Reading for the first weekend of spring / autumn
31st August 2018 –Reading for the first weekend of spring / autumn
People Change:
A 2018 study of longevity in 18 wealthy countries found life expectancy increasing in Australia but declining in Britain, the United States and several other nations. One reason for the American decline is that in 2017 a record 72,000 Americans, up more than 10% on 2016, died from drug overdoses. This is more than died in car accidents or from shootings or the number of Americans who died in the Vietnamese war.
The British Heart Foundation predicts that over the next two decades the number of people with diabetes in England will increase from four million to five million leading to a 29 percent increase in heart attacks and strokes.
Switzerland has the highest male life expectancy of 81.6 years and Japan the highest female life expectancy at 87.2 years.
In 2012, the World Health Assembly endorsed a global vaccine action plan that included the goal of stopping the transmission of measles, which is a leading cause of death for children in Africa and Asia, by 2020. According to the WHO measles cases declined to a record low of about 5,000 in Europe in 2016 then suddenly ballooned to 24,000 cases in 2017 and 41,000 measles cases reported in the first half of 2018. Thirty-seven people have died. One reason for decreasing vaccination rates is misinformation, some of it attributed to populist politicians, that leads parents to believe that vaccines are unnecessary or unsafe for their children. Muslim authorities in Indonesia have gone a stage further and declared a fatwa banning the inoculation of children against measles, mumps and rubella.
Climate Change
Continuing with health issues, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recorded that the continent saw a large uptick in mosquito carrying West Nile virus infections in Europe, with 400 reported and 22 fatalities. In addition there has also been an increase in tick-borne encephalitis in central and southern Europe.
Air pollution causes seven million premature deaths a year.
Research conducted in China found high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education. Some 95% of the world’s population live in areas of high pollution. Other studies have found toxic air was linked to “extremely high mortality” in people with mental disorders and earlier work linked it to increased mental illness in children. Another study found those living near busy roads had an increased risk of dementia.
America’s Environmental Protection Agency conceded that replacing President Obama’s climate plan for electric utilities with a new plan favouring coal could lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days. As a result the country will forego as much as US$ 4 billion a year in net benefits from 2023 to 2037.
2018 has seen multiple major fires breaking out in California, British Columbia, Sweden and on the Russian border with Finland. Smoke from Siberian fires spread as far as Washington State. Of course these all contribute to pollution and rising carbon dioxide levels.
Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 91 in Greece, 70 in Quebec, 29 in South Korea, 23 in Russia and nine in California. Heat now kills more Americans than floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters. Britain’s Environmental Audit Committee predicted that the number of heat-related fatalities in the UK will triple to 7,000 a year by the 2050s. Although summer temperatures in Spain have risen by more than 1ºC since 1980 due to climate change, deaths related to heat have declined as Spaniards adapted.
So far in 2018, new maximum temperatures have been recorded in Africa and in cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of the USA. July was the hottest month in Moscow in 130 years of recorded history. South East Australia is experiencing its worst drought in over one hundred years.
Research published in Nature Communications predicts that the deadliest place for extreme heat waves late this century will be the north China plain, a densely populated food-producing region of China where wet bulb temperatures are forecast to exceed 35C, the maximum humans can withstand. Previous research showed that cities round the Persian Gulf will also suffer wet bulb temperatures of this magnitude.
In August 2018, the government of California published its Fourth California Climate Change Assessment aimed at supporting California’s climate policies and actions. Costs associated with direct climate impacts by 2050 are dominated by human mortality, damages to coastal properties, and the potential for droughts and mega-floods and are in the order of tens of billions of dollars.
Some comments from the assessment: peak runoff in the Sacramento River occurs nearly a month earlier now than in the first half of the last century, glaciers in the Sierra Nevada have lost an average of 70 percent of their area since the start of the 20th century, and birds are wintering further north and closer to the coast
The thick sea ice on the northern coast of Greenland has melted for the first time.
In August 2018, record monsoon floods in Kerala killed hundreds and displace a million from their homes into temporary shelters. In Canada, Toronto experienced its heaviest day’s rain ever recorded, flooding streets and basements and overwhelming storm water drains.
France is concocting a plan so that bottles made from recycled plastic will be cheaper than those made from virgin plastic.
Food and Water
The OECD‑FAO Agricultural Outlook 2018‑2027 recorded that global agricultural production is growing steadily across most commodities, reaching record levels in 2017 for most cereals, meat types, dairy products and fish, while cereal stock levels have climbed to all-time highs. The report predicts agricultural production in Europe will decline prior to 2030 while output from Asia and Africa will increase. Weakening growth in global demand for agricultural commodities and food together with continuing productivity improvements will result in the prices of main agricultural commodities remaining low for the coming decade.
Low Cost Renewable Energy
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that by the end of June 2018 there was a total of 1,013 GW worth of combined wind and solar capacity around the world, 54 percent wind and 46 percent solar. Since the year 2000, total installed capacity has grown 65 fold and more than quadrupled since 2010. The level of investment necessary to achieve the next 1,000 GW will cost much less because of the level of technological innovation and subsequent declines in cost.
The US Energy Information Administration reported that renewable electricity generation accounted for nearly twenty percent of all domestic electrical generation in the United States during the first half of 2018, slightly ahead of nuclear for the first time. Utility-scale and distributed solar combined expanded by 27.6 percent compared to the first half of 2017, while wind energy grew by 11.2 percent. Together wind and solar now account for nearly ten percent of American domestic electrical generation. Coal power provided 26.93 percent of total electrical generation, down 5.6 percent.
In August 2018, the California Assembly passed a bill requiring 100 percent of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free sources by the end of 2045.
Since 2010, India has cancelled 573 GW of coal fired electricity projects in light of the much lower cost of renewable energy.
Ireland will be the first country to disinvest from fossil fuel investments following legislation passed in 2018.
According to a 2018 report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA, auction results in 2016 and 2017 for offshore wind projects due to be commissioned in 2020 and beyond indicated costs in the range of US$ 0.06 to US$ 0.10 per kWh. Bloomberg reports that America’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, the 800MW Vineyard Wind project will produce electricity at US$ 0.065 per kWh, 18 per cent cheaper than any alternative sources.
In 2017 a United Kingdom renewables auction saw two developers win the rights to build offshore wind farms for around US$ 0.075 per kWh. This was 50 per cent below the guaranteed development price for offshore wind in 2015 and well below the cost of nuclear in the country.
The world’s largest solar park, Egypt’s US$ 2.8 billion 1.8 GW Benban complex, will open in 2019. The Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company is also reviewing six bids for the 200 MW Kom Ombo solar PV project including bids from Spanish solar developer Fotowatio Renewable Ventures and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power, both of which are below US$ 0.03 per kWh.
China’s Silk Road Fund will acquire a 24.01 per cent interest in the world’s largest single-site solar thermal plant, the 700 MW solar thermal plant being built in the United Arab Emirates.
South Australia is expected to reach 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2022 and the equivalent of 100 per cent by 2025.
Sila Nanotechnologies, which has developed a novel anode material for lithium-ion batteries, raised US$ 70 million in a funding round.
Oil Change International estimates that aid to Africa’s energy sector, mostly from countries phasing in renewable energy, was US$ 59.5 billion between 2014 and 2016, with 60% spent on fossil fuel projects and only 18% on renewables.
Automation Based Unemployment
Casper von Koskull, the CEO of Sweden based Nordea Bank, predicts that the banking industry will halve its workforce over the next 10 years.
The artificial intelligence system, developed in partnership by Deepmind ,the Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and University College London, is capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists.
The Wall Street Journal reports that IBM’s Watson is not particularly effective in applying AI to cancer treatment despite an investment of more than YS$ 5 billion since 2011.
2018 is already a record year for retails failures in the USA largely as a result of online commerce..
Autonomous Electric Vehicles
Electric car sales in Europe during the first half of 2018 were 40% up on the same period of 2017. There are now more than one million electric cars on European roads with Germany likely to pass Norway as the leading user of electric vehicles.
Baidu and Tencent are major shareholders in electric car startup Nio which started production in mid 2018. Google subsidiary Waymo has established a Chinese subsidiary.
Uber has withdrawn from the market for automated trucks to focus on automated cars. Toyota is to invest $500m (£388m) in the ride-hailing company Uber as the two companies expand their partnership on the development of self-driving cars. the partnership is to use technology from both companies in purpose-built Toyota cars to be deployed across Uber’s ride-sharing network from 2021.
Drive.ai has introduced a fleet of self driving vans to the streets of Frisco, Texas. American supermarket chain Kroger is testing a driverless delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Thailand is planning a massive battery factory.
The OECD‑FAO Agricultural Outlook 2018‑2027 predicts that the demand for cereals and vegetable oil for the production of biofuels will be largely unchanged over the next decade. During the previous ten years biofuels expansion led to more than 120 million tonnes of additional cereals demand, predominantly maize. Reduced use of biofuels by developed countries will be matched by developing countries that have introduced policies favouring biofuels, particularly those derived from sugar cane.
Increasing Inequality
Ontario’s new government has cancelled a basic income grant experiment initiated by the previous government.
Italy’s new government is proposing to introduce a guaranteed wage.
Some 44 million American university graduates owe a total of US$ 1.4 trillion in student debt, an average of more than US$ 30,000 each.
The pay of the chief executives of Britain’s largest listed companies increased an average of 11 percent in 2017 compared to the 2 percent increase experienced by the full time workforce.
According to the World Bank, the number of listed American companies has dropped from 8090 in 1996 to 4336 at the end of 2017. One reason is that private companies are being bought pre-listing by large funds. Another reason offered is that companies are consolidating to form larger entities with more market muscle. According to the IMF, this has led to mark ups in advanced economies increasing by 43% in real terms since the 1980’s.
People Change:
A 2018 study of longevity in 18 wealthy countries found life expectancy increasing in Australia but declining in Britain, the United States and several other nations. One reason for the American decline is that in 2017 a record 72,000 Americans, up more than 10% on 2016, died from drug overdoses. This is more than died in car accidents or from shootings or the number of Americans who died in the Vietnamese war.
The British Heart Foundation predicts that over the next two decades the number of people with diabetes in England will increase from four million to five million leading to a 29 percent increase in heart attacks and strokes.
Switzerland has the highest male life expectancy of 81.6 years and Japan the highest female life expectancy at 87.2 years.
In 2012, the World Health Assembly endorsed a global vaccine action plan that included the goal of stopping the transmission of measles, which is a leading cause of death for children in Africa and Asia, by 2020. According to the WHO measles cases declined to a record low of about 5,000 in Europe in 2016 then suddenly ballooned to 24,000 cases in 2017 and 41,000 measles cases reported in the first half of 2018. Thirty-seven people have died. One reason for decreasing vaccination rates is misinformation, some of it attributed to populist politicians, that leads parents to believe that vaccines are unnecessary or unsafe for their children. Muslim authorities in Indonesia have gone a stage further and declared a fatwa banning the inoculation of children against measles, mumps and rubella.
Climate Change
Continuing with health issues, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recorded that the continent saw a large uptick in mosquito carrying West Nile virus infections in Europe, with 400 reported and 22 fatalities. In addition there has also been an increase in tick-borne encephalitis in central and southern Europe.
Air pollution causes seven million premature deaths a year.
Research conducted in China found high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education. Some 95% of the world’s population live in areas of high pollution. Other studies have found toxic air was linked to “extremely high mortality” in people with mental disorders and earlier work linked it to increased mental illness in children. Another study found those living near busy roads had an increased risk of dementia.
America’s Environmental Protection Agency conceded that replacing President Obama’s climate plan for electric utilities with a new plan favouring coal could lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days. As a result the country will forego as much as US$ 4 billion a year in net benefits from 2023 to 2037.
2018 has seen multiple major fires breaking out in California, British Columbia, Sweden and on the Russian border with Finland. Smoke from Siberian fires spread as far as Washington State. Of course these all contribute to pollution and rising carbon dioxide levels.
Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 91 in Greece, 70 in Quebec, 29 in South Korea, 23 in Russia and nine in California. Heat now kills more Americans than floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters. Britain’s Environmental Audit Committee predicted that the number of heat-related fatalities in the UK will triple to 7,000 a year by the 2050s. Although summer temperatures in Spain have risen by more than 1ºC since 1980 due to climate change, deaths related to heat have declined as Spaniards adapted.
So far in 2018, new maximum temperatures have been recorded in Africa and in cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of the USA. July was the hottest month in Moscow in 130 years of recorded history. South East Australia is experiencing its worst drought in over one hundred years.
Research published in Nature Communications predicts that the deadliest place for extreme heat waves late this century will be the north China plain, a densely populated food-producing region of China where wet bulb temperatures are forecast to exceed 35C, the maximum humans can withstand. Previous research showed that cities round the Persian Gulf will also suffer wet bulb temperatures of this magnitude.
In August 2018, the government of California published its Fourth California Climate Change Assessment aimed at supporting California’s climate policies and actions. Costs associated with direct climate impacts by 2050 are dominated by human mortality, damages to coastal properties, and the potential for droughts and mega-floods and are in the order of tens of billions of dollars.
Some comments from the assessment: peak runoff in the Sacramento River occurs nearly a month earlier now than in the first half of the last century, glaciers in the Sierra Nevada have lost an average of 70 percent of their area since the start of the 20th century, and birds are wintering further north and closer to the coast
The thick sea ice on the northern coast of Greenland has melted for the first time.
In August 2018, record monsoon floods in Kerala killed hundreds and displace a million from their homes into temporary shelters. In Canada, Toronto experienced its heaviest day’s rain ever recorded, flooding streets and basements and overwhelming storm water drains.
France is concocting a plan so that bottles made from recycled plastic will be cheaper than those made from virgin plastic.
Food and Water
The OECD‑FAO Agricultural Outlook 2018‑2027 recorded that global agricultural production is growing steadily across most commodities, reaching record levels in 2017 for most cereals, meat types, dairy products and fish, while cereal stock levels have climbed to all-time highs. The report predicts agricultural production in Europe will decline prior to 2030 while output from Asia and Africa will increase. Weakening growth in global demand for agricultural commodities and food together with continuing productivity improvements will result in the prices of main agricultural commodities remaining low for the coming decade.
Low Cost Renewable Energy
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that by the end of June 2018 there was a total of 1,013 GW worth of combined wind and solar capacity around the world, 54 percent wind and 46 percent solar. Since the year 2000, total installed capacity has grown 65 fold and more than quadrupled since 2010. The level of investment necessary to achieve the next 1,000 GW will cost much less because of the level of technological innovation and subsequent declines in cost.
The US Energy Information Administration reported that renewable electricity generation accounted for nearly twenty percent of all domestic electrical generation in the United States during the first half of 2018, slightly ahead of nuclear for the first time. Utility-scale and distributed solar combined expanded by 27.6 percent compared to the first half of 2017, while wind energy grew by 11.2 percent. Together wind and solar now account for nearly ten percent of American domestic electrical generation. Coal power provided 26.93 percent of total electrical generation, down 5.6 percent.
In August 2018, the California Assembly passed a bill requiring 100 percent of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free sources by the end of 2045.
Since 2010, India has cancelled 573 GW of coal fired electricity projects in light of the much lower cost of renewable energy.
Ireland will be the first country to disinvest from fossil fuel investments following legislation passed in 2018.
According to a 2018 report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA, auction results in 2016 and 2017 for offshore wind projects due to be commissioned in 2020 and beyond indicated costs in the range of US$ 0.06 to US$ 0.10 per kWh. Bloomberg reports that America’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, the 800MW Vineyard Wind project will produce electricity at US$ 0.065 per kWh, 18 per cent cheaper than any alternative sources.
In 2017 a United Kingdom renewables auction saw two developers win the rights to build offshore wind farms for around US$ 0.075 per kWh. This was 50 per cent below the guaranteed development price for offshore wind in 2015 and well below the cost of nuclear in the country.
The world’s largest solar park, Egypt’s US$ 2.8 billion 1.8 GW Benban complex, will open in 2019. The Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company is also reviewing six bids for the 200 MW Kom Ombo solar PV project including bids from Spanish solar developer Fotowatio Renewable Ventures and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power, both of which are below US$ 0.03 per kWh.
China’s Silk Road Fund will acquire a 24.01 per cent interest in the world’s largest single-site solar thermal plant, the 700 MW solar thermal plant being built in the United Arab Emirates.
South Australia is expected to reach 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2022 and the equivalent of 100 per cent by 2025.
Sila Nanotechnologies, which has developed a novel anode material for lithium-ion batteries, raised US$ 70 million in a funding round.
Oil Change International estimates that aid to Africa’s energy sector, mostly from countries phasing in renewable energy, was US$ 59.5 billion between 2014 and 2016, with 60% spent on fossil fuel projects and only 18% on renewables.
Automation Based Unemployment
Casper von Koskull, the CEO of Sweden based Nordea Bank, predicts that the banking industry will halve its workforce over the next 10 years.
The artificial intelligence system, developed in partnership by Deepmind ,the Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and University College London, is capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists.
The Wall Street Journal reports that IBM’s Watson is not particularly effective in applying AI to cancer treatment despite an investment of more than YS$ 5 billion since 2011.
2018 is already a record year for retails failures in the USA largely as a result of online commerce..
Autonomous Electric Vehicles
Electric car sales in Europe during the first half of 2018 were 40% up on the same period of 2017. There are now more than one million electric cars on European roads with Germany likely to pass Norway as the leading user of electric vehicles.
Baidu and Tencent are major shareholders in electric car startup Nio which started production in mid 2018. Google subsidiary Waymo has established a Chinese subsidiary.
Uber has withdrawn from the market for automated trucks to focus on automated cars. Toyota is to invest $500m (£388m) in the ride-hailing company Uber as the two companies expand their partnership on the development of self-driving cars. the partnership is to use technology from both companies in purpose-built Toyota cars to be deployed across Uber’s ride-sharing network from 2021.
Drive.ai has introduced a fleet of self driving vans to the streets of Frisco, Texas. American supermarket chain Kroger is testing a driverless delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Thailand is planning a massive battery factory.
The OECD‑FAO Agricultural Outlook 2018‑2027 predicts that the demand for cereals and vegetable oil for the production of biofuels will be largely unchanged over the next decade. During the previous ten years biofuels expansion led to more than 120 million tonnes of additional cereals demand, predominantly maize. Reduced use of biofuels by developed countries will be matched by developing countries that have introduced policies favouring biofuels, particularly those derived from sugar cane.
Increasing Inequality
Ontario’s new government has cancelled a basic income grant experiment initiated by the previous government.
Italy’s new government is proposing to introduce a guaranteed wage.
Some 44 million American university graduates owe a total of US$ 1.4 trillion in student debt, an average of more than US$ 30,000 each.
The pay of the chief executives of Britain’s largest listed companies increased an average of 11 percent in 2017 compared to the 2 percent increase experienced by the full time workforce.
According to the World Bank, the number of listed American companies has dropped from 8090 in 1996 to 4336 at the end of 2017. One reason is that private companies are being bought pre-listing by large funds. Another reason offered is that companies are consolidating to form larger entities with more market muscle. According to the IMF, this has led to mark ups in advanced economies increasing by 43% in real terms since the 1980’s.
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