This chapter will give you an understanding of the rationale behind the need to transform our chemical industry from one that is based on fossil fuels to one that is based on biomass. This includes reducing the use of fossil resources with the aim of avoiding pollution. Underpinning the rationale is the understanding that the carrying capacity for biomass on our Earth naturally is limited.

Users of biomass must know when the biomass is going to be delivered, which can either be seasonal or a constant delivery of biomass over the year, and they will demand a biomass of the right quality. This is obviously a challenge for the supply chain of biomass because most biomass from land or the ocean is harvested at intervals, and until used the organic components in the biomass is at risk of being lost or transformed. Our task is to provide economical and sustainable methods to store the biomass, avoiding unwanted transformation and loss of the organic components, and to reduce transport costs and spoiling. Therefore, before we make a decision on biomass management, the right logistics of sowing, harvesting, transport, storing, and pretreatment must be considered. For this purpose, you will need to have insight on pretreatment and conservation technologies, storage, transport, and transformation of biomass during handling. Knowledge that will be provided in this chapter.

The chapter explores viewpoint across various topics and genres of political discourse. Viewpoint is defined as a pervasive property of language and conceptualisation which is exhibited across a broad range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The chapter starts by looking at deixis and deictic shifts in media discourses of immigration and political protests. The ideological role of viewpoints evoked by transitive versus reciprocal verbs is also considered in the context of media coverage of political protests. Subjective versus objective construal is further analysed as a viewpoint phenomenon and the role of objective construals in official communication around Covid-19 is highlighted. Viewpoint as an inherent feature in the mental spaces networks configured in response to modal and conditional constructions are considered in the context of Brexit discourse. Finally, conducted within the framework of discourse space theory, an analysis is given of distance and proximity (relative to a deictically specified viewpoint) in the discourse of the far-right organisation Britain First.

The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

Most financial decisions boil down to figuring out how much an asset is worth. For example, in deciding whether to invest in a security such as a stock or a bond or in a business opportunity, you have to determine whether the price being asked is high or low relative to other investment opportunities available to you. In addition to investment decisions, there are many other situations in which one needs to determine the value of an asset. For example, suppose that the tax assessor in your town has assessed your house at $500,000 for property tax purposes. Is this value too high or too low? Or suppose you and your siblings inherit some property, and you decide to sell it and share the proceeds equally among yourselves. How do you decide how much it is worth?

The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

In the previous chapters we introduced the concept of valuation, which involved converting cash flows that are expected to happen in the future into today’s terms, and we learned about the returns on various assets and how to analyze the past performance of financial instruments to inform investment decisions. However, the future is not known for sure. The cash flows that occur may be different from what we initially expect, and the value (and rates of return) of financial instruments change over time. In this chapter, we introduce a fundamental concept in finance: Uncertainty about the future can affect valuation and decision making.

We begin by defining what risk is in finance, and how it affects financial decisions. We then dive into how risk can be managed, which includes identifying relevant risks, assessing how they can affect one’s financial situation, and then determining appropriate techniques that can be used to reduce these risks.

Before proceeding with our first steps in valuation, we need to introduce some tools and define some notation that will be used here and throughout the book when valuing assets.

At a fundamental level, the value of an asset comes from the cash flows that are associated with it—that is, from the amounts of money that the owner either receives or pays at various points in time. An essential tool in analyzing cash flows from any financial decision is a diagram known as a timeline, a linear representation of cash outflows and inflows over a period of time. A negative sign in front of a cash flow means that you are paying that amount of money (it’s a cash outflow from you). No sign means that you are receiving an amount of money (it’s a cash inflow to you).