with an anywhere from 20 to 50-week lag from rig count shifts to corresponding DUC shifts. If that pattern holds true, we may be in for another increase in the number of DUCs in the next few months. Unless, that is, the EIA revaluates the method it uses for establishing its DUC counts. Or, as some suggest, shale has learned to belt tighten, and spending is shifted more heavily toward completing rather than drilling.
