news20090909gdn

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Air transport]
Cost of air travel 'must rise to deter people from flying'
Government advisory body on climate change says ticket prices should rise to ensure emissions fall to 2005 levels
David Batty and Caroline Davies
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 September 2009 08.09 BST Article history


The cost of air travel must rise to an extent that it deters people from flying and to compensate developing countries for the damage it does to the environment, according to the government's advisory body on climate change.

Ticket prices should rise to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels and to raise tens of billions of pounds in flight taxes to help developing nations adapt to climate change, for example, by building new flood defences, the committee on climate change says.

An agreement to cap aviation emissions must be reached at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen if countries are to meet targets to combat global warming, the committee said in a letter to ministers. Rich countries should take the lead, ensuring their aviation emissions were no higher or lower than they were in 2005 by 2050.

It says airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting that emissions cut, the Times reports.

In advance of the December meeting in Denmark, the committee says any deal to reduce emissions from flying should be "ambitious", and the aim should be for no less than the EU's current plan, which require a 5% reduction in emissions from 2013 to 2020.

The committee could challenge the government's decision to approve a third runway at Heathrow airport in order to reduce C02 emissions sufficiently to meet that target, according to the paper.

While the cost per passenger of compensating developing countries for climate change would initially be small, it would eventually rise to a level that would deter people from flying.

The average passenger would pay under £10 extra per return ticket when aviation joins the European Union C02 emissions trading scheme in 2012, the Times says.

The scheme will give airlines free carbon permits covering 85% of their emissions but they will have to buy permits for the remaining 15%. The committee on climate change says airlines should have to pay for all their emissions, which would more than double the cost to passengers.

Writing to Lord Adonis, the transport secretary and Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, the committee's chief executive, David Kennedy, said the measures would not force people to fly less.

"It is vital that an agreement capping global aviation emissions is part of a Copenhagen deal," he said.

"We are calling for a cap that would not require people to fly less than today, but would constrain aviation emissions growth going forward," he said.

"Such a cap together with deep emissions cuts in other sectors would limit the risk of dangerous climate change and the very damaging consequences for people here and in other countries that this would have."

Without steps to stop growth in aviation emissions, planes could account for as much as a fifth of all CO2 produced worldwide by 2050, the committee warned.

The BBC reports that if aviation fails to reduce its C02 emissions the rest of the economy may have to make deeper cuts of 90% by 2050 - 10% more than currently planned.

The committee said it supported plans to include flying in the EU-wide emissions trading scheme, which would give the aviation industry some carbon credits to cover some of its output and let them purchase allowances from greener companies to make up the shortfall. But in the long term real cuts must be made, rather than rich countries relying on offsetting their emissions by purchasing credits from poorer countries under international trading schemes.

A government spokesman said: "The UK now has the toughest climate change regime for aviation of any country in the world and we will bring international pressure for aviation emissions to be part of global deal on climate change at the Copenhagen conference later this year."

A Greenpeace climate change campaigner, Vicky Wyatt, said any government would find it "almost impossible" to build a third runway at Heathrow if they followed the committee's advice.


[Environment > Climate change]--- reprinted
Japan's new prime minister promises ambitious greenhouse gas cuts
Yukio Hatoyama seeks to reduce CO2 emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 September 2009 13.57 BST Article

Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has promised to make ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, months before world leaders meet for crucial climate change talks.

Hatoyama, who will take office next week, said Japan would seek to reduce CO2 emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, but said the target would be contingent on a deal involving all major emitters in Copenhagen in December.

"We can't stop climate change just by setting our own emissions target," he said at a forum in Tokyo. "Our nation will call on major countries around the world to set aggressive goals."

Hatoyama will discuss the initiative, which is far more ambitious than the equivalent 8% cut unveiled by the outgoing government in June, at a UN meeting on climate change in New York this month.

Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister for climate and energy, described the plan as a bold step forward. "For a long time, everybody has been waiting for everybody else to move in the negotiations. Japan has taken a bold step forward and set an ambitious target. I hope this will inspire other countries to follow suit."

The commitment places Japan firmly among countries committed to aggressive CO2 emissions cuts, despite mounting opposition from business and industry groups, which claim the measures will put jobs at risk.

"We have concerns about its feasibility in view of the impact on economic activities and employment, as well as the enormousness of the public burden," said Satoshi Aoki, the chairman of the Japan automobile manufacturers' association.

Harufumi Mochizuki, the outgoing vice minister of trade and industry, said Hatoyama had chosen a "very tough road ahead for the Japanese people and economy".

Hatoyama said his plan would create jobs in sectors such as renewables and manufacturing amid an expected rise in demand for solar energy, home renovations and energy-efficient cars and consumer electronics.

"There are cautious people who worry that it will hurt the economy and livelihoods, but I think it will change things for the better," he said.

To help achieve the reduction, Japan will create a domestic emissions trading market and introduce a "feed-in" tariff – financial rewards for industries that expand their use of renewable energy sources.

The Copenhagen talks will be dominated by attempts to persuade China, India and other big emerging economies to sign up to emissions targets.

Kim Carstensen, the head of the WWF's global climate initiative, said: "The decision by an important player such as Japan to do more and get serious about low carbon future can help break the deadlock between developed and developing countries.

"The climate negotiations are at a critical point and we need urgent progress to get a fair, ambitious and binding deal in Copenhagen."

The target brings Japan, the world's fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, alongside the EU, which is committed to a 20% cut by 2020 from 1990 levels and 30% if other nations agree to match the target. But it is still at the lower end of the 25-40% cuts recommended by the UN climate change panel.

Hatoyama will have to reconcile his bold initiative with election pledges to eliminate road tolls and petrol surcharges.

As host of the Kyoto summit in 1997, Japan is keen to reposition itself at the forefront of the battle against climate change. Its emissions rose 2.3% in the year to March 2008, putting its 16% above its 2012 Kyoto target.

Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN climate change secretariat, said: "With such a target, Japan will take on the leadership role that industrialised countries have agreed to take in climate change abatement."

news20090909sa

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Environment > Green Technology]
September 8, 2009
Threat Down Below: Polluted Caves Endanger Water Supplies, Wildlife
Caves are home to some of the planet's most unusual creatures and important drinking water supplies. Now these underground resources are being polluted by surface activities, ranging from sewage spills to old factories.
By Scott Streater and Environmental Health News

The Bluestone River that straddles the Virginia-West Virginia border has long been a popular trout-fishing spot, as well as a source of drinking water for nearby towns.

So Virginia environmental officials were stunned when routine sampling turned up something disturbing: Carp in the river were loaded with industrial compounds called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Seeking to unravel the mystery, they followed the river all the way up to the entrance of a rural cave in West Virginia.

The groundwater inside Beacon Cave had PCB concentrations that “were just astronomically high,” said Nick Schaer, a geologist with the West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection who helped conduct the sampling. “We were getting numbers many times higher than health-based limits.”

The likely suspect sits directly over the cave--a long-abandoned electric manufacturing plant.
Beacon Cave's pollution is a graphic illustration of the growing problem of surface contamination polluting caves around the country, including some located in national parks and forests.

“The problem is extensive and it’s serious,” said Tom Aley, an expert in groundwater hydrology and president of the Ozark Underground Laboratory in southwest Missouri.

Examples abound, including raw sewage flowing into Shalers Brook inside Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, an animal feedlot in eastern Missouri washing waste down sinkholes into Crevice Cave and dirt runoff from logging activity choking Whispering Canyon Cave at Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

“When caves are threatened, the threats almost always come from surface activity,” said David Culver, a cave expert and biologist at American University in Washington, D.C. “People need to be aware that there’s a subterranean ecosystem and that what happens on the surface impacts these unique ecosystems in a very real way."

The problem is gaining attention because nearly one-third of the drinking water supplies in the United States come from underground streams and springs originating inside caves or passing through them.

In some ways, pollution of caves is inevitable due to the cracks and fissures in the rock surrounding them.

Karst formations, which include caves, sinkholes and other subterranean formations, are slowly carved out of limestone by rainwater. Cracks in this rock allow anything that’s dumped on the ground to travel unfiltered to the bottom.

These karst formations are extensive, lying underneath as much as a quarter of the continental United States.

“It’s a big issue in highly developed karst areas where you have lots of groundwater coming through,” said William Elliott, a cave biologist at the Missouri Dept. of Conservation who has studied caves across North America.

In addition to the threat to drinking water, polluted caves jeopardize some of the Earth's most unusual wildlife, too.

The estimated 50,000 caves in the United States support about 1,100 animal, plant and insect species, almost all of which could not survive outside the cave environment, Culver said. Troglobites are blind animals such as fish and insects that spend their entire lives inside caves, evolving with special senses that allow them to survive in total darkness.

In addition, numerous other species, such as bats, raccoons, cave crickets, salamanders, lizards and snakes, use caves as temporary rest areas or as places to breed and raise their young.

Many cave species are included on the nation’s endangered species list, primarily due to poor water quality.

Aley said the threatened animals should send a warning to people whose drinking water comes from streams flowing through caves.

“If pollution is killing off the snails and arthropods, that ought to be an appropriate warning to the people who also make use of that water. If they can’t live well and prosper, why should we expect people who use the same water to live well and prosper?” he said.

Widespread cave pollution has led some experts to ask whether pollution has played a role in white-nose syndrome – a mysterious disease that has killed more than a million bats in the Northeastern United States.

It’s unlikely pollution caused the disease that’s spreading through caves, said David Blehert, a microbiologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this summer began analyzing bat tissue to determine whether PCBs and other chemicals, particularly those used in pesticides, are contributing to the malady.

“Surface contaminants … could be exacerbating the problem” by weakening immune systems, said Anne Secord, an environmental contaminants specialist with the federal wildlife agency in Cortland, N.Y., who is leading the study. PCBs, for example, are known to suppress the immune cells of animals.

Also, common pesticides such as atrazine, which some studies have linked to altered hormones and feminized wildlife, have long been measured in underground caves and springs.

A common source of cave pollution is human waste. World-famous Mammoth Cave, visited by nearly half a million people a year, was contaminated with sewage from a nearby hotel. Salmonella, most likely from a faulty septic system, was also measured inside nearby Owl Cave.

The National Park Service installed a regional sewage treatment plant in the late 1990s.

In Alaska, dirt runoff from timber operations might have contained diesel fuel and other petroleum products that polluted cave streams and salmon runs in the Tongass National Forest, as well as drinking water sources downstream.

In a rural area of northeast Oklahoma, Twin Cave has been contaminated with 48 compounds, including banned insecticides chlordane and DDT. The suspected cause: illegal dumping of waste down a nearby sinkhole.

“It’s out of sight, out of mind,” Aley said. “There’s this perception we live on top of an infinite filter and that what you dump on the ground will somehow be cleaned up.”

Caves are among the least protected environments in the world, said Penelope Boston, a geo-microbiologist and associate director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute.

The health of cave species and that of underground water are “intimately” connected, said Boston, who also directs the Cave and Karst Studies Program at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Karst aquifers are particularly vulnerable to surface pollution. Unlike sandstone aquifers that sit underneath thick layers of rock and sediment that allow filtering of pollutants, they are made of hard rock such as limestone and gypsum, creating a “super-highway” to the subsurface, she said.

“They are uniquely easy to pollute,” she said.

But that same rapid movement that makes Karst aquifers so susceptible to pollution can also help restore them.

Once a source has been identified and the pollution cleaned, the caves – and the life inside – will recover, said Elliott, the cave biologist with the Missouri Dept. of Conservation.

Elliott points to Hidden River Cave in Kentucky, a popular tourist attraction that was closed in 1943 because it was polluted by municipal sewage and wastes from a creamery and chrome-plating plant. By the mid-1980s, a new wastewater treatment plant was built, and by 1995, many of the animals such as cavefish and crayfish that had vanished returned to the section that was once heavily polluted.

“The cave no longer stinks, and we have tours again,” said Aley, the groundwater hydrology expert at Ozark Underground Laboratory. “When the water was so polluted, there was no life. Cave fish and crayfish were gone. We now have both back. This is a success story.”

That’s the desired outcome for those working to restore Beacon Cave, its underground streams and the waterways it feeds. The problems, however, persist.

The rural West Virginia cave is popular with climbers and valued for its underground stream as well as a slow-moving whirlpool.

Tests of the Bluestone River watershed conducted in July by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that PCB concentrations are dropping, but they still exceed state water standards.

news20090909sn

[SN Today] from [ScienceNews]

[SN Tosay]
50 million chemicals and counting
By Janet Raloff
Web edition : Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Bring out the helium balloons, confetti and a noisemaker or two. Today, researchers the world over have reason to raise a toast. This afternoon, the Chemical Abstracts Service — an American Chemical Society subsidiary — identified the 50 millionth compound known. Arylmethylidene heterocycle — the molecule that qualified for the momentous spot during the long holiday weekend — is a future candidate for reducing neuropathic pain.

Since 1907, the Columbus, Ohio-based Chem Abstracts has maintained a registry of all publicly disclosed chemicals. Over the years, this registry has become the definitive one-stop shopping site for tracking down any and every known compound, including the names for each (as some compounds have as many as 1,000 monikers), a compound’s structure and any general characteristics (such as melting point).

“Thirty years ago, we felt six or seven million substances might be about it,” says Roger Schenck, who manages content planning at Chem Abstracts. He says there had been a suspicion that once chemists had characterized all of these, his group might become little more than caretakers of a static database. However, chemical designers continue to keep his group plenty busy.

The 40 millionth compound that his organization identified was a synthetic analog to the anticancer drug taxol. To keep things simple, we’ll just refer to that member of the azulenobenzofuran family as 1073662-18-6 (its structure appears below). In the intervening nine months since that chemical was added to the database, Chem Abstracts has identified yet an additional 10 million novel chemicals.

To search for new candidates, Chem Abstracts’ staff pores over journal articles, data filed with 59 patent authorities around the world, commercial chemical suppliers’ catalogs and announcements, and reports surfacing on the Internet. In all, “we cover over 50 languages,” Schenck says.

For instance, Chem Abstracts noted that the 50 millionth entrant "was identified by [its] scientists in the Examples section of a nearly 200-page patent document" that was issued on Aug. 13, 2009. The molecule's formal name is a mouthful: (5Z)-5-[(5-Fluoro-2-hydroxyphenyl)methylene]-2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-4(5H)-thiazolone.

Tracking down each and every qualifying chemical has become a bit more than the chemists at Schenck's organization can manage on their own. Computers now sift through machine-readable files, so “we don’t have to manually review each one,” he explains. Good thing, too, since it’s hard to imagine how a staff of 1,300 people could collectively screen and then add some 36,000 new chemicals to the database every day — year in and year out — complete with files describing who developed or first found a chemical and when; citations detailing the chemical’s isolation, function and properties; a chemical structure for the molecule; and often magnetic-resonance or other characteristic spectra.

With 50 million novel compounds in this database, how can anyone find what they're looking for? Explains Schenck: “If someone knows a molecule’s name, they can search for that. Or if they even have a fragment of a name, we will look it up and find matches.” Input a known or suspected structure, he says, and if that chemical resides in the database, “we’ll get them an exact match. Or if someone only knows a piece of a structure, we can find all of the things in our collection that have that same piece in them.”

As you might expect, patent attorneys and patent examiners are key users of this encyclopedic, cross-indexed list of chemicals. So are synthetic chemists looking to cook up the next boffo plastic, alloy or pharmaceutical.

This summer, my daughter and her adviser worked in a materials science lab as part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Their goal: the development of novel quaternary diamondlike semiconductor crystals. My enterprising undergraduate successfully cooked up two such crystals possessing never-before-reported recipes. She was promised first authorship on a paper that reports their structures.

So I asked Schenck: When a paper comes out describing my daughter’s crystals, will each of them get added to Chem Abstracts’ database? “You bet,” he said, “with her name on them.”

I passed the information along to her over the weekend. And her typically nuanced response: “Sweeeeeet!”


[SN Today]
Dopamine primes kidneys for a new host
Transplant patients may fare better if brain-dead organ donors receive an infusion of the compound before surgery
By Nathan Seppa
Web edition : Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Giving dopamine infusions to brain-dead organ donors while they still have a heartbeat seems to fortify their kidneys against the rigors of transplant, a new study shows. Patients receiving a kidney from such donors are less likely to require multiple sessions of blood-cleansing dialysis immediately after the transplant operation, researchers report in the Sept. 9 Journal of the American Medical Association.

What’s more, treating a donor with dopamine seems to prevent some of the damage to kidneys that happens while the organs wait to be transplanted, the scientists find.

Brain-dead donors supply the majority of kidneys for transplant. Such donors often have suffered trauma or brain hemorrhage and have no chance of regaining brain function.

Although dopamine is best known as a neurotransmitter that guides brain signaling, the chemical has been used in intensive care units to stabilize blood pressure in patients, says study coauthor Benito Yard, an immunologist at the University Clinic of Mannheim in Germany. Dopamine can also quell inflammation and preserve blood vessel cells, both of which might benefit a kidney headed for transplant.

In the new study, 122 brain-dead organ donors received infusions of dopamine while 137 similar donors did not. All donors had a heartbeat when they received the dopamine, but they had no brain function as measured by electroencephalography and they needed a ventilator to breathe.

After each organ transplant, the scientists monitored the health of the kidney recipient. Of recipients getting dopamine-exposed kidneys, 25 percent needed multiple kidney dialysis sessions during the week after transplant. Of those getting a kidney not exposed to dopamine, 35 percent needed the multiple sessions.

“This is a big deal for the recipient,” Yard says. A need for dialysis indicates that a donor kidney hasn’t started to filter blood yet. “The sooner it starts to function, the better it will be,” for the patients’ long-term prospects, he says.

In this study, recipients who needed multiple dialysis sessions in the week after surgery were more than three times as likely to have their new kidney fail within three years as were people who got only one dialysis session or none.

Dopamine may be particularly protective in kidneys that face delays before transplant. It usually takes several hours or even a day to get a kidney from donor to recipient, during which time the organ must be kept cold to slow tissue damage. In patients receiving a kidney that had been in storage for more than 17 hours — which was one-fourth of the kidneys in this study — 91 percent of dopamine-exposed kidneys were still functioning three years later compared with only 74 percent of kidneys whose donors didn’t get dopamine. In addition to preserving blood vessel health, Yard says, dopamine exposure before transplant seems to mitigate inflammation in the kidney that can attract the attention of the recipient’s immune system and raise rejection risk.

“I think this study is very elegant, especially since dopamine is routinely used in intensive care medicine,” says Duska Dragun, a transplant nephrologist at Charité Hospital in Berlin. “At least in Europe, it is very difficult to estimate how long a kidney will be in cold storage,” she says. Dragun argues that the new trial is good enough to warrant use of dopamine for kidney transplants.

news20090909nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 8 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.889
News
First swine flu death on the Galapagos
Spread of virus shows islands no longer in evolutionary isolation.
Henry Nicholls

Swine flu has reached the Galapagos Islands, and the first human fatality there has caused widespread alarm, threatening to undermine a booming tourist industry — mixed news for conservation efforts on the Ecuadorian archipelago.

Since the middle of August, when the first case of pandemic H1N1 influenza on the Galapagos was confirmed, the population of Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz — the island with the biggest human population — has been on high alert.

Bars and nightclubs along the main strip were among the first businesses to close and for almost two weeks all activities in the town's schools, colleges and universities were suspended in an effort to prevent further spread of the disease.

In spite of these measures, the virus caused its first death on the islands when a 29-year-old man with swine flu died of a heart attack on 28 August.

"The major problem in Galapagos is that we don't have the hospitals and the doctors to help," says Jaime Navas, a natural history guide and friend of the deceased.

"If you get into trouble over there, there is no chance to get out."

Mainland flight

This fear has led Navas to move his young family from the islands to the city of Guayaquil on the coast of mainland Ecuador, where the hospitals are better equipped to deal with swine flu.

"There are a lot of people [with similar concerns] that have come to the mainland over the last two weeks," he says.

The governor of the islands, Jorge Torres, and the director of the Galapagos National Park, Edgar Muñoz, have both been quoted in recent news reports claiming that swine flu is unlikely to affect the buoyant tourism industry.

But Navas is not so sure. Tourists are thinking twice about coming and residents are thinking hard about leaving, he says. "This is a serious thing for Galapagos."

Tourism is a mixed blessing for the Galapagos. It generates wealth but this fuels expansion of the human population, placing ever-increasing pressure on the islands' fragile ecosystems.

Viral defences
Earlier this year, on 28 April, Muñoz and other local officials agreed on several protective measures, including mandatory use of gloves and masks by everyone working at ports and airports.

The most recent report from the Ecuadorian ministry of health, issued on 28 August, said there had been 1,001 confirmed cases of swine flu in the country, 16 of them in the Galapagos. There were 44 deaths throughout Ecuador, not including the Galapagos fatality. On Sunday, the chief of security of President Rafael Correa also died of the disease, and today the ministry of health sent 40 doctors to the islands with respirators and antiviral drugs.

Simon Goodman, a conservation geneticist at the University of Leeds, UK, has recently monitored how frequently mosquitoes are introduced to the archipelago on board the twice-daily flights to the Galapagos1. For him, the arrival of swine flu highlights just how hard it is seal the islands off from the rest of the world. "The previous geographic isolation of Galapagos is completely eroded now," he says.

There is one consolation: the H1N1 swine flu strain is extremely unlikely to affect any of the native fauna for which the Galapagos are famous, says Kristien Van Reeth, an animal virologist at Ghent University in Belgium. "So far, the infectivity of the [swine flu] virus has only been confirmed for pigs, humans, ferrets and macaques."

In the unlikely event that the virus did break out from the human population in the Galapagos, it would find it easier to spread to another mammal, says Van Reeth. So, she says, swine flu is not something that should concern the reptiles and birds that dominate Galapagos life. "I have never heard of reptiles with influenza."

References
1.Bataille, A. et al. Proc. R. Soc. B published online. doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.0998 (2009).


[naturenews]
Published online 8 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/461153a
News
Cash crisis could ground NASA rocket
Crewed missions to the Moon are under threat, warns an expert panel.
By Eric Hand

A committee of aerospace engineers and scientists was poised to deliver its grim assessment of NASA's human space-flight programme to US President Barack Obama on 8 September. The panel's report will outline the stark choices Obama will face, which could include cancelling a new system of Moon-bound rockets and all but giving up on exploring space beyond the low Earth orbit of the International Space Station (ISS).

"The bottom line is, they concluded that there's not enough money in the current budget to do anything useful in human space flight," says Marcia Smith, president of the Space and Technology Policy Group, a consultancy based in Arlington, Virginia, and former director of the Space Studies Board at the US National Research Council.

In May, Obama ordered the committee to review the current space policy set by former president George W. Bush, with its "vision" of building a Moon base as a prelude to sending people to Mars. The committee was tasked with assessing new scenarios — including using the ISS past its scheduled de-orbit in 2016 — while keeping to strict budget guidelines. Led by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, the ten-member committee has not yet released its report, but public discussions this summer have made some of the options clear.

Given the budget constraints, the choices weren't pretty. In Obama's 2010 budget request, NASA's exploration programme, known as Constellation, would receive about US$6 billion per year — about $1 billion less than Bush asked for in his 2009 budget, and several billion less than what was slated in previous budgets (see chart). "The Bush budget stressed the system, but the Obama budget, if left as is, breaks it," says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC. One analysis by the committee showed that if the current plan and budget are kept, astronauts won't even leave low Earth orbit until 2028.

So the panel looked at alternatives, narrowing down some 3,000 permutations to just a handful for presidential digestion. In several scenarios, the Ares I rocket — one of two needed to take cargo and astronauts to the Moon — would be cancelled. Instead, money would be poured into commercial space companies, such as Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, California, and Orbital Sciences in Dulles, Virginia, which are already trying to build rockets to take cargo to the ISS. But the committee also seems inclined to support commercial rockets that could ferry people into space, says Smith.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin says there are risks not just in making a crewed commercial rocket a reality, but also in ceding the capability for space travel — traditionally held by the US government — to the private sector. "I am not a fan of attempts to rely on such a capability before it actually exists," says Griffin, now a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He says he would also be disappointed if Ares I were cancelled, not so much for the $6 billion that has already been spent on the rocket and its Orion crew capsule, but because he still believes that Ares I is the cheapest way to get past low Earth orbit when paired with its heavy-lift launch companion Ares V. The system, he says, "has the sole failure of costing more than President Obama was willing to provide in the budget".

The committee found that extensive human exploration of the Moon and a direct trip to Mars are not feasible. With a little budgetary leeway, and with the Ares I money put into developing an alternative heavy-lift rocket, the committee determined that there could eventually be a 'deep space' option. Such possibilities could include visits to asteroids, flybys of the Moon and planets, and trips to Lagrangian points — the gravity wells in the Earth–Sun system where some telescopes are situated.

The committee found many ways to extend the operations of the ISS to 2020 in order to satisfy international agreements. What is not obvious is whether, after spending $2.5 billion a year to service the ISS in coming years, there would be money for much else. "I dislike pretending that we have goals that are far-reaching and frontier-oriented when we're not willing to set aside money to achieve them," says Griffin.

Obama's 2010 budget guidance did include the caveat that additional money could be requested for the programme pending the Augustine committee's report. Congress, which is working to set those spending figures this autumn, has scheduled hearings on the report for mid-September. So although the committee's job will soon be over, some tough decisions — whether to argue for more money, or to accept a more limited programme — are still in store. "The more difficult job is going to be on the president's desk," says Smith.

news20090909nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 8 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/461158a
News
Toxicity testing gets a makeover
Europe aims to make chemical-exposure studies more predictive while using fewer animals.
By Alison Abbott

ROME

The European Commission has revealed details of a major new research programme to develop a modern, high-throughput approach to repeat-dose toxicity testing.

Pressure to launch such an effort arose because the commission had drafted conflicting pieces of legislation, which demanded more extensive safety testing of chemicals while also requiring less use of animals in those tests. The programme, says the commission, will help to reconcile these goals.

"Faster, cheaper and more reliable alternative methods will contribute to increased safety" while reducing the use of animals, says a commission communiqué issued in Rome last week at the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences, where the €25-million (US$36-million) programme was presented.

Two items of European legislation present particular dilemmas to industry. One is the 2006 Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances (REACH) directive, which requires retrospective testing of chemicals that are being marketed, to a point that many think overburdens existing testing capacities (see Nature 460, 1065; 2009). The other is the 2003 amendment to the 1976 cosmetics directive, which phases out all testing of cosmetic ingredients on animals by 2013. The legislation also applies to imported products marketed in Europe.

Now, in the first agreement of its kind, industry will match the commission's funds through Colipa, the consortium of Europe's cosmetics, toiletry and perfumery industries based in Brussels. The total €50-million pot represents the largest-ever injection of money into the development of alternative toxicity testing.

The cosmetics industry is not particularly happy about coughing up the money when the chemicals industry is not doing the same. "Of course it is not fair," says one top representative of a cosmetics company, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But the legislation itself is not fair — the science is not there."

{“The programme puts toxicology on a new basis.”}

No one expects the new programme to be more than a modest start to the massive effort needed to rapidly and reliably test, with minimal animal use, for all possible adverse consequences of prolonged exposure to chemicals. "It will take 10 or 20 years before this is going to be translated," says meeting co-organizer Thomas Hartung, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Baltimore, Maryland.

For instance, determining whether long-term exposure to a chemical causes cancer or neurological disease without using animals is much harder than the nearly completed work of replacing animals in single-exposure toxicity work. "You can't just go with a single endpoint — you have to know how the whole system works," says toxicologist Horst Spielmann of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin.

Advanced technology

The commission's call for projects intends to incorporate expertise in five areas not widely used in traditional toxicology. These include developing methods to reliably generate other types of human cells from stem cells, and developing cellular devices that simulate organs such as the heart, lungs or kidney. Other areas include systems biology and computational modelling.

Each area will be tackled by a single consortium of researchers. "We want to concentrate the money on the minimum number of labs who can do the work needed," says Jürgen Buesing, the commission official in charge of the programme.

Stem-cell researcher Jürgen Hescheler from the University of Cologne in Germany is one of those intending to apply for funding through the initiative. "The programme puts toxicology on a new basis and brings it into the right species: the human," he says.

A US initiative — the Tox21 programme coordinated by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health — is also taking a high-throughput, systems approach to toxicology. With $22 million for this year alone, it too aims to increase the predictive value of toxicity tests while reducing animal use, and is prioritizing chemicals most in need of testing. "It is critical that Tox21, and data generated in other countries, are used in Europe so that there is no duplication," says Spielmann, who is running a project under Europe's seventh framework programme for research to ensure just that.

In the meantime, scientists at the Rome meeting said that steps must be taken now to reduce the unnecessary use of animals. Bennard van Ravenzwaay, head of toxicology at the German chemicals giant BASF in Ludwigshafen, says that tests should be abandoned if they add negligible predictive value to the battery of experiments already required by regulatory agencies. Such checks include the two-generation test for reproductive toxicology, in which the second generation uses many animals without providing useful information; the mouse cancer test, which provides negligible additional information beyond the rat cancer test; and developmental neurotoxicity checks.

Regulatory authorities can also engage in "intelligent toxicity testing strategies" to reduce the number of chemicals that need full testing, says Kees van Leeuwen of TNO, the Netherlands' applied research organization in Zeist. "We can reduce which chemicals may not need a full battery of testing, by optimizing the use of information from similar chemicals," he says.

Buesing says that national agencies and industry should be prepared to extend funding of alternative methods in toxicology in the near future. "Otherwise," he says, "our €50 million will have been wasted."

news20090909bbc1

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 08:56 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 09:56 UK
Japan Democrats agree coalition
Japan's newly-elected Democratic Party (DPJ) has agreed to form a coalition with two smaller parties, officials from the three parties have said.

The deal with the New People's Party and the Social Democratic Party came after agreement was reached on a proposal to move a US base in Okinawa.

Despite winning a landslide victory in last month's election, the DPJ needs support in parliament's upper house.

DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama is set to be declared prime minister next week.

The DPJ victory on 30 August overturned five decades of near-unbroken rule by Japan's Liberal Democratic Party.

The DPJ won 308 seats of the 480-member lower house but needs the support of the smaller parties in the weaker upper house to ensure bills are not delayed.

"We've finally wrapped up talks. It's good we had a clean outcome. The three party leaders will meet in the afternoon and sign to confirm," said the DPJ secretary general, Katsuya Okada.

Talks had faltered on Tuesday over the wording of a proposal to move a US base in Okinawa and relocate some US troops out of Japan to the US territory of Guam, in the Pacific.

The DPJ has pledged that foreign policy should lean more towards Asia, but Mr Hatoyama has said the alliance with the US remains central to Japan's diplomacy.

Policy shifts

Mr Hatoyama is set to be voted in as prime minister on 16 September.

As well as his policy of increasing ties with his Asian neighbours, he has pledged to reduce bureaucrats' control over policy-making.

He has also promised to increase welfare provision, including child benefits, and cut greenhouse gas emissions.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 12:45 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 13:45 UK
Malays charged over cow protest
Six Malaysian Muslims have been charged with sedition for parading the severed head of a cow through the streets of Shah Alam in Selangor state last month.

The men were protesting against the building of a Hindu temple near a mosque in the area.

Some of the demonstrators stamped and spat on the cow's head.

The case has stoked tensions between Malaysia's Muslim majority and the Indian, mainly Hindu, minority to whom cows are considered sacred.

'Not an insult'

The six accused men were among a large group of people who marched from a mosque in Shah Alam, the capital of Selangor state, to the state chief minister's office on 28 August.

Their actions were recorded on video and uploaded onto the internet.

Twelve of the protesters were charged with illegal assembly, which could see them fined and jailed for up to a year.

Six were also charged with sedition - for promoting hostility between different groups - and could face an additional three years in jail.

Defence lawyer Salehuddin Saidin said his clients were carrying the cow head to illustrate the state government's stupidity - and did not intend to offend local Hindus.

"For Malays, the cow symbolises stupidity, not an insult to any other religion," Mr Salehuddin told the Associated Press.

But P Uthayakumar, a prominent Hindu activist, dismissed this argument as a "lame excuse", saying the protesters were "clearly inciting the Hindus".

The authorities in Selangor have now found an alternative site for the Hindu temple, further away from the mosque.

Indians - most of them Hindu - make up 9% of Malaysia's 27 million people.

Analysts say the protest reflects the increasingly difficult task facing Prime Minister Najib Razak, as he tries to calm ethnic and religious tensions.


[Middle East]
Page last updated at 12:35 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 13:35 UK
Iran 'closer to nuclear weapon'
Iran is moving closer to being able to make a nuclear bomb, the US envoy has told a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Glyn Davies told the meeting Iran was nearly or already in possession of enough low-enriched uranium to produce a bomb, if it was further enriched.

Iran denies seeking anything beyond a civilian nuclear power programme.

It says it will present a package of new proposals to the group of six world powers negotiating over its programme.

The negotiations are taking place as the IAEA - the UN nuclear watchdog - holds a week-long meeting in Vienna.

'Dangerous and destabilising'

"We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear weapons option," US envoy Mr Davies told the 35 nations on the IAEA board of governors.

{ANALYSIS
Peter Biles, world affairs correspondent, BBC News
There remains deep anxiety in the West about Iran's refusal to answer all the outstanding questions related to its nuclear programme.
Analysts say there is fairly broad consensus that Iran has conducted a process of "weaponisation". But at precisely what stage does Iran constitute a threat to the international community?
Israel is said to be arguing that a red line is crossed as soon as Iran has a "significant uncontained nuclear capability". In other words, it need not be the actual development of a nuclear bomb.
So the six major powers dealing with this - the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany - will be keen to know when Iran reaches "breakout capability", the wherewithal to produce a weapon.}

"Iran is now either very near or in possession already of sufficient low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon if the decision were made to further enrich it to weapons-grade."

He said this moved Iran "closer to a dangerous and destabilising possible break-out capacity" - the point at which it could create an atomic bomb.

On Tuesday, Iranian media reported that Tehran was preparing to present a new set of proposals to the global powers involved in talks over its nuclear programme - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the US - plus Germany.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told Fars new agency he hoped that "in the framework of this package we will be able to launch a new round of talks".

But some observers believe Tehran might just be stalling for time, reports the BBC's world affairs correspondent, Peter Biles.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is due to attend the UN General Assembly in New York later this month, and Iran's willingness to co-operate internationally is now under greater scrutiny than ever, he says.

Mixed report

The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said in the past that the threat posed by Iran is exaggerated. But on Monday he sounded a note of impatience, warning talks had reached "stalemate".

"It is essential that Iran substantively re-engage with the agency to clarify and bring to closure all outstanding issues," he said.

In its latest report, the IAEA said a visit to Iran's Natanz plant in August had noted a reduction in the number of centrifuges used to actively enrich uranium.

But it also accused Tehran of a lack of co-operation with the IAEA on Western intelligence allegations of weaponisation.

Iran is continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of the UN Security Council, saying it has a right to a nuclear power programme.

news20090909bbc2

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 10:19 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 11:19 UK
Australia to probe E Timor deaths
Australian police have launched a war crimes investigation into the deaths in East Timor in 1975 of the "Balibo Five" group of journalists.

In 2007, an Australian coroner found that they were executed by Indonesian special forces in the town of Balibo.

It is believed they were killed to stop them revealing details of an impending Indonesian invasion of East Timor.

Indonesia maintains the men were killed in crossfire. An official said Jakarta had no intention of reopening the case.

Successive Australian governments have accepted Indonesia's version of events.

In June, East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta - a Timorese resistance commander at the time - accused Indonesian soldiers of having tortured and deliberately killed the journalists.

"Allegations of war crimes committed overseas give rise to complex legal and factual issues that require careful consideration by law enforcement agencies before deciding to investigate," the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement.

Hard-hitting movie

The AFP said that if sufficient material was uncovered to show "criminality or a real possibility of criminality", it would ask Australia's chief prosecutor to consider whether war crimes charges should be laid.

"The standard of proof in a criminal proceeding is high, and differs from that of a coronial inquiry," it added.

The inquiry follows the recent release of a hard-hitting movie, Balibo, depicting the deaths of Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britons Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie and New Zealander Gary Cunningham.

The film shows them being shot on the orders of Indonesian army officers.

But Indonesia Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah told the BBC that for his country, the case was closed and the government would not reopen it.

He said an investigation would be very difficult anyway, as many of the witnesses to the events may no longer be alive.

The Indonesian government has not received notice from the AFP about the investigation and is seeking clarification on the issue.

An Australian coroner's investigation determined that the five men were murdered as they tried to surrender to Indonesian soldiers in the border town of Balibo.

The coroner recommended war crimes charges against several Indonesian special forces officers, including Yunus Yosfiah, a captain at the time who rose to the rank of general and served as information minister in the late 1990s.

He has admitted being involved in the Indonesian attack on Balibo, but denies involvement in the journalists' deaths.

Indonesian troops invaded East Timor shortly after Portugal withdrew in 1975, ending 450 years as its colonial ruler.

At least 100,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of Indonesia's 25-year occupation, which ended with East Timor's independence in 2002.


[South Asia]
Page last updated at 13:39 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 14:39 UK
EU trio call for UN Afghan summit
British, French and German leaders have urged the UN to hold a major international conference on Afghanistan's future by the year's end.

British PM Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the plea by letter to the UN secretary general.

They called for a meeting to discuss the aftermath of the Afghan elections.

New prospects and goals should be set in relation to governance, security, law and development, the trio said.

Timelines for handing responsibility to Afghans were also needed, they said.

The letter was made public by the French president's office on Wednesday.

'Benchmarks and timelines'

The call comes amid increasing violence in Afghanistan and mounting concern in Britain, France and Germany over the Nato operation there.

A spokesman for the British prime minister said that London had offered to help organise the conference.

It is envisaged that it will take place in two phases before the end of the year.

The spokesman said that the first phase could be held in the Afghan capital, Kabul, depending on security considerations, while the second could be held in an "international city".

The letter sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says that "benchmarks and timelines" should be agreed "to formulate a joint framework for our transition phase in Afghanistan... to set our expectations of ownership and the clear view to hand over responsibility step-by-step to the Afghans, wherever possible".


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 00:42 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 01:42 UK
Underfunding shackles Nasa vision
Nasa needs its annual $18bn budget boosted by $3bn if astronauts are to conduct meaningful missions like trips to the Moon and beyond, a panel warns.
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

The panel, convened by the White House to review human spaceflight plans, has delivered its summary findings.

It says the spaceship and rocket programmes being developed to replace the shuttle are not presently viable.

The group has given President Barack Obama a series of options to help him shape the US space agency's future.

But the panel, led by retired aerospace executive Norm Augustine, says only a funding increase can truly get Nasa back on track.

"The committee finds that no plan compatible with the [Financial Year] 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way," it said.

"The committee further finds that it is possible to conduct a viable exploration program with a budget rising to about $3bn annually above the FY 2010 budget profile."

Longer delay

After the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, former President George W Bush proposed retiring the orbiter fleet in favour of using an Apollo-like capsule and rockets to take humans back to the Moon by 2020.

But this programme, known as Constellation, has had to battle technical and budgetary woes, meaning that its entry into service originally intended for 2012 will now be at least three years late.

And it is the Augustine panel's assessment that this delay will probably turn out to be longer still, perhaps leaving a gap of seven years between the final flight of the shuttle and the first mission of its successor.

"The committee did not identify any credible approach employing new capabilities that could shorten the gap to less than six years," the summary report notes.

"The only way to significantly close the gap is to extend the life of the shuttle programme."

This is one of the five broad options presented by the panel to President Obama.

Most involve the cancellation or modification of Constellation as currently envisaged. Most see a greater role for the private sector in launching astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

And most also call for an extension of the International Space Station project to 2020, well beyond the currently planned end point of 2016.

Nasa already has spent some $8bn developing Constellation. The proposed Ares I rocket and its crew carrier called Orion are both at an advanced stage.

Orion has just passed its preliminary design review and a test version of the Ares 1 stands ready at the Kennedy Space Centre for a demonstration flight in October.

Many commentators have speculated that the Ares 1 will be cancelled, but they suspect Orion will live on, perhaps launching on a vehicle with a design which relies more heavily on space shuttle technology.

The Augustine panel will deliver its full report later this month. President Obama will consult his new Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden and chief scientist John Holdren before responding. A new vision for Nasa is expected to be outlined in October.

news20090909bbc3

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Europe]
Page last updated at 11:36 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 12:36 UK
Turks swept away in flash floods
At least 23 people have been killed and a number of others are missing after flash floods in north-west Turkey.
"It seems a natural occasion to call for an international conference on Afghanistan before the end of this year right after the inauguration of the new Afghan government," the three leaders wrote.

The letter said that the conference could build on previous international gatherings on Afghanistan and a Nato strategic review.

'Wrong direction'

Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday he was concerned about growing public scepticism about the war effort in Afghanistan and urged the Kabul government to assume more responsibility for issues such as security and better governance.

"The public discourse on the effort in Afghanistan has started to go in the wrong direction," he said in remarks prepared for delivery at a military ceremony in the US.

"What we need is a clear step toward transition to Afghan leadership in all areas - security, health, education, development and governance," he said.

Mr Brown's spokesman said that military involvement in Afghanistan should not be seen as solely the responsibility of Britain and the US, and the conference would aim to ensure commitment from Nato partners in the future.

"This is a Nato initiative and therefore all the key players are involved and need to be encouraged to be involved," the spokesman said.

Britain, France and Germany all have troops serving in the international coalition that has been fighting the Taliban insurgency since the Islamic militia was driven out of Kabul in late 2001.


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 06:34 GMT, Wednesday, 9 September 2009 07:34 UK
Planes 'threaten climate targets'
The UK may have to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 90% by 2050 so the aviation sector can continue to grow.
By Roger Harrabin
BBC Environment Analyst

That is the warning from the government's official climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

It would mean even bigger cuts than the 80% drop on 1990 levels already planned for households and industry in Britain.

But the committee also says global aviation emissions should be capped during the forthcoming Copenhagen climate talks.

The committee was asked by government to advise on what should be done about emissions from aviation.

{It is vital that an agreement capping global aviation emissions is part of a Copenhagen deal
David Kennedy,
CCC chief executive}

In a letter to the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis and the Climate Secretary Ed Miliband, the committee says the aviation industry will have to cut emissions from planes back to their 2005 level by 2050.

That is much more permissive than the overall UK target of cutting emissions 80% on 1990 levels by 2050.

The failure of aviation to play its full part could mean that the rest of the economy has to reduce its emissions by 90% instead of 80%.

This 90% target is so ambitious that it might be easier for some sectors to make the leap to zero carbon emissions rather than trying to whittle down pollution decade by decade.

And some analysts think this might be an easier and cheaper approach than reaching a 90% cut in stages.

The options

The committee members see alternatives.

Planes, they say, might use biofuels or aviation might cut emissions below 2005 levels through new technology.

Plane operators might also be able to buy emissions permits in international emissions trading.

But all of these options carry difficulties of their own.

Biofuels compete with crops for land and are already in demand for fuelling cars.

It looks to be a huge task for aviation to restrict emissions to 2005 levels, even without trying to go further.

And the emissions trading system in which rich countries pay poor ones to clean up their pollution may prove to be a stop-gap solution which could be defunct by 2050.

The CCC's recommendations are designed to reduce aviation emissions in line with a global reduction in emissions of all greenhouse gases of 50% by 2050.

It says that, if left unchecked, global aviation could account for 15-20% of all the manmade CO2 produced in 2050.

The committee advises that:

All CO2 emissions from aviation should be capped, either through a global aviation deal or by including international aviation emissions in national emission reduction targets;
Any international agreement to reduce emissions should be no less than the EU's target of a 5% reduction in net emissions from 2013-2020;
Emissions allowances for aviation in the EU emissions trading scheme, says the CCC, should be fully auctioned to prevent windfall profits for airlines;
Funds should be found for radical innovation in engine, airframe and fuel technology;
Additional non-CO2 gases from aviation are contributing to global warming. The effects of these should be addressed within a global deal on aviation.
The CCC's Chief Executive David Kennedy said: "It is vital that an agreement capping global aviation emissions is part of a Copenhagen deal.

"We are calling for a cap that would not require people to fly less than today, but would constrain aviation emissions growth going forward."

The right-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange recently proposed that world production of sustainable biofuels should be diverted from cars to planes in order to overcome the lack of current breakthrough technologies in aviation.

The only way to make the deep cuts in aviation emissions that we need is to stop building new runways, like the one at Heathrow

Vicky Wyatt, Greenpeace climate change campaigner
Greenpeace climate change campaigner Vicky Wyatt said: "Any government of whatever stripe, were they to follow the committee's advice, would find it almost impossible to build a third runway at Heathrow.

"We already fly more than any other nation on Earth and other industries such as the power sector would have to reduce their emissions even further to create room for the aviation sector to grow even more. Electricity consumers could end up footing the bill.

"The only way to make the deep cuts in aviation emissions that we need is to stop building new runways, like the one at Heathrow."

Secretary of the CCC, David Kennedy, told the BBC it would discuss Heathrow as part of a deeper review on aviation due later in the year, but that it was by no means clear whether or not it would make policy recommendations on the expansion of the airport.

Meanwhile, the Times newspaper has reported that passengers will face new taxes to halt the rise in aviation pollution, but Mr Kennedy said under the current EU emissions trading scheme (EUETS), supported by the UK government, taxes would rise very gently.

In the first decade they would be barely noticeable, he said: "Under the current regime it is likely that in about 30 years taxes would have risen sufficiently to make us think about whether we want to take that third long-haul flight of the year."

The trading scheme currently proposes giving airlines 85% of their emissions permits free of charge.

The committee recommended that airlines should have to buy all their permits at auction to prevent them making a windfall profit.

Mr Kennedy said there was no evidence that this would double the cost of tickets for passengers.

When power firms were given free permits under the EUETS they made billions of pounds in windfall profits by passing on the notional market cost of the emissions permits to consumers even though they had not had to pay for the permits themselves.

Mr Kennedy declined to comment on whether the committee would make recommendations on further aviation taxes in its forthcoming review, but the BBC understands that as car taxes are much higher per tonne of CO2 produced the committee may compare the taxes on planes and cars.

The shadow energy and climate change secretary, Greg Clark said: "The Climate Change Committee was established by the Climate Change Act... to give advice to the government, so its recommendations need to be taken seriously.

He added that the government's policy on aviation would "lack credibility" as long as it continued to support a third runway at Heathrow.