Search Results for: Climate change

BY WANG FANGQING, ALAN OSBORN

Tainted tobacco leaves generate China push to restore polluted soil

A new report has warned that Chinese tobacco plants are sucking up heavy metals from contaminated soils. The Chinese tobacco industry is challenging the findings, and analysts predict sales will not be weakened.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission is writing a white paper on transport that would harmonise European transport systems to such an extent, it could call the European Union (EU) "a single transport area".

A draft (the final version may come in December), read by the Surveyor shows Brussels considering toughening its CO2 reduction targets for transport by switching from relative targets (emissions per kilometre of travel) to absolute targets – making sure levels of greenhouse gas fall, period: "It may be asked whether relative improvements of transport are still ambitious enough."…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission today released its long awaited reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), confirming it currently favours incremental change – preserving the essence of the CAP, and its food production subsidies. The policy paper (called a Communication) confirms a policy switch from the pro-market previous agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, to her more conservative replacement Romania’s Dacian Ciolo?.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has launched an in-depth investigation into a planned Germany subsidy scheme that would help German non-ferrous metals producers to meet their electricity costs. The German government has announced plans to grant operating aid totalling Euro EUR40 million to energy intensive non-ferrous metal companies, such as those making aluminium, copper and zinc).…

BY EMMA JACKSON

THE ALUMINIUM industry is gearing up for a tough road ahead just as the European Union (EU) has raised an emissions cap from 1.9 billion tonnes to just over 2 billion to make way for aluminium sectors and other industries which will come under Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2013.…

BY HELENA FLUSFELDER, GERARD O’DWYER

A PLAN to install an electric car network has been approved by Israel’s government, making this small Middle East country a global leader in electric vehicle (EV) technology.

The project is a joint venture between Renault-Nissan, which will provide the electric vehicles, and a Silicon Valley, USA-based start-up project Better Place, which will operate the re-charging grid.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

WINTER always beings jitters to European utilities. Will Russia cut off gas to a neighbouring country because of a payment row? Until major new pipeline routes are in place, such as Nord Stream or Nabucco, this concern will continue.…

BY David Haworth

Too few universities teach about turning science into specific products to be sold on the markets and lack entrepreneurship departments which instruct ways in which ideas can be turned into money. Dr Bernd Huber, president of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, tells an audience of some 300 researchers attending a Brussels conference on the future of Europe’s science and technology.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, MJ DESCHAMPS

WHEN the European Commission heralds the oncoming launch of a major new energy initiative, it is usually wise to await the details with a healthy dose of scepticism. A master of hyperbole and repackaging old policies as new, the devil is always in the detail with grand European Union (EU) announcements.…

BY WANG FANGQING

TO many Chinese manufacturers, 2011 has been a difficult year – an unfortunate combination of the fast-rising Chinese Yuan Renminbi (CNY); soaring inflation; and a shortage of available investment. And the horizon is not getting brighter: at the beginning of October, for example, the US Senate passed a controversial currency bill, aimed at punishing China for ‘currency manipulation’ with retaliatory tariffs.…