The Business Times

David Fickling

Shipping accounts for about 3 per cent of global emissions, similar to all the aircraft in the sky
THE BOTTOM LINE

The ships moving global trade are going electric

With each passing year, batteries get cheaper, lighter and more powerful

China is promising a fleet of 203,000 satellites to be deployed by the mid-2030s. That would dwarf the ambitions of Elon Musk - SpaceX’s Starlink network has nearly 10,000 orbiters so far - but while there’s undoubtedly a land grab underway, it’s one that Musk is winning.

Musk is beating China’s 203,000 paper satellites

The country’s plans are best understood not as a genuine expansion, but a bid to hobble the front-runner

Solar panels are arranged to resemble a panda at a power plant in Datong. Even with a headlong renewables buildout, China's rising electricity consumption means that any shortfalls are met by coal generators.

China’s energy future still runs on old technology

The country already has the power grid of the future; the problem is it’s being used in a grossly inefficient manner

A corn field in Indiana in the US. Yield growth for the three main cereals - namely corn, rice and wheat - has flatlined in the last five years.

World’s food security is facing a triple threat

Humanity’s risk of starvation is going up with falling crop yields, strained water supplies and restrictive food trade

Residential buildings being built in Beijing, China, which has driven the global cement market for three decades, and still accounts for nearly half of output. But the boom is now well and truly over.
THE BOTTOM LINE

Cement is hitting a wall. There’s no coming back

Prices are at their lowest in a decade, and factories are saddled with more than twice the capacity they need

While power generation from coal is in terminal decline, it still produces almost as much power as renewables do.
THE BOTTOM LINE

Hot metals are exposing the fossil fuel fantasy

The year’s fossil fuel output boom is now piling up in inventories, sending prices slumping

Floodwaters submerging vehicles in Hat Yai, southern Thailand, in late November. At least 34 people died, and thousands more were displaced.

New megacities lie in the path of devastating floods

The monsoon belt from South-east Asia to West Africa is where catastrophic rainfall is set to increase most dramatically

McNuggetisation – the moment America hit in the 1980s, when meat ceased to be aspirational, and became sort of cheap and trashy instead – is on its way to China.
THE BOTTOM LINE

‘McNuggetisation’ is coming for the Chinese diet

The story of the modern Chinese diet is one of scarcity, boom and bust

In domestic refrigerators, HFCs have almost been eliminated in favour of isobutane. Those in supermarkets and convenience stores are shifting to ammonia and carbon dioxide.

BBQ gas is helping to cool a warming planet

Propane, ammonia and carbon dioxide are rapidly displacing the hydrofluorocarbons in refrigerators and air-cons – and reducing greenhouse damage

Judging by current trends, the vast majority of matcha in the future is going to end up in soft-serve ice-cream, chiffon cakes, mochi and macarons. It would be a waste if Japan tried to chase that low-end business, when the opportunities at the top of the market are so much more alluring.

The matcha craze needs more champagne

Why Japan should up its game to protect its cultural capital. Its tea certainly counts as such

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