Rev. Ron Moore: Three reasons to be thankful – State-Journal.com

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Life is precious. Enjoy it while you have it.

There were 151,000 people who died last night. In case you didnt know that's the daily death rate. However, God saw to it that you made the wakeup list!

I understand that for some people the holidays can be the most depressing time of the year. While everyone around seems to be in a celebratory mood life may be hitting you where it hurts the most (family, finances, friends). Often, when we choose to view things from another perspective, not only can we see the good of a situation, but therein lies a smidget of hope. You have fresh air flowing through your lungs. You are alive. You still have time to get it right. You have hope!

The Bible says this:Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God, our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope (1 Timothy 1:1). Its time to put our hope in the Lord. He loves us with an everlasting love. He will never leave us. He will turn it around.

I no longer use the word friend loosely. Over the years, my wife would warn me about who I called my friend, and she was always right. A real friend will be there when you are at your lowest low. When everyone else may be gossiping, lying and laughing at you, a real friend will stand right beside you.

We all have had individuals that we call friends not do very friendly things to us. Well, guess what? Those people were not really our friends. Here is a word that belongs in the friendship discussion: accountability. True friends hold each other accountable for their actions. True friends dont let each other smoke, drink or sex their life away!

There may be someone right now who honestly has no true friends. May I recommend someone? Listen to what Jesus says: Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord does: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard from my Father I have made known unto you. (John 15:15)

Could you honestly imagine yourself living anywhere else? Some may say some exotic island or perhaps some other place. I know that this part may stir up the hornets nest. I understand that America has some serious issues at hand. Perhaps the most notorious problem at hand is race relations. So I am not naive to what is going on in our country.

Nevertheless, we cant let negative circumstances erode the greatness of our country. The devil hates America because America was founded on the precepts and principles of the Bible. We are a country that has chosen Jesus Christ as our God.

Again, I realize that there are other religions in America. However, America pumps out, through various media outlets, more than 82% of the worlds gospel of Jesus Christ. I am thankful to be living in this country. Let's use our faith and believe God that the problems of our country will change for the better of mankind. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance (Psalm 33:12)

The Rev. Ron Moore Jr. is the associate minister at First Corinthian Baptist Church in Frankfort. Contact him at Revronmoore@gmail.com.

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Rev. Ron Moore: Three reasons to be thankful - State-Journal.com

Column: Wolverine tracking and the tale of Terrible Ted – Salmon Arm Observer

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Environmental writer and Vancouver Sun columnist Larry Pynns book, Last Stands, takes a reader on a journey through the great rain forest to Californias red woods, to wolverines of the Columbia Mountains north of Revelstoke.

There, he travels with a biologist in charge of a research project to determine how wolverines are thriving, in a resource-based economy of logging, road building and shrinking environment.

It was estimated 25 of the animals live and roam in a 500-square kilometer range. Funding for the project came from the Columbia Basin wildlife compensation program.

Wolverines prefer wilderness habitats, away from humans, but have been known to cross highways or scavenge road-killed animals.

By 1998, 39 wolverines had been live trapped and collared to track their movements. To capture the animals, a coffin-size live trap is constructed of available material and bait was road-killed deer,elk, etc., with a beaver carcass for smell. When the wolverine tugs at the bait, a heavy log roof falls down and trips a magnetized transmitter beacon, alerting biologists to the capture. Immediately they travel to the area by helicopter or snowmobile, then the animal is tranquilized,weighed and tagged on both ears, and fitted with a radio collar.

Read more: PHOTOS: Salmon Arm trail cam takes rare shot of wolverine

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The collars will rot off in two years. Its not unusual for wolverines to travel 20 to 40 kilometres a day in search of food.

Terrible Ted, so named by the biologist who trapped and collared him, had quite a tale to tell. Seems, a blood splotch in the snow alerted the collaring team as they flew over to have the pilot of the helicopter land nearby. A bull caribou lay in the snow in balsam spruce. It payed no attention to Ted as he shuffled toward it. Ted then jumped onto its neck and, with grinding force, began to gnaw. The bull rose and stumbled through thick foliage, but Ted hung on, finally bringing the caribou down. He then began to tear away at the bull, pulling it apart, burying chunks in the deep snow. This was a first for the biologists, knowing the strength and power of the wolverine.

Ted had given the team a frightful fuss when trapped once before. The caribou, when examined, had a broken shoulder blade and damaged vertebrae, possibly from a grizzly or cougar attack the year before. It could have taken hours or a day or so, but the wolverine clung on, chewing and gnawing until the bull went down.

On other outdoor news: Many hunters report seeing few deer or moose in their quest to harvest game for the freezer. A number of factors remain: high predator numbers; wolf packs in several valleys; extended clear cut logging, even into prime winter habitats for both species; the large number of hunters travelling the bush in search of game. On a bright note, late fall fishing has been excellent on local Skimikin, Hidden and Gardom lakes, and goose hunters are finding lots of birds to harvest.

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Column: Wolverine tracking and the tale of Terrible Ted - Salmon Arm Observer

How to launch Ethiopia’s tech and innovation lift-off – UNCTAD

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Launched in the capital, Addis Ababa, on 22 November, the review evaluates innovation capacity, policies and institutions in Ethiopia and suggests how the government and other key stakeholders can better harness innovation, technology and science to accelerate development and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Through our home-grown economic reform and 10-year strategy, Ethiopia aims to become a middle-income economy. Innovation and technology are the main drivers for attaining this goal, and the STIP review will help us towards this objective, said Getahun Mekuria, the countrys minister of innovation and technology at the launch of the report.

The STIP review contrasts Ethiopia's rapid economic growth with much slower growth in technological learning and innovation capacity as a major obstacle to sustaining this impressive performance and achieving more sustainable development.

It shows that on paper, Ethiopia has most of the policies, regulations, background studies and roadmaps necessary to kick-start a successful process of technological learning, innovation and technological upgrading.

However, in reality the country faces challenges in policy implementation across public institutions related to capacity constraints and sub-optimal allocation of efforts and resources.

Innovation ultimately takes place at the firm-level, but the state plays a key role as a facilitator of the national innovation system, said Shamika N. Sirimanne, UNCTADs director of technology and logistics division during the reports launch in Addis Ababa. The state is the glue that holds the innovation system together.

UNCTAD prepared the policy review at the request of the government to support the technology ministry in preparing a new science, technology and innovation (STI) policy.

The review process is timely, taking place at a critical juncture in the countrys development.

The report finds that hurdles to technological progress are largely due to deficiencies in design processes, in particular with implementation and evaluation, rather than a lack of policies, strategies and institutions.

Improved policy coordination and greater coherence across key areas of development policy are needed, according to the review.

Building productive capacities

The STIP review notes that Ethiopia needs to build its productive capacities to add greater value, produce a wider range of products, diversify the economy and generate higher income.

Like other least developed countries, Ethiopias productive capacity must be reinforced.

Policy action in recent years has enabled the country to initiate a process of productive capacity-building, driven by intensive public-sector investment in targeted areas that has powered recent growth.

Production linkages are not sufficiently developed, reflecting a private sector that is still emerging, and insufficient technological capability and manufacturing production capacity.

In September, the government launched an economic reform agenda aimed at boosting private investment, creating productive jobs and enhancing the role of the private sector in the economy.

Science, technology and innovation are critical for the achievement of these objectives.

The countrys progress has been greatest in productive resources, particularly transport infrastructure, with significant improvements in road and railway networks.

The report suggests that Ethiopias next STI framework should build on this progress and reinforce entrepreneurial and technological capacities as well as production linkages.

From technology transfer to innovation

The current Ethiopian STI policy gives priority to technology transfer, mainly referring to acquisition of technologies from abroad.

Implicit in this approach is the assumption that acquired technologies will be automatically assimilated in the local economy through learning, linkages and demonstration effects.

The report recommends that the next STIP framework should shift the focus of the national STI policy to the dynamic processes of technological learning and innovation, which are aligned with Ethiopias current economic reform agenda.

The focus of the new STI policy framework should be on technological learning and upgrading, and building strong innovation capacity through inter-firm linkages, including between local firms and foreign enterprises, particularly those operating in the country's industrial parks.

The STIP review offers specific recommendations to assist the government to create mature and effective systems to support innovation, with UNCTADs help.

Sectoral case studies

The STIP review also provides an in-depth analysis of two sectors as case studies for understanding how STI policy can stimulate technological upgrading and innovation and thereby improve the performance of industries identified as important for Ethiopia's development.

They are the apparel and textile sector for resource-based labour-intensive exports and the pharmaceuticals sector for knowledge-intensive import substitution.

The STIP review is based on fact-finding missions to Ethiopia conducted in December 2018 and March 2019, which included interviews with government ministries, public sector agencies, private sector firms, universities, research institutes, international organizations and other key stakeholders.

UNCTADs STIP reviews contribute to the development of innovation capacity and upgrading of technologies along with STI policy capacity so that science, technology and innovation policies can better contribute to development strategies.

The reviews evaluate science, technology and innovation capacity, policies and institutions from a neutral and independent perspective, offering suggestions for policy action to harness them for sustainable development.

So far, UNCTAD has completed 16 STIP reviews in 15 countries, in which the reviews have often ignited a renewal in STI policy, raised the profile of STI policy in national development strategies and facilitated the inclusion of STI activities in international cooperation plans.

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How to launch Ethiopia's tech and innovation lift-off - UNCTAD

Challenges of the Indus Basin – The News International

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Challenges of the Indus Basin

In this article, I will summarize key discussion points on understanding and assessing the impact of climate change in the Indus Basin. This article is the outcome of a two-day meeting of the Indus Forum Working Group organized by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) this week in Dubai.

Experts from Afghanistan, India, China and Pakistan took part in this two-day meeting organized by the ICIMOD which currently holds the secretariat of this regional forum. I was invited as one of the experts in the working group meeting to contribute in the joint research programme to address the knowledge gap on basin-wide integrated issues of water, ecology, economy and adaptation. The working group was able to devise concrete steps and a viable roadmap for operationalizing and sustaining the joint research programme for which potential funding opportunities were also identified.

There was consensus among the experts to continue working in collaboration on four interlinked work packages baseline observations, climate change projections, climate change adaptation and capacity building and knowledge exchange. The experts were assigned responsibility to develop a workable research framework by integrating all four work packages into a comprehensive proposal. They, in turn, were able to provide key knowledge ingredients towards the development of a framework for integrated and sustainable basin-wide water resource management and its incremental effects on socioeconomic conditions of people living in the Basin.

The impact of climate and demographic changes on annual water flow as well as the cryosphere (solid water sources like glaciers and snowpack) were thoroughly discussed during the sessions of the working group. Contextual variations of country-specific issues and their interconnectedness with the larger ecology of the Indus Basin were also brought under discussion to help facilitate informed decision-making for the larger good of the 800 million people who are likely to be affected by climate change in the region.

In a nutshell, the experts were given the task to develop a framework for integrated basin-wide water resource assessment under the changing climate in the Indus Basin. It is believed that the joint research outcome will enable development of informed climate change adaptation strategies for informed decision-making about the sustainable management of water resources in the Basin.

Let me summarize the specific objectives of the joint research proposal for the readers. These were; one, to establish long-term monitoring sites in each of the four countries sharing the Indus Basin in order to better understand the spatial and temporal patterns of weather, snowpack, glacier mass balance and black carbon throughout the Upper Indus Basin. Two, develop scenarios to understand the impacts that climate may have on glaciers and water resources in the Upper Indus Basin.

Three, assess potential impacts of plausible future scenarios of cryosphere and climate changes on water, energy and food supply/demand. Four, utilize insights from all the above activities to construct/ develop robust adaptation strategies using a scientific and socioeconomic modelling framework. Five, build the capacity of human resources in the Basin; and six, disseminate and share information learned through the programme with relevant parties.

Based on these broad-based objectives the experts agreed that only regional cooperation beyond the immediate political and economic interests of nation state would usher in long-lasting stability in this ecologically sensitive region. Emanating from the deliberations, the delegates/experts from Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan were able to put forth a concrete proposal under four different work packages as a policy support mechanism for regional cooperation.

The Indus Basin, which is shared by Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, gets most of its annual water flow from melting of glaciers and snowpack. According to ICIMOD estimates, the annual renewable water availability per capita in the Basin is expected to decrease from its current supply of 1329 m3 to below 750 m3 by 2050 with the rapid increase of basin population. The Basin is likely to undergo disruptions in its hydrological regime because of climate change with some serious implications on the life and economy of more than 300 million people living in the Basin.

The disruption in the hydrological balance (annual rate of glacial deposit and melting) and changing patterns of weather will be detrimental to the agro-based economy and livelihood of poor people. This calls for scientific research to understand the phenomena of abrupt changes and their impact on the cryosphere and associated water resources. However, scientific research alone will not suffice if it is not put to work for improving the quality of life of the people by investing prudently to reduce vulnerabilities through community based adaptation strategies.

In this context, one of the key challenges for researchers and practitioners is to bring together a coherent trans-boundary framework to address the challenges of climate change. Any trans-boundary arrangement requires researchers and practitioners to work closely and the regional states to facilitate coordination between researchers and practitioners. The integration out of ecological and hydrological necessity beyond political conflicts is key to the success of this initiative.

Even the long-term socioeconomic development of the countries in the Basin requires trans-boundary cooperation for optimal and prudent management of their water resources. This joint research initiative of the Indus Forum Working Group will be governed by the programme secretariat the ICIMOD a review committee of technical experts and steering committee for administrative oversight.

Despite the visible advantage of cooperation in the water sector among the neighbouring countries in the Basin, so far, there has been no initiative aimed at developing a synoptic understanding of the Indus water system as a whole. The proposed programme is the first of its kind that aims to systematically assess the historic and likely future trends of water resource availability and socio-economic impact across the entire Basin and the four countries sharing the Basin. This will provide policy and decision-makers within the Basin and beyond with the information and knowledge to support the development of evidence-based climate change adaptation planning in the Indus Basin.

South Asia has over one-fifth of the worlds population and is recognized amongst the most disaster-prone regions of the world (UNEP, 2003). The disadvantaged people of the developing countries of the region will be more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, as existing risks will increase and new ones will appear.

High Asia including the Hindu-Kush-Karakoram Himalaya (HKKH), Pamir and which includes the Indus Basin, is referred to as the Third Pole and constitutes one of the most extensive glacier-covered regions of the world outside the Polar Regions. It provides water to approximately 800 million people living in its catchments and it is believed that climate change will heavily affect this region. The loss of cryosphere will directly threaten livelihoods in the whole Basin, in addition to bringing about dramatic changes in its climate system, impacting various sectors such as agriculture, horticulture, hydropower generation, tourism, etc.

This is the right time for all of us to think beyond the national border if we have to save our region from the impending destructions due to climate change effects. The ICIMOD has provided a great opportunity to initiate this dialogue and the Indus Forum Working Group can play a pivotal role in promoting this most needed regional cooperation.

The writer is a social development and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @AmirHussain76

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Challenges of the Indus Basin - The News International

Resiliency and sustainability in the face of industry 4.0 | Eagle Watch – Business Mirror

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By Marjorie Muyrong

Conclusion

Last week, the link between the economy and ecology was explored as premise to answering the question of how the Philippines must rethink its development strategies. After all, adaptation and mitigation to climate change is most urgent in a country directly facing the Pacific. However, equally valid is the countrys desire to adapt new technologies already available abroad as part of its growth agenda. It is also hopeful that the Filipino people are concerned about potential labor displacement with industry 4.0. The question that remains is whether these new technologies set to be adopted all over the world support sustainable development and would not further aggravate the situation of those populations already vulnerable to climate change.

The dilemma of sustainable development in the Philippineslies in the fact that our climate-change problems are caused by the warming ofthe entire planet, and this worldwide warming is caused by the actions ofeveryone in this planet. Unfortunately for the Philippines, our contribution toglobal warming in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions does not compare to thedamage caused by typhoon exposure. While the Philippine emissions in 2014 wasat 106.9 metric tons, China contributes the most at 10,328.7 MT, which isaround 30 percent of all emissions.

However,even if the Philippines remains to be a low carbon-emitter, our countryexperiences the brunt of climate-change impacts. In February 2013, an empirical studylinking windspeed exposure to socioeconomic variables was published. The studyfound that, on average compared to families who did not experience typhoons,income of families exposed to typhoons is lower by 6.6 percent, thereby leadingto human capital disinvestments. In November that year, Supertyphoon Yolanda(Haiyan) hit the Philippines, causing impacts that Filipinos in Leyte and Samarprovinces have not fully recovered from until now.

InDecember 2015, the Philippines, led by then Ateneo School of Government deanTony La Via, sent a 158-member delegation to the 21st Conference of Parties(dubbed as COP21) in Paris, France, that ultimately led to the Paris Agreement.During these negotiations, the countrys negotiators foughtto set the limit of global warming only until 1.5 degrees Celsius abovepre-industrial age and not until 2.0C. Unfortunately, this year, the Duterteadministration had announced that it will no longer send delegates to climatetalks, even when a more recent empirical studyin 2018 from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies links rainfallshocks with poverty.

Economicgrowth has always been linked with capital accumulation and technologicaladvancement. Understandably, countries would want to be part of the industry4.0 bandwagon. Economic growth is simply the expansion of production. Ittherefore relies on the ability of labor and capital in transforming rawmaterials into higher-value goods. Economists have always ignored the role ofnatural resources in the equation, and its perceived abundance has been theusual explanation for ignoring the role of natural resource capital inproduction. However, ignoring land as another factor of production like laborand capital ignores how land is also able to transform seeds into crops.Ignoring marine resources means forgetting how the vast blue seas allow fish togrow from fingerlings. Mother Earth has always been an economic producerherself.

InSeptember this year, Pope Francis sent a video message to the participants ofthe UN Climate Action Summit held in New York. In his message, the Pope linkedour climate and environmental problems with the human, ethical and socialdegradation that we experience every day. He then called us to think aboutthe meaning of our models of consumption and production, and the processes ofeducation and awareness, to make them consistent with human dignity. There isalso the Ling Jiou Mountain Buddhist Society, a Taiwan-based group of Buddhistmonasteries founded by Chan Master Hsin Tao, which aims to establish theUniversity for Life and Peace in Myanmar, as an educational institution thatwould respond to the ecological crisis. In January 2019, they invited a groupof professors and researchers from various fields of study from across theworld for the first Experimental Winter School at Yangon, Myanmar. At the endof two weeks, there was agreement among the researchers that changing economicbehavior would require changing mentality in everyday life.

The dilemma of sustainable development is understandably difficult. Rethinking our development strategies, therefore, require strategies beyond economic planning. It requires changing economic thinking at the global scale. People across the world must change their consumption behavior if we hope to lessen the climate-change impacts at home. We must, therefore, rethink our participation in climate talks. We must also rethink how we teach basic economics. Perhaps, most important of all, we must rethink the power of the ordinary people in bringing about change. So, how do we harness that power?

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Marjorie Muyrongis a PhD Sociology student at La Trobe University. She is currently on-leavefrom Ateneo de Manila University as an instructor of the Economics Department.In January 2019, she joined the two-week 2019 Experimental Winter School atYangon, Myanmar.

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The Grand Illusion – CounterPunch

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As the ecological crisis deepens, nearing the infamous Tipping Point taking us closer to planetary catastrophe we are being led to believe that an imminent greening of the world economy will deliver us from a very dark future. Somehow, against all logic, we have adopted a collective faith in the willingness of ruling governments and corporations to do the right thing. Carbon footprints will be drastically reduced thanks to a combination of market stratagems and technological magic. While greenhouse mitigation seamlessly advances, the ruling forces can return to what they do best indulge their religion of endless accumulation and growth.

That scenario, so widely embellished, turns out to be the saddest and most crippling of all grand illusions. Nowhere is its peculiar influence stronger than in that worst of all environmental culprits, the United States.

The overblown 2015 Paris Agreement was touted as the last great hope, but is now better described as a well-intentioned exercise in futility, closer to James Hansens dismissive fraud with no action, just promises. At Paris the 200 members settled on a 20/20/20 formula: reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent, increase renewable energy sources to 20 percent of the total, elevate overall energy efficiency by 20 percent. That would theoretically keep global average temperatures at less than two degrees Celsius (ideally 1.5 degrees) above pre-industrial levels.

The problem is that all targets are voluntary, with no binding mechanisms. Under Paris each nation (currently 187 signatories) determines its own plans, sets its own outcomes, and reports on its carbon-mitigation efforts. In fact no members have yet moved forward to implement goals thought to be consistent with the 20/20/20 prescription and most are woefully short. While President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris arrangements, its added carbon footprint turns out to be no worse and indeed better than other major emitters China, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, Mexico.

Despite greater reliance on sustainable energy in many nations, heightened overall economic growth has meant higher global carbon emissions of 1.6 percent in 2017 and 2.7 percent in 2018, with anticipated sharper increases for 2019. The fossil economy moves full-speed ahead: oil and gas extractions have reached all-time highs, with no slowdowns expected. Even as renewables significantly climb upward, as in China, India, the U.S., and Europe, we see a steadily rising carbon footprint because of total increases in economic growth and energy consumption. The top 10 countries presently account for 67 percent of all greenhouse emissions, with little change in sight.

Recently the United Nations Environmental Program, hardly a radical source, projected that by 2030 global production of fossil fuels will more than double what can be consumed to reverse further global warming. In other words, the Paris accords are essentially null and void. The UNEP report, extrapolating from emissions data among eight leading national emitters, concludes that humanity is moving along a suicidal path to ecological oblivion marked by temperature increases of four degrees Celsius, perhaps worse.

Even if the 20/20/20 targets were faithfully met by all leading nations, however, little would change. In fact the sum of all pledges at Paris would not keep temperatures from rising two degrees (even more) in coming decades. Overall fossil-fuel consumption dictated by soaring growth levels easily cancels such efforts, so that existing carbon-mitigation strategies turn out to be illusory. In fact many keen observers believe it is already too late, that burdened by a legacy of political failure we are headed straight toward planetary disaster. Waves of militant climate protests across the world speak to mounting public anger, yet these protests (and others before them) have yet to generate the kind of cohesive political opposition that could reverse the crisis. We appear trapped in a cycle of futility, a kind of psychological immobility that David Wallace-Wells, in Uninhabitable World, refers to as climate nihilism. Mass protests in such a milieu are not readily translated into anti-system change or even far-reaching reforms like those associated with the various Green New Deals.

According to writers like Wallace-Wells, we are trapped in a world moving inexorably toward an additional four or five degree Celsius by the end of the century, if not sooner. He concludes: . . . if the next 30 years of industrial activity trace the same arc upward as the last 30 years have, whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today. Ecological cataclysm will befall large sections of Europe, North America, and South America. In this setting the world economy would be reduced to shambles, making Karl Marxs famous crisis theory appear rather tepid. Wallace-Wells adds: Warming by three degrees Celsius would unleash suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced through many millenia of strains and strife and all-out war.

Along with industrial activity Wallace-Wells could have mentioned the even more problematic realm of agriculture and food: that will be the weakest link in a crisis-ridden system. Presently up to 80 percent of all fresh water goes to farming half of that total utilized for meat production. We live in a world where it takes 2400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef and 685 gallons for one gallon of milk, compared to just a few gallons for equivalent amounts of grains and vegetables. Half of all arable land goes to corrosive animal grazing, with no decline expected as more nations reach industrialized status. Taking fossil-fuel use into account, the carbon footprint of meat-based agriculture could be 30 percent of the total, even more. Since more than two billion people are now deprived of adequate food and water, the severe unsustainability of capitalist agribusiness and fast-food industry should need little elaboration.

Amid fashionable pleas to save the planet and recent surge in climate activism, few countries have embraced a program of serious carbon mitigation. For government and corporate elites, it is continued business-as-usual. Writing in Climate Leviathan, British Marxists Geoff Mann and Jonathan Wainwright lament: The possibility of rapid global carbon mitigation as climate-change abatement has passed. The worlds elites, at least, appear to have abandoned it if they ever took it seriously. Instead, the real plan going forward is one of adaptation to a continuously heating planet.

The same corporate behemoths that dominate the world economy also shape decisions impacting the ecological future. At present, according to Peter Phillips in Giants, 389 major transnational corporations manage a world system worth an estimated $255 trillion, much of that invested in a boundless trove of fossil fuels. The U.S. and Europe hold nearly two-thirds of that total. No more than 100 of these corporations are currently responsible for at least 70 percent of all greenhouse emissions. At the top of this pyramid 17 financial giants drive the world capitalist economy. To date there are no signs that the chieftains of fossil capitalism are ready to deviate from their historically destructive course.

In the U.S. nowadays, there is much inflated talk among Big Tech elites of slashing the carbon footprint, a move obviously beneficial to the corporate image. Managers at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook seem anxious to launch their own greening crusades. They ritually tout green technology as the preferred route to carbon mitigation. Jeff Bezos claims Amazon will derive 100 percent of its energy from alternative sources by 2030. Other tech oligarchs, in command of a dynamic technological universe, seem to be promising a carbon-free economy at least partly in response to mounting worker protests.

Another fine illusion: Big Tech and Big Oil have in fact decided to march forward in tight partnership, much to the advantage of those supposedly harmful fossil-fuel interests. The idea of greening apparently does not extend to moves by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others to profit from assisting those giants (Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, etc.) to locate better, cheaper, and more efficient drilling and fracking locations. Big Tech can furnish precisely what is most needed: lucrative cloud facilities, AI, robotics, troves of geological and meteorological data. This has been especially helpful in exploiting the mass shale oil boom in Canada and the U.S. Referring to ExxonMobil in particular, Bezos has said that we need to help them instead of vilifying them. That could mean an extra 50,000 barrels of shale oil daily for just one climate-destroying enterprise.

While business at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon is doing just fine, worker discontent flows through the hardly-dispossessed ranks protests and walkouts directed not only at all the climate hypocrisy but at the spread of other partnerships with law enforcement, border-security agencies, intelligence operations, and of course the Pentagon. Another Big Tech scheme to capture and sequester carbon emissions, or CCS is widely viewed as another fantasy, highly problematic both technically and economically.

The stubborn reality is that, by 2040, the world will be consuming fully one-third more energy than is presently the case probably 85 percent of that from oil, gas, and coal. Many trillions of dollars in fossil fuels remain to be exploited. Corporate logic dictates that such unbelievable sources of wealth be extracted to the maximum, whatever greening targets might be set at Paris and later environmental summits.

Meanwhile, reputable economic projections indicate that China will have a world-leading GDP of $50 trillion by 2040, followed by the U.S. at $34 trillion and India at $28 trillion. Those nations will presumably command more wealth than the rest of the world combined. More daunting, the leading two countries will possess more wealth and control more resources than the total of what exists on the planet today. What could this frightening scenario mean for energy consumption? For climate disruption? For social misery? For agriculture and food shortages? For resource wars and the militarism that figures to be both cause and effect of such wars? Could Paris and its succeeding international accords or any Green New Deal make a meaningful difference on such a wildly unsustainable planet?

As the crisis worsens, with few if any strong counter-forces on the horizon, what we desperately need is an entirely new political imaginary one that finally sets the world free of transnational corporate domination.

The title of this article comes from the seminal 1937 Jean Revoir film Grand Illusion, in that case focused on the ideological mirage of warfare.

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The Grand Illusion - CounterPunch

Podcast: Rich pickings on the abyssal plain? – chinadialogue ocean

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Find the series on APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUKUFind out more on Sustainable Asia.

Episode OneEpisode Two

Gerard Barron, DeepGreenGregory Stone, DeepGreenDavid Santillo, GreenpeaceMatthew Gianni, Deep Sea Conservation CoalitionChong Chen, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and TechnologyJulia Sigwart, Queens University, BelfastDuncan Currie, Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

Executive producer and host: Marcy Trent LongProducer: Samuel ColombieSound engineer: Chris WoodIntro/outro music: Alex Mauboussin

Marcy Trent Long: Welcome to Mining the Deep, a podcast series by Sustainable Asia. My name is Marcy Trent Long.

In the previous two episodes, we looked at the growing need for minerals to build our renewable energy sources. We saw how deep-seabed mining might offer a solution, but we also learned about the risks of destroying unique habitats like hydrothermal vents and the financial burden these experimental ventures can have on developing nations.

In this episode, well follow mining company DeepGreen out to the open ocean, more specifically to the Clarion Clipperton Zone.

International Seabed Authority (ISA) meeting: The Clarion Clipperton Zone, or the CCZed or the CCZee, depending upon your nationality Its probably the most studied area for these seabed deposits in the world.

Marcy: This is a recording from a 2009 meeting by the International Seabed Authority. Theyre discussing an area of seabed the size of the United States, stretched out in the Pacific waters between Hawaii and Mexico.

ISA meeting: And it is in this area that most of the large deposits have been found over time.

Marcy: The mineral deposits in this area are concentrated in whats known as nodules. Potato-sized lumps of black rock full of manganese, nickel and other minerals. They form over thousands of years, when mineral particles sink to the bottom of the ocean and accumulate around a hard object like a sharks tooth. So if theyre just there, lying on the seafloor, maybe they could solve our demand for minerals.

Gerard Barron: Its a resource made by Mother Nature that just happens to sit on the abyssal plain 4,000 metres below sea level, in one concentrated area.

Marcy: This is Gerard Barron. Weve heard him in episode two as well. Hes the CEO of mining company DeepGreen.

Gerard: This is a very, very unique resource with enough nickel and cobalt, and manganese and copper, to electrify our entire transport fleet four times over. You know, its not full of gold, its not full of precious metals, its full of base metals that we need to build batteries.

Marcy: I also spoke with Dr Gregory Stone, the chief scientist at DeepGreen.

Gregory Stone: These base metals, the copper, the nickel, the cobalt, the manganese the atomic properties of these metals we cant replace that. Theyre really quite extraordinary. Theyre like rubber bands that store energy and release it.

Marcy: Gregory and Gerard are clearly sold on the concept. And thats understandable. If the world accepts deep-seabed mining, this could become a multi-billion dollar industry, with DeepGreen at the forefront.

NGOs like Deep Sea Mining Campaign are already suspicious of Gerard Barron, an early investor in Nautilus, who cashed out of the disastrous Papua New Guinea project before it fell apart.

So its worth trying to understand what these nodules really mean for our renewable energy future and what opponents of deep-seabed mining think. Heres Dr David Santillo, the Greenpeace scientist weve heard previously.

David Santillo: I think that theres a real danger in conflating the green revolution with a need inevitably to mine the seabed. Its true that were using a lot more metals now, and quite a range of different metals, including those rare earths that we perhaps werent using anything like as extensively in the past; and that if we move towards an increasingly electronics-based economy in lots of countries, smart technologies, if were moving towards renewable energy, that the demands for some of those minerals are going to increase, at least in the short term. But the question is really: what can we do about the supplies of those? Are there not ways in which we can better recover those metals in obsolete products, and make sure that were building these devices, whether theyre solar panels, electronics for wind energy, for vehicle technology, can we not build them in ways in which we can actually close the loop much more effectively on recycling? Some of those minerals that we go to such lengths to get out from resources on land, theyre recycled at the moment less than 1%.

Marcy: Thats a good point. Do we even need to mine the seabed if we already have so much nickel and copper in the products we throw away every day?

Matthew Gianni: We need as a society to make much better use of the resources that we have.

Marcy: Matthew Gianni, from Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

Matthew: And until we get up to a level where were recycling the kinds of metals that are found in the deep ocean in the products were using today We shouldnt be opening up a whole new area of resource exploitation, with unknown ecological consequences, before we start making better use of what we already have.

David: When people look into the future, they see minerals still as a non-renewable resource, of course, but also as a non-recyclable resource, almost as a single-use resource. And if we look at it in that way, then of course, youre looking at something which is finite on land, and equally is going to be finite if we mine the seabed. So this is not a solution to an unending supply of minerals. In most cases, its just going to look to extend the supplies of these minerals by a few decades. But it doesnt break us out of that same approach of unsustainable use, and perhaps, even greater unsustainable use in the future. And if weve got the ingenuity as a species to even consider going out and mining the seafloor, surely we can put that ingenuity to better use to protect the seabed and to make much better use, and much smarter use, of the minerals that we have already.

Marcy: I put that question to Gerard and Gregory of DeepGreen. Do they not agree that for a truly sustainable future, we need to work towards a circular economy?

Gerard: As an organisation, were big believers in the circular economy. The circular economy is all about moving towards more recycling. And I often hear people say: Recycling should take the place, we shouldnt need to mine anything new, we should just recycle. Well, you know, thats just, unfortunately, an uninformed position. Because to allow recycling, you need a bigger base load of metals. You need to be able to have more metals in the system, and then you need to encourage recycling.

Gregory: We do believe that in some number of years, its possible to acquire enough metal with a corresponding recycling strategy for those metals, that we should be able to close that loop. But we simply dont have enough in circulation right now to do that.

Marcy: Thats true, take copper for instance. More than 80% of copper is currently recycled, but the demand for copper is so high that all the recycled copper amounts to just a third of what we need. So only when we have more copper in our production and recycling systems will we be able to close the loop. But, if we can close the loop in the near future, is it even worth it to start up a whole new extractive industry in the meantime?

Break to thank sponsors.

Marcy: In 2016, researchers at the University of Technology, Sydney looked at the quantity of minerals that is economically available to mine on land, and they concluded: A transition towards a 100% renewable energy supply can take place without deep-seabed mining. I put those results to Gregory.

Gregory: Thats true. But you have to think about where that metal is. All the high-grade ore sites, people go there first. And weve already started to move down, Im told, to lower-grade terrestrial ores. And also nickel, some, or much, or a lot of that is found beneath tropical rainforest. So you want to think about where that metal is going to come from that is in the ground. But yes, if you want to just keep digging, and going for the terrestrial deposits, you can keep doing that. Thats true.

Marcy: So, if we want to get enough base materials in the system to achieve a circular economy, its not really a question of whether we need to be mining the seabed, but whether we prefer it over mining on land. And this is the key argument. Youll hear it from everyone who supports deep-seabed mining: its the best option.

Gerard: The challenge when you getting a new industry going is: how do you benchmark what youre doing versus what the known alternatives are? And the known alternatives, of course, are whats happening on land. And thats there for all of us to see. And so the question when were trying to build the case for ocean nodules is: is it better? The fact is, we dont have to do any of the things that are normally associated with land-based mining. We dont have to blast and drill and create nasty tailings ponds.

Marcy: Tailings, by the way, is whats left over after the minerals have been separated from the ore. In land-based mining, theyre usually toxic lakes of cyanide or other acids.

Gerard: You can understand why people are anxious. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you realise theres been a tailings dam spill in Papua New Guinea, or villages have been wiped out in Brazil due to tailings collapse. You know, people are suspicious of the mining industry.

Gregory: You dont have that with this. You dont have tailings. You have these rocks that you pick up, and you process them. I see it as the most earth-friendly way to get these metals.

Marcy: So its completely harmless then, right? I know were not tearing down hydrothermal vents here, like the Lost City or the ones with the scaly-foot snail. These are just nodules, rocks with a bunch of minerals in them, that we can scoop up

Matthew: Theyre basically finding that what heretofore had been considered, or thought of, as a very large area of deep abyssal plain that consisted of rocks and mud and these so-called polymetallic nodules with metals such as cobalt, nickel, magnesium and copper in them, are actually ecosystems of relatively high biodiversity.

Marcy: So animals live on and among these nodules? To find out more, I asked Chong Chen, the deep-sea biologist who studies the scaly-foot snail.

Chong Chen: So we have new species of sponges and also molluscs. There are these very rare molluscs called monoplacophorans that love the nodules, and they will basically occur only on the nodules. Many species have only ever been found on the nodules. And then you have small species of So, theyre not big. Theyre not big animals like the hydrothermal vent ones, because theres no energy production. But you have many, many small species like worms, snails, limpets and sponges, that live on these nodules and nowhere else.

Marcy: So whereas in hydrothermal vents you get large species like crabs and sea worms all grouped together around the vent system

Julia Sigwart: Habitats like nodule fields are much more widespread.

Marcy: Thats Julia Sigwart, Chongs research partner.

Julia: Theyre much more difficult to study, in terms of the biodiversity, whats there, how abundant the animals are, what the ranges of the species that live there [are] We actually know much less about the biodiversity in nodule fields. That doesnt mean the biodiversity isnt there and isnt valuable, it just means that its spread out over a bigger area.

Marcy: And even though the animals that live there are so spread out, the nodule mining still poses a high risk to their survival because of the scale of this activity.

Matthew: If you put a mining operation into one of these areas, and the mining occurs at the level [of] the target production levels established by the ISA, the International Seabed Authority, which is roughly three million tonnes of nodules per year A typical mining operation over the course of a 25 to 30-year contract would directly impact somewhere between 8 and 10 thousand square kilometres of ocean bottom, and have a knock-on impact of another 10 or several tens of thousands of ocean bottom.

Marcy: But Gerard of DeepGreen says were looking at this all wrong. When asking the question: Whats better, mining on land or in the ocean?

Gerard: You cant look at that question and answer by looking at one simple area. And so we decided that it was necessary to do a full lifecycle analysis, from cradle to gate, looking at a multitude of areas.

Marcy: So what Gerard and his team did was to look at seven areas of potential damage. Things like biodiversity loss, but also the amount of carbon it would release. They compared the results for both mining methods, and found that, on the whole, land-based mining would be worse than seabed mining.

Gerard: Theres a lot of assumptions that people, especially NGO people, like to jump to. And thats because they dont look at these seven areas, they look at their area. And, you know, as responsible citizens of the planet, I think you cant afford to do that. You have to look at this from a complete ecosystem perspective.

Marcy: But theres one key problem with this: right now, we already have land-based mining. So is that just going to stop when we start mining the ocean?

Duncan Currie: Its not simply a question of: do you take the minerals from land or from sea?

Marcy: Duncan Currie, an environmental lawyer with Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

Duncan: Because the reality is, if you have seabed mining, youre going to be almost certainly using both. Minerals are going to continue to be produced from land as well as from the deep ocean. And therefore, the question arises: are you not opening up a whole new area of environmental damage by starting seabed mining?

Marcy: Matthew Gianni agrees.

Matthew: Theres no guarantee that even if you were to mine, say cobalt, in the deep ocean, that the worst of the terrestrial mining operations would shut down as a result. To the contrary, they may even get worse, in the sense that terrestrial mining operations that are trying to improve their human rights and labour standards, trying to improve their environmental performance, might end up cutting back on investments in these sorts of things if they had to compete with cheaper metals coming out of the deep oceans. You know, they might decide to cut costs and ignore, or otherwise work to limit or reduce, environmental regulations and rules, or child labour standards, or whatever.

Marcy: This sounds like something that really needs to be worked out first. Surely we cannot allow seabed mining to start if we know it will make land-based mining even worse.

But we have a chance to do this right. Right now at the International Seabed Authority, member states are negotiating a set of rules for seabed mining. Its called the Mining Code, and it even includes provisions on compensating countries that depend on land-based mining. We might do something properly this time, right? Well scientists and environmental groups are very, very concerned about the way the International Seabed Authority works.

Matthew: Theres a growing recognition that the world isnt ready to start doing this, and a real worry that the ISA, because of its bylaws and the structure and the decision-making process thats in play at the moment, will drag the world into deep-seabed mining without the full consent of the international community as a whole, or the ability for all of us to collectively decide whether this is a good idea or not, and how much more information we need before we can make informed decisions.

Marcy: In the last episode of Mining the Deep: whats going on at the International Seabed Authority, and do we have a chance to set things straight before large-scale seabed mining really takes off?

Mining the Deep is hosted by me, Marcy Trent Long, and produced by Samuel Colombie, in collaboration with China Dialogue. The series is mixed by Chris Wood.

Thanks to all our guests for helping us unravel this complicated issue, to Miguel Urmeneta for his voice-over, and Alexander Mauboussin for his intro music, made from repurposed and recovered waste items. Additional thanks to the podcast After the Fact by Pew Charitable Trusts, for providing audio from a speech by Michael Lodge. Thank you to the entire Sustainable Asia team, Bonnie and Heidi Au, Josie Chan, Crystal Wu and Jill Baxter.

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Podcast: Rich pickings on the abyssal plain? - chinadialogue ocean

Igniting Innovation – BCBusiness

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Credit: InnovateBC

Innovate BC has awarded $5.3 million to 25 BC research projects through Ignite since the program launched in 2016.

Innovate BC, the crown agency supporting the provinces thriving innovation sector, has awarded two B.C.-based research projects with a total of $448,000 through its Ignite Program.

Ignite awards up to $300,000 to research projects that address an industry problem in the natural resource or applied sciences. Most compelling, the program funds projects that address some of the worlds most pressing challenges by turning innovative ideas into real life solutions.

In B.C., were extremely fortunate to have world-class researchers and industry leading companies working hand-in-hand to develop new technologies that have a positive impact on our economy, environment, and overall standard of living, says Raghwa Gopal, President and CEO of Innovate BC.

The first project is a collaboration between Dr. James Olson of UBC, industry partner Polymer Research Technologies (PRT), and the BC Research Institute. Theyre developing a novel solution to chemically recycle polyurethane foam waste from the automotive, transportation, furniture, construction, insulation and appliance industries, creating a reusable, recyclable, economical, and environmentally friendly raw material alternative to petroleum-based virgin polyol.

Kambiz Taheri, Founder and CTO of Polymer Research Technologies, says the $300,000 award will help the company push into a more active phase of development. The funding will allow us to perform all of the necessary and crucial R&D work at UBC and validate the sustainability and scalability of our innovative technology by our key customers, Taheri says.

Recipients of the second award, Dr. Konrad Walus of UBC and industry partner Aspect Biosystems, are using $148,000 to develop a turn-key manufacturing platform that will allow upscaled production of 3D-printed tissue used to radically advance the future of drug development, regenerative medicine, and cellular therapies. This works success will mean animals are no longer needed to discover new therapeutics, doctors can understand how a patient will react to a drug before prescribing it, and lifesaving transplant organs are created, not harvested.

Investing in deep technology for medical applications does not only improve health outcomes, but drives our economy, says Tamer Mohamed, Aspect Biosystems CEO. This support from Innovate BC is a testament to the provincial governments belief in innovation and its power to create impact and value.

The Innovate BC Ignite Program has supported the hiring, training and retention of more than 65 highly qualified personnel in the first two years of the program. Furthermore, several projects have reported that receiving the award has elevated the credibility of their research and helped attract additional investment.

The program has produced several success stories and supported some of the provinces top tech companies. Jetti Resources, Axine Water Technologies and Terramera are notable past winners who have gone on to secure additional funding, awards and recognition after receiving their Ignite Award.

Overall, Innovate BC has awarded $5.3 million to 25 BC research projects through Ignite since the program launched in 2016. Successful projects are selected based on their promising commercial and technical viability as well as their ability to be market ready within three years. For more information about the program and past winners, visit the Ignite Program page.

Created by BCBusiness in partnership with Innovate BC

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Igniting Innovation - BCBusiness

Shedding Light on Surefire Resources Unaly Hill and Victory Bore Vanadium Projects – Kalkine Media

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According to the Government of Western Australia, China was the worlds largest producer of rare earths (71%), graphite (68%) and vanadium (54%) in 2018, and a major producer of all other battery minerals. Moreover, the global economic growth and increased intensity of use of vanadium in steel and emerging vanadium redox batteries (VRBs) is expected to drive near term growth in vanadium demand.

Western Australia, which accounts for the largest lithium production at the global level, also holds the 4th largest vanadium and manganese resources.

Surefire Resources NL (ASX: SRN) is a base metals focussed company that has ample exposure to this lucrative opportunity, owning exploration assets for vanadium in Western Australia. The company operates in the region seeking to target an extraordinary opportunity in base metal exploration while developing its projects.

SRNs vanadium exploration projects include Unaly Hill and Victory Bore (E57/1068 and E57/1036) in Western Australia, with licence areas located roughly 500km north of Perth Sandstone in the East Murchison Mineral Field of Western Australia and forming a 25km long contiguous tenement holding along strike of the Youanmi Shear zone.

Geological Composition of the Projects

Historical and Current Exploration Activities

SRN completed a drilling programme at the Unaly Hill project during the year ended 30 June 2019, intended to test additional magnetic anomalies identified along strike of the already established JORC Inferred resource of 86Mt @ 0.42% V2O5, with the below attributes:

Significant results from the drilling programme included:

The drilling shows that, in accordance with the aeromagnetic data, the mineralisation at Unaly Hill remains open for a considerable distance along strike from the previous drilling.

Recently, SRN intersected several vanadium-bearing magnetite units with significant intercepts at its Victory Bore Project.

To learn more about the other developments in the process of RC drilling, READ: Surefire Victory Bore RC Drill Results Out.

In addition, SRN evaluated and budgeted an in-fill drilling programme designed to delineate a JORC Indicated Resource within the current inferred resource at Unaly, while the planning for the advancement of the project to a scoping study is under pipeline.

To read more on the Detailed view of Surefires activities for the quarter ended 30 September 2019 , READ: SRN Quarterly Results, Eyeing Exploration Prospects.

Metallurgical Test work

SRN also completed a comprehensive metallurgical test work programme (developed and supervised by METS Engineering Group based in Perth) on the Unaly vandiferous magnetite core obtained from diamond drill hole UHDM001.

The metallurgical test work was dedicated on the salt roasting process, which is a frequently used procedure for processing the vanadiferous titanomagnetites to recover vanadium from the ore.

The test work looked at the effects of grind size on mineral liberation and magnetic separation and addressed the parameters of comminution and physical characterisation, mineralogy, magnetic beneficiation and salt roasting.

The advanced test work programme successfully achieved a 192% to 367% vanadium upgrade with V2O5 concentrate grades up to 1.43%, showing consistent vanadium grades and recoveries across the three mineralised zones tested.

SRN Vanadium Resources

The acquisition of the Victory Bore vanadium project in April 2019 significantly increased Surefires vanadium resource base and exploration potential, making it one of the largest vanadium resource holders in Australia. The combined Inferred Mineral Resource for SRN including Unaly Hill vanadium project and Victory Bore Vanadium Project was estimated at 237 Mt grading ~0.42- 44% V2O5 with a contained V2O5 content of 102,900 tonnes.

The magnetic anomalies within both licence areas have the potential for not only an increased resource tonnage but for larger zones of higher-grade vanadium mineralisation as well.

SRN had previously established a significant JORC vanadium resource at Unaly Hill from drilling 3km of magnetic anomaly corresponding with the cumulous magnetite layers within the intrusive.

View at Vanadiums Outlook

Rarely found metal, Vanadium has primary utility in the steel industry for metal alloys like high-speed tools, titanium alloys and aircraft. However, the rapidly developing energy storage (battery) sector has significant utility for vanadium with the expanding use and increasing penetration of the vanadium redox batteries (VRBs), which use the unique ability of vanadium to exist in solution in four different oxidation states to store energy.

The inclusion of Vanadium on the Australian Governments list of critical minerals in Australia validates the growing strategic importance of Vanadium to the Australian economy.

A reduction in global feedstock capacity on the supply side and the declining global inventories along with several other international uncertainties have caused the global vanadium price to rise. Having such positive prospects, SRN can be a significant player in the vanadium market, globally.

SRN stock traded at a price of $0.002 on 29 November 2019 (1:50 PM AEST) with a market capitalisation of $1.26 million.

Disclaimer

This website is a service of Kalkine Media Pty. Ltd. A.C.N. 629 651 672. The website has been prepared for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as a complete source of information on any particular company. The above article is sponsored but NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold the stock of the company (or companies) under discussion. We are neither licensed nor qualified to provide investment advice through this platform.

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Shedding Light on Surefire Resources Unaly Hill and Victory Bore Vanadium Projects - Kalkine Media

North Lake Tahoe vacation rentals impacted most with new regulations – Rocklin & Roseville Today

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AUBURN, Calif. New regulations for vacation rentals in eastern Placer County will take effect in January with the county Board of Supervisors recently voting to approve a short-term rental ordinance.

The ordinance is intended to strike a balance of reducing neighborhood nuisances like noise and parking issues related to vacation rentals without undermining the market for this important guest accommodation.

Among its key provisions, the ordinance establishes a new permitting requirement to operate a residence as a vacation rental property. The new permits would not be required for more traditional lodging types like hotels or timeshares, or homes within resorts that are managed through a resort management company.

The new regulations define quiet hours between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and include a requirement to provide bear bins for garbage.

They also set occupancy limits after 10 p.m. of two adults per bedroom, plus two additional people, excluding children under 16. Occupancy limits were revised from a first draft of the ordinance to allow greater flexibility to accommodate families with children. The revision allows the Community Development Resource Agency director to increase occupancy limits on a case-by-case basis to ensure that large families are not left out of the rental market.

Fire safety is also addressed in the ordinance. Outdoor wood-burning fires and charcoal grills would be prohibited at vacation rentals to reduce the risk of fire. The application for a permit requires a safety inspection by the local fire district once every three years to verify installation of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and a fire extinguisher, and that barbecues and outdoor fireplaces are in compliance with fire code.

Property owners will be required to designate a local point of contact who can quickly respond in person to any complaints about their guests. And either guests or the property owner could be fined for citations. Penalties could escalate with repeat violations, and more than three citations in a year could result in a vacation rental permit being revoked.

With an overwhelming majority of vacation rental properties located in the North Lake Tahoe region 3,638 out of 3,778 of the total countywide the ordinance applies only to properties above 5,000 feet in elevation.

Vacation rentals in western Placer County will not require a short-term rental permit but will still be required to obtain a transient occupancy tax certificate and comply with the TOT ordinance.

Vacation rental owners within a residential association may request an exemption from the short-term rental ordinance and must demonstrate that the association requirements cover noise, parking and trash and that fire requirements are met. Single-family homes in resort areas not managed by the resort are also eligible for an exemption if they meet those requirements.

The board also approved fee amounts for the permits $200.18 for professionally managed properties and $337.13 for privately managed properties. The fees are intended to cover the estimated annual cost to administer the short-term rental program of $455,620, as well as the cost of fire inspections by local fire departments. Fees for rentals managed professionally are lower because those properties have historically presented fewer code compliance issues and better response to complaints.

The permits must be renewed annually by March 31.

Vacation rentals have long been a part of eastern Placer Countys tourism-based economy, and lodging taxes paid by guests are an important source of funding for local infrastructure projects and services.

With the rise of online vacation rental booking services like Homeaway and Airbnb, an increasing number of homeowners are offering their properties part-time as lodging.

Staff and our partners and the fire districts have moved expeditiously to address this situation, said District 5 Supervisor Cindy Gustafson. I really appreciate the time and dedication it has taken to move this forward so quickly.

County staff brought a first draft of the ordinance to the board for consideration Oct. 22. The board approved the introduction of a revised draft of the ordinance Nov. 5. With todays adoption of the ordinance, it will become effective Jan. 1, 2020.

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North Lake Tahoe vacation rentals impacted most with new regulations - Rocklin & Roseville Today

13 new books and reports about the future of food – Yale Climate Connections

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Thanksgiving is a traditional time for Americans to celebrate Earths bounty. The whole of humanity, however, can be thankful that extraordinary advances in agriculture have enabled food producers to keep pace with a fourfold increase in population since 1900 and rising standards of living in the developing world. Can that progress be sustained in the face of climate change? This months selection of books and reports addresses this fundamental question from a variety of perspectives. Their answers may cause you to look more closely at whats on your plate over the holiday.

As always, the descriptions of the books and reports are drawn and/or adapted from copy provided by the publishers or organizations that released them. When two dates of publication are provided, the second is the date for the paperback edition.

The Fate of Food: What Well Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World, by Amanda Little (Penguin Random House 2019, 352 pages, $27.00)

The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: We must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead. Through her interviews with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Amanda Little, a professor of journalism and writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, resilient food supply become accessible to all?

Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World, by Josh Tickell (Simon & Schuster 2017/2018, 352 pages, $16.00 paperback)

Kiss the Ground explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet. This richly visual look at the impact of an underappreciated but essential resource the very ground that feeds us features fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists. Kiss the Ground teaches you how to become an agent in humanitys single most important and time-sensitive mission: reversing climate change and saving the world through the choices you make in how and what to eat.

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2019, 288 pages, $25.00)

Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know. In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer (explains that) the task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat and dont eat for breakfast.

Global Hunger Index: The Challenge of Hunger and Climate Change, by Klaus von Grebmer, Jill Bernstein, Fraser Patterson, Miriam Wiemers, Reiseal Ni Cheilleachair, Connell Foley, Seth Gitter, Kierstin Ekstrom, and Heidi Fritschel (Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide 2019, 72 pages, free download available here, eight-page synopsis available here)

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels. GHI scores are calculated each year to assess progress and setbacks in combating hunger. The GHI is designed to raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger, provide a way to compare levels of hunger between countries and regions, and call attention to those areas of the world where hunger levels are highest and where the need for additional efforts to eliminate hunger is greatest. Measuring hunger is complicated. The report explains how the GHI scores are calculated and what they can and cannot tell us. This years report also focuses on the impact of climate change on hunger.

Climate Change and Agricultural Risk Management into the 21st Century, by Andrew Crane-Droesch, Elizabeth Marshall, Stephanie Rosch, Anne Riddle, Joseph Cooper, and Steven Wallander (United States Department of Agriculture 2019, 63 pages, free download available here; two-report summary available here)

Programs that help farmers manage risk are a major component of the federal governments support to rural America. Changes to this risk and thus to the governments fiscal exposure are expected as weather averages and extremes change over the coming decades. This study uses a combination of statistical and economic modeling techniques to explore the mechanisms by which climate change could affect the cost of the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) to the federal government, which accounts for approximately half of government expenditures on agricultural risk management. We compare scenarios of the future that differ only in terms of climate. (We find that) differences between the scenarios are driven by increasing prices for the three crops studied, caused by lower production, inelastic demand, and increasing volatility.

Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, by IPCC Working Group III (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2019, 1542 pages, free download available here; 43-page Summary for policymakers available here)

This report addresses greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in land-based ecosystems, land use and sustainable land management in relation to climate change adaptation and mitigation, desertification, land degradation, and food security. This report follows the publication of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C, the thematic assessment of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on Land Degradation and Restoration, the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and the Global Land Outlook of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). This report provides an updated assessment of the current state of knowledge while striving for coherence and complementarity with other recent reports.

Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use, by co-lead authors Per Pharo and Jeremy Oppenheim (The Food and Land Use Coalition 2019, 237 pages, free download available here; 32-page executive summary available here)

There is a remarkable opportunity to transform food and land use systems, but as the challenges are growing, we need to act with great urgency. The global report from the Food and Land Use Coalition proposes a reform agenda centered around ten critical transitions of real actionable solutions. These could deliver the needed change to boost progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris agreement, help mitigate the negative effects of climate change, safeguard biodiversity, ensure more healthy diets for all, drastically improve food security, and create more inclusive rural economies.

Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People, by 2050, by Tim Searchinger, Richard Waite, Craig Hanson, and Janet Ranganathan (World Resources Institute 2019, 564 pages, free download available here; 96-page synthesis report available here)

Can we feed the world without destroying the planet? The World Resources Report, Creating a Sustainable Food Future, shows that it is possible but there is no silver bullet. The report offers a five-course menu of solutions to ensure we can feed 10 billion people by 2050 without increasing emissions, fueling deforestation or exacerbating poverty. Intensive research and modeling examining the nexus of the food system, economic development, and the environment show why each of the 22 items on the menu is important and quantifies how far each solution can get us. This site presents text from the Synthesis Report, with download links to full chapters from the complete report.

Climate-Smart Agriculture and the Sustainable Development Goals, by Shereen DSouza, Julian Schnetzer, and Rima Al-Azar (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2019, 144 pages, free download available here)150210

Rising sea levels and more intense storms and droughts are becoming the new normal. In addition, the imperative of reducing food insecurity and population growth amid changing dietary preferences requires increased food production at a time when natural resources are more and more constrained. Given these intertwined challenges and threats to sustainable development, the world needs a comprehensive approach to addressing one of the primary connections between people and the planet: food and agriculture. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) offers a wealth of opportunities in this respect, combining a focus on sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; building resilience and adapting to climate change; and reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, where possible.

Delivering Sustainable Food and Land Use Systems: The Role of International Trade, by Christophe Bellmann, Bernice Lee, and Jonathab Hepburn (Chatham House/Hoffman Centre for Sustainable Resource Economy 2019, 80 pages, free download available here)

Meeting future global food security requirements is not just about quantity; it is also about meeting growing needs in a manner that safeguards human as well as planetary health. International trade and trade policies play an ambiguous role in the current food system. With 80 per cent of the worlds population depending on imports to meet at least part of their food and nutritional requirements, trade has a unique function in offsetting imbalances between supply and demand. However, in the absence of effective regulatory frameworks or pricing frameworks that internalize environmental, social or health costs, trade can exacerbate and globalize challenges associated with food production and land use trends such as deforestation, land degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and the shift to unhealthy diets.

Beyond the Impossible: The Futures of Plant-Based and Cellular Meat and Dairy, by Martin Rowe (Brighter Green 2019, 58 pages, free download available here; two-page brief available here)

Beyond the Impossible: The Futures of Plant-based and Cellular Meat and Dairy imagines what the United States might look like as a vegan country in 2050. Martin Rowe, who heads the Vegan America Project, has read widely in plant-based meat and cellular agriculture, and he has listened to scientists (both natural and social), food marketers, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy mavens. Rowe has gathered the results of his research in a work that is both a state-of-the-industries overview and a work of speculation, a critical effort to reconcile competing concerns and values. Beyond the Impossible is oriented toward a vegan future, even as it recognizes that cellular agriculture has the means to transform just what vegan might mean in that future.

Editors note: Those not yet ready to embrace veganism but still wanting to reduce emissions from the meat in their diet can consult Achieving Peak Pasture: Shrinking Pastures Footprint by Spreading the Livestock Revolution (Breakthrough Institute 2019, 80 pages, free download available here).

Youth in Motion for Climate Action! A Compilation of Youth Initiatives in Agriculture to Address the Impacts of Climate Change, by Melanie Pisano, Fiona Korporaal, and Rima Al-Azar (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2019, 60 pages, free download available here)

This publication is a compilation of 10 successful youth-focused or youth-led initiatives in agriculture that address the impacts of climate change. The case studies are organized under five themes: E-agriculture, innovation and technology; youth employment; capacity development; entrepreneurship; and Alliances and Networks. For each theme one FAO-led initiative and one non-FAO initiative is showcased to provide a broad picture of the activities being implemented around the world at various levels. FAO and other institutions believe that partnerships and collaboration on youth-focused projects, programs and initiatives produce stronger results on the ground. This publication highlights these multi-organizational, collaborative efforts.

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13 new books and reports about the future of food - Yale Climate Connections

Economic clichs and misconceptions – Daily Times

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Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures both the economys total income and the economys total expenditure on goods and services. GDP per person tells us the income and expenditure of the average person in the economy. In an age where a huge cause of social dislocation is inequality, GDP has nothing to say about distribution. A society comprising 100 people where5 out of 100 people have annual incomes of Rs50 million (510 million), 10 peoples annual income is Rs 1 million (10x Rs 100,000), and 85 people have annual income of Rs 1.7 million (85x Rs 20,000), the total GDP would be Rs10 million, and the average per capita income will be Rs53,000.Averages are misleading, as a rise in average GDP could actually be retrograde if it leaves 85 percent of people resentful at how the five percent is making good. GDP says nothing about the distribution of income.

This is the reason that economists are thinking beyond GDP. David Pilling, author of The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty and the Well Being of the People in his recent article in Time stated: This year, New Zealand became the first nation to formally drop gross domestic product as its main measure of economic success. The government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that budget would aim not at maximising GDP but instead on maximising well-being.

The nexus between poverty and poor social indicators is quite obvious, as lack of access to education, primary health care, population welfare, and basic infrastructure limits the potential for gainful employment. In addition to lack of social justice, economic determinants vis--vis lack of infrastructure, inadequate savings and investment and burgeoning debt burden, whereby a considerable part of the budget is allocated for debt servicing, and inflation are some of the causes for abject poverty in the country.

There is a misconception that an increase in the GDP and consequently an increase in per capita income improves the lives of the people. Evidence suggests that the best of economic revival plans cannot succeed unless benefits of economic growth are fairly distributed among the factors of productions. In other words, only equitable economic growth can reduce the incidence of poverty. However, the challenge in Pakistan is enormous, and therefore, conscientious efforts have to be made to alleviate poverty and ensure a decent life to the people.

Lack of access to education, primary health care, population welfare, and basic infrastructure limits the potential for gainful employment

A major constraint in this regard is that distribution of economic and political power is not equal especially due to the feudal factor and mindset. Poverty is indeed the most serious challenge, as it is the basic reason for hunger, disease, ill health, extremism, crimes and other social malaises in a society. A common method used to measure poverty was based on incomes or consumption levels.

A person was considered poor if his consumption of calories level fell below 2,300 or income level fell below $1 or 1.25 per day. To confuse the issue, some economists relate it to deprivation of citizens who are denied political liberty and civil rights by authoritarian rulers. The World Bank, however, described poverty comprehensively in these words: Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time.

The problem is that the policies framed by economic managers are predicated on the assumption that if people on the higher social pyramid generate a lot of wealth, common people would automatically benefit from the trickle-down effect of economic growth.

But that never happens, and the result invariably is that the rich become richer and the poor poorer.

In Pakistan, it is difficult to have reliable statistics, and even if available they fail to capture multi-dimensional perspectives of poverty. Various governments in Pakistan took steps for encouraging investment for revival of economy with a view to generating job opportunities to provide gainful employment to the unemployed, and also to generate revenue to be able to invest in human resource development. But that could not help alleviate poverty as the targeted revenues could not be generated due to corruption, tax evasion and plundering of national resources. There is a perception that then informal economy is about 50 percent of the formal economy, and hence the loss of revenue to the extent of 50 percent of the revenue from the informal or unregistered economy.

There is another clich that the increase in the price of shares in bourses is an indicator of the good health of economy. Though ups and downs in the shares are hallmark of stock exchanges throughout the world but the share market of Pakistan is the most unpredictable and its mechanism incomprehensible with the result that steep rise and fall in price structure of scrips does not come within the ambit of logical reasoning. In fact, a few local manipulators working in tandem with global investors invest targeted shares to increase its price, and the result is a bull Run. Then they unload the shares and make good profit.

Since 1994 the plummeting of share prices after a years escalation of prices has become a regular feature. It is not difficult to conclude from the financial statements of the listed companies that the market value of the shares of many companies has no relevance to the book value or realistic value of the shares.

The writer is a freelance columnist

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Economic clichs and misconceptions - Daily Times

68% of Edmontonians believe transition to green energy will lead to job opportunities: survey – Global News

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The City of Edmonton released the results from its third annual Climate and Energy Perceptions Survey on Thursday and the poll suggests 75 per cent of the more than 1,000 citizens who took part believe there is a need to act now to address the issue of climate change.

The survey also found that 74 per cent of respondents are concerned about climate change and 69 per cent believe climate change is mostly caused by human activities.

Sixty-eight per cent of respondents agreed that investing in energy efficiency and transitioning to renewable energy sources provides job opportunities for the city.

READ MORE: Is the Liberal climate plan achievable?

These surveys help us understand how local perceptions around climate and greenhouse gas emissions are shifting over time, Mike Mellross, the City of Edmontons general supervisor of energy transition and utility supply, said in a news release.

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Year-over-year we are seeing that Edmontonians are growing more concerned about climate change and how it will affect their lives and the economy.

The results show residents want accelerated, decisive action on climate change and want the city to do more to limit emissions and prepare for the impacts of a changing climate.

READ MORE: Catastrophic: Canada set to miss 2030 emissions target by 15%, UN report says

The city noted that the survey found more respondents said Edmontonians should be doing more to help prevent climate change and that more agreed they want to do more personally to help prevent climate change, up 10 percentage points and nine percentage points, respectively, over the last two years.

The survey was conducted just weeks after Edmonton city council officially declared a climate emergency in August.

READ MORE: City of Edmonton declares climate emergency

At the time, council also passed a resolution to plan to respond to climate change with a revised Community Energy Transition Strategy.

This is a response to science first and foremost, Mayor Don Iveson said at the time. I think the fact we are a resource-producing and energy-producing region equips us to be energy problem solvers.

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Last month, thousands of people joined Greta Thunberg, a teenage environmental activist from Sweden, for a rally at the Alberta legislature to demand action on climate change.

READ MORE: Thousands rally with Greta Thunberg at Alberta legislature for climate strike amid counter-rally

METHODOLOGY: The online survey, conducted between Sept. 13 and Sept. 23, used a general population online panel provided by Dynata. Data was statistically weighted by age, gender and region (quadrants) using 2016 Census data to reflect the citys population along those demographics. The city said because this was a general population non-probability panel survey, to report a margin of error is inappropriate. However, the city said if this were a probability sample, the margin of error would be +/- 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, based on this sample size.

2019 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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68% of Edmontonians believe transition to green energy will lead to job opportunities: survey - Global News

News > Working with Business > University opens National Pig Centre in Yorkshire – University of Leeds

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Precision nutrition and 24-hour monitoring will enable scientists to provide new insights for the pig industry, as the University of Leeds opens the National Pig Centre today.

Scientists from a range ofdisciplines at the University will use new state-of-the-art facilities to helpimprove the sustainability and efficiency of pig production.

Supported by more than 11million of investment, the facilities make Yorkshire one of the best places inEurope for pig research.

The National Pig Centrewill be a leading research facility for pig nutrition, behaviour, health andproduction system research all themes identified by the livestock industry ascentral to improving quality, productivity and future competitiveness.

Professor Lisa Collins,academic lead for the PigSustainproject and Head of the University of Leeds Schoolof Biology, said: This new centre allows us to expand our work toimprove the welfare of pigs, and the sustainability of the British pig industry.

Our aim is to lower theenvironmental footprint of pig farming whilst ensuring that high welfarestandards are maintained.

The new centre willbenefit from academic expertise drawn from across a range of disciplinesincluding nutrition, health, behaviour and fertility, as well as computervision, engineering, soil and water sciences, data analytics, and atmosphericand climate science.

It has been launched inpartnership with CIEL (Centre for Innovation Excellence inLivestock). CIEL has invested 4.5 millionwith funding from Innovate UK, the UKs Innovation Agency.

Aerial view of the National Pig Centre

The investment includes athree-fold increase in the previous capacity of the farm, from 200 to 660 sows, ensuring research carried out at the centre better represents commercial pig farming.Of these, 220 will live outdoors.

The combination of anoutdoor sow unit with an indoor system is unique in Europe, enabling directcomparison of the different rearing systems.

Academics will work toidentify the key factors contributing to pig farmings environmental footprint,and attempt to find alternatives that could drive down the sectors greenhousegas emissions.

Their findings will helpthe UK achieve the National Farmers Union (NFU) target of reaching net zerogreenhouse gas emissions across the whole of agriculture in England and Walesby 2040.

The National Pig Centre will provide a key national resource for industry to work in partnership with the University, to develop innovative and practical solutions that make a positive contribution to the economy, environment and society.

The centres indoorfacility includes the ability to perform in-depth, automated nutrition trialsto understand how best to feed and manage pigs at all stages of production. By harnessingprecision nutrition, based on individual requirements, the aim is to reduce thecost of production, improve feed efficiency and reduce the environment impactof pig farming.

Researchers will also beable to make feed recommendations which keep pace with ongoing geneticimprovements to pigs.

The indoor facility isequipped with CCTV throughout, permitting round-the-clock observations ofindividual pigs behaviour at all stages of production. Researchers willuse computer vision to automate data collection from the video footage, sobehaviour and nutrition can be monitored at the individual pig level.

Students from across theUniversity will have the opportunity to study at the National Pig Centre aspart of their degrees, and some will have chance to contribute to researchprojects taking place at the farm.

The facility has also been supported by a generous donation from University of Leeds alumnus Nigel Bertram.

Named in his honour, the Nigel Bertram Visitor Centre features conference and meeting facilities, offices and the live CCTV feed from the indoor pig unit.

Sir Alan Langlands,Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, said: "Leeds is proud to be workingin a number of ways at home and internationally to improve food security andthe sustainability of the agricultural sector.

"The National Pig Centrewill provide a key national resource for industry to work in partnership withthe University to develop innovative and practical solutions that make apositive contribution to the economy, environment and society.

"We are hugely grateful forthe strong support we have received from CIEL and Nigel Bertram, and theleading edge work of Helen Miller, our Professor of Animal Bioscience, indeveloping this facility.

Centrally located in theUK, the National Pig Centre will promote engagement, discussion andcollaboration between researchers and industry. The University and CIEL willwork together to drive this process.

A membership organisation, CIEL works withbusinesses across the livestock supply chain to identify & develop theirresearch needs and build relevant collaborations to deliver new technologiesand processes that address key challenges facing the sector.

"We're very proud towork with Leeds and develop this first for the pig and pork industry, saidLyndsay Chapman, CIELs Chief Executive. It provides unique researchcapability on a commercially relevant scale and complements the investmentsweve made across the CIEL network. Through our nationwide collaborativealliance, we're working to ensure industry has access to the very best expertisein this field of research."

Projects at the NationalPig Centre will help tackle some of the current challenges in pig productionincluding:

Nutrition:developing precision feeding for livestock to improve sustainability andproductivity and study the effects of nutrition on welfare and behaviour;

Anti-microbialresistance: developinghealthier pigs with more robust gut health and improved resistance to disease,thereby reducing antibiotic use;

Production systems: improving efficiency of production andidentifying better ways to feed and manage pigs;

Monitoring pigbehaviour and developingalgorithms to allow early detection of health conditions.

The National Pig Centre isone of the University facilities that will help deliver the goals of the GlobalFood and Environment Institute (GFEI), which aims to address thechallenge of feeding the world whilst protecting natural resources.

This work aligns closelyto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly to endhunger, achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture.

As well as the pig farm, GFEIis also carrying out research projects in arable farming, urban foodconsumption and health, food security in the Global South, and international foodsupply chains.

Further information

For interview requests, please contact the University of Leeds press office on +44 (0)113 34 38059 or pressoffice@leeds.ac.uk

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News > Working with Business > University opens National Pig Centre in Yorkshire - University of Leeds

NASA’s Orion Capsule Takes a Ride on the ‘Super Guppy’ (Photos, Video) – Space.com

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NASA's Orion spacecraft just took a ride on one of the weirdest airplanes in the world.

Orion, which will help astronauts get to and from the moon and Mars, flew from Florida's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to Ohio over the weekend aboard the Super Guppy, NASA's specialized oversized-transport plane.

The Super Guppy touched down at Mansfield Lahm Airport on Sunday (Nov. 24). Orion was removed from the plane and loaded onto a flatbed truck on Monday morning (Nov. 25), NASA officials said. The capsule is headed for NASA's Plum Brook Station, where it will undergo extensive testing inside the world's largest vacuum chamber.

Related: The Orion Space Capsule: NASA's Next Spaceship (Photos)

The testing campaign will begin with a "thermal test," during which Orion's various systems will be powered on in a space-like environment.

"During this phase, the spacecraft will be subjected to extreme temperatures, ranging from minus 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit [minus 160 to 150 degrees Celsius], to replicate flying in and out of sunlight and shadow in space," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "The second phase is an electromagnetic interference and compatibility test, lasting about 14 days. This testing will ensure the spacecrafts electronics work properly when operated at the same time."

After these tests are done, Orion will be ferried back to KSC, where technicians will begin integrating it with NASA's huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket ahead of the Artemis 1 mission.

Artemis 1, which is targeted for November 2020, will send Orion on a three-week, uncrewed flight around the moon. That mission will be the first for the SLS and the second for Orion, which took a brief uncrewed jaunt to Earth orbit in December 2014. (That flight lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.)

Artemis 1 will be a key milestone in NASA's Artemis program, which aims to put two astronauts down near the lunar south pole by 2024 and establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028.

Accomplishing such goals will help NASA and its partners learn the skills needed to put boots on Mars, agency officials have said.

The Super Guppy has been hauling oversized NASA cargo for more than five decades. The plane's strange, bulbous shape makes perfect sense, given this role.

"Although there are other aircraft capable of carrying more weight than the Super Guppy, very few come close to its internal dimensions. Boasting an immense cargo area that is 25 feet in diameter and 111 feet long [7.6 by 34 meters], the Super Guppy can carry items that are virtually impossible to fit inside other cargo aircraft," NASA officials wrote in a description of the aircraft.

"The Super Guppy has a unique hinged nose that opens 110 degrees, permitting full frontal cargo loading," they added. "A control lock and disconnect system at the fuselage break allows the nose to be opened and closed without disrupting the flight or engine control rigging."

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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NASA's Orion Capsule Takes a Ride on the 'Super Guppy' (Photos, Video) - Space.com

China’s Microsatellite Crash Site on the Moon Spotted by NASA Lunar Orbiter – Space.com

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A NASA spacecraft circling the moon has spotted the scar left by a Chinese satellite's impact.

China's Longjiang-2 spacecraft also known as the Discovering the Sky at Longest Wavelengths Pathfinder, or DSLWP-B crashed onto the lunar far side on July 31 after completing its orbital mission. On Nov. 14, a scientist on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission announced that the spacecraft had spotted Longjiang-2's apparent impact site.

The China National Space Administration launched the Longjiang-2 satellite to the moon along with the Queqiao relay communications satellite on May 20, 2018. The small spacecraft, which weighed nearly 100 lbs. (45 kilograms), was designed to work with its twin, Longjiang-1, to validate technologies for low-frequency radio astronomy observations.

Related: China On the Moon! A History of Chinese Lunar Missions in Pictures

Longjiang-2 was designed to orbit the moon for a year. The satellite exceeded that estimate, but its mission still needed to come to an end, and China wanted to crash the spacecraft to ensure it wouldn't clutter up lunar orbit.

Now, a new lunar crater has been identified, and it's most likely the result of that impact, according to a statement from Mark Robinson, leader of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team at Arizona State University.

In his remarks about the images released from the instrument, Robinson saluted the team led by amateur radio operator Daniel Estvez of Tres Cantos, Spain that estimated that the small spacecraft impacted the lunar surface somewhere within Van Gent crater (16.69 degrees North, 159.52 degrees East).

The LROC team used these coordinates to image the area on Oct. 5. Through a careful comparison of pre-existing LROC Narrow Angle Camera images, the LROC team located a new impact crater (16.6956 degrees N, 159.5170 degrees E, plus or minus 10 meters) just 1,076 feet (328 m) from the estimated site.

The crater is 13 feet by 16 feet (4 by 5 m), with the long axis oriented southwest to northeast.

Based on the crater's size and proximity to the estimated crash coordinates, "we are fairly confident that this new crater formed as a result of the Longjiang-2 impact," Robinson wrote.

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China's Microsatellite Crash Site on the Moon Spotted by NASA Lunar Orbiter - Space.com

NASAs in the market for quick taxi rides to and from International Space Station – GeekWire

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An artists conception shows a Boeing Starliner space taxi approaching the International Space Station. (Boeing Illustration)

NASA already has committed billions of dollars to procuring regularly scheduled rides to and from the International Space Station from commercial space taxi operators but now it says its interested in buying short-term trips as well.

The proposed arrangement, detailed on Tuesday, is aimed at giving a boost to the commercialization of space operations in low Earth orbit, as well as to NASAs drive to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. It also makes the line dividing government-funded and privately funded space efforts even fuzzier.

SpaceX and Boeing are both building spacecraft to serve as taxis to the space station: Boeings CST-100 Starliner is due to go through an uncrewed test flight to the orbital outpost next month, and SpaceXs Crew Dragon is slated for an in-flight test of its launch abort system sometime in the next month or so.

Both space taxis are expected to carry crew starting early next year, assuming that they win NASAs clearance.

Once the spacecraft are certified, NASA will execute contracts for a series of regular flights to and from the space station, to support crew rotations every six months or so. SpaceX and Boeing also have the option of selling extra seats on those flights to private customers.

In addition, NASAs commercialization plan would let those companies plan up to two extra missions per year to the space station, for stays lasting as long as 30 days. The privately funded astronauts would have to pay a multimillion-dollar fare to the taxi operator plus a reimbursement to NASA for space station expenses, estimated at $35,000 a day.

The newly issued pre-solicitation notice focuses on the extra, privately organized missions: NASA says itd be interested in buying one of the seats on that kind of mission, in order to further its research goals for future trips to the moon and Mars.

NASA has identified a requirement to use missions of varying length on which it collects standard data to establish profiles of human physiological, behavioral, and psychological variables of importance for ensuring astronaut health and performance during future long-duration deep space missions, the space agency explained in a news release. Private astronaut mission opportunities NASA identified as part of its low-Earth orbit economy plan are up to 30 days, within the time frame necessary to perform research and collect critical data to build a comprehensive human spaceflight physiological profile.

This weeks announcement merely serves to give notice that NASA is interested in the idea. Its up to the organizers of future private-astronaut missions to let NASA know what theyre scheduling, and whether theyre willing to meet NASAs requirements for example, a four-person limit on space taxi occupancy.

Right now, Boeing and SpaceX are focusing on getting their taxis up and running for the missions that are dedicated to NASAs space station crew rotations, so it could be a year or more before they schedule the extra missions theyre entitled to offer.

Nevertheless, the idea sparked a lively discussion today when it was mentioned on Twitter by NASAs Doug Comstock, whos acting as a liaison for commercial crew activities in low Earth orbit:

NASAs proposed arrangement underscores the view that SpaceXs Crew Dragon and Boeings Starliner capsules really are space taxis a concept that one-time NASA Administrator Mike Griffin discussed 20 years ago in congressional testimony when he was Orbital Sciences chief technical officer.

Nowadays, maybe calling them Uber vehicles for spaceflight would be closer to the mark. If we stick with that analogy, you could say that NASA just wants to be able to get in on ordering Uber Pool rides as well as reserving an UberX for itself.

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NASAs in the market for quick taxi rides to and from International Space Station - GeekWire

At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency – Houston Chronicle

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At NASA, 2019 could be called the year of the woman. In October, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir completed the first all-female spacewalk. Koch also is on her way toward 328 days aboard the International Space Station - the longest single space mission by a woman.

Meanwhile, NASA is planning a lunar mission called "Artemis," named after the twin sister of Apollo, which, the agency says, would put "the next man and the first woman on the moon" by 2024. The aerospace industry also boasts an unprecedented number of women in high-ranking positions, including Leanne Caret, who leads Boeing's defense and space division and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX.

But for all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and in the wider industry. Women make up only about a third of NASA's workforce. They comprise just 28% of senior executive leadership positions and are only 16% of senior scientific employees, according to a survey done by the agency.

In the aerospace industry, only 24% of employees are women, and there has been little change in years, according to a study done by Aviation Week.

For many, another example of how far the agency has to go came just a few weeks ago when NASA announced its "honor awards," what it calls its "highest form of recognition" to employees and contractors.

In total, 42 people were honored. All but two were men.

"We haven't moved very much in the last 30 years in overall diversity," said Mary Lynne Dittmar, the president and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group. "Aerospace is still heavily male and white, and we're not moving very quickly."

Though perhaps not as overt as the early days of the space agency, when women were "hidden figures," sexism persists in an industry long dominated by white men. That has led women to leave science and engineering jobs at rates higher than their male counterparts. Women still struggle to get a foothold in the industry and often find themselves the only women in meetings dominated by men. Or being asked to fetch coffee. Or being called "honey."

"That's Dr. Honey to you, and the coffee machine is down the hall and to the right," is how Dittmar, who has worked in senior positions at Boeing and as an adviser to NASA, responds.

"Frankly, those attitudes have gotten better but they haven't completely gone away," said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum who previously served as NASA's chief scientist. "To pretend they have does not help us understand why women get paid 80 cents on the dollar and are still only making up 16 to 30% of the workforce."

While the aerospace industry hasn't been swept up in the recent #MeToo movement, it has over the years been hit by the occasional high-profile scandal. In 2012, Lockheed Martin's incoming CEO was forced out because of an affair with a subordinate, and in 2010, Boeing settled a pair of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging sex discrimination.

In one, two female engineers said they were subjected to sexist remarks and then suffered retaliation when they complained. In the other, a female employee alleged that her male counterparts harassed her and broke her tools, making it harder for her to do her job.

The employee reported the behavior, the EEOC said at the time, "but the company did nothing to address it. As a result, the harassment continued."

At NASA, which has about 17,000 employees, there were 62 EEOC complaints last year, 27 of which were on the basis of sex, according to agency statistics.

While that is not a large number, EEOC spokeswoman Christine Nazer said "it can be [a] difficult decision for individuals to come forward to file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. Employees often fear retaliation such as being fired or demoted if they assert their legal rights. Indeed, retaliation is the most frequently filed charge with the EEOC."

Major corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed say that they go to great lengths to ensure that all employees are welcomed and that they have robust programs to prevent harassment and to protect those who do report it.

Women in the industry acknowledge some improvement in the way they are treated, but cultural change has been slow. Even a term such as "manned spaceflight" continues to be controversial.

In the early 2000s, NASA's style guide was updated to include a section urging that "all references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned)."

The word "manned" should only be used, the style guide said, when referring to any "historical program name or official title that included 'manned.'"

During an interview with reporters from the International Space Station about the first all-female spacewalk, Koch said she was happy to see the term fading from use. "It's been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced," she said. "Even though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants."

But debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) hosted a spirited discussion of the term, with some arguing that "manned" refers to all humans and, as one put it, "the word itself has nothing to do with gender."

That incensed Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, who wrote on the message board that "if we want to encourage women or non-conforming genders to be a part of our next grand adventure, it would serve us well to remove 'manned' from our lexicon."

AIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher responded on the board that the institute "prefers to use 'crewed' or 'human' rather than 'manned' when referring to space travel in our publications and on AIAA.org. Increasing the diversity of the aerospace community and the future workforce has been - and continues to be - a mission priority for AIAA."

The debate became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements "with empathy and respect for your fellow members."

It wasn't until 1978, nearly two decades after John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury Seven had been chosen to go to space, that NASA selected its first female astronauts - six of a class of 35. One of those was Sally Ride, who five years later would become the first American woman in space.

Kathy Sullivan was a part of that class and said NASA was welcoming to the women. "Very open and evenhanded," she said. Then again, "walking in the door of NASA with the title of astronaut is like walking around the Navy with the title of admiral."

If they were accepted inside NASA, the rest of society was adjusting.

A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times posed what he conceded "may seem like a male chauvinist pig question" when he asked about Shannon Lucid's fitness for space given that she "has three children and from her age I gather that the children are rather young."

Did NASA give any consideration "to her responsibilities to her children versus her responsibilities to the program?"

"If I gave you a one-word answer to Shannon Lucid's family situation, the answer is, 'none,' Chris Kraft, the legendary NASA flight director, responded.

Rather, he said "the most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States that can make the qualifications that we set out as astronauts."

Still, there were some embarrassing moments, as the male-dominated agency adjusted to the presence of women.

Before her first flight, the engineers asked Ride how many tampons she would need for her week-long mission.

"Is 100 the right number?" they asked, according to her biographer, Ann Friedman.

"That would not be the right number," she responded.

In many ways, the NASA astronaut class of 2013 was typical: full of overachievers, the best of the best, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants. The group of eight all had the right stuff, and more - six military officers, two scientists.

Typical except for one detail: For the first time, there were as many women as men.

Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, said the agency is making great strides in hiring and promoting women, and he pointed out that three of the agency's four science mission directorates now are led by women.

"We're making significant progress in this area and have been for a number of years," he said. "We're not done. There's a lot more to do." And he said events like the all-female spacewalk last month are "what inspires tomorrow's astronauts, and we want tomorrow's astronauts to represent all of America."

It's not just at NASA. Several major aerospace firms have women in top leadership positions. Marillyn Hewson is the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne's CEO is Eileen Drake.

But for more women to get to the C-suite, many think that more opportunities should be available to women earlier in life. That's why Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, started a fellowship for undergraduate women that places them at aerospace companies across the country.

"It's important to support them, not just through mentorship, but get them actual jobs," she said.

The program has graduated 114 women over three years, creating a support group of women who can talk about the difficulties of breaking into an industry where women have long been a minority and faced discrimination.

When Stofan became head of the National Air and Space Museum, she saw it as not only a "symbolic" opportunity but also as a chance to showcase women in aerospace. "Whose stories are we telling in the museum?" she asked, shortly after starting the job, and decided to highlight the contributions of Margaret Hamilton, who worked on computer guidance systems during Apollo, and Katherine Johnson, one of the African American women whose work on the Mercury program was told in the film "Hidden Figures."

Stofan also oversees a summer camp for middle school girls at the museum called "She Can."

Women are still an overwhelming minority in many university engineering programs, something that remains a drag on female employment in the industry. Harvey Mudd College in California has been working for more than 15 years to attract women to its science, math and engineering programs, where they now represent nearly 50% of the enrollment. One of the biggest steps in that effort was to hire female professors.

"People always talk about how representation matters," said Nancy Lape, an engineering professor who is the interim chair of the engineering department. "I think this is one of those cases. So right away, when students come into our program, they see women, and they see women in leadership positions."

Much of the work focuses not just on lectures but also on hands-on learning - students get into a pool with an underwater robot for their introductory course - which she said has been shown to reduce learning gaps between the general student population and underrepresented groups.

Professors also encourage teamwork among students, which can help women and minorities "get a chance to really feel like they belong."

Female participation also has been on the rise at Space Camp, where adults and children go to learn about space, aviation and robotics at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. When it started 37 years ago, 32% of Space Camp attendees were women. Today, women are 42%.

"That's a little bit of a slow climb over 37 years," said Deborah Barnhart, the camp's director. "I hope it doesn't take us another 37 years to get to 52%, but that's where we should be." The camp works with the Girl Scouts to make space-related badges attendees can earn.

It also highlights the accomplishments of its graduates, who include Koch, the NASA astronaut on the space station. One of 12 women serving in the astronaut corps, she could be chosen by NASA to be the first woman to walk on the moon and become a Neil Armstrong for a new generation.

"The idea of having the honor of being the first woman to walk on the moon is almost too great to fathom," she told reporters, speaking from the space station. "Of course it would be a dream of mine and has been my entire life. But for now I'll settle for knowing that I'll probably at least know the first woman to walk on the moon.

"Hint. Hint," she added, poking Meir, who was floating beside her.

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At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency - Houston Chronicle

NASA Eyes a New Moon Rover for Astronauts and Robot Lunar Explorers – Space.com

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HOUSTON NASA is considering developing an unpressurized rover that astronauts could drive remotely on the moon alongside a suite of robotic lunar explorers as part of the Artemis program.

In a speech Wednesday (Nov. 20) here at SpaceCom Expo, a two-day conference covering the business of space, Tom Cremins, NASA's associate administrator for strategy and plans,said such a project would be a public-private partnership that could include involvement from companies with expertise in making golf carts, all-terrain vehicles, automobiles or even autonomous mining parts. Similar rovers could be used in future crewed Mars missions as well.

Cremins said he would like the rover ready to operate "when the first crews arrive" (which NASA hopes will be in 2024) and allow for astronauts to operate it remotely from as far away as the planned Gateway station in lunar orbit. This rover would be used "to conduct operations and to add to the science objectives," he said.

Related: SpaceX, Blue Origin & More Join NASA's Private Moon Lander Project

The unpressurized exploration rover was also mentioned in late October at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, a group of scientists that supports NASA in identifying priorities and issues for moon exploration.

Once astronauts are on the surface, robotic exploration is a key strategy for expanding the range of terrain astronauts can view, NASA's John Connolly, lunar systems lead for the agency, said last month. People can only range about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) from their lander, due to oxygen constraints. Robots have no such requirements, so they are essential if the agency is to meet its science goals on the moon.

"We're, no kidding, planning what we're going to do during those missions," Connolly said in his talk, which was archived on YouTube. For the first Artemis moon-landing mission in 2024, the agency plans a 6.5-day mission in the Shackleton Crater area with two crewmembers on the surface, he said. These astronauts will remotely drive a 440-lb. (200 kilograms) unpressurized rover and several handheld instruments to sample water ice from chilly, permanently shadowed craters.

But robots will beat humans to the moon.

NASA is drawing up plans for a suite of robotic helpers that will tackle lunar exploration tasks before and alongside the astronauts the agency intends to land on the moon in 2024.

The agency will send several landers and rovers to the surface through its own efforts and those of commercial partners, Steven Clarke, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration, said here at SpaceCom, a two-day conference covering the business of space.

One key target is water ice, because the compound could be turned into drinking water or rocket fuel. Multiple missions have studied ice on the moon, including India's Chandrayaan-1 moon orbiter, which helped confirm its existence; and the ongoing NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has mapped ice locations in high definition. But it's still unclear how that ice could shape exploration activities.

Related: NASA VIPER Moon Rover Will Hunt for Water at the Lunar South Pole

"How much [ice] there is, how easy it is to get to, and once we get to it how easy is it to excavate, we don't know," Clarke said. "We need to get to the ground first."

One rover that will pave the way for humans is called Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER). The VIPER moon rover will help NASA learn about the abundance and location of water ice. VIPER's instruments will include spectrometers to hunt water ice and a drill to burrow into the lunar surface, Clarke said. "These instruments are going to do that ground proofing we are talking about."

About the size of a golf cart, VIPER is expected to cost about $250 million. NASA has not yet decided which commercially provided lander will carry the rover to the moon, but expects VIPER to arrive in December 2022 for a 100-day mission.

NASA has 13 companies vying for lunar landing cargo contract opportunities under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS), to support Artemis preparation and operations, including delivering projects like VIPER. Of that baker's dozen of companies, five were announced just this week SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, Ceres Robotics and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems.

Those commercial partners are a crucial part of NASA's moon strategy, Clarke said. CLPS will let the agency rapidly deploy its spacecraft to locations all over the moon, helping NASA find the most promising locations to send humans.

"I'm very excited about this new era of commercial partners," Clarke said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA Eyes a New Moon Rover for Astronauts and Robot Lunar Explorers - Space.com

NASAs space pallet concept could land rovers on the moon cheaply and simply – TechCrunch

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Establishing an enduring presence on the Moon will mean making a lot of landings and NASA researchers want to make those landings as reliable and cheap as possible. This robotic pallet lander concept would be a dead simple (as lunar landers go) way to put up to 300 kilograms of rover and payload onto the Moons surface.

Detailed in a technical paper published today, the lander is a sort of space pallet: a strong, basic framework that could be a unit in many a future mission. Its still a concept and doesnt really have a name, so space pallet will do for now.

Its an evolution of a design that emerged in studies surrounding the VIPER mission that was intended to minimized cost and schedule and just get the rover to the surface safely. In a rare admission of (at least theoretically) putting cost over performance, the papers introduction reads:

The design of the lander was based on a minimum set of level 1 requirements where traditional risk, mass, and performance trade parameters were weighed lower than cost. In other words, the team did not sacrifice good enough for better or best.

It should be noted, of course, that good enough hardly implies a slapdash job in the context of lunar landers. It just means that getting 5 percent more tensile strength from a material that costs 50 times more wasnt considered a worthwhile trade-off. Same reason we dont use ebony or elm for regular pallets. Instead theyre using the space travel equivalent of solid pine boards that have been tested into the ground. (The team does admit to extrapolating a little but emphasizes that this is first and foremost a realistic approach.)

While most subsystems use off-the-shelf parts, one emerging technology needed for a lander like this would be Terrain Relative Navigation used for precision landing, said Logan Kennedy, lead systems engineer for the concept. Testing is under way!

The space pallet would go up aboard a commercial launch vehicle, such as a Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The vehicle would get the pallet and its rover payload into a trans-lunar injection trajectory, and a few days later the space pallet would perform the necessary landing maneuvers: attitude control, landing site selection, braking, and a soft touchdown with the rovers solar panels facing the sun.

Once on the surface, the rover would go on its merry way at some point in the next couple hours. The lander would take a few surface images and characterize its surroundings for the team on Earth, then shut down permanently after 8 hours or so.

Yes, unfortunately the space pallet is not intended to survive the lunar night, the researchers point out. Though any presence on the moons surface is a powerful resource, its expensive to provide the kind of power and heating infrastructure that would let the lander live through the freezing, airless cold of the Moons weeks-long night.

Still, its possible that the craft could be equipped with some low-key, self-sustaining science experiments or hardware that could be of use to others later a passive beacon for navigation, perhaps, or an intermittent seismic sensor that detect nearby meteorite impacts.

One concept involved unfolding solar panels to last for a whole lunar day (~14 Earth days) and technology exists to survive the lunar night and even longer, said Kennedy in response to a question about putting science instruments on board. NASAs Science Mission Directorate aims to take advantage of all opportunities for science investigations and intends to provide scientific experiments/instruments for all landers traveling to the lunar surface as long as they align with our needs and goals.

Even should the space pallet not be pursued further than concept stage, the team writes in the paper, it is important to note that these and other derived technologies are extensible to other lander designs and missions.

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NASAs space pallet concept could land rovers on the moon cheaply and simply - TechCrunch