'Parasite' filmmaker's secret debut unearthed by new documentary

Claire LEE
Tue, 21 November 2023

Lee Hyuk-rae (pictured), director of documentary "Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club", has brought Bong Joon-ho's obscure first film to the public (Anthony WALLACE)

Oscar-winning "Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon-ho's first movie -- about a trapped gorilla dreaming of a different life -- was hidden from the world for three decades, but a new documentary has brought it to light.

"Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club" showcases Bong's formative years as an obsessive film enthusiast and aspiring filmmaker, as well as a group of quirky young South Korean cinephiles who came together in the early 1990s.

This cohort -- dubbed "Yellow Door" for the colour of their office entrance -- included both Bong and the documentary's director, Lee Hyuk-rae.

Until this year, only Yellow Door members had ever seen Bong's debut film, "Looking for Paradise," which features a stuffed gorilla locked in a basement, fantasising about a real banana tree and battling excrement that comes to life as a worm.

Bong made the film in his own basement in 1992 and screened it for Yellow Door members later that year, turning bright red with nervousness.

The film is seared in the memories of the club's other members.

"I believe that the essence of Bong Joon-ho's films today can be traced back to that gorilla," Choi Jong-tae, one of the members, says in the documentary.

In an interview with AFP, Lee said he was deeply inspired by Bong's amateur debut, and revisiting it in light of the film director's subsequent rise to global prominence was a key motivation for making the documentary.

"When the (final) twist was revealed in the movie, everyone present there really felt a heart-pounding sensation," he said of the 1992 screening.

"As Bong continued to accomplish things that were beyond our imagination at that time, my desire to watch his debut film (again) grew increasingly intense."

- First Academy Award -

One of the most recognisable figures in South Korean cinema, Bong made history in 2020 by becoming the first director from his country to win an Academy Award for his powerful satire of inequality, "Parasite".

He was already well known then for his dark and genre-hopping thrillers, including the 2006 monster blockbuster "The Host" and the 2003 crime drama "Memories of Murder".

But Lee's documentary captures an earlier era of South Korean cinema, when the country's films were obscure overseas and local cinephiles were seeking new content to expand their horizons.

Lee said members of Yellow Door were mostly stuck viewing poor-quality VHS tapes, which in the case of foreign films came without subtitles.

But they happily watched anyway, because they were desperate.

Bong religiously collected VHS tapes, and he meticulously analysed Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 classic "The Godfather" by sketching cartoons of its scenes.

The documentary -- currently streaming on Netflix -- captures light-hearted and youthful moments from the film group's early days, including blurry photographs that members took of each other.

"We were a film group and the photographs (we took) were out of focus," Bong says in the documentary.

- 'Social misfits' -

Bong majored in sociology at university and many members of the group had no formal training in cinema.

One member described the cohort as "social misfits".

Lee said many members of the group had been involved in student activism in the 1980s against South Korea's then-authoritarian government, but felt adrift following Seoul's political liberalisation in the 1990s.

"It seems like people who were wandering aimlessly, unsure what they wanted to do but acutely aware of the places they didn't want to be, fortuitously encountered each other ... at the Yellow Door," Lee told AFP.

In a way, the trapped protagonist in Bong's first movie embodied what the cohort was feeling at the time, he added.

Since then, Bong's signature films -- including "Parasite", "Snowpiercer" and "The Host" -- have featured basements as spaces symbolic of repression, violence and dark secrets.

Yellow Door members have since followed diverse professional paths, spanning cinema, speech therapy, education and academia.

But cinema has always held a special significance for Bong, Lim Hoon-ah, one of the members, says in the film.

"To me, cinema was a romantic (fantasy), but (Bong) Joon-ho really thought of it as his reality," she said.

cdl/ceb/tym/cwl

History-maker Hayley Turner becomes first woman jockey to win 1,000 races

Marcus Armytage
Tue, 21 November 2023 


Hayley Turner has had 15 attempts to reach the four-figure landmark - Getty Images/Megan Coggin

Hayley Turner, the inspiration to a generation of female riders, made racing history again when her victory on Tradesman in the Illuminate Christmas Ball Handicap at Chelmsford meant she became the British female jockey to ride 1000 winners.

Turner, 40, had been stuck on 999 for 16 days but got there when David Simcock’s four-year-old, carrying the same colours as Dream Ahead – on whom she won the 2011 July Cup, making her the first female to win a Group One outright – won the two mile contest.

It is unlikely she will have enjoyed many of her previous 999 as much as she did on the Simcock-trained Tradesman, who sat last for the first mile and then had so many more gears than his rivals that he cruised through the field like a hot knife through butter to win by a length and three quarters going away.


Turner was all smiles as she was cheered to the winners’ enclosure and given a hug by Simcock.

“I did drag it out a bit,” said the relieved jockey afterwards. “I made a mountain out of a molehill but got there eventually. It’s a bit of a relief. I made a bit of a big deal out of it and put pressure on myself but it’s done now.

“It’s taken me a long time but the up and coming girls are riding so well everyday it’ll take them half the time. It makes me very proud to feel that perhaps I played a part in their careers. I’ve seen a lot of girls come and go and they all played a part in getting them to where they are today.”

Michael Bell, whom she joined as an 18-year-old apprentice after having ridden just one winner, stuck his neck out at a time when female jockeys were unfashionable to get rides and she would go on to ride nearly 200 winners for him.

“She really deserved that,” he said. “She’s been a role model for all jockeys let alone females. In many ways she’s been a pathfinder and made it much easier for the current generation of females who followed her into the sport.

“From the outset she stood out as an athlete and she was unusually strong. Riding work she could really push one and you couldn’t pick her out as female which was unusual back then. Obviously they are better coached and advised now and generally fitter but she’s the one who set the standard.”

Born a short hack from Nottingham racecourse, she had her first ride at Southwell in March 2000. Her first winner came that June and, initially, she began to make her name on the winter all-weather circuit.

Since then it has been a career of firsts. In 2005 she was the first female to win the apprentice title, sharing it with Saleem Golam on 44 winners apiece. With that momentum behind her on December 30 2008 she became the first female jockey to ride 100 winners in a calendar year.

A month after Dream Ahead won the July Cup, she won the Nunthorpe on Margot Did for Bell. The following spring she was the first female to ride on Dubai World Cup night and in June 2012 she became the second to ride in the Derby.

In 2015 she retired to take up a role as a television pundit and in 2016 was awarded an OBE but when a 2kg weight allowance for female jockeys was introduced in France she started riding out there before basing herself back in Newmarket again.

In 2019, when she won the Sandringham Handicap, she became the first female to ride a winner at Royal Ascot since Gay Kelleway in 1987. Since then she has ridden three more.

It is unlikely that any British female will ever better the world record for career wins which was set by the American Julie Krone who rode a staggering 3,704 winners between 1981 and 2004; a number no female in the USA or anywhere else has come anywhere near to matching.

Hollie Doyle, who is currently on a contract riding in Japan for the winter, is the next most successful in terms of winners in Britain having ridden 867 winners.

Polarized world threatens open internet: ICANN


Glenn CHAPMAN
Tue, 21 November 2023 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit group that minds the internet's infrastructure, is worried about chatter at the United Nations about giving more control of the world wide web to individual governments 

(Mark RALSTON)

After 25 years of keeping the internet strong and stable, the nonprofit ICANN -- responsible for its technical infrastructure -- is warning that increasingly polarized geopolitics could start cracking the foundations of the online world.

"It's super important to differentiate between what countries decide to do with controlling content, as opposed to the technical infrastructure," the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' interim chief executive Sally Costerton told AFP in a recent interview.

"The risk of fragmentation at the technical level is enormous. The foundation crumbles and game over."


ICANN has managed the technical underpinnings of the internet since the group was established in Los Angeles in 1998, and for the past seven years it has operated under an international model that has all "stakeholders" work collaboratively.

"That has worked really well," Costerton said of the approach.

ICANN is best known for its work maintaining and expanding the internet address system to new "domains" and languages from its early ".com" days only employing the Roman alphabet.

But as online abuses -- from misinformation to hateful content -- have grown more insidious, interest has heightened in giving governments more control of the internet, including aspects that have previously been covered by ICANN.

Shifting control of the internet's infrastructure to governments and trade groups, and shutting out the technical community, could crack its foundation, Costerton warned.

But proposals have been circulating in the United Nations to give governments and trade groups such clout, and such discussions are expected to come to a head in 2025, according to ICANN.

"You start to damage the foundation by changing the way that internet governance model works," Costerton said.

"It looks like a magic trick, but it's the product of hundreds of thousands of people building trust in the technologies and each other."

While ICANN keeps the infrastructure on which the internet operates sound, it has nothing to do with any digital content it supports, the executive noted.

"I can't actually remove something from the internet," the ICANN chief said.

"The other thing is that ICANN is politically neutral, we can't take sides."

Costerton worries that mindset would shift if governments had more control of the internet infrastructure.

She also sees a threat from the unintended consequences of regulation in countries intending to safeguard citizens from what is deemed undesirable online content there.

"The internet was not designed on national borders, it's a global resource," Costerton said.

"The minute you start to decentralize it, you're going to start to create digital islands."

Essentially, the internet could be splintered as countries control what people see online.

"We are living in an increasingly nationalistic, polarized world," Costerton said.

"If you want all that wonderful content, and you want the magic trick to carry on, you must maintain the current trust-based model."

gc/arp/nro

GREENWASHING

A UAE company has secured African land the size of the UK for controversial carbon offset projects


Angela Dewan, International Climate Editor, CNN
Wed, 22 November 2023 at 5:24 pm GMT-7·12-min read

In late September, Zimbabwe’s environment minister signed away control over a staggering amount of land — almost 20% of his country — to a little-known foreign company. Blue Carbon was a small, new outfit, not even a year old, but its chief was no fledgling entrepreneur: he was an Emirati royal whose family had ruled Dubai for 190 years, flush with oil money.

The Dubai-based Blue Carbon has secured forested land nearly equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom across five African nations to run projects to conserve forests that might otherwise be logged, preventing huge amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide, or CO2, from entering the atmosphere.

Blue Carbon can then use that conservation to create carbon credits to sell to companies and governments to “offset” the climate pollution they generate while they continue to burn planet-warming fossil fuels.

The flurry of forest conservation deals with Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Liberia and Tanzania were announced in the months ahead of the annual United Nations’ COP28 climate summit, being hosted this year in December by the United Arab Emirates. But according to several analysts and climate advocates CNN spoke with for this story, these conservation deals are the latest attempt by the petrostate to use green initiatives as a smokescreen for its plans to continue pumping fossil fuels.

At the same time, the UAE has said it plans to extract its very last barrel of oil 50 years from now, when its reserves are projected to dry up — decades beyond when scientists say society needs to be done with fossil fuel.

A spokesperson would not confirm to CNN that the company would sell those credits to the UAE, but given Blue Carbon’s chairman, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, is a relative of Dubai’s royal ruler — who also serves as the UAE’s prime minister — the widely held assumption among analysts CNN spoke with is that these credits will be sold to the UAE to offset its enormous carbon footprint. They could also be sold to other oil-reliant nations and companies in the Gulf and beyond. CNN has reached out to the UAE government for comment.

Blue Carbon would not confirm to CNN the area size of all its projects, how much money it has provided in financing or how many credits it hopes to generate. The agreements are in initial stages and not yet finalized.

But the company did tell CNN it would present its deals at the COP28 summit in Dubai as a “blueprint” for carbon trading. The annual climate summit is where global leaders and negotiators from nearly 200 countries will convene to decide how and when to ramp down fossil fuel use. The UAE is expected to use its COP28 presidency to push hard to include carbon removal — not just from forests, but also from oil and gas as they burn and then storing it underground — central solution to the climate crisis.

Climate advocates have criticized carbon removal — and scientists remain skeptical of its efficacy — as a ticket for companies to continue to produce and burn fossil fuels on a large scale, even expand, and profit handsomely.

The UAE has a lot to lose, financially. Oil and gas account for around 30% of its GDP and 13% of its exports as of last year, according to the US Department of Commerce. More than 80 countries support phasing out fossil fuels, and renewable energy, like wind and solar, are now so cost competitive in most parts of the world that market forces will eventually squeeze oil and gas out anyway.

Unless, that is, fossil fuel companies and lobbyists can convince the world at COP28 not to rely too much on wind and solar, and to keep pumping oil and gas.

The UAE has already been hit with a barrage of criticism since it put Sultan Al Jaber — who runs the nation’s mammoth oil and gas company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and serves as the nation’s international climate envoy — in charge of the negotiations. More than 100 members of the US Congress and the European Parliament in May called for Al Jaber to be replaced as COP28 president.

Al Jaber sees no conflict of interest in his many roles, he has said in multiple interviews. Nor does ADNOC, which told CNN in an email that there was “no one more qualified,” to lead the negotiations, pointing to his experience as leader of the nation’s renewable energy vehicle, Masdar, as well as its fossil fuels oil and gas company.

Sultan Al Jaber delivering a speech during the CERAWeek 2023 energy conference in Houston on March 6, 2023. - Callaghan O'Hare/Reuters

Al Jaber has long argued that fossil fuel companies need to be at the table in climate negotiations to ensure the green transition actually happens.

There is a certain logic to the argument, but climate advocates aren’t buying it, pointing instead to all the time the fossil fuel industry has had to show leadership on the issue, but hasn’t. Some fossil fuel companies were among the first to understand their products were causing climate change. That was around four decades ago, yet they continued to profit from coal, oil and gas.

“I think that ADNOC has turned the UN climate negotiations into a giant greenwashing operation for one of the largest oil companies on the planet,” said Jamie Henn, founder and executive director of the non-profit Fossil Free Media, which supports the movement to end fossil fuels. “It’s been clear from the start when the UAE applied to host this COP that one of the main goals of the meeting was for them to try and situate themselves, and their oil and gas industry by extension, as somehow part of the climate solution.”

As of 2020, the UAE was responsible for around 0.53% of the world’s CO2 emissions, according to data from Climate Watch, but with a small population of nearly 10 million people, it’s the sixth-largest carbon polluter per capita. Despite its relatively small population, the UAE was the world’s seventh-biggest oil producer by volume in 2022.

Henn said it was “absurd” that the negotiations had been taken over by fossil fuel interests.

“It’s like the international tobacco control negotiations being run by Philip Morris. Luckily, the UN has rules in place for those negotiations, where they don’t let tobacco lobbyists at the table,” Henn said. “We need that at COP.”
Carbon offsets not a ‘get out of jail free’ card

Never has a COP, which is hosted by a different city each year, had so many apparent conflicts of interest. Not only is Al Jaber wearing leadership hats for climate and fossil fuels, but Blue Carbon is so intertwined with the nation’s royals and rulers, it’s difficult to separate its promotion of carbon offsets from the UAE’s interest in continuing fossil fuel production.

And it will be in Dubai, at COP28, where the rules of how to buy and sell these very carbon credits will be decided.

When asked by CNN if Blue Carbon was looking at more carbon offset deals in Africa, a spokesperson for the company said that “with COP28 around the corner, we will formally announce a few more of our initiatives.” A source with knowledge of the COP28 agenda told CNN the company would use the deals to promote carbon credits as a bigger part of the climate solution.

It’s not a big surprise that so many countries have signed up to work with Blue Carbon. Its parent company, Global Carbon Investments, has already agreed to transfer $1.5 billion to Zimbabwe in “pre-financing for carbon credits.” That’s more than the country spends on education and childcare, which combined are Zimbabwe’s biggest national expense.

With so little money trickling in from the developed to the developing world to adapt to the climate crisis, carbon credit schemes open a new channel of revenue for forest-rich countries.

Cutting down forests or letting them degrade accounts for at least 12% of global planet-warming emissions. It’s their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that makes them valuable as a climate solution.

Yet the idea of creating tradable carbon credits in exchange for not cutting down forests has been widely criticized as problematic. And some of the world’s biggest companies certifying carbon credits have been shown to use accounting methods that exaggerate their project’s true contribution to mitigating climate change.

In early November, Swiss entrepreneur Renat Heuberger stepped down from his role as CEO of South Pole — one of the world’s first major carbon credit trading companies — after media reports found the company had overstated the climate value of carbon credits that lay in its Kariba forest project in Zimbabwe.

South Pole has denied the media allegations, calling the reports “exaggerated” and “misleading.” In a February news release, the company said, “we strongly refute misleading statements around ‘over-issuances’ of verified carbon credits from one of our flagship climate action projects, the Kariba REDD+ forest protection project.”

A spokesperson for South Pole told CNN in an email Heuberger stepped down because the company wanted “fresh leadership for the job required in terms of (quality assurance) and due diligence processes and controls.”

A drone photo of forest in the Mucheni conservancy in Binga, Zimbabwe -- part of the Kariba carbon offsets project. - Zinyange Auntony/AFP/Getty Images

“Investment in efforts to conserve forests is always welcome. However, the challenge is that conserving forests isn’t a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Julia Jones, a conservation scientist at Bangor University in Wales.

“Globally, we need to both stop further loss of forests and drastically cut emissions,” she said. “Using one to offset the other, without very substantial investment in reducing emissions, is problematic.”

Land rights are another issue. In some cases, indigenous and customary landowners have been evicted to clear the way for such projects, as they witness their homes, once deemed nearly valueless, transformed into cash cows for polluting companies and countries.

The Forest Peoples Programme, a non-governmental organization, says that such evictions have become more common in Kenya since it began allocating land for carbon credits.

“Those in control of Africa’s forests stand to earn a lot of money, and corporations appear to be pursuing a new ‘scramble for Africa,’” Justin Kenrick, a senior policy advisor at the Forest Peoples Programme, told CNN in an email. “Meanwhile such ‘conservation’ in Kenya persists with a failed colonial approach of evicting the very communities who know best how to conserve their forests.”
ADNOC to produce more oil than Shell, BP

Whatever the outcome at COP28, the UAE’s state-run oil and gas company, ADNOC, stands to emerge a big winner, especially if it can convince the world that its “Maximum Energy. Minimum Emissions” slogan is a viable climate solution, even as global temperatures soar and scientists press for rapid fossil fuel cuts.

An ADNOC spokesperson did not directly answer CNN’s questions on how many people would represent the company at COP28, but dismissed suggestions the company would benefit from the conference as “incorrect” and “baseless.”

ADNOC is expected to hike its oil production by 41% and its gas production by a third by 2030, compared to projections for this year, according to an analysis of industry data by Global Witness, a non-profit focused on environmental justice and human rights. That translates to a 40% rise in its greenhouse gas emissions, Global Witness said.

The production boost contrasts with plans among other oil majors: Shell’s production is projected to remain largely flat in that time, while BP envisions a 25-percent production cut by 2030. ADNOC, by 2030, plans to out-produce both companies.

ADNOC is starting to look like a new international oil major in other ways, too: It’s expanding its portfolio by buying up assets overseas, such as a gas fields in Azerbaijan, and it has teamed up with BP in a bid to buy a 50% stake in Israel’s NewMed Energy, with a focus on gas exploration in areas including the eastern Mediterranean. It is also buying into projects around renewables and chemicals, the company told CNN.

To limit its carbon footprint amid the expansion, ADNOC said in October it plans to capture 10 million metric tons of CO2 a year from its operations by 2030 — a figure Global Witness found was wildly exaggerated in a recent analysis.

ADNOC currently has the capacity for 800,000 metric tons per year, though it hopes to capture another roughly 3 megatons per year through two facilities not yet completed. Even if those facilities do come online, Global Witness calculates it would take ADNOC more than 340 years to capture the amount of planet-heating carbon it is expected to emit between 2023 and 2030, if it captured both the emissions from its operations and those that occur from using its oil and gas.

ADNOC did not address the calculation in its response to CNN, saying only that it had set its ambition “to achieve net zero by 2045 backed by an initial $15 billion allocation.”

“Before this year, most people would have been forgiven for never having heard of ADNOC. The more we learn about this company — whose CEO remember is charged with making meaningful progress on emissions reductions at COP28 — the greater an outlier it becomes,” Patrick Galey, a senior fossil fuels investigator at Global Witness, told CNN.

“ADNOC plans not only to produce billions of barrels of oil for decades to come, but it is also positioning itself to be among the most aggressive expanders of oil and gas production out there.”

How much the UAE company expands beyond 2030 will depend on what role negotiators see for carbon capture at COP28, and whether it can find new markets abroad. Ironically, COP28 could be the arena that transforms ADNOC into a global oil major.

This story has been updated to reflect that South Pole has denied allegations it overstated the value of its carbon credits, and to include a statement from a South Pole spokesperson on why its CEO stepped down.

CNN’s Bethlehem Feleke contributed to this report from Nairobi.

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UK

Defra’s failure to protect and restore water bodies ‘unlawful’, high court rules

Helena Horton Environment reporter
Mon, 20 November 2023

Photograph: Richard Burdon/Alamy

The government and environment agency failed in their duty to restore and protect waterways from pollution, the high court has ruled in a significant case that could force an overhaul of the government’s plans.

Fish Legal and Pickering Fishery Association took the government to judicial review over its river basin management plan for the Costa Beck river in the Humber district, which had a reputation as one of the best fly fishing spots in the UK until a few years ago.

The lawyers presented the court with evidence that the Costa Beck is failing for fish under the Water Framework Directive regulations. One of the reasons for that, they argued, is sewage pollution – Yorkshire Water’s “storm” sewage overflow at Pickering treatment works discharged into the Costa Beck more than 250 times in 2020 and more than 400 times in 2019.

They argued that the Environment Agency had failed to follow through with its proposed action against polluters.

The high court ruled that the government and the Environment Agency had failed in their mandatory legal duties to review, update and put in place measures to restore rivers and other water bodies under the Water Framework Directive regulations. The judge concluded there was no evidence the programme of measures could be expected to achieve the stated environmental objectives.

The judge accepted discharges were contributing to the poor condition of the river and said that, under the regulations, discharges for specific rivers such as the Costa Beck need to be regulated more tightly, if their condition is to improve.

The judge characterised the approach of the secretary of state for the environment as one of “smoke and mirrors”. The angling club, which won the court case, said the secretary of state was planning to fail.

Lawyers believe the ruling means the basis for the government’s plans to protect waterways from pollution – which have been criticised as weak – could be unlawful, and ministers could be forced to strengthen their measures.

This has potentially created a mess for the new environment secretary, Steve Barclay, who may have to overhaul the plans of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

It could open the door for other groups to bring similar challenges for the other river basin plans across the country, as the court found that the fundamental requirement to assess and identify specific measures to achieve the legally mandatory targets for each water body – such as tightened environmental permits for controlling sewage pollution – had unlawfully not been done.

Andrew Kelton, a solicitor at Fish Legal, said: “This case goes to the heart of why government has failed to make progress towards improving the health of rivers and lakes in England. Only 16% of water bodies – 14% of rivers – are currently achieving ‘good ecological status’, with no improvement for at least a decade, which comes as no surprise to us having seen how the Environment Agency at first proposed, but then for some reason failed to follow through with the tough action needed against polluters in this case.

“The Upper Costa Beck is just one of 4,929 water bodies, but it is a case study in regulatory inaction in the face of evidence of declining river health.”

He added: “The Environment Agency and the government have taken a high-level, generic – and effectively non-committal – approach to achieving targets when what was needed was a water-body-by-water-body plan of real action to stop ongoing damage.

“We hope this ruling will lead to actual environmental improvements, not only on the Costa Beck but on every other ‘failing’ river and lake across the country.”

Lawyers acting for the campaigners believe the ruling could force the government to strengthen its entire water plans including its much derided “plan for water”, which was announced earlier this year.

Penelope Gane, head of practice at Fish Legal, said: “The environmental objectives and information in river basin management plans underpin all sorts of long-term statutory plans and other strategic planning, including the government’s plan for water, water company business plans, water resources regional plans and the chalk stream restoration strategy. This legal action exposes that all of those policies and plans are effectively built on foundations of sand.”

A spokesperson for Yorkshire Water previously said: “The EA has undertaken water framework directive assessments at Costa Beck. These indicate that neither the water industry nor sewage are either confirmed or even probable causes of the watercourse failing to achieve good ecological status.

“Yorkshire Water is not party to this ongoing case. Nevertheless, we continue to work in partnership with the local angling association on this issue.”

The shadow secretary of state for the environment, Steve Reed, said: “The water industry is broken after 13 years of Conservative failure, with stinking, toxic sewage swilling through our rivers, lakes, and seas. This Conservative government’s plan is so weak it’s now been declared unlawful. They have been happy to stand by and let the sewage flow due to their sheer incompetence.

“Only Labour will take tough action to end this scandal by putting the water industry under special measures. We will ban water bosses’ bonuses, and introduce severe, automatic fines until the water companies clean up their filth.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “We are carefully considering the outcome of this judgment and next steps.

“The government has an ambitious plan for water, which is delivering more investment, stronger regulation and tougher enforcement needed to clean up our waterways. This includes reforming river basin management plans and delivering tailored long-term catchment action plans for local groups to improve all water bodies in England.”

AUSTRALIA

‘Where did I go wrong?’ The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm

Graham Readfearn

GUARDIAN AUS
Mon, 20 November 2023 



“I often wonder: where did I go wrong?” Graeme Pearman says. “Why didn’t people respond? Is that my responsibility?”

When Guardian Australia meets him at his home on the outskirts of Melbourne, the veteran climate scientist is frustrated.

“If you go through the whole process and the rigour of conducting science, [you think] at the end of the day surely people will understand what you’re saying – they will incorporate those risks into what they do,” he says.

“Well, it doesn’t work that way.

“The reality is that for a period of nearly two decades, Australia went backwards [on climate action]. From a personal perspective, yes, it’s frustrating.”

Outside two alpacas are busy keeping the grass down. A pagoda over a deck is heaving with pink wisteria flowers and inside on a kitchen bench Pearman has been struggling with an impossible jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting.

The calmness and lazy beauty of it all is jarring, given we’re here to talk about his life’s work studying a phenomenon that could send countless species extinct, reshape coastlines from rising seas and supercharge storms and wildfires.

More than 50 years ago, Pearman was working at the government science agency the CSIRO and measuring how many CO2 molecules were in the air.

He went on to establish the government’s first climate science program and brief three prime ministers (Hawke, Keating and Howard) on climate change. Later, after an acrimonious parting with the CSIRO, he would travel from community groups to fossil fuel company board rooms giving presentations on climate change.

If there is such a thing as the grandfather of Australian climate science, then 82-year-old Pearman is surely a contender.

Six flasks of air

In 1971, in Pearman’s first job at the CSIRO, he and his colleague John Garratt were asked by their boss Bill Priestley to develop, test and then install equipment that could measure how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere.

Every Thursday Pearman and Garratt drew air samples from a 10 metre-high mast above a wheatfield in Rutherglen, Victoria.

What shocked Pearman was that his measurements were a close match to those taken in Hawaii by the American scientist Charles Keeling – 8,600km away and in a different hemisphere.

“The curiosity for the two of us was why should the concentration be the same?” Pearman says. “Above this growing wheat crop – and on the top of a mountain in Hawaii. Two hemispheres that are totally different. Why should that be the case?”

Since the late 1950s, Keeling had been finding the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was creeping up and by the late 1960s he was blaming the rise on fossil fuel burning.

Pearman suspected Keeling was wrong and that the rise was down to “drifting standards” in the way the measurements were being taken.

“We thought: he’s got to be wrong. How could humans, mere humans, actually influence the global climate?

“But within about a year, we knew Keeling was right.”

In 1974 Pearman took six flasks of Australian air samples to laboratories around the world, including Keeling’s, where scientists were also measuring CO2.

Within a few years, different readings were being taken from planes and Pearman had helped set up a long-term monitoring station for atmospheric gases at Cape Grim on the north-west tip of Tasmania.

Related: How a false claim about wind turbines killing whales is spinning out of control in coastal Australia

The very first carbon dioxide reading at Cape Grim in May 1976 showed CO2 at 328 parts per million. On the day of our interview, the latest reading shows 417 ppm (an increase of 26%).

Australia has just had its warmest winter on record, during what will very likely be the globe’s hottest year on record.

A fact easily forgotten in the blast radius of the last decade of Australia’s climate wars is that in 1990 the Hawke government wanted to introduce a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005.

In 1989 the UN awarded Pearman and the CSIRO a global award, recognising Australians were as well informed on climate change as almost any other community in the world.

Pearman had organised a conference in 1987 where he had asked scientists working across the economy – from irrigation to agriculture, energy and the natural environment – to present their thoughts on the potential implications of climate change for their sectors.

Pearman would eventually make his way through the ranks to become the chief of CSIRO’s atmospheric research division.

By the early 1990s, it seemed Australia was well positioned and well informed.

But Pearman admits he was naive to think that policy and action would just follow the science.
Political pressure and vested interests

Just as Pearman and his colleagues were telling the public and politicians about the risks from climate change, Australia’s fossil fuel industries were bringing their weight and cash to the policy table. Ultimately, the science was outgunned by vested interests.

In 2003 Pearman joined the Australian Climate Group – a group of experts convened by WWF and a multinational insurance group. In 2004 the group released a report saying Australia should cut its emissions by 60% by 2050.

Joining this group would be Pearman’s downfall.

He suspects – but doesn’t know for sure – that CSIRO had come under “a huge amount of pressure” from the government because of the group’s suggestions that fossil fuel use would need to be curtailed.

Related: Guardian Essential poll: most voters don’t believe Australia will meet Labor’s net zero by 2050 target

“I think it was from a government level of some sort to say that we don’t want people actually talking down the future of these particular commodities,” he says. “And I don’t think I ever did that – I simply pointed out what the consequences of pursuing that future would be.

“So all of a sudden I found myself in a discussion … about how it might be a good time to go. I felt devastated.”

Pearman took an academic role at Monash University and started a consultancy to provide briefings on the latest science to industry and the community.

He has racked up more than 500 presentations and continues to write scientific papers.

But he continues to be frustrated at the lack of action.

“We still have people talking about utilising massive gas reserves that should never come out of the ground. Because whether we burn them or someone else burns them, they will contribute to further warming.

“We’ve got to stop this. Not just Australia, but the global community. But Australia should be leading the way, not dragging its feet.”

Pearman is an instinctively optimistic character, but the country’s continued promotion of fossil fuels is causing that optimism to become “overwhelmed by pessimism” about the future.

It is part of the human condition to care about other species, he says. But at the same time “it is us as humans that have created this way of looking at the world – created the importance of wealth generation compared with other values that we might have”.

“And we’re not going to turn that around very quickly.”

What does give Pearman “some sense of security” for the future is that young people are well informed.

“I think they need to have courage – to find courage if they haven’t got it – to accept that the world is different and needs to be different into the future and that they should stand up and be part of the transition.

“The older people of the community have had their time. It’s their time now.

“Stand up and take responsibility and do what you think is necessary.”

UK
Academics call for national database on drug-related harm at music festivals

"AVOID THE BROWN ACID,MAN"

WOODSTOCK,THE MOVIE

Ella Pickover, PA Health Correspondent
Wed, 22 November 2023 


A “small but significant” number of people die in the UK after taking drugs at music festivals, according to a new study.

Academics from the University of Liverpool estimated that between 2017 and 2023 there were 32 drug-related deaths at UK music festivals, including Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, Creamfields and the Isle of Wight Festival.

But only 18 have been confirmed, they said.

Ecstasy was the drug linked to the most deaths, with others including ketamine and prescription medicines.

The study, published in the journal Drug Science, Politics and Law, mentions a teenager who died after taking ecstasy at Leeds Festival.

David Celino, 16, died after falling ill at the festival last August, an inquest was told earlier this year.

The boy, from Worsley, Greater Manchester, became ill after taking ecstasy, which his group bought from a dealer in the Camping Plus area of the festival, and died after being taken to hospital in Leeds.

The researchers said there is no standard process for reporting or accessing data on medical incidents at music festivals.

They collated the information by cross-referencing media and social media content with a national database contributed to by coroners and also spoke to bereaved families.

The team has called for a publicly accessible national database – updated in real time – of drug-related medical incidents at UK music festivals.

Professor Fiona Measham, chairwoman of criminology at the University of Liverpool, said: “Our research has shown that there is a small but significant number of drug-related deaths at UK music festivals each year.

“It is clear that more needs to be done to reduce drug-related harm, to ensure that everyone can enjoy festivals safely and to prevent any other parents hearing the heartbreaking news that their child won’t be coming home.

“While our research has shed light on the issue, currently we’re in a situation where we don’t know the definite number of drug-related deaths at festivals.

“This makes it extremely difficult for everyone to understand whether the situation is getting better or worse and whether festival health initiatives such as drug-checking services, amnesty bins and medical services are effective.

“Introducing a transparent, real-time publicly accessible database of drug-related harm across festivals would provide a comprehensive picture of the extent of the issue and whether or not on-site festival support services are effective.”

H2 NEWZ

EU set to launch world's first hydrogen bank


Maria Psara
Mon, 20 November 2023 

The idea is to make €800 million available from European funds to help the industry and at the same time, incentivise private investment.

Green hydrogen is expected to play a key role in decarbonising the EU so that it can achieve its emission reduction goals by 2050.

"We would like clearly to demonstrate that we are the global leader if it comes to the use of these new technologies," Commission Executive Vice President, Maroš Šefčovič, said in an interview on Monday.

"(And) That we can indeed replace fossil fuels with green hydrogen, that we can produce steel with very low or no carbon footprint and actually that we can also have cars, buses, trains, even planes and ships visually powered by green hydrogen, which is not polluting."

In 2022, hydrogen accounted for less than 2% of the bloc’s energy consumption and was primarily used to produce chemical products, such as plastics and fertilisers.

The priority for the EU is to develop renewable hydrogen and it aims to produce 10 million tonnes and import another ten million by 2030.

During the bloc's Hydrogen Week in Brussels, which started on Monday, the sector will try to join the dots between the European Commission, policymakers, researchers, and industry.

"The energy crisis that Europe has faced so far, especially due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has shown how dependent we are. Hydrogen can be produced in Europe, mainly in countries that have a lot of wind and a lot of solar," Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, CEO of Hydrogen Europe, told Euronews.

"So, Spain or Ireland or Denmark are perfect countries for the production of hydrogen.

"But to be honest, we also need to import hydrogen and that's why we are super happy to welcome here South Africa, Brazil, Saudi Arabia."

There is still work to be done on infrastructure and investment, but some projects are already underway.

Among others, Germany has asked the UK to consider the construction of a 400-mile hydrogen pipeline under the North Sea and an underwater pipeline to carry green hydrogen is being prepared between Spain and France

FROM THE MOON TO MALI

Breakthrough hydrogen discovery in Moon samples could lead to permanent lunar bases


Vishwam Sankaran
Tue, 21 November 2023 


Scientists have discovered how water and hydrogen are formed and retained on the Moon’s surface, taking humans a step closer to establishing permanent lunar bases.

Finding ways to make and utilise fuel on the Moon are key for the future of human space exploration, according to astronomers.

Water and hydrogen on the surface of the Moon are potentially vital resources for future lunar bases and longer-range space exploration.

Effective use of these key resources on the Moon depends on developing a better understanding of where and how water is formed and retained within the lunar soil that is also called regolith.

“Hydrogen has the potential to be a resource that can be used directly on the lunar surface when there are more regular or permanent installations there,” said study co-author Katherine D Burgess from the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

“Locating resources and understanding how to collect them prior to getting to the Moon is going to be incredibly valuable for space exploration,” explained Dr Burgess.

Until now, scientists have found hydrogen from solar winds can react with regolith and form water on the Moon.

However, researchers said this water is formed and retained differently, depending on the content of other minerals in the regolith and other factors.

Microscopy techniques to assess lunar soil samples collected from the Apollo missions were used in the research published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Scientists found hydrogen from solar wind is concentrated in small voids within calcium-phosphate minerals in the lunar soil.

“This is the first time scientists have demonstrated the detection of hydrogen-bearing species within vesicles in lunar samples,” said Dr Burgess.

The research revealed that the weathering of lunar soil by solar wind can form and trap hydrogen on the Moon, indicating grains of regolith containing some minerals can be potential fuel sources.

This finding could help inform the search for potential locations on the Moon where hydrogen and water fuel could be more concentrated.

“Previously, the same team at NRL used state-of-the-art techniques... to detect helium in lunar samples, and other researchers have found water in other planetary samples, but this is the first publication to show hydrogen in-situ in lunar samples,” said Dr Burgess.

MALI

The hunt for clean energy’s ‘holy grail’ buried beneath the ground

Welcome to wildcatter 2.0 and the race for natural hydrogen.

Louise Boyle
Mon, 20 November 2023 

Aerial view of drilling operations by Natural Hydrogen Energy LLC in Nebraska (Courtesy of Natural Hydrogen Energy LLC)

In 1974, “Diamond” Glenn McCarthy sat down to reminisce about the highs and lows, the fortunes made and squandered, by the “wildcatters” of American oil.

“They risked and sometimes they won,” Mr McCarthy, the gregarious risk-taker dubbed “King of the Wildcatters” told Texas Monthly. In the early 20th century, he had bet big on drilling wells in places ignored or considered unproductive by major oil companies. By the 1940s, he had 400 wells and a $200million fortune (about $2.5billion in today’s money).

Today, a new energy revolution is in motion: an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar sprint towards renewables and away from burning oil and gas which have helped crank up the planet’s temperature, leaving it a cauldron of dangerous extremes.

While solar arrays and wind turbines are now commonplace, there are smaller, riskier niches within the clean energy sector. One of these, if it pans out, could be no less than transformational on a global scale, advocates say.

Welcome to wildcatter 2.0 and the race for natural hydrogen.

In Africa, Europe, Australia and the United States, a growing number of start-ups are staking their fortunes and reputations on finding vast, underground deposits of hydrogen.

Like fossil fuels, natural hydrogen can be used as a primary source of energy. Unlike fossil fuels, the gas produces no carbon emissions. What’s more, hydrogen is constantly renewing underground when water and iron minerals react under high temperatures. Early research says there may be enough accessible natural hydrogen to power the planet’s clean energy needs for generations.

The drilling operations of Natural Hydrogen Energy LLC in Nebraska. In 2019, the company established its first hydrogen borehole (Viacheslav Zgonnik)

“There’s a wildcatting phenomenon to it and risk-taking,” Dr Michael Webber, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Independent. “But now it’s super scientific and sophisticated.”

Until relatively recently, it was commonly accepted that natural hydrogen (also called geologic, white or gold hydrogen) didn’t exist on Earth. Or at least, it didn’t exist in places that humans could reach, or in large accumulations.

Then in 2007, a discovery was made in Bourakébougou in the West African nation of Mali. A Malian businessman, Aliou Diallo, had funded tests of a water well in the small village which had been plugged in the late Eighties after an unfortunate worker leaned over the hole while smoking a cigarette and was badly burned. The tests revealed that the borehole was releasing 98 per cent natural hydrogen.

Bourakébougou subsequently became the first place in the world to get its electricity from a source of natural hydrogen, which was run through a retrofitted Ford engine.

For the village, it was a game-changer, giving people lights in their homes and public spaces for the first time. Children did better in school as they were able to study into the evening.

“We were called crazy when we went to conferences,” Asma Diallo, Aliou Diallo’s daughter and development director of Hydroma, the Montreal-based company which emerged from the discovery, told The Independent. “But we decided this was still an interesting discovery, and that we wanted to see what was possible.”

Beneath Mali, a layer of impermeable rock traps hydrogen in highly-concentrated, large quantities fairly close to the surface. In the past decade, Hydroma has drilled 30 wells across an area the size of Switzerland, all of which have yielded high concentrations of hydrogen, Diallo says.

Hydroma has estimated that there are 630 billion cubic meters of hydrogen (around 60 million tons) of natural hydrogen in the Mali field, and the company is forging ahead with plans to become commercial, Diallo says. First, they plan to provide electricity to bolster Mali’s unreliable power grid, and in the long-term, pipe natural hydrogen to neighboring countries and possibly export to Europe.

Testing of the abandoned well in the village of Bourakébougou, 60km from Bamako, Mali, in about 2007. The borehole was found to be releasing 98 per cent hydrogen (Courtesy of Hydroma)

Development, however, is hampered by a volatile political situation. Mali has experienced three coup d’etats in the past decade and 30,000 people have been displaced.

“In a politically insecure location, it doesn’t make it easy. But from a geological and scientific standpoint, it’s the perfect scenario of how natural hydrogen makes sense,” Diallo said.

Some have needed no convincing.

Viacheslav Zgonnik first became interested in natural hydrogen while at university in Ukraine, and what he learned had such an impact that he switched his postdoctoral studies from chemistry to geochemistry. “The Mali discovery happened when I was doing my post-doc. It was extremely encouraging to see that happen,” he told The Independent.

A decade ago, he founded Natural Hydrogen Energy (NH2E) in the US. And in 2019, the company established its first hydrogen borehole near the tiny town of Geneva, Nebraska, and now says it is working towards commercial production.

Zgonnik estimated that five years ago, only a handful of companies were working on natural hydrogen. “This year, I counted around 50 already,” he said. “I believe that next year, that growth will be even faster and we will see hundreds of companies.”

Hydrogen, which releases only water and heat when burned, is already a $150billion industry. But it must be separated from other elements — like the oxygen in water — and that takes vast amounts of energy, still mainly powered by fossil fuels. There are more sustainable ways of producing “green” hydrogen but the process remains expensive.

Still, governments have invested billions in hydrogen production and storage, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an event which showed the danger of relying on an authoritarian regime’s supply of natural gas to power economies.

One tech company estimates that natural hydrogen could be a $75billion industry by 2030 even though it remains to be seen whether it can work at a commercial scale.

Companies from Spain and the UK to Australia are racing to prove it’s possible, and investors with deep pockets and an appetite for risk are flocking. Hyterra, an Australian investment company, has a stake in NH2E. Koloma, a Colorado-based natural hydrogen company, recently received $91m from a group that includes Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

So far, it’s mainly venture capital funds and wealthy individuals that are involved. “There are unknowns associated with exploration, and larger companies are still waiting,” Zgonnik said.

“Small companies are much more agile and willing to take risks to crack the code, so to speak, on how to drill and where to drill. When they find the sweet spots, then I believe bigger companies will put much larger amounts of money in, and accelerate the development significantly.”

Some startups claim that natural hydrogen has the potential to be produced for much lower costs than other forms of hydrogen — one dollar a kilogram and as low as 50 cents — making it cheaper than green hydrogen currently, and comparable to gray hydrogen, which has a chunky carbon footprint.

‘It’s better to work with the Earth’

Last month, the International Energy Agency said that it was the “unprecedented” acceleration in clean energy keeping the Paris Agreement temperature limit of 1.5C within reach, for now — countering emissions from oil and gas, which continue to rise.

But even with an increasing array of clean energy options, reaching global net zero emissions by 2050 is dogged by some serious problems — particularly on how to decarbonize major sectors like shipping, aviation, long-haul trucking and steel manufacturing.

Amid a daily montage of climate disasters, the arrival of natural hydrogen seems an almost Hollywood plot twist.

“I get very philosophical, so excuse me, but of course it’s better to work with the Earth. We just have to know where to look,” said Webber, who has written hundreds of articles and books about energy and advises the US government.

“I’m an engineer but we don’t always have to engineer a solution. That’s been true for coal, oil, gas, wood, wind, solar, water, you name it. Why wouldn’t the Earth make hydrogen as well?”

Hydroma’s operations in Mali. In the past 15 years, the company has drilled 30 wells across an area the size of Switzerland in the landlocked West African nation (Courtesy of Hydroma)

Webber learned about natural hydrogen when he joined French energy company Engie as chief science and technology officer in 2018. There, he met geologist Isabella Moretti, the chief science officer, who he called the “godmother” of natural hydrogen.

Webber said he was “blown away” by what he learned from Moretti, one of a small band of scientists who has been studying natural hydrogen for decades.

“Instead of torturing nature to liberate hydrogen from water, or methane, you can go look for it,” Webber said. “There’s a lot of it, and it’s in a lot of places. As you dig into it, you discover that, actually, we’ve been stumbling over hydrogen for decades but it was a nuisance.

“What if we just change our mindset? It is a remarkable, transformational moment for the globe potentially.”

It’s hard to fathom in a world where atmospheric geoengineering — aka manipulating how much sunlight reaches Earth — is considered a climate solution, that we are only beginning to understand what is beneath our feet.

Dr Geoffrey Ellis, a geologist with the US Geological Survey [USGS] in Colorado, offered a theory. Hydrogen doesn’t exist in the same places as oil and gas and because it is a diffusive and reactive, it was thought it couldn’t accumulate in large amounts.

“Companies weren’t looking for it, or did see it and it wasn’t what they were exploring for, so they walked away from those places,” he told The Independent.

With more time on his hands during the pandemic, Ellis re-read a study, written by Alliou Diallo and colleagues, on the Bourakébougou discovery. Since then, he and a few others at USGS have focused their efforts on figuring out natural hydrogen’s potential.



As you dig into it, you discover that we’ve been stumbling over hydrogen for decades but it was a nuisance.

Dr Michael Webber, Professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin

A USGS simulation model estimated between tens of millions and tens of billions of megatons of hydrogen are in Earth’s crust. But an important caveat: much of that would be inaccessible to humans, either too deep or too far offshore, or too small amounts to exploit, Ellis said.

But if just 1 per cent was recoverable, that would be enough hydrogen to keep the world going for at least two centuries, even if there was a surge in demand for hydrogen.

“There’s still a lot of learning to be done to understand this better,” Ellis said. “But I think we could do it. We just need to do the research and figure it out.”

Despite growing enthusiasm, the challenges surrounding natural hydrogen are immense as even those heavily invested acknowledge.

There is still much to learn about how hydrogen forms and accumulates underground. “There is the prospect of a valuable new primary and even renewable energy source, but for long-term success, the industry will need new subsurface imaging technologies and new data processing techniques to identify potential hydrogen accumulations efficiently,” Rod Davies, hydrogen lead at net zero consultancy, Marakon told The Independent in an email.

He also noted that there may be “potential public resistance to a new form of energy that relies on the extraction of resources”.

Mining laws would need to be adapted in countries where hydrogen does not yet fall into any category that would allow an exploration or production permit to be requested, Moretti explained in a recent interview.

So-called fairy circles, located in the Namib Desert, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park of Namibia. Their presence is a sign that hydrogen is escaping from the Earth

 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Even if large amounts could be tapped underground, the next challenge would be storing and transporting hydrogen over long distances. Hydrogen is the lightest of all atoms and loves to make its escape into the atmosphere, so wastage becomes an issue. And it takes up a lot of space unless pressurized or liquefied, which are expensive.

There is a “mismatch” where natural hydrogen is being discovered and where it could be used, which would require massive investments in completely new infrastructure, said Dr Emre Gençer, a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.

“I think it will be part of the solution but we need to take it with a grain of salt,” he told The Independent.

For now, the oil and gas industry remains on the sidelines. “It’s not that they don’t believe in it, it’s more a stage and maturity thing,” Webber said. “If people figure it out, then they buy it. The wildcatters don’t mind that either, that’s how you get rich.”

Zgonnik suggested natural hydrogen is a “gift” for the fossil fuel industry and one that could provide new jobs. “It presents an opportunity to pivot from fossil fuels, using their skills, existing infrastructure and tools,” he said.

“Switching to renewables requires building new infrastructure, which is expensive and takes time. We need to make the clean energy transition much faster and leverage existing infrastructure for transmission and distribution to end users.”

But the initial problem is finding the stuff. The largest accumulation of white hydrogen to date was stumbled upon this summer by scientists who were studying methane at a mining basin in France.

Fairy circles, which appear across landscapes where hydrogen is present, are a giveaway, but in hundreds of other locations hydrogen has been seeping unnoticed out of the ground for decades.

The USGS plans to publish a map next year of promising US locations of natural hydrogen. The east and west coasts are likely prospects along with the Mid-Continental rift which runs from Minnesota down through Iowa and into Kansas.

But don’t grab a shovel just yet. “The map is at national scale, and very coarse resolution. You’re not going to be able to look at the map and say, ‘I’m going to buy a lease and put a well right there,’” Ellis said.

Election officials count the ballots in Mali’s referendum in Bamako on June 18, 2023, using the light from their cellphones. Mali often has electricity curtailment of up to eight hours a day (AFP via Getty Images)

Whatever the difficulties, the potential remains tantalizing for those on the frontlines of the experimental field. “We don’t know yet how efficient it will be, how quickly we will be able to scale up,” Zgonnik said. “But because the reserves of hydrogen on Earth could potentially supply all we need for the clean energy transition, and even more that, then it’s worth trying at least.”

And it’s hard to underestimate the potency of natural hydrogen in a country like Mali. More than 50 per cent of the population do not have electricity, and even for those who do, power can be curtailed up to eight hours a day. This not only makes daily life harder for its citizens but a lack of stable electricity has hampered the country’s economic progress.

“If you live in the Western world and had to think of living without electricity, you wouldn’t imagine what that means for quality of life,” said Asma Diallo, who took up her role at Hydroma after working in the green hydrogen industry in France.

“I saw hydrogen as having real potential for economic development in the African continent.

“This is an African project that was founded by an African, that has the potential to really change the energy mix in the region. It is very exciting and empowering.”

‘Super mosquito’ driving malaria surge in Africa, study confirms

Sarah Newey
Wed, 22 November 2023 

IT'S A MONSTER MOSQUITO!!!

The study revealed that in Dire Dawa, malaria cases increased 12-fold in the 2022 dry season, compared to 2019 - Simon Townsley

A “super mosquito” from Asia is driving an uptick in malaria across the Horn of Africa, scientists have confirmed for the first time.

In recent years, there has been speculation that the arrival of the Anopheles stephensi mosquito – native to parts of Asia and the Arabian peninsula – in at least five African countries could be behind an unexpected surge in malaria.

This increase has been dramatic and fast: in Djibouti, for instance, infections skyrocketed by 2,800 per cent in just eight years after the highly adaptable, city-loving super mosquito was first spotted in 2012.

But until now, the “impact of An. stephensi in malaria transmission in Africa has been anecdotal,” said Dr Luigi Sedda, an epidemiologist at Lancaster Medical School.

While experts theorised that the mosquito has played a major role – and the World Health Organization warned last December that it poses a “threat to malaria control and elimination” across Africa – no study had confirmed the link.

But in a new report, published in Nature Medicine, researchers tracked a specific outbreak in a university campus in Dire Dawa – a city in eastern Ethiopia, less than 150 miles from the border with Djibouti – and found the “strongest evidence to date” that the stephensi mosquito is driving urban malaria outbreaks in Africa.

The study revealed that in Dire Dawa, malaria cases increased 12-fold in the 2022 dry season, compared to 2019. To track the role played by the insect, researchers mapped where these bugs were living and compared that to the location of patients.

They also analysed which malaria parasites the insects were carrying, and found they were the same as the strains causing disease in people.

“We found a strong geographical and clinical interlink between An. stephensi and the [malaria parasite],” Dr Sedda, a co-author of the report, told the Telegraph. “This evidence is unique.”

Unlike the Anopheles gambiae, the most widespread carrier of malaria, the highly adaptable stephensi mosquito thrives in urban areas and breeds almost anywhere – in a dirty puddle between slum shacks, a rubbish dump, or even water in an abandoned car tyre.

It also survives in high temperatures in dry seasons, when malaria transmission usually lulls, and is resistant to many of the insecticides used to curb the parasitic disease.

“At the moment we don’t have a clear picture of the distribution of An. stephensi in Africa, apart from the Horn of Africa,” added Dr Sedda. Since it was first spotted in Djibouti in 2012, it has been found in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and recently northern Kenya – but surveillance is patchy, making it difficult to assess its overall prevalence.

In the Nature article, researchers also found that the mosquito was carrying malaria parasites resistant to existing treatments and diagnostics.

This is a known problem in the Horn of Africa, but the high prevalence of resistance revealed in the paper demonstrates the urgent need to develop new drug formulations if there’s any hope of eliminating the disease.

“In terms of drug-resistant parasites, this is not new in Africa, but the discovery of a sustained transmission of drug-resistant parasites by a new vector is worryingly,” said Dr Sedda.

Despite huge progress since the millennium, malaria remains one of the world’s deadliest diseases. According to the latest report, it killed roughly 619,000 people in 2021 – a slight drop from 625,000 in 2020, but up from 568,000 before the Covid pandemic struck.

“Sadly, apart from the good news of the development and approval of the first malaria vaccine, more is needed in terms of new drug formulations,” said Dr Sedda. “Malaria elimination is stalled and more needs to be done to understand the bionomics, distribution and resistance of the malaria autochthonous and invasive mosquitoes and parasites.”

Dr Fitsum Tadesse, a malariologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and co-author of the paper, added: “Given increasing reports of An. stephensi in Africa and the lack of urgency, the time window during which elimination of this mosquito from parts of the continent is possible is rapidly closing.”

Camembert row: French rage at EU plan to ban wooden box packaging producers claim will impact cheese

WAIT, WHAT?!
A new EU recycling rule which could see the traditional round wooden boxes used replaced with plastic.

Sky News
Wed, 22 November 2023


French cheesemakers are furious about a new EU recycling rule which could see the traditional round wooden boxes used to encase Camembert cheese replaced with plastic.

The European Parliament is set to vote on the proposed new regulation which will state that by 2030 all food packaging must be recyclable.

Jean-Paul Garraud, a member of the European Parliament for France's far-right Rassemblement National, said: "It is a matter of common sense. Don't touch our Camemberts!"

Some French producers fear the language of the proposal would mean the cheese - which takes its name from a village in Normandy and dates back to the 18th century - would no longer be encased in wooden boxes.

"Plastic heats up the cheese, and alters the product over the long term," one producer told French broadcaster BFM TV.

The box packaging represents 2,000 jobs in France and 45 firms would be affected, Claire Lacroix, chief executive of the Lacroix Group which manufacturers 200 million boxes per year, told TF1info.

Many people have protested against the proposal, calling it a matter of national pride for France.

French MEP Laurence Sailliet said: "Our French cheeses are loved all over the world. But who can imagine a Camembert or a Mont d'Or without its wooden strapping? Packaging them in plastic would be a gustatory and environmental aberration.

"Europe must know how to protect the environment, but never to the detriment of the specific characteristics of its member states," she added.

Even if the boxes are not banned under the rules, they would be subject to new recycling and reuse regulations that could make them costly.

Stephanie Yon-Courtin, an MEP originally from Normandy, said wooden boxes used to package cheeses like Camembert don't have a dedicated recycling circuit because it would be too costly.

She is part of the centrist Renew Europe group in parliament which has tabled an amendment to exempt wooden packaging from the proposed recycling regulations.

Virginijus Sinkevicius, European commissioner for the environment, said on Tuesday the EU would make sure the raw-milk specialised non-industrial Camemberts - those that have a controlled designation of origin - will be exempt from any regulation.

The vote on Wednesday will include such an exemption.

"Indeed, in the EU, certain food packaging made of wood, textiles, ceramics are placed on the market in very small quantities, and many of them protected by the food quality legislation," he said.

"Such packaging may have difficulties to be recycled at scale and is open for specific exemptions."