For seven weeks in the winter of 1964, a hot dry wind blew across the slopes at Innsbruck, Austria, melting the snow ahead of the Winter Olympics. To salvage the games (link in French), Austrian soldiers hauled 20,000 cubic meters (700,000 cubic feet) of ice blocks and 20,000 cubic meters (1.4 million cubic feet) of snow to the site, packing it onto the slopes by hand.
Burnout, exhaustion and mistreatment have hollowed out the world’s workforce of healthcare workers
For decades, the global supply chain has been powered by the dirtiest, cheapest fuel, a sludgy byproduct of oil refineries, called bunker fuel or marine fuel oil. Black smoke billowed from the world’s fleet of 50,000 cargo vessels, accumulating to 3% of annual global carbon emissions, a larger share than all but six countries. But cheap fuel meant cheap shipping, and there was little incentive to do anything about it.
Beijing identified its first locally-transmitted case of the omicron variant on Saturday (Jan. 15), prompting swift action from a city that has spent months fortifying itself against a raging pandemic as it invites an infected world into its borders for the Winter Olympics, set to begin on Feb. 4.
The dream of a carbon-free fuel is driving an investment boom in hydrogen and ammonia projects. Japan, for example, has pledged to reduce its emissions in line with the Paris Agreement by 2050, and plans to generate 10% of its energy needs using hydrogen and ammonia by then.
China’s aggressive pursuit of covid-zero has revved into high gear against omicron, locking down whole cities for weeks, closing factories, and throttling ports, raising concerns that China’s efforts to control omicron’s runaway transmissibility will prolong or worsen manufacturing and shipping delays for the battered global supply chain.
While previous covid waves were marked by shortages of equipment like ICU beds, ventilators and dialysis machines, the omicron wave is distinguished by a shortage of workers.
As covid cases rise sharply in the Philippines, president Rodrigo Duterte has taken a hardline stance against the unvaccinated. In a pre-recorded national address on Thursday (Jan. 6), Duterte told neighborhood officials to rout out and, if necessary, restrain or arrest unvaccinated people caught outside their homes.
With donations and sales, China made its covid shots accessible to the developing world even as the US and EU hoarded vaccines for their own populations. Days after the World Health Organization named omicron a variant of concern, leader Xi Jinping announced that China would be donating 1 billion doses of covid vaccines to Africa, the continent with the lowest vaccination rate.
After scrambling to get goods onto shelves and doorsteps for Christmas, retailers are preparing for a deluge of items that shoppers and gift receivers did not want after all.
As prices skyrocketed and delays piled up for global trade’s workhorse fleet of cargo ships, companies have scrambled for alternatives. For retailers and exporters in China and Europe, with the luxury of land links, that has meant renewed interest in a transport mode that was mostly ignored before the pandemic, but is now booming.
A new covid-19 lockdown imposed last week (Dec. 7) in the port city of Ningbo, China, is raising the specter of further disruptions to an already battered global supply chain.
It’s been a long 21 months of supply chain emergencies.
The container ships stuck in San Pedro Bay, off the coast of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, have become a potent symbol of a broken supply chain. But in mid-November, there appeared to be a remarkable drop in the number of ships in the logjam at the busiest container ports in the US.
America’s post-pandemic shopping spree isn’t just breaking the supply chain, it’s taking its toll on the environment. Ships chasing record-high container prices are speeding across the ocean to load up as often as they can, raising emissions at the fastest rate since 2008.
The overstuffed supply chain is seeping inland in an effort to ease congestion at coastal ports.
Since covid-19 vaccines were first released, public health experts and scientists have warned that unless until the world was vaccinated, unprotected hot spots could breed dangerous new variants. It’s a warning rich countries have largely not heeded.
It started with earning calls. A tally of transcripts showed that utterances of “supply chain” began hitting new highs in 2020 and swelled to a 10-year peak this quarter—S&P 500 firms logged a record 342 mentions (pdf) between Sept. 15 and Nov. 15—as shipments limped toward Black Friday and Christmas. In recent months, the phrase has figured in an Onion headline, a New Yorker cartoon, and in flurries of Tweets and TikToks from people who have nothing to do with logistics.
IKEA has opened its largest store in the world today—and its first physical location in the Philippines.
China kept a low profile for much of the two-week climate summit in Glasgow, but in the final hours fought hard along with India to dilute the wording around coal in the Glasgow Pact.
Two weeks ago, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai took to Weibo to accuse a retired high-ranking Communist Party official of pressuring her into sex. Her post, and discussions of it, were quickly wiped off the Chinese internet. But now colleagues in the tennis world are trying to keep alive a conversation that cannot take place in China.
China had a relatively subdued presence at this year’s COP, but in the final days threw its considerable weight around as the final agreement was hammered out. It stood up on the side of developing countries who are seeking financing to adapt to the damaging impacts of the historical emissions produced by the US and Europe, though China itself doesn’t need such funding. Together with India, China also argued for weakening the language on coal—in 2020, China consumed more than 50% of the world’s coal.
