Plant Fossils Found On A Cold War Expedition Contain An Ominous Climate Message

Gizmodo - Molly Taft

Icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. (Photo: Felipe Dana, AP)

Jars of dirt taken from a Cold War-era military caper and lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise.

A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile beneath the ice in the mid-1960s suggest that the world’s pre-human climate was at one point warm enough to completely melt the Greenland ice sheet.

The dirt researchers inspected is a sediment sample from the bottom of an ice core, retrieved by drilling down into the ice sheet that covers the majority of Greenland. It’s pretty hard to actually reach all the way down to bedrock when taking samples due to the incredible pressure from the ice, explained Drew Christ, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont.

There are only a few expeditions that have actually gotten sediment from the bottom of the glacier. “We have less of this [sediment] than moon rocks,” Christ said.

This particular sample yielded a lot of plant matter, some of which was visible to the naked eye. “It’s like if you went hiking, and got a bunch of twigs and forest floor stuff in the bottom of your boot and poured it out at the end of the day,” Christ said. “It’s kind of like that, but it’s been frozen for 1 million years.”

Christ and the team behind the study used isotope analyses of various elements that helped the researchers tease out the last time the samples were exposed to the sun and cosmic rays. The dating showed the plant matter is roughly 1 million years old.

The Arctic Ocean Was Once Filled With 

Fresh Water, New Research Suggests

Stunning new evidence suggests the Arctic Ocean was covered by a thick layer of ice and filled with fresh water on at least two occasions during the past 150,000 years. The observation could finally explain strange and dramatic climate anomalies associated with these glacial periods. Read more

Before analysing this particular sample, Christ said, scientists had “circumstantial” evidence that the Greenland ice sheet had once melted away completely.
 
But the discovery of these fossils definitively suggests that Greenland was once ice-free enough to provide a home for a variety of plants. And that’s bad news for us right now.

The Greenland ice sheet is a ticking climate bomb, with some estimates projecting that the sheet could raise sea levels by 6.1 metres if it fully melted. While it’s not slated to completely melt tomorrow, the ice sheet is now melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s.

The changes put in motion by rising carbon dioxide will take centuries to play out as the climate adjusts to a new equilibrium. Knowing its history is crucial to understanding the ice sheet’s future.

“The Greenland ice sheet has disappeared in a climate system that didn’t have any human influence,” Christ explained.

“Before humans added hundreds of parts per million of fossil fuels to the atmosphere, our climate was able to melt away the ice sheet. In the future as we continue to warm the planet at an uncontrollable rate, we could force the Greenland ice sheet past some threshold and melt it and raise sea levels.”

A microscopic view of twigs and moss from the dirt sample. (Image: University of Vermont)

The dirt sample Christ and his team used to reach these conclusions has its own incredible backstory, including that it was almost lost to history. The sample was originally recovered from the first ice core of Greenland ever taken during a 1966 expedition to a military base called Camp Century.

The actual purpose of the expedition was a top-secret James Bond-esque style mission called Project Iceworm (yes, really) to try and hide nuclear missiles under the ice near the Soviet Union (we’re not making this up). The scientific part of the expedition, while valid, was created mostly to give cover to this Cold War caper. 

Project Iceworm eventually failed, but at least we got this fascinating ice core out of this. (On the downside, though, climate change is melting out Camp Century, and could cause a toxic waste spill from leftover Cold War-era supplies and chemicals.)

Even though the dirt sample is itself remarkable, since the Camp Century attempt was the first ice core ever retrieved from Greenland, researchers were mostly interested in what the ice itself could tell them, and less invested in the dirt that came with the core.

“I was pulling out inch-long twigs out of this stuff. We could see with our bare eyes, like, this is definitely plant material,” Christ said. “Looking at this as someone who was born way after any of this went down, it’s like, how did [the scientists] not think to look more carefully? I think they had more of a priority to analyse the ice and then the soil didn’t get analysed.”

In what Christ describes as a “weird trick of history,” the soil was such a low-level priority for researchers that it eventually got lost when the expedition got home. The samples were shoved in the back of an army freezer at the University of Buffalo, then moved incognito with a bunch of other material to another freezer at a research facility in Denmark in the 1990s.

It was only in 2017, as JP Steffensen, one of Christ’s mentors and an author on the paper, was doing inventory helping that facility prepare its freezer for a move, that the samples were rediscovered and able to be more fully analysed.

And even though researchers in the 1960s may not have known what they got when they dug up ancient dirt, Christ is grateful that their work provided him with one of the more exciting moments of his scientific career.

“The day that we found the fossils was one of those ‘eureka’ moments. I never thought that those days actually happen for scientists, but it did happen for me,” he said, describing how he first saw specks of plant material as his team was cleaning the sediment samples for analysis. “I was jumping around in the lab. It was so exciting.”

Links

• A multimillion-year-old record of Greenland vegetation and glacial history preserved in sediment beneath 1.4 km of ice at Camp Century
• Greenland Is Now Losing Ice Six Times Faster Than It Was in 1980
• Project Iceworm: the nuclear city hidden under Greenland's glaciers
• The Arctic Ocean Was Once Filled With Fresh Water, New Research Suggests
• Scientists Have Discovered an Ancient Lakebed Beneath Greenland’s Ice
• Great, Now We Have To Worry About Sunny Skies Melting Greenland’s Ice Sheet
• Geoengineering Wouldn’t Be Enough To Stop Greenland From Melting 

(AU) Former Health Chiefs Turn Focus To Climate

Canberra Times - Rebecca Gredley AAP

Health experts say a cleaner environment will reduce deaths from air pollution by phasing out coal.

Former chief state health officers are among a raft of experts calling for climate action to protect the wellbeing of Australians.

Queensland's former chief health officer Gerard FitzGerald and Tasmania's Roscoe Taylor will on Tuesday take their calls to Parliament House in Canberra.

The pair are among a group of 30 leaders in health who want a national strategy on climate health and wellbeing.

Emeritus Professor FitzGerald says politicians have turned to chief health officers during the coronavirus pandemic to help steer the emergency response.

"Today we are asking them to keep listening to the advice of leading health voices and swiftly act on the health emergency of climate change," he said.

Dr Taylor has worked in public health for more than three decades.

"I have witnessed the rising harms and costs of climate change," he said.

"Unless all governments, and particularly the federal government, takes health advice seriously, the preventable harms of climate change will only worsen and more people will lose their lives or suffer ill-health."

Climate and Health Alliance director Fiona Armstrong says health leaders don't use the word emergency lightly.

"Across the country, doctors, nurses and health practitioners are already treating the health impacts caused by worsening climate change," she said.

The Climate and Health Alliance has previously released a framework for a national strategy, which makes a raft of policy recommendations including tougher emissions reduction targets.

It also urges the government to evaluate the economic savings associated with health benefits from a cleaner environment, and to reduce deaths from air pollution by phasing out coal.

Links

• (AU) AMA Raises Alarm On The Health Impacts Of Climate Change
• (AU) Heat Is The 'Silent Killer' Of Australia's Bushfire Season And Experts Say Climate Change Is The Root Cause
• (AU) Climate Change Is Wreaking Havoc On Australians' Health. What's Our Plan To Fix Things?
• (AU) A Coalition Of 29 Health Groups Are Urging Climate Action In Open Letter To Scott Morrison
• (AU) Australian Doctors Accuse Government Of Failing On Climate Change
• (AU) Act Now On Wildfires, Global Climate Change, Human Health, Study Says
• (AU) Australia’s New National Preventive Health Strategy Must Include Climate Change, 30 Health Groups Say
• (AU) Why Climate Change Has The Potential To Cause More Pandemics
• (AU) Coal-Fired Pollution Killing 800 Australians A Year: Report
• (AU) Climate Grief Expected To Be Widespread Soon But It's Still Not Openly Acknowledged
• (AU) 'Two Global Health Emergencies': Doctors Group Backs Green Stimulus
• (AU) Under Climate Change, Winter Will Be The Best Time For Bush Burn-Offs – And That Could Be Bad News For Public Health

‘Inequalities Will Become Even More Entrenched’: Why Climate Change Is A Feminist Issue

The Independent - Natasha Preskey

Climate change is already here, and it’s having a disproportionate impact on women around the world. Natasha Preskey asks experts why

Getty Images/iStockphoto

There’s an old saying that guns make us all the same size.

Similarly, the climate emergency feels - by definition - like something that should be a universal experience, a unifying threat to the home that we all share. But, like almost all other crises, we might all be floating in the same sea of uncertainty but we are certainly not in the same boat. 

Just as with coronavirus, which disproportionately impacts black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (and has hit women harder economically than men), the climate crisis poses more urgent problems for some people than for others. The effects will be felt more quickly, and more deeply, by some, and solutions that are accessible to many are a world away for others.

In 2021, as we get ever closer to the Paris Agreement deadline of 2050 for a climate-neutral world, we can already see that women, particularly women of colour, are experiencing the climate emergency’s worst effects. And for some, this half-century point will come too late.

In much of the global north, climate change isn’t yet impacting everyone’s day-to-day lives in a way that inspires sufficient urgency. Although we are seeing more localised events like historic flooding and freak storms in places like Texas, the situation is much worse in many other regions where the climate emergency is already affecting people’s livelihoods. 

Figures from the United Nations (UN) suggest that 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change worldwide are women. According to a review of 130 studies by the Global Gender and Climate Alliance in 2016, women are more likely to suffer food insecurity as a result of the climate crisis.

Following extreme weather events, women are also more likely to experience mental illness and partner violence. Professor Nitya Rao of the University of East Anglia (UEA) researches gender equality in parts of Africa and Asia which have already been severely affected by climate change.

She says in many of the rural areas where she conducts research, in countries like Nepal and India, droughts and floods can decimate crops and make the outcomes of agricultural labour unpredictable.  The climate crisis means that these sorts of unusual weather events are becoming more common - increasing the likelihood of this change in working status.

How to change your parents’ minds on climate change - by the Gen Zers who’ve done it

In order to reduce overall risk to the household’s income, men, who have access to a wider range of jobs, will often migrate to other areas - particularly urban areas away from land-based incomes - with women staying to care for children and continue agricultural work.

When this work isn’t fruitful, women often end up having to take on multiple jobs, says Rao.  

“They will have their farm, but they will also try and do something else: set up a small shop or some kind of enterprise or maybe wage labour for a richer landlord in order to ensure that there is at least some income in the household for their everyday needs,” Rao tells The Independent from India, where she is currently conducting research. 

She goes on to explain that, although men will often send money home from their new jobs, this change in circumstance means women are under pressure: “Especially at the time when men are absent, they may send money once a month, or once in two months, or three months. In the meantime, women will have to manage - so they end up working much harder.”

Although these effects of the climate crisis are already a day-to-day reality for women in some parts of the globe - and are starting to impact their economic output and options, women in the UK haven’t yet felt noticeable disparities in how they are affected against their male peers. 

But Professor Julie Doyle of the University of Brighton, whose work involves examining the role of media and communication in fighting climate change, says that this will likely manifest with time. Drawing on the pandemic to illustrate how crises affect people differently across existing power lines of gender, race and class, Doyle points out that “inequality is rife in the UK”.

“Women have borne the brunt of caring, housework and homeschooling responsibilities in the UK [during the pandemic], and are more likely to have lost their jobs than men,” she tells The Independent. 

“Women have borne the brunt of caring, housework and homeschooling responsibilities” - Professor Julie Doyle

Research from the Women’s Budget Group, published in November 2020, found that around 133,000 more women were furloughed than men across the UK during the first wave of Covid. Similarly, a study from the University of Exeter, published in July, found women were twice as likely to have lost a job during the first lockdown.

Dr Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at LSE, previously toldThe Independent that, during times of crisis, “gender norms become more entrenched”. She cited examples of pandemics including coronavirus, Ebola and Zika, in which women’s employment was disproportionately affected. 

Doyle says, just as we’ve seen the pandemic change circumstances for women, as the pressure of the climate crisis increases, we will likely see this again.

“As climate change increasingly impacts the UK in relation to localised flooding, heatwaves and ability to access food and other resources from climate impact countries across the globe, then these inequalities will become even more entrenched, limiting our ability to respond to such impacts in equitable and just ways.”

As climate change worsens in the UK, we will continue to see increased flooding. AFP via Getty Images

A 2010 study, published in journal Environmental Health, found that women in several European cities, including London, were already more likely than men to die during heatwaves.

Its authors suggested possible reasons for this may be “attributable to the social conditions of elderly women living alone and to physiological differences, such as a reduced sweating capacity that affects the ability to respond to heat stress”.

What, if anything, can be done to mitigate the impact of climate change on women?

According to Doyle, it’s important we frame the climate crisis as “an issue of justice” and teach it in schools from primary age onwards with this in mind. In taking action against global warming, we mustn’t treat “climate action as separate from gender equality”, she says, encouraging people to view these as intersectional issues.

“I’m very against the view that women are, somehow, becoming the victims of climate change” - Professor Nitya Rao

Rao emphasises that women are “resilient” and are adapting to cope with climate change but that they need support on a structural level to help mitigate the issues they face. She points to things like improving public health and sanitation, as well as food access.

“I’m very against the view that women are, somehow, becoming the victims of climate change,” she says. “They are showing resilience, but we need to support and enable them to do what they’re doing.”

Doyle adds that, in order to fight the gendered impacts of climate, we need more women in power. In fact, research earlier this year by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum found that countries led by women experienced significantly fewer Covid deaths, with women being more “risk averse” around loss of life but “more willing to take risks in the domain of the economy”.

“Women and girls, particularly of colour, need to be at the forefront of decision-making on climate change at the local, regional, national and international level,” Doyle concludes. “Climate change should not be discussed without reference to gender, racial and class inequalities.”

Links between gender inequality and the impacts of the climate crisis aren’t always immediately obvious to those whose day-to-day lives haven’t yet been upturned by global warming.

But to prevent gender disparities further deepening, an understanding of climate change and its complex relationship to human power structures is key.

Links

• Malala Yousafzai Says Educate Girls To Fight Climate Change
• Living With The Legacy Of A Climate Emergency: The Women And Girls Determined To Build A Brighter Future
• (AU) 4 Assumptions About Gender That Distort How We Think About Climate Change [And 3 Ways To Do Better]
• Mapped: How Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Women’s Health
• How Women And Girls Are Ending The Fossil Fuel Era
• (AU) 5 Australian Women Who Are Solving The Biggest Problems Of Climate Change.
• Welcome To The Feminist Climate Renaissance
• Q&A: Why Women Leading The Climate Movement Are Underappreciated And Sometimes Invisible
• The psychology of procrastinating on climate change

Malala Yousafzai Says Educate Girls To Fight Climate Change

Reuters - Lin Taylor

Keeping girls in school can help solve the climate crisis, says Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai

ARCHIVE PICTURE: Pakistani Noble Peace Price winner Malala Yousafzai talks to the media Action Images, London, Britain - May 29, 2019 Reuters/Matthew Childs

LONDON - Keeping girls in school and taking young climate leaders seriously are keys to tackling climate change, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said on Friday.

Speaking to a virtual panel, Malala, 23, said educating girls and young women, particularly in developing countries, would give them a chance to pursue green jobs and be part of solving the climate crisis in their communities.

"Girls' education, gender equality and climate change are not separate issues. Girl's education and gender equality can be used as solutions against climate change," Malala told an online event by British think-tank Chatham House.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some 130 million girls worldwide were already out of school, according to the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO, which said more than 11 million may not return to classes after the pandemic.

"When we educate girls ... they can become farmers, conservationists, solar technicians, they can fill other green jobs as well. Problem-solving skills can allow them to help their communities to adapt to climate change."

From sexual violence in displacement camps to extra farm work, women and girls shoulder a bigger burden from worsening extreme weather and other climate pressures pushing people to move for survival, global aid group CARE International says.

Scientists expect forced displacement to be one of the most common and damaging effects on vulnerable people if global warming is not limited to an internationally agreed aim of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Climate disasters have also been linked with early marriage, school drop-outs and teen pregnancies, says U.N. children's agency UNICEF.

Malala also called on world leaders to pay attention to youth climate activists, citing movements like "Mock COP" in November when young people launched a two-week event designed to mirror the format of the delayed U.N. climate talks.

"Listen to young people who are leading the climate movement. Young people are reminding our leaders that climate education and climate justice should be their priority."

Earlier this week, Malala expanded her partnership with Apple Inc to produce dramas, children's series, animation and documentaries that will air on the tech giant's streaming service.

Apple produced a documentary about Malala in 2015 and teamed up with her Malala Fund in 2018 to promote secondary education to girls across the globe.

In 2009 at age 12, Malala blogged under a pen name for the BBC about living under the rule of the Pakistani Taliban. In 2012 she survived being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for campaigning against its attempts to deny women education.

In 2014, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate at age 17. In 2018 she launched Assembly, a digital publication for girls and young women available on Apple News. She graduated from Oxford University in June.

Links

• Living With The Legacy Of A Climate Emergency: The Women And Girls Determined To Build A Brighter Future
• How Women And Girls Are Ending The Fossil Fuel Era
• Welcome To The Feminist Climate Renaissance
• Q&A: Why Women Leading The Climate Movement Are Underappreciated And Sometimes Invisible
• Women Fighting Climate Change Are Targets For Misogynists
• Young negotiators inject 'new blood' into climate decision-making
• Poor women take the strain as climate change pushes men to leave home
• India's grandmothers harvest new social status from climate-smart farming
• Climate woes growing for women, hit worst by displacement and migration
• Evicted by Climate Change: Confronting the gendered impacts of climate-induced displacement
• Climate change threatens lives and futures of over 19 million children in Bangladesh

Global Warming’s Deadly Combination: Heat And Humidity

New York Times - Henry Fountain

A new study suggests that large swaths of the tropics will experience dangerous living and working conditions if global warming isn’t limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

A farmer in Peukan Biluy village in Aceh, Indonesia, part of the region that could become uninhabitable if global temperatures rise too much. Credit...Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA, via Shutterstock

Here’s one more reason the world should aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement: It will help keep the tropics from becoming a deadly hothouse.

A study published Monday suggests that sharply cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to stay below that limit, which is equivalent to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1900, will help the tropics avoid episodes of high heat and high humidity — known as extreme wet-bulb temperature, or TW — that go beyond the limits of human survival.

“An important problem of climate research is what a global warming target means for local extreme weather events,” said Yi Zhang, a graduate student in geosciences at Princeton University and the study’s lead author. “This work addresses such a problem for extreme TW.”

The study is in line with other recent research showing that high heat and humidity are potentially one of the deadliest consequences of global warming.

“We know that climate change is making extreme heat and humidity more common,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. “And both of those things reduce our ability to live in a given climate.”

Dr. Kopp, who was an author of a study published last year that found that exposure to heat and humidity extremes was increasing worldwide, said a key contribution of the new work was in showing that, for the tropics, “it is easier to predict the combined effects of heat and humidity than just how hot it is.”

Ms. Zhang, along with two other Princeton researchers, Isaac Held and Stephan Fueglistaler, looked at how the combination of high heat and high humidity is controlled by dynamic processes in the atmosphere. They found that if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees, the wet-bulb temperature at the surface can approach but not exceed 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, in the tropics.

That region, a band roughly 3,000 miles from north to south that encircles Earth at the Equator, includes much of South and East Asia, Central America, Central Africa. It is home to more than 3 billion people.

Above a wet-bulb temperature of 35 Celsius, the body cannot cool down, as sweat on the skin can no longer evaporate. Prolonged exposure to such conditions can be fatal, even for healthy people. Lower but still high wet-bulb temperatures can affect health and productivity in other ways.

Ms. Zhang cautioned that the effect on health from her study was uncertain, since she and her colleagues looked only at how high wet-bulb temperatures would get, not how often the extremes would be reached or how long they would last. “Thorough knowledge on the health impact of intensity, frequency, and duration of high wet-bulb temperatures is needed,” she said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Geosciences.

The target of 1.5 degrees of warming was the lower of two established by the 2015 Paris Agreement among nations to fight climate change. But the world has already warmed by about 1 degree since 1900, and the ability to stay beneath the target is slowly slipping away as nations’ emissions reductions, both achieved and pledged, have fallen far short of what is needed.

A growing body of research has found that global warming so far is taking an increasing toll on human health indirectly through drought and crop failures, extreme storms and flooding, increased spread of certain insect-borne diseases and other effects.

But heat also has direct effects on the human body. Even relatively dry heat can be enough to kill people, as evidenced by the toll from heat waves in recent years. And the combination of heat and high humidity has already reached dangerous levels in parts of the world.

A study last year that looked at weather data found two sites in the tropics that have already had numerous occurrences of wet-bulb temperatures above 35 degrees, and many sites, including some along the southeastern coast of the United States, that have had TW readings from 31 to 33 degrees. But in most of the occurrences, the extreme conditions lasted only for an hour or two.

The effects of heat and humidity are worse for women, older people and those with chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, said Glen Kenny, a professor of physiology at the University of Ottawa who studies how the body copes with heat stress.

Work or exercise generates heat, and the body has to dissipate it. If the air temperature is higher than body temperature, the main source of cooling is through evaporation of sweat. But if the humidity reaches a point where sweat cannot evaporate, “essentially the body will gain heat,” said Dr. Kenny, who was not involved in the new study.

That stresses the cardiovascular system. “The strain that the heart is facing becomes progressively greater, especially if there’s successive days of heat exposure,” he said.

Links

• The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (pdf)
• Projections of tropical heat stress constrained by atmospheric dynamics
• Escalating global exposure to compound heat-humidity extremes with warming
• State of the Tropics 2020 Report
• Global Action Is ‘Very Far’ From What’s Needed to Avert Climate Chaos
• Here's What Extreme Heat Looks Like: Profoundly Unequal
• Where 2020's Record Heat Was Felt the Most
• As Phoenix Heats Up, the Night Comes Alive
• How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born?

(AU) NSW Tips $70m Into Hunter Hydrogen Hub As Coal Closures Loom

RenewEconomy - Michael Mazengarb

The NSW government will spend $70 million to support the development of a new hydrogen hub in the Hunter, as the government braces for an accelerating exist of the state’s coal generators, many of which are clustered within the region.

NSW energy minister Matt Kean said the state government would commit $70 million through the government’s recently announced $750 million Zero Industry and Innovation Program,

The development of a hydrogen hub in the Hunter region would allow access to existing ports and exports infrastructure, as well as access to sustainable supplies of water and electricity.

“This is a win-win for our state, by investing in hydrogen hubs we will  kick-start jobs and infrastructure opportunities in NSW while simultaneously contributing to our Net Zero by 2050 goal,” Kean said.

“The Hunter Hydrogen Hub will drive new low carbon jobs and help to set up the region for the future.”

Kean said that the state would be looking to tap into a substantial future market for green hydrogen, expected to be driven by a global shift to zero emissions manufacturing.

The purpose of the hubs, according to Kean, will be to cluster together a number of hydrogen producers and users into dedicated hubs, allowing infrastructure to be coordinated and shared, and for costs to be reduced.

“By 2050, green hydrogen has the potential to drive $350 billion in investment across Australia in current dollars and up to $26 billion per year in additional GDP, supporting the emergence of new decarbonised industries such as green steel and ammonia,” Kean said.

NSW parliamentary secretary for the Hunter, Taylor Martin, said the creation of a hydrogen hub in the Hunter region would also provide key opportunities in emerging green industries, helping to support a region traditionally dependent on fossil fuel industries.

“The Hunter is already an energy powerhouse and a hydrogen industry will mean  new jobs and investment in the region as well as creating new markets for export,” Martin said.

There has been growing speculation that a number of coal power stations are heading to early exits from the electricity market – a fear brought into reality by this week’s announcement from EnergyAustralia that it will close the Yallourn power station in Victoria four years earlier than initially expected.

The announcement of a Hunter region hydrogen hub follows similar commitments to establish a sustainable manufacturing hub in the Illawarra region.

The NSW commitment to establishing a hydrogen hub in the Hunter regions comes as both the federal and Queensland governments take steps to learn from industry about the future needs of the emerging hydrogen industry.

On Thursday, the Queensland government appointed its first Hydrogen Taskforce, led by the University of Queensland’s chair in sustainable energy futures, Professor Peta Ashworth, which brings together representatives from industry and key government leaders, to assess the needs of the hydrogen industry and provide the state government advice on supply chain gaps and opportunities.

“The Hydrogen Taskforce brings together industry, academic and public sector leaders with expertise in science, energy, international investment attraction and economic development, infrastructure planning, regulations, skills development and logistics, and Queensland is lucky to have Professor Peta Ashworth at the helm,” Queensland energy and hydrogen minister Mick de Brenni said.

On Friday, consultancy Arup announced that it had been selected by the federal government to undertake the first National Hydrogen Infrastructure Assessment, as has been recommended under the National Hydrogen Strategy adopted by federal and state energy ministers, and will likewise facilitate consultation with industry to identify gaps and emerging opportunities in the hydrogen supply chain in Australia.

“Australia has already been identified as having a competitive advantage in the race to develop a hydrogen economy but it will need significant and targeted supply chain investment to realise this advantage; Australia has to be smart with how it invests,” Arup’s hydrogen market lead for Australasia, Patrick Gorr, said.

“Our role is to help identify the best opportunities for investment.”

Links

• NSW targets industrial emitters with $750 million decarbonisation push
• EnergyAustralia to close Yallourn coal plant in 2028, to build massive big battery
• Queensland mobilises expert hydrogen team
• (AU) First Hydrogen Produced From Latrobe Valley Coal Generates Export Hopes, Emissions Fears
• POWERPASTE, A High-Density, Safe, And Easily Transportable Hydrogen Energy Fuel
• (AU) World's First Domestic Hydrogen Battery Developed By Australian Firm
• (UK) New Site Will Turn Plastic Waste Into Hydrogen
• (AU) Carbon Targets On Agenda At World Leaders' Summit, But What Is Business Doing To Bring Emissions Down?
• (AU) How To Harness The Power Of Biosolids To Make Hydrogen
• Green Hydrogen: Could It Be Key To A Carbon-Free Economy?

(UK) ‘We Are Seeing A Crisis In Values’ – An Exclusive Extract From Mark Carney’s Book

The Guardian - Mark Carney

The former head of the Bank of England looks at the danger of putting a price on everything

Mark Carney at the Bank of England. Photograph: Reuters

Author Mark Carney is a Canadian economist and banker. He is Vice Chairman and Head of Impact Investing at Brookfield Asset Management as of October 2020. Mark Carney served as the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.  Value(s): Building A Better World For All, by Mark Carney, is published by HarperCollins.

A few summers ago when a range of policymakers, business people, academics, labour leaders and charity workers gathered at the Vatican to discuss the future of the market system, Pope Francis surprised us by joining the lunch and sharing a parable. He observed that:

Our meal will be accompanied by wine. Now, wine is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind. Wine enriches all our senses.

At the end of our feast, we will have grappa. Grappa is one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled.

He continued:

Humanity is many things – passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interest. The market is humanity distilled.

And then he challenged us:

Your job is to turn the grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity. This isn’t theology. This is reality. This is the truth.

In my experience, the upheaval the world has been experiencing demonstrates that it is vital to rebalance the essential dynamism of capitalism with our broader social goals. This is not an abstract issue or a naive aspiration.

For over 12 years, I had the privilege and challenge of being a G7 governor, first in Canada and latterly in the UK.

During this time I saw kingdoms of gold rise and fall. I led global reforms to fix the faultlines that caused the financial crisis, worked to heal the malignant culture at the heart of financial capitalism and began to address both the fundamental challenges of the fourth industrial revolution and the existential risks from climate change.

I felt the collapse in public trust in elites, globalisation and technology. And I became convinced that these challenges reflect a common crisis in values and that radical changes are required to build an economy that works for all.

Whenever I could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed. Can the very act of valuation shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society?

Mark Carney: ‘We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society.’ Photograph: Toby Madden

As we move from a market economy to a market society, both value and values change.

Increasingly, the value of something, of some act or of someone is equated with their monetary value, a monetary value that is determined by the market.

The logic of buying and selling no longer applies only to material goods, but increasingly governs the whole of life from the allocation of healthcare to education, public safety and environmental protection.

Commodification, putting a good up for sale, can corrode the value of what is being priced.

As the political philosopher Michael Sandel argues, “When we decide that certain goods and services can be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use.”

Putting a price on every human activity erodes certain moral and civic goods. It is a moral question how far we should take mutually advantageous exchanges for efficiency gains. Should sex be up for sale? Should there be a market in the right to have children? Why not auction the right to opt out of military service?

There is extensive evidence that, when markets extend into human relationships and civic practices (from child-rearing to teaching), being in a market can change the character of the goods and the social practices they govern.

One of the best-known examples was documented by Richard Titmuss in his comparative study of blood-donation systems in the US and the UK, The Gift Relationship. Titmuss demonstrated that in economic and practical terms, the UK system of voluntary donations was superior to the US system, which paid for donations.

He added an ethical argument that turning blood into a commodity diminished the spirit of altruism and eroded people’s sense of obligation to donate blood to support others in their community.

These observations are familiar from the civic response to Covid. None of the voluntary groups that spontaneously formed were paid for the makeshift PPE and protective masks they created and donated. A call for volunteers to help those in the NHS was met with over a million people within days. No citizen drew on a government payment to help elderly neighbours or the homeless in their communities.

This underscores the moral error of many mainstream economists, which is to treat civic and social virtues as scarce commodities, despite there being extensive evidence that public-spiritedness increases with its practice.

My experience in the private and public sectors accords with Pope Francis’s parable. Value in the market is increasingly determining the values of society. We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society, to future generations and to our planet.

Once we recognise these dynamics, we can turn grappa back into wine, and channel the value of the market back into the service of the values of humanity.

Links

• Mark Carney's journey from money man to climate change crusader
• COVID-19 pandemic adds urgency to fight against climate change: Mark Carney
• Mark Carney: Investing in net-zero climate solutions creates value and rewards
• Mark Carney: Climate crisis deaths 'will be worse than Covid'
• Mark Carney says banks should link executive pay to Paris climate goals
• Mark Carney on how we get finance to act on climate
• Net zero goal ‘greatest commercial opportunity of our time,’ says Mark Carney