the economy took a hard hit now, you know, christmas people looking to buy presents and the things are turning around, at least for the holidays. people are willing to spend more to try and bring some bright brightness and hope into the house and have like a happy holiday. so i think during this time people will spend, even if you know it's a bit difficult for them, but it is do not control that on board there. so they have to rely on what restrictions israel has in place. november. israel has allowed vaccinated tourists to come in and so people here were hopeful that tourism is going to be back. but soon after news of the new barian has emerged, israel has shut down its borders again. people here are saying that while they're glad that there is some sense of normalcy coming back to town, especially during the christmas season, it's the tourism that's going to revive the economy. ah tough. a quick check of the headlines here on al jazeera, early results are expected on sunday in the gumby as presidential election. turnout

was high as people decide that if president adama barrow deserves another term talk about address as both the capital banjo, the turner grocery, really, really impressive. talk to, oh, going been porter. he will tell you that this election is very important. it's significant in many respect, this is the 1st time they brought in, pulls to put out 30 years with lots of freedom of choice, lots of freedom of expression. they were in fact peers of things going wrong during the campaigning period. nothing like that happened on election day. there are few incidents, not violent incident and away, but we are waiting to see exactly what happens when the election results are expected to be announced. france on saudi arabia hill, a joint firm called with lebanon, in what's seen as a significant gesture, resolving a diplomatic crisis. gold states withdrew ambassador some beirut, last month, after a government minister criticized. he shouted at war in yemen. the south african government is working to scale up code 19 vaccinations. the new on the chrome,

veterans driving another weight of infections with new cases nearly quadrupling. and just for days, more than 15 european countries have confirmed cases of on the chronic, but this persistent opposition to the reintroduction of measures to slow rising cobit 19 infections. thousands, march, peacefully with through utrecht sedans, military chief, says the army will leave politics after elections schedule for 2023, general abdel for hom, let them take over in october before a dealer stroke last month to reinstate the prime minister. at least 13 people have been killed and many others injured after eruptions amount so marrow. it's the tallest volcano. when the indonesian island of java huge clouds of smoke and ash of triggered heavy rainfall. well, those were the headlines that he's continues here now to 0, after counting the cost spectrum consulting bye. for now. i spoke with,

well, in preparation the country is staging. a major thing. nation is going head to head in think patent stadiums 2020 will keep you across the action is cancel for, for the regions biggest ever sourcing events. that the for our come on, i was just there. ah . hello, i'm him al santa maria. this is counting the costs on al jazeera, your weekly look at the world of business and economics this week. army crunch. does it ever seem to end another new karone of ours variance, forcing governments to impose travel bands just as economies we're starting to recover the exposure watts impact on the con,

good have on the health of the global economy. also the sweet green hydrogen haled is the clean energy of the future. but can it really help end the use of fossil fuels and start to dekalb and eyes economies. and when sport and money collide, you get a fierce bidding war. my billionaires and broadcast is abetting heavily on the world's richest sport cricket in india. so just when you thought things might be getting back to normal river normal nowadays, and along comes a new variant of covey. 19 throwing everything into disarray. again, a big part of the discussion is whether it's the variant or the fear of the variant which is unsettled things so much, but on cronies. a reminder of just how much out economic normalcy relies on the course of this pandemic. he's what we know about the new varied festival scientist trying to understand more about it after it was officially labeled by the world health organization as a variant of concern. and given that name omicron,

the general consensus is that on the cons, mutations could make it more infectious and perhaps less responsive to vaccines. was 1st detective in south africa and later identified in some parts of europe. the u. s. japan, israel, and now many other countries as well. and then came the reaction and it was fast. borders was suddenly closed off to passenger travel from southern african countries, which brought a lot anger, especially as south africa fell to the on the right thing in alerting the well to the new very to the 1st place. oil prices fell more than 10 percent as soon as the variant was detected, stock markets took a hit to and are expected to face. the weakness of uncertainty is invested closely . watch for updates on, on, maker on. so what comes next, largely depends on what scientists discover and how quickly they do so. so what all this means is that we're back into the realms of one step forward to step back. in fact, we arguably already were before me, con, emerge, consumer demand was rising, it was good. economies reopened, people will back out shopping regularly,

particularly with the end of the holidays approaching. but keeping up with that demand was already a problem. there were a lot of backlogs in the global supply chain and codes and manufacturing hubs, which made a good old fashioned bottleneck was flowing everything dumb. also prices have been soaring. inflation rates have increased in many parts of the world. in fact, in september, in the united states, inflation was 5.4 percent, which was the highest in 13 years. and the travel industry, well, it was starting to recover from its pandemic losses, but the need your reaction to close borders and restrict international travel. i mean, the airlines and hospitality industry are in uncertain territory again. and so the focus and this is part of understanding this new variance is now on how effective our current bank seems, will be against army kron. drug makers have given mixed information on that so far . 5 the buy and take us out beat about protecting against the via coven? madonna's not so sure. and of course they've still the problem of the huge disparities in vaccination rates around the globe. it's estimated around 2 percent

of people in low income countries have received even just their 1st cove at 19 shot . so let's try to get some answers in london. gregor o and is with us. he is the director and chief economist at the strategic advisory group, global counsel. greg, thanks for your time. a little bit of retrospect, 1st of all, now that we've had a bit of time since the on the con variant 1st announced, what do you make of those market and will reactions that we saw. i mean, oil fell off the cliff pretty quickly. markets were all over the shelf as well. i mean, is that just the uncertainty, the fact that we just didn't know what we were really dealing with? yeah, i mean, we've had a few days to begin to get our head round me. all of on the con, let alone the economic impact of it. so i think at the moment, you know, the economic impact is really a highly uncertain and it will be at least a few weeks before we know how big a deal it is in terms of its public health consequences. and therefore,

what sort of impact may have economically markets reacting in a perfectly natural way in those circumstances at their volatile batteries might be seen as if it is about balance, isn't it? i'm talking about the idea of looking for people's help, obviously, but of lock downs and travel restrictions and all these happenings. you would hope, by this stage of the pandemic, that we would have learnt how this works now. and that may be immediate shut down and locked down like that aren't the best way to go. well, i think, i think governments around the world have been incredible amounts about the right way to introduce public house measures how to communicate them. what the economic impact is likely to be and how to calibrate responds appropriately and different circumstances. i mean, it's complicated by politics making a mistake about that. politics gets in the way of good policy making. sometimes i

think what we've seen so far in response to, i'm a tron is, you know, governments, the sort of the most restrictive measures that we've seen so far have been on the travel, sacked sort of thing. that makes sense. but governments are also really sort of the, i think the really carefully focused on the messaging around on the tron. i think the wording about some of the behavioral impacts. and that is why the messaging is being quite nuanced so far. and i think we continue to see that until we get hard evidence of what the public health implications of it are. and therefore we begin to see what sort of restrictions may or may not be required by governance. let's vote some other elements and then supply chain problems. inflation has, well, even if micron turns out to be not as bad as we think there's still a number of other things which, which are holding the economies back. yes. so the supply chain problems remain

quite severe. the cussing, you know, considerable logistical problems in a number of different factors. and at the same time, if you think about what the impact of cobit has been on, on demand shifted mind away from services and towards the goods sector. and then and so for that we had, we've had labor shortages in some markets for reasons that are still being debated that all of this is putting pressure on, i think, good prices. in particular, goods, price, inflation has been much more much higher than the consumer services inflation and a number of different markets. and i'm trying to is going to add to that, you know, probably for a couple of reasons. first of all, because central banks are expecting a rebalancing of demand away from goods, what services and that will be delayed. secondly,

we could actually see some more disruption to specific nodes and complex supply chains that's going to exacerbate problems bear. and i think all of that means that it's just going to take more time for the knots and supply chain to become disentangled. so this combination of supply chain disruption feeding into inflation and i think it's going to is going to cause headaches, a central bank for some time to come goodness me. and then to take a step back, even from the supply chain that the, the supply itself, the manufacturing, they were already some limitations. again, coven related on manufacturing helps places like china, for example. is that a concern that the stuff won't be there? or as you've said, maybe there's going to be this rebalance away from goods and back to what services will. so, i mean, obviously supply chain disruption feeds into the destruction of manufacturing processes. we've seen impact thing most dramatically on,

on those manufacturing sectors that are more sensitive to supply chain disruption. so the auto manufacturing sector and disruption to semi conductor supply sector has been particularly badly affected. i think china is interesting for a number of reasons. one is china, you know, just putting on trying to, i'm sorry, china, china has a challenge in the months ahead, which is hard to exit from the panoramic if, if at some point, you know, the world does exit from at least this phase of the pandemic check. trying to get a 0 covert policy at the moment. how you exit from that begin to open up china to the rest of the world in terms of foreign travel and the rest of it that that's, it's not clear how that's going to happen. and i think on the truck might delete the moment the time and difficult decisions need to be taken. but it will actually probably make those decisions even more difficult when eventually we do need to be taken. because the sort of decline community of chinese population will be lower

and the public health challenges creator. so you know, manufacturing disruption in china. i suspect we may not have seen the last or even perhaps the most severe elements about possibly spending much gregor and great to talk to you. thank you so much for your time today. you're very welcome. the climate now and as the global crisis escalates the world is banking on green energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. thing is wind turbines and solar panels can clean up everything and our cars, trucks, plains, they all require a lot more energy than those sources can, provides that some say they could be a silver bullet in the form of hydrogen earths most abundant element. and it's a clean burner. there are in fact 3 types gray hydrogen is extracted from natural gas. so it's the most commonly used form hydrogen, but it emits

a lot of carbon dioxide. so that's not great. if you capture carbon dioxide though and store it safely, it's called blue hydrogen. so that sounds better, but it emits a lot of methane, which is also not great. and so green hydrogen that is generated by splitting the 2 components of water, oxygen and hydrogen with an electric current that's powered fully by renewable sources. so given that simple chemistry involved green hydrogen could really help us reach 0 emissions. that is the point where we remove as much greenhouse a gas from the atmosphere as we emit. meeting the ambitious plans being made for green hydrogen domains building a whole new industry. there isn't enough renewable energy to produce large amounts of green hydrogen in many places. and the machines used to carry out that electrolysis process are expensive and the gas could cost up to almost $5.00 a kilogram to make when really it needs to be below a dollar to be competitive. that said, we are seeing some movement. the european union is among the biggest investors in

green hydrogen. it's planning to build equipment capable of generating 40 gigawatts of renewable electricity in to hydrogen. by the year 2030, the united states saudi arabia, china, and south africa are also exploring ways to produce it. according to bank of america, the whole hydrogen market is expected to be worth 11 trillion dollars by the 2050. but already there are companies trying to get more hydrogen energy out there. one of them is the straight in mining company for to scoot metals group, which has funds to produce 15000000 tons a year of green hydrogen and 10 years from now. and i'm very pleased to say the chairman of for the skew. andrew forest is with us now from sidney. thank you for your time, mr. forest. we've just done a little bit of an explainer for our view is about the different types of of hydrogen, the green, the blue and the gray. it seems that at the moment most of it is is gray, and that's not great because if it's a polluting element and blue is not great on that front either. so is there any

point in going down those paths? should we just be focusing solely on the green? i think we should focus solely on gray. blue and grey have really had that day in the sun grey flukes about 15 times per unit carbon than it ever produces hydrogen blue. we don't know if it's much better. we think it's probably about 12 to 16, but what we do now is most boy will come from maintained o l n g, as it's cold in the popular sent. but ellen, geez, just made time. that's $80.00 to $90.00 times more dangerous is a global warming agent than carpet so. so what about global warming would move straight away from gray. we wouldn't touch blue and we'd go grained green will be abundant. we can see it very clearly. i've done this before. the huge companies, projects from scratch by can see this very clearly. this is going to happen. i've got a feeling that green is expensive. you find anything is expensive at the start. hm

. luckily, most of your consumers, they're not gonna buy the 12000. you're still a microwave. when it 1st came out, they'll probably end up buying the $100.00 microwave, which is much, much better than the 1st one, which came out a lot like the computer. it, it will, will be initially expensive, but that's going to come more at our cost by the time we're really in production in the late $20.00 twenty's. this will be as competitive as any fuel out there with one great difference. you will not be polluting the planet you will not be harming the future of your planet or your kids. so let's talk about what you've got plans for. we mentioned the numbers before. i think it was 15000000 a year by, by 10 years from now an alternate plan to build what would be the world's largest electrolyzer if i'm saying that correctly? ah, tell us a little bit about that and what that will actually mean in an,

in an output sense. like what we will get out of that. in theory. we have great hardship projects now all over the world. ah, ah, in every major precinct of our little planet, we're prepared though to be very confident as good as guarantee the 15000000 tons from our own country. we not best. there's a huge upside with every other country africa, the middle east, latin america, europe, etc. but from our own country week, we can, we can be assured of it. so the 1st $15000000.00 tons is likely to come from australia with then top up supplies. we grow to woods. 50000000 tons. now, specifically, i can share with you that that tonnage is on its way. good. that's good to hear. my very simple question for the day is and forgive my ignorance. is it like oil and gas? can you ship it? is it, is it? is it cost effective as well to move it around? right now you would container. i think, i mean any, any highway you drive down,

you'll probably be passing a great a mine, your great 100 trucks. i. it's very common. we've been sending it up into space. 50 is sending it across the, the oceans would be contained initially, but we're going up tend to, in the common year for grain, hudson, and ships in great money ships with all the major shipping pies. we know that green hutch and perspective they're going to crack that. not just like they, they cracked the mate o l n j not so we know it's going to be done. but in any event, to the well shipping industry, all those you need ammonia that 15000000 tons would supply, sending to 80000000 tons of great ammonia, which will power the shipping industry power called bio power plants, which you can drop by 50 percent, immediately replace it with great ammonia, so there's a huge demand already for those harsh molecules as ammonia. but we won't stop there

where to turn to also ship our customer cartoon, because they made green hodgen as well as grande ammonia. so you're doing all this at, at a corporate level, and as you said, you've, you've built previous things from scratch before. how important is that the government get on board now? the european union is one which is said very much. yes. we are committed to this idea. is the israeli government, are there others out there? i think it's absolutely critical. governments get on board. there's no, i was powerful enough now and the major plan supposed flat rate will never cut this . it's just not sustainable. you need a fully sustainable therefore business like approach to the end of global warming, a approach which is so large that it can actually bring the warming of a planet to an end over time. that will need to be sustaining that that is, of course, the power of business, the power of comments that empowerment will already happen if the governments get on board. you cannot what you had to say. well, business will fix everything because actually business is like mine got into this

business is like mine must get us out. same. i mean, we were all focused on cop 26, not long ago that this is that kind of thing, which governments could easily get behind. because if we, as you said, you're looking for actual solutions, then well, it there and, and not ready to go. but the planning has already come out. this is a practical implementable solution for the wells energy and great energy product requirements can be fertilized. they can they steal it. conduce meant it can do my bill or the can they pick slot? we just need to get in behind brain hot and people have sent me all look has been around for a while. i remind them that it took a 100 years for the steam engine to actually get into a try in which revelation i transport yes. hodge. and it has been around a while, but now it's day has come and why not? it's the most abundant element in the universe. it will never run out. we make it with great energy, only, not anything today with carbon up and feels we make it with great energy. we now

have a permanent supply of pollution, brief feel we owe that to ourselves, the or that to our planet. we owe that to i q. and your 1st great to talk to you and good luck with things. thank you. come off. finally this week, my favorite sport, cricket. and if i'd been any good at it, when i was younger than now in 2021, i'd be part of something huge, especially in india, where it is without question, the most popular sport. and now the richest, the indian premier league now has an estimated brand value of $6800000000.00 that attracts millions of view as world wide. and so broadcast is a bidding high for the rights to stream the matches. after 2 franchises was sold for a combined $1700000000.00, the new broadcast contract starts in 2023. it covers the following 5 years and is expected to bring the indian cricket board up to $5000000000.00. even facebook stone, it's hat in the ring, especially with the i p al, expanding to a 10 teen season next year with 74 matches that

a 74 opportunities to make some mega money. look at this from duff and phelps, a financial consultancy, which produces an appeal brand valuation report each year. the broadcasting fees per match last year were in the realm of $8000000.00. not that much less than both the english premier league football and american major league baseball and higher than the german football league, the bundle slager and the n b a. it's all ridiculous amounts of money, quite frankly. so we've got simon chadwick with us to help understand that simon is the director of the center for your asian sport industry is joining us from commentary in the u. k. so i'm a good to say you as always, can i make a grand sweeping statement to start with and say that sport is not about sport any more? it's about not just money, it's about broadcasting, right? this is the center of it all. i think support is about a lot of things and not just about sport money, but about politics as well. it's interesting because we, we, we talk about broadcasting and i think increasingly we need to talk less about

broadcasting and more about content generation. and, and that really is where i sport is, i think, beginning to, to boom, not just cricket, but i think across the world in so many ways because essentially fur fur over the top platforms like netflix, for example, for amazon and many others. sport is a way of filling schedules, it's where filling air time it's, we're generating content for, for people to access on their, on their tv, on their mobile devices, on the, on their tablets and so forth. and, and so there is an intense optimism and, and, and a great deal of speculation about the financial windfalls that the future will bring on. so i think we're doing is we're seeing not just traditional media companies and broadcast is entering the industry. but lots of new places as well, because i think there is dispute over the next 10 years. so what we're going to see is a sport being really one of the main drivers of the development of these over the top platforms. okay, so for talking about content,

if we talk about the i p l as content, what is it that makes it attractive? obviously, it's cricket, it's the best players in the world. it's india where there's a huge audience. anyway, how is it all packaged up into something which is becoming so attractive and that broadcast is want to pay so much for? i think one of the things you gotta keep in mind is, is the broadcasters over the top platforms and, and others who are involved in any sport, neat to know that the sport is going to be watched, that it's popular that people will buy what's on offer the, the crucial thing about india is it will very soon be the biggest country in the world. what we've also seen in india is, is going back 101015 years is really quite daring and courageous development of the game that i think in many ways has changed the world beyond a change cricket beyond recognition across the world over the last decade and not is this the short format game because many of us time impoverished, you know, we really busy lives. we got kids to look after. we've got jobs to, to,

to go to. we've got other things to do. so we need our sport bundled up into, to really easily consumable bits. and what i p l has done is, is to provide us with something that is very easy to consume, that really retains the essence of what good sport is all about, which is uncertainty of outcome. so there isn't the domination by just one team. there are several teams always that can win, and that leads to a product that is engaging. it's exciting people. i draw drama from it. they say it is tense. and so in that way it's, it's a great product. it's easy to sell and people are engaging with it. the other side of things where the i, p l is concerned is not just the, the broadcast side, but the actual teams there are going to be 2 new franchises. am is a lot of money being thrown around to get the licenses for those. i believe even the glaze of family who are in manchester united have shown some interest as well. or is this the other sort of side of it that you know? if you've got a lot of money, then owning a team is,

is kind of the new thing or an important thing. one of the things about the global market for sport is, is that there is a lot of sports and there is increasingly a lot of competition. and so if you want to either improve or even just maintain your position in the industry, you have to spend to 5, you have to invest new technology, new formats, you have to enter new markets and so on and so forth. and i think again, that's what we're, what we're seeing. but i, i think, certainly in terms of the glazes, this is a very interesting move and, and for the glazes themselves, they are sports entrepreneurs. they, they spend money buying clubs and franchises around the world. so i, in one sense their investment or their, their attempted investment into the i, p l is testament to the power of the i, p l and the commercial returns that can be achieved. but i think the other thing about the glazes is ace that clearly they're from the united states and. and what we're now beginning to see in the united states is radia. they said that

something bubbling up as quick as simmering in the us. and, and what we're seeing is, is investment within the united states in cricket, in the creation of leagues, and the creation of competitions. and this for me is a really, really significant move because the u. s. remains the largest market for sport in the world may be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of global industry size. so there's money there from t v, from sponsors, from audiences and so forth. but crucially, i think in the united states, we also have a very large indian das bra. and what i sense is that it's the indian diaspora in the united states that is really driving this forward at the moment. cricket in america who of a thought i simon shepherd, always a pleasure talking to you. thank you. thank you. and that is ashley for this week, but i want to know what you think. what do you want to say on the show in the future? 3, her d, m, me at come all ha, if you are waiting, use the hash tag a j c t c, or if emails more, you'll thing counting the cost of al jazeera dot net is our address and is more for

you online at out 0 dot com slash ctc, that'll take you straight to our page, which has individual reports, links and entire episodes for you to catch up on that that is it for this edition of counting the cost. i'm kim all santa maria, the whole team. thanks for joining us. the news on al jazeera is ah, a mass pro democracy movement, violent crackdowns assassinations, and you imposed sanctions. old tactics in the struggle that ensued from the 2020 bella luce, him presidential elections. that shook the country, self proclaimed dictators seat of power. and now new tactics, migrants, people empower, investigates the humanitarian disaster unraveling on europe's borders and asks what's next in the battle for bella bruce on a jazz eda ah

al jazeera when ever you oh, results are expected soon in the gambia as presidential election, where voters use marbles to cast their ballots. ah, alarm darn jordan, this is abs. they are alive and go are also coming up. winter's coming, but russia is accused of putting a chokehold on ukraine's energy supplies. we follow con belize and ugandan troops are joining forces against a rebel group that's threatening both countries on christmas cheer.