Liquid Air Battery
The UK is starting construction near Manchester of the world’s largest battery. Spare green energy will be used to compress air into liquid for storage. Releasing the liquid back into gas willpower a turbine to put the green energy onto grid. The plant will be operational in 2022 and will...
Solar Geoengineering
Gernot Wagner has a scary op-ed in Business Week with this conclusion: Solar geoengineering is potentially so powerful that one actor might be able to lower temperatures for the globe. It’s only a matter of time before pressure will increase to do just that, regardless of how fast the...
A Call to DeCommodify Capitalism
Three scholars: Isabelle Ferreras, Dominique Méda, and Julie Battilana on May 16, 2020 launched a petition in Le Monde for #democratizingwork. The text Work: Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate was published in 41 publications, in 36 countries around the world, in 27 languages. The text is open for signing at the...
Ozone Layer Destruction Once More
A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation. The Guardian May...
Agriculture threatens Birds
“The State of the World’s Birds”, a five-year compendium of population data from the best-studied group of animals on the planet, reveals a biodiversity crisis driven by the expansion and intensification of agriculture. In all, 74% of 1,469 globally threatened birds are affected primarily by farming. Logging, invasive species and...
Enzyme eating Plastic
An international research team headed by Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, has - by accident - created a mutant enzyme that breaks down PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat...
Bird Collapse in France
The bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last 15 years. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds. The Frech countryside is in the process of becoming a veritable desert. The common white throat, the ortolan bunting, the...
Collapse of the Polar Vortex?
The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in...
Ocean Dead Zones increasing
Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the...
Ocean Plastics Tax
The UK Treasury is starting considereing taxes / charges on single-use plastics such as takeaway cartoons and packaging. The introduction just over two years ago of a 5p charge on single-use plastic bags led to an 85% reduction in their use inside six months. An estimated 12m tonnes of plastic...
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