No abstract

No abstract

Animal farming exceeds all forms of transport in terms of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite the implications of the seriousness of addressing animal farming in relation to mitigating the effects of GHG emissions, to date, the relationship between consumer behaviour and climate change has tended to neglect the role of animal foods. This paper reports on a pilot study in which six UK households were ‘shadowed’ to facilitate the investigation of the relationship between animal food practices and environmental practices, as they emerge in day‐to‐day life. Results indicate that most participants make no connection between the two issues at present, in terms of awareness or practice. However, animal foods do have an ambiguous and complex status in most participants' food practices; for instance, being viewed as problematic for reasons of health or animal welfare. This finding suggests that further research is needed into the potential for raising awareness of the link between animal‐based foods and climate change. This might have a role to play in shifting food practices towards more plant‐based, less GHG intensive, foods.

The Gorgon gas field lies 70 km west of Barrow Island in 200 m of water. The field is jointly owned by ChevronTexaco Australia, Shell Development Australia and Mobil Exploration and Producing Australia and has certified proven hydrocarbon gas reserves of 272.69 Giga cubic metres (Gm3) (9.63 trillion cubic feet (Tcf)). Carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises about 14 mole % of the raw gas resource.The Gorgon joint venture is committed to the responsible management of greenhouse gas emissions and this ongoing commitment is reflected in the plan to inject Gorgon CO2 into the Dupuy Formation beneath Barrow Island, unless it is cost prohibitive or technically unfeasible.This paper summarises the Phase 1 assessment made by the Western Australian Department of Industry and Resources (DoIR) into the technical feasibility of the Gorgon CO2 storage project. Technical feasibility is defined as the ability to inject CO2 in a manner that has acceptable safety, environmental and reservoir risks based on assessments made by both the Gorgon joint venture and regulatory bodies.DoIR and ChevronTexaco Australia agreed to regularly review the technical work for due diligence purposes. To assist in the assessment, DoIR engaged the services of Curtin University. The Phase 1 review was completed in June 2003 and provided technical assurance on the feasibility of CO2 storage beneath Barrow Island. This provided one of the criteria for the WA State Government’s decision to grant in-principle access to Barrow Island for the project.The Phase 1 review provided a comparative risk analysis and recommendations related to improving the sub-surface definition of the earth model, further assessment of seal and fault integrity, injectivity, near-well bore reactions and CO2 surveillance and monitoring technologies. Key DoIR recommendations included the need for additional geological data and a long-term monitoring strategy for reservoir management and contingency planning. The second Phase of due diligence commenced in February 2004.

Abstract-The coding advantage refers to the potential for network coding to improve end-to-end throughput or reduce routing cost. How large can the coding advantage be? We investigate this fundamental question in the classic undirected network model. After almost a decade of research in network coding, so far all known networks where such potential exists are based on a special class of topologies known as combinatorial networks. We try to prove a rather small upper-bound (close to 1) for the coding advantage for the class of combinatorial networks and its variations. Such a result, interestingly, will lead us to the following dilemma: either we are still missing the most appropriate network topologies for demonstrating the power of network coding, after a decade of research in network coding, or we have been ignoring a very effective perspective for efficiently approximating the minimum Steiner tree problem, after a few decades of research in Steiner trees. We elaborate on the above arguments and present the early stage results of our research: the coding advantage (in terms of routing cost) is upper-bounded by 1.125 in the class of uniform combinatorial networks.