The post Geopolitical Change Dominating This 21st Century Decade: Part 3 – China’s Bid For Global Dominance And Respect appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The rapid modernization of Japan in the late 19th century was called the Meiji Restoration. It ended centuries of isolation and transformed Japan from an agrarian to a modern industrial country.
Japan copied British and German military, economic and political models in setting itself on a path to build an empire. With centuries of enforced isolation gone, Japan’s pursuits on the world stage had few guardrails.
In 1875, Okinawa and the Kuril Islands became Japanese colonies. A war with China in 1895 led to the annexation of Taiwan. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 was soon followed by the seizure of Korea.
Through the first three decades of the 20th century, Japan used its European-style military to exact land, leases and exclusive economic zones from its nearby neighbour, China, which was undergoing a period of anarchy and civil war. By 1932, Manchuria, China’s most northeastern province, became Japan’s Manchukuo.
Japan’s emulation of European models in pursuit of empire appeared to be highly successful until it confronted the United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941. A post-war Japan, following its defeat in 1945, assisted by its former American enemy, pivoted to more peaceful pursuits to produce the Japan we see today.
The United States cajoled Japan to open up. China’s isolation ended differently with the corpse of the Qing Dynasty picked at by Europe, Japan and the United States. The Empire ceased to exist in a revolution that led to the founding of the Republic of China in 1912.
Chinese attempts at modernization, however, didn’t enjoy the rigorous model that Japan followed with the Meiji Restoration. Chinese generals and warlords fought with each other and the nascent Republic. The rise of Soviet Russia inspired a Marxist movement in neighbouring China, led by Mao Zedong. The Nationalist leaders of the nascent republic had to contend with all these adversaries and Japanese aggression. It was a no-win situation for China.
Following World War II, the war’s political survivors clashed in a civil war, which ended in 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic under Mao Zedong on the mainland, and the republican Nationalists in Taiwan, now no longer under Japanese rule.
Mao’s Communist regime attempted Soviet-style reforms, including land redistribution and collectivization, rapid industrialization, and the provision of education and healthcare to the masses. Some experiments proved to be colossal failures, setting the country’s modernization back by decades.
Following Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping became the leader of the Communist Party. From 1978, he introduced an opening up to the world with market liberalization, special economic zones, and the introduction of private enterprise. The transformation has been remarkable.
Today, China, based on the measure of economic strength, is second only to the United States. It manufactures 30% of worldwide production by value, more than the next nine largest producers, including the U.S.
Unlike the Japan of the early 20th century, China’s success until now has seldom involved the use of the military externally.
When the Soviet state dissolved, why didn’t China step into the void? For China, the lesson of Soviet failure has driven many of the changes seen in how the country is governed since the beginning of the 21st century. The Soviet Union was the original Marxist model of government, and its collapse represented a cautionary tale for China’s Communist rulers.
It also represented an economic opportunity that under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has led to the Belt and Road Initiative, and a different expansionist agenda that includes control of the South China Sea, ending the separate existence of Chinese Taiwan, and a Chinese economic presence in Central and South Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the countries of the Asia-Pacific.
China, today, has become the older brother in the relationship with post-Soviet Russia, a complete turnabout. Without China’s economic support, Russia’s war in Ukraine would become increasingly problematic.
China and the United States represent the two strongest points of the trilateral triangle that also includes Russia. In Trump’s reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere is America’s exclusion zone. He views any incursion by China, Russia or any other nation as an aggression against American interests. The Venezuela action, therefore, can be seen as more than just the taking down of a dictatorial regime, but also as a statement about American hemispheric exclusivity.
For China, it is much more. The country has a growing presence in Central and South America. In a January 10, 2026, opinion piece appearing in the Globe and Mail, Shlomo Ben-Ami describes China’s presence in the hemisphere, including more than US$300 billion in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. China, today, accounts for 80% of Venezuela’s current international oil sales.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has involved more than $60 billion in Venezuela since the early 2000s. Payment is being made through oil shipments. The Chinese National Petroleum Corporation has several oil extraction joint ventures in the country, and recently, Concord Resources has invested $1 billion into a Venezuelan project to produce 60,000 barrels per day this year, destined for China.
Trump, after the Maduro grab, announced that the U.S. will be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future and directing where Venezuela’s oil goes. What does that mean for China?
In addition, does America’s declaration of hemisphere hegemony extend a quid pro quo to China related to its interests in East Asia? Ben-Ami writes, “With the Venezuela operation, Mr. Trump has effectively given China an open invitation to invade Taiwan.”
China has other issues with America, namely, excessive tariff barriers erected by the Trump administration. China has exhibited aggressive behaviour in claiming extraterritorial ownership of the waters, islands, shoals and seabed of the South China Sea. It has bullied neighbouring nations that have equal claims to the territorial waters of that body of water.
Xi Jinping continues to claim Taiwan for the motherland, with reunion by negotiation or invasion. In China’s latest war games, it encircled Taiwan to demonstrate an ability to blockade its ports. So, can China interpret Trump’s latest actions as Ben-Ami suggests? Are we about to see the People’s Republic go as rogue as America?
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]]>The post Why is China And Not The West Leading In Mitigating Climate Change? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>For several decades, the Chinese government has promoted rapid modernization. That demands electricity. To generate electricity, China turned to domestic and imported coal. Today, China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.
According to the Visual Capitalist, in 2024, China produced and consumed 4.78 billion tons. A distant second was India at 1.08 billion tons, followed by Indonesia at 836 million, the United States at 465 million, Australia at 463 million, Russia at 427 million and South Africa at 235 million.
In 2026, China will launch new plans to address climate change, reconciling the issue with its continuing economic ambitions as the leading manufacturer on Earth. Part of its manufacturing remit is clean technology, which the country continues to export to Developing World countries in the form of solar panels and wind turbines, to help them make the energy transition from carbon.
At this past international climate meeting in Belém, Brazil, China updated its 2035 NDCs (National Determined Contributions) as follows:
As promising as these climate change pledges are, and the country’s efforts to date, the Climate Action Tracker rates the country as “highly insufficient,” largely because of its immense reliance on coal for energy production. But China stands in good company. For example, Canada’s NDC rating was “highly insufficient,” the European Union’s was “insufficient,” and the United States was “critically insufficient.”
In March, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) reconvenes for its annual meeting. Largely a rubber stamp for the Communist Party’s central leadership, the next five-year plan will be approved. Will the plan enhance the commitments already pledged at COP30? Lili Pike of Bloomberg sees the key number to watch will be China’s target for carbon intensity. Pike notes that the country is “currently off track from its last five-year plan, created in 2020.” Will the plan the NPC rubber stamps include efforts to close the gap?
As for China’s support for Developing World ambitions to go greener, the country’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been providing financial support for green energy projects in over 150 countries.
At COP30, its climate finance investments were not disclosed. The previous meeting at COP29, however, stated that since 2016, the nations of the Developing World had received loans and contributions from China in excess of 177 billion Chinese Yuan (CNY), greater than US$24.5 billion.
Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs) are visible across the globe, except for North America, where imposed Trump tariff barriers have restricted the flow. Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg notes that in countries like Bangladesh, off-grid home solar panels are speeding up rural electrification and have set records.
Elsewhere, solar panels and battery sales to Pakistan are causing that country to accelerate its transition from natural gas as a primary fuel. For Ethiopia, in its move to reduce gas and diesel pollution, the country has been importing Chinese electric vehicles at a record pace. China’s EV exports now span more than 200 countries, with most in the Global South. Total numbers for 2024-2025 reached 5.5 million. These countries see Chinese green imports as a way to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, improve urban air quality, and electrify transportation. Rathi predicts these Chinese green exports will keep rising in 2026.
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]]>The post The Middle Kingdom Is Back: China Takes Leading Role Among Nations appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Chinese science led in geology and astronomy. Chinese observatories created the technology and scientific observations that inspired Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and others in Europe to make subsequent breakthrough hypotheses.
Between 1405 and 1433, China launched maritime expeditions involving hundreds of ships that travelled across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Arabia. It was 1488 before Portuguese explorers rounded Africa’s southern Cape of Good Hope and another decade before four small ships from Portugal reached India.
The late Medieval China, turning in on itself, saw its technological and scientific advantages disappear. European nation-states that adopted Chinese technologies and discoveries, while seeking competitive advantage, subsequently launched banking and scientific revolutions that spurred rapid growth, wealth accumulation, significant discoveries and new technologies.
Today, the Medieval mindset that stifled China is gone. The culture, dominated by Confucian thinking and resistance to external influences and change, has been replaced by a modern state led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a political institution that was inspired by the Russian Revolution in 1917 but has adopted a native tone.
The CCP bears little resemblance to the party of Soviet Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Although it remains centralist, it has integrated market-based ideas borrowed from Western democracies, embraced private enterprise and capitalism, and created a distinctive ideological synthesis that even Mao Zedong, the CCP’s founder, would find unrecognizable.
The result is an emerging China that is reasserting itself as the Middle Kingdom or Zhōngguó. This term suggests a China that sees its civilization as the centre of the world. Zhōngguó dates back to 1,000 BCE and, until the mid-15th century, was how China saw itself. Now, five hundred years later, the Middle Kingdom is back with the latest conference on climate change, COP30, an apt example of this move to the global centre.
The absence of the federal government of the United States at COP30, put the spotlight on China and the country took advantage, announcing ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions by up to 10% by 2035, to increase wind and solar power by 600%, raise non-fossil fuel energy production to 30% of the country’s total, show off its advances in solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs) and more. China at COP30 pledged significant reforestation projects, increasing natural carbon sinks, expanding ecologically protected areas, reducing methane emissions from agriculture, and reducing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 30% from the atmosphere to protect the ozone layer. It was China, not the United States, that offered Global South countries financial help and technology sharing as part of a multilateral climate diplomacy initiative.
The European Union and 193 other countries attended. Joining them were NGOs, charities, and energy producers, including oil, gas and nuclear. The EU attempted to match the Chinese, with the bloc pledging to reduce GHG emissions by 72.5% by 2035, 90% by 2040, and 100% by 2050. It also announced climate finance efforts to support 80 countries transitioning from fossil fuels, a tropical forest conservation fund, and a Just Transition Action Plan to address nations most vulnerable to global warming and rising ocean sea levels.
Where was the U.S. at COP30? With Donald Trump pulling America out of the Paris Climate Agreement and referring to climate change as a Chinese hoax, there was no federal presence. The Americans who showed up were former diplomats, some state governors, city mayors, businesses and advocacy groups. America joined Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino as the only countries not in attendance.
At COP30, China didn’t steal the show, but it did move itself further on the path to restoring the Middle Kingdom. Whether the style of government that China represents is not to Western tastes, the model of multilateralism demonstrated by Belt and Road, and the Global Governance Initiative recently unveiled at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, the country sees itself as the present and future centre of the global community with a responsibility to establish a common future for humanity.
Indeed, the Middle Kingdom is back.
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]]>The post Is Solar Energy from Outer Space in Our Future? – Part One: Building a Geosynchronous Solar Power Plant appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Both concepts wish to take advantage of uninterruptible solar energy which has been an aspirational goal for a long time but no single country as of yet has developed a feasible project. The reasons to do it, however, are tantalizing: 100% renewable energy for as long as the Sun continues to shine without interruption.
Today a state-of-the-art solar panel on Earth can convert between 20 to 30% of the energy it collects from sunlight into electricity. At night solar panels here contribute nothing. But in space with nothing to block the Sun, that same Earth-based solar panel becomes thirteen times more efficient. And that is enough of an incentive to consider solar power from space.
The Chinese and UK models are massive arrays located in geosynchronous orbit while continuously beaming energy to receiving stations here on Earth.
The US model is different using a constellation of solar power generating satellites. These would be in relatively low orbits and interconnected to form a mesh network. The total network would generate continuous energy beaming it to the surface even when a portion of it gets blocked when the satellites enter the night side of the planet.
In this two-part posting, we look at the Chinese and UK models.
What experience to date can we apply to build what both China and the UK are proposing – monster arrays that would span multiple square kilometres in geosynchronous orbit? There are quite a few telecommunications satellites today in geosynchronous orbit. None are the size of what is being proposed. But we know how to get there from Earth.
Building something big in space has only one current model. It currently orbits 400 kilometres (248 miles) above the Earth and is the International Space Station (ISS), a structure several football fields in size. The ISS was built from modules and components delivered to the low-Earth orbit site and then assembled. It took ten years and $150 billion US and costs about $3 billion for annual maintenance, not including astronaut visits and provisioning for the onboard crews.
A solar power array of the size being contemplated could be built from modular components sent into space where assembly could occur in low-Earth orbit in a similar fashion to the ISS. China has some experience already in building its own space station, Tiangong, using a similar technique. But the solar power array as envisioned by China would be a structure 25 times larger than the ISS. The simple math would suggest for such a structure costs could be 25 times higher. That means to build it could run up a $3.7 trillion bill.
If the site of the build is a low-Earth orbit, the solar power array would after completion have to be moved to a geosynchronous orbit 35,786 kilometres (22,236 miles) above the Earth. A move of this type at this scale would be unprecedented. Likely the means of propulsion would be plasma or ion thrusters, or maybe a novel use of a series of solar sales which could be deployed to move the completed array to its permanent location. Then finally there needs to be a receiving station on Earth that can capture what the array sends back to Earth in the form of microwave beams. There is the experience we have in building large radio telescopes and networks of them, and we know how to build large solar farms. But the antenna array will need to collect energy from the array that when transmitted to Earth must be diffuse enough to not harm anything or any creature flying through it. At the same time, there should be little in the way of energy loss in transmission from space.
From a recent UK feasibility study that looked at building a solar power array in space similar to what China is envisioning, British engineers have concluded that a geosynchronous orbiting power station is viable and can be built from materials launched from Earth. The study calculated the need for 300 launches equivalent in capacity to SpaceX’s current Starship. That would be enough to deliver materials for the assembly of a demonstrator array several kilometres in size by 2035 and capable of generating Gigawatts of electricity. The UK proposed array would be built by robots in the geosynchronous orbit location. Once the demonstration proves it works the array would continue to grow in size encompassing a significant space footprint.
The British call their project CASSIOPeiA which stands for Constant Aperture Solid-State Integrated Orbital Phased Array. (I wouldn’t have considered this particular acronym because if my Greek mythology is right, Cassiopeia was a vain African queen who was punished for her hubris by Poseidon and tied to an upside-down chair where she hangs today as the constellation that goes by her name.)
The first question that comes to mind is — is one of these things enough? Redundancy in infrastructure makes for better outcomes as telecommunications companies will tell you. They learned about redundancy in their networks by overbuilding relays and substations to meet a five 9s standard. That’s 99.999% uptime or no more than 2 minutes of downtime for dial tone annually.
Power companies on Earth aspire to get close to five 9s but the cost to build redundancy into generation and delivery comes at a much higher cost. Even then utilities can be hit by unanticipated extreme events that normally would seldom interrupt dial tone. We are talking about hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
For a geosynchronous orbiting power array, there are space equivalents to extreme events that happen here on Earth. I can name three.
If we are to build solar power arrays as conceived by China and the UK then we will need to ensure that these massive projects in orbit will not suddenly go dark on us. We will have to build self-repair capacity into the structures, and to a degree overbuild them beyond 100% performance capacity. The question we have to ask is not can we build it, but more can we afford it?
But the US may have a solution that would make the vulnerabilities we have identified for a geosynchronous solar solution go away. And that’s what we will describe in Part Two.
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]]>The post China Embarks on Transmitting Solar Power from Space to Earth Using Microwaves appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>It’s an idea born from science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, who described space stations transmitting solar energy to Earth using microwave beams back in a 1941 short story. And since the 1970s various subborned attempts have been made to turn Asimov’s fantasy into a reality. That includes work done by Japan’s space agency JAXA and the US Naval Research Laboratory.
In 2014 the US Department of Energy described what microwave transmission of energy to Earth would look like. It would involve satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO), 35,000 kilometres above the Earth. The solar reflectors would span up to 3 kilometres and weigh more than 80,000 tons. Each would generate multiple Gigawatts of power or enough to sustain a large city.
The microwave wavelengths used would long antennas, which would allow power to be beamed at low intensity to receiving stations regardless of atmospheric conditions. The intensity of the microwave beams would be no stronger than the midday sun allowing birds and airplanes to flying through them. The receiving antennae to collect the microwave beams would cover a large area of land. It was estimated anywhere between 3 and 10 kilometres in diameter.
In 2014, the estimated cost of launching, assembling and operating one of these satellites was estimated to be tens of billions of dollars requiring scores of material supply missions from Earth. At the time, there was no consideration of using space-based materials in the building of these geostationary satellite power arrays.
Currently, a British company, International Electric, has its own plans to beam power to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices equipped with high-gain antennae for receiving power from a phased array, called CASSIOPeiA.
Now China is entering the field with plans this year to complete the Bishan Space Solar Power Station near Chongqing in an attempt to wirelessly collect energy beamed from a high-altitude balloon with a suspended floating solar array beneath. This test, if successful, will lead to a fully working small-scale power station and satellite to be deployed by 2030, and the ultimate goal, to harvest Gigawatts of energy from space using microwave power transmission.
So it appears we are witnessing another space technology race that could prove to be a zero-emission solution to end our reliance on fossil fuels for the bulk of our energy needs. Maybe, the latest IPCC Climate Assessment will hasten the research and development for these projects. It would be the ultimate solar energy solution with no intermittency issues whatsoever. What a game breaker that would be.
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]]>The post China UFO-ology Competes with U.S. UFO-ology Except the Former is Using AI to Figure Out What’s Going On appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>But it is the Chinese leak as reported in the South China Morning Post, which states the military in the People’s Republic is tracking what it calls UACs (Unidentified Air Conditions), its term for UFOs, and applying artificial intelligence (AI) to try and make sense of hundreds of sightings across the country.
Chen Li who serves in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), at the Air Force Early Warning Academy, in a 2019 report notes the frequent occurrence of UACs in recent years. Applying AI to the entire dataset of sightings, he states that China hopes to figure out what is being observed while separating natural and explainable phenomena.
In one notable 2010 incident (see the image at the top of this posting), the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport reportedly shut down its operations because of an observed UAC which lingered in the area for several hours. At the time locals reported a glowing object that resembled a comet but the picture displayed above doesn’t really fit that description. Could these be the running lights of an airship or other type of lighter-than-air craft?
But it is reports coming from radar stations, pilots, police, weather stations, and science observatories that China is putting into a national database for the AI to analyze. From this, the PLA hopes they can discern consistent patterns including the behaviour of the objects, their shapes, and possibly their make and materials. The end result could be the development of an appropriate threat index to apply to future sightings.
China takes the search for extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence very seriously. The country has invested in the world’s largest radio telescope, even bigger than the recently decommissioned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. One of its projects is to search for ET with it concentrating much of its focus on the dense star fields located at the centre of our galaxy. It is the sheer number of stars in this location that makes it an ideal hunting ground to find ET’s signal.
So what can explain this Chinese fascination? Maybe it’s because China only recently staved off the threat of being dominated by earthly aliens. Of course, I’m referring to the 19th and early 20th-century encroachments by European colonial powers, the British Opium Wars, the establishment of Hong Kong and European and Japanese control of other coastal ports, and the Japanese invasion and occupation prior to and throughout the Second World War.
In the absence of similar reports from Russia other than the one cosmonaut sighting on the ISS, don’t be surprised if the U.S. or China point to Russia as a terrestrial source for many UFO sightings.
A final note: Observations of UFOs are not just a contemporary phenomenon. They go back millennia from ancient Egypt to the present. One might even conjecture that our religious faiths owe much to the inexplicable observed in past night skies.
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]]>The post How Do You Measure Risk and Come Up With Policy That Works in the Age of Pandemic? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>For the most part governments have always recognized the potential threat of a global pandemic. There is enough history to fall back on to ensure that the subject doesn’t move too far from the agenda when dealing with public health. And governments have known for sometime that the risk of pandemic in the 21st century is far greater than at anytime in the past.
Why? Because we are living in a more crowded and physically interconnected world than at any time in human history. With over 7.5 billion of us on the planet we are exploiting more of the natural world than ever before and in encroaching upon it making ourselves more vulnerable to cross-species transmission of infectious diseases. And then there is the interconnectedness through travel and trade today whether it be global supply chains, or the vast increase in global tourism. So it behooves our policymakers to pay attention to emerging pandemic threats, and to making investments in health capacity preparedness and rapid response should a novel disease outbreak occur.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has been the United Nations’ coordinating body for the health of the global community to aggregate knowledge about the detection, reporting, and responding to outbreaks. Beginning with influenza, HIV, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Zika, and others, the WHO has established preparedness standards and probabilistic modeling and analytical tools for identifying, plotting the spread, and combating pandemics. And for the most part it has done the job effectively by becoming a knowledge aggregator and clearinghouse, an organizer of worldwide conferences, and through disseminating best practices and the publishing of policy and position papers.
COVID-19, however, has proven to be a different story. Called a novel coronavirus because no known previous contact with humans had been recorded, there have been so many unknowns attached to this virus that its spread was inevitable. If it had been contained at the onset it would have remained a regional outbreak within China and may never have gone beyond the country’s borders. But the controlling nature of China’s authoritarian government when practiced by local authorities made knowledge suppression and misinformation more important than physical containment.
In many respects, the COVID-19 story resembles the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl disaster where precedence was given to knowledge suppression before addressing the immediate and larger physical threat. In Chernobyl, committees of the local soviet debated while radiation contamination spread. Suppressing the truth, keeping locals close to the source of the nuclear contamination, and locking down the area made everything much worse.
The WHO, which has been well prepared to deal with influenza pandemics because it has a history of flu upon which to model and build a response, in the case of COVID-19 was wholly reliant on data from local Chinese authorities. This was a mistake. The WHO probabilistic modeling and analytical tools for influenza could have been adapted for COVID-19 and should have provided a means to understand and manage the outbreak. But modeling requires good data, and China fell short in the first few weeks on delivering just that. The local and national delay in locking down Wuhan and Hubei proved to be the country’s biggest mistake. China let the coronavirus out of the proverbial bag and a local outbreak became first an epidemic and then a global pandemic.
There are two measures for pandemic risk. One is called “spark.” The other is called “spread.”
In March I wrote about BlueDot, a company that developed a dashboard that tracks infectious disease outbreaks. BlueDot’s risk model based on a combination of artificial intelligence algorithms and programs that could sift through unstructured data such as emails, memos, local news reports, and even airline tickets, was able to predict COVID-19’s spread beyond the borders of China nine days before the WHO. So what started as a local disease outbreak in Wuhan before Christmas 2019 has now infected more than 5.2 million, killed over 335 thousand, and done it all in less than a six-month window.
The collateral damage to the world economy has been unprecedented. The social and behavioural impacts will leave millions with emotional scars. And it is more than likely that a number of governments will face political stresses and tensions that will lead to disruptive consequences. We are already seeing this all over the world as governments that imposed quarantines and lockdowns struggle to try and reopen society and national economies. This is happening because of the knowledge gaps these governments currently have. What kind of knowledge?
Barbara Matthews is the founder and CEO of BCMstrategy, Inc., an Alexandria, Virginia, creator of automated predictive analytics that measures policy risk objectively. I have had the pleasure of speaking and corresponding with her for the past year, and among the topics we have discussed is just how little understood is the means by which to calculate risk and costs associated with addressing the current pandemic.
The one most missed by governments in this current pandemic is preparedness. It appears no governments in the Developed or Developing World had the wherewithal to commit themselves to the resources and public health infrastructure needed.
The second missing in action policy was a lack of coordination between levels of government and public health in information dissemination, and testing.
The third missing in action policy was the lack of surge capacity to deal with peak levels of infection within the existing public health infrastructure.
The fourth missing in action policy was the lack of research investments to develop rapid response to the pandemic including drug and non-drug treatment, and the development of vaccines.
The fifth missing in action policy was the lack of contingency funding specifically to be used in the event of a pandemic.
The sixth missing in action policy was the lack of a central repository for collecting data from any and all sources not just to better understand the virus, but to also uncover potential ratholes and blind spots in treatment, and make corrections to optimize patient outcomes.
The seventh missing in action policy was the lack of understanding of the vulnerability of particular population groups to the virus, particularly seniors in long-term care facilities.
And of course there are the economic policies that governments and their minions have attempted as emergency measures to deal with the collapse of global business. No one in most governments knows what inevitably will work to right the economies of countries. No one knows whether lockdown measures already implemented can be weathered without causing permanent damage. And no one knows what governments and the planet will look like when we come out of this phase of the pandemic or what it will be like if we go through several subsequent spikes.
Living in a state of continuous emergency is like living with a heart arrhythmia (which the virus has given me). You don’t know if the whole thing is going to come crashing down or revert to previous norms.
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]]>The post The Coronavirus Pandemic May Give Us a Glimpse of What Could Result From Decarbonizing Our Global Economy appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>This change in human activity is not just to be found in my country. It is becoming common almost everywhere where the virus has struck. And based on satellite images, this changed behaviour everywhere is significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in our global atmosphere. This came to me as I was reading headlines that claimed most major airlines would be bankrupt by the end of May because of COVID-19, and the automobile manufacturing sector throughout the world would be making dramatic production reductions for the foreseeable future.
In terms of human-generated air pollution, transportation and manufacturing rival electricity and heat production as among the largest contributors of atmospheric GHGs. Take these two out of circulation, so to speak, and you can reduce human GHG emissions by as much as 35%. That’s an interesting number because it is even greater than the GHG emission reduction target Canada is hoping to achieve by 2030, a 30% decline.
It wouldn’t be fair not to point out that the reduction in the above two sectors will be partially offset by those people who aren’t commuting and who are staying at home. They will need more electricity and heat. The difference, however, is if someone is already at home, the additional heat and energy being added would only play a small part in increasing GHG emissions. Even empty homes use electricity and heat. Today, our built infrastructure contributes far fewer GHG emissions than transportation and manufacturing. In the end, there should be an overall decline in emissions.
Does the evidence bear this out?
Satellite imagery over China and Europe supports this hypothesis as you can see in the pictures that follow.
In China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown national response has produced a decline in emissions from coal-fired power plants coincident with reduced manufacturing and transportation. NASA satellite images taken in January and February 2020 show how significant the short-term decarbonizing has been over China’s major urban and industrial centers. In the following map of the country, tropospheric concentrations of nitrous dioxide (NO2) largely produced from thermal power plants and motor vehicles is the measuring stick.
Drilling down on Wuhan where COVID-19 first made its appearance you can see the comparisons. In the six images below the changes to GHG emissions between January and February 2019 and the same period in 2020 are starkly revealing.
The net emissions decrease as seen in the images above represents a 30% decline from 2019. And better yet, there has been little in the way of a rebound to 2019 levels so far.
Italy is our second example. It is another epicenter for the virus. Here too we see a similar decline in NO2 emissions recorded by satellite. From January to March the concentration of GHGs in the troposphere have notably declined.
This pandemic is brutal. It is disrupting the entire planet. But one thing is certain, the virus is showing us that changing our behaviour can curb GHG emissions. When the pandemic finally subsides we may learn something, that we at least through modifying activities can immediately impact the atmosphere significantly. For policymakers seeking climate change mitigation strategies, we may have learned a valuable lesson.
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]]>The post Peter Diamandis Believes Coronavirus Containment is Possible by Emulating China’s Response appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>China’s collective response to the outbreak has ranged from building two hospitals in under ten days to locking down an entire city, and to rapid national coordination of public action. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO) ascribes China’s actions as impressive stating, “We would have seen many more cases outside China by now — and probably deaths — if it was not for the government’s efforts.”
China has adopted a technological approach to combat COVID-19 and its spread. They have done this with seven different technological tools and strategies. A description follows:
China is flying drones over parts of the country sharing information on loudspeakers, carrying signs like the one above sporting QR codes for non-contact registration, spraying disinfectant, delivering packages, and taking people’s temperatures. The temperature readers use infrared thermal imaging which is proving to be quite accurate in determining the health of the population. The drones mean there is no need for close contact between community health workers and residents which minimizes the risk of spreading the infection.
A number of Chinese companies are funding drone use to be used for disinfecting remote areas. In one town in Shandong Province, the villagers disinfected 480,000 square meters of their locality in less than one afternoon.
Beyond disinfection runs, drones are doing medical supply deliveries with one routinely flying to the center for disease control in Xinchang County, representing the nation’s first anti-epidemic medical urban-air transport. Other drones have been used in Wuhan to deliver medical supplies from logistics stations to local hospitals, avoiding vehicles and pedestrians in transit. The Zhejiang Xinchang People’s Hospital is just one example where drones are transporting samples for analysis.
Hospitals across Beijing, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hubei, and Hunan Provinces are using robots as zero-contact distribution servers. Medical staff place items on robots which then deliver them to patients without any human contact. After each route completion, the robots return to nursing stations to be disinfected before going on another run. In some hospitals, robots provide contact-free delivery service to as many as 20 wards at a time. Meanwhile, robots and driverless vehicles are serving hospitals and communities by providing contact-free delivery of consumables from coffee to fresh vegetables.
A Chinese company has released a new line of medicinal noodles with immune-boosting ingredients. Carmakers and smartphone manufacturers are churning out face masks faster than the face mask manufacturers themselves. Government and the private sector are flooding biomedical services and medical technologies with investment.
Online medical consults have gone from non-existent to becoming the norm. According to Ali Health, even prior to the end of January, total visitors to online free clinics exceeded 2.8 million serving more than 1,000 doctors. Meanwhile, a number of online medical service platforms launched online diagnostic services for coronavirus symptoms in order to avoid false-positive visits to hospitals. Damo Academy, an Alibaba research institute, is testing coronavirus infection with AI analytics, reporting 96% accuracy simply by looking at a CT scan and completing the recognition process in 20 seconds.
The boom in virtual classrooms and online education in China has been unprecedented. More than 20 provinces in China have joined a home-schooling program involving 10,000-plus primary and secondary schools with five million students live streaming their classes. Early in February the Chinese Ministry of Education provided instructions for the deployment of online teaching to resume classes from the safety of students’ homes, offering 24,000 online courses on 20 online platforms at no cost.
The spring semester for some 3,923 courses offered by Tsinghua University (China’s top STEM school) and 4,437 courses at Peking University (China’s top liberal arts college) are being taught using recorded courses, live streaming, and teleconferencing.
The educational technology business is booming in an effort to provide e-learning environments that, in the long run, may dramatically change the face of K-12 and higher education in China.
The world’s biggest remote work experiment has been unleashed by COVID-19. The CEO of Alibaba describes it as a “chance to try a new way of living and new way of work.” The company’s DingTalk app became the most downloaded free iOS app in China, and remained number one for the last few weeks. On one day in February over ten million corporations were using DingTalk, for team chat groups, org charts and teleconferencing. Companies were using it to track attendance and overtime hours automatically. Tencent has also seen dramatic growth in demand for its online work tools among the top five most downloaded free iOS apps in China.WeChat Work and Tencent Meeting are today being used by more than 2.5 million companies, covering 60 million corporate users. There is even an online health management platform that allows workers to log on and record their daily temperature.
After completing the new Wuhan hospital, an unmanned supermarket was launched within a day. Open 24/7, the supermarket provides self-service checkout with no receipts. On opening day it was used by more than 200 customers.
While China’s e-commerce ecosystem is already well ahead of the rest of the world, many still prefer to buy offline. But COVID-19 has turned buying groceries online into becoming the norm. China’s Sinopec petrol stations now sell no-contact groceries. You order online and have your groceries put directly into the trunk of your car. There is no need to leave the driver’s seat or even open the window.
China under the COVID-19 virus challenge has been building emergency hospital centres, locking down outbreak epicenters, and mobilizing resources over the last few months. The integration of drones, robots, e-commerce platforms and novel biotechnology as described above, is creating the smart city, an integrated platform for defending society against the virus’ spread. China has showcased an extraordinary example of mutual accountability between the government and citizens. We caught a glimpse of this during the construction of two hospitals in fewer than ten days as millions watched live-stream.
While we have yet to see how 21st-century smart cities can serve as community defense mechanisms, their help protecting against an outbreak should spur capital investment and innovation across our own smart cities worldwide. The Chinese government is predicting both public and private investment amounting to 74 billion USD in smart city development.
Creating a network of real-time information, WeChat and Baidu Maps have released health clinic information covering 3,000 clinics in over 100 cities across the country. Patients can find on their phones designated hospitals qualified to treat fever and coronavirus.
Other innovations for smart cities will use big data and cloud computing, and early-warning infection detection technologies as preventive tools, tracking, analyzing, and making real-time decisions.
Countries in the early stages of this pandemic can still get the infection under control. Mobilizing around our shared public health, saving lives, and global recuperation, are within our reach. The virus can be contained if the world collectively takes action, using tactics and technologies that China has shown can work.
Whether governments and institutions are executing a consistent response, businesses do have tools to meet COVID-19’s secondary challenges. Schools and communities can launch coordinated responses through the online environment.
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]]>In December, when China first saw the signs emerging of a new viral respiratory illness, controlling the message seemed to be more important than transparency. The result was the public could take little in the way of preventive measures to stop COVID-19 from spreading. At the beginning, human-to-human transmission was unknown. But it soon became apparent when health workers became infected.
Early on the Chinese authorities claimed the infection was occurring only in older patients with underlying conditions. But now we know that those most severely impacted by the disease were between the ages of 25 and49 with more than two-thirds having no underlying conditions. And when China finally quarantined Wuhan and Hubei Province it was almost one month after the first noted COVID-19 report, and 5 million had left the city to travel throughout China and the world. Without investigative journalists and active democratic opposition, the Chinese bureaucracy held back vital information until the cat was out of the bag.
The disease soon found new significant outbreaks on a quarantined cruise ship tied up in Yokohama harbour, in a city in South Korea, in Qom, Iran, and in Northern Italy. COVID-19 fears have caused world stock markets to plunge, will likely cancel the Hajj, the annual rite of passage for Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia, is closing tradeshows all over Europe, and may cause the cancellation of this summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games.
So China’s closed political system has led to unnecessary deaths, some 2,788 as of today, 44 in the last 24 hours which represents a decrease. Worldwide, more than 2,800 have died and 83,000 are infected (78,900 in China). The World Health Organization (WHO) has yet to make the call of pandemic although the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention has indicated that two of the three criteria to label it so have been met. As we stated earlier, COVID-19 is now in 50 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. Africa has reported its first confirmed cases. California yesterday reported 33 new infections. Italy has exported 24 cases to 14 countries, and Iran has exported 97 cases to 11 countries.
What amazes me is the infighting between various health authorities to define COVID-19 as either an epidemic or s pandemic. The difference between the two terms is nuanced. An epidemic usually is associated with a single outbreak that remains localized, think outbreaks of cholera because of local water contamination. But pandemics are diseases that go global. By that definition, COVID-19 is a pandemic.
Toronto is part of the story now. The city has a sizable Chinese population where the reaction to COVID-19 has varied from anxiety to meltdown. In today’s Toronto Star, interviews with Chinese businesses in the downtown core indicate a significant decline in traffic. It appears the local Chinese community is entering lockdown even though Toronto has seven confirmed cases with one of those originating from a person who became infected when traveling to Iran, not China. Yesterday the first confirmed human-to-human transmission in Toronto occurred between a husband and wife. There is a run on hand sanitizer in Toronto drugstores with many reporting they are sold out. The Ontario government is advising us to stock up on food items just in case we have to self isolate should COVID-19 spread.
The impact of the virus goes beyond those infected and those who have succumbed to it. It seems that the virus has infected global markets as well. World stock markets are being battered by fears that the pandemic will affect global trade and supply chains. Chinese factories have experienced prolonged shutdowns in the last couple of months and with the nation a prime supplier of the world’s manufactured goods the markets have plunged wiping out the gains since the beginning of the year. China is hoping in the next month, as new case numbers for the disease begin to drop, that it can restart its economy and begin to bring some calm to world markets. But should COVID-19 continue to see infection numbers and deaths rise, then the virus will have not only killed thousands but will have caused a global recession.
Could this outcome have been different? If the disease first emerged in a democratic country with an investigative press and transparency from health authorities I don’t believe we would be seeing 83,000 infected and 2,800 deaths.
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