14 September 2022. Media | Hydrogen
The Queen, the Igbo, and the limits of the public sphere. // The first hydrogen-powered train line in the world
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1: The Queen, the Igbo, and the public sphere
The coverage of a news event such as the death of the Queen quickly turns to slush. What I mean by that is that the event itself is well understood—well-grooved, even—so there’s not actually that much to say. So three days in we’re reduced to stories about where the Corgis are going to live.
So it was refreshing to read a post by the American digital theorist Ethan Zuckerman, watching on from a distance, on the lessons from the aftermath of the Queen’s death for a new course he is teaching on the digital public sphere.
Before I get to those, the three core ideas that sit behind the course are worth a mention:
- democracy requires a healthy and robust public sphere
- the public sphere includes “at least” three components—it needs a way of knowing what’s going on in the world, a space for discussion, and the conditions that allow individuals to participate in these discussions
- as technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well.
This last point has had some significant consequences, obviously:
A shift away from broadcast towards participatory media has similarly brought about tradeoffs. Many people are deeply disconcerted by a public sphere in which gatekeepers are less powerful, speech is less controlled, and mis/disinformation plays a larger part in our information ecosystem... (But) it’s worth remembering that recent information disorder has an interesting and directly related upside: a massive diversification of points of view expressed within media.
(Uncredited photo shared on Twitter this week by @Princes9302)
As it happens, we’ve had some striking examples of this since the death of the queen. Zuckerman writes particularly about the now infamous tweet from the American-based academic Uju Anya that described the Queen as “the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire”. Other views are available, of course, and Twitter deleted the Tweet, her university condemned it, and social media users, including Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, piled on.
As Zuckerman notes, there is some context and some history here. Dr. Anya’s parents were survivors of the Biafran war in the 1960s, in which Igbo Nigerians tried to secede from Nigeria following massacres of Igbo people in Nigeria. Two million Biafran people died of starvation as a result of a Nigerian blockade; Britain provided arms to the Nigerian army. (Don McCullin’s photography from that war was shocking enough to make his reputation; at least one of his photos is now owned by the Tate Gallery.) News outlets who chose to ask Dr. Anya for a fuller explanation got one.
Zuckerman’s interest here is in the relationship between the public sphere and the media. It turns out that this moment certainly got his students engaged in this question:
(M)y undergrad students, mostly white kids from eastern MA, had an excellent discussion in class on Friday about the legacy of colonialism and the power of counterspeech. Questions about whether it’s disrespectful to use the moment of a monarch’s death to remind the world about colonialism and its legacies sound a bit like complaints that discussing gun control after a massacre is “politicizing” an event.
Zuckerman’s version of what’s happening here is that there are three acts in the media coverage of predictable events. In Act 1, there are pre-ordained—and often official—reactions, often planned in advance. In Act 2, there are unanticipated reactions, usually unofficial, sometimes opportunist. And in Act 3, “we debate whether or not speech in the second wave is acceptable in a democratic society.” He characterises this as “a dominant narrative, subaltern narratives and a debate about the role of dialog itself”.
An example of that Act 3 debate, about the role of dialogue, by Karen Attiah in the Washington Post, is quoted in Zuckerman’s piece:
“It shouldn’t take the death of a monarch to bring this colonial history to light, but this is where we are. The public relations imagery of a dedicated, elderly grandmother devoted to her corgis, and the Hollywood-ification of the royal family, serves all too well to blunt questions about empire. When the opportunity comes to surface truth, it must be seized.”
His point is that some of this conflict is exactly a result of the broadening of the public sphere through digital technologies. He also suggests—and this may be more contentious—that
much of the panic about mis- and disinformation is a reaction to the airing of narratives many of us are uncomfortable hearing articulated.
Nonetheless, it’s not controversial to suggest that the range of available and acceptable public narratives was a lot narrower in the days when these were largely articulated by broadcast news programmes and mass circulation newspapers.
The more difficult question is about the limits of these competing narratives. Offering different interpretations of public events probably ought to be OK, even if other people find it tasteless. Hate speech? Conspiracy theories? Maybe not so much, even if much of this is increasingly difficult to stop. At least, that’s Zuckerman’s conclusion:
The interesting conversations have expanded beyond “How should we talk about a particular issue?” to “What perspectives can we discuss about a particular issue and still live within a democratic society?” It seems clear that we can talk about the Mau Mau rebellion and the Biafran war while mourning (or not) Queen Elizabeth’s death. What’s less clear is whether perspectives that deny others’ basic humanity – white supremacy, for example – push the capabilities of this new, pluralistic media sphere to their limits.
2: The first hydrogen-powered train line in the world
There’s a piece in Fast Company on the first train line in the world to go fully hydrogen-powered. As in, all the locomotives on the Cuxhaven and Buxtehude line in northern Germany are now running on hydrogen; all the diesel locomotives have been phased out. Some hydrogen trains had been running on it since a commercial trial in 2018, but most of the work had been done by diesel trains.
It’s a small regional line, so it’s still early days, but this is, all the same, a set of trains in actual scheduled use rather than just a trial or a demonstrator. It’s also replacing a set of vastly polluting diesel trains.
(The Coradia iLint hydrogen fuel cell train. Photo: Alstom)
It’s not clear from the various articles I saw what the source of the hydrogen is. In a perfect world, it would be ‘green’ hydrogen, made from renewable energy sources, but the last time I looked that was still more expensive than ‘blue’ hydrogen, made from natural gas. Obviously, blue hydrogen just moves some of the emissions upstream, unless it’s attached to a Carbon Capture and Storage system. But even blue hydrogen is a lot less polluting than diesel.
All the same, it’s still an important step. Although it’s possible to further electrify large chunks of our railway lines (especially in Britain, where we’re as ever behind much of Europe on this) there are likely to be parts of the rail network where electrification is not a worthwhile investment. This is true of rural lines, for example, which are less heavily used.
The jury’s out on whether we’ll be able to use batteries to decarbonise these—broadly it comes down to whether you think there are going to be really big improvements in the density of batteries, because otherwise the size of batteries you need to power a train are significant. There’s been a trial of a local battery-powered passenger train in the UK, but it might struggle with the weight of a freight train.
So, in the meantime, it makes sense to implement both, in case one of these low carbon solutions doesn’t work.
There’s a couple of points to be made here. The first is that trains have a 30-year life, which means that buying a new diesel engine is problematic in a ‘Net Zero by 2050’ world. It’s going to become a stranded asset at some point before the end of its life, and a credible carbon price in the meantime would wreck its economics. This was part of the thinking of the German company:
“We will not buy any more diesel trains, in order to do even more to combat climate change,” Carmen Schwable, a spokesperson for (train company) LNVG, told Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster. “We (also) are convinced that diesel trains will no longer be economically viable in future.”
The second—as Glenn Lyons, Charlene Rohr and I realised when we co-wrote a report on decarbonising UK transport, for the Department for Transport—is that hydrogen is almost certainly going to be part of the solution to transport Net Zero, especially for heavy vehicles, but it’s not mainstream for any specific mode of transport. (Unlike batteries, say, which are central to transforming the car and van sector, and are therefore the subject of vast competitive investment by the auto companies.)
This means that public investment is going to be needed to get hydrogen working as a fuel source, and that co-location of different possible applications will probably help—trains, road freight, heavy vehicles, and perhaps buses and some nearshore shipping as well.
Thanks to the Carbon Commentary newsletter for the tip.
j2t#368
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