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How urgent is the need to prepare Australia's grids to accommodate 100 per cent renewables? Ask Victoria.

The post The day wind and solar nearly met 100 per cent of demand in Victoria appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau on Sunday called an election for next month, sending voters to the polls for the second time in two years amid ongoing concerns over the pandemic and climate change.

After a mammoth journey across the country the pack of pachyderms are finally heading home.

Fifty sustainable sewage treatment plants have been built that work in similar way to a cow's stomach.

New research found girls particularly liked to see wildflowers, hear nature sounds and touch animals and plants. Ryan Keith, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney Dieter Hochuli, Professor, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney John Martin, Research Scientist, Taronga Conservation Society Australia & Adjunct lecturer, University of Sydney Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Science, Centre for Design Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Ashjayeen Sharif wants Australia’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter to be 100% renewable by 2030

An 18-year-old student and climate change campaigner is bidding for a seat on the board of energy company AGL, Australia’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

Ashjayeen Sharif, from Melbourne, wants the company to phase out its “dirty coal-burning power stations” by 2030 and replace them with 100% renewable energy.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Trouble is brewing ahead of the climate change summit in Glasgow, but the friendless PM appears blissfully ignorant

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.

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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

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A new study aims to discover more about how the rare creatures have bred in the New Forest.

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.

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The clothes we wear can have a huge impact on the climate, even more so than the aviation industry.

“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.

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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

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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.

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US scientists say July's land and ocean temperature was 0.93C (1.68F) above the 20th Century average.

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