news20091208gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Gordon Brown: EU cuts must go deeper to get Copenhagen climate deal
Prime minister tells the Guardian he hopes the EU will agree to a cut in emissions of 30% by 2020
Ian Katz, Damian Carrington and John Vidal in Copenhagen
The Guardian, Tuesday 8 December 2009 Article history

Gordon Brown is pushing European leaders to commit to deeper cuts in carbon emissions in an attempt to seal a global deal, he revealed as representatives of 192 countries began negotiations at the climate change summit in Copenhagen.

The prime minister told the Guardian he hoped the EU would agree to cut its output of greenhouse gases by 30% on 1990 levels by 2020 – a cut 10 percentage points deeper than Europe is currently offering. So far, the EU has said it will cut by 30% only if an ambitious global deal is reached.

Brown said: "We've got to make countries recognise that they have to be as ambitious as they say they want to be. It's not enough to say 'I may do this, I might do this, possibly I'll do this'. I want to create a situation in which the European Union is persuaded to go to 30%."

Any move to increase Europe's emissions reduction target would be fiercely resisted by eastern European countries as well as Italy and Austria, who have opposed deeper cuts.

An increase in the European pledge would mean the UK would have to achieve a cut of 42% by 2020, compared with the current British target of 34%. Because the UK is already racing to build renewable energy as fast as it can, the additional cuts would probably require measures such as road charging, increased fuel taxes and tougher emissions standards for cars.

On the opening day of the Copenhagen summit Saudi Arabia's chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, told delegates that the scandal over hacked emails from University of East Anglia researchers had undermined confidence in the science of climate change and would "affect the nature of what can be trusted in the negotiations".

But after lambasting climate deniers as "flat-earth sceptics" and "anti-change Luddites", Brown would say only that he "fundamentally disagrees" with Sabban, who last week said he believed there was no link between human behaviour and warming. "I somehow think that when we get agreement the Saudis will not refuse to be part of it," Brown said.

The prime minister's call for Europe to increase its "level of ambition" came as the expert committee charged with setting Britain's carbon targets published a report suggesting that higher flight taxes will be necessary to choke off demand for air travel.

The report said Britain could afford to see air travel increasing by up to 140m journeys a year by 2050 without breaching its carbon targets, allowing for the building of runways at Heathrow, Stansted and Edinburgh airports.

But it warned that development at other regional airports such as Gatwick, Birmingham and Newcastle would have to be curbed if growth in aviation was to be kept to 60% rather than the 200% by which it would expand if allowed to go unchecked.

Brown stopped short of suggesting that the EU should increase its offer irrespective of the outcome in Copenhagen, but said an increase in the European target would be "a signal that the world has come round to agree an ambitious deal".

Campaigners and experts including the economist Lord Stern have argued in recent weeks that the EU must increase its offer to unlock a deal because the US president, Barack Obama, constrained by the need to secure domestic legislation, cannot. Lord Stern told the Guardian last night: "The EU can show real leadership and help to bring an agreement in Copenhagen a step closer by committing now to its higher ambition."

He said if all countries confirmed their highest conditional offers, the target for annual emissions of 44bn tonnes by 2020 – which gives a reasonable chance of meeting the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2C – would be bridged with further commitments of just a few more billion tonnes.

Bryony Worthington, carbon expert and founder of the campaign group Sandbag.org.uk, said: "The prime minister's support for a move to the EU's higher target is very encouraging. With targets on the table from all major countries, the EU can kickstart a leadership race and do much to unlock political tensions in Copenhagen. The move would mean taking on a much more realistic target than the current one, which will be met with almost no effort."

A Polish diplomat at the UN summit in the Danish capital said any unilateral move would not be strategic, as it would give away a significant EU concession without anything in return. The Polish economy is highly dependent on coal and its government has strongly resisted increases in the EU's targets.

The prime minister also said he hoped Labour would be able to match a Tory commitment to cut government emissions by 10% within a year as a contribution to the 10:10 campaign, which is asking individuals, businesses and other organisations to cut their carbon footprint for next year.

Brown said: "We are trying to achieve 10% … throughout Whitehall the message has gone out: 'You've got to save energy, we've got to be more energy-efficient'."

Until now, the government has argued it would be too expensive to cut government emissions by 10% within a year, and some departments that have already reduced their footprint would struggle to cut deeper.

In October, Labour killed a Lib Dem/Tory-backed bill that called for the government to make the 10% cut.

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has meanwhile signed up City Hall to the 10:10 campaign, as part of his goal to make the capital "the greenest city on Earth". But he stopped short of making a personal pledge.

Additional reporting: Hélène Mulholland


[Environment > Carbon emissions]
US climate agency declares CO2 public danger
Environmental Protection Agency declaration allows it to impose emissions cuts without agreement of reluctant Senate
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 20.24 GMT Article history

The Obama administration adopted its climate change plan B today, formally declaring carbon dioxide a public danger so that it can cut greenhouse gas emissions even without the agreement of a reluctant Senate.

The timing of the announcement – in the opening hours of the UN's Copenhagen climate change summit – prevents Barack Obama from arriving at the talks without concrete evidence that America will do its bit to cut the emissions that cause global warming.

"Climate change has now become a household issue," said Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), adding that the evidence of climate change was real and increasingly alarming. "This administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we ignore the responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren."

The announcement gives the EPA a legal basis for capping emissions from major sources such as coal power plants, as well as cars. Jackson said she hoped it would help to spur a deal in Copenhagen.

The EPA action had been seen as a backstop should Congress fail to pass climate change law. Obama and other officials had repeatedly said they would prefer to pass legislation, but that prospect has grown increasingly remote. The House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate change bill in June, but the proposals have stalled in the Senate.

Jackson said the EPA's regulations, which would come into effect from next spring, would not be too onerous, applying only to facilities emitting more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The oil and manufacturing industries, which have opposed climate change action, said the move was overly politicised, and warned that the new regulations would be tied up in lawsuits.

The US Chamber of Commerce, also sceptical on global warming, said the move would hurt the economy. "An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down, command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," said Thomas Donohue, the chamber's president.

Jackson is to address the Copenhagen meeting on Wednesday, while Obama will join more than 100 other world leaders in the Danish capital on the final day of the conference, on 18 December.

The endangerment declaration dates from a supreme court decision in 2007 ordering the EPA to make a ruling on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions were a pollutant subject to the Clean Air Act of the 1970s.

news20091208gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Hopes of a deal remain high as climate talks open in Copenhagen
UN and rich nations express confidence that a political deal is possible but the summit remains overshadowed by questions over climate aid and the science of global warming
John Vidal, environment editor uardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 18.14 GMT Article history

The Copenhagen climate change summit opened today with the United Nations and rich countries expressing confidence that a political deal can be reached. But the summit remains overshadowed by major disagreements over climate aid and questions over the science of global warming.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, appealed to the 192 countries present to be prepared to compromise to achieve one of the most important agreements that the world would ever make. "The political resolve to forge a global deal is manifest. Differences can be overcome if the political will is present. I believe it is," he said.

"The clock has ticked down to zero. The time has come to deliver. The time has come to reach out to each other," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN's climate body.

Diplomats in the vast Bella conference centre on the edge of the city were warned strongly by Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN's Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that unless a way was found to limit greenhouse gas emissions that sea ice would entirely disappear, cyclones and hurricanes would become more powerful and many of the world's cities would be drowned by sea level rise by the end of the century.

"The evidence is overwhelming that the world will benefit from early action and that delay would only lead to costs that will become progressively higher," he said.

Pachauri defended climate science against its critics. "Given the wide-ranging nature of [climate] change that is likely to be taken in hand, some naturally find it inconvenient to accept its inevitability," he told the conference. "The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC. But the panel has a record of objective assessment performed by tens of thousands of dedicated scientists from all over the globe".

Nonetheless, the chief negotiator for Saudi Arabia, one of the world's biggest oil exporters, told the conference that the emails would have an impact. "The level of trust is definitely shaken, especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that ... is going to mean sacrifices for our economies," said Mohammed al-Sabban.

A British initiative to fast-track $10bn a year from rich to poor countries to enable them to adapt to climate change was yesterday gaining ground with the US, Japan and other developed countries publicly supporting it.

The money would be available by 2012 and sources close to the talks said that Britain intended to pledge a total of £800m over a number of years. This evening, it was not clear how much of this money was new and how much, if any, would be as loans.

But the tentative offer of $10bn was dismissed as "peanuts" by the G77 group of 132 developing countries.

Development groups expressed deep unease over advanced plans by the EU and the US to expand carbon trading to provide much of the money needed to compensate poor countries and prepare them for the worst of climate change.

Analysis released by Friends of the Earth international and the Third World Network said that carbon trading "threatened to be ineffective and might only result in enriching banks while posing new [financial] risks."

Environmental and development groups also warned that in the rush to get an agreement at Copenhagen, loopholes could emerge which would compromise efforts to cut deforestation. Razing forests causes almost 20% of all carbon emissions but finding a watertight way to pay countries to halt deforestation is complex.

"The talks are on a knife edge. If the wrong deal is signed up, then some of the most corrupt countries on earth could get their hands on billions of dollars without any checks and the forests could continue to be felled," said a spokeswoman for Global Witness.

"The conference must not end only with political statements. There must be concrete commitments from the developed countries on their emission reduction figures and commitments on finance", said Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental thinktank of developing countries.

"The pledges are so far depressingly low, adding up to only 12-19% by 2020. This is still far below the 40% cut that developing countries say is needed and below the 25-40% figures quoted by the IPCC," he said.


[Business > Shanks]
Shanks receives £536m bid from Carlyle Group
> Unsolicited offer comes in exceptional slow year for buyouts
> British waste management firm holding out for 150p a share
David Teather
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 18.48 GMT Article history

The waste management group Shanks has received a £536m bid from the buyout firm Carlyle Group – a rare offer in a year that has seen the lowest volume of private equity backed deals since 1984.

In a statement to the stock market today, Shanks said it was in receipt of an unsolicited approach valuing the business at 135p a share. In an unusual move, the company put a figure on the price at which it would be willing to sell: 150p. According to sources close to the companies, the two sides are now locked in discussions.

If agreed it would be one of the largest private equity-backed deals this year in a market that has been in the doldrums, as the credit crunch caused banks to become more reluctant to provide debt.

According to data from Nottingham University Business School, there were only 31 private equity-backed buyouts completed in the first nine months of the year, with a combined value of £3.6bn. The figure is way below the £18.2bn worth of deals done in 2008 and £43.4bn completed in 2007, at the peak of the market.

Carlyle Group, with $87bn (£53bn) under management, is one of the world's largest private equity firms but has not done a deal in the UK since September last year. Its assets in this country include the child seat manufacturer Britax, the bank teller company Talaris, a digital media firm called Mill and Ensus, a bioethanol plant in Teesside.

In its statement, Shanks said it had support from its two largest shareholders, Legal & General and Schroders, which together own more than 30%, to hold out for at least 150p a share. Shares in the company had closed at 90.1p on Friday and today rose to 128.5p. People close to Carlyle, however, also suggest that talks with investors have been positive. Carlyle declined to comment.

If the deal with Shanks went through at the offer price, it would be the third largest completed this year, after the digital television technology firm NDS and the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

Rod Ball, a research fellow at the centre for management buyout research at Nottingham University, described this year as a "write-off" for the private equity industry. "Bank debt became practically impossible to raise for large deals at the start of 2008," he said. "The state of the economy has also left company cashflows unstable, so private equity firms are just sitting back and waiting. There has also been a gap in pricing expectations – vendors haven't yet brought the price of their business down enough to make a deal worthwhile."

Shanks is the last remaining independent waste management group in the UK and if the deal is successful would follow rivals Cory and Biffa, which were bought in leveraged buyouts in 2005 and 2008 respectively. In the year to March, Shanks made £34m on revenues of £697m from operations in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and Canada. This year the business has suffered from the recession, as both the amount of waste produced and the price of recycled materials have fallen. It launched a £71m rights issue in May to reduce its debt and scrapped its dividend.

The company said it had sharpened its focus on three areas: recycling, organic processing and UK PFI initiatives.

But Nick Spoliar, an analyst at Altium Securities, said the approach could prompt counter-bids from other waste companies and private equity firms, attracted by the steady returns from a business that often has 25-year contracts: "Businesses such as this have long-term characteristics which are very attractive in terms of generating predictable returns over decades."

Top 5 2009 UK private equity deals
NDS Group: £1.25bn
Wood Mackenzie: £553m
Chesapeake: £325m
Aurora Fashions: £215m
Viking Moorings: £170m
Total: 3.7bn (first nine months only)

UK private equity-backed management buyouts/buy-ins
2005: £22.7bn
2006: £24.9bn
2007: £43.4bn
2008: £18.2bn

Source: Centre for Management Buy-out Research/Barclays Private Equity

news20091208gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Education > University of Edinburgh]
How one university is facing the 10:10 challenge
The University of Edinburgh is cutting emissions by probing the private lives of its staff and students
Severin Carrell
The Guardian, Tuesday 8 December 2009 Article history

If it were a small market town, the University of Edinburgh's campaign to transform the lifestyles, travel habits and consumption of its entire population into one of the greenest and most climate-savvy in Britain would have made headlines.

In what may be one of the country's quietest green revolutions, over the next few months, every one of its 25,700 students and 10,400 employees will be confronted with a significant personal challenge: cutting their flights, meat consumption, energy bills and driving by at least a tenth in under a year.

With a population of 36,000, the university is equivalent in size to Grantham or Bridgend. At a conservative estimate, this "town" emits at least 350,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent each year. And the campaign is straying well beyond the traditional interests of academics and university administrators into uncomfortable areas such as the heavy reliance on air travel by researchers and students.

The university is one of scores of educational institutions across the UK that have joined the 10:10 climate campaign to make a 10% cut in CO2 emissions next year. Many aim to make deep cuts in their energy use to meet the target; many hope to exceed it.

10:10 signatories such as City University in London have pledged a 15% cut and want to save 1,000 tonnes a year with a new combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) plant. Bristol University, too, will cut its emissions by 15%, spending £2m next year on energy efficiency. St Peter's College, Oxford, is aiming at a 20% cut in two years.

However, Edinburgh believes its policies are the most radical. Last week, its initiative was given a significant boost when it won £339,000 from the Scottish government's Climate Challenge fund to employ six staff for 16 months to conduct an exhaustive study of its carbon emissions, and then champion lasting cuts in the emissions.

"It's a short, sharp opportunity for us to harness the community's capacity for change," said David Somervell, Edinburgh's sustainability adviser. The six staff will run its carbon reduction campaign, called Transition Edinburgh University (TEU), named after the global Transition network, which aims to increase sustainability at a community level. It is a campaign officially sanctioned by the university principal, Timothy O'Shea, and overseen by its vice-principal for sustainability, Mary Bownes.

Edinburgh has already cut its energy use by 31% since 1990, despite trebling in size. It already has the highly efficient CCHP plants now being installed by other 10:10 signatories, and it is gutting its 1960s buildings and refitting them with double-glazing, sensor-activated lighting and insulated cladding. Its newest building, housing the psychology, philosophy, language science and computing departments, uses state-of-the-art, low-carbon technology, earning an "excellent" rating for energy efficiency.

But that, said Somervell, was relatively easy. The university's own energy use – its heating, lighting, academic travel and small vehicle fleet – accounts for just under a sixth of the community's CO2 emissions. Targeting the lifestyles of students and academics is a far tougher task: the campaign is effectively probing into the private lives of 36,000 people.

Preliminary research into the lifestyles of Edinburgh's mostly British-born first-years threw up a challenging discovery. Lured by cheap flights, domestic air travel is now routine, even for freshers.

The university's transition team surveyed freshers who had moved into the Pollock halls of residence, which provides housing for 2,000 students south of the city centre. They were questioned about issues such as their food bills, meat-eating, leisure spending, commuting and book costs. They were also asked to list the flights taken this year. Perhaps naively, the form only gave them space for eight one-way journeys. For many, the list of flights spilled over on to the back of the form.

Somervell's team knows the university paid for nearly 7,000 flights in 2007-08 to conferences and meeting research partners, resulting in 95% of its own "internal" travel-related emissions, and nearly 5,000 tonnes of CO2.

But an exhaustive 96-page study of the university's total climate impact and its strategies for tackling it, called Footprints and Handprints, estimated that its 7,500 overseas students produced five times as much just on their flights home, or 25,855 tonnes of CO2. Per capita, this is 11 times higher than the average British student. It also equals half of Edinburgh's total "institutional" CO2 emissions.

It raises a conundrum for universities trying to significantly cut climate emissions. Facing a 15% reduction in future funding, institutions such as Edinburgh feel intense pressure to increase overseas student numbers to increase revenue, influence and prestige.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency estimates there were 390,000 overseas students in the UK in 2007-08. Using Edinburgh's estimate that every foreign student flies home twice a year, that produces 1.34m tonnes of CO2 a year.

Somervell plans to test these figures, and all the other carbon emissions data in Footprints and Handprints, in a major survey of all students and staff in January. Despite this conflict in objectives, he believes that the carbon burden from overseas students can be absorbed by other measures to tackle CO2 emissions.

Ric Lander, an environment and development master's graduate from Edinburgh, and one of the paid co-ordinators of TEU whose salary is covered by the Scottish government's Climate Challenge grant, said foreign students were vigorous activists in the low-carbon campaign and the university's People and Planet society, which has helped drive the campaign. The initiative is defined by its international outlook. "Often they're the boldest people with an interesting perspective," he said.

Next year's campaign will ask students to make their digs more energy efficient and greener – it has 20 volunteers running the "big green makeover" campaign for student flats; encouraging lower meat or meat-free diets; funding energy-saving competitions between halls of residence; promoting car sharing; getting students to swap flights for trains; asking academics to install video-conferencing suites to "meet" foreign colleagues on screen; and promoting re-use of discarded duvets and household goods at campus "swap shops".

Facing rising energy prices, a worsening climate, potential taxes on carbon emissions and cuts in central government spending, reducing CO2 emissions increases Edinburgh's resilience and demonstrates social responsibility, Somervell argues. "It's about positioning and future-proofing the university as an institution and reducing future risk. It's about ensuring we've a strategy for our continuance."

news20091208sa

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[News > Technology]
December 7, 2009
Carbon Nanotubes Turn Office Paper into Batteries
Beyond cover sheets and TPS reports–white copy paper could be the basis for lightweight, inexpensive batteries
By Charles Q. Choi

Plain white office paper could be the basis for efficient batteries. Scientists have converted sheets of them into efficient electrical storage devices using ink loaded with carbon nanotubes. This new spin on an ancient invention is the latest in a line of research striving to incorporate paper into batteries to reduce their weight, one of battery technology's major shortcomings.

To trim weight, researchers have tried several approaches, including the use of thin films of materials laid down as inks. The appeal of paper for centuries—its porous microscopic structure, which makes it ideal for holding onto inks—now intrigues researchers for modern applications, not to mention that paper is also a flexible, lightweight, affordable, well-established technology that is used everywhere and could be made from renewable sources.

To devise the novel paper batteries, materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford University and his colleagues coated plain copy paper with black ink made with single-walled carbon nanotubes, which are electrically conductive pipes only billionths of a meter wide. Positive and negative electrodes—cathodes and anodes—were then applied as slurries dried on the nanotube-impregnated paper. (The cathodes were made from lithium manganese oxide nanorods, and the anodes made either from nanopowders of lithium titanium oxide or nanowires with cores of carbon covered with shells of silicon.)

The batteries were then dipped in an electrolyte of lithium hexafluorophosphate solution to connect the electrodes and sealed in a pouch. In this setup the nanotubes collected current from each electrode. "It provides a nice example of the combination of high tech with low tech," says materials scientist John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who did not take part in this research.

Close to conventional storage cells

These paper batteries, described online December 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , were as good as conventional ones in terms of energy storage and recharging-cycle life. Based on their experiments, the researchers say that incorporating carbon nanotube paper into conventional rechargeable batteries could reduce their weight by up to 20 percent.

This reduction could help make electric and hybrid vehicles more feasible and could lead to longer-lasting mobile phones, laptops and other portable electronics. "The fabrication of inexpensive, flexible and lightweight batteries could revolutionize portable electronics," remarks materials scientist Francesco Stellacci of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did not participate in this study. At large scales, they could also inexpensively help solar and wind farms store what energy they generate, Cui adds.

The carbon nanotubes bonded very strongly to the paper, obviating the need for adhesives that decrease performance and significantly increase production costs, Cui and his colleagues note. The battery could also bend and curl without losing its ability to conduct a charge and "can be easily laminated into flexible computers to power the devices," he suggests. The team noted in their paper that its technique is easily scalable for mass production, and that the ink could even be painted on with brushes, if desired.

Paper trail

These new devices are the latest in a series of paper batteries that have emerged in recent years. For instance, in 2007 biopolymer expert Robert Linhardt of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and his colleagues made batteries with a composite of multiwalled carbon nanotubes and paper as the cathode, a lithium metal film as the anode and aluminum foil as the current collector. They carried out experiments where sweat or blood operated as their electrolytes, suggesting they could find uses in bodily implants.

Nanotechnologist Maria Strømme of Uppsala University in Sweden and her colleagues have also devised batteries with a paper made from seaweed. Because such paper had 100 times more surface area than that made from wood, it can hold dramatically more power, they reported in the October 14 Nano Letters.

One concern about the new sheets is their electrical resistances, which are some 10 times or more than those of the metal foils used as current collectors in conventional batteries. Such resistance slows the delivery of power. Cui suggests incorporating metal nanowires into their devices to lower resistance, thereby helping provide more electrical oomph.

Another major obstacle to implementing these findings is the current high price of carbon nanotubes. "However, carbon nanotube price will continuously drop as production ramps up," Cui notes. "The conductive paper concept can also be realized with other nanomaterials with potentially low cost, such as graphene."

news20091208nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 7 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/462706a
News
Primate study halted by US university
Officials fear violent reprisals from a reinvigorated animal-rights movement.
Brendan Borrell

Administrators at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater have abruptly cancelled an anthrax vaccine study that would have killed dozens of baboons.

The project, funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by Shinichiro Kurosawa of Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts, had been approved by the OSU animal-care committee in September and was awaiting review by the biosafety committee when OSU president Burns Hargis vetoed it in October, calling the study "controversial".

Kurosawa had hoped to use the OSU animal facility because it has the required level of biosafety containment for anthrax. "As guest scientists at OSU, we are obliged to follow their policies, and it is unfortunate that we cannot fully complete our research there at this time," Kurosawa says. Along with collaborators at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, the University of Oklahoma in Norman and the University of Chicago in Illinois, he planned to investigate the biochemical pathways that lead to death following anthrax infection, and to test an anthrax vaccine.

Some faculty members have suggested that the decision to cancel the study might be linked to pressure from OSU benefactor T. Boone Pickens, whose wife Madeleine previously expressed disapproval of surgical training procedures involving animals in the university's veterinary school. Spokespeople for both Pickens and the university deny the suggestion. Hargis defended his decision in the Tulsa World newspaper, empha­sizing that 124 animals could have been killed on campus.

"There are regrettably some violent acts committed by animal-rights groups," says OSU vice-presi­dent of research Stephen McKeever, "and the president felt we should take our breath here and not do this project just yet." McKeever says the decision does not indicate a change in institutional policy, but that future proposals for primate studies will be considered in consultation with researchers, the OSU animal-care committee and his administrators. Indeed, for several faculty members, the biggest upset is not the decision itself but the fact that it was made without consulting them.

Veterinary researcher Richard Eberle, who was an administrative liaison for the study, believes that the affair might give the impression that the university is no longer a reliable research partner. He notes that two major proposals for OSU-based primate research, involving some of the same institutions, are pending at the NIH. The NIH Office of the Director said in a statement that institutions are expected "to complete NIH supported projects as requested, approved and funded".

The dispute comes during a time of heightened activity by animal-rights activists, including firebombings at two University of California campuses. Although few institutions have policies that prohibit primate research, not many are keen to establish new primate programmes, says Dario Ringach, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who stopped working on primates because of pressure from activists. "It is changing the kind of work people will do in the future," he says. "If students come to me interested in primate research, I would tell them to think about other things."


[naturenews]
Published online 7 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1127
News
Tar sands mining linked to stream pollution
Canada's oil sands could be bad for local fish.
Nicola Jones

Canada's tar sands mining operations seem to be raising the levels of toxins in local rivers, according to a study released today. The report finds that levels of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) are higher downstream of mining activity, and can be detected in concentrations high enough to merit concern about the development of fish eggs.

The authors note that their results contradict some government and industry claims that these compounds arise from natural erosion of the surrounding oily landscape and are not a cause of environmental concern.

"Industry's response has always been 'of course there are carcinogens in the water, there's a natural source'," says lead author David Schindler of the University of Alberta, Edmonton. "But it defied logic to think that all that was going in was natural."

The main body that monitors pollution in the area — the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP) — has typically found low to undetectable levels of PACs in river water, and that their flow into the main river delta has not gone up since 1997, which would indicate that they are not linked to mining. RAMP, set up by the Alberta government in 1997, is composed of representatives from the government, aboriginal communities, environmental groups and industry.

In the study, to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, the authors says that RAMP suffers from "serious deficits", such as an inconsistent sampling design, a lack of strong government leadership, and datasets that aren't open to the public. In a response to Nature, RAMP said that it employs scientifically credible methodology, and has typically restricted access to its data in order to encourage membership — a practice that they are considering revising.

Crude oil

The Albertan tar sands are thought to contain 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves, making it the second largest reserve on the planet after Saudi Arabia. The tar sands are scooped up by giant trucks, blasted with water, and upgraded to crude oil in chemical plants. There are concerns that this pollutes the local environment with metals such as arsenic and mercury, naphthenic acids and PACs. Some of these are carcinogenic or toxic.

{{“It defied logic to think that all that was going in was natural.”}
David Schindler
University of Alberta, Edmonton}

The study's authors looked at water samples from the Athabasca river and its tributaries upstream of the tar sands area. They compared them to samples downstream of the tar sands but upstream of any mining, as well as downstream of mining activities. There was a small increase in PACs for both downstream samples in winter, and a large, 10-50-fold increase in PACs downstream of mining in summer when the river is not covered with ice and so more open to pollutants. Areas with more extensive mining development were linked to higher levels of PACs. The highest levels detected were about 0.7 micrograms per litre; 0.4 micrograms per litre can be toxic to fish embryos, the authors note.

The researchers also looked at snowpack samples in winter, and found elevated levels of PACs near the stacks of an oil-upgrading facility. The pollution could be detected up to 50 kilometres away. "When you look down the river, the snow looks grey," says co-author Erin Kelly. "When you melt it you get an oily black residue on top of it."

Peter Van Metre, a hydrologist with the US Geological Survey in Austin, Texas, says more work is probably needed to unpick the question of whether the stream samples are really higher in PACs than they would be if mining was absent. Regardless of this, he says, "the strength of paper is to show there are some significant local releases, and some questions about the impacts on the fish". The concentrations found in the survey are relatively low in comparison to the Canadian aquatic guidelines, he notes, but still worth investigating.

Industry watch

"There's been a lot of concern about inadequate monitoring for many years," says Simon Dyer, with the environmental group the Pembina Institute in Edmonton. "There have been a number of critiques of RAMP to suggest it's scientifically not adequate." The Pembina institute withdrew from RAMP eight years ago because of concerns over a lack of government oversight and industry dominance, Dyer says. RAMP says it has responded to the criticisms brought up in peer review, and that less than 50% of its voting members are from industry.

Preston McEachern, a limnologist with Alberta Environment, a government body that participates in RAMP and regulates pollution in the region, says it is industry's responsibility to monitor their own water emissions. Alberta's government spends Can$400,000 (US$380,000) a year auditing these reports. He notes that the government has been working with the University of Victoria to develop isotopic tracers that can untangle natural erosion from mining pollution, which is a tricky problem. "It's not like we're trying to whitewash," he says.

"It's a bad idea to have industry monitoring itself," counters Schindler. "Sort of like abolishing the police and asking people to pull over if they see they're speeding and report themselves."

Schindler recommends that the federal government takes control of the monitoring programme and ensures that the data are made public. He also recommends the installation of scrubbers on the upgrading stacks, wetting down roads to reduce dust from mining trucks, and restricting mining operations from going right to the water's edge.

Press officer Travis Davies of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the body that represents the tar sands industry, says the organization does not comment on scientific papers prior to publication.

References
1. Kelly, E., et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073_pnas.0912050106 (2009).

news20091208nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 7 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1129
News
London's biomedical research institute takes shape
Tight budgets could mean operations begin with fewer researchers.
Natasha Gilbert

{{Plans for the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation are crystallizing.}
UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation}

Details of a new £520-million (US$850-million) biomedical research centre in central London were revealed today, giving some insight into its proposed scientific scope and architecture.

The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI) will bring together four leading UK research institutes in one building on a 1.5-hectare site near London's St Pancras International rail station. The centre will accommodate the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), currently based in Mill Hill, just outside London, and Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, which has laboratories split over two sites — one in central London and the other near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. Also partners in the project are University College London and the biomedical-research charity, the Wellcome Trust.

Biologist and Nobel laureate Paul Nurse, president of the Rockefeller University in New York, is leading the scientific planning for the UKCMRI. He told journalists today that the centre will aim to be a "magnet" for attracting and training the best young researchers from all over the world, with the hope that they will then move to other UK institutions. "UKCMRI will be a feeder for other research institutes in the UK," Nurse said.
The institute will have "no particular" research focus but will aim to cover all aspects of human disease by building on the science expertise of its partner organizations, including fields such as infectious disease and brain cancer. However, he proposed that research areas could, for example, include the use of stem cells to grow human organs in the lab. University College London will contribute research in non-biomedical areas including computer science, engineering and physics.

Animal research will be carried out at the institute, but pathogens, such as the Ebola virus, that require the highest level of biological containment, category 4, will not take place. It is not clear what will happen to the category 4 research that is currently undertaken at the NIMR. A more detailed science plan will be developed over the next few years, Nurse said.

Clinical research will not be done in house — instead, UKCMRI scientists will collaborate with nearby hospitals and research centres. Translating that research into products and services will be something that is embedded in the institute's culture, rather than being an afterthought when research projects come to an end. But the building will not house biotech companies — one proposal that had previously been floated for the centre.

Tight budget

The centre will be an open-plan environment without "artificial departments", and will have communal break-out areas to encourage collaboration and discussion between the institute's researchers. It will also have networking and training centres that can be used by external researchers. Much of the front of the building will be glass, letting the public see researchers at work in their labs.

The building was originally estimated to cost £500 million, but the need to build an extra basement floor has added to costs. Speaking to Nature, Nurse said that a definite figure for the building costs would not be available until the construction contract goes out to tender, but noted that the budget "will be tight".

The Medical Research Council will pay for 45–50% of the building costs, while 25–30% will come from Cancer Research UK, 20% from the Wellcome Trust and 5–10% from University College London.

Nurse told Nature that if construction goes over budget they will seek to find savings, which may include starting operations with fewer than the intended 1,250 researchers, and building up their numbers over time.

He also added that no concrete plans are in place for how to choose which researchers at the partner institutes will move to the UKCMRI, but that staff will undergo a review and assessment to help inform the decision.

Nurse noted that he was not concerned for the institute's future if the current Labour government loses power to the Conservative party at a general election due to be held next year. He said that the Conservatives had shown "support" for the project in informal discussions.

Richard Treisman, director of Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, told Nature that many of the researchers at the institute's Hertfordshire site had "mixed feelings" about moving into central London. Treisman and NIMR director Jim Smith agreed that their biggest challenge would be to ensure that the move does not disrupt research activities.

Planning permission for the building is expected to be submitted to the local council next year.

news20091208nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 7 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/462711a
News
Centre turns away from healing herbs
US research hub on complementary and alternative medicine shifts towards symptom management.
Meredith Wadman

{{Echinacea doesn’t alleviate cold symptoms.}
J. Tenneson/Monsoon/Photolibrary/Corbis}

A decade ago, US National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Harold Varmus was invited to quit when he opposed a senator's plans to elevate a small NIH office into a research centre for testing the validity of alternative therapies.

Having grown from those modest beginnings, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in Bethesda, Maryland, celebrates its tenth anniversary this week. It still draws fire from traditional scientists, who complain that by the very act of studying therapies outside the realm of conventional medicine, it has legitimized them.

But, many of the centre's clinical trials have ended up disproving alternative therapies rather than endorsing them. One study published in July 2005 (R. B. Turner et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 353, 341–348; 2005) showed that the herb echinacea neither prevented nor relieved the symptoms of rhino­virus infections, the most common cause of the 'common cold'; sales of echinacea fell markedly thereafter (see graphic). "We are in fact unbiased," says Josephine Briggs, who took over as centre director early last year, having overseen the NIH's kidney research for almost a decade until 2006. "We are directing research that will be rigorous."

In 2007, 38% of Americans said they had turned to alternative treatments at least once over the previous 12 months, spending US$33.9 billion on a gamut of therapies from acupuncture to herbal remedies to yoga. Dwarfed by other research powerhouses on the NIH's Bethesda campus, the NCCAM this year spent $125 million studying these treatments, or about one-third of the NIH's total investment in alternative therapies; the rest is spent by other institutes and centres, particularly the National Cancer Institute.

Briggs and others say that the goal is to provide hard data on alternative therapies, regardless of whether that data debunks or affirms any given treatment. "One of [NCCAM's] critical roles is to actually weed out the snake oil, which I am sure there is quite a bit of," says Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and NCCAM grantee at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work on the effects of meditation on the brain and peripheral biology has been published in mainstream journals such as The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLoS Biology and The Journal of Neuroscience.

Many US researchers still say such funding is a waste of time and money. "You are doing scientific research on treatment modalities that are not being used or promoted by science-based practitioners in the first place," says Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "They never abandon a treatment because the scientific evidence shows that it doesn't work. So what's the point?"

Briggs says that she would like to see the focus of the institute move away from overly "optimistic" attempts to cure chronic diseases, a trend she saw in grant applications after assuming the centre director job. "Investigators entered the project thinking a herbal compound might change diabetes or cancer," she says. "The main way I'm trying to adjust our portfolio is greater focus on symptom management, particularly greater focus on pain", for which many use alternative therapies.

Indeed, the list of "promising leads" flagged in the centre's draft strategic plan for the next five years is weighted towards pain management and mind–body medicine and silent on herbal therapies.

Briggs is also pushing an increased emphasis on basic and animal studies of the physiological mechanisms underlying alternative remedies. In its first decade, along with the echinacea work, the institute funded costly clinical trials studying whether St John's wort could relieve depression and, with the National Cancer Institute, whether vitamin E and selenium could prevent prostate cancer, among other studies. The results were resoundingly negative. Briggs concluded that the NCCAM needs to invest in fundamental work on natural products "before we invest more in clinical trials".

The centre "is increasingly defining a mission for itself that makes sense scientifically", says Bruce Rosen, an NCCAM grantee at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who studies acupuncture's effect on brain function.

Briggs's approach has earned the respect of even the institute's fiercest critics. "I'm encouraged by Dr Briggs's receptiveness to comments and criticisms, and her commitment to altering the research priorities of the NCCAM," says Donald Marcus, an immunologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "My concern is the political constraints under which she operates."

Marcus and Novella are members of the Institute for Science in Medicine, a group of physicians and scientists newly set up to fight government policies promoting alternative medicine. He contends that the entire NCCAM enterprise "has been a remarkable waste of money", driven by Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa), who authored the 1998 legislation that established the centre. "The best thing they could do with the NCCAM is to dissolve it," Marcus says. "But that's not going to happen. Harkin's too powerful."

A decade after the NCCAM's birth, that power remains on display: Harkin and others have inserted provisions in health-reform bills in both houses of Congress mandating that insurers reimburse state-licensed alternative medicine providers.

news20091208nn4

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 7 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1125
News: Briefing
Copenhagen: let the talks begin
Nature's low-down on the world's biggest climate summit.
Jeff Tollefson

{{The Copenhagen climate talks could help to develop an international agreement to avert damaging climate change.}
Punchstock}

After two years of preparations, delegates from 192 countries begin the difficult task of piecing together a climate agreement in Copenhagen today. All the major industrialized nations have now put their commitments to cut carbon on the table, and the major emerging nations have outlined their voluntary targets too.

But the proposed cuts fall well short of what many had hoped, and the gulf between developed and developing nations over core issues — such as who should pay for dealing with climate change and who should be leading the way — remains as wide as ever. Nature takes a closer look at the key issues that will play out over the coming two weeks.

Several countries, including the United States and China, have announced formal commitments in recent weeks. Have the prospects for a deal improved?

Yes and no. US President Barack Obama removed one of the largest barriers to a deal by signalling that he will commit to reducing emissions by about 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, even though Congress has yet to enact a domestic climate policy. A second barrier came down when China said it would commit to reducing carbon intensity — how much carbon it emits per unit of gross domestic product — by at least 40% from 2005 levels by 2020. Both announcements were preceded by aggressive commitments from Brazil (at least 36% from expected levels by 2020) and South Korea (30% below projections for 2020). India came through last week with a less-than-inspiring promise to cut carbon intensity by 20–25% from 2005 levels.

{“Developed countries will need to pay serious cash to help poor countries shift onto a sustainable development path.”}

These announcements are significant in that they pave the way to an agreement that quantifies emissions commitments. But they do not guarantee a deal. Developing countries have asked rich countries to reduce emissions to 40% below 1990 levels, but current commitments come in at around 13–19%. Bridging that gap won't be easy.

How does science affect this debate?

Developing countries regularly invoke the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) 2007 assessment as evidence that rich countries aren't doing enough. The IPCC's report on mitigation options specified that industrialized countries would have reduce emissions by 25–40% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 parts per million (p.p.m.) — roughly what is needed to limit the average temperature rise to 2 ºC.

Carbon dioxide levels registered at 386 p.p.m. in 2008, compared with preindustrial levels of about 280 p.p.m., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, DC. Those levels are rising at about 2 p.p.m. per year. Most industrialized nations have signed on to the 2 ºC goal, but not the major emerging economies, which fear they will have to pick up the slack if rich countries fall short.

Will the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia affect the talks?

Probably not. But the talks operate by consensus, which means that just one country could hold things up. So far only one nation — Saudi Arabia — has weighed in on the side of the climate sceptics, with their chief negotiator citing these e-mails as evidence that scientists fudged their findings to play up the human impact.

Are developing countries holding up their end of the bargain?

Experts are still analyzing the proposals, but some analyses suggest that the commitments of developing countries — driven by the major emerging economies — would fall within the range of 15–30% emissions reductions from 1990 levels by 2020.

Yet India, for one, has repeatedly said it will not sign on to binding commitments, and will only verify emissions reductions that it undertakes with money it receives from rich countries. The United States and Europe want developing countries to formally commit to these goals, and to open their books to outside inspection.

What are the other major hurdles to a deal in Copenhagen?

The first is money. Developed countries will need to pay serious cash to help poor countries shift onto a sustainable development path and cope with the inevitable impacts of global warming. The United Nations' climate chief Yvo de Boer says that consensus seems to be emerging around a start-up fund of US$10 billion, which was endorsed by Obama last week. There is also more tentative agreement that in the long-term, that figure may have to rise to $100 billion a year. Many countries — and researchers — contend that even this sum isn't enough.

And delegates still need to figure out the architecture of the treaty. Developing countries want to preserve the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and fold the United States — which did not ratify the protocol — in through a separate agreement. Europeans want a single treaty, but the United States objects to many of the accounting and verification rules of that treaty.

Questions also remain about the role of existing multinational institutions such as the World Bank and potential new institutions that could be charged with allocating money, organizing energy research and development programmes, and helping poor countries to adopt clean-energy technologies.

Nearly 100 heads of state are expected to attend, including Obama. Will they secure an agreement?

Probably. But negotiators are now aiming for only a political agreement on major issues, leaving the details of a formal treaty to be filled in next year. Such an agreement would include a deadline for filling in those gaps, perhaps as early as next spring but more likely a year from now at the next UN climate conference in Mexico City. It might also feature agreements on key issues such as short-term funding; research, development and deployment of clean-energy technologies; and on handling emissions from tropical deforestation.

UN officials are still urging developed countries to increase their commitments, but it's unlikely that their negotiating positions — particularly those of the United States — are going to change substantially. That means developing countries must decide whether they are willing to sign a deal that falls short of their expectations, and so far they aren't backing down.

Some pragmatists argue that any agreement at Copenhagen represents an important first step. But others argue that a stronger deal might be secured by continuing negotiations for another year, rather than rashly signing a questionable deal this year.