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Victoria consents to gas production from well near Twelve Apostles
Greens says government’s support for fossil fuel expansion is ‘bonkers’ and no one will visit the tourist site ‘if it’s surrounded by gas drilling rigs’
The Victorian government has given consent for a gas company to produce gas extracted from beneath a national park in the state’s south-west, near the celebrated tourist site the Twelve Apostles.
Documents tabled in Victorian parliament earlier this month show Lily D’Ambrosio, the state energy and climate change minister, gave consent for an existing exploration gas well underneath the Port Campbell national park to be developed into a production well.
Continue reading...The nature of a dragonfly: weigher of souls | Helen Sullivan
Upside down, they resemble a pair of scales
Dragonflies have a near-perfect hunting record, successfully grabbing their prey in mid-air 95% of the time: they do this while flying skywards, earthwards, side to side, backwards and upside down. In one experiment, a dragonfly with numbers drawn on its clear wings alights backwards from a reed, legs raised above its head like a person making an offering to God, and scoops up the bug flying behind it. The dragonfly appears to catch its prey both benevolently and malevolently: snatching it and saving it, like a ball or a falling baby.
Dragonflies transform from their larval stage with similarly precise acrobatics: the skin splits, the insect wriggles its head and chest out with the awkwardness of someone trying to get into a sleeping bag while standing up, and then it hangs upside down for a while, its tail still trapped in the skin. The almost-dragonfly regains its strength, then does an upside down sit-up at the same time it pulls and flicks its tail out: a perfectly controlled dismount, a precisely calibrated monkey acrobat toy.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s oily politics: not-so-slick green policies | Editorial
How can Britain can persuade other countries to ditch fossil fuels when it won’t do so itself?
Boris Johnson’s apparent willingness to sign off a new oilfield, Cambo, in the North Sea makes a mockery of his claim to global climate leadership. The first phase of Cambo would produce up to 170m barrels of crude. That is the equivalent, say Friends of the Earth, of the annual emissions of 18 coal-fired power plants. This sends dark clouds scuttling over the UK’s presidency of Cop26, held in Glasgow in November this year. For the UN climate summit to be a success, Mr Johnson’s team, headed by Alok Sharma, must cajole recalcitrant countries into line. It is doubtful that Mr Sharma can persuade other nations of the merit of forsaking fossil fuels when Britain will not lead by example.
Last week, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its starkest warning yet about the planetary emergency. To have a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C requires the world to get net emissions of carbon dioxide down to zero before 2050. In a foreword to the IPCC report, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote that countries should “end all new fossil fuel exploration and production”. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental group founded to protect access to hydrocarbons, has said much the same.
Continue reading...Germany ‘set for biggest rise in greenhouse gases for 30 years’
Increase means country will slip back from goal of cutting emissions by 40% from 1990 levels
Germany is forecast to record its biggest rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 this year as the economy rebounds from the pandemic-related downturn, according to a report by an environmental thinktank.
Berlin-based Agora Energiewende said the country’s emissions would probably rise by the equivalent of 47m tons of carbon dioxide.
Continue reading...Green issues expose Tory division and loner Boris Johnson’s distance from his party | Isabel Hardman
Boris Johnson is a bit of a loner, socially and politically. He doesn’t have a clear group of friends. Neither does he hail from a particular political faction. The latter probably contributes in no small part to his electoral success: it’s hard to pigeonhole him, much to the frustration of his opponents. The former is useful, too, as he doesn’t end up just appointing his mates to jobs. He doesn’t really have mates, for one thing. He’s notoriously difficult to get truly close to.
But there are obvious disadvantages to not having your own tribe. One is that you don’t automatically have people who will come out to fight for you when you find yourself in the trenches. The other is that you find it hard to notice when there is a political problem brewing in your party because you haven’t really bonded with one part of it, let alone its noisy, often stubborn, entirety.
Continue reading...Documenting American wilderness – in pictures
Photographer Bob Wick is retiring from the Bureau of Land Management after 30 years documenting public lands across the western United States. This selection shows the diverse beauty of the landscapes, and the work of the BLM in protecting the wildlife and people that inhabit them
Continue reading...Hidden cameras spot New Forest pine marten
UK can’t fight climate crisis with austerity, warns expert
Author of government study says Treasury resistance to green spending programmes could halt progress to net zero
Imposing “premature austerity” again will undermine the fight against climate change and stop poorer households going green, one of the world’s leading climate economists has warned the government, amid claims that the Treasury is resisting policies to tackle the crisis.
Nicholas Stern, the author of the seminal 2006 government study into the costs of climate change, said comprehensive programmes were needed to help poorer households make the switch to electric cars and away from gas heating, if the government hoped to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
Continue reading...How do we slow down fast fashion?
Micro marvels: Levon Biss captures seeds close up – in pictures
“As a boy, my main interest in nature was finding the tallest tree to climb,” says the British photographer Levon Biss. However, after travelling the world, his curiosity shifted to nature’s most minuscule structures.
For his photo series The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits, Biss immersed himself in the collections housed at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden , sifting through its 3,500 historical specimens. “I was stunned by the variety of designs that exist to disperse seeds. Some are truly ingenious,” he says, singling out the hairy-stemmed electric shock plant, “an innocent-looking seed pod until an animal (or human) decides to bite!”
- The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss is at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, until 26 September.
Turkey floods: drone footage shows widespread devastation in Bozkurt – video
At least 44 people have died from the floods in the northern Black Sea region in Turkey, the second natural disaster to strike the country this month. Drone footage shows massive damage in the town of Bozkurt, where emergency workers were searching collapsed buildings. Torrents of water tossed dozens of cars and heaps of debris along streets, destroyed bridges, closed roads and cut off electricity to hundreds of villages
- Flooding death toll passes 44 in Turkey’s Black Sea region
- Turkey flood deaths rise as fresh fires erupt on Greek island of Evia
Guess who’s coming to dinner? Roadkill placed on ‘sky tables’ to lure rare birds of prey
Farmers are laying out carcasses to tempt vultures and eagles back to the UK countryside
When a griffon vulture last year graced the UK with its presence, awed birdwatchers from across the country gathered in the Derbyshire moors in the hope of catching a glance.
Now conservationists are hoping to make sightings of these magnificent birds more frequent by adding raw nature back into the countryside.
Continue reading...Climate change: July world's hottest month ever recorded - US agency
CP Daily: Friday August 13, 2021
Will I ever be able to fly without feeling guilty again?
WCI speculators add, regulated entities cut length ahead of Q3 auction
‘Is it too late?’: a retrospective on Australia’s climate crisis by Stephen Dupont – in pictures
As the northern hemisphere is inundated with natural disasters, photographer Stephen Dupont looks back on Australia’s own changing climate.
Stephen Dupont is currently premiering his new exhibition, Are We Dead Yet? at the aMBUSH Gallery, Kambri in Canberra until the 19th of September.
Continue reading...July was world’s hottest month ever recorded, US scientists confirm
Global land and ocean surface temperature last month was 0.9C hotter than 20th-century average, beating July 2016 record
July was the world’s hottest month ever recorded, US government scientists have confirmed, a further indication of the unfolding climate crisis that is now affecting almost every part of the planet.
Related: Greenhouse gas emissions must peak within 4 years, says leaked UN report
Continue reading...TC Energy, Irving Oil to consider emissions reduction projects in Atlantic Canada
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