It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Japanese steelmakers have raised concerns with Australian authorities that BHP Group could become too dominant in the global supply of coking coal if it goes ahead with a takeover of Anglo American.
Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coking coal and top supplier to Japan, making up around 60% of its imports, with most of the steel-making ingredient coming from the state of Queensland, where BHP and Anglo American are the two largest producers.
Steelmakers’ concerns about BHP’s coking coal market power could derail a deal if the Australian giant comes back with a revised bid for Anglo American, after being rebuffed with a $39 billion offer last month.
“BHP already has a large share of the supply of high-quality hard coking coal in the seaborne trade, and we will take measures to ensure that further oligopolization will not impede sound price formation and stable supply,” a JFE Steel spokesperson said, declining to elaborate on what measures they could take.
Representatives of Japanese steelmakers met with Queensland government officials raising alarm bells that if a deal went ahead it would concentrate the world’s top quality coking coal mines in the state’s Bowen Basin in the hands of BHP, two people familiar with the talks said.
The combined group would control 44 million tons, or about 13%, of the seaborne coking coal market, data from consultants Wood Mackenzie shows. That comes even as BHP’s production has fallen after sales of some mines in recent years.
“In general, we are against the (BHP-Anglo) union as it would create a supplier with a huge market share, especially in the hard-coking coal market,” said a source at a Japanese steel maker, adding that it was closely monitoring the situation.
“We, for our part, would not want BHP to buy Anglo and gain a stronger price competition power.”
Queensland Deputy Premier and Treasurer Cameron Dick said BHP would need to ensure its coal remains competitive or risk losing state government support. “We work closely with our Japanese customers and are aware of their concerns,” Dick told Reuters.
“BHP needs to explain to Japanese steelmakers and the market more broadly how it will ensure the ongoing supply of steelmaking coal remains competitive,” he said.
BHP declined to comment for this story but has said expanding in high quality coking coal was a main driver of its tilt for Anglo.
Anglo American declined to comment.
Coking coal squeeze
Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has the authority to investigate a BHP-Anglo American transaction and could block a deal if it found it would harm Japanese companies, two anti-trust lawyers in Tokyo said.
However, if a deal was deemed anti-competitive, the commission would likely ask BHP to offer a remedy, which could include a coal divestment, one of the two lawyers said. They both declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.
The Fair Trade Commission declined to comment whether it has received any request to examine the BHP-Anglo deal.
Like JFE, Kobe Steel said it is keeping a close eye on the proposed deal and a potential increase in BHP’s market power. Nippon Steel was not immediately available for comment.
Key among steelmakers’ concerns is that BHP has stressed it will not invest to expand production in Queensland after the state hiked coal royalties without industry consultation, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
BHP CEO Mike Henry said last year the company “will not be investing any further growth dollars in Queensland under the current conditions”.
Anglo’s Moranbah North and Grosvenor mines are effectively an extension of BHP’s Goonyella mine, which produces a type of coal favoured by Japan and India.
The Japanese are facing growing competition from India for that coal. BHP already sends 40% of its coking coal to India and expects the country’s demand for the steel-making ingredient to double by the end of the decade, CFO Vandita Pant said in March.
Japan could lobby anti-trust authorities in other jurisdictions to block a deal if it believes there will be an impact to the competitiveness of the global coking market, as it did when BHP made a bid for its iron ore rival Rio Tinto in 2007, one of the lawyers said.
Queensland could also complicate a deal.
“The transfer of mineral assets in Queensland are subject to a number of state government approvals. No resources company should take those approvals for granted,” Treasurer Dick said.
(By Melanie Burton, Yuka Obayashi and Katya Golubkova; Editing by Sonali Paul)
Saturday, April 20, 2024
Japan Plans Next Generation Containership for Zero Emissions and Efficiency
A Japanese consortium made up of coastal shipping company Imoto Lines and marine software company Marindows is launching a government-backed effort to develop a next-generation containership. Plans call not only for the vessel to address decarbonization with the ability to operate emissions-free, but also to address the emerging challenges due to the lack of seafarers in Japan. The companies have scheduled the completion of the vessel for January 2027.
Imoto, which is a leading operator of coastal feeder ships, reports the designs for the new vessel feature a hybrid operational capability centered on batteries. The vessel will be able to use containerized batteries that can be swapped out to extend its efficiency. They expect to power the vessel with three 20-foot battery containers with an assumed 2000kWh power capacity. It will employ a standardized and modularized universal plug-in hybrid powertrain.
The vessel will also be equipped to use shore power while on dock both to power its operations and to recharge. Using two 360kW engines, the vessel is expected to have a speed of 12.5 knots. Its maximum range in hybrid operations will be 2,700 miles while using just the three containerized batters it will have a range of 180 miles. It will also be designed for the future installation of low-environment impact technologies such as hydrogen fuel or the use of bio or synthetic fuel.
Plans call for the containership to have a capacity of 200 TEU. It is projected to be 499 gross tons with an overall length of 265 feet (81 meters) and a beam of 44 feet (13.5 meters). Miura Shipbuilding in Saiki City will build the vessel.
The hybrid containership will be designed for zero-emission operations and to address the growing shortage of seafarers
The ship will be deployed on the route between Kobe and Hiroshima. It will also operate as a demonstration project supported by the Ministry of Environment’s Carbon Neutral Technology Research and Development Program.
In addition to addressing the challenges of zero-emission operations, Imoto points to the challenges of a shortage of seafarers and skilled mariners to operate vessels. The government has highlighted in the past the anticipated challenges as the Japanese population ages.
Working with Marindows they plan to develop standardized operations that will be supported by a shore operations center meaning the vessel will require fewer people and less skills and experience to operate. They report systems will be modularized and standardized for ease of operation.
One of the five goals of the project is to improve the work environment for crewmembers while also enhancing productivity per crewmember. They believe it will be possible to create a vessel that will have the same expenses as existing ships and can be environmentally friendly while costing basically the same as existing ships.
They believe mass production will maximize the financial efficiency of the vessel for operators. Modularization will also permit them to protect from obsolesce by creating the ability to replace individual systems as new technologies are commercialized.
Monday, March 11, 2024
Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed
Two bees solving the two-step puzzle.(Queen Mary University of London)
The humble bumblebee is proof that brain size isn't everything.
This little insect with its wee, seed-sized brain has shown a level of collective intelligence in experiments that scientists thought was wholly unique to humans.
When trained in the lab to open a two-step puzzle box, bumblebees of the species Bombus terrestris could teach the solution to another bee that had never seen the box before.
This naive bee would not have solved the puzzle on its own. To teach the 'demonstrator' bees the non-intuitive solution in the first place, researchers had to show them what to do and offer them a reward after the first step to keep them motivated.
"This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviors that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans," write the team of researchers based in the United Kingdom and United States.
Humans have a long history of 'moving the goalposts' on what sets our species apart from all others.
Some of these cultural behaviors even show signs of refinement and improvement over time. Homing pigeons, for instance, learn from each other and adjust their culture's flight paths year on year.
An influential way to move the goalposts on human intelligence is to say that humans are unique from other animals because we can learn things from each other that we could not invent independently.
Think of the device you are reading this article on right now. No one human can invent all its parts and mechanics from scratch on their own and in one lifetime. It's taken decades of work and refinement to get to this advanced stage. Even the very act of reading is a skill that generations of humans have built upon little by little.
Obviously, no animal can put together an iPhone or read an article on animal intelligence. But at a basic level, bumblebees join chimpanzees in "cast[ing] serious doubt on this supposed human exceptionalism," writes Alex Thornton, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, in a review of the bumblebee research for Nature.
Chimpanzees have large brains and rich cultural lives, but the discovery among bumblebees, Thornton argues, is "all the more remarkable because it focuses not on humanity's primate cousins, but on… an animal with a brain that is barely 0.0005 percent of the size of a chimpanzee's."
The collective intelligence of their hive mind is also not to be dismissed.
To test it, behavioral scientist Alice Bridges from Queen Mary University of London and colleagues housed colonies of bumblebees with a two-step puzzle for a total of 36 or 72 hours over 12 or 24 consecutive days, with no human help.
After all that time, the bees could not figure out how to get to the sugary reward. Bumblebees spend on average about 8 days foraging in their lifetimes, so it's as if they had up to a third of their lifetime foraging time to work on the puzzle.
In the image below, you can see the puzzle. The yellow circle contains a drop of sugar under a plastic lid. Bees can get to it by pushing the red tab, but only once the blue tab has been pushed out of the way.
It took a human to painstakingly show them the way, and this was only possible using an extra reward. But once one bee figured it out, they could teach others how to move the two tabs to retrieve a sugary treat.
A similar experiment on chimps was also published recently in Nature Human Behavior. Both the vertebrate and invertebrate case studies showed a sharing of ideas that were exceptionally hard to learn alone.
Of course, this behavior wasn't observed in the wild. It had to be taught to the bees and chimps first. But the findings leave open the possibility that if there were a rare, once-in-a-lifetime innovator in chimp or bee society – an Einstein among bees – their ideas might stick around in animal culture and be used for generations to come.
Bees' famous honey waggle dance, pointing out the distance, direction, and quality of sources of food, for instance, is a behavior that was once thought to be purely instinctive, but it now appears to be somewhat shaped by social influences.
In 2017, researchers also trained bumblebees to roll a ball into a goal for a reward. To score, the insects had to learn from each other and remedy their previous mistakes. And so they did.
The newest experiment, Thornton writes, "suggests that the ability to learn from others what cannot be learnt alone should now join tool use, episodic memory (the ability to recall specific past events) and intentional communication in the scrapheap" of explanations for human cognition and culture.
Why do bees have queens? – Rhylie, age 8, Rosburg, Washington
When you think “bee,” you likely picture one species that lives all over the world: the honey bee. And honey bees have queens, a female who lays essentially all of the eggs for the colony.
Instead, a single female lays eggs in a simple nest, either inside a plant stem or an underground tunnel. She provides each egg with a ball of pollen mixed with nectar that she collected from flowers, and she leaves the eggs to hatch and develop on their own. She doesn’t have anyone to help with this process.
Since lots of bees successfully live without a queen, what is it that queens provide for the bee species that do have them? We are behavioral ecologistswho study social insects, and this question is at the heart of our research
. A bee colony may have many thousands of workers who support the single queen.
Along with honey bees, two other kinds of bees also have queens: bumble bees, which are found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica, and stingless bees, which are found primarily in tropical areas.
One honey bee colony – also called a hive – may have more than 50,000 bees, while bumble bee colonies usually have just a few hundred bees. Stingless bee colonies are often small, but some are as large as the biggest honey bee hives.
These bees’ social structures have two more things in common besides the egg-laying queen: the female workers who care for the colony, and the males, sometimes called “drones.”
Notice the males are not included in the “worker” group. Males generally don’t help collect nectar or pollen, protect and maintain the hive, or care for the young larvae. The females do all of those jobs.
Instead, the males have one task: to find and then mate with a female who may become a future queen. After building their strength, males leave the hive to join thousands of other drones to wait for new queens that are also looking for mates. If males are lucky enough to mate, they die soon afterward. In contrast, females typically mate with many different males before starting their lives as egg-laying queens.
Female worker bees do pretty much all the work.
The isolated queen
Maybe you imagine a queen as the one in charge, ordering everyone around. But that’s a case of language being misleading. Unlike human queens who lead their people, bee queens don’t rule over their workers.
Instead, particularly for honey bees, the queen is rather isolated from what’s happening in the hive. Remember, she just lays eggs, up to 2,000 in a day. The workers surround and take care of her while managing the colony. The queen bee might live for a few years, much longer than female worker bees and drones.
Other animals also live in social groups with a division of labor between those who reproduce and those who maintain the colony. Ants, termites and some wasps – like yellow jackets and hornets – have a similar kind of colony structure. So does the naked mole rat. Why did these groups evolve to have queens?
Family ties
One way for an organism to pass on genes is by having offspring.
Another way is to help close relatives, who are likely to share many of your same genes, to produce more offspring than they would if they were on their own.
This option is pretty much what happens in a bee colony. Those thousands of female worker bees may not themselves reproduce, but the queen is their mother. They help her produce another generation of siblings who will one day be their sisters. In this way, the female worker bees are passing their genes on to the next generation, just not directly.
Something else to consider: A honey bee hive is a wonderfully complex structure. The layers of wax combs built to store honey and raise offspring are a marvel of architecture and require a large workforce for construction, ongoing repairs and protection from intruders or predators.
So you might ask: Which came first? Social groups with queens and workers producing large numbers of related offspring that required more elaborate nest structures? Or did the complex nest arise first, which led to greater success for groups that evolved to divide tasks among queens and workers?
These are fascinating questions that biologists have been exploring for decades. But both of these factors – the division of labor and the complex hive structures – help explain why there are bees with queens.
Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who wrote about the liberation of women and the need for any kind of socialist revolution to deal with the inequalities existing between men and women before it could be truly
Love of worker bees is her novel which expands on some of these ideas, being built on the conflict between a (common-law) husband and wife when the husband, Volodya, is still tied to bourgeois notions of marriage while his wife, Vasya, is convinced that the new politics of post-revolutionary Russia must be reflected in new social and personal relations. Volodya becomes a director of a large factory, and starts to expect Vasya to take on the bourgeois role of ‘director’s wife’ – to stay at home and keep the house nice (with the help of a servant), leaving behind her previous work in the Party, and the communal house she has devoted herself to organsing. She finds this constricting, and when her husband’s workers come to the house to complain about working conditions enthusiastically throws herself back into the role of Bolshevik trade unionist, helping them find ways to fight the boss.
Volodya sees this as a betrayal; but betrays Vasya in turn by keeping up an affair with a beautiful, non-political woman, Nina. Vasya, sincerely committed to a new politics of sexual engagement, is less troubled by the affair than by Volodya’s failure to tell her the truth about it. The psychological reality of the novel is in Vasya’s inability to make a clean break with Volodya: she is sensible enough to realise that the life he offers is not for her, but her passionate sexual desire for him makes her dither and delay, breaking things off only to be overwhelmed by his declarations of love; convincing herself again and again that he is not lying to her, that he has truly broken off his affair. But in the end her redemption is to walk away from her marriage to Volodya and return alone but pregnant to her communal house. Here she intends to make a life more in keeping with her communalist, progressive ideas:
‘But how are you going to raise a child all on your own?’ [asks her friend Grusha]
‘What do you mean, all on my own? Everything will be arranged perfectly, and we’ll set up a crêche. In fact I thought of asking you to help run the crêche. I know how you love children. And soon there’ll be a new baby, for all of us!’
‘A communist baby!’
‘Precisely so!’ They both laughed.
Sheila Rowbotham, who writes the afterword to my copy, suggests in Women, resistance and revolution that Love of worker bees fails to solve the problem it expresses so beautifully:
‘…Vasilisa’s choice simply ignores the basic causes of tension. She goes away and is able to rid herself of her jealousy of Nina and the traditional feminine […] She finds her identity thus only by denying the existence of the man and her own sexuality. The only solution possible is no real solution.’
But this is a misreading of the source of conflict: Vasya’s problem in Love of worker bees is not one of sexual jealousy of the other woman, but of separating her own desires and needs as an individual (for freedom, independence, her work, the ability to live how she likes) from her sexual desire for Volodya. Furthermore, Vasya doesn’t rule out sexuality forever: all she decides is that her passion for Volodya is spent, since they no longer share the friendship and trust she needs in a relatio
Nonetheless it’s true that the ending with its sunny communist optimism is not as psychologically subtle as the depiction of Vasya’s struggle to detach herself from Volodya. But Kollontai’s ideas about the need for new forms of personal life to follow new political structures are important, and Love of worker bees expresses them beautifully.