Elisabeth Jeffries

Wednesday

Elisabeth Jeffries

Can we pump carbon back beneath the North Sea?

Few people have ever seen them, except perhaps from a plane. Yet these huge, remote structures have stood planted in the North Sea, buffeted for decades by wind and wave, pumping cash into the UK economy. They are the hundreds of oil and gas platforms which churn out the equivalent of 2.8 million barrels of oil per day. But there is a strong likelihood that the North Sea will within a generation return to the unbroken grey expanse of the mid-1960s, when the first offshore rig struck gas. If the government’s predictions are accurate, most of the rigs will have tumbled by 2035. Approximately 470 installations are to be decommissioned, including up to 14,000km of pipelines, 15 onshore terminals and around 5,000 wells.

Wednesday

Elisabeth Jeffries

Are electric cars really the next big step for mankind?

Putting Lord Mandelson into an electric Mini may not seem to bear much comparison with putting a man on the moon, but there are interesting parallels. In 1961, the US government embarked on the Apollo space programme, with the ambition of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. By 1969, it had achieved exactly what it set out to do. But it was a risky project, with no guarantee of success. To land on the moon, scientists had to solve three problems: how to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft, how to work outside a spacecraft, and how to survive prolonged periods of time in space.

Saturday

Elisabeth Jeffries

Carbon footprints

There’s a modern myth that food miles are bad. But measuring the carbon footprints of food items produces surprising results. We discover, for example, that bringing New Zealand lamb to our table — according to information collated by Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute — can generate fewer emissions than if the Sunday joint originated in Wales, due to higher emissions from UK feed and rearing methods. And it’s not cool to buy roses from Dutch hothouses. We should fly them in from Kenya, where they grow in the sun.

Wednesday

Elisabeth Jeffries

Greener than thou: the carbon tax contest

Labour’s climate change levy has led to lower emissions, says Elisabeth Jeffries, but can the Conservative alternative yield better results — or command business support? There are many ways to eat a potato: chopped into chips and deep-fried, baked in the oven or slivered as crisps. Not many consumers care about the dozens of ways to cut down on the energy used to cook, store or produce it, such as buying a super-efficient freezer. But it is a question many retailers and food suppliers have been trying to unpeel. McCain chips installed three new wind turbines and an anaerobic digestion facility (which processes food waste to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas methane) at its Whittlesey plant in the East Midlands.