Now, I am going to open it up for feedback from the remote centers. So, the five remote centers that we have requested are, Vijay T.I. in Matunga, Mumbai, our neighbors, VIT Velor, Siliguri Institute of Technology, Darjeeling, Dronacharya College of Engineering, Noida, and IPS Academy, Indore. So, we will start with Vijay T.I. Matunga. Good evening, sir. Good evening. Sir, myself, Mrs. Geetha Leengawal is speaking from Vijay T.I. The lectures were really very, very informative and at the same time, as a teacher, whatever we learn here, those part are really very, very interesting and wonderful and those part we will definitely convey to our students as well as we will definitely go for that route to reduce these global warming or whatever environmental problems are there. So, that we will be really try to educate not only ourselves, students and for the entire society. So, these particular two weeks programs are really, really very, very, very informative and we express sincere thanks to our remote centers, coordinators and at the same time director. So, thank you very much, sir, such organizing and looking forward. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Congratulations. Okay, very nice. We go on to VIT Velour. We are very happy to attend this program. I lost 10 days. We have learned many things about environmental studies. I am very happy to say that our tender coordinates, they treated very well for us. At the same time, we learned many things from you. I appreciate all of you, the effort taken. At the same time, I find out some of the courses is not covered as per our standard given. Even we understand that practical problems, but even though we are expecting some of the topics should be covered in some other expert. So, only this type of minor correction. So, in future, if we correct it, definitely the participant will get benefit out of it. I hope 150 centers of people definitely get benefit out of it. This will go to our student community really. Thank you very much for giving this opportunity. Thank you. Okay, very good. Thank you. Yeah, so, my request to you is please send us on the Moodle. I will open up a thread which says we wish you had taught us this as well and then we'll open it up. And then we'll add over there the topics which you think should be covered. So, we will make an attempt to actually have it covered next time or make resources available to you over the next few months. Let's move on to Shiliguri Institute, Darjeeling. So, thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this two weeks very valuable workshop on environmental studies. We learned a lot from the eminent speakers of IIT, Mumbai and other eminent institutes like Amruta University. We enjoyed at the max the sessions conducted by Professor Nikhil. It was really a very fruitful one for all of us along with the odd sessions on air pollution. And thank you very much for your assignments also. We hope we'll meet up the expectations which is there for the workshops. And I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the coordinator, RC coordinator as well as our principal sir as well as director sir for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this program and learn from the eminence professors like you sir. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Shiliguri. Appreciate your acknowledgement. Okay. One, three, one, six. Dhronacharya. Hi, Dr. S.K. Bhagga, director, Dhronacharya College of Engineering, Greater Noida. Thank you very much for conducting this workshop at our institute. The faculty of our college as well as the participating colleges they have given an excellent feedback about the overall outcome of the workshop. They have, they will utilize this experience or this knowledge to conserve the Mother Earth and that leads to the better green and clean environment. In the end I would like to thank for this workshop and my faculty members they would also like to share their feedback. Good afternoon, sir. I am Sarika Agarwal from Dhronacharya College of Engineering, Greater Noida. This workshop was very impressive and interesting. We have learned a lot from it and the video shown in this workshop was very effective especially the video which shows how to save water. It was well suggested the right and practical ways how to save water. Like we can use our wastewater in watering the plants, flushing the toilets. Moreover, this workshop was really an eye-opener for us and motivate us to make our planet more beautiful. Thank you, sir. I hand over the mic to Mr. S.Ganesh to give a feedback. Good afternoon, sir. This is S.Ganesh from Dhronacharya College of Engineering, Greater Noida. Sir, we have entered this workshop with very little knowledge and a lot of queries and environmental studies. Now, most of us are having very good knowledge on the concepts like sustainable development, biodiversity, natural resources, social issues and environment and many others. The videos shown during the presentation are very helpful in understanding very clearly the quiz discussions which had happened. It was very energetic. The lectures and recorded course material which you had given us in the module is the most wonderful part of the workshop. We are 100% sure that we will give this knowledge to students and motivate them to help the environment too. Finally, all this is possible only with great effort and time of faculty from IIT Bombay and Amrita Viswavidya. We are very thankful to all of you, sir. Thank you. The director of your institute spoke before. I just want you to know that, as I am saying this to you, sir, I just want you to know that all across the other 151 remote centers as well. Thank you for standing for the participation at this center and for the neighboring. There are a lot of people who come from the neighboring colleges. I request that we continue to look at this as an opportunity to be a node for other activity on environmental work that we are proposing in future. Thank you very much. In thanking you, I would like to thank all the senior administration colleagues who have supported in the fulfillment of this mission. Thank you. 1039 IPS Academy Indore. Very good evening, sir. On behalf of IPS Academy, I would like to thank all the eminent professors and lecturers who gave us informative sessions on air pollution, food resources, water resources and ethics. Further, I would like to emphasize especially, sir, that we had a very good experience of how to teach environmental studies, especially through your lectures. It would have been amazing if we had some more emphasis on modern instrumentation techniques related to environment and some more emphasis on biodiversity and sustainable development. At this point, it would be nice if we could share with you that we in IPS Academy are practicing the plastic recycling methods and we have an ETP of our own with water treatment facilities and we are also planning for a water harvesting method. And we assure you that after having gone through your sessions, we will surely disseminate this knowledge to our students effectively and to the society also effectively. Thank you. 1202, Ratnavel. Greetings, sir. First of all, I would like to thank IIT Bombay for organizing this kind of nationwide workshop on environmental studies. And we would like to confess that we are very fortunate to be a part of this kind of workshop and being part of it, being a witness to the lectures given by the eminent professors like you. And I assure that we will implement all the ideas given by you to students and day-to-day life. Thank you, sir. Not for VNIT, not for... So this is very excellent and outstanding STDP program or workshop to understand the environmental studies knowledge for various discipline faculty members. And it will be definitely helpful for the students in our institutions and it will be also helpful for the building the nation in environmental implications. Thank you very much, sir. Have a good day. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Big hand. All right. So before I request some of the faculty colleagues to come and acknowledge and appreciate you, I just want you to know that it's been an absolute pleasure working with you. And the work hasn't ended yet. We've got another two weeks of work to do and then I'm sure there will be more follow-up work to do. Okay. So let's keep playing. This is just a starting point. You will actually be stepping out from this course into the real normal back when you came from. And so you will have different eyes to be looking from and different things to be sharing. Okay. So thank you very much and congratulations for all the hard work that you have put in. I'm going to now request Professor Narayanan to come and summarize his part of the talk. Very good evening to all of you. So glad to be around here listening to all of you and your feedback. We also look forward to receiving your feedback and response to the quiz that we are conducting because that will also give us an idea of how effective we have been as Professor Sethi had already pointed out. Now I just wanted to say, reiterate what Professor Sethi said as well as what was said in the inaugural session. The idea here has been to sort of share this knowledge with all of you, share what exactly we are teaching in environmental studies course in IIT Bombay over the years. And we are glad to know that most of you have found the material that we have discussed with you very useful. Of course it is coming from variety of background so you might find it a little tough and it will be a lot of effort that you have to put in to synthesize all of them to take it to the classroom. If at any point in time you want some input from me as especially to introduce concepts and methods in environmental economics, please do feel free to post message in Moodle and we will be able to assure you that I will respond in short span of time. So the whole idea is sensitize the students the way we wanted, we have attempted to sensitize you in dealing with the economic issues. The reason why I am saying economic issues is because all of us are affected and also participants of the development process. So at no point in time we would like to say environment can be preserved or conserved only at the cost of cutting down on the development process. The development and environment can go together. Preservation of environment, conservation of resources, optimal use of resources can go alongside achieving high rates of economic progress and prosperity for all communities. So that is the thing that we that is the message that I would like to I was hinting at in the discussion. So what we should aspire is for placing the economy on the path of sustainable development. Thank you for the opportunity. Professor Nikhil, would you please take this camera now? Okay, good. Thank you. Please go ahead. Yeah, hello everyone. It's been a great pleasure to have been with you for the past so many days. It's actually a great privilege and I got to learn a lot of things. I would just like to in one minute I would like to summarize the various sessions that I covered. I started off with sustainable development, which where the main point that I made over there is that sustainability cannot be an automatic outcome of our well-meaning efforts, but that it must be designed. So coordinated efforts from various directions and various fields are going to be necessary. Various fields such as economics, technology, policy, governance, all these various fields they have to come together for sustainability to happen. But then again, no solution is possible unless we fundamentally understand what caused the problem. So if fundamental root cause analysis becomes absolutely essential and it turns out that in this context, the root cause is actually to do with human attitude. It is not something physical. The root cause is not something physical in nature, but it has got to do with human attitude. So our attitude towards the environment, our attitudes towards our fellow men and our attitude towards ourselves. So this is, this is why the topics like ethics and philosophy become very central to this whole discourse about sustainability. And that is why we actually had sessions by Professor Phan Dao, so on philosophy. So these areas are extremely important and education, which allows us to investigate into these areas and also to to spread the whatever we learn. And to the future generations, it becomes essential that our educational system is geared up towards sustainability. In other words, it cannot only be a, you know, the conventional education, which is let's say technology education or science education or whatever it is. But along with that, it should integrate the ethics and the philosophical aspects also. So a holistic education which gives this kind of a balance to weightage to all these things alone is capable of maintaining the equilibrium with the biosphere, so to speak. So that's all I have for now. It's been a great pleasure. We'll continue to interact on Moodle. There are many things that we could have done, but due to the limited time we could not do. But then of us are such creative teachers and so many creative ideas have also come up on Moodle that I'm totally confident that you can in your own classroom and in your own teaching with your own students, you can absolutely take it to the next level and please share your ideas so that we can continue to learn together. Thank you so much. I want to now request Dr. Mukta Atre to please come and bring a closure on behalf of Professor Fatak and on behalf of herself. She's been the force, the wing, the wind beneath the wing, so to say. So I just want you to know that I appreciate all the work that has gone into it. Thank you, Professor Sethi. It has been a great pleasure for all of us here as well. As I speak on behalf of my team, it's been absolutely wonderful working with a team of faculty as enthusiastic and as committed as this particular team. It's really been great. And on behalf of our project, I'd like to say that we've been doing this for the past five or six years now almost. And this particular group of participants, I believe, has been the most enthusiastic and the most interactive so far. Though you are maybe smaller in numbers compared to our earlier workshops, but I must say that the number of emails, the number of, you know, discussions on the forum and everything, it has kept us on our toes and we have really enjoyed doing that. Thank you so much for being a part of this wonderful STTP. Thank you. I'm now going to request Professor Partha Sarthi, who was a part of our team as a colleague for teaching. But really, I've requested him to be here as someone who heads the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, and he has a larger vision of where we are headed with this. So I'm going to hand over the microphone to Professor Partha Sarthi. So please welcome Professor Partha Sarthi for the valedict, please. Thank you, Professor Sethi and all the other faculty members and the team here and all the coordinating centers who helped us very successfully carry out this workshop. So usually, when people like your coordinators enter IIT, they do so through the main gate and come through this road that you are seeing here. So even though we couldn't bring all 4,000 of you here, we brought you here using technology and we hope you have all benefited from this. But we also want to thank you for allowing us to get into your minds and hopefully into your hearts. And for that, a big thank you from all of us. But thank you also for many other things. Firstly, for the opportunity to co-learn as many of us believe teaching is the best way of learning and we and you, I think, have learned a lot in the last few days through mutually training each other. Though all of us here have been involved in this course, I think doing it in this way for all of you has helped us to develop a more multi-and interdisciplinary perspective on environment studies which hopefully we have also been able to convey to you. But thank you also for helping us to structure our thoughts, get more focus in teaching this course and get a grasp especially on issues related to pedagogy because all these years that we have been teaching to students, we have been focusing more on content. The fact that we are training teachers who will be teaching students how to teach environment studies itself is a very interesting and huge issue and we all thank you for that opportunity for us to train ourselves in thinking about these issues. And also for the very large number of interesting questions you threw at us which we have not yet had time to answer. But rest assured, in the next few days, we will get back to your questions and answer each one of them. So, I think we have if those of you who have been to IIT Bombay campus would have seen this culture called Tree of Knowledge and this I think is a very good example of what we have done here. Seven of us along with this team, about 300 coordinators, 4,000 teachers and who knows about 400,000 students will be teaching. That is what the Tree of Knowledge is about. So, we wish to close by focusing on a few issues. One is that environment studies as a subject is unique. It is very different from teaching all other subjects because it is by nature multidisciplinary and that it is not just about conveying certain skills to students, making students aware but it is about creating a larger impact on society through teaching a particular course. And especially I would like to say as I have been stressing in my classes as well that the Indian context throws up some unique problems and as I was discussing with a colleague before I came here today in the morning, we were talking about the huge impact that engineering colleges such as yours will have can have if you people start focusing on environmental issues rather than hiring all kinds of consultants from the United Nations and World Bank who come and do a lot of things for us and then finally we end, we find nothing much has happened. It is you who are in the field who are closer to the ground and who know what kind of technological solutions are required for what kind of problems. So, I think you may treat this workshop not just as a way in which you have acquired skills for teaching students but also more importantly as way in which you yourself can begin working on environmental problems in your own neighbourhoods. I would again like the earlier speakers also have said advocate that all of you focus not just on content but also on how best to teach environment studies. The issues that I have mentioned earlier I have highlighted here but those of you who have the advantage of being more autonomous please make use of that flexibility to teach topics beyond the UGC syllabus to get into learning exercises beyond just exams and make use of multiple modes like we have advised you over the last few days and also most importantly to help students to learn to reflect and innovate on environmental issues and not to repeat the mistakes of our previous generations which has led to this particular mess. Finally, some of you have been bothered by this question as some of us and some of you have written to me about this. I am a chemical engineer, I am a civil engineer, I teach commerce, I teach management, I teach English communications why should I teach environment studies? We have environmental studies specialist as some of you have said. We need to remind ourselves of what Professor Fatak said in the introduction. Environmental studies should not be made into a separate silo which is taught only by experts and all of us can just go back to sleep and live life as it is as we have done before without thinking about the environment thinking that somebody else is going to take care of it. The whole purpose of teaching environmental studies in this way to students is perhaps to make environmental studies redundant that 10 years from now, 20 years from now we would not have to teach this course because every single faculty in every particular discipline will have incorporated or integrated environmental studies into his or her specialization and discipline and that is the best way in which you can teach environmental studies. Since that was not done for so many years and decades, we are following this method and you can train the future generation who will think environmentally irrespective of which subject they are teaching. So, but in the process if you can also identify certain distinct roles for science, technology, policy, commerce, management each of your different disciplines and see how these can contribute to making the world a better place in terms of human environment interface. Finally, I want to end by saying that all of us despite the fact that we are the so called trainers here who taught all of you we are still in these silos whereas, you have now gained a multi and interdisciplinary knowledge of environmental studies because of our own training and the research we do despite the fact that we have been teaching these courses together we are still experts in our own fields.  Thank you very much.


Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and U.P. Scott as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Good morning everyone and welcome back to Amsterdam where it is a bright and beautiful sunny day. So bright in here. I've even got my shades on. Don't worry, I'm still looking at you kid. We are at KubeCon Europe and I'm very excited to welcome Rob hosting next to me for the first time. Rob, welcome. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here with you. How does it feel? Are you intimidated right now? No, not at all. I just made this so smooth. So it's like, how could, and you're very brightly colored not to mention the sunshine. So this makes it very smooth and we're here with some great people. So a lot of fun nerding out going on. It's going to get nerdy, folks. I hope you're all ready. And that is a sexy thing and a good thing here on the Kube. So we don't mind that. Without further ado, welcome to the show. Gentlemen, this prop indicating the company that you work for. Machi and David, how are you guys doing today? You enjoying the show? Awesome. It is beautiful day after literally cloudy couple past days. Today is just wonderful. The sun is shining on the Kubernetes community and we are lucky to be part of it. Yes, I love that. David, when we got to chatting in our green room, aka sitting here before the show started, you talked a little bit about the keynote. Tell me about your hot takes. So I really enjoyed hearing about how all these projects are being built on top of it. And there was a lot of focus on the ecosystem around it. And there's a lot that the platform really builds out, needs to make and also currently provides. And so seeing how people use it and then I'm here to hear what people need from it in addition to keep building out their products and their projects. I love that. So if you all were listening, make sure you find these gentlemen and tell them exactly what you need when it comes to building your Kubernetes based project. Just a casual offer for the audience. What was your take? Oh, I really loved how we can grow the community. I really like the community in bloom theme that is spread all over the place. It's like literally building on top of where we are. And at the same time, it's also building on top of what we care about the most with regards to community building. And that has been brought up numerous times. Yesterday, when we were talking with the rest of the Kubernetes contributors, talking about we need more folks that will help us to make the product even better than it is already, how we are welcoming and we're opening our gates to engage more folks, introduce them to what it looks like to work on Kubernetes.  You're like a gateway drug for Kubernetes. Yes, I'm trying a lot, but we'll see how that works. I mean, we are in Amsterdam. So here we go. I can't think of a better city to try things out. So tell me a little bit more about that. How does Red Hat act as that gateway? How do you make it easier for folks to build? Both David and I, both of us, we are very engaged in community. And we're basically in the Kubernetes project since the early days. David has been longer than I did, because if I remember correctly, David was involved even before the official 1.0 release. Kubernetes OG up in here. I got involved a little bit later around December, 2014. You were still pretty OG too. That's no joke either. Correct. It's going to be very early after that point. So it was, and we're trying, and we're the fact that we are so long. We have a lot of knowledge that we want to share with everyone and help them succeed. I can feel it sitting next to you. And help them succeed. Both of us are representing multiple interest groups within the Kubernetes project. We're trying to raise new people that will come after us so that we can slowly retire. Let's call it that way. I'm not going to retire. Yeah, it's not a real retirement. Delegate maybe some of your responsibilities. Partially that. That will allow us to grow the community, grow the project. It's like, literally, that's all it's about. David, how you've seen this community grow basically since day zero. How has it evolved? Well, gosh, I have so many questions for you given that. Let me get my mind straight here. What sort of, are we where you thought we would be a decade ago when you got involved? That's the question I'll start with. So it is much larger than I ever anticipated. Oh, I'd love to hear that. And so I spend a lot of time working on the core platform, talking to other people about what their projects need, what we as the core Kube community need to build for them to be successful and to create more value on top. And so I would say that we started out in the very early days. It was like, let's get something off the ground that a cluster admin can use. Something that shows, yeah, this is valuable. You want to use it. And then from there, you look and say, okay, I've got this core piece. What can I build on top of it to make it easier for those people to succeed? And that's just been rinse, lather, repeat. And we've been going at it now for like, gosh, going on nine years. So Rob, did you rinse, lather and repeat this morning? I did. I did before getting here. You know, you've got to be clean. But I thought what was interesting, and I think you guys hit on this a little bit, is 58% of the people are first timers here at this platform. Yeah, it was out of 10,000 plus attendees. I think there was a strong message of simplicity. Yet as people know, it's not as simple as that, especially when you're talking about hundreds of projects and all of the different pieces. What are you seeing when you're talking to customers and talking to the others out there about how do you look to make it simpler for them, I guess? That's really good. I mean, I actually gave a talk yesterday about we need to make this simple enough for someone to use and succeed operationally. So when you go to deploy it, the platform extension authors, they're doing the very best they can. It's still tough to manage. And so we're continuing to invest in core concepts in KK itself, the cube product itself, to make that easier so that operationally, when you run, it does what you expect. We spent, you spent a lot of time doing that as well.  I'm going to geek out a little bit. I totally can get nerdy. In one of the early cube cons in Europe in Berlin, that was like years, eight years, seven years ago, when someone in the room, I was sitting with a friend, both of us developers involved in the core cube. And someone said to us that yams are today's assembler, basically. And I was talking with her and I was like, I don't feel that way at all. But over time, I actually realized that a lot of the tooling helps to initial users, especially because, yes, the fact that we are still nine years in, on the keynote, we are showing yams. That's a little bit intimidating and problematic. We're trying and we're building a lot of tools to make those yams, make those initial people help them start faster. It's not easy task. That's why I'm saying we need more people. Because the hard part for us, where we are so old timers, is we know a lot of this stuff. And it's always when talking with the newcomers, so the 58% that is present over here, that's a huge number of input that we can gather. That's really exciting. We literally gather as much feedback as we can on every possible session, taking notes, talking with them, everything, or listening to them. And based on that input, we're trying to filter and help them to succeed, to make the platform easier. Because it's equally hard for users, but it's also equally hard for developers to help join us and join the ranks. Yeah, and I was talking to a gentleman who's in software development for his company, and they do hardware and it's IoT type devices. And we were having this conversation last night about he's still trying to figure out where to get started with Kubernetes. Right now, they're fully virtualized on VMware stack right at the moment, but he's looking at, okay, I now need to make that next jump. And I'm building microservices, but how do I then, which is the right platform? Which is the right set of services? And I think that's, I think one of the big things that we're seeing is, they're coming here to see that. And I think for me, personally, this is my first KubeCon. So I've done a welcome. Welcome, welcome. I am not an OG. You've got the welcoming committee right here. Yes, I was going to say I feel very welcome. Gosh, I'm actually feeling vulnerable, which is saying something. But it was, I think what you guys are saying, I think resonates is, how do we help people learn more and get started quicker to know what here's the primitives you need, right? And is that some of the work that you're seeing going on with what you're doing with Red Hat and that you're bringing to the table for them? Is that through KubeCon and others? I mean, your talk yesterday. KubeCon's definitely a part of it. Trying to handle all that scope to say, I need something that works in a cloud environment. I now need it to work on-prem. I now need it to work small. I now need it to work at the edge. Finding people who can help you do that, who actually span all of those, is really difficult to do. And I guess- Yeah, it's like a super generalist with that. Yeah, I mean, at Red Hat, we do spend a tremendous amount of time to be able to do that. I going down into the edge and having a really small footprint and then scaling back up to something that you can manage and having that single interaction style to know, okay, this is how I take care of it. I can do it on my cloud. I can do it in my data center and I can do it on my edge devices. It's a huge win. Yeah, because I think it was just last year that you guys announced OpenShift Edge single node, if I remember correctly. And I think he and I were talking about various different platforms and full disclosure, I was at AWS for a little bit and he was leaning towards one of my former colleagues' services in ECS because of the simplicity. And I happened to have left Amazon and went somewhere else where we were using ECS when I got there and we were trying to move off onto pure Kubernetes. And I can tell you, it's not easy. And I think that's one of the things. Are you seeing a lot of people here that are looking to understand how they can move between different, I guess you could say varieties and they're looking at the true standards? At the end of the day, if everyone are looking at the platform, it's just not just Kubernetes. You actually need Kubernetes to be the base. And then you also need the operating system. You need the additional tools to build around it.  Being on your own on that journey is very challenging. It's intimidating. There's a lot of things you're thinking about. Exactly. There's so many. If you look at the landscape of CNCF products, that is just mind-blowing how huge it is. And they're so different. It is, of course, the variety that helps all of us. But having a helping hand that will guide you through your initial steps will help you direct you with your choices and help you build the initial steps. That is definitely a key. And we're doing a lot of effort to help people at all those stages, all the way from, like David mentioned, from Edge to AI. And there's still a lot more going into ensuring that whatever you come to us with your problem, we will be able to help you to solve your problems. I just noticed your shirt. Thank you. Will you give us a little chest so the cam can zoom in on you there? So in case you're wondering how to pronounce the name of the platform that we keep talking about here, it is Kubernetes. Just in case. Is this a Red Hatcher? Yes, it is. It's from a couple years back. I'm still trying to convince our branding team to to brought it back without any success so far. Well, consider this my formal endorsement. And I speak on behalf of theCUBE. We the media would love to see that back. I do a segment on swag and I mean, it made me smile as soon as I saw it. David, you both brought a lot of energy to the show when you guys sat down. I love this. You're bringing it right now. What's got you most excited? You know, I'm really looking forward this time to how people are leveraging some of the new stuff that we've made in the past year, right? You see a ton of stuff about security. And so I've slated that in. How are we going to integrate with security this, security that? And it really is a buzz here. Yeah, it is. And we've actually done a lot of work again, core platform have done a lot of work to enable integrations and to enable people to have more confidence than when they deploy. It's not going to go all sideways on them. And I'm planning to attend a bunch of sessions around that. What about you? What's got you most pumped? Outside of talking to everyone, because I feel like you were just the advocate for that. Yeah, talking is a lot of my day job. But other than that, I think my passion goes back to the early days and everything around batch workloads. So job is basically where I got my first major contribution to Kubernetes. And it just goes on and on. We're expanding the territory to add more HPC related workflows. Crunch up, I think we can say finally that we've managed to cover a lot of the use cases. So it's very good. But there's more and more requests about workflow support, about AI ML. There's a ton of people. Yeah, that's a lot of topic. We have a separate group that is discussing all those. We're gathering feedback from all those different projects, which is missing about supporting different tooling or hardware. It's actually like GPUs, because if you're talking about AI ML, you definitely want to run them on dedicated GPUs. If you're talking about HPC, you want to run them on dedicated CPUs and so forth. And there's a lot of work going on into ensuring that it works. It works the way you specifically wanted it. And that's probably the one that I'm most passionate about around these days. And yeah, I'm looking forward to a couple of good sessions about that. Well, I love this. Red Hat has definitely brought the passion here, day one of KubeCon. Machi, David, thank you so much for being here with us. Really enjoyed chatting with you before and during this interview. And Rob, high five, man, for a show in the books. Thank you for joining me. Well, thank you. And thank you all for tuning in live or watching this recording. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined by Rob, we are live from Amsterdam at KubeCon Europe. And you are watching the Kube, the leading source for high tech coverage.


It's a great honor to be here today, getting this award because it's about social justice. It's about advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. It's about transforming experiences from the global west to global south as a person who speaks English. So I'm able to learn from people and activists' campaigners and disabled people generally, and non-disabled people as well. Learning along these people who were provided with good education, with good experiences around disability, who have resources as well, who have accommodations, who have these lots of things in the global west, the US and Europe and the UK. I'm quite privileged to have come here and to have learned about that and to also transform these experiences to these Egyptian people and to these people who unfortunately are unable to learn the language and who are unable to have no access to this education and material. So it's not about being open as an advocate, it's about being open as not stopping the learning that I got from people, but transforming it to people who need it and who are unprivileged to have it and to access it, to go attend it and see it as wide as possible, if I can put it that way. We have to face the adversities of institutional boundaries and academic gatekeeping. There are some challenges that emerge that are the result of that, AI and all these global trends. We also have to appreciate being open to teach people, being open to make as much resources available to people as much as we can about disability and not about everything else. I'm interested in inclusive education, so how can we make like education as inclusive as possible and as wide as possible and as accessible as possible? How can we encourage those voices that are less heard to be heard? How can we sustain communities of disabled activists as well? For me, I'm an activist. At the end of the day, my activism will continue until it's over, but how can we make sure that there are generations of courageous activists who are confrontational about disability issues? That's how I see it for myself and for openness and for the values of open education. How can we ensure that no one is left behind when it comes to accessing education about their disabilities and about their lives? From time to time, I just wanted to say that for anybody in this world, remember that, yeah, we are different when it comes to disability, but appreciate the idea of connection, embrace the values of diversity. Don't take the opportunity to go to a disabled person and speak to them for granted. Like, go and say, hi, is there anything I can help you with here? Can I just learn about that? How can I make this accessible? How can I make this more clear for you? How can I include you in the conversations? Sometimes also people with disabilities do have anxiety. Sometimes they are overloaded with their lives. They have financial burdens. They have family burdens. So sometimes they do not have the capacity to educate you, but if you go and ask, they will be happy to do that. And this is a part of openness, is that you as non-disabled people, being open to explore, being open to learn and being open to also take the experience and transform it to another level.


Good morning, Eric. Breaking news. The Chinese have just set to introduce export permits for certain graphite products starting December 1. We immediately thought of you. Where do you want to start with this? Yeah, it's a great way to get up from the bed this morning reading this. It's a great news. I think an expected one, but we never knew when it would happen. I think the expert believe it's way earlier than everyone thought that China is making it more difficult on battery materials to go out of China. This is a first on graphite, but most likely not the last event. Well, Eric, you and I both know that most electric vehicles require five times the amount of graphite than any other critical mineral. Getting graphite to the top of the news flow is more than timely. Would you like to add anything about graphite and graphite supply in general? Because you're one of the leading suppliers, of course, in North America. Yes, indeed. But maybe a few more words on probably why China selected graphite specifically. China controlled close to 100% of the natural graphite processing that goes into EV. So on the other minerals, it's not as much control as graphite. For lithium, for instance, 0% is in China, but 60% and over of the transformation. So it's a good selection for China. They know they have a grip on all those guys who are building massive amount of cell making factor in the US. And they are building now a lot of cathode facility as well. But nobody is building an old material. Nuvomong is really one of the first leaders to build the largest and most advanced natural graphite operation outside China located right here. We are very much advanced with our main partner Panasonic, main customers, but we needed to finalize all the agreements. So it's very timely for us. And we have also a lot of other, two handful of other discussions that most likely this morning will be more active. We're just literally receiving notes from around the world from our Critical Minerals Institute Board. We have Jack Lipton from Detroit who wrote me with, from the Western automotive industry is not yet divorced from its Chinese supply base. De-coupling is a long and complex path, which is now showing the obstacle strewn path to do de-risking. The clearly annoyed Chinese are reacting to these processes by showing how important Chinese critical mineral production and processing is. Expect more of this as China reacts to the de-coupling, de-risking fad currently among politicians and frightening to industrialist. Do you agree with this or what are your thoughts on Jack Lipton's comments? Yeah, it will take a while to completely replace China for the supply chain here, especially when all the product comes from there and we want to grow this cell making factory as the highest pace possible. But we want to be an alternative for sure and we want to grow our business as fast as possible. We do have the projects to deliver graphite in the upcoming decades. So we can be this great alternative, but we need some sort of a push on pricing and hopefully this is what is happening now.  I mean they are not happy to not be able to export as easily their product. So the price in China will go down, but we should not look at this price in China going down because we need to create our own market, our own indices on graphite. It's a very opaque market stills, but it's obvious that we deserve like those 100% premium compare China. We need to be at least one alternative so we can continue making those sales out here. Well of course we are very committed to sustainability and we cannot agree with you more. One of our top CMI directors Matt Boulson always puts you in his top five graphite companies in the world to watch. Can you tell someone out there who might be going, oh no, tell us more about graphite. Can you tell us just a little bit about why Matt has selected you as one of his top five graphite picks in the market? Yeah probably our level of advancement. So we have one phase we've invested close to 300 million in our project so far. So we have 120 employees already. So we're as big as it gets outside China. We are in construction on the phase two that will be delivered in the upcoming years after construction. So this is will be the largest and most advanced fully vertically integrated natural graphite operation and we indeed have a phase three. If you remember we've made an agreement with our friends at Mason Graphite to acquire a 51% controlling interest to build the largest graphite mine in the world at 500,000 ton per annum. So this is in the pipeline. Once we are in full construction mode on the phase two, we will develop this one as fast as possible and I can tell you the customer always asks about this phase three. When can you accelerate this phase three? It's important for us in the future. So I think now it's even more clear. We have secured the two largest and most advanced mining assets in North America on graphite and now it's our goal to develop more and more capacity around it. Of course one thing I've always appreciated about Nouveau Monde is the amount of resources you've invested in educating your shareholders about how critical graphite is. For everybody out there who want to appreciate this, please go to NMG.com. Thank you, Eric. Thank you very much for having me, Trissy.


Saqed Ayodhya Faizabad, what is the Ram Temple really about? How does the clamour for a Ram Temple ahead of the 2019 General Elections is actually the final legitimisation of a politics that has violated both the Indian constitution and Indian law? Violence and revenge is integral to a bloodied path to refashion the Indian Democratic Republic into an authoritarian, theocratic Hindutva nation. It is significant that December 6 was chosen for this brazen act. Babasabh's memory is venerated and commemorated by hundreds of thousands on this day. Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar have provided formidable critiques of the entrenched and exclusionary caste system. To replace what December 6 stands for in public memory is crucial for the supremacist ideology of Hindutva that is constructed on the hegemony and discriminations of caste. Babasabh Ambedkar was singular in his critique of organised Hinduism, whether it is through annihilation of caste or riddles in Hinduism. It is a kind of psychological war against the Dalit Bahujan. It all began in 1984, so to speak, if not before. In 1949, first, the idols were surreptitiously smuggled into the Babri Masjid, post-independence, and after the assassination of Gandhiji on 30th January 1948. Before 1984, there are some other dates that are relevant, 1529, 1853, 1855, when the mosque designed by Mirbaki was built, when the claims of a Hindu temple first began under British colonial rule, before British colonial rule, there were no such claims. 1947, we, India, became independent, 1950, we, India, became a republic with a constitution. Key to understanding this issue is what we in India stand for, the fundamentals of Indian citizenship, the fundamentals of Indian nationhood, equality of citizenship, reason over faith, supremacy of the rule of law. In 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an offshoot of the Rajshri Swayamsevaksangara says, held a Dharam Sansa and identified 3,000 conflict sites between Hindus and Muslims, quote-unquote, that could mobilize the sentiments of Hindus and polarize the nation. The top three sites chosen were at Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathra, the Dharam Sansa decided to start with the clamor for a Ram temple at Ayodhya. A nationwide village-to-village campaign to collect bricks and money to build a grand Ram temple in place of the Babri Masjid was masterminded. Hindutva NRIs chipped in with dollars, pounds and the like. Around the same time, India's state-controlled television channel, Doordarshan, started to run a never-ending serial on the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. The story of Lord Ram. Mythology began to rule our consciousness. Militaristic, confrontational, domineering faith Hindutva was set when BJP hardliner Elki Adwani set out on the chariot of fire in 1990. His chariot was flagged off symbolically at the site of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, near Rajkot, rewind. Seven-century historians say that at the location of present-day Ayodhya, Stan Sakit, in the 16th century, when Tulsidas visited Ayodhya many times composing the Ram Charitrimanas in Kali Boli. It was this text that popularized the legend of Rama in Kali Boli, earlier known only in Sanskrit, and took it to the ordinary folk of North India. Several Hindus know that Tulsidas does not ever mention a temple marking the birthplace of Lord Ram that was just demolished by Babar. Remember this was just a century after. In the middle of the 16th century, when the Babri Masjid was built, it is highly unlikely that there were any Ram temples at all at that time in Ayodhya. Today, Ayodhya is full of such Ram temples and at least 20 of them claim to be built in the birthplace of Ram. The reason is obvious. Any temple that establishes itself as the birthplace of Ram gets huge donations from its devotees. Fast forward to 1990, violence continues as the campaign for this political act mounts. Traditional greetings of ordinary folk in North India, Jayasiya Ram, greeting both Sita and Ram changed to Jayasi Ram, a threatening Rama in a muscular form with bow and trishul is now hung in posters all over India. 30th October 1990 had been declared by LK Advani as the target date for Karsheva at the disputed site, the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Mosque site in Ayodhya. Until then, it was known as the site of the Babri Masjid. Laldas was then the court appointed head priest of the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Mosque site. Laldas was an outspoken critic of Hindutva, despite being a Hindu priest and had received death threats. The UP government had provided him with two bodyguards. Laldas spoke out against the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, pointing out that they had never even prayed at the site but were only using it as a political act to garner funds and for financial gain. He spoke of the syncretic past of Ayodhya. He expressed his anguish in interview after interview that Hindu-Muslim unity in the country was being sacrificed by people who were cynically using religion. On the 1st of March 1992, BJP's Kalyan Singh government removes him from his position. On 6th of December 1992, the Babri Masjid is demolished. Laldas fears for his life he is not given security. On the 9th of November 16, 1993, he was shot dead under mysterious circumstances. Another victim to the cold and calculated politics of Hindutva. Blood, gore, revenge and violence has been the underpinning of Hindutva politics in general and the clamour for a Ram temple at Ayodhya in particular. Between 1990 and 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished, the mainstream media, quote unquote, tracked the aggression and violence, took a stand and spoke out. Stop the rathyatra, government told the Hindustan Times headline on October 7, 1990 read. The communal flare-up wrote an article, a Sunday Observer, on October 14, 1990, authored by none less than Sudindra Kulkarni, later an advisor to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He tracks the attacks on Muslims in villages of Karnataka, including Thumkur, Manvia, Kodagu, Kurg, Chittadurga, Mysore, Mangalore, Shimoga, parts of Bangalore city itself and even Dharwad in North Karnataka. The telegraph, October 14, 1990, likened Adwani's Rathyatra with a chariot of fire, that when the pink city ran red with blood, Sunday Observer, October 28, 1990, describes the violence in Jaipur. The Independent, dated November 2, 1990, in a story titled, communal riots take a new turn in Indore, depicts the difference in the violence, to quote unquote, rampaging mobs, bearing armed trishools and being armed to the teeth, clashing with the police, attacking police with firearms, among all things. Curfew orders are violated with impunity and families of policemen have been attacked and their houses damaged. Fast forward to Bulanshahar, 2019, Uttar Pradesh, obliterating the name Faizabad, Taj Mahal, Kashi, Mathara and then 3,000 more sites are their target. Already the Gyanwapi Mosque has been exposed and is under real threat. Does this politics have a 21st century place? Can India, with its commitment to all its citizens of all denominations, languages and multiple cultures afford such an aggressive hegemony? In 1992, after the Majid was demolished, in clear violation of law and good faith, thousands were massacred all over India. Thousands lost their home. In 2002, the politics of Hindutva wrecked another kind of havoc when in Gujarat, close to 2,000 minority lives were lost in reprisal killings following the burning down of S6 Sabarmati coach at Godra. At 2014, different shades of communal violence, lynchings and violence have dotted our landscape as India is sought to be violently refashioned and redrawn to a blood-drenched, saffron nation. Though Adwani, the man who played a pivotal role in the movement that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, with callous disregard to the implications for the rule of law or the human consequences, is today a pale shadow of himself, the purposeful glow in the new found generals of the Hindu nation. In Delhi and Lucknow is yet to politically fade. For India, Indians committed to a rule of law, we need to understand what this campaign is about and share what the demand for the Ram Mandir really means. It is not about faith or spirituality, but about supremacy. It is not about ways of worship, but about violence and subjugation. For centuries, the Indian people have found their multiple ways of coexistence, respect, reason and toleration. We must not allow a unique brand of secularism to be taken away now.


The next item of business is portfolio questions. I will try to get as many people in as possible in each part of the 40-minute, 20-minute session so that people could be aware of quite succinct questions and answers so that all their colleagues can get an opportunity here. Question number one on rural economy and connectivity is Alex Rowley. Presiding Officer, to ask the Scottish Government what support it gives for skills development in the rural economy. Fergus Ewing. The Scottish Government supports skills development in rural areas through developing Scotland's young workforce programme through modern apprenticeships, schools, colleges and universities. That activity provides opportunities for people living in rural Scotland to develop their skills and gain qualifications, including in traditional rural industries such as farming, forestry and land use. We committed in the programme for government to developing a rural skills action plan, and we will publish that in due course. Alex Rowley. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. I recently had the pleasure of meeting young people who had completed a shared forestry apprenticeship scheme, delivered by Rural Skills Scotland, a not-for-profit sharing organisation based in Lochgelley. The land-based sector needs an injection of new and young talent to keep up with the growing demand for skills. However, the sector comprises mainly of small and micro businesses, and many of them find it difficult to employ apprentices through the existing model. Would the minister join me in congratulating Rural Skills Scotland for this piece of innovative work, and will he take the time to look at this successful project in order to provide sustainable mechanisms for the future delivery of apprentices in this sector? Fergus Ewing. Yes, I think that Mr Rowley makes a very fair point. I am pleased that he has raised the scheme. It is a good scheme. He did anticipate that he would raise it and looked into it. Through Forestry Commission Scotland, the Scottish Government provided £107,000 over the last two years towards the shared apprenticeship scheme. Six apprentices were employed by Rural Skills Scotland and placed with forestry enterprises, mostly in the public or third sector. Also, forest enterprise has subsequently provided eight young people with apprenticeships in the south of Scotland. I understand that there were more than a couple of hundred applications for that, namely quite a few who were unsuccessful. I certainly undertake, Mr Rowley, that I will look into those matters further. Good progress has been made, but more can be done. Short supplementary, please. Jamie Halcro Johnston Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I declare an interest as partner in the farming business of Jamie Halcro Johnston and Sons. I recently attended the national sheep association event and spoke with a young person who is looking at entering sheep farming as a profession and is facing a number of barriers to that. Those new entrants are vital to the sustainability of Scotland's rural economy. Can I ask the minister what update he can give to the Scottish Government's commitments to improve opportunities for new entrants and particularly what co-ordination there is with skills providers and rural businesses and communities to ensure that we are building rural skills in a way that meets the needs of those areas? Fagish Ewing Since 2015, grant schemes under the Scottish Rural Development programme have helped to kick start more than 250 new agricultural businesses with around £13 million of support, mainly to young farmers. In addition to that, we have set up farming opportunities for new entrants, such as the acronym that I devised, which seeks to maximise land opportunities for those seeking access to the first rung of the farming ladder by making available land from the public sector owned by local authorities, the Scottish Water Forestry Commission and, already, thanks to the good work of Henry Graham and others, we have created more than 50 new land opportunities through that initiative. Thirdly, we put in place a dedicated new entrance to farming programme under our farm advisory services, providing a network of support with advice and skills. However, there is more that we need to do. I acknowledge that. Mr Johnson's question is quite aposite, and I am very happy to work with him as we develop our plans further. To ask the Scottish Government what investment it has committed to transport infrastructure in central Scotland region. Hamza Yousaf. I continue to invest heavily in our transport infrastructure in central Scotland. Recent and on-going commitments include, for example, the £500 million that is spent on the MEM73-74 motorway improvement project, the EGIP rail project, SHOT's electrification, the refurbishment of Concardian bridge, continued investment in the canal network and continued investment in an active travel infrastructure through our community links and community links plus program. Mark Griffin. I thank the minister for that answer. The Twecker bridge over the Forth and Clyde canal is now out of commission, which means that my constituents who live in the Oconstarry marina can no longer travel west. The Twecker bridge might not be as grand as the Falkirk wheel, but it serves exactly the same purpose of opening the canal network to travel. I think that if the Falkirk wheel broke down, we would expect to see immediate action. When can my constituents expect to see the Twecker bridge being repaired and the central Scotland canal network, which successive Governments have committed millions of pounds to reopen on a permanent basis? Hamza Yousaf. I thank Mark Griffin for his question. It is an important issue that he is raising. Of course, just a couple of points to make. One is perhaps the obvious one, but it is worth reiterating. The reason for the closure is based on safety. Safety has to be absolutely paramount. When there are issues with the assets or failures of the assets, we cannot risk anybody's lives at all. Therefore, that action has been taken because of safety and safety being paramount. The Government may increase the budget for Scottish canals in the most recent budget. There are, at the moment, restricted hours of operation for the Bony bridge in Tweckirk. The last time that bridge was opened, around half a dozen people took advantage of that. To give the member some reassurance, the Scottish canals are continuing work at the moment to identify any potential solutions to restore full operation of the bridges that he mentions. I will ask Mark Griffin to keep up the date if he has not met with any of the Scottish canals. Recently, I will make sure that we facilitate that meeting. It is worth saying that the vast overwhelming majority of users of the canal are still used by foot and by cycling and on active travel, and that will continue to be the case. However, I will notwithstanding that, I will make sure that Mark Griffin is kept up to date. We are getting a bit laborious in the questions and answers here. We are only at question 3, which is Jamie Halcro Johnston. To ask the Scottish Government what assessments it has conducted of passenger air links to Scotland's island communities. Following a discussion at the island transport forum, I assigned Hyal the task of looking at what air services in the islands and islands could and should look like in the future. Hyal will be carrying out a consultation shortly, seeking views on what the strategy should look like over the coming period. Given the level of dependence on a single operator in the island air routes and the effect that that has on competition, has the minister had any discussions with any other potential providers of services on those routes? Will he agree that competition would have the benefit on the level of service provided? It is interesting that the member will know that FlyB entered that market and the direct competition to Loganair. The market share of people using air services increased, but that no doubt came at an impact to Loganair and FlyB, who eventually ended up pulling out. From a Scottish Government's perspective, we are the more air services, the more connections to our islands, the better. Therefore, if there is an approach, certainly if it comes through Jamie Halcro Johnston, if it comes to me direct, I will continue to be open-minded about that. The main thing is that the sustainability of air services and connectivity to islands is first and foremost in my mind. A quick supplementary question from Liam McArthur. I welcome the minister's confirmation of the revelation that Hyal is going to engage in a prior consultation. In relation to internal air services within Orkney, he may be aware of capacity issues on what are lifelines to those small island communities. Will he commit to engaging with Orkney Islands Council about how that might be addressed as part of the overall discussion around lifeline, airline and ferry connections between the small isles in Orkney? I do not know if that is the opening salvo of another budget discussion around negotiations from those. I do not know if they were formally lived, but they are part of the group that voted in the budget to support the Scottish Government's budget on internal ferries. I will take up that discussion in my next conversation with Orkney Islands Council. It is worth saying on his point on consultation, although he laughed in scoffed, that Hyal did announce just yesterday—it was, possibly, the day before—that it will be extending its exemptions based on the consultation and the passenger surveys that it has had. That includes those that are travelling from other islands and that may be affected by those car parking charges. Last year, the number of passengers using Hyal airports was up 15.4 per cent. Does the minister agree that we should be doing all that we can to ensure that businesses, residents and tourists can continue to benefit from those lifeline services to the highlands and islands? The emphasis is not lost, and Gail Ross is right to emphasise that the importance of our highland and island airports. That is why, for example, sustainability of air services is so vital and so important. The car parking charges are being brought in to ensure that air services are sustainable for the future, whether it is for our island communities or our island communities. Question 4. To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the impact on farming of Brexit. Fergus Ewing. Numerous studies confirm the Scottish Government's position that Brexit is a major threat to farming in Scotland. Those include the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute, which is funded jointly by the UK Government and devolved administrations, SRUC, Quality Meet Scotland and the AHDB. All of those show that failure to replicate the current trade arrangements with the EU means that Brexit will have a detrimental impact on farmers and sheep farmers in particular. Farm incomes could be seriously affected due to Scotland's ability to export being reduced and the possibility of a reduced budget from the UK Government for farm support. In addition, businesses are already reporting problems with workforce availability. Colin Beattie. Can the cabinet secretary update Parliament as to what progress has been made on the review of convergence funding that was promised by the UK Rural Secretary, Michael Gove, last year? Fergus Ewing. Sadly, although Mr Gove did promise that there would be a review, a promise that was originally made incidentally by Owen Kelly in 2013-14, but broken by successive ministers until then, in that period, but made by the UK Government about five years ago. Eventually, Mr Gove decided that he would get around to implementing the pledge last November, and he promised to have it. Indeed, a Tory MP claimed credit for it, but, since then, Mr Gove has said that matters rest with the Treasury. As I have explained to him when I met Mr Cunningham, I explained that this is a very serious matter indeed. It is money that the EU intended to go to Scottish farmers and Scottish farmers alone because only Scottish farmers qualified for the particular convergence funding. Therefore, my recommendation to Mr Gove is that he implement his promise without further delay that he persuaded the Chancellor, Mr Hammons, to bring it up to the top of his entry and that we get on with this review, which was promised so many years ago and is still not being implemented by the UK Government. I very much share the cabinet secretary's frustration over the lack of progress in the review, but does he agree that one of the frustrations of Scotland's farmers is what he perceives as a lack of detail from the Scottish Government on their vision for the future of agricultural support post Brexit? Organisations such as the NFU and the Scottish Environment Link are leading the way, exploring alternatives to CAP and setting out clear principles behind what that support should look like. Can the cabinet secretary say that when he will do the same and set out clearly the Scottish Government's vision and views on what post-Brexit support should look like in Scotland? I do not accept that. The reasons I do not accept that are twofold. First of all, we have repeatedly sought out meetings with Mr Gove and Mr Eust as clarity about what precisely the powers of the Parliament will be. We have no absolute clarity over that. Secondly, about funding post-Brexit and we absolutely know nothing about that. Can any member tell me any business plan—I have been in business—which has no figures in it? It is ludicrous to suggest that anybody could come up with a detailed plan as long as the UK Government completely failed to ob-temper the promises that they made during the Brexit referendum when they said that funding would be at least matched. No wonder that people voted for Brexit when they were told that they were going to get the possibility of more money and now we know nothing whatsoever. The second reason why I disagree with Mr Smith is that we expect a report from the agricultural champions on the future of agriculture and very shortly a consultation document from the National Council of Rural Advisers with its final report in September. That report, incidentally, is a report that was commissioned from the council that was set up directly in response to Parliament's wishes. We are doing exactly as the Parliament has requested. John Scott will have a quick supplementary question and a quick answer, please. I am notwithstanding the cabinet secretary's answer to Mr Smith, can he tell the Parliament today when the Scottish Government will outline their plans for future support for agriculture and what his priorities might be in that regard, declaring an interest? As soon as the UK Government says what the funding will be, it is possible to produce a plan. I do not know if—I used to run a business and you had figures of estimated income and expenditure. There are no figures at all post-Brexit from the UK Government, not one. However, you and your party promised that people would be better off. We shall shortly see the publication of the agricultural champions proposals that are for independent experts. Instead of the opposition carping and making political points, they would be well advised to study carefully the recommendations from our agricultural champions, which we expect to be published shortly. Question 5, Joan McAlpine. To ask the Scottish Government what support it is giving to the food and drink industry in the south of Scotland. Fergus Ewing. Presiding Officer, direct investment and support to the food and drink sector in Scotland from the public sector equates to approximately £100 million per annum across a range of areas, including skills, education, research, industry development, standards and capital investment. This funding is provided on a national basis and is available to companies throughout the south of Scotland region. Joan McAlpine. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Many of the food and drink companies in south Scotland are micro-businesses and need a local approach. Can the cabinet secretary explain when Connect local will hold a workshop in Dumfries and Galloway and what monitoring will be put in place to ensure geographical parity of awards from the new regional food fund? Fergus Ewing. Yes, the member is correct to point to Connect local and the work that they do. The funding of three million pounds from the Scottish Government enables them to provide in the four-year period to 2020 an advisory service. My understanding is that it is expected that there will be a local event in response to a question of Collect local. I can write to her regarding the details and the timescale of that. I conclude by saying that Dumfries and Galloway has outstanding reputation and excellence in the production of high-quality food and drink. I work closely with the new south of Scotland vehicle, led by Professor Russell Griggs and Rob Dixon. I think that there are enormous opportunities for those businesses to be even more successful. With Young's expected to announce bad news at Pinnies later today, can the cabinet secretary set out for me what support will be available to the workforce? Will he reaffirm that the Scottish Government remains 100 per cent committed to ensuring a new operator continues production on that site? Fergus Ewing As the member knows, my colleague Paul Wheelhouse is leading on this matter. It is extremely important to us that we get the best possible outcome. I have been involved in meetings and discussions there and then. We are absolutely determined to get the best possible outcome, as Mr Mundell knows. That remains unchanged and will continue to be the case. 7. George Adam To ask the Scottish Government what progress it is making with the roll-out of fibre broadband, including ensuring that all new-built homes have access. Fergus Ewing The Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband roll-out has passed its 95 per cent fibre coverage target. The independent commentator Think Broadband reports that superfast coverage of 30 megs and above now stands at 93.4 per cent in Scotland. New investment, gain share funding, will increase those figures even further through 2018. Beyond that, we are investing £600 million in the initial phase of R100, which will extend superfast access to every home and business in Scotland. George Adam I thank the cabinet secretary for his answer and I welcome this, particularly the benefit families and businesses in Paisley will have. Can the cabinet secretary advise what funding is being provided by the United Kingdom Government to support the roll-out of superfast broadband to all premises in Scotland, including those in Paisley, as it is, after all, a policy responsibility that is entirely reserved? Fergus Ewing Well, yes, the UK Government did contribute more than £400 million investment for the DSSB programme, and I acknowledge that less than the Scottish Public Sector contribution, but nonetheless a reasonable size of contribution. However, in respect of R100, the funding is £600 million for the whole of Scotland, and it is the biggest funding of any single broadband project ever in the UK. I am very sad to say that the UK Government is contributing of that £21 million. We are contributing £579 million, and the UK Government is putting in £21 million—3 per cent. I think that that is a disgrace, and what I do not understand is why, when the Scottish Tories say that they are standing up for Scotland, not one of them has criticised the pathetic contribution of £21 million. Not one of them here or in Westminster has had the guts to say that this is the reserve function and that we should be making our fair contribution. I think that that is truly sad and pathetic, but we are seeking to obtain a proper commensurate contribution from the UK Government, and obviously we will not let this matter rest. That concludes questions on the rural economy and connectivity, and we will now move on to portfolio questions on environment, climate change and land reform. I will give just a moment or so for people to get in their places. We come to question number one, Anas Sarwar. To ask the Scottish Government how it will meet its carbon emission targets and lower air pollution in Glasgow. Our climate change plan sets out the actions needed to continue to drive down Scotland's greenhouse gas emissions. Many of those will have additional positive impacts, such as improvements in local air quality. For example, the plan includes the introduction of low emission zones to Scotland's four largest cities. The first of which, of course, will be Glasgow by the end of this year. The Scottish Government is also working closely with Glasgow City Council as it implements its measures containing the council's air quality action plan. It is providing practical and financial assistance to both monitor air quality and support the delivery of measures. On top of that, of course, we are looking to see how we can move more freight from road to rail, increase electric vehicle uptake and, of course, continue to invest in our public transport in Glasgow and wider Scotland to help to reduce our carbon emissions. We all agree that carbon emissions need to fall. There are clear health benefits, as well as climate change considerations. Before London introduced the congestion charge, huge investment was made to deliver and improve public transport and active transport and active travel opportunities. Can the minister outline what additional transformative investment will be made in public transport and active travel opportunities in Glasgow before any charging is introduced? There is not a charging scheme as such, although I should say that it was Labour councillor, Matt Kerr, who brought forward an amendment to the recent city administration proposals, which would introduce congestion charging. I would be wary of that, and we will have conversations in and around that, of course. I would say that he is absolutely right that investment in public transport is absolutely vital to go hand in hand. It is not either or, I think, here. We will continue to invest in Egypt, which was the faster journey times between Glasgow and Edinburgh. We will continue to invest in new rolling stock, which will, of course, attract more people to our railways. On other investment, if he is in the south side of Glasgow and Victoria road, he will see the south city way that we are investing in for better active travel between the south of the city and, indeed, into the city centre and many other projects that are active travel as well. However, I would like to emphasise that it is not either or that we have to invest in, of course, the low-emission zone, which is pioneering in Scotland, and then also invest in a public transport network as well. If we are going to achieve the targets that the minister has spoken about, then surely when there is money to spend on investing in the built environment, it needs to be directly achieving a reduction in the volume of polluting transport and making it safer and easier to use active travel. Like the standard of bike lanes that the minister just praised on Victoria road in the south side, it would not be a missed opportunity if Glasgow City Council continued with its plans for buyers' road, one of the most polluted parts of the city, without including mitigating measures to reduce through traffic and proper, safe, physically separated cycle space so that people can cycle on that busy road without being in danger constantly from the volume of traffic there. I say when it comes to particular schemes, there is, of course, the local authority's decision to take those ones forward. I am sure that, again, he can engage directly with Glasgow City Council. I think that he will agree with me, though, that the leadership being shown by Anna Richardson councillor and Anna Richardson from City Council and indeed officials like George Gillespie and indeed others, there is a real step change and a cultural shift from Glasgow City Council recently with the new administration into more active travel. We can see that with their projects that they have committed to in both community links and community links plus. On the buyers' road scheme, he would do best to take that up directly with Glasgow City Council. To ask the Scottish Government what support is available to farmers to prevent riverbank erosion. The rural payments agri environment and climate change scheme contains a number of funding measures aimed at the restoration and protection of riverbanks. Oliver Mundell. I thank the minister for that answer. There are a number of constituents across my Dumfrieshire constituency who are struggling to access funds that are urgently needed following severe weather over the winter. There are banks that have broken and huge quantities of land are disappearing. Is there anything that she can do to look into that and accelerate payments to those who need it most? Roseanna Cunningham. We are aware that there are some customers who are experiencing difficulties at the moment in submitting applications for various IX options. We have identified the applications that are currently in draft. I do not know if those are the ones that he is discussing today. Will, for those cases, particularly allow the submission of late applications after 31 May? We understand that that is likely to affect around 20 applicants, and I would be happy for the member to bring to me the names of individual constituents to see if that marries up with the information that I am being told. We will see if we can help to put things on to a better queue. Supplementary from Alex Rowley. Thank you, Presiding Officer. As the Cabinet Secretary knows, as well as erosion pollution is also a major issue for our rivers.  A smell so bad that it was making people physically sick. What assurances can the Government give me that its agencies have the powers to stop people when they deliberately damage the environment around them by dumping or spreading pollutants? Broadly related, but if the Cabinet Secretary is content to answer— As it happens, Presiding Officer, the member was raising some related issues at the committee that he is a member of on Tuesday morning, so I am conscious of his concerns around the way some issues are being handled. If he cares to write with detail about the incident to which he is referring, I will be only happy to investigate. Question 3, David Stewart. To ask the Scottish Government what plans it has to bring forward a clean air bill. We are continuing to make good progress in delivering the actions set out in our Clean Air for Scotland strategy, including the establishment of Scotland's first low emission zone in Glasgow by the end of this year and in Aberdeen Dundee in Edinburgh by 2020. We have committed to a full review of Clean Air for Scotland by 2020. Any requirements for further policy or legislative changes will be considered as part of that process. David Stewart. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It has been a quarter of a century since the Clean Air Act was passed. Is it not time for a new Clean Air Act that adopts the World Health Organization's principles on air quality guidelines? For example, research from the British Heart Foundation at the University of Edinburgh has shown that diesel exhaust produced tiny nanoparticles that can injure blood vessels and contribute to cardiovascular disease. Will the cabinet secretary provide an update on the activity that the Scottish Government has undertaken to reduce air pollution and minimise exposure to harmful diesel fumes? I have just indicated that we are in fact undertaking a review of our Clean Air for Scotland strategy, which was only published in November 2015. I think that a review as quickly as that indicates the urgency with which we understand that this is being taken. Once that review has been undertaken, we will look very carefully at that. If there are legislative changes required as part of that, we will think very carefully about that. However, I just say that Scotland is leading the way on delivering Clean Air, and we have already adopted several of the proposals that are in DEPHRA's current draft strategy. I do not think that we want to allow an impression to develop that somehow we are lagging behind. In 2016, we were in fact the first country in Europe to adopt the World Health Organization's guideline value for fine particulate matter. I think that that is something that the UK Government is only beginning to look at. A short supplementary please from Kenneth Gibson. Given that, according to Cancer UK, cigarette smoking was responsible for 5,736 people being diagnosed with cancer compared to 288 cases due to other forms of air pollution, will new clean air policy include action to further reduce cigarette smoking and its deadly impact on Scotland's health? Legislation on smoking and enclosed public spaces is already enforced. The Parliament is further legislated for smoking in cars. The Government has also legislated to bring in no smoking areas around hospital buildings, and many local authorities already have restrictions on smoking around play areas for children in parks. Our forthcoming tobacco action plan also includes proposals for restricting smoking in other places, such as in communal stairwells. We have no proposals to include smoking at the moment in any clean air legislation that might emerge from the review that I have just mentioned in my earlier answer. Question 4 is from Kenneth Gibson. Kenneth Gibson indeed. To ask the Scottish Government what the environmental impact is of using wholly recycled retread lorry tyres compared with new ones. The reuse of tyres that are retreaded to the required British standards of quality and safety clearly has a positive environmental impact by extending the life of the original product, decreasing the amount of used tyres being sent for disposal and reducing the amount of new tyres required for the market. That fits in with our circular economy strategy making things last, which encourages materials to be kept in high value use for as long as possible and thereby minimising the need for the use of virgin material. Kenneth Gibson. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Every wholly recycled retread lorry tyre saves 85 litres of oil. Such tyres also last up to 150 per cent longer, which is no doubt why at least 15 Scottish local authorities use them. Will the cabinet secretary encourage other local authorities, the wider public sector and indeed the private sector, to do likewise, given that tyres are not only more friendly to the environment but retreaded in Scotland, sustaining Scottish jobs, whereas new tyres are wholly imported? Roseanna Cunningham. Indeed, the benefits are considerable. The Scottish Government supports all forms of reuse and remanufacture, particularly when Scottish business and economy is benefiting. Scottish waste legislation is underpinned by the waste hierarchy, and the high-quality reuse of materials is key to its application. Although the important thing is that all retreads reach the required standards, I would certainly encourage all stakeholders who use tyres to consider their merits and, more generally, how a more circular approach can be good for the environment and for business. Bill Kidd. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I should be William Kidd. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide a further update on progress in developing the low-emission zone in Glasgow. Roseanna Cunningham. Nope, that should be coming up. Sorry, the look of shock on the cabinet secretary's face. How was I used to have? I can see how you can get us confused. Glasgow City Council published an update report on 20 March in relation to progress with developing the Glasgow low-emission zone with a further update that is expected to be published in June. Bill Kidd. I thank the minister for that reply. Emissions and fumes from traffic affect everyone and need to be tackled, obviously. Of course, those on lower incomes are not only most affected by pollution but also by any potential fare increases. Can the minister say how grants to bus companies for retrofitting can help to avoid fare rises? He is absolutely right that we are committed to helping to fund retrofitting or the mission abatement measures for bus operators. We are also giving substantial funding towards the low-emission zones across the four cities. Therefore, I would see no reason to use the low-emission zone as any excuse to raise fares at all. Of course, the last time there were fare rises in Glasgow, I took that issue up directly with the first Glasgow. There is no reason why the implementation of the low-emission zone, which has a lead in time and is phased over a number of years, should give way to fare rises. The minister will be aware of the friends of the earth reports that have warned of the significant possibility of ozone events across Scotland this week. With that in mind, what arrangements does his Government have in place to protect vulnerable people with pre-existing lung conditions from illness, bought about by the low-air quality and ozone events such as this, if they occur in Scotland? Forgive me, I will have a look at the friends of the earth report that she refers to. The Government is taking a range of measures that the cabinet secretary has outlined in the most ambitious plans that we have for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Transport has to play a really key part in that. In fact, we are. Transport is not a good thing at all. Of course, it is the largest emitter of emissions at the moment. Transport has to be a key part of that. Low-emission zones act of travel, uptake of electric vehicles, and of course we have ambitious targets on all of those, plus more. Clearly, there is a cross-government responsibility here, and I intend that the Minister for Transport to play my part in that. To ask the Scottish Government how its environmental policy and its climate change commitments are informed by active travel. Just as my previous answer, the act of travel and building an active nation is very much at the heart of the administration's thinking when it comes to our climate change plans. Indeed, commitments are double the act of travel budget, as he knows from £40 million to £80 million. That funding is providing cycling and walking infrastructure across the country, segregated infrastructure, for example, in towns and cities, and greater access to bikes, I hope, including electric bikes as well. Education and training programmes for adults and children learning to cycle and making our towns and cities generally safer, friendlier but also greener places to live and to work. Brian Whittle I thank the minister for that answer and welcome the projects that he is doing. I point out that there are some projects where I think that there has been missed opportunities. For example, in the Queen Elizabeth hospital, there is a lack of cycle racks, for example, bike racks. There are some major infrastructure projects being designed without cycle routes and capacity on rail carriages for bikes. I wonder whether the cabinet secretary can impress on his colleagues in other portfolios that active travel considerations need to be paramount if environmental targets are going to be met. Humza Yousaf My point is a fair one. When it comes to projects on the ground in various local authority areas, we have more than doubled the community links project. That is the project that helps to build some of those infrastructure projects that he refers to, from £15 million to £36 million. The first round of that will be announced shortly, but there will be some money for round 2 and subsequent round, so I would encourage him to speak to partners where he thinks they can make the benefit of that very important funding. In terms of cross-government working, there is very good and collaborative cross-government working on that agenda. For example, I meet on a regular occasion with the public health minister with Aileen Campbell to talk about our commitment around active nation commissioners, so there is good cross-government working. The very last point that I would make is that, although he welcomes the doubling of the budget from £40 million to £80 million, it would have been nice to have the Conservative support for that budget, of course, and the increase in that budget. Short supplementary from Stuart McMillan. Stuart McMillan I thank the minister for his comments a few moments ago, but what further actions can the Scottish Government undertake to encourage people to change their behaviour? Can this particular piece of work take place with some type of campaign, or further work with local authorities? Hamza Yousaf I think that behavioural change is hugely important. One is that, if we look at our younger generation—I know that Mike Rumbles has a particular interest in that, too—we offer as many young people the opportunity to get psychotraining in their school, but also, hopefully, on-the-road practical training as well, which is hugely important. Is then looking at those who perhaps have not had the confidence to cycle previously, who might have had some sort of mobility issues, even disabilities or, indeed, other chronic health conditions. I think that that is where, perhaps, the exciting opportunity around e-bikes might well present themselves. I am looking very hard at how we can use some of that doubled active travel budget to not only affect behaviour change, which is important, but also make cycling and active travel more accessible for more people and as many people as possible. We were a little late starting this section of portfolio questions, so question number eight, Jeremy Balfour. Thank you. To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to reduce plastic pollution in the furth of forth. Presiding Officer, you would probably disapprove of me embarking on a very long list of the things that the Government is doing, but within our marine litter strategy, many policies are already under way to target the particular issues faced in the furth of forth, namely sewage-related debris and pre-production plastic pellets, also known as nerddles. Scottish Water is currently investigating the problem of litter entering the estuary area through sewage systems. It will report this summer and will identify solutions. Obviously, two of the plastics are being dealt with, microbeads and plastic stem cotton buds. With regard to nerddles, we do support the plastic industries operation clean sweep scheme, which encourages responsible handling of pre-production plastics, however more needs to be done. Jeremy Balfour. Can I thank the cabinet secretary for her answer? Surveys over the years across the furth of forth have found anything between 200,000 to more than 2 million plastic nerddles. People have been keen to clean up in Malorian beaches and last autumn 450,000 nerddles were removed from the shore with close to bonus by volunteers. Can I ask the Scottish Government if it would consider localised plans for the worst plastic policing hotspots? I would, in fact, consider anything that I thought would actually help this difficulty. Nerddles are a major problem. I have been following some of the local activity on social media, and I think that it is one of those things, however, that needs to be dealt with across countries. It is a global problem. Nerddles are an absolutely essential part of the production of plastics, and the difficulty is managing them at source, because we cannot produce plastic items without them. One way we can help, of course, is to reduce that reliance on plastic in the first place. The last supplementary decision to Ivan McKee. The Sunnyside ocean defenders are doing amazing and inspiring work across Scotland. They are based in Glasgow Proven, a constituency that is not noted for having a coastline. Does the cabinet secretary agree that as valuable activity is tangible proof that this is an issue that affects everyone, not just those with a shoreline? It is fair to say that the children of Sunnyside primary have worked tremendously hard to highlight the problem of single-use plastics. They have supported us in introducing our deposit return scheme with the Have You Got the Bottle campaign, and they are now promoting the message of Nesdra or Taw. Despite being landlocked, they are working very hard with the Marine Conservation Society to do a variety of beach litter surveys at Prestwick South, and they are involved in cleanser air and arycar, which Jackie Baillie might be interested in. They clearly show that the issue concerns us all regardless of age, whether on the coast or inland, and I applaud all their efforts and the efforts of children the length and breadth of Scotland concerned about the impact of plastic on both land and sea. That concludes portfolio questions, and we will now move on to the next item of business.


Welcome to All Hands Up Date. Here's what's happening around your Navy today. C.R. Chief Special Warfare Operator Edward C. Byers, Jr. will be presented the Medal of Honor today during a White House ceremony for his courageous actions while serving in Afghanistan. He is the 11th Living Service Member to be awarded the Medal of Honor for Bravery Displayed in Afghanistan. To view the White House ceremony, visit navy.mil. The 2015 SecNAP Innovation Program recognized Commander Jeffrey Heems, Commanding Officer of USS Preble, as the SecNAP Innovation Leadership Award winner. Since taking command in December, 2014, Heems and his crew developed more than 54 innovative concepts that led to him winning the award. Navy Week 2016 kicks off March 21st. The Navy will come home to 15 cities to give Americans the opportunity to learn about the Navy, its people, and its importance to national security and prosperity. Find out when Navy Week hits your town at the Navy Outreach website. You can read more about what's happening around your Navy at navy.mil.