Climate change is driving supply chain shortages — and your supermarkets are not prepared

The problem with our supply chains can be explained by climate change — and America is in no way ready for it

By MATTHEW ROZSA

SALON
DECEMBER 19, 2021 

Out of control fire on Narrow Neck Plateau, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Australia. Climate change is causing extreme weather, prolonged droughts and increasing bushfires | Empty store shelves are seen in a supermarket as people has been stocking up for food and other essential items fearing the supply shortages

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Before the days of antiseptic supermarkets, with their fluorescent lights and linoleum floors, food was sold in very different types of markets, most of which would not pass muster to a modern health inspector. Take Medieval Europe: Even the sturdiest contemporary carnivore might have felt a bit queasy at the sight of animals being slaughtered, which would happen not far from where the cuts of meat were ultimately sold (if they were cut up at all). Farmers would wheel in their produce from plots of land within walking distance of their homes, or at most a short horse ride away. By contrast, citizens of the early 21st century are used to their food coming to them in the same way as their cars, their clothes and their household appliances — through sprawling international supply chains.

Unfortunately, just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest leak, a supply chain can become inefficient or fall apart if there is even a slight hiccup. This is especially so when the supply chains overlap in so many ways that it's more of a "supply labyrinth" or "supply knot" than a supply chain.

Consumers may already be starting to feel that the more disparaging terms are more appropriate. Retailers are reporting rising costs for holiday-returns, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an inquiry into a number of supermarket chains, retailers and food corporations to get to the bottom of the seemingly endless product shortages.

Based on this reporter's own journey to a pair of local retail outlets, including Walmart and Target, it was noted that customer complaints seemed to fall into three major categories: Electronics (like video game consoles or VR headsets), frozen food items (like chicken wings and pizzas) and sanitary products like (you guessed it) toilet paper. Each of those items has a series of interconnected supply chains, from the foods themselves to the added ingredients and the packaging, not to mention (in the case of frozen items) extra care taken for transportation and storage.

It is literally impossible to map the origin of every single item used in every single one, much less plug all of that data into one central database for reference. This means that, when a major disruptive event occurs across the planet, this delicate and interconnected web of chains can be easily disrupted in countless untraceable ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic was just such a worldwide disruptive event.

"The global economy is a complex system of national and local economies," Christa Court, an assistant professor of regional economics at the University of Florida, told Salon by email. The pandemic brought about an abrupt halt to major economic sectors across the planet, which in and of itself had ripple effects on countless smaller business transactions. Not all of these could simply wind back up once the lockdowns were reversed. Even then, those reversals often did not immediately allow a full restoration of economic activity, and many times were applied so erratically that they wound up being integrated into the business environment.

"By now, we are all familiar with the term 'pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions,' whereby the evolution of the pandemic itself (trends in cases and deaths) as well as the policy responses to the pandemic ('shutdowns,' stay-at-home orders, vaccine or mask mandates, etc.) have resulted in massive shifts in supply and/or demand for many products and sectors," Court pointed out.

When it comes to food-based supply chains, climate change is another major culprit, albeit one that is very difficult to quantify. Unlike other economic sectors, where there can disruptions from the demand end as well as the supply end, people never decide they have had enough of food. (They may, of course, alter their dietary preferences.) When there are supply chain issues, it is usually because some unwanted outside variable has made it more difficult for those who produce food to do their job. Climate change causes many of those unwanted outside variables: Warming temperatures harmed American corn yields in 2010 and 2012, as well as $220 million in losses for Michigan cherries in 2012. As weather continues to warm, crops that depend on precise temperatures at specific times will be thrown off kilter or possibly wiped out. While moderate warming and carbon dioxide increases will help some plants grow faster, even they will ultimately be harmed by the droughts and floods that will harm so many other crops.

"A major drought in California or freezing temperatures in Florida can throw a wrench into this market," Dr. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an associate professor of applied economics at Cornell University, told Salon in August. "Those events can drastically reduce the supply of oranges from those regions. While oranges can be produced in other areas (e.g. Brazil), acquiring them is much more expensive especially if the supply chains are not already established and prepared to larger volumes."

In addition to climate change, there is also the built-in structural problem of capitalism itself: Concentration of power, and the fact that supply chain disruptions also exist because the global economic system is built around what individual powerful corporations have decided will maximize their profits. A system that prioritizes profitability over everything else will make choices about who gets what first based on how they can make the most money, not on who needs it most or what will be most efficient. That means that supply chain disruptions, though not ideal, are also not viewed as a company's absolute worst case scenario.

"To analyze supply chain disruptions as if they were exceptional is a mistake," Dr. Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon by email. "They are regularly recurring products of capitalist decision-making. It is only because of capitalists' buck-passing that their media focus us on the conditions (forever changing) and away from the profit-maximizing strategies of capitalists' responses to those changing conditions."

If there is one silver lining to the supply chain crises, it is that an increasing number of those companies are deciding that it makes more sense to "re-shore" jobs than it does to have sprawling, worldwide supply chains. The term "re-shore" is a play on "offshore," which refers to moving jobs overseas. "Reshoring" means those jobs would be brought back to the United States.

But until reshoring happens, the supply chain in the United States will remain as fickle as the pandemic has proven it to be. Recently, an image of a plastic container of pears went viral for its packaging: "Grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand," read the package, which was sold in the United States. Of course, there are plenty of pears grown in the United States; these pears' three-continent trip was not only wasteful, but fragile in the face of disruption — and the mere existence of three-continent pears speaks to the greater problem.

MATTHEW ROZSA
Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.MORE FROM MA

Study: Climate Change Puts Farmed Seafood Production At Risk

File image courtesy Thomas Bjørkan / CC BY-SA 3.0

PUBLISHED DEC 14, 2021 3:23 PM BY UBC

 

The supply of farmed seafood such as salmon and mussels are projected to drop 16 per cent globally by 2090 if no action is taken to mitigate climate change, according to a new UBC study.

Ocean-farmed seafood or mariculture is often seen as a panacea to the problems of depleted stocks of wild fish and growing human demand, and is expected to grow substantially in the coming years, says lead author Dr. Muhammed Oyinlola (he/him), a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). But the new modelling study highlights the industry is as vulnerable to the effects of climate change as any other. “If we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, the amount of seafood such as fish or mussels able to be farmed sustainably will increase by only eight per cent by 2050, and decline by 16 per cent by 2090.”

By comparison, in a low emissions scenario where the action is taken to mitigate climate change, mariculture is projected to grow by about 17 per cent by the mid-21st century and by about 33 per cent by the end of the century, relative to the 2000s.

The model takes into account many factors, including changing ocean temperatures, suitable mariculture areas in the future, and the supply of fishmeal and fish oil. It examined approximately 70 per cent of the world’s mariculture production as of 2015, focusing on Exclusive Economic Zones, where most of the world’s seafood farming occurs.

Climate change will affect mariculture production differently depending on where farms are in the world, and what they produce, says Dr. Oyinlola. The hardest-hit regions in the high-emissions scenario— Norway, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, and China—could see their mariculture production decline by as much as 40 to 90 per cent.

Climate effects on mariculture include changes in the area of viable ocean in which to farm fish as well as the stock of food used to feed them. Fish farms tend to use fishmeal and fish oil, which are largely composed of smaller fish such as herring and anchovy – stocks which are also threatened by climate change.

“Some regions produce more bivalves, such as mussels, oysters and clams, and in these regions, the impact is smaller,” Dr. Oyinlola said. “In regions that produce more finfish, such as salmon, the impact will be high due to reduction in the supply of fishmeal and fish oil.”

Under current carbon emission rates, finfish farming, such as salmon, is projected to decrease globally by three per cent by 2050, and 14 per cent by 2090. Bivalve farming is projected to increase by 2050 and decrease by 2090 under both climate scenarios.

Countries where mariculture is prominent especially for finfish production, such as Norway, Iceland, Finland, Chile, and Bangladesh, will be hit hardest, according to Dr. Oyinlola, whereas regions that produce more bivalves will be more stable or in Canada’s case, will grow.

Vegetarian fish: feeding fish soybeans

The study also found that substituting fishmeal and fish oil for plant-based foods such as soybeans could help alleviate the effects of climate change for fish farms.

When a quarter of the fish food was substituted with alternatives, under a low emissions scenario, mariculture production was projected to increase by 25 per cent by 2050 and 31 per cent by 2090.

With no change to current emissions, when a quarter of the fish food was substituted with alternatives, mariculture production was projected to increase by 15 per cent by 2050 and four per cent by 2090. When half the food was substituted in both climate scenarios, these percentages increased.

“This study highlights the need to diversify mariculture development from the current focus on fish,” said senior author Dr. William Cheung (he/him), IOF professor and director. Climate-adapted mariculture would include species that are not dependent on fishmeal and fish oil, such as shellfish or algae, or those that can utilize non-fish-based feed. “Farming these species generally helps to reduce exposure of seafood farming to climate hazards.”

While there is enthusiasm about ocean mariculture helping to increase the production of seafood, the study shows if humans don’t relieve climate change, such enthusiasm will be tempered, says Dr. Cheung. “Climate change affects everything, including aspects of seafood farming we’ve not previously considered. We need to act, and quickly, to mitigate climate change rather than rely on one solution to solve all our seafood production problems.”

This article appears courtesy of UBC and may be found in its original form here. 

Top image: Fish cages at a Norwegian fish farm (File image courtesy Thomas Bjørkan / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The year’s top 10 science stories, chosen by scientists

Billionaires in space, an end-date for deforestation, facing up to racial bias in healthcare – we asked scientists to share the most important developments of 2021

Jeff Bezos launches on Blue Origin’s New Shepard, Van Horn, Texas, 20 July. 

Photograph: Blue Origin/Zuma/Shutterstock

Sun 19 Dec 2021

The billionaire space race

Space made the headlines on many occasions in 2021: the landing of Nasa’s Perseverance rover on Mars, the arrival of a rare meteorite in the UK, the launch of a mission to hit an asteroid, the discovery of almost 200 new planets beyond the solar system – all shared their moment of fame with the public. However, the most extensive coverage of space news was probably of the 11-minute flight to outside the edge of Earth’s atmosphere made by William Shatner, AKA Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise, in October 2021.

The flight was the second made by the New Shepard rocket, named in honour of the first American in space, Alan Shepard, and operated by Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos. New Shepard’s first passenger flight in July 2021 carried Bezos and three others, but Richard Branson pipped Bezos to the post of being the first billionaire to make a space flight by taking off in Virgin Galactic’s rocket, Unity, nine days earlier. A back-and-forth bicker about whether Branson had been into space has rumbled along ever since. Branson’s flight only reached 55 miles (88km) above the Earth’s surface, so didn’t cross the Kármán line, the boundary 100km above the surface that marks the edge of space. Bezos’s flight did.

Why should we care about extremely wealthy individuals who can afford their own spacecraft? 

Monica Grady

These voyages are significant technological developments. But why should we care about a handful of the fortunate few who have been transported into space by extremely wealthy individuals who can afford their own spacecraft? The importance comes in what this represents for the future. We have seen, over the last decade or so, the development of individual private companies building satellites. Now we have companies – like Elon Musk’s SpaceX – with their own rocket programmes, winning contracts from government agencies to carry out launches for them. SpaceX has also carried cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa.

Space tourism might be thought a natural next step in space exploration – and there is nothing wrong with private enterprise taking this forward as long as it is monitored and regulated appropriately. And that is where these flights are significant. They open up a whole new series of issues to be addressed before space travel can move from control by governments to the private sector.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation, an agency of the UN, oversees policies to ensure safe, secure, effective and fair access to the skies. The UN also has an Office for Outer Space Affairs, which is responsible for application of the Outer Space Treaty. I do not know if the two organisations are discussing under whose responsibility space tourism falls – but I do know that the Outer Space Treaty, which came into force in 1967, is almost solely concerned with the activities of governments, not private individuals or companies, and so should be revisited as a matter of urgency.

Leaving all this aside, I thought there was a much more exciting first in the history of spaceflight that occurred in 2021. It was the flight of Ingenuity, the little helicopter carried by Perseverance to Mars – the first flight on another planet. Now that is an achievement to write home about. 

Monica Grady

Monica Grady is professor of planetary and space science at the Open University

Racial biases in the healthcare system

Racial biases in healthcare were exposed – for example, pulse oximeters take less accurate readings from darker skin. Photograph: Grace Cary/Getty Images

2021 was the year when it became widely understood that inequalities in health outcomes for black and Asian people were partly the result of a mix of professional, systemic and technical biases that together produce institutional racism.

It was a year when many people bought pulse oximeters believing that, if they became ill with Covid-19, a finger-tip reading would alert them to seek medical assistance. However, black and Asian people learned that their pulse oximeters were three times more likely to miss low oxygen levels in dark skin. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, who is himself from a Pakistani family, launched an investigation in November. However, this is in a pandemic where platitudes that “we are all in the same boat” swiftly gave way to a reality of “we are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat”, as it became clear that black and Asian people were much more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people. Clearly, technical biases do not help.
This is a pandemic where ‘we are all in the same boat’ became ‘we are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat’Ann Phoenix

2021 also saw publicity given to revelations that black and Asian women were respectively four and two times more likely to die in childbirth, and to have more stillborn infants than white women. These systemic, institutional biases were not even recorded in national statistics until reported by MBRRACE (Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the country). The Office for National Statistics, which has now convened an Inclusive Data Taskforce to ensure that everyone counts and is counted, will no doubt produce figures in the future.

The oximeter and childbirth examples say little by themselves about professional practices and discrimination. However, in May 2021 the airing of a BBC documentary, Subnormal: A British Scandal, led to an apology from the BPS Division of Educational and Child Psychology for its history in the 1960s and 1970s of diagnosing large numbers of black children as educationally subnormal and having them removed from mainstream education. Yet, even the Inner London Education Authority had documented that they knew many were not “subnormal”.

Taken together, these examples point to a healthcare system where black and Asian people have reasons to question whether they will gain equal treatment. As the pandemic has shown, unless we are pulled into the same boat, no one can be sure that they are safe. Building trust that, for example, vaccines are designed with black as well as white people in mind, requires that trust more generally is built. 2021 may, hopefully, prove to have been a landmark year when enough people recognised the importance of building genuine equality in the healthcare system. 

Ann Phoenix

Ann Phoenix is professor of psychosocial studies at University College London

Cop26: time to act

A Cop26 protest in London, 6 November 2021. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Global heating isn’t just the story of this year; it’s the big beast in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of every other scientific development this century. But there were some big science milestones this year, and a significant shift of emphasis.

In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) published the first chunk of its Sixth Assessment Report, which covered the state of our knowledge about the climate system and what science can tell us about what will happen next. The overall message was the same as the Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, but even clearer and stronger: things are bad, and drastic action is required to keep the worst consequences at bay. But there has been a significant shift this year from hand-wringing to action, even though progress on the “action” bit is still far too slow.

The media focus on events at Cop26 rather than the climate science itself is a good thing: more science will always be important, but we already have more than enough science to act. The next steps are about the flow of money, political and humanitarian priorities, and the messy business of global collaboration. But robust science will keep that process honest: we can predict the consequences of our actions, and those predictions must motivate us all, government, business and individuals alike.

 Helen Czerski

Helen Czerski is a physicist and oceanographer at University College London

Fibromyalgia: new understanding could lead to treatments for chronic pain

Scientists have discovered the role antibodies play in fibromyalgia and, possibly, other chronic pain conditions. 

Photograph: Dr_Microbe/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Fibromyalgia – characterised by widespread pain, crippling fatigue and emotional distress – affects 1 in 40 people, predominantly women, but has no known cause or cure. Like many other chronic pain conditions, it is considered a “functional neurological disorder”, best explained by differences in how the brain processes and attends to pain signals. The current treatments therefore include CBT and stepped exercise, but have limited efficacy.

A King’s College-led study published in 2021 may change all of that. Researchers injected mice with antibodies from fibromyalgia patients and found they developed difficulties related to the patients’ symptoms: reduced movement, grip weakness, and increased sensitivity to cold and pressure. Mice injected with antibodies from healthy adults did not develop these problems.

The authors conclude that fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disorder. If replicated, this finding would revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of this, and possibly other, chronic pain conditions. The mice in the study recovered when the antibodies had cleared from their systems, raising the hope that treatments that reduce antibodies, such as plasma exchange, may end the misery of fibromyalgia for millions of people across the globe. 

Francesca Happé

Francesca Happé is professor of cognitive neuroscience at King’s College London

A boom in precise protein-structure prediction by AI

DeepMind’s AlphaFold algorithm created a database covering 99% of human proteins – opening up new avenues of drug discovery. 

Photograph: Deepmind/PA

In more than 60 years since the first detailed structure of a protein was determined at atomic resolution by X-ray crystallography, a series of increasingly powerful experimental techniques had resulted, by 2020, in structural elucidation for well over a third of all proteins encoded by the human genome. Nevertheless, a large part of the proteins remained intractable for traditional laboratory methods, resulting in a major gap in our efforts to make sense of the protein-coding genome sequence information. 2021 has seen major advances in overcoming this limitation, based on AI-powered computational structure-prediction methods of unprecedented accuracy.

In July, DeepMind’s second generation of the AlphaFold algorithm was used to generate a comprehensive atlas of protein structures for almost 99% of all human proteins, including tens of thousands of structures for critically important components of the human body that had evaded previous experimental characterisation. Excitingly, all this information is freely available to the global research community through the Alphafold Database hosted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge.

This breakthrough was followed by another publication in August in which a group at the University of Washington in Seattle took AlphaFold’s AI approach to the next level. In a living cell, proteins rarely carry out their functions in isolation; instead, they engage in a complex molecular dance guided by protein-protein interactions. The enhanced algorithm managed to accurately predict the molecular details of these interactions, taking us an important step forward towards an understanding of the dynamics of human cell physiology.

Combined with the massive acceleration of genome sequencing, these new computational tools for predicting the detailed three-dimensional structure of the cellular machinery are rapidly being deployed in laboratories worldwide, enabling new strategies for drug discovery and making sense of the function of the human body. And the story of AI applications in biology is not going to end here. Watch this space in 2022. 

Eriko Takano

Eriko Takano is professor of synthetic biology at the University of Manchester

Extreme weather becomes more extreme

The dangers of global heating were illustrated by extreme weather events around the world, including destructive flooding around in the Rhineland and its environs. Photograph: Adam Berry/Getty Images

The last year has been anticipated by climate scientists for a good while, with both the delayed Cop26 conference and latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report finally released. But it has been the unexpected aspects of nature – and the inability of governments to properly prepare for them – that has provided the reality check of climate risk in 2021.

The “heat dome” that inflated itself and sat over North America this summer was perhaps the moment that made climate scientists go wide-eyed. The fact that temperature records were not just broken, but completely obliterated across wide parts of Canada and the US, was the first indication that something new was happening. When the heat turned to fire, destroying millions of acres of forest, wiping out whole communities, the academic oddity became a frightening reality.
The fact that temperature records were completely obliterated was the first indication that something new was happening.Hannah Cloke

Heatwaves and fires in the eastern Mediterranean had a similar effect, while parts of Australia, having suffered years of drought and fire, were flooded. The devastating floods that killed more than 200 people in the world’s most developed region around the Rhine showed that money and democracy are no protection against nature at her angriest. They also showed that advances in weather and flood forecasting are useless unless authorities heed their warnings and act swiftly. 

Hannah Cloke

Hannah Cloke is professor of hydrology at the University of Reading

Record numbers of children living with obesity

One in four 10-year-olds is now obese, and figures are much worse in deprived areas. Photograph: Getty Images

The most significant story of the year for me was not a breakthrough but a setback. In November the National Child Measurement Programme revealed a shocking increase in one year of the numbers of primary schoolchildren in England living with obesity – up from a fifth to a quarter of those aged 10-11. More shocking are the widening inequalities – 14% of children in the most affluent neighbourhoods live with obesity, compared with 34% in the most deprived.

The pandemic has exacerbated these trends, but they long predate it. Poverty drives obesity, as do environments that make healthy eating and physical activity increasingly difficult. Fast food outlets, junk food adverts, pedestrian injuries and air pollution are far greater in our poorest neighbourhoods, and green spaces far less common. Evidence from cities improving these environments shows promise.

Creating healthier towns and cities is challenging, and resisted by powerful commercial interests, but its impacts go well beyond childhood obesity. It would improve children’s mental health, reduce adult obesity and in turn dementia, type 2 diabetes and many cancers. Re-greening our urban environments, prioritising play and pedestrians over traffic would also contribute to a net zero world. Reversing this setback for children’s health through science-led policies could then become the breakthrough story, protecting us all, and our planet. 

Theresa Marteau

Theresa Marteau is a behavioural scientist and director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit, University of Cambridge

The Winchcombe meteorite: a gift from space

In February a meteorite landed on a driveway in Winchcombe, Glos. Analysis suggested its origins lay in an object near Jupiter.

 Photograph: Trustees of the Natural History Museum/PA

On 28 February 2021, there were more than 1,000 reports of an unusual streak of light across the skies of the UK. But scientists were already on the case – the UK Fireball Alliance’s cameras had picked up the signal and were busy estimating a landing site. The fireball was a meteor, an extraterrestrial remnant of our early solar system hurtling at hypervelocity through our atmosphere, ending its journey in pieces, scattered across rural Gloucestershire.

A meteor is more than just a remarkable sight; we can back-track its trajectory through the darkness to work out where it came from, and also predict where fragments will land. Recovery teams were deployed, and multiple pieces were found in a family driveway and a nearby sheep field. The meteorite – the first of its kind recovered in the UK for 30 years – was a primitive “carbonaceous chondrite”: a rare specimen containing materials essentially unaltered since the formation of the solar system circa 4.5bn years ago.

To recover an uncontaminated primitive meteorite is unusual, and allows us an opportunity to learn about the basic building blocks of planets, and how the Earth came to possess the resources required to sustain life. Analysis suggests that the Winchcombe meteorite comes from an object near Jupiter’s orbit which contains water and ice, and has a chemical makeup similar to our Sun.

As scientists, we spend a lot of time looking up and out at the vastness of space. Missions like Jaxa’s Hayabusa2 and Nasa’s Osiris-Rex have been sent to asteroids with the express purpose of returning samples to Earth, and the recently launched Nasa Dart mission aims to test the technology required to divert larger and more threatening space rocks heading our way. But the Winchcombe meteorite is like a gift from the universe, landing on our doorstep, delivering a sample of the early solar system directly to us for analysis and inspiration.

 Emma Bunce

Prof Emma Bunce is head of physics and astronomy at the University of Leicester, and president of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Fatty RNA particles to the rescue, for some at least

The benefits of the RNA Covid-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna were felt around (some parts of) the globe. 

Photograph: Sumaya Hisham/Reuters

While the first vaccine made from genes was approved last December, it was only in 2021 that we learned how effective the Pfizer jab was in the real world. The idea is that this genetic material, known as ribonucleic acid, or RNA for short, is transported into cells where the antigen is manufactured to create the immunity from disease and death. In theory, these RNA vaccines could be tweaked in response to new variants.

Two other things make RNA vaccines remarkable. First, it took 10 months from sequence to vaccine approval, a remarkable sprint when it normally takes a decade. Second, the vaccines introduced tiny fatty particles safely into mainstream healthcare. RNA vaccines are packaged within tiny fatty particles and these fatty shuttle buses are absolutely essential when it comes to getting RNA into the cells.

This excellent science has highlighted two other issues. Vaccines do prevent serious disease but do not always stop transmission, and we will need to rapidly halt transmission in future pandemics. Our economies depend on this. Additionally vaccine inequity makes a mockery of international vaccination efforts, as illustrated by the Omicron variant. While vaccination rates in the UK hover at 70%, the comparable figure for the African continent is just over 4%.

 Ijeoma F Uchegbu

Ijeoma F Uchegbu is professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience at University College London

The role of nature in tackling global heating is finally recognised

World leaders at Cop26 pledged to end deforestation by 2030. 

Photograph: Alamy

This year, a huge scientific effort over many decades finally paid off in policy terms. The United Nations climate conference held in Glasgow (Cop26) has been labelled “Nature’s COP” because of the high profile given to conserving and restoring natural ecosystems, in particular forests, as a way of tackling global heating. On just the second day, world leaders (now more than 140, covering more than 90% of the world’s forests) pledged to end deforestation by 2030.

Data demonstrating the importance of forests to the planet’s carbon balance has been extremely hard won. Literally thousands of scientists have been measuring tree growth, tree death, and emissions, from thousands of forest plots, over many, many years. Collaborations such as ForestPlots.net, RainFor and the Global Ecosystems Monitoring network have done incredible work drawing together and standardising these essential field measurements. The resulting data has demonstrated, for example, that the vital role of intact tropical forests in soaking up anthropogenic carbon emissions is starting to reverse, and have allowed calculations of the potential contribution natural climate solutions could make to tackling the climate crisis.

There is widespread scepticism about the extent to which the Glasgow leaders’ declaration on deforestation can be delivered: similar pledges in the past have spectacularly failed. However, such clear recognition that there is no path to net zero without nature is a very positive step.

 Julia PG Jones

Julia PG Jones is professor of conservation science at Bangor University

Shifting conferences online cuts carbon footprint 94%

by Blaine Friedlander, Cornell University

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The COVID-19 global pandemic—unexpectedly—has shown humanity a new way to reduce climate change: Scrap in-person meetings and conventions.

Moving a professional conference completely online reduces its carbon footprint by 94%, and shifting it to a hybrid model, with no more than half of conventioneers online, curtails the footprint to 67%, according to a new Cornell University-led study in Nature Communication.

The annual carbon footprint for the global event and convention industry is on par with the yearly greenhouse gas emissions of the entire U.S., according to the new paper.

"We all go to conferences. We fly, we drive, we check in to a hotel, give a talk, meet people—and we're done," said senior author Fengqi You, professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell University and a senior faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

"But we looked at this problem comprehensively and behind the scenes, conventions generate a lot of carbon, consume a lot of energy, print a lot of paper, offer a lot of food—not to mention create municipal solid waste. Yet, video conferencing also requires energy and equipment use. Conference planning means a lot to consider."

By studying the amount of carbon needed, adding regional conference hubs at the right locations and boosting virtual participation levels, carbon-reduction benefits can be achieved, You said.

"But environmental benefits become less prominent as the number of regional hubs increases" he said. In 2017, more than 1.5 billion participants—from about 180 countries—traveled to attend conferences, according to the paper.

The number of regular, international convention events—of more than 50 people—doubles every 10 years, and the convention industry's market size is expected to grow at a 11.2% rate over the next decade.

The growth leads to substantial greenhouse gas emissions, said Yanqiu Tao, the first author of the paper and a doctoral student at You's Process-Energy-Environmental Systems Engineering (PEESE) lab.

The carbon footprint per individual participant reaches up to 6,600 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, as reported by life cycle assessment studies.

For in-person conferences, Tao and You suggest participants should reduce stopovers when booking flights. Hybrid and in-person meeting organizers should carefully select hubs and take transportation modes and distances into consideration. For virtual conferences, carbon-reduction opportunities include improving the energy efficiency of the information and communication technology sector and increasing the share of renewable energy in the power grids.

"There is a lot of interest and attention on climate change, so moving from in-person conferences to hybrid or remote events would be beneficial," You said. "But we should also be cautious and optimize decisions in terms of selecting hubs and determining participant levels for hybrid meetings."Virtual conferences are better for the environment and more inclusive

More information: Yanqiu Tao et al, Trend towards virtual and hybrid conferences may be an effective climate change mitigation strategy, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27251-2

Journal information: Nature Communications 

Provided by Cornell University 

Mass anti-coup protests in Sudan mark uprising anniversary

Samy Magdy
The Associated Press

Published Sunday, December 19, 2021 

WOMEN LEAD THE REVOLUTION 

People protests against the October military coup and subsequent deal that reinstated Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in Khartoum, Sudan, Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali)

CAIRO -- Sudanese took to the streets in the capital of Khartoum and elsewhere across the country for mass protests Sunday against an October military takeover and a subsequent deal that reinstated Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok but sidelined the movement.

The demonstrations mark the third anniversary of the uprising that eventually forced the military removal of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir and his Islamist government in April 2019.

Sudan then followed a fragile path toward democracy and ruled by a joint military-civilian government. The Oct. 25 coup has rattled the transition and led to relentless street protests.

Video footage circulated online purported to show tens of thousands protesters marching in the streets of Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman on Sunday. Protesters were seen waving the Sudanese flag and white ones with printed images of those killed in the uprising and ensuing protests.

Ahead of the demonstrations, Sudan's authorities tightened security across the capital, barricading government and military buildings to prevent protesters from reaching the military's headquarters and the presidential palace. They also blocked major roads and bridges linking Khartoum and Omdurman across the Nile River.

Security forces used tear gas to disperse protesters headed toward the palace on the bank of the Blue Nile in the heart of Khartoum, according to activist Nazim Sirag. The Sudan Doctors Committee said some protesters were injured, but didn't provide a tally.

Activists described chaotic scenes, with many protesters rushing to side streets from the tear gas. Later, footage showed protesters at one of the palace's gates chanting: "The people want the downfall of the regime" -- a slogan heard in the Arab Spring uprisings that began in late 2010. Those movements forced the removal of leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

The Sudanese Professionals' Association, which spearheaded the uprising against al-Bashir, called on protesters to gather outside the palace and block roads with make-shift barricades.

There were also protests in elsewhere in the country, such as the coastal city of Port Sudan and the northern city of Atbara, the birthplace of the uprising against al-Bashir.

The protests were called by the pro-democracy movement that led the uprising against al-Bashir and stuck a power-sharing deal with the generals in the months that followed his ouster.

Relations between the generals and the civilians in the transitional government were shaky and capped by the military's Oct. 25 takeover that removed Hamdok's government.

Hamdok was reinstated last month amid international pressure in a deal that calls for an independent technocratic Cabinet under military oversight led by him. The agreement included the release of government officials and politicians detained since the coup.


Talks are underway to agree on what Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, head of the ruling Sovereign Council, described as a "new political charter" focused on establishing a broader consensus among all political forces and movements.

Addressing Sudanese late Saturday ahead of the protests, Hamdok said he stuck the Nov. 21 deal with the military mainly to prevent bloodshed. He warned that the country could slide further into chaos amid uphill economic and security challenges.

"Today, we are facing a retreat in the path of our revolution that threatens the country's security and integrity," Hamdok said, adding that the agreement was meant to preserve achievements his government made in the past two years, and to "protect our nation from sliding to a new international isolation."

"The deal, in my view, is the most effective and inexpensive means to return to the course of civic and democratic transition," he said.

Hamdok urged political parties and movements to agree on a "national charter" to complete the democratic transition and achieve peace with rebel groups.

The pro-democracy movement has meanwhile insisted that power be handed over to a civilian government to lead the transition. Their relentless protests follow the slogan: "No negotiations, no compromise, no power-sharing" with the military.

The list of demands also includes restructuring the military and other security agencies under civilian oversight and disbanding militias. One is the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary force that grew out of janjaweed militias and is accused of atrocities during the Darfur conflict and most recently against pro-democracy protesters.

Sunday's protests have "unified all revolutionary forces behind a single demand: handing over power to civilians," said Mohammed Yousef al-Mustafa, a spokesman for the Sudanese Professionals' Association.

"Prime Minister Hamdok must declare a clear position and choose whether to join the people or continue siding with the generals," he told The Associated Press.

The continued protests since the coup have increased pressure on the military and Hamdok, who has yet to announce his Cabinet.

Security forces used violence, including firing live ammunition at protesters, in the past round of demonstrations, according to activists. At least 45 people were killed and hundreds wounded in protests triggered by the coup, according to a tally by a Sudanese medical group.

Hundreds of thousands march to Sudan presidential palace in protest against coup

Reuters
Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir
Publishing date: Dec 19, 2021 • 

KHARTOUM — Hundreds of thousands of people marched to the presidential palace in Sudan’s capital Khartoum on Sunday in protest at the Oct. 25 military coup, drawing volleys of tear gas and stun grenades from security forces, Reuters witnesses said.

Some protesters managed to reach the gates of the palace and the protest’s organizers called on more to join a planned sit-in there after sundown. Reuters was not able to verify how many were able to reach the palace. Live video footage showed those who remained being tear gassed heavily.

The outpouring of protest, the ninth major demonstration since the coup and one of the largest, marked the 2018 burning of a ruling party building which touched off a popular uprising that led to the overthrow of long-ruling Islamist autocrat Omar al-Bashir.

Protests against the coup have continued even after the reinstatement of the prime minister last month, with demonstrators demanding no more military involvement at all in government in a transition towards free elections.

Demonstrators marched down a main road leading to the palace, chanting “the people are stronger and retreat is impossible,” with some darting into side streets to dodge volleys of tear gas.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or arrests.

Despite security forces blocking bridges over the Nile river into the capital early on Sunday, protesters were able to cross a bridge connecting the city of Omdurman to central Khartoum but were met with heavy tear gas, Reuters witnesses said.

Reuters witnesses also watched protesters crossing a bridge from Bahri, north of Khartoum, to the capital.

Images shared on social media showed protests taking place in several other cities including Port Sudan, El-Deain, Madani and Kassala.

FLAGS AND MASKS

Early on Sunday joint army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces sealed off major roads leading to the airport and the army headquarters and they were heavily deployed around the presidential palace.

Protesters also blocked roads leading to the main route of the march. Some were carrying Sudanese flags and photos of protesters who were killed in demonstrations in the past few months. Others were handing out COVID-19 masks and carrying stretchers in anticipation of people being wounded.

The Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors says 45 people have been killed in crackdowns on protesters since the Oct. 25 coup.

It was the ninth in a series of demonstrations against the coup, which have continued even after the military signed a deal on Nov. 21 with Hamdok, who had been under house arrest, and released him and other high-profile political detainees.

On Saturday night, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok warned in a statement https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/sudans-stability-unity-are-risk-pm-says-amid-mass-protests-2021-12-18 that Sudan’s revolution faced a major setback and that political intransigence from all sides threatened the country’s unity and stability.

The military and civilian political parties had shared power since Bashir’s removal. But the agreement reinstating Hamdok angered protesters, who previously had seen him as a symbol of resistance to military rule and denounced his deal with the military as a betrayal.

Civilian parties, and neighborhood resistance committees that have organized several mass protests, demand full civilian rule under the slogan “no negotiation, no partnership, no legitimacy.”

On Saturday night and early Sunday morning, people arrived in bus convoys from other states, including North Kordofan and Gezira, to join the protests in Khartoum, witnesses said. 

 (Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir, writing by Nafisa Eltahir and Sarah El Safty, editing by Mark Heinrich and Susan Fenton)

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2022: A major revolution in robotics
A world class roboticist on why everything is about to change.


Written by Greg Nichols, Contributor

ZDNET
Posted in Robotics on December 14, 2021 | Topic: Robotics


For a while now, those who track robotics development have taken note of a quiet revolution in the sector. While self-driving cars have grabbed all the headlines, the work happening at the intersection of AI, machine vision, and machine learning is fast becoming the foundation for the next phase of robotics.

By combining machine vision with learning capabilities, roboticists are opening a wide range of new possibilities like vision-based drones, robotic harvesting, robotic sorting in recycling, and warehouse pick and place. We're finally at the inflection point: The moment where these applications are becoming good enough to provide real value in semi-structured environments where traditional robots could never succeed.

To discuss this exciting moment and how it's going to fundamentally change the world we live in, I connected with Pieter Abbeel, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research lab. He is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Covariant and host of the excellent The Robot Brains podcast.

In other words, he's got robotics bon fides, and what he says about the near future of automation is nothing short of astounding.

GN: You call AI Robotics a quiet revolution. Why is it revolutionary and why do you think recent developments are still under the radar, at least in popular coverage?

For the past sixty years, we've had physically highly capable robots. However, they just weren't that smart. So these physically highly capable robots ended up constrained to factories — mostly car and electronics factories — where they were trusted to execute carefully pre-programmed motions. These robots are very reliable at doing the same thing over and over. They create value, but it's barely scratching the surface of what robots could do with better intelligence.

The quiet revolution is occurring in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) Robotics. AI robots are empowered with sophisticated AI models and vision. They can see, learn, and react to make the right decision based on the current situation.

Popular coverage of robotics trends towards home-butler style robots and self-driving cars because they're very relatable to our everyday lives. Meanwhile, AI Robotics is taking off in areas of our world that are less visible but critical to our livelihoods — think e-commerce fulfillment centers and warehouses, farms, hospitals, recycling centers. All areas with a big impact on our lives, but not activities that the average person is seeing or directly interacting with on a daily basis.

GN: Semi-structured environments are sort of the next frontier for robots, which have traditionally been confined to structured settings like factories. Where are we going to see new and valuable robotics deployments in the next year or so?

The three big ones I anticipate are warehouse pick and pack operations, recycling sortation, and crop harvesting/care. From a technological point of view, these are naturally in the striking range of recent AI developments. And also personally, I know people working on AI Robotics in each of those industries and they are making great strides.

GN: Why is machine vision one of the most exciting areas of development in robotics? What can robots now do that they couldn't do, say, five years ago?

Traditional robotic automation relied on very clever engineering to allow pre-programmed-motion robots to be helpful. Sure, that worked in car and electronics factories, but ultimately it's very limiting.

Giving robots the gift of sight completely changes what's possible. Computer Vision, the area of AI concerned with making computers and robots see, has undergone a night-and-day transformation over the past 5-10 years --- thanks to Deep Learning. Deep Learning trains large neural networks (based on examples) to do pattern recognition, in this case pattern recognition enabling understanding of what's where in images. And then Deep Learning, of course, is providing capabilities beyond seeing. It allows for robots to also learn what actions to take to complete a task, for example, pick and pack an item to fulfill an online order.

GN: A lot of coverage over the past decade has focused on the impact of sensors on autonomous systems (lidar, etc). How is AI reframing the conversation in robotics development?

Before Deep Learning broke onto the scene, it was impossible to make a robot "see" (i.e. understand what's in an image). Consequently, in the pre-Deep Learning days, a lot of energy and cleverness went into researching alternative sensor mechanisms. Lidar is indeed one of the popular ones (how it works is that you send a laser beam out, measure how long it takes to get reflected, and then multiply by speed of light to determine distance to the nearest obstacle in that direction). Lidar is wonderful when it works, but the failure modes can't be discounted (e.g., Does the beam always make it back to you? Does it get absorbed by a black surface? Does it go right through a transparent surface? etc..).

But in a camera image, we humans can see what's there, so we know the information has been captured by the camera, we just need a way for the computer or robot to be able to extract that same information from the image. AI advances, specifically Deep Learning, has completely changed what's possible in that regard. We're on a path to build AI that can interpret images as reliably as humans can, as long as the neural networks have been shown enough examples. So there is a big shift in robotics from focusing on inventing dedicated sensory devices to focusing on building the AI that can learn and empower our robots using the natural sensory inputs already available to us, especially cameras.

GN: Robotics has always been a technology of confluences. In addition to AI and machine vision, what technologies have converged to make these deployments possible?

Indeed, any robotic deployment requires a confluence of many great components and a team that knows how to make them all work together. Besides AI there is, of course, the long-existing technology of reliable industrial grade manipulator robots. And, crucially, there are cameras and computers, which are ever becoming better and cheaper.

GN: What's going to surprise people about robots over the next five years?

The magnitude at which robots are contributing to our everyday lives, most often without seeing any of these robots. Indeed, we likely won't personally see the robots physically interacting with the things we use everyday but there will be a day soon in which the majority of the items in our household were touched by a robot at least once before reaching us.

 FROM 1930 TO THE AGE OF ROBOTS

How Magnus Carlsen won chess back from the machines


Photograph: Jon Gambrell/AP

Breakthroughs in computing have changed how high-level chess is played, making draws all too common. But the Norwegian champion’s stunning performance in Dubai wrests the game back from the grip of the supercomputers, Guardian US deputy sport editor Bryan Graham reports

DOWNLOAD PODCAST

https://audio.guim.co.uk/2021/12/17-17280-tif_chess_robot-002.mp3

Presented by Michael Safi with Bryan Armen Graham; produced by Sami Kent and Axel Kacoutié; executive producers Mythili Rao and Phil Maynard

Sun 19 Dec 2021 16.30 GMT

Nearly 25 years ago, world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a series of matches watched around the world. The Guardian’s US deputy sport editor, Bryan Graham, tells Michael Safi he vividly remembers those games, played in his home town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It seemed as if chess had been changed forever.

Now the game of chess is in the midst of another pivotal transformation. With the rise of online chess and the recent success of the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, the game has never been more popular – or accessible. But breakthroughs in computing have made it increasingly bloodless: top players simply study and memorise the ‘perfect’ moves (as determined by computers), reinforcing a style of play that more often than not ends in a draw.

The first five games in this year’s world championship in Dubai – which all ended in ‘perfect’ draws – seemed to be following a familiar pattern. But then, reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen surprised his opponent – and chess fans everywhere – in a match that upended expectations, providing a symbolic win for humans over machines.

Understanding AlphaZero Neural Network’s SuperHuman Chess Ability

Summary of the paper 'Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero'
By Leonardo Tanzi
-December 16, 2021

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

As a common and (sometimes) proven belief, deep learning systems seem to learn uninterpretable representations and are far from human understanding. Recently, some studies have highlighted the fact that this may not always be applicable, and some networks may be able to learn human-readable representations. Unfortunately, this ability could merely come from the fact that these networks are exposed to human-generated data. So, to demonstrate their ability to learn like humans (and not that they are simply memorizing human-created labels), it is necessary to test them without any label.

Following this idea, the DeepMind and Google Brain teams, together with the 14th world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, studied their creature AlphaZero from this point of view. AlphaZero is the descendant of AlphaGo, the super neural network that beat the world champion Lee Sedol in a best-of-five GO match, a turning point in the history of deep learning, as can also be seen in the wonderful Netflix documentary AlphaGo.

Unlike AlphaGo, AlphaZero is trained through self-play (i.e., it learns to play competing against itself) and masters not only GO but also chess and shogi. This trait makes AlphaZero the perfect case study to explore this idea. Moreover, given the fact that it performs at a superhuman level, understanding its functionality is also particularly useful for highlighting unknown patterns which have never been discovered by chess theorists.

AlphaZero is composed of a CNN (convolutional neural network) based on ResNet50, which has two branches and computes a policy (p) and a value (v) and a Monte Carlo tree search to evaluate the state and update its action selection rule. p contains the probabilities associated with possible next moves, and v is a value that predicts the outcome of the game (win, lose or draw). As can be seen from the image below, the network takes an input of shape 8 x 8 x d, whose number of channels d depends on the parameter h (in the paper, h=8), which represents the number of previous positions considered. Different channels encode different information, such as who has the white pieces or the number of moves played.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

Three approaches were conducted to investigate the capability of this architecture to acquire chess knowledge: 1) screening for human concepts, 2) studying behavioral changes, and 3) exploring activation.

1. Screening for human concepts

The aim is to find out if the internal representation (i.e., the activations) of AlphaZero can be related to human chess concepts. Concepts can vary from the basic, such as the existence of a passed pawn, to the more complex, such as the mobility of pieces.

Most of the concepts were retrieved from the evaluation function of Stockfish (a very famous hard-coded chess engine). Using a method based on sparse linear regression, the authors were able to compute the what-when-where (what concept is learned, when it was learned during training, and wherein the network) plots.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

To demonstrate that AlphaZero develops representations that are closely related to human concepts over the training, the authors evaluated how much importance AlphaZero gives to different pieces and to different basic chess concepts during the training. It can be seen in the figure above how the value assigned to different pieces reaches the conventional theory (9-10 the queen, 5 the rooks, and 3 the knights and the bishops) and how some concepts become more and more important after a considerable number of steps, very close to how a human improve his way of playing.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

2. Studying behavioral changes

The objective is to investigate, focusing on chess openings, which are highly theorized, how internal representations evolve over time and subsequently a) relate them to progression through human history b) study the behaviors change in relation to these changing representations.
When the progression of AlphaZero was compared to the one of human games played after the 15th century (the first game in the dataset was played in 1475!), it was discovered that human players, during the different centuries, tend to focus on a specific opening and play it as default and then branch into different variations, while AlphaZero tries out a wide array of opening moves already in the early stages. A focus was also conducted on the famous Ruy Lopez opening (for chess players: 1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bb5) where AlphaZero’s preferences and human knowledge can take different paths. The Berlin defense, which today is considered one of the most effective continuations, rapidly became AlphaZero’s favorite answer to the Ruy Lopez opening, while it took centuries for humans to understand deeply the Berlin defense.
A very interesting qualitative assessment was also performed by the GM Vladimir Kramnik, who tried to understand different behaviors of AlphaZero related to the training steps done and, therefore to the evolving internal representations. The GM evaluated games played by two AlphaZero trained with a different number of iterations (k). From the comparison between AlphaZero-16k and AlphaZero-32k, Kramnik easily deduced that AlphaZero-16k has a quite basic understanding of material value, which often led to unwanted exchange sequences. From the games between AlphaZero-32k and AlphaZero-64k, came out that the main difference probably lies in the understanding of king safety in unbalanced positions. Finally, from AlphaZero-64k versus AlphaZero-128k, king safety re-emerges, and AlphaZero-128k has a much deeper understanding of which attacks will succeed and which will fail.

3. Analyzing activations

The third aim is to explore activation directly with unsupervised methods instead of the first two approaches. Indeed, the fact that the first two methods are supervised entails the risk of not finding relationships or concepts that have not been included in the dataset.

Hence, through non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), the authors were able to visualize patterns not related to labeled human data, by analyzing the model formerly trained for concept screening in a concept-agnostic (i.e., unsupervised) manner. Given a specific board position, the visualization process highlights the most fundamental squares considered by the network in evaluating the position, as shown in the figure below. Not all results were interpretable with a certain level of confidence (for example the column (d) has a high level of uncertainty) while some possible interpretations were given to other activations. For example, columns (a) and (b) show the development of diagonal moves for white and black respectively; column (c) probably shows a more complex factor: the number of opponent’s pieces that can move to a specific square (the darker the square, the more piece can move in that square).
  

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

Conclusion

This paper was a first step into the comprehension of complex systems such as AlphaZero. The next step is summarized at the end of the paper with the following sentence:

“Can we go beyond finding human knowledge and learn something new?”

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf

Opinion: Deals in the oil sands are coming, as Canada’s biggest energy companies put cash and science to work


Giant dump trucks haul raw tar sand at the Suncor tar sand mining operations near Fort McMurray, Alta.Todd Corroll/Reuters

If you want to know who will be having dinner, and who will have dinner, in the coming round of consolidation in Alberta’s oil sands, all you need to do is check for membership in at least one of Calgary’s exclusive clubs.

Back in June, five of Canada’s largest energy companies launched an alliance called the Oil Sands Pathway to Net Zero. The group is investing in innovations such as carbon capture and bitumen processing technology to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from its properties by 2050.

To join the club, CEOs had to publicly commit to spending to responsibly develop one of the largest fossil fuel reserves on the planet. Canadian Natural Resources, Suncor Energy, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil and MEG Energy stepped up from the start. In November, ConocoPhillips joined the group.

Notably due to their absence from this list are some global energy companies, which have long been associated with oil sands as minority partners in projects run by members of the Pathway Alliance. Right now, players such as California-based Chevron, Europe’s Total, BP, Shell and China’s CNOOC and Sinopec are out of the club.

The decision to turn down the Pathway partnership is the latest sign of a long-expected move in the energy sector – an exit from Alberta by most foreign investors in the oil sands. In a recent report, a team of analysts from RBC Capital Markets said: “Given the ESG – and primarily E – headwinds that continue to blow into oil sands investments, there is a need for a further exodus of international oil companies from Canada.” can be imagined.”

Investors will appreciate the oil sands consolidation, as analysts at RBC pointed out that any potential multi-billion dollar deal between the owners of the projects “has no consolidation risk and is similar to an ordinary share buyback.”

Raising cash for the acquisition is not an issue, as the recent rise in oil and gas prices has strengthened the balance sheets of potential buyers. Collectively, the five founding companies in Pathways Club are expected to generate about $33 billion in free cash flow next year — money left over after paying dividends and investing in operations, according to RBC. Canadian Natural, led by billionaire co-founder Murray Edwards, will have $10.5-billion of that total.

Mr. Edwards built Canadian Natural by acquiring assets at bargain valuations during a downturn in energy markets. He is the sole buyer for Chevron’s 20-percent stake in the Athabasca oil sands project and Shell’s 10-percent stake — Canadian Naturals operates assets and owns a 70 percent stake.

According to bankers and energy analysts, in recent months, Chevron and Shell have raised the valuations placed on their Athabasca stakes. Mr Edwards is ready to wait and let those ESG headwinds fly, as active investors pressure energy companies headquartered in Europe and jurisdictions such as California to exit the oil sands, even if they get a haircut on the deal.

We have seen a steady stream of sophisticated, long-term institutional investors sell Canadian energy assets due to ESG awareness. In September, Caisse de dépôt et Placement du Québec said it would sell its oil production investments by the end of next year as part of its climate strategy.

In November, Heritage Royalty, a Calgary-based company owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, sold a 1.9-million-acre land package to PrairieSky Royalty Ltd. for $728-million. This is in contrast to the Ontario Teachers strategy six years ago, when Heritage Royalties paid $3.3 billion to acquire a 4.8 million-acre portfolio from Cenovus.

Institutional investors such as How and Educator have considerable influence in the boardroom. An energy company that needs an ESG-friendly approach to oil sands, such as the Pathway Alliance, or will face pressure to sell these assets.

The dynamic power is now evident in Alberta’s oil sands. On one side of the table, you have six cash-rich energy companies that pledge that they will work together and use science to tap longer life properties in environmentally responsible ways. On the other hand, global companies are increasing pressure to leave the sector.

For patient investors like Mr. Edwards and peers from Suncor, Imperial, Cenovus, MEG and ConocoPhillips, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow the oil sands.

Did monkeys really sail the oceans on floating rafts of vegetation?

The mystery of how some species colonised new continents is as old as the theory of evolution itself. Now, with fresh clues surfacing, the rafting hypothesis might finally sink or swim

LIFE 15 December 2021

By Graham Lawton

NEW SCIENTIST

Brett Ryder

IN DECEMBER 2016, Uwe Fritz at the Museum of Zoology in Dresden, Germany, was doing fieldwork in Colombia when something incredible crossed his path. While chugging across a vast expanse of wetland, he passed an enormous floating island complete with tall trees and a resident colony of howler monkeys. “Have you ever seen a howler monkey?” says Fritz. “They’re huge! But the trees were large enough so the monkeys can permanently live in them. They do not swim.” All told, the island covered an area about the size of two Olympic swimming pools.

Fritz later told a collaborator, Jason Ali at the University of Hong Kong. Ali’s jaw hit the floor. “For me, it was just a random observation,” says Fritz. “But he is the floating island guy. He has worked on them for years, but never seen one.”

Ali is one of the leading advocates of one of the most controversial ideas in evolutionary biology: that the presence of certain species in certain places can only be explained by long-distance maritime voyages. The hypothesis, essentially, is that animals were carried across the ocean on rafts of vegetation and started afresh on the other side.

The sheer unlikeliness – some would say preposterousness – of this idea has always been an obstacle to its acceptance, and the arguments for and against the rafting hypothesis have sloshed back and forth for 160-odd years. But now, with floating islands in Colombia and fresh clues from the sea floor, both sides are claiming to have evidence that could finally see the idea sink or swim.

The rafting hypothesis is as old as the …

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25233653-500-did-monkeys-really-sail-the-oceans-on-floating-rafts-of-vegetation/#ixzz7FX93JHhM

IN LIEU OF THE REST OF THE ARTICLE 

WHICH IS BEHIND PAYWALL