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

Offset standards body Verra published its VCS methodology for biochar Tuesday, outlining how emissions removals will be calculated using the increasingly popular carbon credit technique.

The government is in a row with the EU over the UK's membership of the €100bn Horizon research programme.

Traders have identified a roughly $2 range as to where the August WCI current vintage allowance auction will likely settle on Wednesday, with bullish market sentiment stemming from California Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) ambitious climate plan running up against lighter speculator participation and a recent secondary market price leap.

Shifting to renewables means many more high voltage powerlines. But these powerlines are seeing strong pushback from farmers and rural communities. Are there any alternatives? Asma Aziz, Lecturer in Power Engineering, Edith Cowan University Iftekhar Ahmad, Associate Professor, Edith Cowan University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

When the pandemic hit, green space was there for us at a time when others weren’t or couldn’t be. Urban greening might be the solution to the ‘lonelygenic environment’ that our cities have created. Xiaoqi Feng, Associate Professor in Urban Health and Environment; NHMRC Career Development Fellow, UNSW Sydney Thomas Astell-Burt, Professor of Population Health and Environmental Data Science, NHMRC Boosting Dementia Research Leadership Fellow, University of Wollongong Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Singapore's Vena Energy is the latest to reveal interest in Australia's first offshore wind zone, and there may be even bigger players to come.

The post Singapore’s Vena Energy joins rush to Australia offshore wind with Gippsland project appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Hedging emissions with vintage 2026 to 2030 nature-based offsets will cost more than $24 a tonne on exchange ICE, which launched ten new voluntary carbon market (VCM) futures this week.

The regulator approved a rescuer of Southern that hardly had a clean record in the sector

Ofwat is not a complete patsy and is in the business of holding companies to account, the chief executive of the water regulator argued on the Today programme on Tuesday. David Black even waved a metaphorical big stick at a couple of firms. “I think that companies like Thames and Southern really need to up their game,” he said.

He described Thames as “a repeated poor performer”. And he said Ofwat’s £126m penalty on Southern in 2019 for wastewater and reporting breaches was instrumental in forcing a change of ownership last year. “That’s an example of a company that performed poorly, that was held to account by Ofwat and the investors lost their shirt,” argued Black. “That is exactly as it should be.”

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Thousands of owners of small forestry plots in the US could be enrolled into carbon markets with the launch of a dynamic baseline methodology for calculating emissions that could be later rolled out to more than 100 countries globally, and help end the criticism of hot air, its proponents claim.

The EU’s total GHG emissions rose 6% year-on-year in Q1 but held below levels seen before the coronavirus pandemic, the bloc’s statistics office said in an update on Tuesday.

Firefighters are struggling to contain large wildfires tearing through forests in Valencia. Powerful winds have made the fires difficult to put out and it has swept through 6,500 hectares. More than 1,000 people have been evacuated from nearby villages. Spain has been simultaneously struggling with another blaze in the Aragon region, which has forced authorities to evacuate 1,500 people. According to data from the European Forest Fire Information System, 659,541 hectares of land burned across the continent between January and mid-August, 260,000 of which has been in Spain alone

• Wildfires in Europe burn area equivalent to one-fifth of Belgium
• ‘It’s much easier to stop someone lighting a match than to put out a 1,000-acre fire’

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Conservation International leads an innovative international program focused on developing and implementing hybrid Green-Gray Infrastructure solutions for climate adaptation. The Nature-based Solutions Engineer/Senior Manager will be central to advancing this green-gray initiative, providing specialized technical and programmatic guidance to projects restoring and conserving ecosystems along alongside conventional engineering solutions as a climate adaptation strategy for people around the world.

Artist Philip Chatfield hopes river journey will alert people to damage being done by poultry excrement

It was not the most elegant start to the day. The sculpture was trundled down to the Herefordshire riverbank on a sack truck borrowed from a builder before being bolted and strapped to a makeshift catamaran constructed out of two canoes.

But after that, it was much more graceful and serene as the peculiar vessel was pushed off into the current, and craft and carving, Our Lady of the Waters and the Wye, began to meander downstream.

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Taxpayers lost out, and consumers have paid through the nose ever since. This failed regime is long past its sell-by date

• Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

“You could be an H2Owner.” That was the slogan, to the sound of Handel’s Water Music, of the 1989 campaign to sell shares in the 10 water and sewage companies of England and Wales – not quite as memorable as British Gas’s earlier “Tell Sid” campaign, but almost as successful. Although water privatisation was extremely unpopular, with every poll showing that a substantial majority of people were opposed to the policy, that didn’t stop more than 2.5 million people applying for shares. The offer was nearly six times oversubscribed.

The only surprise is that it wasn’t much more. Long before anyone talked about “magic money trees”, the Thatcher government offered one: this was free money to anyone who filled in the application form. The average gain to investors on the first day of trading was 40%, and over the next two decades the privatised water companies paid more than £57bn in dividends, at the same time as running up large amounts of debt, the interest on which is effectively paid for by customers.

Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

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Climate Energy Finance offers scathing review of how everyday Australians lose out due to the favourable financial treatment of coal and gas companies.

The post How a great big tax on fossil fuel profits could fix Australia’s energy crisis appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Fightback comes amid concerns race to replace Boris Johnson could lead to rollback of environmental policies

A leading group representing green-minded Conservatives has called for the new prime minister to take urgent action to insulate more homes and scale up the installation of heat pumps to help poorer households with energy bills.

The Conservative Environment Network (CEN), which has the support of 133 Tory MPs, half the backbench parliamentary party, said its plan could be rolled out in parallel with measures to directly help with this winter’s fuel costs and would help move the UK towards its net zero goals, as well as saving people money.

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Henry Dimbleby says move is politically toxic but only way to achieve sustainable land use and avoid ecological breakdown

• Revealed: the most damaging farm products
• How can the UK reduce meat consumption and cut emissions?

The only way to have sustainable land use in this country, and avoid ecological breakdown, is to vastly reduce consumption of meat and dairy, according to the UK government’s food tsar.

Henry Dimbleby told the Guardian that although asking the public to eat less meat – supported by a mix of incentives and penalties – would be politically toxic, it was the only way to meet the country’s climate and biodiversity targets.

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EUAs rose to another three-month high early on Tuesday as energy prices continued to set records, with German cal-23 baseload power trading above €500/MWh for the first time amid widespread concerns that Europe may experience blackouts this winter as fuel supplies fall short of demand.

David Black also says most firms are meeting leakage targets despite water shortages in England

The head of the water regulator for England and Wales has defended water companies against criticism over not building new reservoirs despite high levels of executive bonuses and shareholder dividends.

David Black, the chief executive of Ofwat, also said old pipes were not to blame for leaks and that most companies were meeting their leakage targets.

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