Benjamin Cooke

London

Environment and Clean Technology Writer at The Times

Writing about the environment and clean tech for the Times. DMs open for tips. benjamin.cooke(at)https://t.co/2tn7hawvUt

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thetimes.co.uk

Articles

Institutions 'will invest more in UK if climate change risk is cut'

Jan 21, 2025 | thetimes.com | Benjamin Cooke
Big Butterfly Count hits a new low, and dreary weather is to blame

Jul 29, 2024 | thetimes.com | Benjamin Cooke

With a week to go before the end of its Big Butterfly Count, the wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation has said that this year’s results may be the lowest in the survey’s 14-year history. Members of the public who spent 15 minutes looking for butterflies for the count saw on average seven. At this time last year the average was 12. The charity attributed the low number to this year’s unusually wet and windy spring, coupled with the cold start to the summer.
Inside the world’s largest carbon capture plant, sucking CO2 from the skies

May 13, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Benjamin Cooke

At the foot of a dormant volcano in Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks has kickstarted a geological process of its own. The eggy smell of sulphur wafts across the valley in plumes of geothermal steam, but Climeworks’s technicians are concerned with a more insidious gas: carbon dioxide. Using energy from a nearby geothermal power station to power an array of steel fans, they are taking the planet-warming gas out of the air, then locking it away deep within the solidified lava underfoot.
Carbon capture technology aims to create jet fuel from thin air

Dec 10, 2023 | thetimes.co.uk | Benjamin Cooke

Pioneering machinery has been switched on to take carbon dioxide from the air to be recycled into jet fuel, in the first “direct air capture” facility in Britain. Paid for by Sheffield University and housed in its Translational Energy Research Centre, the plant was designed by Mission Zero Technologies, a start-up based in London. The machines in the facility waft air towards a water-based solvent, which carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into.