A solar-powered plane completed an 18-hour journey from California to Arizona on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States with no fuel but the sun's energy. Deborah Gembara reports.
TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER: A plane powered only by solar energy landed in Arizona after an 18-hour journey from southern California. It's the first leg of the Solar Impulse's attempt to fly across the U.S. without any fuel. The brainchild of Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, the Solar Impulse has a battery that's charged by energy collected from 12,000 solar cells built into its wings. Piccard was the pilot for the first of a five-stop trip across the U.S.
BERTRAND PICCARD, PILOT AND CO-FOUNDER, SOLAR IMPULSE: "I tell you, it was a lot of preparation and we have done the first leg. I just can't believe we have been working on that since [sic] so long and the first leg is done." REPORTER: Both pilots hope the trip will generate interest in clean energy air travel.
GRAMMAR French speakers often make the mistake of saying "since a long time/two weeks, etc." instead of "for a long time/two weeks, etc.", because French uses "depuis" with both a period of time and a point in time. At least, Piccard gets the tense right! See here for more on this point.
A six-storey inflatable 'rubber duck' created by a Dutch artist floats into Hong Kong's iconic harbor. Elly Park reports.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER: It's China's turn to take part in a big international bath as a six-storey rubber duck floats into Hong Kong, turning Victoria Harbor into its giant tub. Hundreds lined the railings to welcome the well-traveled duck that's bobbed in the waters of Amsterdam, Sydney and Osaka delivering a message from its creator, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. FLORENTIJN HOFMAN: "We're living on one planet, we're one family and all the waters in the world is our global bathtub and it joins people together, it makes us family. And it also means that we have to take care of each other, you know, and be responsible about this planet." REPORTER: It's the first time the 16.5-meter, or 54-feet inflatable art object has been shown in China, where it's scheduled to stay until June 9th. Afterwards it'll continue its global journey to visit the United States and the Middle East.
Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts, claims The Observer. Full story >>
VOCABULARY Starvation is extreme suffering or death, caused by lack of food. • Over three hundred people have died of starvation since the beginning of the year.
A plan to welcome bees onto the roof of the French National Assembly building in Paris takes flight as blue, white and red hives are installed. Tara Cleary reports.
TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER:
An austere French parliamentary building will soon be a hive of activity. Not because of the politicians inside, but thanks to bees on the roof. Thierry Duroselle of the French Society of Beekeepers says besides honey production, the insects are a great symbol of biodiversity. THIERRY DUROSELLE: "We think it's a nice opportunity to educate people -- members of the public and politicians -- on the role of bees." REPORTER: Laurence Dumont from the French National Assembly says if the bees produce enough honey it will be donated to visiting school groups or charities. LAURENCE DUMONT: "So, with three hives we aim to produce 100 to 150 kilos of honey a year. So maybe about 800 pots." REPORTER: It's not clear if the queens and their workers will be avid royalists or whether France's state colors painted on their hives will have them humming a nationalist tune.
WORDPLAY This report contains several bee-related plays on words: 1. Buzz is the noise made by bees when they are flying. If something such as a news story creates a buzz, it gets a lot of people talking about it. 2. If birds or insects take flight, they fly into the air. If a plan takes flight, it begins successfully. 3. A hive is a structure in which bees live. If you describe a place as a hive of activity, there is a lot of activity there or people are busy working there. 4. The fertile female bee in a hive is known as the queen, which explains the reference to royalists. However, France is no longer a monarchy, hence the reference to nationalist tune (also a nod to National Assembly). 5. If something hums, it makes a low continuous noise (like bees). If you hum a tune, you sing it with your lips closed.
The Department of the Environment has admitted that recycling waste is being shipped to countries including China and India where it ends up in landfill, reports the Daily Mail. Full story >>
VOCABULARY A confidence trick (often abbreviated to con trick) is a trick in which someone deceives you by telling you something that is not true, often to trick you out of money. • Global warming without doubt is the biggest con trick ever played out.
A powerful Chinese businessman is offering cans of clean air to smog-choked Beijingers. Sarah Sheffer reports.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER: An eccentric Chinese multimillionaire's latest venture — selling what smoggy Beijing dearly needs after the past two weeks — fresh air. On Wednesday Chen Guangbiao and his colleagues took to the streets to give away hundreds of cans of fresh air, purportedly collected from far-flung and pristine regions of China. Though it may not be a cure for Beijing's ongoing air pollution problem, Chen hopes the stunt will send a message. CHINESE BILLIONAIRE CHEN GUANGBIAO: "I'm selling this clean air to remind everyone to protect our environment. Selling this air, I am using an exaggerated method, a principle, to tell everyone that if we don't start protecting the air in our environment, in ten years our descendants will all be wearing gas masks." REPORTER: Beijing's air quality often registers far into the unhealthy zone, but this month has shocked citizens with the worst ever recorded smog. Chen started his campaign last September. Footage provided by his office shows a truck which sold his cans as it made its way across the country. More footage from him shows people holding the cans performing a slow dance and scooping the air inside. Proceeds from selling the cans for five yuan each will be donated to charity.
Millions of families face higher energy bills because of a “shocking” catalogue of errors made by the Government when it awarded contracts for expensive offshore wind farms, MPs will disclose today. Full story >>
VOCABULARY A blunder is a careless or embarrassing mistake. • Officials were accused of making a huge administrative blunder.
Millions of people around the globe will toast the new year with a glass of one of Scotland's best exports but only one traditional whisky also provides fuel for your car. Ivor Bennett reports from the Scottish distillery, Tullibardine, which has gone into business with Celtic Renewables, part of Napier University, to convert its whisky leftovers into auto fuel.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER: Whisky and cars don't normally go together, but the term drink-driving now has a whole new meaning. Scottish scientists are converting whisky waste products into butanol ... which soon could be powering cars. CELTIC RENEWABLES FOUNDER, PROFESSOR MARTIN TANGNEY: "SO; when you malt the barley you're left with this draff..." REPORTER: Energy company Celtic Renewables is driving the initiative. It's using bacteria to ferment the unused barley and leftover liquid from whisky production. The ingredients may be waste, but company founder Martin Tangney says the final product is invaluable. CELTIC RENEWABLES FOUNDER, PROFESSOR MARTIN TANGNEY: "What we put into the cars is biobutanol. This is a fuel that has been recognised over the last number of years as being a very powerful, direct like-for-like substitute for petrol. It has the same energy value. You can use the same existing infrastructure. you don't need to modify car engines. You can genuinely use it as a like-for-like replacement." REPORTER: Tullibardine's the only distillery involved at the moment, but plans to commercialise the process mean what began with 3 litres of butanol could hit 10 thousand within 3 years. Scotland produces over 1.8 billion bottles of whisky a year - but its waste is a lot more than that. Over 90% of what comes out of whisky distilleries is in fact not whisky at all — it's waste. And most of it is this stuff - pot ale. It fills up stills like this one behind me, and for every one litre of whisky made, there are eight litres of this. As for the barley, or draff - Tullibardine fills six lorry-loads a week. These waste products do have other uses - as low grade animal feed and fertiliser, but that comes at a hefty cost. Tullibardine spends a quarter of a million pounds year just on waste disposal. Distillery Manager David Simpson hopes the money will now flow back in. TULLIBARDINE DISTILLERY MANAGER DAVID SIMPSON: "It's not just for Tullibardine. Obviously the whole industry would benefit from this and everyone is sort of looking at this with open eyes, hoping that this will work for the whole industry which would reduce costs for everyone." REPORTER: Plans are brewing to export the technology to other whisky producers like India, Japan and North America. Celtic Renewables wants to use beer too, hoping to create a biofuel industry with a turnover of 100 million pounds.
Scotland will hold a referendum on independence from Britain in 2014 but just how realistic are its chances of success when its main income source, North Sea oil and gas, is dwindling? Ivor Bennett reports on Scotland's new green energy hopes.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER Kilts...whisky...and tartan Scotland may have a distinctive identity. But is independence a good idea for business? A recent poll showed over 70% of industry leaders think not. With less than 2 years until a referendum on a split from the rest of Britain, key factors like currency, tax and banking regulations are still undecided. A low corporate tax has been promised. But the Scottish director of Britain's main business lobby group Iain McMillan says any difference with the UK would be bad for business. IAIN MCMILLAN DIRECTOR CBI SCOTLAND: "Over time, our laws, our rules, our reglations, our taxes, would differ form those south of the border in England. And that would make the conduct of business much more challenging between these two countries." REPORTER: Picturesque maybe, but a financial centre Edinburgh is not. When it comes to banking, 90% of business lies south of the border. And a YES vote could trigger a brain drain. Scotland's biggest bank RBS has warned it may relocate. Gerry Devenney from pension advice firm Punter Southall says many of his clients could pack their bags too. GERRY DEVENNEY, PRINCIPAL, PUNTER SOUTHALL: "A good number of them have actually said they'll take their businesses south. They'll actually relocate and take all the jobs south of the border...so that means not only would Scotland be without jobs, they'd obviously be without pensions. And demographically that's the last thing Scotland needs." REPORTER: It was architecture like this which earned Edinburgh the nickname 'the Athens of the North'. And if Scotland does go independent, the fear is that name could become apt again. But this time for a reason that's a lot less positive...the economy. The bid for independence rides on energy. An estimated 90% of Britain's North Sea oil is in Scottish waters. While revenues exceeded 11 billion pounds last year, output's dwindling fast. Production in 2011 dropped 18% - the sharpest decline in a decade. Scotland's renewable resources may be vast, but there's no guarantee they'll be as lucrative. One company voicing the concerns is Aggreko - the world's largest temporary power provider. It fears massive short term disruption but few other firms are as vocal. According to CEO Rupert Soames, the fear of retribution is keeping companies quiet. Long gone are the days of William Wallace and Braveheart. But Scotland's previous wars of independence haven't been forgotten. National pride's impossible to price and in the end that could be all that matters.
Washing clothes in a ground breaking substance could blast away pollution, according to a British scientist who's developped a substance to neautralise harmful gases. Joanne Nicholson reports.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER: Even dedicated followers of fashion will be able to do their bit for the environment once a groundbreaking washing powder gets to market. Fashion designer, Helen Storey and chemist, Tony Ryan have developed a substance that turns clothes into pollution busting garments. TONY RYAN, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY AT SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY, AND CO-DEVELOPER OF CATCLO: "I sat down and calculated the surface area of my suit in this really boring meeting I had to go to and when I came back I had the answer of how we could use low-grade energy. We'd turn people into catalyst supports, so that they were covered in catalyst and could wander around using light and the surface of their clothes to clean up." REPORTER: The product, called Catclo, sticks to clothing fibres when added to the wash. It then reacts with the light to neutralize airborne nitrogen oxides - the gases that cause harm to the environment. And unlike other inventors, the pair are refusing to patent their product. They say the technology should be free to anyone who wants to use it. TONY RYAN: "One way we could have done this was to go to a big brand - Levi's, Gap, G-Star. However, it wouldn't be effective because there aren't enough people doing it so to make this work you need about half the population in a city to be catalysed." REPORTER: Ryan's co-developer, Helen Storey, is a professor of fashion science at the London College of Fashion. She's been testing clothes. HELEN STOREY, PROFESSOR OF FASHION SCIENCE AT THE LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION, AND CO-DEVELOPER OF CATCLO: "This piece has now been sprayed for about a year and I've been wearing these jeans for about two years and so far there's been no detrimental effect to the process, either of the handle of it or the wear or the colour of it. But it's deliberate that we've gone for a laundry process. We want people to be able to just use it in the way they would use any other product. We don't want them buying special clothes. We don't want to add to the problem, we're trying to solve one of them." REPORTER: Catclo, developed at Sheffield University in the UK, is being tested by cleaning products company, Ecover. And Ryan believes it could hit supermarket shelves within a year.
This cartoon by Schrank from The Independent relates to the Doha Climate Change Conference, which finally produced an agreement that would see the Kyoto Protocol continuing for a further seven years. However, the deal was denounced by climate activists as inadequate to contain global warming at 2 degrees Celsius, given that greenhouse gas emissions are likely to hit another record level this year. Read more >>
A polar bear is sweltering in the desert heat on the road to Doha, which is in Qatar. He asks a group of three camels, "Where are the wise men?" Meanwhile, planes crisscross the sky, emitting tons of Co2 into the atmosphere.
EXPLANATION The cartoonist plays on the word 'wise'. According to Christian tradition, the Three Wise Men were a group of distinguished foreigners who visited Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They are usually shown riding camels. More generally, a wise person is able to use their experience and knowledge to make sensible decisions and judgements, something noticeably lacking at the Doha conference.
Animators have created a video showing the physical scale of the 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into New York City's atmosphere in 2010. Using a technique they call 'concrete visualisation', the team hopes to spark delegates at the Doha Climate Change Conference into decisive action on global warming. Jim Drury has more.
TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER: New York City under siege. The blue balls represent air pollution that animators from Carbon Visuals say enveloped the city in 2010. Each ball, 10 metres in radius, represents a tonne of carbon dioxide gas produced in the city that year, all piled in one place. Other sequences show the emissions build up after an hour and over one day. Carbon Visuals' creative director Adam Nieman says the technique of concrete visualisation is a useful way of explaining complex environmental data. ADAM NIEMAN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF CARBON VISUALS: "It turns them from things which are just numbers (that) don't have that sense of reality to actually feeling that they are real. In the case of carbon dioxide that's really important because it's invisible, it's something which gets discussed a lot but it does have this sense of unreality, so simply by showing how much of it there is we can, hopefully we can improve the level of debate about carbon emissions." REPORTER: New York's official data showed building emissions accounted for 75 percent of the city's 2010 emissions, 21 percent of it coming from office buildings alone. But Nieman says other big cities including London, home of the famous Shard skyscraper, also need to act. ADAM NIEMAN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF CARBON VISUALS: "If we took the emissions from all the world and they were all coming out from London as one tonne spheres like in the New York video then it would be taller than the Shard in one minute, the pile would be taller than the Shard in one minute. That's the rate at which we're emitting carbon dioxide. It's 1,062 spheres like the New York video every second." REPORTER: Nieman says the animation isn't meant to alarm, but to inform, pointing out New York's impressive efforts to reduce its emissions, which experts believe will have fallen 30 per cent by 2017. Their data was sourced from the New York Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Carbon Visuals plan animations of other major cities, including London, to help ensure the world's environmental decision makers don't take their eye off the ball.
"BALL" IDIOMS 1. If someone has a ball, they have an exciting or enjoyable time. • We really had a ball at the party last night. 2. If someone takes their eye off the ball, they do not give their attention to what they are doing at the time. • If you're a manager, you can't afford to take your eye off the ball for one minute.
Calls for swift action to tackle emissions ahead of the Doha climate talks. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.
TRANSCRIPT REPORTER: Extreme weather in the United States. The East coast is hit by superstorm Sandy. In its aftermath some question whether extreme weather is linked to global warming. As scientists and policymakers prepare for the Doha climate conference, it is a question on more minds. It's also an issue raised by U.S. President Barack Obama at his first post election news conference. U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: "There have been an extraordinarily large number of severe weather events here in North America, but also around the globe. And I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions and, as a consequence, I think we've got an obligation to future generations to do something about it." REPORTER: Delegates from 190 countries will meet in Doha at a U.N. conference next week to work on emissions cuts under a new climate pact. It comes at a critical time says Janet Redman, of the Institute for Policy Studies. JANET REDMAN, THE CO-DIRECTOR OF THE SUSTAINABLE ENERGY AND ECONOMY NETWORK AT THE INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: "We've heard for 20 years now scientists telling us that extreme weather is one of the trends that we would see when we have a warmer planet, and I think that's coming to fruition right now. It's coming faster than we thought it would, which is the scary reality." REPORTER: The World Bank warned this week that the world is likely to warm by 3-4 degrees by the end of the century and extreme weather will become the "new normal."
The cartoon shows the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The whole area is flooded. Obama and Romney are on a floating stage, taking part in a debate. The moderator says, "Oh, and one thing we forgot to mention; climate change ..."
COMMENTS 1. You can find more cartoons connecting Hurricane Sandy with climate change at the Cagle Post. 2. Watch this talk in which Chappatte tells us about his background and discusses some of his cartoons.
LESSON IDEA Since the presidential candidates didn't want to debate climate change, why not get your students to do it? The motion could be: This house believes that global warming is a myth. Divide the class into two groups and get them to research arguments for and against. Then hold the debate.
This cartoon by Mac from The Daily Mail merges two news stories: the deadly fungus which is threatening to wipe out ash trees in the UK, and the declaration by engergy minister John Hayes, who said that wind turbines had been ‘peppered around the country’ with little or no regard for local opinion, insisting that ‘enough is enough’.
The scene takes place some time in the future. A grandfather and his grandson are contemplating an area of devastated woodland, strewn with broken wind turbines and trees. The grandfather is reminiscing about the causes of the disaster, and tells his grandson, "'Aye, lad. Losing our elm then our ash trees was bad enough,
but then the great wind turbine blight started in 2012...'
VOCABULARY Blight is a plant disease, especially one caused by fungi, but the word 'blight' can also be used to refer to something which causes great difficulties, and damages or spoils other things. • The expanding urban sprawl is a blight on the countryside.
