February 2012 Archives

If it came down to a choice between the two, the public would be fairly evenly split between supporting a third runway at Heathrow or a new airport in the Thames Estuary, according to a poll by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. 

A quarter of the 1,000 people asked said they would favour the expansion of Heathrow as a way to tackle the UK's airport capacity crunch, while 21% said they would back the new estuary hub. 

When asked if they believed the government was right to block Heathrow's third runway, 35% thought it was the right decision and 32% the wrong one.

Meanwhile the ES reports that Ken Livingstone (pictured) has made the Thames Estuary airport a central focus of his campaign for re-election as Mayor of London. 

Livingstone reportedly said current mayor Boris Johnson would cause the "total collapse of the west London economy" if he succeeded with the plans.

More detail has emerged about next week's meeting in Moscow of nations opposed to the European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Twenty-six countries are expected to take part in the meeting to discuss joint action against the EU's emissions trading scheme, which they say creates competitive distortion and breaks international law. Until now, all we knew was that were going to discuss taking "retaliatory measures" against the ETS. But a draft agenda has been leaked, which outlines some of the measures under consideration. According to the NY Times, those include:

Interesting blog post from one of the US Department of Defense's energy advisors, Kate Brandt, this weekend on how the EU ETS could kick start the American advanced biofuels industry. 

The industry has made some significant process, Brandt points out, but there are still no commercial scale advanced biofuel plants in the US. (Advanced biofuels, or "drop in" fuels, can be used in existing engines, but are cleaner burning than traditional jet fuels - oh and they can be made from things like municipal waste, hence the lovely photo of a dump in Mumbai.)

Now, she argues, airlines have an incentive to purchase biofuels to avoid paying a tax every time they fly to and from Europe. "In the short-term, airlines may see passing on the cost of the ETS to the customer as the easy solution but this would be a very unpopular long term solution."

On a related note, this paper prepared for the 27th roundtable on sustainable development, held at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) headquarters last week, has a good breakdown of the arguments for and against biofuels, including advanced biofuels.