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Corporate Australia is anxious about how much climate action will cost but still believes the country now needs to be thinking about net negative targets.

The post Australian business leaders still baulking at 1.5°C target, despite their net zero promises appeared first on RenewEconomy.

The Progressive Conservative government of the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia on Tuesday presented an alternate plan for meeting Canada's federally mandated carbon price of C$65/tonne in 2023, which if passed would replace Nova Scotia's three-year-old cap-and-trade programme.

The state is going after five oil companies – ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips – for their role in the climate crisis

New Jersey has joined the ranks of Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont as the latest state to sue some of the world’s largest oil companies for their role in delaying climate policy and increasing the climate impacts, risks and costs borne by state governments. Like Minnesota and the District of Columbia before it, New Jersey has also included the industry’s top US trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, in its suit, which includes not only liability, but also fraud claims against five oil majors: ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips.

Some two dozen climate liability suits have been making their way through the courts since 2015, bolstered by media investigations and attribution studies that are able to accurately pinpoint the precise contribution climate change has made to the damages inflicted by extreme weather events. A 2021 study in the journal Nature, for example, found that just over $8bn (£7bn) of the $62.7bn (£55.3bn) in damages caused by Superstorm Sandy across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, is attributable to sea-level rise caused by climate change.

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The UK government released its 2021-40 emissions projections on Tuesday, detailing progress towards climate goals while underscoring that further efforts will be needed to reach net zero GHGs by mid-century.

38 mammals have been driven to extinction since colonisation, and many more are close to joining them. We have the solutions at hand, but warnings continue to be met with mediocre responses. Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Exchange operator ICE has unveiled a roadmap for participation in its upcoming voluntary carbon auctions, with the first such sale set to take place in December.

The European Commission will propose adding “EU financial firepower” to the bloc’s REPowerEU initiative to exit Russian fossil fuels, it said on Tuesday, making good on an earlier call by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and raising the potential for a further raid on the EU ETS.

A new exchange has taken a step closer to launching a batch of voluntary carbon market futures that will soon be followed by a fresh approach to the liquified natural gas (LNG) market.

Intermediaries and investor profits accounted for a third of the traded value in the voluntary carbon market (VCM) in 2021, claimed a report published on Tuesday that proposed a more developer-centric model to finance small and mid-sized projects.

Climate Emergency Fund lauds National Portrait Gallery stunt and pledges to keep fighting against ‘mass delusion of normalcy’

The US funders of a climate activist group that poured tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London have vowed similar attention-grabbing stunts will take place in various countries in the weeks ahead.

On Friday, two young activists from the Just Stop Oil group entered the gallery, opened two tins of Heinz tomato soup and hurled them over the painting, which is protected by a pane of glass. As onlookers exclaimed “Oh my gosh!”, the activists glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting.

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A new survey suggests the majority of Australian businesses want the government to set more ambitions emissions reduction targets, and that getting to net zero by 2050 is not fast enough, as uncertainty dominates the domestic carbon market.  

European carbon prices eased lower in very light trading on Tuesday ahead of news from Brussels on measures to limit gas price increases, though there was also a growing sense that the market is losing direction after analysts recently adjusted price forecasts downwards.

Global capacity of carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) is set to grow six-fold over the rest of the decade to around 280 million tonnes per year, although this rate of growth is still not fast enough to meet climate goals, according to research by an energy consultancy released on Tuesday.

Thirty 20MW wind turbines to feature in what is being hailed as the world's first subsidy free floating offshore wind project.

The post Massive 20MW turbines proposed for world’s first subsidy-free floating wind farm appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Two regional governments in China have announced their latest plans for the forestry offset market, despite a lack of policy clarity due to the suspension of the national offset programme.

Analysis finds ‘widespread contamination’ in the US, with forever chemicals frequently exceeding federal and state limits

Most of America’s waterways are likely contaminated by toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, a new study conducted by US water keepers finds.

The Waterkeeper Alliance analysis found detectable PFAS levels in 95 out of 114, or 83%, of waterways tested across 34 states and the District of Columbia, and frequently at levels that exceed federal and state limits.

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An Australian-based carbon market investment company has secured a $10 million investment in its second carbon fund from a Singapore financial investment firm specialising in regenerative agriculture and nature-based solutions.

Mumbai-based EKI Energy Services, the world’s largest carbon offsets developer, has launched India’s first climate impact fund, worth $125 million, in a partnership with a Singaporean fund management company, they announced on Tuesday.

The rate of warming in the top 2km has doubled from levels in the 1960s, review finds

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The amount of heat accumulating in the ocean is accelerating and penetrating ever deeper, with widespread effects on extreme weather events and marine life, according to a new scientific review.

One of the report’s authors said the devastating floods in eastern Australia had likely been made worse by warming oceans. The risks would continue to rise as the ocean took up more heat, the report said.

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Australia and Singapore on Tuesday signed an extensive green economy agreement (GEA) that paves the way for bilateral cooperation on a wide range of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including on international carbon markets.