ANOTHER highway project in the Himalayan region, this time part of this government’s flagship Char Dham Highway, yet another tunnel, and one more disaster, fortunately with no casualties so far as this goes to print. 40 workers have been trapped for over 70 hours inside a 4.5 km railway tunnel under construction between Silkyara and Dandalgaon on the Brahmakhal-Yamunotri portion, when the roof of the tunnel near the mouth collapsed in the early hours of Sunday, November 11, 2023.

THE energy and climate change universe is abuzz with the new developments around discovery of large deposits of natural or “white” hydrogen, with many commentators hailing it as great news and a potential game-changer in the battle against climate change. Fossil-fuel related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are today, even after so many international emissions control agreements and considerable installed capacity in renewable energy, still 91 per cent of global CO2 emissions.

THE Paris Agreement (PA) had mandated a periodic five-yearly cycle of assessments of climate action called the Global Stocktake (GST) starting in 2023. GST is a process involving both country parties i.e., governments, as well as non-party stakeholders to review progress made on the different actions agreed upon in the international negotiations under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to tackle the greatest crisis to confront humankind, namely climate change.

AS one of the outcomes of the recently concluded G20 Summit in New Delhi, a new Biofuels Alliance was announced, with India, Brazil, the US and other countries taking the lead towards a programme of action aiming to increase the uptake of sustainable biofuels especially in the transport sector.  Here in India, much has been made of this initiative as another triumph showcasing the growing global leadership of the present government, and also as a step towards a big push to India’s already sizeable and ambitious biofuels programme.  The impression is that this new global alliance would work

THE chip wars between the US and China show no sign of abating as the US tries to stop the flow of advanced chips – sub 7 nm chips, graphical processor units (GPUs), 5G chipsets – and the lithographic machines that manufacture such chips. The US had started with sanctions that made it impossible for Huawei to manufacture its top-of-the-range processors at the heart of the 5G mobile phones. The US had then progressively widened the sanctions to advanced chip manufacturing lithographic machines and high-end computing processors, the GPUs from Nvidia.