Disarmament
THE TALK is all of nuclear disarmament. This year is supposed be the year of disarmament, with important work on at least three, maybe four, treaties, and progress on Iran and North Korea. Indeed, the prospects of agreeing in the early new year the first part of this complex jigsaw, a follow-up Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), are good, according to both Washington and Moscow.
Irish Times 2nd Jan 2010 more >>
Israel
What happens to Vanunu is important for Britain and the British press. It was to London and the Sunday Times that he came with his story. It was from London that the first stage of his illegal kidnapping took place. The foreign secretary has this week rightly protested on behalf of Akmal Shaikh, executed for drugs smuggling in China. There is a similar duty to speak up on behalf of a man who trusted that Britain was a place where he could safely tell the world about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As Yossi Melman wrote in Haaretz at the time of Vanunu’s last arrest: “In a proud country that purports to observe the judicial and moral norms of the enlightened world, one might have expected it to take courage and allow Mordechai Vanunu to be free once and for all.”
Guardian 2nd Jan 2010 more >>
Microgeneration
Letter from the CHP Association: Adair Turner is right that the government has a key role to play in creating green-collar jobs, and in highlighting the need to cut carbon emissions from Britain’s homes. However, for at least one green technology that can be used in the home, micro-CHP, current government indecision is threatening the future of 20,000 UK jobs, and a industry with a potential value to the UK economy of £1.5bn. Government officials are in the final stages of setting the subsidies in a key environmental policy, the feed-in tariff (FIT) which is intended to provide financial incentives to householders for the generation of renewable and low-carbon electricity. But with just a few weeks before the government’s internal deadline to set the FIT tariffs from April for the next three years, the UK’s emerging micro-CHP industry still has no idea what tariff rate the technology will receive. Support from the FIT for micro-CHP at 15p per kilowatt hour could mean a saving of up to 10 million tonnes of CO2 per annum from Britain’s buildings by 2020.
Guardian 2nd Jan 2010 more >>
Green New Deal
Some of Britain’s leading firms are partnering top academic institutions to develop projects that will overhaul household energy, water, transport and waste provision to drastically cut carbon emissions.
Guardian 2nd Jan 2010 more >>
