May 19
2009

The Independent, Rachel Shields: Last year, you couldn’t give away old paper and bottles. But now the salvage industry is back in business and starting a new boom.

As an investment tip it is unlikely to inspire a rush: put your money in rubbish. Nevertheless, new figures reveal that the price of recyclable waste has doubled in the past six months.

The news will provide a boost to Britain’s flagging recycling movement, and go some way towards reversing the gloom over mountains of glass bottles and newspapers piling up across Britain after the drop last year in the value of recyclables.

It will also be a welcome change for UK waste collection companies and councils, hit hard by a drop in demand last autumn for paper, bottles and cans from countries such as China and India. There had been calls for warehouses and disused airfields to be made available for storing rubbish that could not be sold.

A huge global drop in the volume of waste being produced, partly due to the economic downturn, is thought to have sparked the recent sharp rise. The price of cardboard has trebled to £59 per ton since November, while PET - the plastic used in drinks bottles - has also more than doubled from £75 per ton to £195. During the same time period, the price of gold has risen by just 14 per cent, and crude oil by 16 per cent.

“The main reason for this is that the quantity of recycled material available around the world is lower than it was six months ago. It is a question of supply and demand,” said George Broom, the owner of the commercial recycling company Environmental Support Services. “Also, the international demand that had dropped off is coming back.”

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May 5
2009

The Independent, Mike Hodgkinson: Berkshire boy Dr Brian MacGowan might look an unlikely hero, but with 192 laser beams at his fingertips, a research chamber that resembles the Death Star and a plan straight out of a Spider-Man story line, he might just have the answer to all our energy problems.

Clean energy forever. That, in a glorious theoretical nutshell, is what nuclear fusion - the reaction that gives stars and hydrogen bombs their immense power - could deliver. The urgency of the climate-change debate and the renewed impetus to tackle the 21st century’s glaring energy problems have put fusion back on the agenda… and, thanks to key contributions from the British-trained scientist Dr Brian MacGowan, the highly volatile process may be harnessed to provide us with a viable source of green electricity sooner than previously expected.

Staff at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in central California are confident that some time in 2010, they will create a fusion reaction by focusing 192 intense ultra-violet lasers on to a tiny golden pellet, recreating the energy of the sun for a fraction of a second, thereby paving the way to a carbon-neutral future without global warming or nuclear waste. If all goes to plan, the implications would fairly reflect California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent description of the project as “monumental”. Fusion, we’re told, could be mankind’s salvation - but what are the chances of translating theory into practice?

From the outside, NIF - based within the grounds of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - doesn’t look much: a big aircraft hanger, you might presume, or an oversized warehouse. Surrounded by the bucolic Tri-Valley region hills, half-an-hour due east from San Francisco Bay, it sits unassumingly between the high-street wine bistros of Pleasanton (once labelled “The Most Desperate Town in the West”) and Altamont Raceway Park, where the Rolling Stones played their infamous free concert in 1969. NIF’s exterior offers little clue to what goes on there - but inside, it’s a different story.

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Apr 29
2009

The Independent, David Whitehouse: Scientists are baffled by what they’re seeing on the Sun’s surface - nothing at all. And this lack of activity could have a major impact on global warming.

Could the Sun play a greater role in recent climate change than has been believed? Climatologists had dismissed the idea and some solar scientists have been reticent about it because of its connections with those who those who deny climate change. But now the speculation has grown louder because of what is happening to our Sun. No living scientist has seen it behave this way. There are no sunspots.

The disappearance of sunspots happens every few years, but this time it’s gone on far longer than anyone expected - and there is no sign of the Sun waking up.

“This is the lowest we’ve ever seen. We thought we’d be out of it by now, but we’re not,” says Marc Hairston of the University of Texas. And it’s not just the sunspots that are causing concern. There is also the so-called solar wind - streams of particles the Sun pours out - that is at its weakest since records began. In addition, the Sun’s magnetic axis is tilted to an unusual degree. “This is the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” says NASA solar scientist David Hathaway. But this is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on Earth and force what for many is the unthinkable: a reappraisal of the science behind recent global warming.

Our Sun is the primary force of the Earth’s climate system, driving atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. It lies behind every aspect of the Earth’s climate and is, of course, a key component of the greenhouse effect. But there is another factor to be considered. When the Sun has gone quiet like this before, it coincided with the earth cooling slightly and there is speculation that a similar thing could happen now. If so, it could alter all our predictions of climate change, and show that our understanding of climate change might not be anywhere near as good as we thought.
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Apr 21
2009

The Independent, Andrew Grice: The Government will next week announce a groundbreaking, legally-binding target to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by at least 34 per cent by 2020 to combat climate change.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, told The Independent yesterday that the Government would not achieve the target by buying large amounts of “offsetting” credits - effectively paying poor countries to cut carbon on Britain’s behalf. Instead, it will cap the proportion of the target that can be achieved by offsetting.

“I want to achieve as much as we can through domestic action,” he said. “There will be a cap on credits from overseas. We are going to be sending a strong signal about that.”

The world’s first “carbon budgets” for the next 15 years will be unveiled by the Chancellor Alistair Darling in his Budget next Wednesday. He will embrace proposals by the Independent Committee on Climate Change, chaired by Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, which called in December for an interim 34 per cut in emissions from 1900 levels by 2020. Lord Turner said the figure should rise to 42 per cent if a new global deal on emissions was signed at crucial talks in Copenhagen this December.

Ministers are also likely to implement Lord Turner’s proposals to ensure “deep domestic emissions cuts” by limiting the amount that could be achieved through offsetting. He proposed that less than 10 per cent be met by offsets outside the European Union if the target is a 34 per cent cut, rising to 20 per cent after a global agreement. Previously, the Government had planned to “buy” up to half of its carbon credits.

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Apr 3
2009

The Independent, Steve Connor: Hope for the fight against climate change as study finds greenhouse gas can be buried without fear of leaking.

Carbon dioxide captured from the chimneys of power stations could be safely buried underground for thousands of years without the risk of the greenhouse gas seeping into the atmosphere, a study has found.

The findings will lend weight to the idea of carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) - when carbon dioxide is trapped and then buried - which is being seriously touted as a viable way of reducing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide while still continuing to burn fossil fuels such as oil and coal in power stations.

There are two substantial problems with CCS. The first is how to trap carbon dioxide efficiently in power-station emissions and the second is how to ensure that the underground store of the gas does not leak back into the atmosphere and so exacerbate the greenhouse effect and global warming.

In seeking to answer the second question, scientists looked at natural underground reservoirs of gas. They found that carbon dioxide trapped underground had been stable for possibly millions of years because it dissolves harmlessly in subterranean stores of water which do not appear to have leaked any substantial quantities of the gas back into the atmosphere.

The researchers believe the study shows that it will be possible to inject vast amounts of carbon dioxide from power stations into deep underground reservoirs where it will dissolve in water and remain undisturbed for at least as long as it will take for mankind to completely abandon fossil fuels and generate clean, carbon-neutral electricity.
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