It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, February 08, 2024
UK
Sales of used electric cars up nearly 91% last year
Sales of used battery electric cars almost doubled last year, new figures show (John Walton/PA)
By Neil Lancefield, PA Transport Correspondent
Sales of used battery electric cars almost doubled last year, new figures show.
A record 119,000 of the vehicles changed hands in the UK in 2023, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said.
That represented a 90.9% increase on the previous 12 months.
The market share for sales of used battery electric cars was 1.6% last year, up from 0.9% in 2022.
The SMMT said the figures demonstrate “keen demand for zero emission motoring”.
The overall used car market grew by 5.1% last year with 7.2 million transactions, up from 6.9 million in 2022.
The Ford Fiesta was the most popular used car purchase in 2023, with 308,000 sales.
SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said: “A healthy new car market is key to driving choice in the used sector and it’s great to see record numbers of second and third owners benefitting from the growing availability of electric vehicles.
“The demand is there, but to sustain it we must enable every motorist to make the switch.
“The upcoming Budget is a prime opportunity for Government to do just that – halving VAT on new EVs, while making public charging as easy and affordable as plugging in at home, would ensure a faster and fairer transition for all, giving the UK a green economic boost.”
Ian Plummer, commercial director at online vehicle marketplace Auto Trader, said: “The used electric market may still be in its infancy, but last year saw a definite growth spurt
“Significantly softened prices, greater availability and more choice has proven a compelling combination for car buyers.
“With many second-hand models now at price parity with their traditionally fuelled counterparts, along with lower running costs, the switch to electric has never been more attractive.”
Alex Buttle, co-founder of used car selling comparison website Motorway.co.uk, said: “With new car production growing, more car owners sold their cars to get their hands on new or nearly-new vehicles.
“This led to a steady supply of high-quality used cars for savvy motorists keen to get a great deal.”
At Saturday’s Palestine solidarity protest — which took place on E.P. Thompson's centenary — Jeremy Corbyn, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's Kate Hudson and John McDonnell remember the pioneer of ‘history from below’ and the debt owed to him by the anti-war movement.
E.P. Thompson speaks from the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, 1986.
INTERVIEW BY Owen Dowling
This Saturday, the 3 of February 2024, saw a diverse crowd of 200,000 people descend upon Whitehall in the Eighth National March for Palestine since the onset of Israel’s genocidal latest assault upon the people of Gaza. Mustered by the longstanding coalition around the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the bustling demonstration demanded a ceasefire in Gaza as a step towards negotiations for a just political settlement, and for Britain to withdraw all military and diplomatic succour for Israel following the ICJ’s ruling last week.
Joining a platform hosting Palestinian representatives and campaigners, and progressive British activists, MPs, and trade unionists, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch addressed the impassioned crowd:
No matter what our background, no matter what our community, no matter what our religion, we are all working people together. They are working people in Gaza and in the West Bank, and we must show our solidarity. We call on all of the trade unions, and all of the socialist movement, and our Labour Party: stand up and support the people who are being massacred, stand up against the slaughter, stand up against genocide — and build the bridges of peace on behalf of the people of the world, and especially the people of Palestine!
The mobilisation of the working-class movement in its tradition of internationalism against war and oppression and for peace and freedom was also a paramount concern for the celebrated Marxist historian E.P. Thompson (1924-1993), whose centennial birthday fell upon the same Saturday as London’s latest Palestine march. Author of a foundational classic of radical history-from-below, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Thompson was also a leading champion and protagonist of popular protest in his own time — against exploitation, war, state repression, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
With centenary celebrations for this legendary founder member and former vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament coinciding serendipitously with the occasion of another massive national demonstration against the greatest international injustice of our own age, co-organised by the CND of today, Tribune’s Owen Dowling spoke to several of the rally’s speakers about Thompson, his tradition as both historian and campaigner, and his significance for Britain’s socialist movement in its solidarity with Palestine today. Jeremy Corbyn OD
Looking back today, on the centenary of his birth, what has been the significance for you and your socialist and antiwar commitments of Edward Thompson, as a historian and as a peace campaigner? JC
I always thought of him as E.P. rather than Edward; his children lived in my constituency and I obviously knew them. His role in political history and historical writing was fantastic, and I was brought up on his books, if you like, politically. And then when he wrote that absolutely brilliant polemic, Protest and Survive, against the government’s ludicrous Protect and Survive pamphlet in 1980, an absolutely brilliant riposte, that inspired a whole movement of people.
We should remember that the intellectual, academic, challenging historian has an incredibly powerful place in our movement and in our society, because if we don’t look at history from the point of view of popular movements and the growth of common causes, and only look at it through the prism of the interests of states, the military, royalty, and establishments, then we lose so much. And I think that Edward Thompson was one who did that. I thank him for that, and his legacy will last forever for all of that.
Dorothy Thompson [socialist historian and campaigner, author of The Dignity of Chartism among other works, and Edward’s wife] I also knew quite well. Dorothy and I had a very interesting relationship; we used to go to a secondary school in Marleybone, Quintin Kynaston School, which had an annual ‘balloon debate’ where you had to go into ‘the balloon’ playing a particular character, and then would vote on who would be ‘thrown out’ and who would ‘survive’ to the end. I was there being Karl Marx, and Dorothy was there playing Queen Victoria. She was absolutely brilliant at being Queen Victoria, and managed to create a sort of almost feminist narrative around Queen Victoria’s life. At one point we got into a sort of repartee, she was saying: ‘Mr Marx, you don’t even want my head to be on my shoulders’, and I was just saying: ‘Your Majesty — no, I’m not calling you “Your Majesty”, you’re just a person, you’re Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha!’ It became a big joke, the whole thing, and we got on really well. She was actually brilliant at bringing out Queen Victoria in the role of the monarch during all the social movements of the nineteenth century; she would say things like: ‘I suppose, Mr Marx, you support the Chartists?!’ OD
Do you think E.P. Thompson’s life and work has an importance for those of us in Britain marching for peace and in solidarity with Palestine today? JC
E.P. Thompson would absolutely be here today, right at the front of the march, because he would see the connection — as there is an obvious connection — between the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to bring about a nuclear-free world, and the cause of Palestine solidarity. Israel is an undeclared holder of nuclear weapons; Mordechai Vanunu suffered eighteen years imprisonment for revealing the truth about Israel’s nuclear aspirations. And Thompson would also have been supportive of a campaign which for many years many of us raised at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of a Middle East weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone, in order to bring about the possibility of talks between Iran and Israel, about Israel getting rid of its nuclear weapons in order to discourage Iran from developing them. So yes he would absolutely be at the front of it.
I think the whole peace movement, the labour movement, the socialist movement needs to thank people like Edward Thompson. Kate Hudson OD
As General Secretary of CND, which is one of the cohosts of today’s march and has been part of the coalition behind these Palestine demonstrations for some years, how do you see the politics of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament aligning with those of the movement for solidarity with Palestine? KH
Well this movement is overwhelmingly for peace, for justice, for a negotiated political solution to the crisis for the Palestinians, and that is fundamental to the type of politics that CND has. We’re always looking for a peaceful solution, we’re always looking for an end to weapons use, to the weapons trade, and so on, so it aligns very closely. Of course for us, one of the points which we do try and draw out is that Israel is a nuclear-armed state, it has nuclear weapons, and there is a danger if the conflict spreads more widely in the region that nuclear weapons may be used. OD
From the time of its inception in 1958 through the 1980s to today, CND’s politics have also had an anti-imperialist orientation. Do you see that as reflected in its contemporary solidarity with Palestine? KH
Well, very, very clearly; we draw out a number of strands around this. There’s a really strong developing movement against nuclear colonialism, raising the question of where nuclear weapons have been tested in the past, where uranium is mined — largely on the lands of indigenous people — so there’s a big issue around that. But again it comes back to the question of justice and freedom. If a small number of countries, maybe they have nuclear weapons, maybe they go around invading other countries, start stamping on other people’s rights — we’re absolutely opposed to that, because you can’t have a world of peace while you continue to have that kind of power inequality in the world. OD
On the centenary of E.P. Thompson’s birth, how do you see his legacy in relation to the internationalist and antiwar practice of CND today? KH
It’s really fundamental to it, E.P. Thompson was one of the great figures in our history. But he’s not just a historical figure; his values, his whole ethos, everything he fought for is central to our movement today, absolutely. Those concepts of peace, socialism, and internationalism — those are at the heart of the labour movement, and that’s what we want to ensure, that peace and anti-imperialism remain central to the labour movement. OD
Since the 1950s CND, and in the 21st century the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have both entered into the canon of British popular social movements from below that E.P. Thompson of course helped recover historically: from the Levellers and the Diggers through the Chartists, the trade union movement, support for Republican Spain, and beyond. Do you think Thompson would be marching with us today if he were here? KH
100 percent. He was in that fantastic tradition — of the people, from the grassroots, organising, working together, solidarity. He would have been here now. John McDonnell OD
Today would mark the 100th birthday of Edward Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class and lifelong CND and peace activist. You’ve written on and engaged publicly with that school of history-writing. What has been the significance for your politics and conception of radical history of E.P. Thompson? JM
When I was a student, I came off the shop floor and then went to a university after night school, and one of the key texts you did in politics and political theory and history was E.P. Thompson’s book. It was one of the most fundamental analyses of how the working class was forming itself, how it was recognising itself in all its different strands. And then for a number of years it was one of those books that you read as a text that were so enjoyable, so enlightening.
Then years after, during the pandemic, I discovered a reading group [‘Casualties of History’ (2020) with Alex Press and Gabriel Winant, from Jacobin Magazine] reading a chapter a month of Thompson’s book, and it was so enjoyable re-exploring it all again. It shaped an understanding of the class relations of our society, about how they were formed from their origins, and the very title — The Making of the English Working Class — about how the working class were making themselves, and they still are. OD
In the 1980s, when you were on the Greater London Council, did you have any involvement with the CND movements of the time in which Thompson was prominent as a campaigner? JM
You and I are talking outside in Whitehall at the moment. When I was a GLC councillor I came out of County Hall to greet a CND demonstration, and they had a band, and they decided as part of the protest that they would sit down in Whitehall. So I was arrested and spent the night in the cells and came out the next day, and it was one of those occasions which you always remember — because at that point in time we were again on the edge of a nuclear war because of the rearmament that was taking place. And it was people like Thompson and others who held fast in convincing people that that wasn’t the way to go and that we needed peace. OD
Having led several enormous demonstrations through these London streets against NATO’s installation of US cruise missiles on British soil during his time, would Thompson have been in support of today’s demonstration for Palestine? JM
Yes he would, he was an internationalist, an antiwar internationalist. He was about changing society, transforming society, but not just here in terms of British politics: he was an internationalist who wanted a global transformation. That whole generation of the New Left would be here, definitely. Because one of the things that they emphasised was how working people can come together and then exert their power to secure peace.
We haven’t come as far as we wanted to in terms of the CND campaign, but people haven’t gone away; the concerns that people have about war and instability in the world at the moment demonstrates how necessary it is to get rid of nuclear weapons, and I think that’ll come back on the agenda. There’s a new wave, a new generation of political activity now, and I think it’s important that we seize this opportunity and insert again the nuclear weapons debate into that.
About the Authors Jeremy Corbyn is the member of parliament for Islington North.
John McDonnell is the Labour Party member of parliament for Hayes and Harlington.
Kate Hudson is the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). About the Interviewer
Owen Dowling is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune.
UK
How the Media Still Gets the Miners Wrong
By Gavin Hawkton A new series explores the painful realities of the miners' strike through the eyes of those directly involved. But it ignores the crux of the strike — Thatcher's determination to crush the organised working class.
Pickets clash with police outside the National Union of Mineworkers headquarters, Sheffield, UK, 13th April 1984. (Photo by John Rogers)
As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike, Channel 4 has delivered a groundbreaking three-part documentary: Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain. As the filmmakers state, this was a watershed of the post-war era — an event that wounded and changed Britain forever.
The series reveals the painful realities and traumatic divisions that tore through mining communities in 1984. Interviews with those who experienced the strike first-hand are essential viewing, revealing the ongoing trauma of the year-long struggle to a younger generation of viewers. New ground is also covered on the police brutality of Orgreave that will intensify public outrage and fuel long-running and ongoing demands for an inquiry into events that day.
Never-before-seen footage shot by Keith Brookes and Martin Harvey of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) shows events from the miners’ perspective, rather than the one presented by South Yorkshire Police. Miners recount how they were lured into the fields at Orgreave before riot police and mounted officers charged, inflicting appalling levels of violence. Miner Arthur Critchlow, featured, recalls being struck by a truncheon when he stopped to help an injured man:
[I got a] fractured skull. By the time we got to the holding area, the blood had gone down my back, down my legs and into my socks. I think about it most days and you do get upset but you have to drop it. Otherwise it will devour you.
Important also is the perspective of Critchlow’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, who states that the police chose to push miners into the village of Orgreave, among members of the public, to secure the charge of riot. At the time the charge could have led to miners serving a life behind bars. As we know, the riot trials collapsed after fabricated police testimony was deemed ‘unreliable’ in court. What is new is former officers appearing on national television and blowing the whistle on the scale of police corruption. Tony Munday, a serving officer at Orgreave, reveals that his statement was directed by a senior officer:
He dictated probably two paragraphs. Essentially, they were the components of the offence of riot, in fear and expectation of violence.
Dubbed ‘the biggest frame-up ever’ by defence barrister Michael Mansfield, police brutality at Orgreave and the fabrication of evidence is long overdue an inquiry. If the documentary achieves a swing of public support as we have seen in recent weeks following ITV’s Mr Bates Vs the Post Office it will be judged, rightly, as a success.
However, despite its merits, the series is not without shortcomings. Elsewhere it largely follows in the groove of well-worn narratives, lingering on picket line clashes, strike-breaking miners, and divided communities. Missing are the real cruxes of the strike — politically motivated mass pit closures and the existential threat to collective working-class security posed by the weakening of trade unionism.
The documentary repeats the presentation of 20 pits that were set to close in March 1984 with the loss of 20,000 jobs. This downplays the real number of pits set for closure, a ‘hit list’ revealed by Arthur Scargill at the time and later confirmed in declassified cabinet papers that showed the true intention was to close 75 pits over three years. This would have led to the loss of 64,000 jobs and plunged entire communities into the swelling numbers of those already unemployed.
It is this scale of closures at a time of high unemployment that is vital for understanding the miners’ fierce and prolonged resistance in defence of communities that were sustained by the local pit. As one former miner put it in the documentary, the pit was like a ‘mother’:
If people came upon bad times, had to have a leg off or an arm off, the ‘mother’ could look after them, find them work.
More, too, could have been said of the ongoing impact of pit closures in former mining areas or the campaign to pardon miners who were unfairly imprisoned and blacklisted. A decision to pardon miners in Scotland is a step in the right direction here.
Context is also missing in the form of the government’s meticulous planning and instigation of the strike, leaving viewers unaware of the power dynamics at play. The Thatcher government’s micromanagement, from controlling the narrative of so-called uneconomic pits to its willingness to absorb colossal amounts of resources – described as a ‘very good investment’ by Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson after the strike – are aspects less explored. The state’s intention to crush the nation’s strongest trade union, the ‘enemy within’, as precursor to imposing a new social and economic order therefore remains a story yet to be fully examined – and yet it is a vital one to understand the politicisation of police forces and the callous weaponisation of hunger that placed unimaginable pressures on miners to return to work.
While the documentary rightly questions media coverage of Orgreave, events elsewhere are framed through the eyes of reporters who often adhered to government narratives rather than challenging them. This is evident in the portrayal of ‘Scargill’s Strike’ in episode three, which centres on the shadowy figure of David Hart as a lens through which to view Arthur Scargill and the strike overall. What this typically achieves is a misdirected focus away from the agency of striking miners on the ground, who largely directed the character and trajectory of the strike.
Forty years on, a stark disconnect persists between local knowledge and national representation, with competing versions of the strike sharing little resemblance. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than the unprecedented scale of international solidarity and support that striking miners received from workers across the world – a topic that continues to be largely ignored and unknown outside of pit communities.
While local memory risks being forgotten, national representations of the strike continue to dominate, with a fixation on division and picket line violence. This follows in Channel 4’s documentary which, regrettably, also drifts towards the conventional portrayal of the strike as a doomed cause led by a leader out of touch with his members. What remains obscure is the fact that communities up and down the country were united behind their union in solidarity and that the strike came close to success on several occasions, despite being badly let down by the feeble leadership of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress.
Despite its flaws, the documentary gives a wider audience an insight into a now alien world of vibrant working-class communities with trade unionism at its heart. The full story of their struggle against the state, however, is one that still needs to be covered.
About the Author
Gavin Hawkton is a PhD student and teacher in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. His research is examining news media coverage of the miners' strike 1984-85.
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SPACE
SpaceX launches billion-dollar environmental research satellite for NASA
A long exposure shows the Falcon 9 climbing to orbit and the first-stage entry and landing burns. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched an environmental research satellite for NASA early Thursday, a nearly $1 billion spacecraft that survived multiple cancellation threats and is now poised to shed new light on climate change and the complex interplay of heat-trapping carbon, aerosols and sea life on global scales.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission — PACE — “will dramatically advance our understanding of the relationship between aerosols and clouds, and the global energy balance,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth sciences division. “This is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in our ability to model the climate.”
She said PACE is “going to teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb (the James Webb Space Telescope) is teaching us about the cosmos.” And that includes “a tremendous amount about ocean biology.”
“This is going to really center around understanding phytoplankton, these very small (organisms) that live in the ocean, that are at the foundation of life in our oceans in general.”
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface, she added, “and yet the oceans are one of the least well understood parts of the Earth system. PACE is going to profoundly advance our understanding of how the oceans work and how life in the oceans is related to life on land.”
Running two days late because of high winds at the launch site, the mission began at 1:33 a.m. EST Thursday when the nine first stage engines powering a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life, lighting up the deep overnight sky across Cape Canaveral.
Putting on a spectacular show, the Falcon 9 arced away on a southerly trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean just off the eastern coast of Florida as it climbed toward a 420-mile-high orbit around Earth’s poles. Along the way, the rocket’s first stage fell away as planned and flew itself back to landing at the Space Force station.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 roars away from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral carrying NASA’s PACE spacecraft. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
Polar orbits allow Earth-observation satellites, weather stations and reconnaissance platforms to view the entire planet as it rotates below. Tuesday’s launching marked the first polar launch from the East Coast for the U.S. government since 1960 when a rocket went awry and debris fell on Cold War-era Cuba, killing a cow.
Since then, NASA and the Pentagon have launched polar payloads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
But SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 to polar orbit from Florida in August 2020 and has since launched multiple payloads on such southerly trajectories. With PACE, NASA agreed government safety requirements had been met.
An artist’s impression of the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem satellite, or PACE, in an orbit around Earth’s poles. Image: NASA.
Trajectories and launch sites aside, the PACE mission had a rocky road to the launch pad. The Trump administration made multiple attempts to cancel the project, in part to devote more resources to NASA’s accelerated moon program. But Congress did not go along, and funding was added back to the agency’s budget each time.
“I’m not going to dive into policy or politics, but it’s been a really remarkable journey,” said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist. He credited support from the science community, NASA and the public for keeping the program on track and boosting morale throughout.
The 3,748-pound PACE satellite, built at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is equipped with three instruments: a hyper-spectral color camera and two light-analyzing polarimeters, one providing wide-angle views of polarized light reflected from land, sea and the atmosphere below and the other providing a narrow-angle view.
“It’s a three-instrument payload and frankly, the technology really just operates like your eyes do,” Werdell said. “We are looking for interactions of sunlight — photons, quanta — with the atmosphere, ocean and land. Whatever those photons touch, they get absorbed or they get scattered, and then the instrument sees what they are.”
The Falcon 9 carrying PACE soars skywards. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now. Despite its name, PACE “is not an ocean mission. It’s not an atmosphere mission. It’s not a land mission. It’s an all-of-those-things mission,” Werdell said.
“And that is so incredibly important, because you can’t understand one without understanding the other. … This is a mission that we don’t know what we’re going to learn about. And that is so deeply exciting.”
PACE is expected to provide high-precision data allowing researchers to fine-tune computer models, giving policy makers more accurate information about ongoing trends and long-term threats. It will also provide real-time measurements of aerosol movement through the atmosphere, plankton health and carbon transport.
“Understanding how ocean life interacts with the atmosphere and the global climate is one of the secrets of the universe right here at home,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free.
“Aerosols that cycle through the ocean and atmosphere are a factor in how clouds form and how weather systems behave. But exactly how that process works is a scientific mystery. Unraveling it is one big goal of the PACE mission.”
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said the last 10 years have been the hottest since record keeping began, reflecting an overall warming trend driven in large part by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
“As carbon dioxide is released, some of it is absorbed by land, some of it is absorbed by the ocean, and some stays in the atmosphere trapping heat,” she said. “Greenhouse gases aren’t the only factors affecting temperature, there’s also these tiny particles called aerosols that reflect or absorb sunlight and also affect cloud formation.
“PACE is going to provide more information on oceans and atmosphere, including providing new ways to study how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon. It’s also going to give us information on aerosols, information that helps us understand long-term climate.”
The PACE satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket and mission operations are costing NASA $948 million. After extensive tests and instrument calibration, science observations are expected to begin in about two months.
While the design life calls for a three-year mission, project officials are optimistic the spacecraft will operate for 10 years or more when all is said and done.
A volcano erupts in same part of southwestern Iceland where earlier activity required evacuations
GRINDAVIK, Iceland (AP) — A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted Thursday, less than two months after a previous eruption in the area forced the evacuation of the coastal town of Grindavik. The eruption began about 6 a.m.
A view of the volcano erupting, north of GrindavÃk, Iceland, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. Iceland’s Meteorological Office says a volcano is erupting in the southwestern part of the country, north of a nearby settlement. The eruption of the Sylingarfell volcano began at 6 a.m. local time on Thursday, soon after an intense burst of seismic activity. (AP Photo/Marco Di Marco)
GRINDAVIK, Iceland (AP) — A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted Thursday, less than two months after a previous eruption in the area forced the evacuation of the coastal town of Grindavik.
The eruption began about 6 a.m. local time, sending lava into the air along a 3-kilometer-long (1.9-mile-long) fissure northeast of Mount Sundhnukur, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said.
Coast Guard surveillance indicated the eruption was taking place in the same area as one that occurred Dec. 18. The Met Office said lava was flowing to the west and there was no immediate threat to the town of Grindavik -- evacuated after a previous eruption late last year -- or to a major power plant in the area.
Icelandic national broadcaster RUV said the nearby Blue Lagoon thermal spa, one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions, was closed when the eruption began and guests were evacuated to hotels.
This is the third eruption since December of a volcanic system on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which is home to Keflavik, Iceland’s main airport. There was no disruption reported to the airport on Thursday.
Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, averages an eruption every four to five years. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.
Grindavik, a town of 3,800 people about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, was evacuated in November when the Svartsengi volcanic system awakened after almost 800 years with a series of earthquakes that opened large cracks in the earth between the town and Sýlingarfell, a small mountain to the north.
The volcano eventually erupted on Dec. 18, sending lava flowing away from Grindavik. A second eruption that began on Jan. 14 sent lava towards the town. Defensive walls that had been bolstered since the first eruption stopped some of the flow, but several buildings were consumed by the semi-molten flow.
The Associated Press
Natural gas flare samples collected by aircraft reveal high variation in nitrogen oxides emission estimates
Red triangles represent flaring locations as seen by NOAA's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The shaded boxes indicate the oil-producing regions studied with Bakken in purple, Permian in yellow and Eagle Ford in green. Credit: Plant et al. 2024 RED TRIANGLES EXTEND INTO ALBERTA IN THE NORTH
Natural gas flaring, or burning, is commonly used in parts of the United States to dispose of the gas byproduct from oil extraction. The flare's combustion converts hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide and water, which lessens the climate impact and reduces the safety concerns of the natural gas on site but also produces nitrogen oxides, or NOx.
NOx—which includes the highly reactive gases nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide—directly and indirectly impacts air quality. The Clean Air Act requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate nitrogen dioxide, the most prevalent form of NOx, due to its influence on public health and the environment.
Currently, the EPA gauges NOx emissions from flares using emission factors, a static value multiplied by activity data provided by the flare operator. Despite the spread of flaring practices across the U.S., few assessments have directly measured how much NOx flaring operations truly produce.
As a part of the F3UEL project, which aims to provide data-driven updates to U.S. oil and gas emission estimates, a University of Michigan-led research team measured NOx production from real-world natural gas flares.
The research team collected data from three regions—Eagle Ford in Texas, Permian in Texas and New Mexico, and Bakken in North Dakota—which together produce more than 80% of gas volumes flared in the U.S.
A small aircraft equipped with high precision instruments flew close to the ground in these regions, intercepting the mixed combustion plume from flares. NOx flaring emissions were estimated for each region using observationally-derived emission factors from 480 airborne intercepts along with region-based estimates of flaring gas volumes.
"Using an airborne approach allowed us to sample flares over large geographical areas and capture a variety of operations conditions, all without requiring ground access to the sites," said co-author Genevieve Plant, an assistant research scientist of climate and space sciences engineering at the University of Michigan.
"This highlights the importance of measuring emission sources under real-world operating conditions," said Plant
Although the median emission factor for each region was within the range of values used by the regulatory agency in Texas, some flares generated NOx at much higher rates with 20-30% of the flares responsible for 80% of basin-wide flaring NOx emissions. High-emission flares brought up the average emissions factors in the Bakken and Permian region to two to three times larger than the value used by the EPA.
"Our measurements show that some flares emit excessive amounts of NOx, and that these flares will have greater air quality impact than currently understood," said co-author Eric A. Kort, an associate professor of climate and space sciences engineering at the University of Michigan.
Reduced air quality could impact the health of workers onsite along with the estimated 17.6 million Americans that live within a mile of active oil and gas wells. For the regions observed in this study, 500,000 people live within five kilometers of a flare—a distance associated with an increased risk of preterm birth.
"This work, combined with previous results from the F3UEL project on methane emissions from flares, shows that reducing the volume of gas flared will have greater climate and air quality benefits than previously realized," added Kort.
More information: Genevieve Plant et al, In Situ Sampling of NOx Emissions from United States Natural Gas Flares Reveals Heavy-Tail Emission Characteristic, Environmental Science & Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c08095
