Ultra-processed food linked to big rise in dementia risk

Eating wholegrains, fruit and veg and other unprocessed foods lower the chance of dementia.Getty

From The Age

Regularly snacking on crisps, biscuits and other fatty, sugary foods significantly increases the risk of dementia, a study has shown.

Harvard University found that a diet high in ultra-processed items, which also include ready meals, fizzy drinks, breakfast cereals and cured meats, raised the chance of developing dementia by 58 per cent.

Researchers followed 5000 Americans for 10 years and found those eating the most junk food also had 46 per cent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, the forerunner to dementia.

Processed meats, such as bacon, hot dogs and sliced ham, were found to contribute most to dementia risk.

Prof Cindy Leung, of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the study showed that the benefits of switching to healthy foods “extends well beyond our waistline”.

“The good news is we also found the opposite effect for minimally processed food,” she said.

“Those who ate the most minimally processed whole foods, like fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and unprocessed meats, were 41 per cent less likely to develop dementia. [Which means that the junk food eaters have 2.7 times the risk of whole food eaters!]

“This gives us optimism for clear and actionable next steps. Our study shows that eating healthy whole foods is an important behaviour that can protect our minds as we age.”

Although researchers said they could not prove that junk food was driving dementia they added that it was “biologically plausible” and fitted with growing scientific evidence that ultra-processed foods impact brain function.

Dr Alex Henney, an endocrinologist at the University of Liverpool, said that junk foods may drive obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which raise the risk of dementia.

Additives such as emulsifiers and preservatives may also drive inflammation, which has also been implicated in dementia.

The study was published in a special issue of The American Journal of Public Health, looking into the harms of ultra-processed foods.

Experts warned that the public was being prevented from making healthy choices because of “aggressive marketing and harmful food environments”.

New research published in the issue found that the ingredients in ultra-processed food were often combined in forms deliberately chosen to engage the brain’s reward systems, making them likely to trigger addictive patterns of eating.

Dr Ashley Gearhardt, professor of psychology, of the University of Michigan, found that quick-release carbs coupled with high fat created the “once you pop, you can’t stop” addictive quality of junk food.

“Real whole food did not trigger an addictive response,” she said. “Nobody is bingeing on that stuff. Nobody is saying ‘apple slices, bet you can’t stop once you start.’

“The number one lever that was pulled was rapidly delivering carbohydrates into the body. That was often complemented by fat.

“This is literally missing from Mother Nature. Our bodies never evolved to get this ‘one-two punch’ in these energy-dense concentrated packages.”

Researchers argued that many of the same corporate strategies used by the tobacco industry were now being employed to keep people addicted to disease-causing food.

They found that many US tobacco companies had bought into the ultra-processed food industry and were using sales tactics similar to those used for cigarettes to sell the products, such as flavour engineering, and creating seemingly “low-fat” versions to retain customers who were concerned about health harms.

“Ultra-processed food is not simply an issue of personal responsibility or individual choice,” said Dr Nicholas Chartres, the lead editorial author and researcher at the University of Sydney and the University of California, San Francisco.

“The evidence increasingly points to a commercial system that has engineered, marketed, and normalised products linked to widespread chronic disease. The public health and government response must reflect that reality.

“The research that has been published adds to a growing body of evidence that these products are associated with chronic disease and that they have addictive characteristics.”

Life on Mars?

 

Life on Mars? This tiny South American mouse might hold the answer

[Hmmm.  Maybe not.]

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

There was a reason biologist Jay Storz braved 21 volcano summits in two years, battling bouts of altitude sickness and fissures belching sulfuric fumes.

That reason lay nestled next to a pile of rocks at the 6000 metre-high summit of Volcan Salin, a mountain on the Argentina-Chile border – a mummified mouse.

The Mars-like flanks of Volcán Salín in northern Chile, which researchers scoured for signs of life.CREDIT:MARIO PÉREZ MAMANI

For years Storz, an expert in high-altitude biology from the University of Nebraska, had chased evidence that mice live on the cloud-splitting peaks of South America’s mountains, thousands of metres above what was considered the altitude threshold for long-term mammalian life.

The freezing, dry, low-oxygen environment is one of the habitats on earth most similar to Mars, and the discovery of the mummified mouse – reported in Current Biology – has redefined our understanding of the physiological limits of mammals.

So what can we learn from these mummified mice about our search for life on Mars?

After stumbling upon their first mouse mummy, Storz and a colleague started searching through a nearby rock pile and uncovered seven more cadavers.

They found another five mice – mummified by the thin atmosphere and extreme cold – while trekking to other volcano summits across the Andes.

There was a chance the mice were ferried to those heights by the ancient Incas, who once performed ceremonial sacrifices on the peaks.

But radiocarbon dating revealed the oldest mouse mummy was 350 years old, and many had died only in the past few decades.

Researchers set traps and captured live specimens, proving populations of Punta de Vacas leaf-eared mice roam more than 6700 metres above sea level. Previously, anything higher than 5200 metres was considered a mammalian no-go zone.

Extremophiles are usually bacteria, but you could say the leaf-eared mouse – found far above the normal mammalian altitude threshold – has joined the ranks of microbes that live in permafrost and radioactive waste.CREDIT:MARCIAL QUIROGA-CARMONA

“Well-trained mountain climbers can tolerate such extreme elevations during a one-day summit attempt, but the fact that mice are actually living at such elevations demonstrates that we have underestimated the physiological tolerances of small mammals,” Storz said.

“The most surprising thing about our discovery is that mammals could be living on the summits of volcanoes in such an inhospitable, Mars-like environment.”

Creatures that thrive in toxic, acidic, radioactive, anaerobic, searing hot or deadly cold habitats – called extremophiles – rewrite biologists’ understanding of life on earth and the sheer force of evolution. But another group of researchers pay attention, too: astrobiologists.

These scientists scrutinise how life may have sprung up on Earth and where it could be lurking elsewhere in the universe.

“You might classify these mice as a type of extremophile,” says Dr Albert Fahrenbach. He’s the director of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Astrobiology, the only centre of its kind in the country.

Fahrenbach’s colleagues have scoured the globe for the most alien environments to help them deduce what we might find on seemingly barren exoplanets.

For example, the centre’s Professor Belinda Ferrari discovered bacteria in the soil of hyper-arid deserts in Antarctica, where there’s little available water or organic carbon, and the sun can vanish for months, precluding photosynthesis.

The bacteria were consuming hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, generating energy and water to stay alive – essentially, living off thin air. Their discovery provided a new model for how bacteria might thrive on harsh alien planets, nourished only by the atmosphere.

Each time scientists discover an extremophile – from the high-altitude mice to air-eating bacteria – our limited ideas about what life might look like beyond Earth expands, boosting our chances of recognising habitats on other planets that may sustain alien organisms.

In June, another of the centre’s astrobiologists, Professor Martin Van Kranendonk, led NASA personnel through the red dust of the Pilbara in the north of Western Australia to show them stromatolite fossils.

These swirls of dark silica, produced by prehistoric cyanobacteria, date back 2.7 billion to 3.5 billion years – the oldest confirmed evidence of life on Earth.

In 2007, the Spirit rover stumbled across similar silica structures in the Columbia Hills of Gusev crater on Mars, Fahrenbach says.

In particular, the structures resembled microbe-produced silica deposits found at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile – another landscape used as a proxy for Mars that isn’t far from Storz’s mummified mice.

Silica deposits found on Mars in 2007 compared with silica deposits in Chile, which were shaped by microbes.CREDIT:LIFESPRINGS MARS

“To the untrained eye, they just look like some unusual rock,” says Fahrenbach. “They have these really crazy textures, but from a geologist’s point of view, they’re pretty easy to identify as arising from life.”

The Martian structures, too, could yield biosignatures – evidence of creatures once alive on the dusty red planet.

“There’s only one way to be sure – to bring a sample back and study it on Earth, to see if we can provide evidence that these structures were generated biologically, ” says Fahrenbach.

The LifeSprings Mars mission, led by Van Kranendonk, aims to retrieve that all-important Martian sample for testing. According to the researchers behind the mission, it’s “humanity’s best chance to search for extraterrestrial life”.

But even as our knowledge of earthbound biology expands, there’s always the chance alien life is so beyond our current imagination we’re looking in the entirely wrong places, Fahrenbach says.

“There could be life out there that’s not based on any chemistry that we recognise.”

A very interesting article.  

However, Mars has even more extreme conditions than on top of a Chilean volcano.  Mars's average temperature is -60 degrees C.  The average air pressure is just 6.1 millibars, which reaches 11.6 mbar in Mar's deepest crater, Hellas Planitia.   Even at 6000 metres altitude, air pressure on Earth is 472 mbar.  In fact, Mars's air pressure is so low, the blood in your veins will boil.  If air pressure is below the Armstrong Limit (62.5 mbar) water will boil at body temperature.  At the summit of Mt Everest, your blood might not boil, but air pressure is so low (337 mbar) that your lungs can't absorb enough oxygen from the atmosphere, and you die of hypoxia.   Mars is a long way from habitable even by a miracle mouse from Andes volcanoes.

But the extremophile organisms discussed in the article might well be useful as we terraform Mars.  If we ever do,

Rising seas to cause $440 bln damage in Victoria

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

More than 16,000 properties in Melbourne’s Southbank are at high risk of damage from sea-level rises and storm surges within 17 years as climate change exacts an alarming toll on Victoria, new research shows.

Melbourne’s west, Geelong and South Gippsland are also among the regions highly vulnerable to sea-level rises, according to the forecast, while Victoria faces property damages reaching $337 billion in present value by 2100.

The losses to wetlands would reach a further $105 billion over the same period, bringing the total to $442 billion.

The report, commissioned by the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, includes research from Melbourne University and consulting firm Climate Risk, which shows rising sea levels and more dramatic storm surges and flooding will batter bays and coastal areas, causing extensive damage to residential and commercial properties as well as roads and environmental and agricultural assets.

The University of Melbourne research found more than 80,000 currently existing residential, commercial and industrial properties would be impacted by sea-level rise and storm surges by 2100.

It says a host of adaptation measures will be necessary, ranging from natural and human-made barriers on coastlines to “basic retreat” of homes and buildings from near the coast.

Tom Kompas, University of Melbourne environmental economics professor and lead researcher, said both his team and Climate Risk reached similar conclusions, despite using different models.

“I was alarmed, especially in terms of the losses of environmental assets,” he said.

He hoped the research would help guide authorities in determining where properties should be built in future.

“If you build a house now in the wrong area you’re going to have trouble,” he said. “There are people on the coast who already have erosion problems.”

The report used two sea-level rise models.

The University of Melbourne modelled the impact of a sea-level rise of 20 centimetres, 47 centimetres and 82 centimetres for the years 2040, 2070 and 2100, respectively. Climate Risk used a sea-level rise of 1.5 metres by 2100.

Victorian Marine and Coastal Council chair Anthony Boxshall said the research was groundbreaking because it assessed the economic impact of sea-level rise and storm surges on the environment, not just property.

He said it was important to act now because delaying would result in higher future costs.

“Ultimately, some pretty stark choices need to be made,” he said.

Boxshall said sea-level rise would threaten iconic infrastructure, including the Great Ocean Road and other suburban bayside roads.

“We need to have that conversation about do we need to move elements of the Great Ocean Road or any other roads on the coast,” he said. “What do we do with Beach Road?”

Source: The Age
Locals Dave Sutton (left) and Phillip Heath on the remaining strip separating the surf beach from the road at Inverloch, where erosion has caused major problems.CREDIT:JUSTIN MCMANUS
[A rock sea wall has since been built here.]

 

Half of America's banks insolvent

From The Age

The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $US9 trillion ($13.5 trillion) uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.

The second- and third-biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are “idiosyncratic”. That is a dangerous evasion.

Almost half of America’s 4800 banks have already burnt through their capital buffers and are running on negative equity. They may not have to mark all losses to market under US accounting rules, but that does not make them solvent. Somebody will take those losses.

“It’s spooky. Thousands of banks are underwater,” said Professor Amit Seru, a banking expert at Stanford University. “Let’s not pretend that this is just about Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. A lot of the US banking system is potentially insolvent.”

The full shock of monetary tightening by the Fed has yet to hit. A great edifice of debt faces a refinancing cliff-edge over the next six quarters. Only then will we learn whether the US financial system can safely deflate the excess leverage induced by extreme monetary stimulus during the pandemic.

A Hoover Institution report by Professor Seru and a group of banking experts calculates that more than 2315 US banks are currently sitting on assets worth less than their liabilities. The market value of their loan portfolios is $US2 trillion lower than the stated book value.

These lenders include big beasts. One of the 10 most vulnerable banks is a globally systemic entity with assets of over $US1 trillion. Three others are large banks. “It is not just a problem for banks under $US250 billion that didn’t have to pass stress tests,” he said.

The US Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) thought they had stemmed the crisis by bailing out uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank with a “systemic risk exemption” after these lenders collapsed in March.

The White House baulked at a blanket guarantee for all deposits because that would look like social welfare for the rich. Besides, the FDIC has only $US127 billion of assets (and less very soon) and may ultimately require its own bailout.

The authorities preferred to leave the matter vague, hoping that depositors would discern an implicit guarantee. The gamble failed. Depositors fled First Republic Bank at a fast and furious pace last week despite an earlier infusion of $US30 billion from a group of big banks.

White knights probing a possible takeover of First Republic recoiled once they examined the books and discovered the scale of real estate damage. The FDIC had to seize the bank, wiping out both shareholders and bondholders. It took a $US13 billion subsidy along with $US50 billion of loans to entice JP Morgan to pick up the pieces.

“No buyer would take First Republic without a public subsidy,” said Krishna Guha from Evercore ISI. He warns that hundreds of small and mid-sized banks will batten down the hatches and curb lending to avoid the same fate. This is how a credit crunch begins.

The share price of PacWest, the next on the sick list, fell as much as 60 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday. That will be the bellwether of what happens next.

The US authorities can contain the immediate liquidity crisis by guaranteeing all deposits temporarily. But that does not address the greater solvency crisis.

The Treasury and the FDIC are still in the denial phase. They blame the failures on reckless lending, bad management, and over-reliance on footloose uninsured depositors by a handful of banks. This has a familiar ring. “They said the same thing when Bear Stearns went down in 2008. Everything was going to be all right,” said Seru.

First Republic lends to technology start-ups, but it chiefly came unstuck on commercial real estate. It will not be the last on that score. Office blocks and industrial property are in the early stage of a deep slump.

“Where we stand today is a nearly perfect storm,” said Jeff Fine, real estate guru at Goldman Sachs.

“Rates have gone up 400 to 500 basis points in a year, and financing markets have almost completely shut down. We estimate there’s four to five trillion [US] dollars of debt in the commercial (property) sectors, of which about a trillion is maturing in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.

Packages of commercial property loans (CMBS) are typically on short maturities and have to be refinanced every two to three years. Borrowing exploded during the pandemic when the Fed flooded the system with liquidity. That debt comes due in late 2023 and 2024.

Could the losses be as bad as the subprime crisis? Probably not. Capital Economics says the investment bubble in US residential property peaked at 6.5 per cent of GDP in 2007. The comparable figure for commercial property today is 2.6 per cent.

But the threat is not trivial either. US commercial property prices have so far fallen by just 4 per cento 5 per cent. Capital Economics expects a peak to trough decline of 22 per cent. This will wreak further havoc on the loan portfolios of the regional banks that account for 70 per cent of all commercial property financing.

“In a worst-case scenario, it could create a ‘doom loop’ which accelerates a real estate downturn that then feeds back into the banking system,” said Neil Shearing, the group’s chief economist.

Silicon Valley Bank’s travails were different. Its sin was to park excess deposits in what is supposed to be the safest financial asset in the world: US treasuries. It was encouraged to do so under the risk-weighting rules of the Basel regulators.

Some of these debt securities have lost 20 per cent on long maturities – a theoretical paper loss only until you have to sell them to cover deposit flight.

The US authorities say the bank should have hedged this Treasury debt with interest rate derivatives. But as the Hoover paper makes clear, hedging merely transfers losses from one bank to another bank. The counterparty that underwrites the hedge contract takes the hit instead.

The root cause of this bond and banking crisis lies in the erratic behaviour and perverse incentives created by the Fed and the US Treasury over many years, culminating in the violent lurch from ultra-easy money to ultra-tight money now under way. They first created “interest rate risk” on a galactic scale: now they are detonating the delayed timebomb of their own creation.

Chris Whalen from Institutional Risk Analyst said we should be wary of a false narrative that pins all blame on miscreant banks. “The Fed’s excessive open market intervention from 2019 through 2022 was the primary cause of the failure of First Republic as well as Silicon Valley Bank,” he said.

Mr Whalen said US banks and bond investors (ie pension funds and insurance companies) are “holding the bag” on $US5 trillion of implicit losses left by the final blow-off phase of the Fed’s QE experiment.

“Since US banks only have about $US2 trillion in tangible equity capital, we have a problem,” he said.

He predicts that the banking crisis will keep moving up the food chain from the original outliers to mainstream banks until the Fed backs off and slashes rates by 100 basis points.

The Fed has no intention of backing off. [It raised rates further this week to the highest level in 16 years, and chair Jerome Powell warned not to expect any rate cuts this year]. It continues to shrink the US money supply at a record pace, with $US9 billion of quantitative tightening each month.

The horrible truth is that the world’s superpower central bank has made such a mess of affairs that it has to pick between two poisons: either it capitulates on inflation, or it lets a banking crisis reach systemic proportions. It has chosen a banking crisis.

 

The rise in the US discount rate from 1% in 2004 to 5.3% in 2006
led to the GFC.  The rise this cycle has been even larger.

A remarkable new weight-loss drug

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

Scientists and advocates say new anti-obesity drugs generating remarkable levels of weight loss in clinical trials will once and for all dispel the myth that obesity is simply the result of making unhealthy choices, rather than a genuine disease.

The emergence of the new drug, marketed locally as Wegovy, promises to revolutionise weight-loss treatments. In one major clinical trial patients using the drug lost 11 per cent more body weight than those undergoing an intensive diet and exercise program.

Scientists and campaigners have long rejected the popular narrative that obesity is solely the result of unhealthy choices. Wegovy’s dramatic results might provide the sort of black-and-white proof that convinces society at large, they hope, that it is a disease and needs to be treated as such.

“I think it will reframe the argument. As these drugs become more effective and available, it will be harder for people to ignore them,” said Professor Brian Oldfield, a leading obesity researcher at Monash University and editor of the field’s top academic journal.

Tiffany Petre, director of the Obesity Collective, said she “hopes this drug changes conversations about obesity in society”.

“People with obesity haven’t been able to get appropriate healthcare. Now there is something on the market.”

Governments around the world have poured hundreds millions of dollars into public health campaigns that aim to tackle obesity by encouraging healthy eating and exercise.

Then-prime minister John Howard in 2004, for example, rolled out a $116 million program to pay for after-school sports and healthy-eating education for families – while also rejecting plans to ban fast-food advertising in children’s TV programs.

While healthy eating and physical activity are vital for good health, decades of evidence suggest they simply do not lead to large amounts of weight loss, said Oldfield. “They are not enough by themselves. They typically give a 3 to 5 per cent reduction in body weight.”

This problem shows up in a large trial of Wegovy published in JAMA early last year. Some 611 volunteers were given ‘Intensive Behavioral Therapy’: eight weeks on a supervised very-low-calorie diet, followed by more than a year of a low-calorie diet.

They were also asked to do 100 minutes of exercise a week, eventually increasing to 200 minutes, and received 30 visits from a dietitian. “That’s extreme and unsustainable,” said Oldfield.

After this enormous effort they lost, on average, 5.7 per cent of their body weight. A subgroup who did all this and took Wegovy lost 16 per cent of their body weight – an average of 16.8 kilograms.

Wegovy, which was approved by Australia’s medicines regulator for weight loss last year, mimics a natural hormone that slows down how fast the stomach works, making people feel fuller for longer. It also seems to affect how the brain regulates appetite.

The drug does come with side effects – particularly nausea – and in clinical trials about 6 per cent of volunteers are forced to drop out. Experts caution it is not a silver bullet and must be used alongside diet and exercise.

Several years ago, Professor Stephen Simpson, director of the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, and his team ran a series of focus groups looking at how to change people’s opinions about the cause of obesity.

“People have this deep-seated view it is their fault, particularly those with living experience. It’s deeply held and pervasive,” he said. (Oldfield has received fees from the drug’s sponsor Novo Nordisk, as has Obesity Australia; Simpson sits on that organisation’s board).

This stigma has even shown up in the response to recent Wegovy shortages, said Simpson, with some seeking to blame people with obesity for seeking medical treatment for their condition.

The most-effective tool, he found in his focus groups, was to “smash the frame” – to disrupt people’s idea that obesity was caused by predominantly by bad choices.

“One of the most powerful ways of pushing back against that, we found out very quickly, is to say it is biological. There is a powerful biology that underpins obesity.” The success of Wegovy, he said, “is clearly indicating there is a profound biological underpinning”.

Coal's executioners gather

German ski slope, January 2022

From The Age

The savage winter heat in Europe over recent days has been so surreal that observers are running out of words to describe what they are seeing. Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks global weather extremes, told The Washington Post that the weather was “totally insane” and “absolute madness”. The heatwave was, he said, “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology”.

In Poland, on New Year’s Day, the temperature peaked at almost 19 degrees, 15 above average. In parts of the continent winter temperatures at night were more typical of summer days.

About the same time, a cold snap caused by a polar vortex gripped North America, killing directly and indirectly more than 200 people.

In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting that the La Nina weather pattern that has caused both horrific flooding and cooler temperatures across the Southern Hemisphere is showing signs of dissipating. With this climatological Band-Aid torn away, there are fears the fierce heat La Nina’s clouds has protected us from over the past couple of years will suddenly return, exposing us to the true temperatures of a warmer world.

All this comes as Russia’s war of aggression drags towards its second year, causing not just untold misery for millions Ukrainians but a global energy crisis that has propped up demand for dangerous fossil fuels and super profits for the companies that peddle them.

In this context, it is difficult to address positive news on climate action, but it is there and it is worth addressing. According to the International Energy Agency’s most recent report on coal, published last month, the rise in coal demand prompted by the energy crunch was limited to just 1.2 per cent, and it is not expected to last long.

And despite that war-related jump, the global seaborne coal trade in 2022 is likely to have been between 5 and 8 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. Europe’s overwhelming response to the energy crunch has been to buy gas whereever it can find it and to pump eye-bleeding sums of money into energy efficiency measures and renewable energy technology.

Coal’s new high price might be creating short-term profits, but it is also destroying demand.

As a result, the sprawling coalition of government and activist forces dedicated to killing off coal now believes the first phase is already achieved – the pipeline of new coal power stations has effectively been shut.

Countries such as China an India are still building plants permitted and contracted over the past decade, but are rapidly turning towards renewables. At the end of 2021, the coal industry’s key financiers – China, Japan and South Korea – declared they would no longer invest in new offshore coal plants.

As an Australian miner complained in a parliamentary inquiry last year, banks no longer wanted to finance coal projects because the “grief to income ratio” was not worth it. Activist shareholders were becoming too much of a pain.

Camilla Fenning, who leads the coal program for the British-based climate think tank E3G, told me this week the speed of the retreat from coal over the past couple of years has been startling.

“There are now only around 35 countries that have a coal pipeline [of planned new plants],” Fenning said. “None of those are now in Europe, and only four are in the OECD – that’s Turkey, Australia, the US and Japan. Of those 35 countries, something like 16 only have one planned new coal plant, so even they are near the tipping point of no new coal.

“And also, of those 35, probably half of them were dependent on China or Japan or Korean investment, and now they have pulled the plug, it’s pretty unlikely they will get the investment to build. So now we have a domino effect.”

And with coal costs so high, even China’s new plants are running far below capacity.

The problem is that a new coal plant lasts for about 40 years. So even with the pipeline of new plants cut to a trickle, if the existing global fleet is allowed to live for the course of its natural life, the emissions it creates will blow the world’s limited remaining carbon budget to keep warming under 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees.

So now the anti-coal movement has shifted its attention to how it can most effectively shut them down sooner.

Huge steps were taken in this direction at the last two world climate talks in Glasgow in 2021 and Sharm El-Sheikh in November. In Glasgow, a new model to accelerate the process was finalised and announced.

Under the so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy) the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $US8.5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as seed money for a fund to purchase and close South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewables.

South Africa is the perfect laboratory for such a program because it has a some of the world’s best access to sun and wind. And because it has, even by a dirty industry’s standards, a particularly dirty coal fleet. As a result, a dollar spent greening South Africa cuts far more carbon than a dollar spent in, say, Europe.

The model is also in keeping with one of the Paris Agreement’s core principles, which recognises that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in tackling climate change.

In simple terms, this means that poor nations agreed to take action if rich ones – which caused the problem in the first place – agreed to pay for it.

In Egypt in November, the JET IP backers and South Africa detailed impressive progress in the plan and now negotiations have begun for similar agreements to accelerate coal retirement in Indonesia and Vietnam. Because each nation has different energy demands and different coal industries, developing the plans is complicated, says energy analyst Tim Buckley.

And care must be taken to ensure the money is well spent. There is no point in buying out a coal plant only to later see it resold, Buckley explains. Nor is there any point in shutting off the power before it is adequately replaced with clean alternatives.

Due to generations of failure to properly address climate change, even this rapid progress is not fast enough, says Fenning. She hopes the South African model will be improved as versions of it are deployed in Indonesia and Vietnam, and then, hopefully, across the world.

Many climate scientists believe the 1.5 degrees target has already slipped from our grasp, though rapid decarbonisation could see temperatures stabilise and then slowly drop by the end of the century.

Until then, we will face unfeasibly warm winters across Europe, and a return to infernal summers in Australia.

Less competition worsens inflation

I can't read the signature, and The Age itself doesn't give credit.  
If you know who created this, let me know in the comments

From The Age, in Melbourne

We’ve worried a lot about inflation and its causes this year, but in one important respect the economy’s managers have yet to join the dots. The most basic economics tells us that what stops prices rising more than they should is strong competition between firms. If competition has weakened, that will be part of our inflation problem.

But is there evidence that competition is less intense than it was? Yes, lots. It was outlined by Assistant Treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh in a recent speech.

The basic model of how markets work – the one lodged in the head of almost every economist – assumes “perfect competition”.

Markets are supposed to consist of a huge number of consumers and many producers, each of them too small to have any ability to influence the price of the products they’re selling. So the price is determined purely by the interaction of producers’ supply and consumers’ demand.

Competition between these small firms is so intense that, should any one of them be so foolish as to raise their price above what all the other firms are charging, consumers would immediately cease buying their product, and they’d go out backwards.

I doubt if that was ever an accurate description of any real-world market. But even if it approximated the truth at the time economists got it so firmly fixed in their minds – the late 19th century – all the years since then have seen firms getting bigger and bigger.

So much so that many key industries today have just a handful of firms – often no more than four – accounting for well over half the industry’s sales.

This has happened thanks to a century or two of firms using improvements in technology to pursue “economies of scale”. Up to a point, the more widgets you can produce from the same factory, the lower their average cost of production.

Firms do this in the hope of increasing their profits. But the magic of markets – when they’re working properly – is that your competitors also use the new technology to cut their production costs, then undercut your price to pinch some of your share of the market.

This is the competitive process by which the benefits of scale-economies end up mainly in the hands of consumers, in the form of lower prices. This is a big part of the reason we’re all so much richer than our great-grandparents were.

The digital revolution has moved scale-economies to a new stratosphere. It costs a lot to develop a new GPS navigation program, for instance, but once you’ve done it, you can produce a million or two million copies at negligible extra cost.

So, fundamentally, the move to fewer but much bigger firms is a good thing. Except for this: the bigger a firm’s share of the market, the greater its ability to influence the prices it charges. This is a key motivation for big firms to keep taking over smaller firms.


And when markets are dominated by three or four big firms, it’s easy for them to reach an unspoken agreement to use advertising, marketing and superficial product differentiation to compete with their rivals, while avoiding undermining existing prices and profit margins by starting a price war.

Similarly, when all the big firms in an industry are hit by similar big increases the costs of their imported inputs – caused, say, by pandemic or war-related shortages of supply – it’s easy for them to reach an unspoken understanding that they will use this opportunity to fatten their profit margins by raising their prices by more than the rise in input costs justifies.

Which is just what seems to have been contributing to the huge rise in consumer prices this year – though it’s far too soon for economic researchers to have hard evidence this is happening.

What we do have, according to Leigh, is a “growing body of evidence that suggests excessive market concentration can lead to economic problems”.

“Dominant firms in a market may have less incentive to carry out research and development. They may have less incentive to produce new products. And in some cases, they may have less incentive to pay their employees fairly.

“As you can imagine, the drag on the economy only becomes stronger and deeper with each and every concentrated market,” Leigh says.

In the past decade, there has been a huge increase in the number of studies – covering the US and many other countries – confirming that markets have become more concentrated. That is, a higher share of the market held by a few big firms.

But, Leigh says, “mark-ups” – the gap between firms’ costs of production and their selling prices – are one of the most reliable indicators of “market power”. That is, power to raise their prices by more than is justified by their increased costs of production.

Australian research led by Treasury’s Jonathan Hambur finds that industry average mark-ups increased by about 6 percentage points between 2003 and 2016. This fits with figures for the advanced economies estimated in a study by the International Monetary Fund over the same period.

Hambur finds that mark-ups for the most digitally intensive firms increased by 12 percentage points, compared with 4 percentage points for all other firms.

And also that industries experiencing greater annual increase in concentration had greater annual increases in their mark-ups.

Of course, none of this should come as a great surprise to those few economists who specialise in the study of IO – industrial organisation – the way the real-world behaviour of monopolies and oligopolies differs from the way simple textbook models of perfect competition would lead us to expect.

Institutionally, the responsibility for seeking to ensure “effective competition” in our highly oligopolised economy rests with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. But its efforts to tighten scrutiny of company takeovers and other ways of increasing a firm’s market power have met stiff resistance from the big business lobby.

This new evidence of increasing mark-ups suggests the econocrats responsible for limiting inflation should be giving the ACCC more support.

DNA from 2m years ago reveals lost Arctic world

From The Guardian

Two-million-year-old DNA from northern Greenland has revealed that the region was once home to mastodons, lemmings and geese, offering unprecedented insights into how climate change can shape ecosystems.The fragments are 1m years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “DNA can degrade quickly but we’ve shown that under the right circumstances, we can now go back further in time than anyone could have dared imagine,” said Willerslev.

In future, similar techniques might be used to uncover new insights into the first humans and their ancestors, he added.

Willerslev and colleagues worked for 16 years on the project, which resulted in the DNA of 41 samples found hidden in clay and quartz being sequenced and identified. The ancient DNA samples were found buried deep in the Kap København Formation, a sediment deposit almost 100 metres thick that built up over 20,000 years. The sediment, tucked in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point, was eventually preserved in ice or permafrost and lay undisturbed by humans for 2m years.

Extracting and analysing the DNA was a painstaking process that involved piecing together tiny fragments of genetic material that first needed to be detached from clay and quartz sediment. It was only the advent of a new generation of DNA sequencing techniques that allowed the scientists to identify and piece together extremely small and damaged fragments of DNA, through referencing extensive libraries of DNA collected from present-day animals, plants and microorganisms.

A picture emerged of forests populated by reindeer, hares, lemmings and mastodons, elephant-like ice age mammals that have previously only been found in North and Central America.

The breakthrough in ancient DNA analysis pushes back the DNA record by 1m years to a time when the Arctic region was 11-19C warmer than the present day. The analysis reveals that the northern peninsula of Greenland, now a polar desert, once featured boreal forests of poplar and birch trees teeming with wildlife. The work offers clues to how species might adapt, or be genetically engineered, to survive the threat of rapid global heating.

Prof Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, said: “A new chapter spanning 1m extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time.”

The samples did not reveal any carnivores – probably because they were fewer in number – but the scientists speculated that there may have been ancient bears, wolves or sabre-toothed tigers. “We don’t know what was there, but probably something that ate mastodons and reindeers,” said Willerslev.

The authors say it is encouraging that these species were able to thrive so far north in a region that would still have been cast into darkness for much of the winter, despite warmer temperatures.

“The data suggests that more species can evolve and adapt to wildly varying temperatures than previously thought,” said Dr Mikkel Pedersen, of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen and co-first author.

However, the speed of global heating today means that many species will not have enough time to adapt, meaning that the climate emergency remains a huge threat to biodiversity. Willerslev and colleagues said studying ancient ecosystems could provide clues to how some species were genetically adapted to a warmer climate.

“It is possible that genetic engineering could mimic the strategy developed by plants and trees 2m years ago to survive in a climate characterised by rising temperatures and prevent the extinction of some species, plants and trees,” said Prof Kurt Kjærr, of Copenhagen University and a co-author. “This is one of the reasons this scientific advance is so significant because it could reveal how to attempt to counteract the devastating impact of global warming.”

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

Eu votes for "green tariffs" on imports

From The Age

The European Union has struck a political deal to impose carbon tariffs on imports of polluting goods such as steel and cement, in a world-first scheme which aims to support its domestic industries against those from countries with weak climate laws.

The 27-member bloc last year proposed a law to impose a green levy from 2026 on imports of steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium and electricity, to prevent domestic industry from being undercut by cheaper goods made in countries with weaker environmental rules.

As part of an all-night sitting of European Parliament measures will now also apply to imported hydrogen, and some downstream products such as screws and bolts and similar articles of iron or steel.

The scheme, known as the carbon border adjustment mechanism, has faced criticism from countries with high-carbon exports including Australia, China, Turkey, India as a protectionist measure, although Brussels has said countries could be exempted if they have a domestic carbon price akin to the EU’s, or similar climate change targets. Europe’s target under the Paris accord is to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 per cent on 1990 levels by 2030.

The measure comes amid heightened trade tensions with the United States over the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for green technologies, which the EU has said could disadvantage European firms.

Brussels argues the new schemeis designed to be in full compliance with World Trade Organisation rules and plans for it to apply from October 1 next year, but with a transition period, where the obligations of the importer shall be limited to reporting.

Before the end of the transition period the European Commission will assess whether to extend the scope to other goods at risk of carbon leakage, including organic chemicals and polymers, with the goal to include all goods covered by the current European emissions trading scheme by 2030. They will also assess the methodology for indirect emissions and the possibility to include more downstream products.

Companies importing goods into the EU will be required to buy certificates to cover their embedded carbon emissions. The scheme is designed to apply the same carbon cost to overseas firms and domestic EU industries - the latter of which are already required to buy permits from the EU carbon market when they pollute.

Mohammed Chahim, European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the law, said the border tariff would be crucial to EU efforts to fight climate change.

“It is one of the only mechanisms we have to incentivise our trading partners to decarbonise their manufacturing industry,” he said. “On top of this, it is an alternative to our current carbon leakage measures, which will allow us to apply the ‘polluter pays’ principle to our own industry. A win-win situation.”

Some details on the law, including its start date, will be determined later this week in related negotiations on a reform of the EU carbon market.

Australian industry has said the country had little to fear in the medium term from implementable border adjustments by the EU because only 0.25 per cent of trade with Europe was affected by the current proposal.

However, the scheme will likely expand and similar schemes in the United States, Japan or other economies could affect much more trade.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has said it would examine the EU’s proposal to see whether it is WTO compliant.

The department said it was committed to participating in multilateral discussions that promote trade, build sustainable supply chains and share knowledge.

Charity groups have criticised the EU for introducing the measure without lifting climate funding to developing economies, which will likely be hit hardest by the scheme.

Oxfam EU Tax expert Chiara Putaturo said Europeans were responsible for double the carbon emissions as the poorest half of the world.

“Yet, the EU just agreed to pass the buck to those least responsible by forcing them to pay a tariff despite being hardest hit by the climate crisis. EU countries did not even accept to channel revenues to climate finance funds,” she said.

“The EU and EU countries need to increase climate finance funds, especially now that poor countries are going to bear the cost of the carbon tariff.”

Oxfam's criticism is completely wrong.  If developing countries impose a carbon price on their own steel, they won't have to pay green tariffs in the EU.  It's quite simple:  either they pay the tax to themselves, or they pay tax to the EU.  Which makes more sense?  This measure will encourage other countries to introduce their own carbon price.  Which will be a good thing.

Finished coils of rolled steel at BlueScope's Port Kembla steelworks in NSW.CREDIT:BLOOMBERG

How to survive an energy crisis

 By Megan Herbert, cartoonist at The Age

Lab-grown milk by 2024

Milk brewed in a lab using precision fermentation. Eden Brew expects the product to be on the market by 2024.

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

A new animal-free milk promising to be more sustainable than dairy but with near-identical taste and nutritional content could hit supermarket shelves in the next two years, adding to the growing roster of milk alternatives available to Australian consumers.

CSIRO-backed start-up Eden Brew, which has worked out how to “brew” milk in a lab in a way that emulates the natural fermentation process that happens in cows, is working on industrialising the process and expects to have its animal-free products on the market by 2024.

Founder and chief executive Jim Fader said the company’s business model would be based on global beverages giant Coca-Cola’s supply chain, where the main ingredient - in this case the animal-free milk protein - is brewed centrally and then shipped to dairy companies across the world.

“We’re taking it from two- to 10-litre scales to 500,000-litre scale so that we can make it at a cost and scale that makes the whole thing worthwhile,” he said.

“We expect that by about 2028 to 2030, we will be at the same retail price to the consumer as milk, mostly because we come down in price but in part because there’s forecast continued inflation in dairy.”

The process involves inserting synthetic cow DNA into yeast to form a protein known as a casein micelle, the “essential building block” for cow’s milk. These proteins are then brewed, filtered and dried ready to be rehydrated and turned into animal-free dairy products.

Eden Brew is among a host of new companies racing to get animal-free products to consumers, promising a more ethical and ecologically sustainable alternative to dairy. In the US, consumers can already buy ice-cream, spreadable cheese and protein powder made from animal-free milk protein produced by Silicon Valley player Perfect Day.

Fader said the fledgling industry would help meet the growing global demand for protein, which the UN forecasts will increase by 74 per cent by 2050 as the global population nears 10 billion.

“You just can’t scale existing food manufacturing industry to meet that demand sustainably - you’d need two planets,” he said. “This will supplement, not replace, [dairy] supply as demand goes through the roof over the next generation.”

Fader said Eden Brew would consider its environmental impact at every step along the supply chain.

“There’s no point being a business that markets itself on good environmental outcomes and then not be a business that challenges every facet of itself, its supply chain and people it does business with to make sure it’s as optimum as it can be,” he said.

Emissions from agriculture (if you include methane from ruminants' burps and farts, mostly burps) contribute as much as 30% of global emissions.  It would make a huge difference to the rate at which the world warms if we could eliminate or reduce these.  And non-animal milk, and non-animal cheese, which taste like milk and cheese, will take us closer to that goal.

Giant leap in renewable hydrogen technology

The key disadvantage of the hydrogen economy, or the hydrogen storage cycle, is that the energy loss during conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis has been too high.  The round trip efficiency of producing hydrogen for storage using green electricity, and then burning the hydrogen later to produce electricity has been very low.  For example, in cars, if you compared lithium-ion batteries with hydrogen fuel cells, batteries are 76% efficient, while fuel cells are only 30% efficient, although this calculation also includes the cost of compressing and transporting the hydrogen.   The major reason is that there is a substantial energy loss during electrolysis.  But the new technology mentioned in this report by The Age promises to change that. 

Australian researchers claim to have made a “giant leap” in lifting the efficiency of electrolysers, bringing forward the time when green hydrogen will be competitive with fossil fuels as an energy source.

Hysata, a company using technology developed at the University of Wollongong, said its patented capillary-fed electrolysis cells achieve 95% efficiency, meaning little wastage, beating by about one-quarter the levels of current technology.

The achievement, published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communication journal today, could see the Morrison government’s so-called hydrogen stretch goal of $2 a kilogram to make the fuel competitive reached as soon as 2025, the Hysata chief executive, Paul Barrett, said.

“We’ve gone from 75% [efficiency] to 95% – it’s really a giant leap for the electrolysis industry,” Barrett said.

Renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar is making big inroads into the power sector, supplying more than a third of eastern Australia’s electricity in the final three months of 2021. However, decarbonising industry and some transport, such as trucking, is likely to be tougher unless fuels such as hydrogen become much cheaper.

Gerry Swiegers, Hysata’s chief technology officer and a UoW professor, said electrolysis – which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – had been around for two centuries with mostly only incremental improvements in processing.

The central challenge was to reduce the electrical resistance within the electrolysis cell. Much like a smart phone battery warming as it charges, resistance wasted energy in a regular cell as well as often requiring additional energy for cooling.

“What we did differently was just to start completely over and to think about it from a very high level,” Swiegers said. “Everyone else was looking at improving materials or an existing design.”

With the help of two PhD researchers – Aaron Hodges and Anh Linh Hoang – the small team used readily available materials to develop a thin sponge-like membrane to suck the water up between two electrodes. The avoidance of creating bubbles was also key.

“So a combination of that wicking membrane and that bubble-free operation resulted in inherently low resistance,” Barrett said. Hydrogen could be produced using 41.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram.

“For hydrogen producers, this will significantly reduce both the capital and operational costs to produce green hydrogen,” he said, adding the efficiency levels achieved were “the best in the world”.

From an initial concept in 2019, the research has advanced quickly. With $4.25m from UK-based IP Group and $750,000 from Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corp, Hysata is now looking to begin a pilot manufacturing site of electrolysis plates – each 250mm in diameter – by the end of 2023.

“We want to help Australia build core electrolyser technology,” Barrett said, adding the plan would be to build a plant capable of producing one gigawatt of electrolysers a year. Similar-sized plants for elsewhere in the country and beyond would follow as the production techniques were mastered.

Hysata is hiring more staff to add to its 20-strong team, with a plan for a fundraising announcement in the second half of 2022, Barrett said.

At stake is potentially an industry worth trillions of dollars. According to the government’s national hydrogen strategy released in 2019, a “cautiously optimistic scenario” could see an Australian hydrogen industry generate about 7,600 jobs and add about $11bn a year in additional GDP by 2050” or another 10,000 jobs and $26bn annually if markets develop faster.

“I’m very excited about this project,” Swiegers said. “I think this really gives us a chance to get to net zero [carbon emissions] potentially earlier than expected.”

Even if this technology takes off, there are still problems with the hydrogen storage cycle.  Hydrogen has to be compressed and liquefied for transport; the H2 molecule is so small it escapes easily even through metal; it makes the pipes brittle.  Even with this advance, hydrogen fuel cells for transport are not going to replace batteries.  However, there are plenty of uses where hydrogen, or methane/hydrocarbons created from hydrogen using the Sabatier process, can be useful.  We will need seasonal storage for 100% green electricity grids.  De-carbonising iron and steel production using green hydrogen or green methane, fuelling jets and shipping are others.

Why China can't bail out Russia

 From The Age. [Article written by Paul Krugman for The New York Times]

In deciding to invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin clearly misjudged everything. He had an exaggerated view of his own nation’s military might; my description last week of Russia as a Potemkin superpower, with far less strength than meets the eye, looks even truer now. He vastly underrated Ukrainian morale and military prowess, and failed to anticipate the resolve of democratic governments — especially, although not only, the Biden administration, which, in case you haven’t noticed, has done a remarkable job on everything from arming Ukraine to rallying the West around financial sanctions.

I can’t add anything to the discussion of the war itself, although I will note that much of the commentary I’ve been reading says that Russian forces are regrouping and will resume large-scale advances in a day or two — and has been saying that, day after day, for more than a week.

What I think I can add, however, is some analysis of the effects of sanctions, and in particular an answer to one question I keep being asked: Can China, by offering itself as an alternative trading partner, bail out Putin’s economy?

No, it can’t.

Let’s talk first about the impact of those sanctions.

One thing the West conspicuously hasn’t done is try to block Russian sales of oil and gas — the country’s principal exports. Oh, the United States might ban imports of Russian oil, but this would be a symbolic gesture: Oil is traded on a global market, so this would just reshuffle trade a bit, and in any case US imports from Russia account for only about 5 per cent of Russian production.

The West has, however, largely cut off Russia’s access to the world banking system, which is a very big deal. Russian exporters may be able to get their stuff out of the country, but it’s now hard for them to get paid. Probably even more important, it’s hard for Russia to pay for imports — sorry, but you can’t carry out modern international trade with briefcases full of $US100 bills. In fact, even Russian trade that remains legally permitted seems to be drying up as Western companies that fear further restrictions and a political backlash engage in “self-sanctioning.”

How much does this matter? The Russian elite can live without Prada handbags, but Western pharmaceuticals are another matter. In any case, consumer goods are only about one-third of Russia’s imports. The rest are capital goods, intermediate goods — that is, components used in the production of other goods — and raw materials. These are things Russia needs to keep its economy running, and their absence may cause important sectors to grind to a halt. There are already suggestions, for example, that the cutoff of spare parts and servicing may quickly cripple Russia’s domestic aviation, a big problem in such a huge country.

But can China provide Putin with an economic lifeline? I’d say no, for four reasons.

First, China, despite being an economic powerhouse, isn’t in a position to supply some things Russia needs, like spare parts for Western-made airplanes and high-end semiconductor chips.

Second, while China itself isn’t joining in the sanctions, it is deeply integrated into the world economy. This means that Chinese banks and other businesses, like Western corporations, may engage in self-sanctioning — that is, they’ll be reluctant to deal with Russia for fear of a backlash from consumers and regulators in more important markets.

Third, China and Russia are very far apart geographically. Yes, they share a border. But most of Russia’s economy is west of the Urals, while most of China’s is near its east coast. Beijing is 3,500 miles from Moscow, and the only practical way to move stuff across that vast expanse is via a handful of train lines that are already overstressed.

Finally, a point I don’t think gets enough emphasis is the extreme difference in economic power between Russia and China.

Some politicians are warning about a possible “arc of autocracy” reminiscent of the World War II Axis — and given the atrocities underway, that’s not an outlandish comparison. But the partners in any such arc would be wildly unequal.

Putin may dream of restoring Soviet-era greatness, but China’s economy, which was roughly the same size as Russia’s 30 years ago, is now 10 times as large. For comparison, Germany’s gross domestic product was only 2 1/2 times Italy’s when the original Axis was formed.

So if you try to imagine the creation of some neofascist alliance — and again, that no longer sounds like extreme language — it would be one in which Russia would be very much the junior partner, indeed very nearly a Chinese client state. Presumably that’s not what Putin, with his imperial dreams, has in mind.

China, then, can’t insulate Russia from the consequences of the Ukraine invasion. It’s true that the economic squeeze on Russia would be even tighter if China joined the democratic world in punishing aggression. But that squeeze is looking very severe even without Chinese participation. Russia is going to pay a very high price, in money as well as blood, for Putin’s megalomania.

A person holds cash withdrawn from an ATM machine at a Sberbank branch. On February 24, the United States announced it was imposing sanctions on major Russian banks, including Sberbank and VTB in response to the special military operation in Ukraine.

Anton Novoderezhkin | TASS | Getty Images