- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
Friends in cement, the UK has decided to leave the EU. We at Global Cement were ‘Remainers,’ hoping for future reform of the EU. A slim majority of the British people saw it the other way and decided that there was no hope of reform, and that they did not want further integration. Jean Claude Juncker (president of the European Commission) himself had said in the week before the referendum that there was no possibility of further reform, no possibility of further renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Perhaps his comments clinched the final result in the referendum. With 33 million votes cast, 17,410,742 (51.9%) were for an EU exit, while 16,141,241 (48.1%) were for remaining. Only 634,750 people would have had to have changed their minds for the result to be a tie.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
I originally trained as a geologist, and gained a PhD in mineralogy and geochemistry (studying lignites in Northern Ireland) a long time ago. It’s been useful in many ways, not least to give me some insight into the relative magnitudes of things, be they time scales (3.8 billion years since life first evolved), physical scales (the difference between a microgram and a milligram) or the severity of earthquakes. The Richter Scale1 of earthquake intensity is logarithmic, meaning that for each increase in scale of one, the shaking, in short, will be ten times bigger. A Richter scale nine earthquake is 100 times ‘bigger’ than a Richter scale seven earthquake (which is already considered a major earthquake).
- Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
The British Prime Minister David Cameron has returned from Brussels to metaphorically declare that he has done a deal with the continental powers, echoing Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘I hold in my hand a piece of paper,’ speech after meeting Mr Hitler in 1938. In his turn, Mr Cameron claims to have wrested important concessions from the current rulers of Europe. The difference between 1938-9 and now being that the deal will be put to the test of the referendum ballot box instead of by being tested by opposing armies. The British people, including the restive Scots (themselves arch-Europeans and sometimes seemingly half-French), will now vote on 23 June on whether to remain in the EU or to leave.
- Written by Amy Saunders Deputy Editor, Global Gypsum Magazine
World leaders, environmentalists and journalists everywhere have been celebrating extra hard in recent days. December 2015 saw two weeks of negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris. At the end of the event, the final agreement, a mix of mandatory and voluntary statements that apply to almost 200 countries, were agreed. These included:
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
Those of you with a good memory will recall the havoc of the Asian Crisis of 1997-1998. Over-borrowed Asian countries were forced to devalue their currencies compared to the dollar, following a bubble originating in property development and inflated asset prices, stoked by relatively cheap dollar-denominated borrowing. Over-capacity in many industries, built on the back of over-enthusiastic production expansion in the expectation of spectacular future growth, combined with a collapse in demand to calamitously unbalance markets: Building materials were especially badly-hit, with some materials taking a decade or more to grow back to a situation of supply-demand balance. Only towards the end of the 2000s were some Asian markets seriously thinking about new production facilities - after their break-neck expansion of the 1990s.
