Category Archives: Environment

Environment, Research, Science

Natural Environment: How we’ve lost 600 plant species

PLANT EXTINCTIONS

ALMOST 600 plant species have vanished in the past 250 years – potentially robbing science of new medicines.

The figure is more than two-and-a-half times the number of birds, mammals and amphibians that have become extinct.

Around two species of plant are lost forever each year – although, according to research, the true figure is likely to be even higher than that as plants could be disappearing before they are even discovered.

Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Stockholm University analysed extinction records worldwide to arrive at the figure.

Species include the Chile sandalwood, a tree that grew on the Juan Fernandez Islands between Chile and Easter Island and was heavily exploited for its scent.

Another is the St Helena olive. One lone tree survived until 1994 but two others propagated from cuttings succumbed to a termite attack and fungus in 2003.

Recent research, published in Nature, Ecology & Evolution, found that 571 plants have disappeared in the past 250 years – four times more than thought. In contrast, a total of 217 of bird, mammal and amphibian species are thought to have become extinct over the same period.

Dr Aelys Humphreys, of Stockholm University, said: “Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct, but few can name an extinct plant.

“This is the first time we have an overview of what plants have already become extinct, where they have disappeared from, and how quickly this is happening.

“Many extinct plants were so poorly understood that we do not even know what their exact roles in nature were, or whether they may have been useful for production of future food or medicine.”

The scientists found that extinctions could be happening 500 times faster than the “natural” background rate – normal losses without human intervention.

Many plants have vanished because of changes of land use, which remains a threat to other surviving species.

Co-author Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha, from Kew, said: “Plants provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, and makeup the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

. Recommended (Forbes) UN Report: 1 Million Animal And Plant Species At Risk Of Extinction

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Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Government

Energy security: Is there to be a next generation of reactors?

UK ENERGY NEEDS: SECURITY OF SUPPLY

EVER SINCE the Labour government under Tony Blair rebooted nuclear power some 13 years ago, successive British governments have been committed to new reactors to secure electricity supplies and by cutting carbon emissions. Yet, those ambitions have yielded just one project that is currently under construction – Hinkley Point C in Somerset.

The past three months or so have dealt serious blows to hopes for more. Toshiba scrapped its plans for Moorside in Cumbria and Hitachi has axed Wylfa. That means that a second Hitachi plant planned for Oldbury in Gloucestershire is also doomed. Together, these three projects would have provided around 15% of current UK electricity demand.

This must now raise the question: is it time to rethink plans for new nuclear, and focus on more renewables – or redouble our nuclear efforts?

The UK needs more low-carbon power. Coal and old nuclear plants are shutting, and tough climate targets are looming.

Environmental groups, such as The Green Party and Greenpeace, want to ditch nuclear in favour of more renewables, more energy efficiency, imports, batteries and other technologies. Most energy industry experts, however, think we still need nuclear. They say that if we try and rely on just renewables and storage, without carbon capture and storage or nuclear, then we will be looking at a very challenging transition and one that is costlier than a balanced mix.

National Grid’s four future energy scenarios all envisage some new nuclear, though the amounts do differ.

The main issue is that nuclear provides baseload power (or continuous electricity supply). But there is a school of thought that baseload is a 20th-century thing. Those who suggest such an argument might be right. It would, though, be a big call by government to suggest baseload won’t be a thing by 2025.

The government has already downgraded the amount of new nuclear it expects to be built. It assumes 13GW of new nuclear capacity by 2035 – or three more plants on top of the 3.2GW at Hinkley. There are now just two companies in the running, with plans for two new plants. French state-owned EDF, which is behind Hinkley, wants to build a carbon copy of that project at Sizewell, on the Suffolk coast, in 2021. Chinese state-owned CGN, is working on a Chinese-designed reactor for Bradwell in Essex, to be operational around 2030.

Hitachi’s withdrawal suggests the financing model used for Hinkley and proposed for Wylfa – a guaranteed price for the electricity generated for 35 years – is now dead. The alternative is the “regulated asset base” (RAB) model, where a regulator sets a fixed sum for the plant’s costs and fixed returns for the developer, paid for by energy bill payers or taxpayers. Critics say RAB loads the risk of construction delays – such as those seen in France and Finland – on to citizens. Returns would be paid for years before any electricity was generated.

Labour, which is pro-nuclear, has branded the approach risky and reckless, but has not put forward an alternative.

So, could Britain manage without nuclear? The answer is maybe, but it would take a lot more renewables. Filling the 9.2GW-sized hole left by Moorside, Wylfa and Oldbury would require 14GW of offshore wind power, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. That is the equivalent to more than 20 of the world’s biggest offshore windfarm, which consists of 87 giant turbines.

Undoubtedly, that would mean spending a vast amount of money on saturating the UK with offshore wind – with enough turbines in enough different locations to replicate the “always-on” nature of nuclear. Large-scale batteries will help, but they won’t address the fact that electricity demand is much higher in winter than summer – or solve long windless spells.

The other big techno fix could be carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems attached to fossil-fuel power stations. However, years of government efforts to kickstart it have failed. Officials have been working on CCS gas for around 20 years and are nowhere near reaching a satisfactory outcome that are mainly due to cost considerations.

 

ALL sources of electricity face the same trilemma in the 21st century: carbon emissions, continuity of supply and cost. The British government has placed a big bet on nuclear power, but reactors meet only two of the three challenges. Nuclear power is low-carbon and a secure source of electricity – but it is hugely expensive.

While building nuclear plants and fuelling them requires concrete, transport and so on, the overall emissions are similar to wind power and solar power. All produce far less carbon than coal- or gas-powered stations.

Nuclear power also largely passes the security of supply test. The giant plants provide steady electricity 24 hours a day, but are incredibly complex, and technical problems can result in long shutdowns. They also need vast amounts of cooling water, causing problems during periods of droughts.

Nuclear power’s big problem is its price tag – building extraordinarily complicated plants and keeping them safe is extremely expensive. Solar and onshore wind power prices have plummeted and are now about one third of that of nuclear. How to deal with nuclear waste in the long term is another expensive, and as yet unresolved, headache.

The industry has hopes that “small modular reactors” could be cheaper and faster to build. But to fight global warming the world needs low carbon energy now, and no SMR is likely to be generating power in the next 10 years because of long and rigorous safety checks.

The government faces a difficult decision. It could persist with its nuclear dream, hoping that a way to finance new plants can be found and that they are then built on time and on budget.

Or it can pivot towards renewable energy, storage and interconnectors, potentially with gas plants that capture and bury their carbon emissions as a backup. That would mean overturning its antipathy to onshore wind and solar power and ramping up offshore wind.

Around the world only two nations are putting new nuclear plants into service: China and Russia. Overall, nuclear construction is at its lowest for a decade and global nuclear generation has been flat since 2000. Even France, that most nuclear of countries, is planning big cuts in nuclear power. If Britain persists with nuclear, it will be swimming against the international tide.

SUMMARY

. Britain’s old nuclear power stations supply a fifth of electricity supplies and are a significant part of the energy system. However, their share of the mix has been gradually shrinking as renewables have grown. Significantly, seven of the eight nuclear sites will have shut by the end of the 2020s as they reach the end of their economic lives, with just Sizewell B in Suffolk continuing to operate. The government has also committed to shutting the country’s last seven coal plants by 2025 at the latest.

. So far, the only nuclear project to get the go ahead is EDF Energy’s Hinkley Point C, a 3.2GW plant in Suffolk that will power around 6million homes. It is officially due to begin supplying electricity in 2025, but similar projects in Finland and France have run many years over schedule. EDF has warned the plant may not be generating until 2027. Originally there were plans for five nuclear plants to meet Britain’s new nuclear ambitions. But three – Moorside, Wylfa and Oldbury – have been shelved. That leaves Sizewell C, backed by the Chinese state firm CGN, and the 2.3GW, Chinese-led Bradwell B in Essex (in which EDF has a one third stake).

. The UK government negotiated a guaranteed price for power for 35 years with EDF Energy for Hinkley. Hitachi was trying to do the same, with the government taking a multibillion-pound stake, but could not make the numbers work.

Attention will now turn to a new method of financing known as the regulated asset base model (RAB). The UK government plans to give more details later this year. An RAB model is one in which the regulator sets fixed costs and fixed returns for a nuclear developer to overcome the huge upfront cost of constructing plant and the years-long delay for investors reaping a return.

. No new nuclear plants would pose a challenge to carbon targets, but it is unlikely to threaten energy supplies, given the speed with which gas plants and windfarms could be built. Offshore wind power could fill the gap, and more inshore windfarms and solar power would help. The intermittent nature of those technologies could be addressed to a degree by more batteries and other storage, imports and technologies that allow big energy users – and maybe homes – to reduce consumption at peak times in return for a financial incentive.

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Arts, Environment, Government, Health, Science, Society, United Nations

How Can We Deal With Global Population Growth?

POPULATION GROWTH

Intro: With population numbers projected to continue to swell over the course of the twenty-first century, there are some pressing questions that remain unresolved. We should turn to science in search of solutions to Earth’s depleting space and resources.

THE subject of global population growth can be an emotive one, and many accounts of rising populations are accompanied by dire warnings of impending catastrophe. Concern about population growth is by no means a modern phenomenon, though. In 1798, the British cleric Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principles of Population, in which he addressed the potential problems that could develop due to the rapidly rising population in Britain at that time, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. He argued that populations had the capacity to grow more quickly than food production, writing, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” It would become a highly influential concept and one that would reach beyond demography alone – acknowledged, for instance, by Charles Darwin as having been one of the key ideas that led to his theory of evolution by natural selection, which described competition for resources as being one of the driving forces behind evolution.

The Population Bomb

In 1968, the American entomologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote in Malthusian terms in The Population Bomb of an upcoming catastrophe, in which many millions of people would die of starvation. Though not the first publication to examine the so-called “population problem”, its popularity introduced the issue to a much wider audience. It was followed in 1972 by the even more widely read The Limits to Growth, a collaborative report commissioned by the political think tank the Club of Rome. Both works were relatively sober, informed assessments, but were followed by a range of sensationalist books and articles, containing various prophecies of doom – which remain a feature of environmental discussion today.

Paul Ehrlich

Paul Ehrlich, whose book brought the population problem to the attention of a much wider audience.

In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote that the Earth could support two billion people before disaster ensued – a figure that had already been exceeded by more than a billion at the time the book was published. Now, almost 50 years later, the predicted catastrophic collapse has not occurred (at least not yet anyway). In July 2015, the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs in New York released the annual revision to its 2010 population census, providing estimates of the global population over the course of this century. According to this, the global population was 7.3 billion in 2015, and was expected to continue growing, reaching 10 billion by the middle of the century and 11.2 billion by 2100, by which time the rate of growth is expected to have slowed – before stabilising and perhaps beginning to fall.

By no means do all demographers agree with the UN figures. The wide variation between experts’ population predictions is a consequence of the number of unknown factors involved, and because in reality people rarely behave exactly as expected. But, if we take the UN figures as a reasonable estimate, over the next three to four decades an additional 3 billion people will inhabit the world, and the total figure will be five times higher than Paul Ehrlich’s estimated carrying capacity of the Earth.

The Impact of Science

One of the ways science has helped to avert potential disasters is through agricultural research aimed at increasing food produce. One of the best-known examples of this is the Green Revolution on the Indian subcontinent, which began in the 1960s – a period when India and Pakistan were experiencing population booms that appeared to be outstripping the capacity of the region’s agriculture to produce enough food for everyone. New varieties of high-yielding wheat, developed by the American agronomist Norman Borlaug at a research station in Mexico, were transferred to the subcontinent, greatly increasing agricultural productivity and averting the potential for widespread famine.

Subsequent research produced new varieties of other staple crops, including rice, and these, together with the use of new technologies in the shape of farm machinery, fertilisers and pesticides, have had a dramatic impact on the amount of food produced – even if these technical advancements can come with social and environmental costs. It has become clear that new technology on its own is not a complete solution, though, and extreme poverty can lead to people remaining malnourished despite there being no local food shortages, through not having land to grow crops themselves or the means to buy enough food.

Science can also help in the field of healthcare, through the development of medical technology and drugs that address the particular problems causing high levels of child mortality, which are often encountered in those parts of the world where high rates of population growth occur. When such technologies are combined with more widely available healthcare services, the resulting reduction in child mortality often leads to lower rates of population growth. Put simply, women have fewer children in places where those children are more likely to survive into adulthood, and so population numbers gradually begin to stabilise.

Hope For The Future

The UN figures show that growth rates have already slowed down in many parts of the world. Europe, North and South America and Oceania now show no growth at all, and nor does much of Asia, with the notable exceptions of India and Pakistan. About three-quarters of the population growth set to occur over the course of this century is projected to be on the African continent, and this rise will almost all be as a consequence of people living longer, rather than an increase in the number of children being born. This statistic is key to gaining an understanding of how population growth should slow down and eventually stabilise in the future; improvements in healthcare initially lead to a rapid rise in life expectancy, so, rather than a rising population being caused by more children being born, it is actually a consequence of there being an increased number of older people. Over time, the initial rapid increase in life expectancy will tend to level off and, at this point, the population will stop rising as well.

 

IN the future, then, there will be many more people in the world, and it does appear that population growth is set to continue in the long term. The challenges ahead are to grow enough food, to alleviate extreme poverty and to provide adequate healthcare for the entire global population.

Alternative Theories

UNLIKE the doom merchants who have until recently dominated the public debate on population growth, the Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling describes himself as a possibilist, believing not only that the Earth can support 11 billion people, but that all of them can enjoy a good quality of life. He appears to be on a mission to make population statistics entertaining as well as informative, making use of dynamic graphics to illustrate his lectures and enlivening proceedings with plenty of comical jokes, mostly at his own expense.

To take just one example of many, Rosling describes the washing machine as being one of the great inventions of the twentieth century because of the impact it has had on freezing women from domestic drudgery, allowing them the time to do other things, like going to university or by seeking an alternative career. As he points out, the statistics show that as women become better educated, they gain more control over their lives – over the age at which they start a family and the number of children they have. Where they have the choice, many women opt to have children later in life than their mothers and grandmothers did, and often prefer to have two or three children rather than five or six. This phenomenon has been seen around the world and has often occurred over the course of a single generation. Rosling is not trying to say that this is entirely caused by the washing machine, rather using it to illustrate the point that the empowerment of women has been one of the driving forces behind the observed reduction in population growth rates.

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