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NSW, ACT and South Australia in cross party push to speed transition to net zero
NSW, South Australia and ACT form cross-party state alliance to fast track shift to zero emissions with focus on existing technologies.
The post NSW, ACT and South Australia in cross party push to speed transition to net zero appeared first on RenewEconomy.
CEFC’s first big hydrogen play to fund zero emissions trucks for zinc refinery
CEFC to fund five purpose-built, fuel cell electric trucks and the hydrogen production and refuelling kits in first major hydrogen play.
The post CEFC’s first big hydrogen play to fund zero emissions trucks for zinc refinery appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Telstra lands energy retail licence, to challenge incumbents with green energy offer
Telstra to launch challenge to big energy incumbents after regulator granted a licence to offer energy services to its 13 million phone and internet customers.
The post Telstra lands energy retail licence, to challenge incumbents with green energy offer appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Scott Morrison is hiding behind future technologies, when we should just deploy what already exists
Feel alone in your eco-anxiety? Don't – it's remarkably common to feel dread about environmental decline
Australia’s emissions from land clearing likely far higher than claimed, analysis indicates
High-profile experts cast doubt over the bulk of the country’s touted reductions in greenhouse pollution
Australia is likely to be releasing more emissions from deforestation than reported to the United Nations, new analysis indicates, stoking calls for an independent review of the sector that has delivered the bulk of the country’s claimed reductions in greenhouse gas pollution in recent decades.
An assessment of satellite imagery of more than 50 properties in Queensland by Martin Taylor, an adjunct senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, has identified significant discrepancies between what is treated as cleared land by Australia’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) and the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (Slats) used by the state government.
Continue reading...Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds
Exclusive: poll of 10 countries including US, UK, France and Germany finds people prioritising measures that are already habits
Citizens are alarmed by the climate crisis, but most believe they are already doing more to preserve the planet than anyone else, including their government, and few are willing to make significant lifestyle changes, an international survey has found.
“The widespread awareness of the importance of the climate crisis illustrated in this study has yet to be coupled with a proportionate willingness to act,” the survey of 10 countries including the US, UK, France and Germany, observed.
Continue reading...The eastern Australian waterbird survey is a white-knuckle flight of avian accounting
One of the world’s largest bird counts is ‘hours of terror separated by minutes of boredom’
“Two-hundred pelicans breeding, 20 whiskered terns, 100 grey teal, 30 black swans, one little pied cormorant …”
Richard Kingsford, a veteran ecologist, is rattling off the waterbirds he’s spotting below. He clutches his voice recorder closely to overcome the engine noise as our Cessna banks steeply, tracking the shoreline of Lake Brewster, a large lake in central-west New South Wales.
Continue reading...‘I get scared’: the young activists sounding the alarm from climate tipping points
From Philippines to Greenland, protecting dying coral reefs to melting ice sheets, young people are fighting for their futures
• What is Cop26 and why does it matter? The complete guide
For millions of young people around the world, climate breakdown is something they have known their entire lives. Many live in regions that are particularly at risk of being affected by tipping points - parts of the Earth’s system where small changes, such as increased temperatures, could lead to accelerated and irreversible impacts.
A landmark IPCC report earlier this year warned that tipping points such as melting ice sheets or Amazon forest loss could soon be triggered, with the potential to bring catastrophic change to vulnerable areas.
Continue reading...UK may eventually need carbon border tax, George Eustice says
Levy on imports related to CO2 generated by meat production might be necessary, says minister
The UK may eventually need to implement a carbon dioxide border tax to stop consumers effectively exporting greenhouse gas emissions abroad, the environment secretary has said.
On Sunday, George Eustice insisted he was not in favour of a domestic meat tax to help reduce global heating and that such a proposal had “never been on the cards”.
Continue reading...The billion dollar race to defy ageing is the last thing the planet needs | John Harris
Instead of investing to cheat death, we should be trying to make old age livable and dignified for all
Welcome to the era of immortalists: scientists, dreamers and – crucially – billionaires, who want us to think of age as a curable disease, and our final end as something that could be indefinitely postponed. According to one estimate, the revenues of the global anti-ageing industry will increase from about $200bn today to $420bn by 2030. One sure sign of its rosy prospects is the involvement of high-profile people in the US who have made vast fortunes from the internet. If many of them can avoid taxes, why not death?
“Death is sort of an affront to American life,” wrote Zadie Smith in 2003. “It’s so anti-aspirational.” In tech circles, this kind of distaste for mortality often blurs into the culture of “biohacking” (fasting, closely tracking your vital signs, gobbling supplements and “smart drugs”) which is one manifestation of transhumanism: to quote the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, “a belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current limitations, especially by the use of science and technology”.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...It’s time to shift from the ‘war on terror’ to a war on climate change | Heidi Peltier
Climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires than the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks. Let’s treat the climate crisis with equal seriousness
Large government bureaucracies are often slow to adapt to changing realities, such as the catastrophic threats we face in a warming world. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no exception. New research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project shows that the DHS has been overly focused on foreign and foreign-inspired terrorism, while violent attacks in the US have more often come from domestic sources. A combination of willful ignorance and institutional inertia caused the agency to miss the rise in white supremacy and domestic terrorism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
The new data from Dr Erik Dahl, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, show that just one of the 46 failed terror plots in the US from 2018 through 2020 was directed by a foreign organization. In contrast, 29 plots were planned or carried out by domestic groups. In 2019, DHS finally acknowledged the growing threat of targeted violence and domestic terrorism borne mainly of far-right ideology and white supremacy and issued its first strategy document identifying these threats.
Heidi Peltier is a senior researcher at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and director of programs for the Costs of War Project
Continue reading...Oil spills, plastic, rising seas: artists invoke climate breakdown in San Francisco exhibition – in pictures
Lands End, a new exhibition of international artists staged at the site of a historic San Francisco restaurant, showcases the fragility of the planet through photography, film and found objects.
- Lands End runs 7 November 2021 – 27 March 2022 at 1090 Point Lobos Ave San Francisco
‘No power to stop it’: optimism turns to frustration over east Africa pipeline
Promised an income, those affected by $20bn oil project are losing their land and resources instead
A bumpy, mud-spattered road leads deep into Kakumiro district in western Uganda, where the longest heated oil pipeline in the world will pass through its homes, farms and wetlands.
The villagers in the Kijungu settlements welcomed the project when the route was announced in 2017, hoping that the government and companies involved would buy their land and change their lives for good. Their optimism has since given way to frustration.
Continue reading...Nearly 300 flights within UK taken by government staff … every day
Green campaigners are aghast as report shows increases in many departments despite a drive to cut emissions
Ministers and civil servants took nearly 107,000 domestic flights in Britain in just one year despite a drive to reduce carbon emissions, reveals a new official report on “greening government”.
The environmental audit reveals 22 Whitehall departments and government agencies took 106,824 internal flights in the year to 31 March 2020, an average of 293 flights a day.
Continue reading...Counter climate summit kicks off as activists lament Cop26 inaction
Coalition aims to give voice to ideas and solutions it believes are largely absent from the Cop talks
A counter climate summit kicks off in Glasgow on Sunday amid mounting criticism from activists about greenwashed solutions and stalled action from corporations and rich nations inside Cop26.
The People’s Summit for Climate Justice will bring together movements and communities from across the world to amplify voices, ideas and solutions it believes are largely absent from Cop – including the global green new deal, polluters’ liability, indigenous ecological knowledge and the gulf between net zero and real zero emissions.
Continue reading...Want to change the world? Then you’d better give up on self-defeating pessimism | Kenan Malik
He quickly apologised for his crassness but the archbishop of Canterbury’s comparison of politicians who fail to tackle climate change with those in the 1930s who appeased the Nazis was not simply crass. It illustrated how many imagine that the best means of arousing political concern is by painting as dark a picture as possible of social problems. And few things today speak more of evil than the Holocaust.
The kind of facile optimism that a figure such as Boris Johnson exudes is deeply obnoxious. It’s a way of avoiding the issues, of pretending that we can resolve our problems by not thinking deeply about them, but by simply asserting “we can do it”.
Continue reading...Big oil wisely acts as a climate ally, but the rising crude price is far from net zero
The likes of BP and Shell promise a ‘transition’ to green energy backed by their revenues. They need to convince us further
Executives at big oil and gas companies, at least the European ones, have spent the past two years trying to change the narrative. The likes of BP and Shell have trumpeted their net zero plans, declared themselves to be “transitioning” to a cleaner energy future and talked up the historical significance of new targets. Think of us as part of the solution, was the message.
To climate activists and politicians demanding faster decarbonisation, the industry’s reply has been that switching off investment in oil and gas too quickly would create a supply crisis: instead what’s needed are “integrated” energy companies that can recycle cashflows from hydrocarbons and build the green infrastructure of tomorrow.
Continue reading...‘No one knew they existed’: wild heirs of lost British honeybee found at Blenheim
The ‘ecotype’, thought to have been wiped out by disease and invasive species, is thriving in the estate’s ancient woodlands
Thousands of rare forest honeybees that appear to be the last wild descendants of Britain’s native honeybee population have been discovered in the ancient woodlands of Blenheim Palace.
The newly discovered subspecies, or ecotype, of honeybee is smaller, furrier and darker than the honeybees found in managed beehives, and is believed to be related to the indigenous wild honeybees that foraged the English countryside for centuries. Until now, it was presumed all these bees had been completely wiped out by disease and competition from imported species.
Continue reading...Climate change: National Trust joins international call for peat product ban
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