Around The Web

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Family of inventor says they were designed to be reused to stop trees from being destroyed.

As we become more aware of our relationship to the Earth there is an urge for many to nurture a more sustainable and ethical way of living. But this hankering to leave modern society for an alternative life is not new. According to PhD Candidate Rachel Goldlust it goes back before the 1900's.

New video footage reveals the world's fastest ants galloping across the scorching sand of the Sahara at speeds approaching one metre per second, which is the equivalent of a house cat tearing about at 120mph.

Researchers have found that at full pelt the Saharan silver ants can travel 108 times their body length per second in gallops that brought all six legs off the ground at once

• Fastest ants in world found in northern Sahara, researchers say
  

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A committee is set up to push climate action but critics point to delay on environment policy.

Kathy Castor’s letter to Sundar Pichai says it’s hard to ‘overstate the detrimental impact’ groups have had on the climate debate

A Democratic lawmaker has called on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to stop investing in organizations that deny the existence of the climate crisis, saying it was hard to overstate how detrimental the impact of such groups had been on the US climate debate.

Kathy Castor’s letter to Pichai followed a report in the Guardian last week that revealed Google had made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington, despite the internet giant’s insistence it supports political action to combat the crisis.

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An economy-wide CO2 price in the US would help prevent against emissions leakage versus subnational and sector-specific initiatives, while Congressional action would be needed to clarify if federal law will allow for a power sector carbon charge, according to wholesale grid operator PJM.

Among those who've been anticipating this morning's announcement from the National Farmer's Federation is Water Minister David Littleproud.

The NFF wants drought relief programs to be monitored and evaluated to establish what does and doesn't work.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation will release a draft post-2020 RGGI regulation this year and will hold a public comment period as it looks to conform to the US Northeast ETS’ revisions, a government source told Carbon Pulse.

Little more than two years of land clearing will cancel out the $1.5bn in taxpayer funds that goes towards protecting native habitat

Since 2015 the Australian government has committed more than $1.5bn of taxpayer funds to climate change projects that plant or protect native habitat. Over a slightly longer period it has also spent nearly $62m on a policy to plant 20 million trees promised under Tony Abbott.

At the same time the country has significantly stepped up land-clearing programs in several states, bulldozing hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, mostly for agriculture.

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An epidemic of land clearing is sabotaging efforts to address climate change. Farming communities are bitterly divided over the issue – but it also has global consequences.

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The leashed beasts may look like large powerful dogs, but they still have the wild heart of a wolf.

Carbon market analysts have raised their medium-term EU carbon price forecasts by as much 18% on the view that coal-to-gas fuel switching potential will be exhausted sooner than previously thought.

European carbon hit a fresh three-week high on Wednesday, whipsawing around for another session as EUAs continue to be directed by Brexit-fuelled fluctuations in the British pound.

Researchers grow brains in a lab and discover that human neurons develop more slowly than those of other primates.

Monitoring trip returns from ‘stronghold’ for species without finding a single sawfish

Numbers of endangered sawfish in one of their most globally important strongholds are dropping, with conservationists calling for a rules that will cut the numbers of animals being caught in commercial fishing nets in north Queensland.

In September, a two-week private expedition to monitor and tag sawfish in the Norman River, Queensland, returned without finding a single sawfish.

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Several big-emitting Asian nations are considering stepping up their low-ball Paris emission pledges as they discover viable alternatives to coal and a limited role for emissions trade under Article 6, according to the operational head of intergovernmental body GGGI.

The team behind the Bloodhound supersonic car is in Northern Cape to start running the vehicle.

Anti-nuclear campaigner who targeted the Sellafield complex in Cumbria and became a respected expert on the industry

For 30 years Martin Forwood, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a thorn in the side of the huge Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria. With his unrivalled collection of original documents on the nuclear industry he was a more reliable source of information to journalists and campaigners than the government-owned industry British Nuclear Fuels, or anyone in Whitehall.

But Martin was not just an armchair campaigner; he went in for many imaginative direct actions, including, in 2003, chaining himself to a railway line to halt a nuclear waste shipment from Italy destined for Sellafield. When he came up in court charged with a Victorian-era offence of obstructing the railway, which carried a potential sentence of life imprisonment, the judge acknowledged his sincerity, reduced the charge and fined him.

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