How to Reduce Aircraft Emissions at a stroke

At a briefing for MEPs given by EASA (the European Air safety Agency) we are told that they “can reduce aircraft emissions by 12% at a stroke”. Challenged to explain how, the answer is to create a single European air space”.

At present, aircraft weave their way across Europe and are subject to instructions from each country’s air traffic controllers. The result is a zig-zag flight-path across European skies. If there were a single set of traffic controllers - as there is for the USA - aircraft could come in to land on a straight line and thus save lots of fuel. Why doesn’t this happen? Because each national government in Europe wants to keep control in its own little hands, rather than seeing the bigger beneficial picture.

 

Hoping to defeat Climate Change with Technology, and ever-faster computers

Lunch with one of the men who will take over when Bill Gates retires from Microsoft in June. Asked about Climate Change, he says the world’s only hope is a technology breakthrough and the problem which worries him out is whether the breakthrough will be allowed to get to market. The breakthrough, he says, is unlikely to come from a big corporation but from some smaller outsider.

There is plenty of energy around us, but hydrogen will not be the big source. We need a better electricity buffering mechanism. The future may lie with lots of individual energy generators, most probably solar powered, and linked together by a grid.

The biggest change in micro processors of the last 30 years will come in the next five years because computer manufacturers have reached a physical heat emission limitation with current microchips. Over the next ten years the speed of computers will increase fifty fold, voice recognition may become perfect, equipment will be integrated so there will be no separate telephones for example. One can foresee that simultaneous interpretation will be done by high-speed computers and they may perhaps replace human interpreters.