Left with a bitter taste

Aijaz Nizamani

Published January 3, 2022 

PAKISTAN’S economic direction including its agriculture and food policy is characterised by contradictions which could not be more stark than its sugar policy. Sugar is an important part of the household diet in Pakistan but is not consumed more than rice, both in terms of volume and value. Paradoxically, rice is liberally exported and is without price control whereas sugar is subject to various price controls and other administrative machinations. It is a classic case of a conspiracy against the consumers.

Read more: Bitter sweet facts

It would be helpful to understand the sugar business value chain in Pakistan and identify the actors and players conspiring against the consumers who are forced to buy expensive local sugar when it is significantly cheaper in the international market. The sugar cane crop which is the raw material for sugar as a finished product, is cultivated on 2.1 million acres of land in Pakistan, mostly in Punjab and Sindh. Later, sugar is extracted from the crop in 81 sugar mills, again mostly in Punjab and Sindh. These mills are the processing units where farmers and middlemen/contractors sell the sugar cane crop through a highly interventionist method devised by bureaucrats which in the end satisfies no one in the value chain. A tiny portion of the crop is also processed on the farms and gur is produced which is consumed mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and exported to Afghanistan.

Sugar cane cultivation and sugar manufacture represent the ‘worst of both worlds’. The price of sugar cane is administratively fixed by the government and the finished product ie sugar is supposedly sold at the ‘market rate’ to wholesale dealers and ultimately to consumers (both households and industries). It is akin to the government ordering a tailor to buy fabric at the price set by the government and sell his finished garment at the market rate! This cannot work and creates significant distortions in the value chain. Very few people in Pakistan are aware that this illogical system of the sugar sector value chain is sustained through a 40 per cent duty on the import of sugar in Pakistan and ultimately it is the poor consumers who bear the brunt of the madness of the sugar policy.

It would be a valid question to ask what justifies government intervention or market rigging for a food commodity such as sugar which has far less value when compared to another food commodity like rice. It is important to know that more than half of the sugar is used in commercial businesses including sweets, biscuits and soft drinks where it functions as an intermediate commodity rather than being consumed by an individual and supposedly a poor household.

Sugar cane cultivation and sugar manufacture represent the ‘worst of both worlds’.

The list of government ‘distortions’ in the sugar sector is long and starts with the issuance of or application for the licence of a sugar mill. It is the government that decides where a sugar mill can or cannot be installed. The government also decides when sugar mills can start the crushing season (in other words when the tailor master will open his shop) and when mills have to make payments to their raw material suppliers for a business which is supposed to be free and liberal in nature in which private parties are supposed to make deals on their own without government intervention. It would not be out of place to ask what justifies government meddling in the sugar sector when invariably every household spends more on rice than sugar.

Sugar cane is a long-gestation crop and takes from 14 to 18 months and is known as a water guzzler requiring a huge quantity of precious irrigation water for maturing. This 14- to 18-month crop period makes sugar cane unsuitable for small growers and only medium- and large-scale farmers cultivate this crop. The dual aberration, that is the lower consumption importance and lower equitability value for the sugar cane crop on the production side (and a large environmental impact in terms of water requirement), makes government intervention even more bizarre. Why does the government intervene and take upon itself the wrath of all stakeholders as it is impossible to satisfy conflicting expectations of the players in the value chain?

To understand the sugar sector mess, it is important to bring into the picture the current sugar mill owners who are also large-scale sugar cane farmers. This is different from the 1960s or the early 1970s when mill owners were mostly industrialists who had little interest in farming and the mill owners hardly had any electoral clout. This sugar mill ownership landscape changed in the 1980s and large-scale farmers, as a form of state patronage (and with public-sector bank financing) got sugar mill licences and entered the business. The rise of these large-scale farmers as mill owners consolidated vested interests. The worst form of this vested interest manifested itself last year when millers were provided large-scale export subsidy and the same year the commodity was imported at almost twice the price of its export. Taxpayers and consumers were doubly robbed with this simultaneous export and import of sugar.

Read more: Ministerial body proposes major reforms in sugar sector

There is no doubt that the sugar policy is most bizarre and cannot be sustained no matter how powerful the sugar lobby is in Pakistan. It invariably results in losses for mill owners when international prices are low and our neighbours, particularly Afghanistan, do not lift our sugar and the local market is suppressed. With the current boom in the international market for commodities such as sugar, it is the best time for the government to deregulate sugar altogether. As household consumers are already conditioned for higher prices, the mill owners would be able to export without substantially impacting the local market. Perhaps currently the biggest hurdle in deregulation are the large-scale sugar cane farmers and not the mill owners.

The writer serves as additional secretary in the forestry department, Sindh.
aijazniz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2022

US defeat tied to Afghan war becoming business

Pajhwok Monitor
3 Jan 2022 - 

KABUL (Pajhwok): US military contractors made fortunes as Washington outpoured money for the Afghan conflict, a media report said on Monday.

The Department of Defense spent 14 trillion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

According to the newspaper, a California businessman running a bar in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan launched a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue.

An Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.

Hailing from Ohio, two Army National Guardsmen initiated a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters that grew into one of the army’s top contractors. It amassed nearly $4 billion in federal contracts.

The Pentagon spent six million dollars on a project seeking to import nine Italian goats to fuel the Afghan cashmere market. The project, however, failed to reach scale.

Meanwhile, political analysts tied the US defeat in Afghanistan was to the war morphing into a business.

“One of the main things that caused the collapse of the Afghan government and the US defeat in Afghanistan was the war becoming a business,” remarked one analyst Muqadam Ameen.

Sadeq Hameedzui, another analyst, was quoted as saying: “The corruption existed at a high-level, even the salaries of the (Afghan) security forces were being embezzled.”

Christopher Miller, the Trump administration’s acting defense secretary, insisted a lot had to be outsourced to contractors while fighting a war with an all-volunteer military smaller than in past conflicts and without a draft.

In reaction to the WSJ report, the Islamic Emirate said despite pouring a a lot of money into Afghanistan, the country had not been reconstructed.

PAN Monitor/mud

US spent $14tr on wars in 20 years,

 $6m on rearing nine goats

Anwar Iqbal

Published January 3, 2022 

US troops patrol at an Afghan National Army base in Logar province, 

Afghanistan, August 7, 2018. — Reuters/File


WASHINGTON: The US military spent $14 trillion during two decades of war in Afghanistan and the Middle East, enriching arm manufacturers, dealers and contractors.

A detailed, full-page report in The Wall Street Journal shows that since Sept 11, 2001, US military outsourcing pushed up Pentagon spending to $14 trillion. One-third to half of that sum went to contractors.

The report includes numerous examples of how American tax-payers’ money was wasted on projects that never came to fruition. On one such project, “the Pentagon spent $6 million on a project that imported nine Italian goats to boost Afghanistan’s cashmere market. The project never reached scale.” Five defence companies — Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, General Dynamics Corp, Raytheon Technologies Corp and Northrop Grumman Corp — took the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services.

Read more: Casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq much higher than US admitted: NYT

The newspaper collected the data from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, area scholars, legal experts and others who are working on the hidden impact of America’s wars.

The WSJ report also includes some rags-to-riches stories: A young Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.

A California businessman running a bar in Kyrgyzstan started a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue. Two Army National Guardsmen from Ohio started a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters. It grew to become one of the US Army’s top contractors, collecting nearly $4 billion in federal contracts.

The Biden administration has now ordered an inquiry to determine how the reliance on battlefield contractors multiplies the war cost.

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), created to monitor the almost $150 billion spent on rebuilding the country, collected hundreds of reports of waste and fraud. A SIGAR survey released in early 2021 found that, of the $7.8 billion earmarked for projects, only $1.2 billion, or 15 percent, was spent on new roads, hospitals, bridges, and factories. At least $2.4 billion was spent on military planes, police offices, farming programs and other development projects that were abandoned, destroyed or used for other purposes.

The US Agency for International Development gave $270 million to a company to build 1,200 miles of gravel road in Afghanistan. The USAID canceled the project after the company built 100 miles of road in three years of work that left more than 125 people dead in insurgent attacks.

In 2008, the US had 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the US deployment, and 203,660 contractor personnel.

When President Barack Obama ordered most US troops to leave Afghanistan at the end of his second term, more than 26,000 contractors were in Afghanistan, compared with 9,800 troops.

By the time President Donald Trump left office four years later, 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, along with 2,500 troops.

More than 3,500 US contractors died in Afghanistan and Iraq and more than 7,000 American service members died during two decades of war.

Read more: Afghan debacle cumulative effect of 20 years of mistakes, says US military chief

The contractors often used Afghans to do their work but paid them only a fraction of what they would pay an American or a European employee. Average monthly income for Afghan linguists fell from about $750 in 2012 to $500 in 2021. Some

Afghan linguists working alongside US soldiers in the toughest parts of the country were paid as little as $300 a month.

In January 2010, an Afghan interpreter working for a contracting firm Mission Essential on an Army Special Forces base near Kabul grabbed a gun and killed two US soldiers.

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2022

AMERICA'S LONG WAR OF REVENGE
Some 28,500 children killed in past 16 years in Afghanistan: UNICEF

January 3, 2022

KABUL: Over 28,000 children have been killed in conflicts since 2005 in Afghanistan, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.

“Afghanistan, for example, has the highest number of verified child casualties since 2005, at more than 28,500 – accounting for 27 percent of all verified child casualties globally,” the organization said in a statement.

Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and northern Ethiopia are the places where children have paid a devastating price as armed conflict, inter-communal violence and insecurity continued, UNICEF said.

“Year after year, parties to conflict continue to demonstrate a dreadful disregard for the rights and wellbeing of children,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

 “Children are suffering, and children are dying because of this callousness. Every effort should be made to keep these children safe from harm.” According to the statement, the UN has verified 266,000 cases of grave violations against children in more than 30 conflict situations across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America over the past 16 years. The statement says these are only the cases verified by UN-led monitoring and reporting mechanisms, meaning that the true figures may be far higher.

UNICEF says that so far there is no data available about grave violations against children in 2021, but in 2020, 26,425 grave violations against children were verified by the UN.

UNICEF has called on “all parties to conflict” to take concrete measures to protect children.

“Ultimately, children living through war will only be safe when parties to conflict take concrete action to protect them and stop committing grave violations,” said Fore. “As we approach the end of 2021, I call on all parties to conflict to end attacks against children, uphold their rights and strive for peaceful political resolutions to war.”

The Kabul Times

Experts warn Covid conspiracy groups may pivot to climate misinformation in 2022

2 January 2022

Ratcliffe on Soar power station stock. Picture: PA

After a year that saw the UK host the Cop26 summit, experts have raised concern over an increase in climate misinformation.

Covid-19 conspiracy groups may pivot to pushing climate misinformation in 2022, experts have warned.

Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), told the PA news agency that coronavirus misinformation on topics such as vaccines and lockdowns could evolve to focus on climate policy.

“‘Green lockdowns’ is a term that’s bandied about in these conspiracy communities… that’s a merging of Covid worlds and climate disinformation worlds,” he said.

Mr O’Connor said conspiracy groups “will frame” climate policy as a “loss of civil liberties and loss of freedoms”.

“If you think about the Covid protest movements – be it anti-mask, anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccines – the branding and the language that’s been used by these kinds of conspiracy units has always been around,” he said.

“This is a civil liberties argument.

“The climate dialogue, rhetoric and discussion is gonna be rolled into that kind of civil liberties discussion, I think (that) is where you’re going to see a lot of these groups go.”

Dr Jonathan Bright, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, agreed, adding that there “could be more activity” from climate conspiracy groups in 2022.

“I think people are going to be thinking about climate change misinformation quite a lot,” Mr Bright told PA.

Telegram has become the ‘platform of choice’ for conspiracy groups  AND RT

Picture: PA

The experts were also concerned that conspiracy groups and communities have traded mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, for Telegram – a platform with comparatively relaxed content guidelines.

“Telegram has… taken a very robust ‘we’re not interested approach’ to any media pressure to get it to moderate its content,” Dr Bright said.

Mr O’Connor added: “Telegram has become the platform of choice for far-right, extreme right wing groups, for conspiracy communities, (and) for extremist communities in general. Facebook and YouTube… they do have community guidelines, they do enforce them.

“Telegram takes largely a hands off approach to this. They have bare bones terms of service. That means that essentially they only take down threats of violence and child pornography and things like this.

“What that means is that Telegram is a safe space for conspiracy communities.”

The experts also pointed to the fact that online conspiracies are increasingly feeding real-world activity.

England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty is among the public figures who have been targeted by protesters 

(Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA)

In February, footage emerged of a man confronting England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty on the street, accusing him of lying about coronavirus case numbers.

In October, protesters were filmed entering Colchester Hospital in Essex and serving staff with bogus legal papers accusing them of “crimes against humanity”.

And earlier in December, anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn was arrested on suspicion of encouraging people to attack MPs’ offices.

“Online actions have offline consequences,” Mr O’Connor said.

“What we’re seeing in relation to that idea… is the increased threat especially towards public health officials, towards politicians, and even towards frontline staff, people who are working to protect people.”

An anti-lockdown protest in London in June 2021 (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is responsible for the Government’s response to disinformation.

It announced a raft of measures over the past year to combat the issue, including funding training for libraries, youth workers, and teachers to help build media literacy in young people.

Tech and digital economy minister Chris Philp said: “Our mission is to make the online world a better and safer place and tackling disinformation is a vital part of this work.

“Our new online safety laws will create clear requirements for tech platforms to tackle disinfo and misinfo and our media literacy strategy will provide people with the skills they need to be able to tell fact from fiction online.”

Telegram had not responded to a PA request for comment at the time of publication.


By Press Association

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen

Illustration by Eric Chow.

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can

Johann Hari
Sun 2 Jan 2022 

When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.

Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.


When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. You are handed an iPad, you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, a photograph of where you are appears on the screen, while a narrator describes it. So as we walked around we were surrounded by blank-faced people, looking almost all the time at their screens. As we walked, I felt more and more tense. When we got to the jungle room – Elvis’s favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when a middle-aged man standing next to me turned to say something to his wife. In front of us, I could see the large fake plants that Elvis had bought to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. “Honey,” he said, “this is amazing. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and began to move his finger across it. “If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.”
If you read your texts while working, you lose that time, but also the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which is a lot

His wife stared, smiled, and began to swipe at her own iPad. I leaned forward. “But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the jungle room. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand, and the fake green leaves rustled a little. Their eyes returned to their screens. “Look!” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.” They hurried away. I turned to Adam, ready to laugh about it all – but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat.

At every stage in the trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down in New Orleans two weeks before, he took out his phone while we were still in our seats. “You promised not to use it,” I said. He replied: “I meant I wouldn’t make phone calls. I can’t not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.” He said this with baffled honesty, as though I had asked him to hold his breath for 10 days. In the jungle room, I suddenly snapped and tried to wrestle his phone from his grasp, and he stomped away. That night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel, sitting next to a swimming pool (shaped like a giant guitar), looking sad. I realised as I sat with him that, as with so much anger, my rage towards him was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus was something I felt happening to me too. I was losing my ability to be present, and I hated it. “I know something’s wrong,” Adam said, holding his phone tightly in his hand. “But I have no idea how to fix it.” Then he went back to texting.

Johann Hari at his home in London. 

Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically.

I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us. When I asked him what he would do if he was in charge of our culture and he actually wanted to destroy people’s attention, he said: “Probably what our society is doing.” Prof Barbara Demeneix, a leading French scientist who has studied some key factors that can disrupt attention, told me bluntly: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” We can see the effects all around us. A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

When I first got back from Graceland, I thought my attention was failing because I wasn’t strong enough as an individual and because I had been taken over by my phone. I went into a spiral of negative thoughts, reproaching myself. I’d say – you’re weak, you’re lazy, you’re not disciplined enough. I thought the solution was obvious: be more disciplined, and banish your phone. So I went online and booked myself a little room by the beach in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. I announced triumphantly to everyone – I am going to be there for three months, with no smartphone, and no computer that can get online. I’m done. I’m tired of being wired. I knew I could only do it because I was very lucky and had money from my previous books. I knew it couldn’t be a long-term solution. I did it because I thought that if I didn’t, I might lose some crucial aspects of my ability to think deeply. I also hoped that if I stripped everything back for a time, I might start to be able to glimpse the changes we could all make in a more sustainable way.

In my first webless week, I stumbled around in a haze of decompression. Provincetown is a little gay resort town with the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the US. I ate cupcakes, read books, talked with strangers and sang songs. Everything radically slowed down. Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day. Every few hours, I would feel an unfamiliar sensation gurgling inside me and I would ask myself: what is that? Ah, yes. Calm.

Later, I realised when I interviewed the experts and studied their research that there were many reasons why my attention was starting to heal from that first day. Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.” Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another”, he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”

This is called the “switch-cost effect”. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount. For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”.

For the first time in a very long time, in Provincetown I was doing one thing at a time, without being interrupted. I was living within the limits of what my brain could actually handle. I felt my attention growing and improving with every day that passed, but then, one day, I experienced an abrupt setback. I was walking down the beach and every few steps I saw the same thing that had been scratching at me since Memphis. People seemed to be using Provincetown simply as a backdrop for selfies, rarely looking up, at the ocean or each other. Only this time, the itch I felt wasn’t to yell: You’re wasting your lives, put the damn phone down. It was to yell: Give me that phone! Mine! For so long, I had received the thin, insistent signals of the web every few hours throughout the day, the trickle of likes and comments that say: I see you. You matter. Now they were gone. Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. Losing the web felt like that. After the rhetorical heat of social media, ordinary social interactions seemed pleasing but low volume. No normal social interaction floods you with hearts.

Provincetown: a place to switch off. 

Photograph: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

I realised that to heal my attention, it was not enough simply to strip out distractions. That makes you feel good at first – but then it creates a vacuum where all the noise was. I realised I had to fill the vacuum. To do that, I started to think a lot about an area of psychology I had learned about years before – the science of flow states. Almost everyone reading this will have experienced a flow state at some point. It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly. Flow is the deepest form of attention human beings can offer. But how do we get there?

I later interviewed Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who was the first scientist to study flow states and researched them for more than 40 years. From his research, I learned there are three key factors which you need to get into flow. First you need to choose one goal. Flow takes all your mental energy, deployed deliberately in one direction. Second, that goal needs to be meaningful to you – you can’t flow into a goal that you don’t care about. Third, it helps if what you are doing is at the edge of your abilities – if, say, the rock you are climbing is slightly higher and harder than the last rock you climbed. So every morning, I started to write – a different kind of writing from my earlier work, one that stretched me. Within a few days, I started to flow, and hours of focus would pass without it feeling like a challenge. I felt I was focusing in the way I had when I was a teenager, in long effortless stretches. I had feared my brain was breaking. I cried with relief when I realised that in the right circumstances, its full power could come back.

At the end of every day, I would sit on the beach and watch the light slowly change. The light on the cape is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been and in Provincetown, I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life – my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I was living in the light. So when the time came to leave the beach house and come back to the hyperlinked world, I became convinced I had cracked the code of attention. I returned to the world determined to integrate the lessons I had learned in my everyday life. When I was reunited with my phone and laptop after taking a ferry back to where they were stashed in Boston, they seemed alien, and alienating. But within a few months, my screen time was back to four hours a day, and my attention was fraying and breaking again.

In Moscow, the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world – told me I had made a crucial mistake. Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”.

Nigg said it might help me grasp what’s happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent. He said: “Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.

I learned that the factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests. I came to believe we need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. I would say that by doing most of them, I have boosted my focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far. At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.

Illustration by Eric Chow.

This can sound a bit abstract – but I met people who were putting it into practice in many places. To give one example: there is strong scientific evidence that stress and exhaustion ruin your attention. Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night. In France, ordinary workers decided this was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it.

Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. Other scientists say the evidence is strong and these anxieties are like the early warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis in the 1970s. I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence. We have to act based on a reasonable assessment of risk. If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.

But none of these changes will happen unless we fight for them. Just as the feminist movement reclaimed women’s right to their own bodies (and still has to fight for it today), I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.

The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.

Why Nova Scotia's fossil fuel energy megaprojects are going bust

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Changing attitudes, financial hurdles posed challenges for

troubled projects

Frances Willick · CBC News · Posted: Jan 02, 2022 

Pieridae Energy's proposed liquefied natural gas project in Goldboro, Guysborough County, was abandoned in July. (Pieridae Energy)

Several of Nova Scotia's energy megaprojects have fizzled in recent months and years, and some say the societal shift toward renewables is the reason.

AltaGas, the company with a plan to store up to 10 billion cubic feet of natural gas in underground caverns alongside the Shubenacadie River, announced in October it was pulling the plug on the project due to the "repositioning of the business and the challenging nature of the storage project economics."

In July, Pieridae Energy announced it would not proceed with its proposal to build a processing plant and export facility for liquefied natural gas in Goldboro, Guysborough County, citing cost pressures and time constraints.

The future of the Bear Head LNG project, a proposal to bring in natural gas to Port Hawkesbury from Western Canada or the U.S., and then import it to Europe, is uncertain after the company behind the project tried to sell it last year.

The province's offshore oil and gas future looks less than rosy after a call for exploration bids this year yielded no interest.

Encana Corp.'s Deep Panuke project drills for natural gas off the coast of Nova Scotia in this file photo. The province's offshore oil and gas industry has waned in recent years. (SBM Offshore)

Last year, the Donkin coal mine — which produced both thermal coal for electricity generation and metallurgical coal for steelmaking — closed permanently, with the company blaming geological conditions in the underground mine.

Transition away from fossil fuels

Jennifer Tuck, the CEO of the Maritimes Energy Association, said the industry's transition away from fossil fuels is affecting the energy landscape in Nova Scotia.

"Focus on climate change, achieving global emissions reductions targets, all of those things, I think, make it challenging in the fossil fuel sector," she said.

Tuck said investment funds have been pulling out of funding oil and gas projects, and federal policy changes are focusing more on clean energies and technologies. 

The Donkin coal mine in Cape Breton closed permanently in 2020. (Radio-Canada)

Pieridae Energy had requested nearly $1 billion from the federal government to support its plan to send liquefied natural gas to Europe, but the funding failed to materialize.

Community and global resistance to fossil fuels also likely played a role in the demise of some of Nova Scotia's energy megaprojects, said Noreen Mabiza, an energy co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax.

"It is definitely a factor, not a factor to be ignored," said Mabiza. "People have been on the ground for years saying they don't want these sorts of projects."

AltaGas, the company behind the proposed natural gas storage project along the Shubenacadie River, pulled the plug in October. (AltaGas Ltd.)

When AltaGas announced it was abandoning its natural gas storage plan, it said the project had received "mixed support, challenges and experienced delay." Mi'kmaw protestors and other opponents have long spoken out against the project, setting up a camp next to the river and launching court challenges.

"It takes years. It wasn't an overnight effort to get these projects to leave, but it's just that continued fight of people who want to fight and protect our land, and people who do recognize we are in a climate emergency and just certain things won't pass anymore," Mabiza said.

'Constant wishful thinking'

Larry Hughes, who teaches energy systems analysis at Dalhousie University and is a founding fellow of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, said there were different factors — including finances, logistical hurdles and opposition — involved in the demise of the different energy projects in Nova Scotia, but what was consistent was the hype behind each.

Hughes said Nova Scotia has a "colonial mentality" when it comes to energy projects, primarily thinking about exporting resources such as gas or coal to other areas instead of using them at home first.

"These projects get so hyped up by the province, that this is going to set us on the course to riches, we will become a have province, no more equalization payments.… There's a constant wishful thinking."

• Offshore wind farms could make Nova Scotia an 'energy-exporting region'

Hughes believes the province is at the beginning of a transition more toward renewables.

"Unless BP went out and found a megafield that nobody had realized was out there and we did become Houston of the North, but unless something like that happens, there's nothing really on the non-renewable side on the cards that I can see," he said.

So what's next?

In October, the Nova Scotia government tabled legislation that would see coal-fired electricity generation phased out and 80 per cent of the province's power coming from renewables by 2030.

Nova Scotia Power president Peter Gregg said the utility expects to meet the 80 per cent target largely through two renewable megaprojects, the Maritime Link and the Atlantic Loop.

• 35-year hydro electricity supply set to flow into Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia started receiving some electricity from Labrador's Muskrat Falls hydro project one year ago through the Maritime Link subsea cable. The Muskrat Falls project has been beset by difficulties, but is expected to deliver up to 60 per cent of Nova Scotia's electricity needs by the first half of 2022, Gregg said.

The Atlantic Loop project would see hydroelectric energy from Quebec and Labrador flow to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick through upgraded transmission grids. Gregg declined to estimate how long it may take to get the Atlantic Loop up and running, or how much of Nova Scotia's power would come from the project once it's completed.

A close-up shot of the Maritime Link cable that connects Nova Scotia to the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project in Newfoundland and Labrador. Once the project overcomes current challenges, it would significantly boost the amount of renewable energy flowing into Nova Scotia's power grid. (Nic Meloney/CBC)

He said talks are ongoing between the relevant provincial governments, the provinces' utility companies and the federal government.

"There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of people involved in the discussions. And so I guess it starts with having everyone agree to what the plan looks like and then commit to making it happen."

Gregg said he's confident that even if the Atlantic Loop doesn't come to fruition by 2030, Nova Scotia Power will be able to meet the target through other means, noting the utility has a "portfolio of solutions" that includes onshore wind and grid-scale batteries to store wind energy.

In 2020, 48 per cent of the utility's power came from coal, about 29 per cent came from renewable sources, 17 per cent came from natural gas and six per cent came from imports, according to Gregg.

Embraer’s Eve eVTOL unit inks civil and defense UAM deals

Bruce Crumley - Dec. 27th 2021 @BDroneDJ


The Embraer group’s urban air mobility (UAM) unit, Eve, has signed another deal to sell its future electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles to a US passenger airline, and will also examine the craft’s development for potential defense and security clients through a partnership with the UK’s BAE.

The news comes amid a flurry of moves by Eve, including accords to sell 300 of its craft to two airline transport sector customers, and the decision to take the company public with a Wall Street listing. The additional announcements involve a letter of understanding with the regional North American airline Republic Airways to buy up to 200 of the eVTOL planes. The other is based on an agreement between Embraer Defense & Security and BAE to examine ways Eve’s UAM craft could be used as a cost-effective, sustainable, and adaptable alternative to traditional aerial vehicles by militaries and security companies.

According to an Eve press release, the agreement with Republic will focus on workforce development initiatives and exploring the future of air travel. The airline will notably work with Eve to examine UAM opportunities within Republic subsidiaries like its Lift Academy. As part of that, the partnership will map out the creation of a regional air transport network across US central and East Coast markets, starting with the Boston, New York, and Washington, DC, areas.

“Republic’s commitment to provide sustainable aviation solutions to our codeshare partners, American, Delta, and United, relies on continued investments in both workforce development and emerging clean technologies,” said Republic Airways president and CEO Bryan Bedford. “The strategic relationship with Eve builds upon decades of a successful relationship with Embraer that has expanded access to regional airports across the country, and we believe Eve’s UAM platform could play a critical role in our future workforce development initiatives.”

A similar thinking is at work in the BAE link-up with Embraer Defense & Security to look for ways to adapt and market Eve eVTOL aircraft to defense and security markets. The effort will seek to modify initial designs for passenger travel and business uses to military applications that include personnel transportation, surveillance and reconnaissance, disaster relief, and humanitarian response.

It is hoped the Eve eVTOL alternatives will provide a carbon-free and considerably cheaper option to current, heavy transport technologies for defense clients. The joint study furthers BAE’s support of Eve’s UAM activities, in which it has already invested $10 million.

“Bringing together Embraer’s innovative technology in the commercial sector with our extensive defense engineering and systems integration experience will help us to accelerate the pace of new innovations,” said Ian Muldowney, BAE Systems Air sector COO. “This joint study is a great example of how we’re delivering against our commitment to collaborate to explore new and sustainable technologies for our customers.”

Aussie farmer plants (possibly) first-ever sunflower crop using a drone

Bruce Crumley - Dec. 28th 2021  @BDroneDJ


As an exploit, it may not rank up there with UAVs saving lives on first responder missions or locating people desperately lost in the inhospitable wilds, but an Australian farmer is celebrating what he believes to be the world’s first sunflower crop to be entirely planted by a drone.

Queensland farmer and agricultural UAV service provider Roger Woods performed the reputedly unprecedented aerial feat in a series of fields near the city of Toowoomba, about 125 km west of Brisbane. As excited as he is at pulling off what he believes is the first 100% drone-executed sunflower plantation, Woods is even more chuffed at what the accomplishment will mean in facilitating the work and lives of farmers around the globe.

“To our knowledge, it’s the first sunflower crop in the world entirely planted by a big agricultural drone that we use commercially,” Woods told ABC News. “It spreads the seeds, and then that drone subsequently fertilized and kept the crop healthy. The only thing it doesn’t do is harvest it.”

Woods says he’s used the craft to spread seeds for growing crops like lucerne, wheat, and barley, but had been warned by peers that UAVs aren’t suitable for sunflower planting. Seeds need to be disseminated far enough apart to favor germination, they advised, while sprouted stalks require sufficient and regular spacing to fully take root and thrive.

But after 12 test runs to fine-tune his system, Woods carried out his drone flights in September, spreading 45,000 seeds per every 2.5-acre sewn. His objective was to produce 30,000 sunflower plants on each of those component zones.

“We probably didn’t quite get that in a lot of areas, so we can probably drop that rate a little bit in the future,” he said, proud nevertheless of the thick, tall plants that have arisen from the ground. “I’ve also got some ideas on heights, spin speed, patterning, and just to tidy up what we’ve learned across the 12 experiments here.”

In addition to adding a reputedly difficult crop to the list of those drones now help produce every year, Woods says his sunflower experiment has also again demonstrated the environmental and financial contributions UAVs can make to farming. The craft are more precise and less wasteful than other alternatives in agriculture, and their lack of terrestrial footprint is valuable to crops and ground that can be disturbed, or even damaged, by land vehicles.

“For smaller farmers, being able to plant crops from a drone might be economically a better idea than getting equipment in,” he says.

The (possibly) first-ever drone plantation of sunflowers has also had an unexpected secondary benefit: tourists. Many visitors have flocked to the area, ABC News says – some to see the novelty crop for themselves, and others to simply mingle with tall, colorful plants as they twist to follow the sun’s rays. The fields have even been opened up for tourists to inspect for the first time.

“It’s been a dual purpose of satisfying that want people have to be up close and personal with sunflowers, and also educate them about new techniques of farming that are much less harsh on the environment than older techniques,” Woods explains.

'MAYBE' TECH

This Hydrogen Fuel Breakthrough Sounds Sweet

Sanjiv Sathiah - Jan 2, 2022

Hydrogen-powered Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs) have something of a bad rap despite having some clear advantages over conventional EVs like those made by Tesla. In fact, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has variously called the technology “mind-bogglingly stupid”, “a load of rubbish”, and “fool cells” (via CNBC). While Musk may have a vested interest in promoting Tesla’s preferred battery-based EV technology, he is undoubtedly standing on some solid ground when it comes to questions over FCEV technology that have yet to be satisfactorily addressed.

FCEVs are still in their infancy with just a fraction of the sales enjoyed by conventional EVs. There is a myriad of reasons for this but the leading reason is the lack of hydrogen gas fuel station infrastructure.

Without investment in the infrastructure, there is little likelihood of FCEV uptake and even if it is introduced at tremendous cost, there is no guarantee that people will buy FCEVs as they are considerably more expensive than regular EVs. The biggest advantage of FCEVs is that – in addition to being clean to run – once quickly refueled with hydrogen gas, they can be charged and ready to go in around just five minutes.

Palladium and hydrogen storage breakthrough

DESY

Another challenge facing the potential for FCEVs to achieve commercial success is the cost of storing hydrogen gas even in purpose-built hydrogen fuel stations. The gas either needs to be kept in pressurized tanks at up to 700 bar or it needs to be converted to liquid form, which requires cooling it down to minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celcius). As you might imagine, this is not only costly, but it also requires a lot of energy which negates both the appeal of FCEVs and their environmental benefits.

Enter German research center Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). DESY has discovered an approach to storing hydrogen in nanoparticles made from palladium – a precious metal – that can be easily extracted. Although it has been long known that palladium can absorb hydrogen like a sponge, the DESY approach differs by making the hydrogen easier to extract.

The process involves palladium particles only one nanometer across in a structure that resembles nut-coated marzipan chocolate. At the center of the structure is an iridium ‘nut’ around which is enveloped a layer of palladium (like marzipan), which then gets coated by a layer of hydrogen (the chocolate). A small amount of heat is all that is required to extract the hydrogen.

Scientists have a long way to go

Audio und werbung/Shutterstock

While DESY’s scientists have cooked up a tasty treat for fans of FCEVs, there is still a long way to go before breakthrough hydrogen storage and extraction techniques can be commercialized. 

DESY plans on scaling the technology to find out the storage densities that it can achieve. It is currently using graphene as a carrier for the ‘nano-chocolates’ (as DESY calls them), but plans on investigating other carbon structures.

However, DESY is optimistic that its approach will be able to hold substantial amounts of palladium which in turn means its approach will be able to store substantial amounts of hydrogen, without the downsides of current methods of hydrogen containment.

US ESTABLISHMENT PRO NUKE

Opinion: Germany is closing its last nuclear plants. What a mistake.

The Grohnde Nuclear Power Plant is one of three facilities being decommissioned by Germany


By Editorial Board

A little more than 10 years ago, the world held its breath as Japanese authorities struggled to contain an accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station following a major earthquake. At the time, many observers wondered whether nuclear power, with its radioactive waste and meltdown risk, was worth continuing to use. In retrospect, it was this very backlash — against a virtually carbon-free energy technology that the world needs to slash greenhouse emissions — that turned out to be among the Fukushima saga’s most substantial negative consequences.

An energy dilemma on the other side of the world shows why. Germany is shutting three more nuclear power plants — nearly half of the nuclear capacity it has left — even as energy prices soar and the country struggles to cut its carbon dioxide emissions. The nation’s remaining reactors will close down by the end of 2022. This is the result of a pledge to rapidly phase out nuclear power that Germany’s government made hastily in the wake of the Fukushima accident. At the time, the decision pleased longtime anti-nuclear activists, advocates for renewables and frightened citizens. But clearer heads warned that then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision was a mistake that would force Europe’s largest economy to rely on fossil fuels such as lignite, an especially dirty form of coal.

Which is precisely what happened. Though Germany has invested heavily in renewables, it nevertheless has had to burn massive amounts of coal since 2011 to keep its economy running. Absent nuclear, Germany also depends more on Russian natural gas, a deep geopolitical vulnerability that gives leverage to Russia’s authoritarian government.

True, the German government has committed to phasing out coal — but not until 2038. Even on this long time frame, eliminating coal without help from nuclear power plants will be perilous for Europe’s largest economy. Analysts warn that Germany’s supply margin — how much electrical generation capacity the country has in reserve — could plummet in the next couple of years, risking blackouts in times of grid stress.

Next door, French President Emmanuel Macron is moving in the opposite direction, announcing plans for new nuclear reactors. France relies more on nuclear power than any other nation, a major reason the country has about half the per capita greenhouse emissions Germany does. Mr. Macron rightly sees expanding the nation’s nuclear capacity as a better alternative than attempting to rely on renewables alone. Solar and wind power will be essential pieces of a cleaner energy mix, but the grid will still require reliable, always-on sources of electricity to back up intermittent renewables. Better it be nuclear than coal, oil or gas.

Nuclear energy frightens many people. But the deadly chemicals that coal plants spew into the air should scare them more. So should the existential threat of climate change. At the least, countries with legacy nuclear power plants — the United States has many — should aim to keep them online for as long as possible rather than repeat Germany’s mistake.