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lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2020/feb/25/thunberging-climate-anxiety-created-new-dating-trend-okcupid | Thunberging: how climate anxiety created a new dating trend | Name: Thunberging. Age: As old as gen Z. Appearance: Increasingly on dating apps. Surely Greta’s too young to be on dating apps? At 17 she is, and will have to wait another year before signing up. Will she still care about the environment then? Don’t be so cynical. She’ll have no trouble finding people who share her interests, at any rate. How so? New data analysis by the online dating platform OkCupid has found that online daters are increasingly connecting over the climate crisis. Bit heavy for a first date, isn’t it? Regardless, mentions of climate change and the environment on profiles have increased by 240% over the past two years, with millennials and gen Z the most concerned. Fair enough – they will live to see the worst of it. On the in-app questionnaire by which OkCupid measures users’ compatibility, 51% of respondents said climate crisis was the issue that mattered most to them – over world peace, the economy and eradicating disease. Well, shared values are important in a relationship. Don’t forget compromise – on issues such as “food security” and “air quality”. And I’ve been looking for someone to go halves with on an air purifier. Good news: 88% of OkCupid users in the UK are concerned about air pollution levels in the country. Finally – I believe in love again. And if you’re a man wanting to date women, your chances are even better: 90% of UK women are concerned about rising sea levels, compared with 83% of men. Personally, “concerned about rising sea levels” used to be top of my list of criteria. But as I’ve got older, I’ve learned to be relaxed about those. That’s where you and Thunberg might differ. I’m counting on her to do something about it! You, and everyone on OkCupid. Mentions of “Greta Thunberg” on profiles increased by 800% in the past year. It must be gaining on “must have good banter” and “looking for a partner in crime”, then. What are they saying about her? It’s not a sentiment analysis, so who knows, but OkCupid is calling the trend “Thunberging” ... “two daters bonding over their passion for the environment/climate change”. “Passion” is one word for it. What does this make Extinction Rebellion, then? Speed dating? No, still very much activism. And 91% of OkCupid users in the UK feel the government should be doing more on the climate crisis. In my day, we joined environmental groups for hooking up. Maybe it would have been better if you had focused a bit more on the carbon emissions? Do say: “My hopes for the future are to avoid the 2C scenario.” Don’t say: “Love to travel long distances by air.” | ['lifeandstyle/dating', 'environment/environment', 'news/series/pass-notes', 'tone/features', 'news/shortcuts', 'environment/greta-thunberg', 'lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle', 'environment/extinction-rebellion', 'environment/activism', 'type/article', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/g2', 'theguardian/g2/features', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-g2-features'] | environment/activism | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2020-02-25T14:00:40Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
world/2014/jul/18/coalition-failures-follow-carbon-tax-repeal-success | Mining tax and 'asset recycling' losses follow success on carbon tax repeal | The Abbott government has suffered two big losses straight after it succeeded in “axing” the carbon tax. The government has refused to accept Senate amendments to the mining tax bill – so the mining tax and associated spending measures stay, at least for now – and the Senate is insisting on major changes to the “asset recycling” scheme that is supposed to ensure the construction of the “roads of the 21st century”. The votes mean the government enters the five-week parliamentary winter break lagging in the polls and facing the defeat of more than $40bn in budget savings. It achieved the abolition of the carbon tax, but only after chaotic scenes during which Clive Palmer’s party appeared to be calling the shots. During the two sitting weeks insisted upon by the government to force its key policy promises through the parliament, it was also forced to withdraw key bills and compromise on others and was defeated in an attempt to cut $435m from higher education funding. In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Palmer said the federal government had "little choice but to have a mini-budget or go back to the polls because the bulk of its budget measures will never pass the Senate". On Friday, the government tried to call the bluff of the mining magnate’s Palmer United party, insisting the three PUP senators keep the mining tax if they wanted to also retain around $9.4bn in “associated” spending measures – including the schoolkids bonus, the low-income earner superannuation contribution and a biannual bonus for welfare payments. But the PUP senators stuck to their guns, voting with Labor, the Greens, Motoring Enthusiast senator Ricky Muir, Family First senator Bob Day and DLP senator John Madigan, to demand that the repeal of the spending measures be scrapped. The leader of the government in the Senate, Eric Abetz, made a last ditch appeal to the Senate to abandon its opposition to the spending cuts. “I say to the Senate we cannot have it both ways … we cannot say on the one hand we will vote down a tax, but we still want $17bn in expenditure. It simply does not stack up,” he said, pointing out the government had accepted the “public odium” of promising to abolish the schoolkids bonus before the election “and nevertheless they voted for us.” “The people of Australia will be watching very closely what we as senators do,” he warned. But PUP senator from Tasmania Jacqui Lambie accused the government of seeking to take money from battlers for “blind ideological reasons”. And Family First senator Bob Day said there were “lots of savings that can be made without taking away the low income superannuation contribution” and that the spending measures in question represented “less than 1% of the budget”. “We can have both the spending and the repeal of the mining tax,” he said and the Senate then voted 37 to 29 against the spending cuts. During the mining tax repeal debate, government backbencher Ian Macdonald made a speech wearing a hi-visibility orange suit bearing the logo “Australians for coal” and his name embroidered on the front pocket. The spending measures that will now stay are: • The schoolkids bonus, which provides eligible families with $410 per primary school child and $820 per high school child. Retaining the bonus will cost the budget $4.6bn over four years. • The low-income superannuation guarantee, which provides a $500 top-up to the superannuation accounts of very low-income earners to make up for the vastly higher tax advantage super savings offer higher income earners. Retaining the guarantee would cost $3.86n over four years. • The income support bonus – a top-up for unemployment and other benefits – at a cost of $1.2bn. The mining tax will also stay, with liable companies due to make their next payment next week. Just before the mining tax vote the Senate had also insisted on major changes to the government’s asset recycling scheme, insisting that projects worth more than $100m were assessed by Infrastructure Australia with a published cost-benefit analysis and gutting $3.5bn from the $5.9bn fund because it was money that was supposed to pay for education infrastructure. The government wants to use the $5.9bn fund to provide 15% “bonus” payments to state governments that sell assets and use the proceeds to pay for “nation-building infrastructure” – speeding up the construction of infrastructure, especially major road projects. It now must decide whether to try to get the original bill through on a second attempt, drop the idea altogether or try to proceed with the “gutted” legislation. The mining tax was originally announced as the resource super profit tax by then prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2010. It was dramatically scaled back soon after Julia Gillard took over as prime minister, in the wake of a multi-million-dollar campaign by mining companies. After these changes, negotiated with the mining companies themselves, the tax raised very little revenue, and no longer covered the spending measures nominally funded from it. In 2012-13 it raised only $200m. During the tumultuous two weeks of sitting, the government was also forced to withdraw legislation trying to abolish the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and to amend regulations watering down laws protecting consumers receiving financial advice. The government also dropped from its immediate “to do” list legislation to reintroduce the indexation of fuel excise, which has been booked in the budget to reap $2.2bn over the next four years but was set to be defeated in the Senate. The Senate also disallowed $435m in cuts to higher education funding. The government also backed down on its insistence that Qantas be open to majority foreign ownership, instead implementing a compromise proposal agreed with Labor. The parliament has now adjourned until August 26. | ['australia-news/australian-politics', 'environment/carbon-tax', 'business/mining', 'australia-news/coalition', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'type/article', 'profile/lenore-taylor'] | environment/carbon-tax | CLIMATE_POLICY | 2014-07-18T08:00:07Z | true | CLIMATE_POLICY |
news/datablog/2013/oct/23/australia-bushfires-animated-map | NSW bushfires: mapping the spread of the blazes | The New South Wales rural fire service releases updates to the burned area from bushfires through its RSS feed. I've taken snapshots of these from Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to compare movement in the bushfire areas. Thankfully, most of the fires have remained largely contained. This map shows the outbreak of the bushfire near Dudley on Wednesday afternoon through to Thursday morning: Map data ©2013 Google, DigitalGlobe, SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO, Landsat. Click here to enlarge or view on mobiles Here's the Lithgow and Mount Victoria fire comparing Tuesday and Wednesday: Map data ©2013 Google, Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, Landsat. Click here to enlarge or view on mobiles Here's the Minmi fire near Newcastle, showing hourly movements for Wednesday from 1:38 through to 4:48: Map data ©2013 Google, Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, Landsat. Click here to enlarge or view on mobiles And here's the fire at Springwood, which has again been well contained: Map data ©2013 Google, Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, Landsat. Click here to enlarge or view on mobiles | ['news/datablog', 'australia-news/bushfires', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'world/wildfires', 'tone/blog', 'australia-news/australia-datablog', 'type/article', 'profile/nick-evershed'] | world/wildfires | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2013-10-23T07:48:32Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2016/mar/25/great-barrier-reef-aerial-survey-reveals-extent-of-coral-bleaching | Great Barrier Reef: aerial survey reveals extent of coral bleaching | An aerial survey is revealing the worst bleaching ever seen on northern parts of the Great Barrier Reef, as the scientist leading the survey live-tweets the devastation and pleads for the world to take action on climate change. Last week Terry Hughes, a professor at James Cook University and convener of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, told Guardian Australia he planned to hire a charter plane and map the bleaching to see how bad it was. They would start from Cairns and fly north, he said. “We’ll expand that initial aerial survey to crisscross the whole northern region and map it all out.” Now, using both planes and helicopters, Hughes has found what he says is the worst bleaching in the region he has ever seen. On Tuesday, Hughes said he surveyed 600km of reef and found that more than 60% of it had been bleached. That was just two days after the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority raised the threat level of coral bleaching to the highest possible alert, “level 3” , indicating “severe regional bleaching” in the northernmost quarter of the 344,400 sq km marine park. On Wednesday Hughes upgraded to a helicopter and continued the survey. Over the following days, Hughes tweeted photographs of reef after reef, all appearing stark white. On day three, he said only four of 400 reefs he saw were not bleached and that, while there had been bleaching in 1998 and 2002, this event was the worst. Bleaching occurs when coral gets stressed, usually by heat, and it expels the colourful algae that live inside it, giving it its brilliant colour and providing it with most of the energy it needs. If it stays bleached for long enough, the corals die and the reefs risk being colonised by other organisms such as seaweed. This bleaching event is linked to the current El Niño, which raises temperatures in the region, on top of climate change-induced warming. While Hughes surveyed the reefs from the air, other teams were in ships, examining the coral up close to get a more in-depth picture of which corals were bleaching, he said. | ['environment/great-barrier-reef', 'environment/coral', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'australia-news/queensland', 'environment/marine-life', 'environment/wildlife', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/michael-slezak'] | environment/great-barrier-reef | BIODIVERSITY | 2016-03-25T02:25:56Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
australia-news/2020/sep/15/young-australians-could-be-given-jobseeker-payments-as-incentive-to-pick-fruit | Young Australians could be given jobseeker payments as incentive to pick fruit | Young Australians could be incentivised with jobseeker payments to pick fruit as short-staffed farms desperately seek to make up for absent backpackers due to Covid-19 border restrictions. A parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday recommended the government “urgently” set up a program targeted at year 12 and university students, encouraging them to “have a gap year at home” by moving to regional Australia to pick fruit. At the same time, a growing list of MPs – including Labor’s shadow immigration minister, Kristina Keneally – are also backing an idea where refugees are offered permanent residency if they pick fruit on short-staffed farms. The inquiry into working holiday makers released its interim report on Tuesday, looking at solutions for the labour crisis facing farms due to the coronavirus. Chaired by Liberal MP Julian Leeser, it recommended that domestic farm workers be made eligible for jobseeker payments while working, meaning they could receive two income streams. Workers would get one-off payments to cover travel and living costs, and could also have their Hecs/Help debts reduced, according to the inquiry’s recommendations. Under coronavirus restrictions, the number of working holiday makers has halved from 140,000 to 70,000 between March and June. Also on Tuesday, Labor MP Julian Hill, Nationals MP Damian Drum and Liberal MP John Alexander said they would personally back a system where refugees on temporary visas were given permanent residency if they worked on farms. The proposal, suggested by the Refugee Council of Australia, would offer people on temporary protection visas (TPV) or safe haven enterprise visas (Shev) permanent residency after one or two years working on farms. Currently, thousands of people who have been found to be genuine refugees are on the temporary visas, and have waited in Australia for years without permanent residency. The Refugee Council of Australia told the inquiry that there are 17,000 people on either TPVs or Shevs who “are able to fill labour shortages across Australia”. Hill told Guardian Australia that the idea would be a “win-win”. Alexander told the Sydney Morning Herald it was “a reasonable idea” and Drum said “it merits a genuine look”. Keneally said on Tuesday afternoon she was also “keenly interested” in the idea. “With the right safeguards in place to prevent the exploitation we’ve seen in the backpacker visa scheme, this could be a win-win for both farmers and refugees,” she told Guardian Australia. “I’m keenly interested to understand how the government MPs who proposed this idea see it working in practice.” According to an ongoing survey conducted by the Refugee Council, 81% of temporary visa holders said they would be willing to work in regional areas of Australia if promised a permanent visa after one year. Hill said he received positive feedback on the proposal and was excited by the cross-party support. “My personal view, as a Labor MP, is that TPV and Shev holders should simply be given a permanent visa,” he said. “However, we are not the government, and this proposal supported by the Refugee Council and many farmers’ groups, is absolutely worth exploring as a compromise position and a win-win.” Greens senator and immigration spokesman Nick McKim said that permanent residency should “not be conditional on doing hard labour”, and the government could instead speed up the processing of temporary visas. “We are deeply concerned about people on protection visas being used in this way,” he said. “If people are owed protection, that protection should be permanent, and not conditional on doing hard labour. “The way to resolve this is for the government to start processing claims in a timely fashion, not tying protection to the ability to do manual labour.” He added that a way to fix the labour shortage on farms would be to pay workers more. “There is a significant labour shortage in the agriculture sector and the way to address it is for the federal government to ensure that workers are adequately paid and supported to do this work.” Hill, Alexander, Drum and McKim are all on the standing committee on migration, which wrote the interim report, but the committee has yet to make recommendations on the temporary visa proposal. In its report, the committee said it was still receiving evidence on that proposal. A spokesman for the Department of Home Affairs said it would “consider the recommendations of the inquiry” but did not offer any comment on the temporary visa proposal. “The government has already made changes to allow working holiday makers and seasonal workers to stay an additional 12 months if they work in agriculture,” it said. The inquiry on Tuesday also recommended that the government offer incentives to those on international student visas to pick fruit. That would include payments for transport and living costs, and extending visas or “where applicable as counting towards a pathway to permanent residency”. | ['australia-news/australia-news', 'science/agriculture', 'environment/farming', 'world/migration', 'world/refugees', 'australia-news/australian-politics', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/naaman-zhou', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/farming | BIODIVERSITY | 2020-09-15T09:10:03Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
environment/2019/dec/06/measures-to-arrest-natures-decline-must-be-passed-into-law-say-meps | Measures to arrest nature's decline must be passed into law, say MEPs | If humanity wants to reverse the widespread destruction of the natural world, biodiversity needs legal protection like the Paris agreement on climate change, members of the European parliament have said. Action to halt biodiversity decline is based on voluntary commitments but, less than a year before a crucial UN biodiversity conference in China, MEPs pointed to the destruction of precious ecosystems and the more than 1m species facing extinction as evidence that the approach is failing. The 15th meeting of the conference of the parties (COP15) in Kunming next October offers the next big opportunity to create a decade of new targets to protect the world’s land, oceans and wildlife. These targets will replace 20 biodiversity targets agreed in 2010 in Japan, only one of which is even close to being met. MEPs want the next set of pledges to be underpinned by law so that countries are forced to act – and they say the EU should lead the way. “If it’s not legally binding, at the end of the day it’s nice to have but it does not deliver enough to fight what we are facing: not only the climate change crisis, but a huge biodiversity crisis,” said Pascal Canfin, chair of the committee on environment, public health and food safety, which approved the resolution. “We are living in an ecosystem, and if this ecosystem is vanishing, then we will have to pay to replace these free services and it will be very, very costly,” he said. The draft legislation calls for more sustainable agriculture and forestry to contribute to healthy habitats and ecosystems. MEPs want to make 30% of EU territories places for nature by 2030 and aim to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems. They believe the EU should commit a minimum of 10% of its budget to increase biodiversity. The European parliament will vote on the resolution in January. Anna Heslop, a lawyer for ClientEarth, welcomed the idea of creating legally binding targets. “We must not reproduce our old mistakes and risk losing another decade of action. 2020 is an absolutely crucial moment for worldwide biodiversity protection,” she said. Sam Chetan-Welsh, a political adviser to Greenpeace UK, said it was “reassuring” MEPs recognised the urgent need for legally binding targets and urged the UK government to adopt similar targets after Brexit. He said legally binding commitments on biodiversity should also include protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force in 1993, but decades of international collaboration have failed to save the destruction of the natural world. At least one in ten insects is at risk of extinction, and $577bn (£440bn) of domestic crops are at risk due to the loss of pollinators, according to the IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity report. The global biomass of wild animals has fallen by 82% since records began and 25% of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. The IPBES report also found there was a strong link between climate change and loss of biodiversity and one could not be solved without the other. “The dual emergency of nature decline alongside climate breakdown means transformational action is needed,” said Sandra Bell from Friends of the Earth. “We seem to have lost sight of the fact that nature provides us with healthy soils, water and air. In the UK, and across the EU, existing targets haven’t worked because they have lacked action, so it’s up to the EU commission and national governments to enforce nature laws.” | ['environment/biodiversity', 'world/eu', 'world/europe-news', 'environment/conservation', 'environment/wildlife', 'environment/environment', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/phoebe-weston', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-age-of-extinction'] | environment/biodiversity | BIODIVERSITY | 2019-12-06T16:44:19Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
environment/2002/jan/12/activists.climatechange | Melchett quits Greenpeace board | Lord Melchett, the former director of Greenpeace UK, has resigned from the board of Greenpeace International, the world's most prominent environmental organisation, as a result of the furore that followed his announcement last week that he was joining a corporate PR company as an adviser. Yesterday, Anne Summers, the chair of Greenpeace International, which is based in Germany, welcomed his decision. "The interests of Greenpeace must be safeguarded by ensuring that no one who holds a position within the organisation engages in any other activity that is, or could be perceived to be, in conflict with our principles and our campaign goals," she said. Lord Melchett, a former Labour minister who was arrested for destroying a field of GM maize in 1999, has accepted a job in the corporate responsibility department at Burson-Marsteller. The firm is the world's largest corporate communications company and in 25 years has worked to improve the image of many companies and governments accused of serious human rights and environmental abuses. Neither Lord Melchett nor Greenpeace UK, which he consulted before taking the position, initially believed that the job would compromise the environment group, which has more than 5m members worldwide. Lord Melchett said that he remained a passionate environmentalist and that he could work with only those companies he chose to work with. The job entails him trying to persuade some of the world's largest companies to adopt environmentally sound policies. But the PR company was widely interpreted as having pulled off a coup to have hired so prominent an environmentalist. The resignation further widens the split in the green movement between those who believe there should be no contact between environmentalists and corporations and those who believe in "constructive dialogue". Lord Melchett had helped Greenpeace UK work closely with refrigeration, food and energy companies. He joined the international board only last year. His resignation followed talks with the board. But his problems may not be over. His job as policy director of the Soil Association, the leading British organic foods certification body, was yesterday in some doubt. Patrick Holden, head of the SA, said: "I have total and utter confidence that Peter would never sacrifice his principles, but obviously we will have to see how this pans out and if there is any collateral damage." Lord Melchett was not available for comment yesterday. A colleague in Burson-Marsteller said he expected to see him in the office next week. | ['environment/activism', 'environment/environment', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'uk/uk', 'environment/greenpeace', 'type/article', 'profile/johnvidal'] | environment/greenpeace | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2002-01-12T02:03:57Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
australia-news/2022/nov/08/secret-ministries-morrison-officials-asked-industry-department-for-brief-on-pep-11-gas-project | Secret ministries: Morrison officials asked industry department for brief on Pep-11 gas project | Officials from Scott Morrison’s department asked their counterparts in the industry department to provide a briefing to the prime minister on the Pep-11 gas project in December 2021, because Morrison had designated himself the decision-maker. Senior bureaucrats from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet sought the highly unusual briefing on the controversial gas project on 8 December according to Meghan Quinn, secretary of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. Quinn was asked in a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night whether or not the portfolio minister, Keith Pitt, was given the same briefing material as Morrison last December, given he was the federal resources minister. Quinn said: “I don’t believe so”. Morrison used his extraordinary ministerial powers to overrule Pitt on the controversial Pep-11 project, without a transparent signal to voters or stakeholders that he had appointed himself responsible for the resources portfolio. While Morrison did not disclose his secret ministries publicly, Quinn told Tuesday night’s hearing there was “an awareness” in the industry department that Morrison had been appointed to the portfolio on 21 April 2021. Furthermore, there was “an awareness” by December that the prime minister, and not Pitt, would be the decision-maker for Pep-11. “It was clear [to officials] who the decision-maker was,” Quinn said on Tuesday night. “It was made clear the decision maker for that [project] was the prime minister”. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup The secretary said to the best of her knowledge, Morrison only sought the briefing from industry department officials on the Pep-11 project and not any other matter in the resources portfolio while he held the ministry. “I understand, from the information I have, on a particular matter the department provided advice to the decision-maker, the prime minister, and for other matters, they provided information to the single decision-maker, being the minister for resources,” Quinn said on Tuesday night. “I’m not aware of circumstances where there were two paths.” After Morrison’s secret portfolios were revealed following the Coalition’s election defeat in May, the current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, appointed the former high court justice, Virginia Bell, to head a snap inquiry, with a reporting date of 25 November. The Bell inquiry is considering Morrison’s appointments from March 2020 to May 2021 to administer the departments of health, finance, industry, science, energy and resources, and home affairs, and the Treasury. Before convening the Bell inquiry, Albanese released advice from the solicitor general finding Morrison’s additional ministry appointments were legal but “fundamentally undermined” responsible government. In the advice, the solicitor general, Stephen Donaghue, concluded that Morrison was “validly appointed” to administer the department of industries, science, energy and resources on 15 April 2021, because disclosure of the appointment was not required for it to be effective. But he added it was “impossible for parliament and the public to hold ministers accountable for the proper administration of particular departments if the identity of the ministers who have been appointed to administer those departments is not publicised”. Morrison has defended the extraordinary ministerial arrangements as a “necessary” safeguard in “extraordinary circumstances” of the Covid-19 pandemic that were done with the “best of intentions”. Ahead of Morrison designating himself as decision-maker on the gas project, Liberal MPs in coastal seats had raised concerns directly with the prime minister’s office about the Pep-11 project’s unpopularity, and expressed frustration that Pitt had not rejected the permit renewal after it expired in February 2021. Pep-11 is a petroleum export permit covering coastal electorates between Sydney and Newcastle. It was strongly opposed by communities in seats targeted by teal independents in the run up to the May contest. Morrison made public his rejection of the application on 16 December – five months before the federal election – citing widespread community opposition, a lack of financial support underpinning the project and insufficient justification to extend the exploration permit as reasons for the refusal. While Morrison’s additional portfolios were not made transparent to the public, the prime minister signalled at a press conference at the Terrigal surf life saving club he had made the Pep-11 decision, not Pitt. Morrison said he had listened carefully to the community backlash, and had killed the project “through my own decision”. The validity of Morrison’s decision is being tested in the courts. In an application for judicial review filed with the federal court in June, the Pep-11 proponent, Asset Energy, alleges Morrison “predetermined the application and the purported decision was infected by actual bias” after he secretly took over the portfolio from Pitt. | ['australia-news/scott-morrison', 'australia-news/australian-politics', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'campaign/email/afternoon-update', 'australia-news/business-australia', 'business/mining', 'environment/mining', 'environment/environment', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/katharine-murphy', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/mining | ENERGY | 2022-11-08T13:04:41Z | true | ENERGY |
australia-news/2023/aug/28/home-of-endangered-marsupial-threatened-by-state-sanctioned-logging-in-nsw-environmentalists-say | Home of endangered marsupial hit by state-sanctioned logging in NSW, environmentalists say | Conservation groups have accused a New South Wales agency of logging one of the last known strongholds of the greater glider, an endangered marsupial species, and urged the state government to intervene. Bob Debus, a former Labor environment minister and now chair of the group Wilderness Australia, said there was overwhelming evidence that a Forestry Corporation of NSW logging operation was “smashing into the middle” of forest that was home to a large population of greater gliders. Dr Kita Ashman, an ecologist with the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia, said researchers had recorded 96 greater gliders in the Tallaganda state forest east of Canberra over two nights of searching with spotlights last year. The two groups have written separately to the environment minister, Penny Sharpe, and state Environment Protection Authority, calling on them to stop the logging and order an independent scientific survey of the 1,800-hectare (4,400-acre) area. “It’s the only place I’ve ever seen where greater gliders were the dominant species,” Ashman said. “I’ve never seen anything like the density [of the population]. In most other places where greater gliders were once abundant they are disappearing. To know this habitat is being logged is extremely upsetting.” Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup The greater glider is Australia’s largest gliding marsupial. It was listed as endangered in 2022 after losing significant parts of its habitat to bushfire, drought, land-clearing and logging. It was particularly badly affected by the 2019-20 bushfires, which damaged its habitat in Gippsland and NSW. Scientists say its population has fallen by about 80% in 20 years in some areas. Forestry Corporation said the forestry operation in the Tallaganda state forest had been carefully planned under the rules that govern it. It said that included “intensive pre-harvest surveys” to identify and map “sensitive habitat and ecological features and retain wildlife habitat”, including connections into surrounding forest and parks. The corporation said monitoring prior to logging involved “over 40 kilometres of spotlight transects and finding almost 400 greater gliders”. It said this showed that “active management of forests under these rules, in concert with surrounding protected areas, is supporting greater glider populations”. Conservation groups said the permitting of logging showed environment laws were failing threatened species. Ashman said WWF Australia had worked with scientists from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney over two years to protect greater gliders after the black summer bushfires nearly four years ago. The two projects, which cost $300,000, included installing specially designed nest boxes in trees and attaching GPS collars to animals in burnt and unburnt forest to examine how fire damage altered their behaviour. She said the researchers “thought they had hit the jackpot” when they discovered the Tallaganda state forest glider population. “Aside from directly impacting the local population of greater gliders, the logging threatens the viability of the research that has been under way to protect the species,” she said. Debus said he “felt very despondent about the circumstances we’ve discovered”. “It suggests that the Forestry Corporation is yet again … vandalising the forest. Much of this timber is going to be used for wood chips,” he said. “This is massively important habitat for gliders and at the moment we’re knocking it to pieces.” He said the true value of the forests was being kept as a carbon store, not being logged. Sharpe did not respond before publication. An EPA spokesperson said environmentalists had not alleged current laws were being broken. “We will review the operations and will work closely with WWF and [the Forestry Corporation] on the matters raised to ensure appropriate outcomes are achieved,” they said. Ashman said the Albanese government should quickly scrap an effective exemption from national environment laws for state-sanctioned logging. The federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has said forestry will be covered by new national environmental standards as part of a revamp of the laws next year. Both groups said NSW should join other mainland states in banning native forest logging, a step the state government has rejected. Labor governments in Victoria and Western Australia have promised to end the practice this year. Labor’s conservation arm, the Labor Environment Action Network, has called for a national industry policy that ends native forest logging and focuses on restoring native forests and building an expanded, publicly owned plantation industry. The proposal was backed by more than 300 Labor branches but not adopted at the recent party national conference. The party instead committed to rewriting its three-decades-old national forest policy statement. | ['australia-news/australia-news', 'environment/endangered-habitats', 'tone/news', 'environment/environment', 'campaign/email/afternoon-update', 'environment/endangeredspecies', 'environment/conservation', 'type/article', 'profile/adam-morton', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/endangered-habitats | BIODIVERSITY | 2023-08-28T15:00:41Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
commentisfree/2007/jan/02/comment.hurricanekatrina | Giles Fraser: Betrayal of the Big Easy | It's well over a year since the levees collapsed and billions of gallons of water flooded into New Orleans, trashing the city and displacing several thousand residents, most of them black and poor. Many may not return. For Hurricane Katrina produced acres of empty real estate that are being eyed up as a promising opportunity for corporate developers. Mayor Ray Nagin wants the new New Orleans to be "market driven". The Episcopalian Bishop of Louisiana thinks differently. Once a conservative, he was rebaptised with dirty water. He now speaks for many in condemning the mayor's words as "a blow against the poor and needy", and says developers threaten "the soul of the city". Last August two-thirds of New Orleans was under water. In low-lying areas - such as the lower ninth ward, where many of the city's musicians originate - almost no reconstruction work is being done. Insurance companies won't cover new buildings unless the levees are reinforced to withstand another big storm, and the government won't cough up the $30bn-plus the work is expected to cost. So the powers that be are effectively abandoning the lower-lying areas, offering precious little hope of return to the Katrina diaspora spread over the south. A city that had a population of nearly half a million has been reduced by 300,000. Some are whispering that this is a way of rebalancing the city's ethnic mix, which has been majority black for some time. Dr Courtney Cowart, who runs the Diocese of Louisiana's disaster relief team, escaped from the shadow of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. She cannot help but compare the government's response to both tragedies, noting that nothing like the financial commitment made to New York is being offered to New Orleans. The Big Easy, disliked by conservatives because of its reputation for debauchery, is in danger of being ignored. Debauched and religious. In this most Christian of cities, the churches are forming powerful alliances with local community groups to spearhead the fight against mammon. For this is a place where the language of the Bible seems to have daily application. Those who experienced the scale of this disaster wouldn't think the Bible's apocalyptic literature fanciful. They have lived it. Outside the shell of an old Baptist church in the lower ninth, a scruffy piece of board is scrawled with the prophecy from Ezekiel in which dead bones are reformed into living human form. "Can these dry bones live?" is the question. In the increasingly lawless central district, the resurrection is given a hedonistic inflection through the tradition of the second line. The first line is the sombre procession to a funeral. The second line is the exuberant, jazzy, band-led, umbrella-popping return. Most Sunday afternoons, thousands gather to dance their way through the wreckage, reclaiming the streets for music and laughter. Last month I watched as the second line jigged down Washington Street and came to rest outside one of the city's social housing projects, declared out of bounds by the civic authorities. The music intensified. A huge number of the projects are fenced off, even though many received only superficial damage. It's surely no coincidence that some are in areas of prime real estate. Residents were evicted at gunpoint during the storm and have not been allowed back. Mark Twain said there were only three cities in the US with any real culture: Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans. What a tragedy if this once-great city is to be saved from the waters only to be destroyed by developers set to rebuild another generic US metropolis, designed for profit and not for people. · Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford [email protected] | ['commentisfree/commentisfree', 'tone/comment', 'us-news/hurricane-katrina', 'us-news/us-news', 'world/world', 'world/hurricanes', 'type/article', 'profile/gilesfraser', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/commentanddebate'] | us-news/hurricane-katrina | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2007-01-02T00:17:11Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
world/2008/may/25/italy | Naples street battles erupt | Street battles raged in Naples yesterday between police and protesters opposed to a new rubbish dump only days after Silvio Berlusconi set down a new hard line on a garbage crisis that has left piles of rotting rubbish on many city street corners. The new Prime Minister convened his first cabinet meeting in Naples last week and announced a decree opening new dumps, which will be designated military zones, and new incinerators in and around Naples. But by Friday hundreds of people living close to one site, in a quarry in the suburb of Chiaiano, were turning out to hurl stones at police and overturn a bus in protest. Ignoring threats to impose stiffer sentences on protesters, Neapolitans even tried to set up road blocks around Naples's fortress-like police HQ, when arrested protesters were taken there. Yesterday, following further clashes, some protesters built a street barrier out of rubbish skips and barbed wire. Naples' latest garbage crisis has seen sacks of refuse piling up since December as dumps run out because of stumbling local government, protests against new dumps and suspected Mafia infiltration of the collection business. 'The exasperation of the people in Chiaiano about being chosen for Naples' urban rubbish does not justify violence,' said Ermete Realacci, shadow environment minister for the centre-left opposition. 'And this is not dangerous waste.' Experts counter that protests are fuelled by the suspicion the Naples Mafia, known as the Camorra, is inserting toxic waste into municipal garbage. 'If the government can clamp down on that, it's on the right path,' said cancer specialist Antonio Marfella. But others suspect that the Camorra itself supports the protests to perpetuate a very profitable crisis for its collection firms. The battles marked a second bout of violence this month. In another poor suburb, Ponticelli, the heady cocktail of Mafia and trash was augmented by an influx of gypsies in the past two years from Romania, who set up camp amid abandoned factories and goods warehouses and were soon scavenging for metal in roadside rubbish, in competition with locals. 'We wanted to be charitable, but could not find a way to help them,' said teacher Irma Battimo. 'Then one night they stole the entire aluminium door of our apartment building.' When a gypsy girl was accused of trying to steal a baby from a local mother, three camps were firebombed with Molotov cocktails, allegedly by youths following Mafia orders. 'The message from the Camorra was, "The state is not here to resolve your problems, but we are", said a local who refused to be named. Other reports have suggested that anti-gypsy locals were angry to discover that a local boss, nicknamed 'The Mayor', was charging gypsy families €50 (£40) a month to camp. Faced with a rebellion, he ordered the attack. By Friday, after hundreds of gypsies were moved out, council workers were erasing any trace of the camps. Poverty and crime in Ponticelli ensured that recent inflammatory, anti-immigrant rhetoric from Berlusconi's allies found an outlet here, rather than in the rich north it was scripted for. 'This is a classic guerra fra poveri, a war among the poor,' said Battimo. When Diego Maradona won the Serie A title for Napoli in 1990 and Bill Clinton jogged the seafront during the 1994 G7 summit, Naples was headed for the same rebirth as its Mediterranean cousin Barcelona. Maradona's downfall, after accepting one too many lines of cocaine, was an early warning. But the Camorra could be ignored as long as it remained in the suburbs, amid the garbage piles, far from the seafront villas of the city's rulers, who still trot out the mantra 'Naples really is the most beautiful city in the world'. Berlusconi said he would tackle the garbage crisis 'as if it were an emergency caused by a earthquake or volcano eruption'. Cynics pointed out the danger of moving from inaction to overreaction, recalling how state funding that poured in after the Naples earthquake in 1980 was often pocketed by the Camorra. For one police officer, the solution is simple. 'You stop the Camorra with better sentences, more guarantees of jail time, more police on the streets and less bureaucracy to keep them behind their desks,' said Cristiana Mandara, head of the Fugitive section at the Naples Flying Squad. Mandara, 38, hit the headlines in December with her capture of boss Edoardo Contini, and now has her sights on the Camorra's two most famous fugitives, Antonio Iovine and Michele Zagaria, bosses of the Casalesi clan active around Caserta outside Naples. Caserta is home to the region's real rubbish crisis, where clans have for years buried toxic waste taken off the hands of northern industrialists. It was fitting that the gypsies who fled the Molotovs in Ponticelli were last reported setting up camp under the same Caserta bridges. | ['world/italy', 'world/world', 'environment/waste', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/environment', 'world/silvio-berlusconi', 'world/europe-news', 'type/article', 'profile/tomkington', 'publication/theobserver', 'theobserver/news', 'theobserver/news/worldnews'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2008-05-24T23:01:00Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
sustainable-business/2015/nov/06/rubber-tyres-russian-dandelions-sustainability-timberland-shoes-waste | The journey towards more sustainable rubber leads to Russian dandelions | The life of a tyre begins with the rubber tree in south-east Asia, which produces around 90% of the world’s natural rubber supply. The tyre industry consumes around 70% of all natural rubber grown because it offers performance qualities, such as resistance and load-bearing capability, unmatched by synthetic alternatives. Increasing car ownership in countries such as India and China is driving up demand for rubber. To meet this, recent research estimates rubber plantations in south-east Asia will have to expand by 8.5m hectares by 2024, with potentially “catastrophic” consequences for forests, primates and endangered birds. The industry also faces supply chain risks. The reason that rubber production is so heavily concentrated in Asia is because commercial cultivation in South America is restricted by a fungal disease. Dandelions: an alternative source of rubber? To reduce dependency on the south-east Asian rubber trees, the search is on for alternatives. Research project Drive4EU is looking to the Russian dandelion. Indigenous to the high plateau of south-east Kazakhstan, and the adjacent areas of China and Kyrgyzstan, the Russian dandelion produces a high quality of natural rubber and was used by the Soviet Union during the second world war to produce army vehicle tyres. Though its use in tyres is proven, research is still required around breeding, cultivation and extraction to scale up production. Drive4EU, now two years into the four-year project, has plots of Russian dandelions growing in Belgium, the Netherlands and Kazakhstan and is making progress in breeding for higher yields, improving cultivation and harvesting, and scaling up extraction. “When you look at wheat, it used to be like grass, with very tiny kernels on it, but by breeding we could improve its form and make really big kernels that are the grain that we eat today. And that’s what we’re trying to do here – take a wild plant species and make a crop out of it,” says van der Meer. The goal is to harvest 1,000kg of dandelion rubber per hectare per year, which compares with the 1,5000-2,000 per hectare a year that a seven-year-old rubber tree plantation typically produces. If the agronomy can be cracked, crops could be cultivated in Europe, closer to the production sites of tyre manufacturers. This is one of the benefits for tyre manufacturer Continental, which has been working on dandelion rubber for a number of years and presented its first test tyres in October 2014. Making new rubber from old rubber Grappling with supply chain issues is just one of the tyre industry’s challenges; dealing with waste is another. When a tyre is no longer roadworthy you’re left with highly flammable waste that can’t biodegrade. Tyres are also perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying deadly diseases such as dengue fever. Rather than simply sending tyres to landfill (which is banned in the UK under the EU landfill directive), more inventive ways of handling tyre waste are emerging. Rubber from end-of-life tyres is being turned into rubber “crumb” and incorporated into new materials such as running track paving, weightlifting plates and acoustic barriers. Green materials company Lehigh Technologies is approaching the problem with a chemicals mindset. The US company buys shredded tyres from waste recyclers and, using its turbo mill technology, turns it into micronized rubber powder (MRP) that’s the consistency of flour and smaller than a human hair in diameter. It then sells this as an additive to go back into new tyres (making up 5%-7% of all the rubber in new tyres), reducing raw material costs. “If you’ve made a molecule once already, why do you have to keep on making it? Why can’t you use it over and over again? The reason is, it’s very hard to do that. Once you’ve turned all those molecules into a table, for example, how do you de-construct it and bring it back into a form that can be reused? That’s what we’re doing for rubber,” explains Lehigh’s chief executive, Alan Barton. The small venture-capital-backed company has built the world’s largest MRP plant in Atlanta and plans to build a smaller European plant near Barcelona. It currently supplies six of the top 10 tyre manufacturers with MRP, and says 350m tyres have been made using it to date. Rubber shoes In an effort to prevent its tyres from piling up as waste, manufacturer and distributor Omni United headquartered in Singapore has teamed up with fashion brand Timberland to design and manufacture a tyre that can be recycled into Timberland shoes. “When you sell a product, it’s absolutely your responsibility to take that product back and do something with it once it’s done its shelf life if it’s not biodegradable,” says Omni United’s chief executive, Gajendra Singh Sareen. Timberland Tires are produced and sold in the US. Positioned at the premium end of the market, they compete with Michelin, Bridgestone and Goodyear. These tyres will be collected and sorted by Liberty Tire Recycling, and the first shoes to incorporate the recycled rubber are expected to be available in 2017. “We make lots of shoes, and therefore we use lots of rubber,” explains Timberland’s president Stewart Whitney. “For some time now, we have been seeking a consistent source of recycled tyre rubber that meets our stringent quality and environmental standards.” Given tyres are essentially “a rolling billboard”, Sareen is surprised a collaboration between the fashion and tyre industries has taken so long. In leveraging a household name like Timberland, he wants to raise awareness around tyre waste and set a trend. He also hopes the initiative will give Omni United a marketing edge over its competitors. Timberland makes a lot of shoes but with the global tyre industry predicted to reach 2.9bn units by 2017, the initiative isn’t a large-scale solution to waste. However, these are the first baby steps towards making the tyre industry more sustainable. | ['sustainable-business/series/circular-economy', 'sustainable-business/sustainable-business', 'environment/environment', 'business/car-scrappage', 'business/automotive-industry', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/ethical-living', 'environment/waste', 'fashion/fashion', 'type/article', 'profile/hannah-gould'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2015-11-06T12:36:38Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
australia-news/2023/sep/14/sydney-air-quality-smoke-haze-today-back-burning-schedule-hazard-reduction-burns | Sydney smoke: air quality among worst in world due to hazard-reduction burns | A haze of smoke has settled across Sydney for another day, accumulating after a week of hazard-reduction burns ahead of the weekend, when temperatures are forecast to hit 30C. Much of Sydney was blanketed in smoke early on Thursday morning with poor or very poor air quality in suburbs including Alexandria, Earlwood, Lidcombe, Randwick, Rozelle, Prospect, Rouse Hill, Bringelly and Oakdale. The city was ranked third-worst in the world for air quality at the time by IQAir, a live map monitoring global air pollution. Smoke was expected to remain over parts of Sydney and the Central Coast until late in the week, the Rural Fire Service said on Tuesday. The smoke from hazard-reduction burn sites generally improves mid-morning, according to the NSW Planning and Environment website. But Thursday night’s NRL Women’s Premiership match between Wests Tigers and Newcastle Knights has been moved to Leichardt Oval from Campbelltown Stadium over concerns the air quality was “unsuitable due to burning in the region”. And some Sydney Marathon runners competing this weekend have health concerns, with NSW anticipating temperatures 10-14C above average. The Sydney Marathon race director, Wayne Larden, said organisers were working with the RFS ahead of Sunday’s race to minimise the impact of smoke. “Sydney Marathon has taken several precautionary steps, including increasing the availability of hydration capacity and medical assistance points along the course,” Larden said. “This is in addition to the existing rigorous safety protocols and medical support available on the course.” The RFS has postponed burns for 48 hours to help accumulated smoke settle through the weekend. “There will be no new burns today, no new burns tomorrow,” the service’s Ben Shepherd said. “We will re-evaluate on Saturday morning ... and may hold to Sunday.” The RFS said it would continue hazard-reduction burns in the months leading up to bushfire season and smoke would continue to be trapped in the Sydney basin. “Smoke goes in there overnight and the inversion layer comes in and just traps that in the morning until a bit of a breeze picks up,” the RFS commissioner, Rob Rogers, said on Monday. “For some people, it is just an inconvenience, but to others, it does have health impacts on them.” Asthma sufferers have been warned to take precautions. The chief executive of Asthma Australia, Michele Goldman, said the smoke sitting over Sydney made for a “stressful and risky time” for people with asthma. “Poor air quality is bad for our health, especially people with asthma. It’s been a few days now so people will be experiencing breathing difficulties and other impacts like irritated sinuses. They are staying indoors and working from home where possible.” Chrissy, a 28 year old from Sydney, said she had to buy an air purifier to get through the smoky days. “[The smoke] definitely worsened my asthma. I found myself being a little tighter in the chest, coughing, and having to take my puffers more often,” she said. “And the past couple days of increased smoke has been a little frustrating and stressful, I’ve had to stay indoors where possible, and I’ve bought a air purifier to be able to cope. Chrissy, who asked that her full name not be used, said she was anxious about the upcoming bushfire season. “I am just planning ahead, making sure that I have a good supply of puffers and access to a space with air conditioning.” | ['australia-news/bushfires', 'australia-news/sydney', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'campaign/email/afternoon-update', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/air-pollution', 'australia-news/health', 'australia-news/new-south-wales', 'environment/environment', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/rafqa-touma', 'profile/mostafa-rachwani-', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/air-pollution | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2023-09-14T00:44:06Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
environment/2019/aug/27/sydney-anglican-and-catholic-schools-system-wont-back-student-climate-strike | NSW Uniting church backs school climate strike, Sydney Anglicans and Catholics decline | Sydney Catholic and Anglican churches say they will not follow the example of the Uniting church, which has granted support to the school climate strike movement and given students support to attend the marches. Students across the country are planning to walk out of school on Friday 20 September, to protest government inaction on the climate crisis. Thousands of Australian students participated in two previous strikes, which have since grown into a global movement of millions. On Monday, the Uniting church’s NSW and ACT synod – which oversees the administration of nine Sydney schools – announced it would “use their voice and their networks” to support the latest protest. “We need to listen and learn from young people,” the church said in a statement. “It’s their future that is at stake and their protests are genuine and informed and should not be ignored.” But spokesmen for the Sydney Anglican diocese and Sydney Catholic Schools told Guardian Australia they would not go as far as the Uniting church. Sydney Catholic Schools, which oversees 152 systemic schools, said it had to abide by the NSW education department’s guidance on the strikes. “The NSW government is very clear in its expectation that during school hours, all students should be at school,” a spokesman said. “While we are thrilled to see our students passionate about the environment, the best way for young people to really make a difference is to receive a quality education. This will provide them with the skills and knowledge to positively change the world as adults.” A spokesman for the Anglican diocese of Sydney said: “Christians may disagree as to the wisdom of responding to government inaction on climate change in this way. This is a matter for individual schools and their students.” Meanwhile, school strikers thanked the Uniting church for its leadership. “Tackling the climate crisis demands action from all of us,” they said in a statement. “Unfortunately it has fallen to institutions and people outside of government to step up and fill the climate leadership vacuum left by our politicians.” The Uniting Church’s NSW and ACT moderator, Reverend Simon Hansford, said the decision was not binding and it would be up to individual schools to decide if they let their students attend. “The reason we are acting in speaking out is we think it is an issue of faith,” he said. “Caring for our climate and humanity is a responsibility for us, from the first creation story. This is our responsibility as people of faith but also as human beings. “Uniting and many other churches have been active in this space for decades,” Hansford added. “The Catholic bishops in South America have been calling for action on the fires in the Amazon.” Hansford added that it was “not in our purview to tell anyone what to do. There is no question in my mind that there are students across Australia, in independent and government schools that are seeking to act on that day. But to reiterate, the actions of students are up to the students and parents and individual schools.” But he said an overwhelming majority of the synod’s 360 members passed a resolution in July to offer support for the strikes. Adult employees of the Uniting church will also be allowed to take a long lunch, take personal leave or swap a shift to attend the rallies and protests. In November last year, in the lead-up to the first climate strike, prime minster Scott Morrison told students to “go to school” and be “less activist”, while NSW education minister Rob Stokes told students in February before the second strike that “you can’t strike if you don’t have a job”. On Monday, Hansford rejected criticism that the strikers were uninformed. “I would suggest that action on anything like the climate crisis is a consequence of a high quality education,” he told Guardian Australia. “My understanding of education is that we are training people to not only learn things at school, but to learn how to be leaders, how to be responsible, part of the community and active socially and politically. “The history of adult responses to young people’s activism is to class them as uninformed, but these young people are informed and responding to the climate crisis.” | ['environment/school-climate-strikes', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'world/catholicism', 'world/anglicanism', 'world/christianity', 'australia-news/australian-education', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/environment', 'world/protest', 'world/religion', 'world/activism', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/naaman-zhou', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/school-climate-strikes | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2019-08-26T22:07:14Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
world/2022/jan/27/poland-starts-building-wall-through-protected-forest-at-belarus-border | Poland starts building wall through protected forest at Belarus border | Poland has started building a wall along its frontier with Belarus aimed at preventing asylum seekers from entering the country, which cuts through a protected forest and Unesco world heritage site. The Polish border guard said the barrier would measure 186km (115 miles), almost half the length of the border shared by the two countries, reach up to 5.5 metres (18ft) and cost €353m (£293m). It will be equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras. Poland has accused Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, of deliberately provoking a new refugee crisis in Europe by organising the movement of people from the Middle East to Minsk and promising them a safe passage to the EU in revenge for the sanctions Brussels has imposed on his authoritarian regime. Thousands of asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan and Afghanistan, were caught attempting to cross the frontier and were violently pushed back to Belarus by Poland’s border guards, and hundreds of families were trapped in the forest between the two countries in the midst of a frigid winter. At least 19 people have died since the beginning of the border standoff between Poland and Belarus. Most of them died of exposure to freezing temperatures. The humanitarian emergency reached its peak in November when Belarusian authorities escorted thousands of asylum seekers to the Polish border. Dozens of refugees told the Guardian how Belarusian troops gathered groups of up to 50 people and cut the barbed wire with shears to allow them to cross. “The construction of the barrier on the Polish-Belarusian border has started,” said a statement from the Polish border guard on Twitter. “It is the largest construction investment in the history of the border guard.” The cost is approximately 10 times the whole budget of Poland’s migration department this year. The news has raised human rights concerns among aid workers and charities worried that refugees fleeing conflicts and starvation will not be able to apply for asylum, and there are also environmental concerns. “This money could be used to build and launch [an] effective and humane migration, reception and asylum policy,” said a spokesperson for Ocalenie Foundation, which supports refugees living in Poland. “No wall in the history of the world stopped migration. Also, it would be a disaster for the nature in Białowieża area.” The Białowieża forest world heritage site, on the border between Poland and Belarus, is an immense range of primary forest including conifers and broadleaved trees. It is home to the largest population of European bison. Anna Alboth, of Minority Rights Group and a member of Grupa Granica, a Polish network of NGOs monitoring the situation on the border, said: “Walls are dividing, not protecting. The decision about building such a wall on the Polish-Belarusian border is not only lawless but also brings a risk of irreversible harm to the environment, in one of the most rich natural places of Poland and the whole of Europe. “Instead of spending money on walls and private companies, it should be spending on developing a migration policy that prioritises human rights and safety of the people on the move, local people, animals and nature.” A border guard spokesperson, Anna Michalska, told Poland’s PAP news agency that the “intention is for the damage to be as small as possible”. She said: “Tree felling will be limited to the minimum required. The wall itself will be built along the border road.” Contractors would only make use of existing roads, she said. Last year Warsaw’s rightwing government quadrupled the presence of border guards and military personnel in the area, creating a two-mile deep militarised zone, and built a razor-wire fence, in a show of force unknown in the country since the end of the cold war. Dozens of checkpoints were placed along the perimeter of the so-called red zone, which is inaccessible to aid workers and journalists. Last week Poland’s supreme court condemned the government for preventing reporters from accessing the area. Judges in Warsaw said the ban was incompatible with Polish law and that “there is no justification for admitting that this particular professional group represents a threat to steps taken”. | ['global-development/global-development', 'world/poland', 'world/belarus', 'world/refugees', 'world/migration', 'environment/forests', 'environment/environment', 'world/europe-news', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/lorenzo-tondo', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-foreign'] | environment/forests | BIODIVERSITY | 2022-01-27T16:58:55Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
environment/2023/jun/04/dom-phillips-bruno-pereira-amazon-anniversary | Events in Brazil and UK to celebrate lives of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira | Friends and admirers of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira are preparing to gather in towns and cities across Brazil as well as London to remember the men and the causes they cherished. The British journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert were shot dead during a reporting trip in the Amazon’s remote Javari valley region a year ago, on 5 June 2022. To mark Monday’s anniversary, events will be held in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, where Pereira once worked for the Indigenous agency, Funai, and on Rio’s Copacabana beach, where Phillips often went paddleboarding while living in the seaside city. Other memorials will be held in Campinas, Salvador and the Amazon city of Belém while activists from EVU, the Indigenous monitoring team Pereira helped create, will travel up the Itaquaí river to erect a towering redwood cross where the two men were killed. “We must never forget what happened in the Javari valley,” the Indigenous leader Beto Marubo said at the premiere of a Brazilian documentary celebrating the victims and the rainforest where they died. Tributes will also be paid in London, where Phillips’s friends and family will demand justice and champion the Indigenous communities he was writing about when he died. “Many people were touched by this tragedy and these events are for people to come together and remember Dom and Bruno, and help deal with their loss,” said the journalist’s sister, Sian Phillips. Phillips hoped the memorials would maximise awareness of the issues her brother spent the final years of his life investigating for an unfinished book called How to Save the Amazon. “It’s about alerting people to those facts, the politics of the Amazon, the dangers for the Indigenous people … these issues are just as relevant today as a year ago, so we have to keep on campaigning,” she said. Clare Handford, a close friend who is helping organise the event at east London’s Rich Mix arts centre, called the tributes “an important symbol of the love and respect for Dom and Bruno which the world now shares with us”. “We refuse to allow them to be forgotten and are determined their deaths will not be in vain,” Handford said, remembering “the panic, the fear and the feeling of utter helplessness” that followed reports of their disappearance last June. A year after the killings – which exposed the Amazon devastation inflicted during Jair Bolsonaro’s four-year presidency – the culprits have yet to be punished. Three local fishers are in high-security prisons while a judge decides if they should face trial by jury. Two have confessed, although they later claimed that they acted in self-defence. A fourth suspect, an alleged mobster who federal police claim ordered the murders, is in custody but has yet to be formally charged. Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has sent security forces to Atalaia do Norte, the isolated river town that is the main entry point into the Javari valley Indigenous territory, as part of a government effort to reduce Amazon destruction. “We will not abandon this struggle for the planet, nor will we forget Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira,” Lula told the Guardian last week. But Javari activists continue to receive death threats, despite nascent government efforts to control the crime-ridden region. “Indigenous people remain under siege in their lands, waiting for answers from a country which closes its eyes to our plight,” Beto Marubo warned in an article for the Guardian as part of The Bruno and Dom Project. Without more emphatic government action, Marubo said other activists and journalists would die on the frontline of a global war on nature and its Indigenous defenders. “There will be other Doms and other Brunos in these trenches – and unfortunately they will lose their lives,” Marubo said, warning that conservative lawmakers were trying to “raffle off” Indigenous territory with controversial legislation stripping back protections. If you want to help finish Dom Phillips’s book on the Amazon you can contribute here | ['environment/series/the-bruno-and-dom-project', 'environment/environment', 'world/brazil', 'world/world', 'world/americas', 'world/indigenous-peoples', 'environment/amazon-rainforest', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/tomphillips', 'profile/constance-malleret', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/topstories', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-foreign'] | environment/amazon-rainforest | BIODIVERSITY | 2023-06-04T09:30:09Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
environment/2012/jul/04/shale-gas-northcarolina | North Carolina politician's button mishap gives fracking green light | Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature successfully overrode a veto to its bill allowing the fracking of natural gas, after a Democrat opponent absent-mindedly pushed the wrong button. State representative Becky Carney said that while sitting at her desk during Monday night's vote she plumped erroneously for the green "yes" button, only realising afterwards that she had meant to select the red "no". The resulting 72-47 vote gave Republicans the majority they needed to overrule Governor Beverly Perdue's veto of a measure that could advance the use of fracking in the state. Carney's slip followed a marathon debate in the state legislature over the controversial mining technique opposed by many environmentalists. It came to a vote just after 11pm. Carney realised her mistake soon after making it, but Republicans in the House refused to allow her to retract her "yes" vote. The chamber's rules prevent members from changing a vote if it affects the outcome. Speaking to the Charlotte Observer on Tuesday, Carney put her hands up to the error. "It was a huge mistake. I take full responsibility," she told the newspaper. | ['environment/fracking', 'us-news/northcarolina', 'environment/oil', 'environment/gas', 'world/world', 'us-news/us-politics', 'tone/news', 'us-news/us-news', 'type/article', 'profile/matt-williams'] | environment/fracking | ENERGY | 2012-07-04T17:55:00Z | true | ENERGY |
uk-news/2018/jul/15/firefighters-tackle-large-grass-fire-east-london-wanstead-flats | Firefighters tackle large grass fire in east London | More than 225 firefighters tackled a large grass fire in east London that sent smoke billowing over the capital throughout Sunday afternoon. The fire began at around 3pm and was still smouldering at 9pm by which time the flames had been extinguished and firefighters were damping down the scorched earth. The cause of the fire, which could be seen for miles, was not known in the immediate aftermath of the blaze. Forty fire engines attended the scene of the blaze, which stretched across 100 hectares (247 acres) of Wanstead Flats, in the south of Epping Forest near Stratford.Emergency services began to arrive at about 4pm after receiving more than 110 calls. Residents were warned that they may have to evacuate their homes. Road closures were imposed and the Metropolitan police warned people to avoid the area. Rob Davies, a London fire brigade (LFB) group manager who is at the scene, said: “This was a large grass fire and while Wanstead flats is an area of grass land, crews had to work very quickly to stop it from spreading. Smoke was making conditions very difficult for firefighters and causing a lot of disruption to local roads. “Grass fires can embed into the ground and so while it is now smouldering, crews will be there into the night to keep damping down the earth. It can take a long time to properly stamp out a grass fire and while we expect to have crews at the scene for some time, we will reduce the levels of crews and equipment which will also help get roads moving again.” Davies said the LFB had attendedmore than 20 grass fires this month as the hot weather made the ground especially dry. Clive Power, a resident of Aldersbrook Road adjacent to the park, said: “There are multiple plumes of smoke, which are possibly arising from separate sources and I can occasionally see flames coming up from the overgrowth. Police are telling people on my street to make preparations in case we are told to evacuate.” Ambulances and police vehicles attended the scene, along with fire engines from stations including Walthamstow, Leytonstone and Hainault. Cann Hall police, which is part of the Met force, tweeted: “It is confined to the grass area, so please stay put, but close windows as smoke/ash is not the best for big or little lungs. Police will visit door-to-door to advise on evacuation if the situation changes. “As tempting it is to get closer for a look, please stay away from the area. LFB are extremely busy fighting it, but fire can be unpredictable, spread quickly, or even surround you. Do not make their job harder!” | ['uk/london', 'uk/uk', 'world/wildfires', 'uk/metropolitan-police', 'uk/firefighters', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/mattha-busby', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | world/wildfires | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2018-07-15T21:02:41Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2016/jul/25/disasters-linked-to-climate-can-increase-risk-of-armed-conflict | Disasters linked to climate can increase risk of armed conflict | Climate-related disasters increase the risk of armed conflicts, according to research that shows a quarter of the violent struggles in ethnically divided countries were preceded by extreme weather. The role of severe heatwaves, floods and storms in increasing the risk of wars has been controversial, particularly in relation to the long drought in Syria. But the new work reveals a strong link in places where the population is already fractured along ethnic lines. Previous work has shown a correlation between climate disasters and fighting but the new analysis shows the disasters precede the conflict, suggesting a causal link. Experts have warned that an increase in natural disasters due to global warming is a “threat multiplier” for armed violence. The scientists behind the new research say it could be used to predict where future violence might flare, allowing preventative measures to be taken. “Armed conflicts are among the biggest threats to people, killing some and forcing others to leave their home and maybe flee to faraway countries,” said Prof John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the research team. The combination of climate disasters and ethnic tensions make an “explosive mixture,” he said. “People have speculated about climate links with conflict: some people say yes, some say no. But we find a really robust link,” Schellnhuber said. “Economic and social disruption caused by climate disasters are in general not significantly linked to the outbreak of armed conflict, except in one class of countries or regions: where you have pre-fracturing by ethnic difference. The analysis also shows clearly the shock precedes the conflict era and so this is the first step to unravel the causal tangle involved in this environment-conflict relationship.” The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that 23% of the armed conflicts in ethnically divided places were linked to climate disasters, compared to just 9% of all armed conflicts. Schellnhuber speculated that ethnic divisions might mean that the impact of a climate disaster would disproportionately impact one group more than another, due to their location or poverty level. “People immediately start scapegoating then,” he said. The research team concluded: “This has important implications for future security policies as several of the world’s most conflict-prone regions, including north and central Africa as well as central Asia, are both exceptionally vulnerable to [manmade] climate change and characterised by deep ethnic divides. “Recent analyses of the societal consequences of droughts in Syria and Somalia indicate that such climatological events may have already contributed to armed conflict outbreaks or sustained the conflicts in both countries.” Schellnhuber said the climate-conflict link will be even more important in the future: “In 50 years from now, under a business-as-usual scenario, 80-90% of disasters will be driven by climate change. Then the whole thing really explodes.” He said cross-referencing predictions of where extreme weather is likely to increase with places that are ethnically divided could provide a way to see trouble ahead. “You could construct a conflict ‘radar’ system to anticipate hotspots where the probability of armed conflict is high. Then you could try to diffuse certain things, or say, given the current migration debate, see where the potential sources of emigration are.” Prof Solomon Hsiang, at the University of California Berkeley and not part of the new research, showed in 2011 that changes to the climate were linked to 20% of civil wars since 1950. He said: “The linkage between large-scale climatic changes and violence is a remarkable finding of the last several years and has major implications for societies around the world, both today and in the future.” “Recent studies have demonstrated that these patterns hold around the world, throughout human history, and at all scales of social organisation: from violence within families all the way up to full scale civil war,” Hsiang said. “This new study corroborates these earlier results, demonstrating that they can be recovered using an alternative statistical approach. It is important that these types of findings are replicated and demonstrated to be robust by numerous research teams since the consequences for society are so critical.” Previous work has focused on linking conflicts with meteorological data, such as temperature and rainfall. The new analysis, however, used the economic impact of climate disasters, which takes into account the vulnerability of the nation affected. “Both Syria and California have now experienced the biggest drought on record, but there is no civil war in California,” said Schellnhuber. He said the new work showed another, very significant, benefit of action to halt global warming: “Our study adds evidence of a very special co-benefit of climate stabilisation: peace.” | ['environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/environment', 'world/natural-disasters', 'world/world', 'global-development/conflict-and-development', 'global-development/global-development', 'science/science', 'science/scienceofclimatechange', 'environment/drought', 'environment/water', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/damiancarrington', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/drought | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2016-07-25T21:00:55Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2022/oct/24/narwhals-adapting-to-climate-crisis-by-delaying-migration-study-finds | Narwhals adapting to climate crisis by delaying migration, study finds | Narwhals have been delaying their seasonal migration because of the impact of the climate crisis, suggesting an ability to adapt to the changing Arctic but increasing the risk that they may become trapped in ice, according to new research. Narwhals, recognisable by their long spiralled tusk that has earned them the nickname “unicorns of the sea”, inhabit the Arctic waters of Greenland, Canada and Russia. They are a migratory species that spend summer months in ice-free coastal areas before moving to deeper waters between late September and mid-November. Researchers from the University of Windsor, in Canada, examined satellite data from 1997 to 2018 from 40 narwhals to explore how they moved around the Canadian Arctic and when they left their summer grounds. They compared this data with local and regional changes in temperature and ice formation. The findings suggest that narwhals have been delaying their migration by almost 10 days each decade, with a total of 17 days’ delay since 1997. Narwhals are also taking an average of about four extra days in the earliest phase of their migration transit, according to the study. The patterns in the narwhals’ delayed departure match the sea ice trends in the area, said Courtney Shuert, the study’s author and a researcher at the University of Windsor. For instance, the scholars mention other research showing that the ocean surrounding the Canadian archipelago froze over approximately five days later a decade. “There’s this general trend [towards delaying migration], but there’s also a lot of inter-annual flexibility, which highlights that they’re having this strategic approach to when they’re leaving and they’re tracking these broad-scale climate trends,” Shuert said. Narwhals – which live to about 50 years, with some living up to 100 – are more susceptible to the impacts of the climate crisis because they take longer to genetically evolve than animals with shorter lifespans. The suggestion that they are adapting to their changing environment was a positive sign, Shuert said. But it could also put the cetaceans at risk, especially as the climate changes and extreme weather events become more frequent. Adapting to leaving the coast a little later each year could leave narwhals more vulnerable to getting trapped in “landfast ice” – sea ice that is attached to the coastline and prevents the animals surfacing for air. “If you’re a narwhal going off clues [about when] to leave, you might not be able to factor in these sudden somewhat random extreme events,” Shuert said. Entrapment in ice can kill hundreds of animals. Delayed migration could also lead to more encounters with predators such as orcas, which can reach farther north, as well as ships able to access routes that would have previously been frozen over, the study concluded. More research was needed to understand the impact of the change in migration patterns, Shuert said. “We still don’t really understand the downstream effects of this shift.” The study’s findings add to research about how climate change is altering animal migratory patterns – a phenomenon that has also appeared among birds and terrestrial mammals. “The rate of change that we’re seeing now in the Arctic is a huge concern for a lot of animals because it could exceed how quickly the animals can adapt through evolution,” said Shuert. “But [these findings] really show this idea of behavioural flexibility and how important it can be to bolster these populations against change.” | ['environment/series/seascape-the-state-of-our-oceans', 'environment/environment', 'environment/cetaceans', 'environment/marine-life', 'environment/wildlife', 'world/arctic', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/sofia-quaglia', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/global-development'] | environment/wildlife | BIODIVERSITY | 2022-10-24T19:00:14Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
sustainable-business/2014/dec/26/business-values-2014-meditation-google-politics-environment | Values-led business: the top five stories of 2014 | A distraction from real issues or an important tool for reforming business? Whatever you consider it, the concept of mindfulness was on the brain in 2014. Our most popular stories on business values most often dealt with this new trend, which is popping up everywhere, from Google’s boardroom to the halls of parliament. Readers flocked to Jo Confino’s various stories about Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, whose teachings have drawn the attention of political leaders and CEOs worldwide. Even older stories on mindfulness had many eyes on them, indicating that sustainable business readers are actively seeking out information on the subject. Beyond mindfulness, our readers were also eagerly watching Google. Whether it was a story on Google CEO Larry Page’s path to leadership or a piece on the company leading the way on climate change, readers gathered and commented. Finally, a discussion about companies’ role in politics rounded out the hot topics. In particular, we saw the slow slide of conservative lobbying group Alec. As voices in sustainability – on the Guardian and elsewhere – called on companies to dissolve ties with the group for its environmental stance, big players such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and eBay answered by doing just that (while Overstock recently rejoined the group). Here were the five most popular values-led business stories this past year: 1. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: only love can save us from climate change A leading spiritual teacher warns that if people cannot save themselves from their own suffering, they cannot be expected to worry about the plight of Mother Earth 2. Ebay joins Google and others in dumping Alec over climate stance The online retailer is the latest tech giant to leave the right-wing lobbying group over its position on climate change 3. How Google’s Larry Page became a responsible entrepreneur Four early influences helped shape the Google CEO’s world view and turn him into a change agent, writes Carol Sanford 4. Google’s head of mindfulness: ‘goodness is good for business’ Chade-Meng Tan, the search engine giant’s Jolly Good Fellow, on meditation, acceptance and the power of positive business 5. Beyond environment: falling back in love with Mother Earth Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains why mindfulness and a spiritual revolution rather than economics is needed to protect nature and limit climate change Get involved! Tell us about your favorite values-led business stories from 2014. Was there an article that had a particularly strong message, that gave you a fresh perspective or that you found especially useful professionally? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter @GuardianSustBiz. The values-led business hub is funded by SC Johnson. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “brought to you by”. Find out more here. | ['sustainable-business/series/values-business', 'sustainable-business/series/sustainable-business-predictions-2015', 'sustainable-business/sustainable-business', 'business/business', 'business/ethicalbusiness', 'environment/corporatesocialresponsibility', 'politics/lobbying', 'lifeandstyle/meditation', 'sustainable-business/technology', 'type/article', 'tone/features'] | environment/corporatesocialresponsibility | CLIMATE_POLICY | 2014-12-26T19:06:52Z | true | CLIMATE_POLICY |
travel/2013/aug/17/top-10-music-venues-museums-nashville | Top 10 gig venues and music museums in Nashville | Grimey's A Nashville institution and one of the best record stores anywhere, Grimey's sits atop a music venue (The Basement) and beside an annexe that houses Grimey's Too (where the "pre-loved" vinyl records congregate), indie bookstore Howlin' Books and cafe/restaurant The Frothy Monkey. Time your visit right (5.30pm or so) and you might catch an in-store performance or, just as well, a music-lovers' happy hour with free beer and great music pumping through the sound system. • 1604 Eighth Avenue South, grimeys.com. Open Mon-Fri 11am-8pm, Sat 10am-8pm, Sun 1pm-6pm Third Man Records In a gritty downtown corridor sits Jack White's tri-coloured temple to all things, well, Jack White-curated – ie the Third Man Records catalogue and assorted sundries. The adjoining performance space where JWIII debuted his current solo-artist incarnation doesn't host shows often, but the block is always abuzz when it does. • 623 Seventh Avenue South, thirdmanrecords.com. Open Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun noon-5pm Ryman Auditorium An atmosphere like no other hangs over the Mother Church of country music and its distinctive wooden pews, and the former home of the Grand Ole Opry stands as one of the few venues that inspires weak-kneed reverence – and impromptu unamplified, off-the-mic renditions – from those who stand in its spotlight. • 116 Fifth Avenue North, ryman.com. Open for tours, daily from 9am-4pm The 5 Spot Long before its star turn in the TV series Nashville as seemingly the only rock club in the entire city, this cosy bar in the 5 Points neighbourhood has welcomed a diverse and mostly local mix of live music – an ad hoc wedding band featuring members of Pavement once breezed through a set of classic rock covers on the corner stage –and jam-packed dance nights. • 1006 Forrest Avenue, the5spotlive.com. Check listings/website for details United Record Pressing Audiophiles who love the smell of vinyl in the morning should go see how their favourite LPs are made – the machinery is both curiously anachronistic and oddly hypnotic. (See The Dead Weather's video for Will There Be Enough Water? for evidence of that.) Tours of the plant include a look at the upstairs rooms, once used by musicians of colour who couldn't get rooms at white-owned hotels while on tour. • 453 Chestnut Street, urpressing.com. Tours available on Fridays at 11am, $10 Robert's Western World If there's one spot on the neon-flashing tourist strip locals willingly flock to, it's Robert's. If you want the genuine honky-tonk experience, complete with cowboy boots for sale alongside beers and fried bologna sandwiches, stumble no further. • 416 Broadway, robertswesternworld.com. Check listings/website for details RCA Studio B Recording studios aren't necessarily compelling spaces on their own, but standing inside the walls where – to name just two – Elvis Presley's Are You Lonesome Tonight and Dolly Parton's Jolene were committed to tape can be eerie and exhilarating. Tickets for public tours are only available in conjunction with admission to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, but that's a two-birds-one-stone proposition. • 1611 Roy Acuff Place, +1 615 416 2001, countrymusichalloffame.org/studiob. Tours, which include Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, from $24. Open daily 9am-5pm The Station Inn Even as the neighbourhood gentrifies all around it, this squat magical little building keeps Music City's deepest musical traditions alive – bringing world-class bluegrass, country and Americana players to its stage night after night. Folk like to throw the phrase "only in Nashville" around, but this is a true original. • 402 12th Avenue South, stationinn.com. Open daily, doors from 7pm The Stone Fox Co-owned by the brilliant guitarist William Tyler (formerly of , currently touring internationally as a soloist) and his sister Elise, this cosy west Nashville club has a bit of everything, from creative takes on familiar foods - the delicious bar-b-que slider substitutes meaty jackfruit for pork - to a consistently lively and diverse mix of touring and local bands. • 712 51st Avenue N, thestonefoxnashville.com. Open Mon-Fri 5pm to 3am, Sat & Sun 10am-3pm The End Along with big-sister club Exit/In across the street, venerable dive The End anchors the city's storied Rock Block. Many a Nashville band has cut its teeth in front of the velvet curtains at this venue, long a bastion of scrappy, punk-edged rock'n'roll. • 2219 Elliston Place, endnashville.com. Doors open at 9pm, check listings/website for show details Steve Haruch is a writer and culture editor for Nashville Scene • For more information on holidays in the USA, visit DiscoverAmerica.com • This article was amended on 7 February 2014 to reflect that one of the venues, The Owl Farm, has closed. It has been replaced by The Stone Fox | ['travel/nashville', 'travel/bars', 'travel/series/road-trips-usa-chicago-to-memphis', 'travel/travelfoodanddrink', 'travel/usa', 'travel/northandcentralamerica', 'travel/travel', 'music/music', 'culture/museums', 'culture/culture', 'tone/features', 'type/article', 'profile/steve-haruch'] | travel/nashville | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2013-08-16T23:10:00Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
uk-news/2019/nov/15/doncaster-residents-pull-together-as-post-flood-cleanup-begins | Doncaster residents pull together as post-flood cleanup begins | A week after floods hit parts of Yorkshire, two communities are trying to come to terms with the damage. While the national focus moved on to Boris Johnson’s handling of the crisis, people in the rural community of Fishlake and the town centre suburb of Bentley in Doncaster had more pressing matters at hand. In Bentley on Thursday, water pumps were removing sewage-contaminated water, vans bearing the names of insurance companies and decorators came and went, and a delivery of mops and buckets arrived for residents to begin cleaning their homes. At his home in Yarborough Terrace, one of the worst affected streets in the area, Kevin Wingfield described the suburb’s residents as the “forgotten people of Doncaster”. He said they had had more support this time than during the floods in 2007, when two people died in Sheffield, but more could and should have been done. “It has been totally devastating again. We are back in that same place again of losing everything. And there is some frustration about how much support we got compared to other communities, but we have shown that we can get through this together,” he said. Wingfield, 52, and his wife, April are the main carers for Wingfield’s father, Kenneth, 78, who has vascular dementia and was too distressed to voluntarily leave their home. They had to barricade him in an upstairs bedroom until he was rescued by a volunteer, Mark Ibbertson, on Friday. With his father now safe, Wingfield said the family had begun to assess the damage. He said they were not insured and were still paying off debts from the 2007 floods. Despite their circumstances, they were helping others. The night before, Wingfield had used a camping gas bottle to cook 45 pots of chilli and rice for local people. Another resident cooked a batch of jacket potatoes so that neighbours who had been living on a diet of cold sandwiches for days could have a hot meal. April Wingfield described the anxiety she felt every time the rain returned. “This is no way to live,” she said. “Something needs to be done about this because we live in constant fear. Many of us now can’t even get insurance. I haven’t cried yet because if I start I won’t be able to stop.” In Fishlake as the rain began to fall again, army officers were using JCB trucks to deliver sandbags to homes but some streets remained submerged and residents sought refuge in makeshift shelters in cafes and pubs. At the Hare and Hounds, the publicans Angela and Scott Godfrey had been cooking hot meals round the clock while locals slept on camp beds in the bar area. Linda Bushell, who had been there for seven days, said: “I saw the light on and they let me in. My house was completely flooded and we have been here ever since. I appreciate it so much and this is what it has been like in the whole village. Everyone coming together when it mattered.” | ['uk/doncaster', 'uk-news/yorkshire', 'environment/flooding', 'uk/uk', 'environment/environment', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'tone/features', 'profile/nazia-parveen', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/flooding | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2019-11-15T17:15:59Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
sport/2023/mar/07/michael-vaughan-lawyers-accuse-ecb-of-woefully-inadequate-investigation | Vaughan’s lawyers accuse ECB of ‘woefully inadequate’ investigation | The England and Wales Cricket board conducted a “woefully inadequate investigation” into Michael Vaughan that displayed “actual bias” and was “an affront to fairness”, the final day of the Yorkshire racism hearing was told. In his closing submission the former England captain’s legal counsel, Christopher Stoner KC, questioned why the ECB had initially withheld a statement from Ajmal Shahzad that backed Vaughan’s claims that he had never uttered the phrase “there are too many of you lot” to four Asian players before a Twenty20 game in 2009. Stoner also raised concerns to the Cricket Discipline Commission that the ECB had not spoken to the umpires, cameramen or many of the players at the game before charging Vaughan. “The investigation in this case was woefully inadequate,” he said. “Due process matters and it is the cornerstone of law. But in our submission it was sent on holiday by the ECB. It raises a real question of fairness, which Mr Vaughan has not been afforded. “Given the nature of the allegation, the minimum requirement for any fair‑minded investigation was to speak to everyone involved. Instead there was a prosecution from the outset,” added Stoner, who said it amounted to “evidence of actual bias”. Stoner also questioned why Vaughan would ever have used such a phrase when a Sky TV cameraman was next to the Yorkshire team’s huddle. “It is inherently improbable that such serious and unacceptable words were spoken to teammates just as a game was starting, in the presence of a cameraman and almost certainly a microphone,” he said. “And were then not spoken about for a period of 11 years between any of those involved.” Concluding his case, Stoner told the panel that the case was of considerable importance to Vaughan, adding that “the shape of his life and livelihood are at stake”. However Jane Mulcahy KC, counsel for the ECB, said Vaughan’s insistence that he had never heard the P-word during an era where Yorkshire have already admitted systemic racism raised doubts about his credibility. “Matthew Hoggard had admitted to using the words ‘Paki’ and ‘token Black man’ and the phrase ‘you lot’,” she said. “While Gary Ballance had admitted to using a number of discriminatory words, including ‘Paki’ to Azeem Rafiq on numerous occasions. “Mr Vaughan played in 35 games for Yorkshire in the 2008 and 2009 seasons, 17 of which he played with Mr Hoggard, yet claimed not to have heard any use of the word ‘Paki’. His response was simply not credible, and therefore undermines his credibility generally.” Mulcahy also alleged that three tweets, sent by Vaughan in 2010 and 2017 which he has since admitted were unacceptable, were indicative of a general pattern. “If a person has a tendency to make racist comments, they have a tendency to make racist comments,” she said. Mulcahy also told the hearing that Vaughan had been charged on “credible evidence” from Rafiq, corroborated by Adil Rashid and supported by Naved-ul-Hasan, adding there is “no suggestion they have lied or conspired together”. And she denied claims that the ECB had been biased, telling the hearing the claims were “very inappropriate”. Vaughan is charged with a violation of ECB directive 3.3, related to improper conduct, along with five other players – Hoggard, Tim Bresnan, John Blain, Andrew Gale and Rich Pyrah – who have had charges heard against them in their absence. Tim O’Gorman, chair of the three‑person panel, told the court he hoped to announce a written verdict in the next three weeks. “These are judgments that need careful consideration,” he said. “We hope to have them by the end of the month. However I hope you understand the panel has considerable professional commitments.” | ['sport/ecb', 'sport/yorkshire', 'sport/azeem-rafiq', 'sport/cricket', 'world/race', 'sport/sport-politics', 'sport/sport', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/seaningle', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/sport', 'theguardian/sport/news', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-sport'] | sport/ecb | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2023-03-07T19:00:12Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
environment/2019/aug/02/greta-thunberg-hits-back-at-andrew-bolt-for-deeply-disturbing-column | Greta Thunberg hits back at Andrew Bolt for 'deeply disturbing' column | The teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has hit back at the Australian News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt for writing a deeply offensive column that mocked her autism diagnosis. The Swedish schoolgirl posted a tweet overnight calling out the “hate and conspiracy campaigns” run by climate deniers like Bolt, adopting his insult that she was “deeply disturbed” and turning it back on him. The widely read Herald Sun columnist and Sky News commentator used his significant platform to take aim at the 16-year-old campaigner, dismissing her followers as members of a cult and disparaging her decision to sail across the Atlantic in a high-speed racing yacht to attend UN climate summits in the US and Chile. “Thunberg has announced she’s finally going to the United States, the last bastion of the heathen, to preach the global warming faith to the Americans,” Bolt wrote. “Of course, she’s going by racing yacht, because she refuses to fly and heat the planet with an aeroplane’s global warming gasses.” The highly personal character assassination published in Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids repeatedly referred to Greta’s mental health, saying she was “deeply disturbed”, “freakishly influential” and “strange”. “I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru,” Bolt wrote. “Far more interesting is why so many adults – including elected politicians, top business leaders, the Pope and journalists – treat a young and strange girl with such awe and even rapture. “Her intense fear of the climate is not surprising from someone with disorders which intensify fears.” Bolt even described Greta’s younger sister as having “a spectacular range of mental issues”. But the campaigner sees her condition not as a disability but as a gift which has helped open her eyes to the climate crisis. The teenager, whose solo protest last year sparked the Fridays for Future global school climate strike movement, is taking a year off school to attend the summits, on 23 September in New York and 2-13 December in Santiago. Bolt said Greta was wrong on climate change because “the evidence does not suggest that humanity faces doom”. The editor of the Herald Sun, Damon Johnston, did not respond to a request for comment. Attacks on the teenager are commonplace in the rightwing media. On the same day Bolt’s column appeared an anonymous column in the News Corp broadsheet the Australian referred to Greta as “the pig-tailed soothsayer”. | ['environment/greta-thunberg', 'world/andrew-bolt', 'media/australia-media', 'media/news-corporation', 'environment/environment', 'environment/activism', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'society/autism', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/amanda-meade', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/activism | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2019-08-01T20:43:03Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
australia-news/2023/sep/12/strong-support-from-australian-business-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-by-2040-survey-finds | Strong support from Australian business to phase out fossil fuels by 2040, survey finds | Almost half of business respondents back Australia becoming a net zero economy no later than 2040, while almost three in four support phasing out fossil fuels by then, according to the latest annual survey by the Carbon Markets Institute. The poll of 301 respondents, many of them company executives or board members, also found almost two-thirds want Australia to introduce its own carbon border adjustment mechanism (Cbam) to shield industries from imports of nations that don’t impose similar curbs on carbon emissions. Europe’s own Cbam starts from 1 October. The Albanese government’s tightening of emissions from the nation’s biggest polluting plants, known as the safeguard mechanism, came into effect on 1 July and four-fifths of respondents covered by the scheme said it was already having some impact. About 38% said it was accelerating on-site decarbonisation investments, while 49% said it was “necessitating the development of a carbon market strategy”. The role of carbon credits to underpin Australia’s transition to net zero or even net negative emissions remained an issue needing more clarity, respondents to the 10th annual survey said. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Forty-five per cent said there was “insufficient policy and regulatory guidance on their role in corporate decarbonisation”, while almost all – at 92% – called for the government to develop a national carbon market strategy to “provide more effective guidance”. Whistleblowers including Andrew Macintosh, the former head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, have described the use of carbon credits to offset rather than cut emissions as “largely a sham”. A government-commissioned review by former chief scientist Ian Chubb dismissed many of the claims but also proposed a major overhaul of the market. Among other findings, almost two-thirds of the survey respondents back Australia holding a UN climate conference with Pacific partners in 2026. Comments indicated many wanted “more robust policies” such as a firm phase-out date on fossil fuel use, greater emissions reduction targets, and a federal budget allocation for climate change mitigation and adaptation, the report said. Separately, the Victorian government said it would launch a new pilot program to train electricians for solar battery storage system installation and off-grid energy solutions to quicken the shift to renewable energy. The program, worth about $1m, would support Future Energy Skills, a nonprofit organisation, to foster the creation of a skills base needed to meet the expanding sector. Victoria’s transition away from fossil fuels is expected to create 10,000 jobs annually until 2030 and transform more than 500,000 existing jobs through new skills training, the Andrews government said. “This investment will help get more Victorians into secure jobs in the clean economy and help more Victorian households to make the transition to renewable energy solutions no matter where they are in Victoria,” said Steve Dimopoulos, the acting minister for training and skills. | ['australia-news/energy-australia', 'australia-news/business-australia', 'environment/fossil-fuels', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'business/australia-economy', 'campaign/email/afternoon-update', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/peter-hannam', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/fossil-fuels | EMISSIONS | 2023-09-11T15:00:11Z | true | EMISSIONS |
business/2023/oct/22/as-a-global-energy-crisis-returns-the-uk-push-for-a-green-economy-makes-even-more-sense | As a global energy crisis returns the UK push for a green economy makes even more sense | Richard Partington | Earlier this year, the world economy had a lucky escape. After a mild winter in Europe, energy prices were in retreat as the continent shifted away from Russian gas supplies. Inflation was cooling, while economic growth remained resilient. “Hello lower gas prices, bye-bye recession,” analysts at the US investment bank JP Morgan wrote in January. Less than a year later, the Israel-Hamas war serves as a stark warning that the global energy crisis has far from vanished. European gas prices have jumped by more than a third since the start of October, before a difficult winter to come, as the conflict in the Middle East threatens to escalate. Oil prices have risen sharply, with a leap of more than $20 a barrel since June, continuing a rise that began even before the war. While not underestimating the human tragedy in Israel and Gaza, most experts reckon that a serious escalation engulfing the wider region remains unlikely – limiting the impact for the world economy. Yet the outbreak of war in another of the world’s most important energy exporting regions, less than two years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is an all too painful reminder of economic vulnerabilities. Mohamed El-Erian, the president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and a former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, says a further rise in tensions would compound existing fragilities as policymakers navigate weak economic growth and stubborn inflation. “If this horrific crisis is not contained then this will add to the supply constraints facing the global economy. The very first impact will be higher prices, and possibly less oil around, and that is inherently stagflationary. It’s not just inflationary, it’s stagflationary,” he says. At a highly uncertain juncture, the extreme risk is the possibility of Iran becoming directly involved and impeding transit through the Strait of Hormuz – the supply route for about 30% of the world’s seaborne oil and one-fifth of global liquified natural gas (LNG). It’s a concern raised with alarming regularity – in these darkest of days for the Middle East, this is a danger many are considering. For Britain and other European countries there should be particular alarm. After efforts to diversify gas supplies away from Russia, the reliance on fossil fuel imports from the Middle East has only risen – especially from Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, which ships through Hormuz. European LNG imports rose by 71% last year in the rush to replace Russian gas – including a 74% rise to the UK, which sources almost one-third of its imported supply from the country. With the UK experiencing a much slower decline in inflation than almost any other advanced economy, there is potential for any renewed energy shock to trigger a fresh phase in the cost of living crisis before the last one is over. Fossil fuels account for almost 80% of the UK’s primary energy consumption, and reliance on imports is a risk the government is all too aware of. So far, Rishi Sunak’s answer to the question of Britain’s energy security has been to redouble efforts to exploit North Sea oil and gas reserves. The prime minister also wants to see billions of pounds invested in renewables, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear. Yet despite promising “long-term decisions for a brighter future” in his Tory party conference speech, nowhere near enough is being done to move to a low-carbon economy fit for an increasingly volatile world. Rather than accelerate the transition, Sunak has chosen to water down net zero policies in an attempt to build a narrow electoral advantage. This is not only shortsighted, but makes little economic sense. After the Covid pandemic, leading nations have struggled to cope with successive shocks to the supply side of the economy – not least because of the current energy crisis. All have added to inflationary pressures, fuelling the cost of living emergency. One shock is the restructuring of global supply chains. After severe disruption in the pandemic, and in an increasingly volatile geopolitical world, businesses are putting more emphasis on resilience over efficiency. Supply chains are being reshored, nearshored and friendshored, with higher costs entailed. Another disruption is the function of the labour market. Repatriation of workers during the pandemic, and tighter post-Brexit controls on migration in the UK, alongside an ageing population, have cut the supply of workers available to businesses. However, the energy crisis also presents a serious economic opportunity – from the jobs, growth and future energy security that building a low-carbon economy could bring. In the US, Joe Biden is aiming to capture this opportunity with the vast Inflation Reduction Act, ploughing billions of dollars into helping the US meet its climate goals, while creating jobs and ultimately bringing down bills for households and businesses. It’s a plan that EU nations are responding to, and one now forming the cornerstone of Labour’s economic agenda. As free marketeers, the Conservatives are naturally sceptical, yet there is a recognition in the mainstream of economics that state activism and taxpayer funding are vital components in this transition. “This is a case where governments need to be involved in partnership with the private sector,” says El-Erian. “These are generation-defining transitions the private sector can’t handle on its own.” Britain has a serious opportunity to revive growth and restore economic security. Given the clear risks in the world economy, there isn’t a moment to lose. | ['business/series/economicsmonday', 'business/global-economy', 'business/economics', 'business/business', 'politics/economy', 'politics/politics', 'world/israel', 'world/hamas', 'business/energy-industry', 'business/oil', 'business/gas', 'money/energy', 'business/supply-chain-crisis', 'business/useconomy', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/green-economy', 'business/commodities', 'environment/energy', 'type/article', 'tone/comment', 'profile/richard-partington', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/energy | ENERGY | 2023-10-22T10:55:14Z | true | ENERGY |
news/2021/jan/12/cities-provoke-worsen-and-prolong-storms-finds-research | Cities provoke, worsen and prolong storms, finds research | Not only do urban landscapes turn up the heat; new research shows that some cities also help to stir up storms. The combination of concrete and air pollution can precipitate storms, make gusts stronger, hail larger, and even steer storms towards cities. Jiwen Fan, of the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, modelled thunderstorms over Houston and Kansas City, exploring what difference the buildings and air pollution made to the storm’s development. She found that the contrast between the warm city air and the cool coastal air enhanced convection over Houston, pulling the storm towards the city and whipping up stronger winds. Meanwhile, the warmth of the city kept the storm going for longer, while pollution particles aided cloud droplet formation. Over Kansas City, the heat from the built-up area created a more violent storm, and the combined effect of heat and pollution amplified the frequency of large hail by about 20%. Fan, who presented her work last month at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting, hopes that models like these can be used to understand how cities all over the world shape our weather, and ultimately be used to provide more accurate forecasts of severe storms and hazardous weather. | ['news/series/weatherwatch', 'world/extreme-weather', 'us-news/us-weather', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/kate-ravilious', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-weather'] | news/series/weatherwatch | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2021-01-12T06:00:31Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
world/2024/oct/29/four-missing-after-torrential-rain-brings-flash-flooding-to-spain | Dead bodies found after torrential rain brings flash flooding to Spain | Several dead bodies have been recovered by emergency workers after torrential rain caused flash floods in southern and eastern Spain, shutting roads and high-speed train connections. Raging mud-coloured flood waters swept through the town of Letur in the eastern province of Albacete on Tuesday, pushing cars through the streets, images broadcast on Spanish television showed. The leader of the eastern Valencia region told reporters early on Wednesday that several dead bodies had been found in flood-affected areas, without specifying how many. “Dead bodies have been found, but out of respect for the families, we are not going to provide any further data,” Carlos Mazon said. Emergency services workers backed by drones were looking for six people who were missing in the wake of flash floods in the town, the central government’s representative in Castilla-La Mancha told Spanish public television TVE. “The priority is to find these people,” she added. Police in the town of L’Alcúdia in Valencia said they were looking for a truck driver who had been missing since early afternoon. “I am closely following with concern the reports on missing persons and the damage caused by the storm in recent hours,” prime minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X, urging people to follow the advice of the authorities. “Be very careful and avoid unnecessary trips,” he added. Twelve flights that were due to land at Valencia airport have been diverted to other cities in Spain due to the heavy rain and strong winds, Spanish airport operator Aena said. Another 10 flights that were due to depart or arrive at the airport were cancelled. National rail infrastructure operator ADIF said it had suspended high-speed trains between Madrid and the eastern port of Valencia due to the effects of the storm on main points of the rail network in the Valencia region. A high-speed train with 276 passengers derailed in the southern region of Andalusia, although no one was injured, the regional government said in a statement. Emergency services rescued scores of people in Álora in Andalusia, some by helicopter, after a river overflowed. State weather agency AEMET declared a red alert in the Valencia region and the second-highest level of alert in parts of Andalusia. Several roads were shut in both regions due to flooding. The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to the formation of towering cumulonimbus clouds in a matter of hours and dumping heavy rain across eastern parts of Spain. Scientists warn that extreme weather such as heatwaves and storms is becoming more intense as a result of the climate crisis. | ['world/spain', 'environment/flooding', 'world/europe-weather', 'world/europe-news', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-foreign'] | environment/flooding | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2024-10-30T00:43:32Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
world/2005/sep/12/hurricanekatrina.usa | Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans | Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters. The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America. After scenes of looting and lawlessness in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 70,000 national guard troops and active-duty soldiers now based in the region. Blackwater, one of the fastest-growing private security firms in the world, which achieved global prominence last year when four of its men were killed and their bodies mutilated in the Iraqi city of Falluja, has set up camp in the back garden of a vast mansion in the wealthy Uptown district of the city. David Reagan, 52, a semi-retired US army colonel from Huntsville, Alabama, who fought in the first Gulf war and is commander of Blackwater's operations in the city, refused to say how many men he had in New Orleans but indicated it was in the hundreds. Asked if they had encountered many looters so far, Mr Reagan said that the sight of his heavily armed men - a pump action shotgun was propped against the wall near to where he was standing - was enough to put most people off. Two Israeli mercenaries from ISI, another private military company, were guarding Audubon Place, a gated community. Wearing bulletproof vests, they were carrying M16 assault rifles. Gill, 40, and Yovi, 42, who refused to give their surnames, said they were army veterans of the Israeli war in Lebanon, but had been living in Houston for 17 years. They had been hired by Jimmy Reiss, a descendant of an old New Orleans family who made his fortune selling electronic systems to shipbuilders. They had been flown by private jet to Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, and then helicoptered to Audubon Place, they said. "I spoke to one of the other owners on the telephone earlier in the week," Yovi said. "I told him how the water had stopped just at the back gate. God watches out for the rich people, I guess." | ['world/world', 'us-news/hurricane-katrina', 'us-news/us-news', 'type/article', 'profile/jamiewilson', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international1'] | us-news/hurricane-katrina | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2005-09-11T23:24:32Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
business/2010/jun/23/deepwater-oil-drilling-brazil-petrobras-flotation | Deepwater oil drilling under scrutiny as Brazil's Petrobas delays flotation | Brazil's national oil company Petrobras has surprised investors by postponing its $25bn (£16.86bn) stock market flotation, potentially delaying its efforts to extract oil from deepwater reserves off the coast. The Petrobras stock offering, which had been scheduled for July, will now be delayed by two months until September. It blamed the move on Brazil's ANP energy regulator, which needs more time to assess the value of oil reserves which lie deep below the seabed off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The flotation of Petrobras is a key part of the country's efforts to extract huge quantities of high-quality oil which lie around 280 miles offshore. These reserves are trapped around 4,000 metres under the sea floor, beneath layers of salt and rock. There is also around 2,000 metres of seawater between the seabed and the surface, further complicating the drilling process. Under Petrobras's flotation plan, the government would sell the company the right to extract 5bn barrels of oil in reserves currently under the state's control, and would receive an equal share of the listed company in return. The BP question Analysts believe that the delay is partly due to the ongoing Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP's Macondo well has been leaking for two months. The huge environmental and economic damage caused by this spill means oil companies could face tougher safety measures when they attempt to extract oil at such depths. This disaster also potentially makes Brazil's reserves even more valuable, as America and the oil industry lock horns over President Obama's attempt to ban new deepwater drilling in the Gulf. The first of Brazil's massive pre-salt oil fields, Tupi, was discovered in 2007. It contains between 5bn and 8bn barrels of oil, triggering fevered speculation that the country had suddenly become a major player in the world energy market. Other fields have since been discovered, pushing up the total estimates size of the reserves to around 30bn barrels – roughly the entire world oil consumption in 2010. But environmental activists are deeply concerned that extracting the oil will be dangerous, as it is even deeper than BP's Macondo field. Last week the Global Renewable Fuels Alliance (GRFA) named Brazil's Tupi field as one of the 10 most dangerous offshore sites in the world. "Drilling through the salt layer will create significant risks," the GRFA warned. BP's failure to plug the Deepwater Horizon leak has shown that the oil industry is ill-prepared to fight a spill at such depths. Its under-fire chief executive Tony Hayward has admitted that the "blowout preventer", the piece of equipment that is relied on to plug a well if needed, is "not as failsafe as we'd believed it to be". BP itself has a stake in the Brazil oil fields, having paid $7bn for 10 exploration blocks back in March. This could be one of the assets put up for sale, though, as it tries to cover the costs of the Deepwater disaster. The Brazilian government is committed to exploiting the pre-salt oil fields. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to use the reserves to cut poverty in the country and improve its education system. | ['business/oilandgascompanies', 'business/oil', 'environment/oil', 'business/business', 'environment/environment', 'world/brazil', 'world/world', 'business/stock-markets', 'world/americas', 'type/article', 'profile/graemewearden', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international'] | environment/oil | ENERGY | 2010-06-23T10:31:00Z | true | ENERGY |
uk-news/2023/sep/11/facial-recognition-could-transform-policing-in-way-dna-testing-did-says-met-chief | Facial recognition could transform policing in same way as DNA, says Met chief | Britain’s most senior police officer has predicted that facial recognition technology will transform criminal investigations as much as DNA testing has done, a prospect described as dystopian byhuman rights campaigners . Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said: “We’ve also shown recently that live facial recognition is massively effective at picking out wanted offenders from crowds of people.” Speaking at an event to mark his first year in the post, Rowley added: “The next step is more exciting: retroactively using facial recognition to identify unknown suspects from CCTV images is showing immense potential. “The results that we’re getting are beyond what I expected and I think are going to transform investigative work, potentially, in the way that DNA transformed investigative work 30 years ago.” The campaign group Liberty said Rowley’s comments would have a chilling effect on the right to protest. Katy Watts, one of its lawyers, said: “We all have the right to go about our lives freely, without being scanned and monitored, but expanding the use of facial recognition will invade our privacy and violate our rights.” She added: “This dystopian technology can be used to subject people existing in public to intrusive surveillance. Retrospective facial recognition can be used to scan people caught on CCTV or on mobile phone footage at protests – meaning anyone standing up for what they believe in could have their sensitive personal data recorded and monitored.” Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said that without the strongest safeguards, facial recognition technology threatened to turn the UK into a surveillance state. “It can absolutely be as intrusive as DNA, which is why it’s so concerning that the Met is using it to scan hundreds of thousands of innocent Londoners, often with dangerously inaccurate results,” she said. “Just as the emergence of DNA led to robust laws that balance and limit powers on its use in law enforcement and trials, we need a democratic, lawful approach to the role of facial biometrics in Britain, but so far there hasn’t even been a parliamentary debate on it.” She added: “We cannot have police making up the rules on such a powerful surveillance technology as they go along, nor monitoring the public with live facial recognition cameras which are at the most invasive, extreme end of the spectrum.” Referring to a court of appeal ruling that the use of facial recognition technology breached privacy rights and broke equalities law, Watts added: “A court has already ruled once that the use of facial recognition technology breached our fundamental rights. Instead of allowing the police to expand the ways they use it, the government should be banning its use.” In a speech to the right-leaning Policy Exchange thinktank, Rowely suggested the use of new technology, such as facial recognition, was necessary to make up for cuts in police funding and would help tackle the greater complexity of crimes. “We spend less per capita on policing than many other western countries,” he said. “I have 28% less to spend on policing London in real terms per capita than we had a decade ago. “We have also stretched ourselves from policing that 30 years ago focused simply on the public space to one that increasingly, and rightly, invests in tackling those predatory crimes that often take place in private, like rape and child abuse and domestic abuse. And of course we’re struggling to cover the ground presented by the online threats of fraud.” He added: “Success in such a landscape with constrained resources requires real precision. That’s the reason we’re using data – for that precision to have the maximum effect with a minimum resource.” Asked about changes to the Public Order Act to increase police powers to deal with disruptive protests, such as those by Just Stop Oil, Rowley said: “We’ve seen with the JSO protests that once the law changed, our response was able to change much more swiftly.” Rowley also called for changes to the criminal justice system to cut the time police officers spend preparing legal cases. “It now takes five times more work to get a case to court for the police and CPS as it did 20 years ago. The complex legal duties of disclosure and redaction have been pushed to the front end of the system, slowing down justice and creating nugatory work for officers. In other jurisdictions, prosecutors do most of this work. If you make a system more costly and bureaucratic, it will achieve less.” He added: “Criminal justice reform is overdue and the effect of that will be to let the police police.” | ['uk/police', 'technology/facial-recognition', 'uk/ukcrime', 'technology/technology', 'uk/uk', 'uk/metropolitan-police', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'uk-news/mark-rowley', 'profile/matthewweaver', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/topstories', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | technology/facial-recognition | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2023-09-11T14:42:44Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
environment/2020/jan/14/government-fails-on-green-transport-policies-despite-promises | Cutting air passenger duty to help Flybe could wreck UK carbon plan | Travel from Exeter to Manchester next Wednesday, and a round trip with the airline Flybe returning the next day would cost you £68, of which air passenger duty amounts to £26. A train ticket for the same journey would cost £141. This kind of price disparity between domestic flights and rail journeys has been the norm for years, the result of under-investment in railways and rail fares allowed to rise at rates much higher than inflation, while regional airports and airlines receive publicly funded incentives and tax breaks on fuel. It comes despite the government’s much-vaunted green policies, and its repeated goal to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Given these price differences, and the woeful state of many of the UK’s railways, it is easy to see why the UK’s aviation sector is set to become the country’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, if left unchecked. That would blow apart the country’s carbon budgets and the net zero commitment. The Committee on Climate Change, writing to the government last year, warned: “Plausible options for how aviation could become zero carbon, even by mid-century, are lacking. Given a population that is anticipated to grow and rising incomes, some growth in [aviation] demand is expected. However, this cannot be unfettered.” If the government presses ahead with plans to cut air passenger duty from domestic flights, as it is proposing in attempts to ensure the survival of Flybe, that would also send the wrong signal to the markets, argues Sam Fankhauser, director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. “Air passenger duty is applied as a green tax, based broadly on the principle that the polluter pays. Cutting or removing [it] would essentially reduce or eliminate the carbon price for flying.” As price comparisons show, air passenger duty at its current rate is at nowhere near the price that would be needed to tip the economic balance away from air travel. Indeed, according to the veteran flying campaigner Leo Murray, director of innovation at the climate charity Possible, that was never the intention. “It was designed not to have an impact on demand for air travel,” he said. “They [governments] do not want it to reduce demand. Air travel has been regarded as if it is a really precious economic sector.” Yet the entire sector contributes only about £20bn to £30bn to the national economy, according to estimates, and leisure trips taken abroad by UK residents far outnumber those by tourists coming to the UK. Murray points to a deficit of about £23bn when the amount overseas tourists spend in the UK is subtracted from the amount British holidaymakers spend abroad. That means, he says, there is economic space for far higher air passenger duty in the leisure sector. Long-haul business flyers could also pay far more without being discouraged from flying, as air passenger duty barely makes a difference to them. “We are bleeding money out of the country, and you could repatriate some of that by encouraging people to stay in the UK,” he says. One of the fairest ways to curb emissions from flying would be a frequent flyer levy. The majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people – in a given year, most people in the UK do not fly at all, and most of those who do are taking one or perhaps two return flights on holiday. One-fifth of overseas flights are taken by just 1% of the population. The airline industry is kept afloat by well-off people spending more on their leisure, taking advantage of low prices to jet off frequently on short trips. A frequent flyer levy would allow people a small number of flights a year without charge or at a small charge, while each subsequent flight would attract a much higher toll. Critics say it could penalise people in the outer edges of the UK, such as the north of Scotland or Northern Ireland. But there could be ways to manage those impacts while ensuring that the environmental cost of cheap flights is accounted for. Encouraging rail travel could also play a big role in reducing emissions from domestic aviation. Germany has just slashed the price of rail travel, to encourage people to use the lower-carbon form of transport. Even more radically, France is considering restrictions or even a ban on some domestic flights. Both those countries have well developed high-speed rail networks, however, which have benefited from public investment over decades. The UK has only one short stretch of high-speed rail, in the south-east, and plans for HS2 are still mired in controversy. This November, the UK will host the crunch UN climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow, and the government’s green policies will be scrutinised on the international stage. As ministers consider cutting air passenger duty on domestic flights while regions compete for what is likely to be limited investment in the national rail networks, a coherent green transport policy looks further away than ever. | ['environment/carbon-emissions', 'politics/transport', 'world/air-transport', 'business/flybe', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'uk/transport', 'environment/environment', 'politics/politics', 'travel/travel', 'business/business', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/analysis', 'profile/fiona-harvey', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/carbon-emissions | EMISSIONS | 2020-01-14T14:49:10Z | true | EMISSIONS |
environment/blog/2010/oct/29/environment-cuts | The environment cuts that didn't make the headlines | Juliette Jowit | Are these signs of things to come in the new post-cuts environment? Even before last week's spending review, it was obvious that Natural England, the government's main agency advising on and implementing policies to help biodiversity, had been earmarked for a major restructuring and downsizing. Ministers made little effort to hide their irritation at Natural England's occasional suggestions that government policies were not the best thing for the natural world. This was a worrying sign, though predictably overlooked in the fallout from slashing more than 50 environment bodies and hundreds of millions of pounds a year of spending by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Less than 48 hours later, an observant correspondent pointed out that over the previous week, Natural England had removed two people from its board, including the popular and highly respected chief scientist Tom Tew. The other was Robin Tucker, executive director for national delivery - important-sounding work. Natural England - which one can presume is not delighted at having such a radical downsizing forced upon it - told the Guardian that the two top-level departures were part of the restructuring. They were "planning for a reduction in funding in the region of 30% over the next four years. We anticipate this will require a reduction in the size of the organisation of about 800 FTE (full-time equivalent jobs) over that period." Meanwhile, as early as this week, Defra is expected to announce further details of plans to sell off Forestry Commission land in a bid to raise more funds. Presumably it will sell it off so that it can be logged more intensively or developed to make more money for the buyers. Last week ministers confirmed they are still also looking at getting rid of nature reserves, as the Guardian reported earlier this summer. Separately, earlier this week an alliance of groups interested in the River Wye put a proposal to Defra offering to take over the running of the river from the Environment Agency and other public bodies. They suggested this could be a "blueprint" for other river systems. It was a plan apparently in the spirit of the new regime, but Defra appeared to be cool about the idea, telling me: There are a number of disadvantages in regional or district fisheries boards which in the past have resulted in inconsistent management, deterioration of habitat and water quality, and over-exploitation of fish stocks. Change is inevitable, and often beneficial. The problem is a declining confidence in Defra's leadership to resist the sort of "reform" championed by the Treasury's spending review, which opened its chapter on the department with: "Defra will focus spending on areas of high economic value" (page 64, paragraph 2.111) - principally flood defences. Given a growing acceptance - one publicly acknowledged by environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, - that traditional economics woefully ignores the value of the natural world, and mostly operates to destroy it, this statement seems peculiarly outdated. With such little strategic vision, it is likely that most significant changes will slip out in these ways: a buried quote here, a local press release there, a changed website few people notice. If you spot them first, tell us in the comments below, on our cuts-watch form, or via Twitter (@guardianeco). | ['environment/blog', 'environment/green-economy', 'environment/green-jobs', 'environment/conservation', 'environment/environment', 'tone/blog', 'politics/spending-review', 'politics/taxandspending', 'environment/green-politics', 'politics/politics', 'type/article', 'profile/juliettejowit'] | environment/green-politics | CLIMATE_POLICY | 2010-10-29T12:12:21Z | true | CLIMATE_POLICY |
environment/2013/oct/18/gwent-levels-wildlife-motorway-plan-m4-conservation | 'A Berlin wall for wildlife': battle looms over Gwent Levels motorway plan | The Gwent Levels is a tucked-away gem: a flat land with huge skies providing a haven for precious flora and fauna including wading birds, otters, rare insects and unique aquatic plants that thrive in the murky-looking drainage ditches criss-crossing the area. But the peace and quiet of this sparsely populated corner of south-east Wales is about to be shattered as conservationists and villagers fight a scheme to build a new motorway that would cut through four sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) and change the nature of daily life in the levels for ever. "This is a unique place," said Tom Clarke, chief executive of Gwent Wildlife Trust. "The levels is one of the largest surviving areas of ancient grazing marshes in Britain. It is a nationally important habitat but also incredibly important from a historical and cultural point of view." Clarke, who is also chairman of the Campaign Against the Levels Motorway (Calm), a group including the RSPB, Friends of the Earth and community councils on the levels, argues that a new motorway would slice the flatland in two, creating a deadly barrier for wildlife. He claims pollution from the cars speeding along the road would harm the fragile ecosystem. Among the creatures and plantlife that would be affected are one of the UK's rarest bumblebees, the shrill carder, threatened birds such as the lapwing, and flora including frogbit, arrowhead and Wolffia (better known as duckweed), which colonise the hundreds of manmade ditches (or reens). Clarke says a motorway would also isolate the people who live here, many of them farmers who look after the cattle and sheep-grazing pasture, which has been reclaimed from the sea since Roman times. It may also have an impact on tourism – the long, flat roads with glimpses of the Somerset hills across the Severn estuary are a magnet for cyclists – and there is concern that a motorway would open the door to more development. "This is a tranquil place full of life of all sorts. The levels must be protected," he said. Calm's campaign tactic is not just to say that the motorway plan should be scrapped because of the impact on the levels – it is trying to build the case that a new motorway does not make sense economically. "We're not a load of beardie-weirdies shouting that nothing must change," said Clarke. "We don't think the figures add up. There are cheaper and better ways." The motorway is being proposed as a way of easing congestion on the M4 around Newport and Cardiff. Some business leaders and politicians argue that traffic problems in south Wales, especially in and around the notorious Brynglas tunnels, blight the country's economy by discouraging investors. They say the congestion is likely to get worse in the coming decades. The Labour-controlled government in Wales is currently consulting on options but its favoured solution is for this seven-mile motorway sweeping through the levels and crossing the Usk (designated a special area of conservation) at Newport. The current M4 would be reclassified as a trunk road. In its draft consultation document, the government acknowledges the potential impacts on the landscape. It says the preferred route would cross more than five miles of SSSI land and recognises this area as "an important wildlife corridor, an essential migration route and key breeding area for many nationally and internationally important species". The document also accepts that the route crosses a "landscape of outstanding historic interest". A listed vicarage would have to be demolished and a standing stone that has been designated a scheduled ancient monument moved. In addition, it highlights that a new motorway could lead to "adverse affects" on the water table and may increase the risk of floods on the levels. It concedes the plan goes against the government's objective of achieving a "cultural shift" away from the car to more sustainable forms of transport. However, a Welsh government spokesperson said that if the plan were adopted, it would be "subject to a full environmental impact assessment which would give careful consideration to any potential effects on the Gwent Levels and the associated SSSIs". There are no costings in the government's document but opponents including Calm believe it would cost £1bn. Prof Stuart Cole, a transport expert at the University of South Wales, is championing an alternative scheme to improve existing roads east and south of Newport including a straight, relatively quiet stretch built to provide access to the huge steelworks south of the current motorway. "This would provide a safety valve for the M4 at a fraction of the cost of a new motorway," said Cole. Neither he nor Calm believe it is clear that the volume of traffic on the motorway is rising. They hope that a proposed south Wales metro system and improvements to train lines will help ease traffic congestion. At Gwent Wildlife Trust's Magor Marsh site, which the motorway would pass desperately close to, volunteers Vaughan and Trina Thomas were in their wellies checking for signs of water voles and were delighted to spot dragonflies flitting around the reens this late in the year. Vaughan Thomas sighed deeply when asked about the road. "It will create a Berlin wall for the wildlife," he said. "It's hugely expensive, a fantastic undertaking. Life would never be the same here. I don't think we need it and we certainly don't want it." | ['environment/conservation', 'environment/environment', 'environment/wildlife', 'environment/endangered-habitats', 'environment/travel-and-transport', 'world/road-transport', 'uk/wales', 'uk/uk', 'tone/features', 'type/article', 'profile/stevenmorris', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews'] | environment/endangered-habitats | BIODIVERSITY | 2013-10-18T17:41:35Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
world/2018/nov/16/weatherwatch-tornado-alley-moving-east-midwest-us | Weatherwatch: is Tornado Alley moving east? | Five years ago, on 17 November, 73 tornadoes barrelled across the US midwest, killing 11 people, injuring more than 100 and costing about $1.6bn in damages. It was an exceptional event but in future the region may have to brace itself for more tornadoes. The most tornado-prone part of the country extends from northern Texas, through the Great Plains of Oklahoma and Kansas then into Nebraska. Some of the most powerful storms spin up in this area, known as Tornado Alley. But now it seems Tornado Alley may be moving to the east. In a study published in the Nature journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, Vittorio Gensini and Harold Brooks say that while the annual number of tornadoes in the US has remained roughly the same since 1979, there has been a shift from the Great Plains towards the midwest and south-east. The reason for this is not clear but the scientists say it is consistent with a warming climate. This shift is of particular concern because the new Tornado Alley is more densely populated, with a greater proportion of people living in highly vulnerable mobile homes. | ['world/tornadoes', 'us-news/us-weather', 'world/natural-disasters', 'world/world', 'us-news/us-news', 'us-news/oklahoma', 'us-news/texas', 'us-news/kansas', 'us-news/nebraska', 'news/series/weatherwatch', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/kate-ravilious', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-weather'] | world/tornadoes | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2018-11-16T21:30:13Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
world/2005/sep/09/hurricanekatrina.usa1 | Oil spills, ravaged industry and lost islands add to the hurricane's toll | The extent of the environmental damage inflicted on the southern US states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama began to emerge yesterday with reports of an entire group of islands disappearing, serious oil slicks and the potential ruin of the seafood industry. Immediate concern centred on Louisiana's heavy industrial area. Katrina flooded many of the 140 large petrochemical works that line the Mississippi river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and little assessment has been done of the damage. Initial aerial reconnaissance by the environmental protection agency suggests no serious chemical damage but has revealed several large oil spills. About 85,000 barrels of crude is now known to have escaped from a Murphy Oil plant in Chalmette, Louisiana, and a further 68,000 barrels were spilled by a damaged storage tank at the Bass Enterprises site in Venice. As an international relief effort gathered pace and the Mexican army entered the US for the first time since 1846 to bring aid, scientists warned that Katrina had seriously weakened the delta's natural defences and the whole region was much more vulnerable to further hurricanes and storm surges. "The 40-mile long Chandeleur chain of barrier islands off the Louisiana coast which used to protect the delta from storm surges have pretty well gone," said Laurence Rouse, of the oceanography department at Louisiana State University. "The delta is definitely under more threat now. Great damage has also been done to the important wetlands and marshes east of New Orleans which also act as defences. They have been ripped up." Many scientists believe that one of the reasons Katrina was so devastating was because a century of river engineering and levee building had reduced the delta's natural defences. "Katrina would have been much worse if the islands hadn't been there," said Klaus Meyer-Arendt, a coastal expert at the University of West Florida. Several other barrier islands were also badly damaged. The increased vulnerability of New Orleans will raise further questions about the advisability of rebuilding the city below sea level in a floodplain which now has few natural defences left. According to the US coastguard, 37 shallow oil platforms are missing from the Gulf and another 20 have been badly damaged, including four deep-sea ones. The department of the interior's oil minerals management service (MMA) said that 70% of the Gulf of Mexico's oil output and 54% of its gas were still closed off because of Katrina. "A full assessment of the damage will require several more days," Rebecca Watson, assistant secretary of the MMA, told the Senate natural resources committee in Washington. She expected 90% of Gulf oil production to return to the market within a month if refineries were repaired but said that some pipelines suffered damage that could take months to repair. On land, the environmental protection agency warned people to take precautions against an explosion of mosquitoes which could be carrying West Nile fever and said 73 drinking water systems were still affected in Alabama, 555 in Mississippi and 469 in Louisiana. More than 500 sewerage systems were damaged across Louisiana. The scale of the task confronting the federal and state environmental officers is immense and there were calls yesterday to relax standards. Some 6,600 petrol stations, each with an average of three underground storage tanks, must be inspected for leaks, as well as hundreds of industrial facilities that could be releasing contaminants to add to the air and water pollution. The task of clearing up to 90m tonnes of debris has barely been contemplated. Damage to the oyster, crab and shrimp industries, one of the major employers on the coast, is thought to have been extensive. The storm surge wrecked many boats, harbours and warehouses and destroyed breeding grounds. The Gulf is home to more than 80% of oysters grown in the United States and is the centre of the shrimp industry. But the industry may be further hit by the tide of industrial pollution which will be flushed down the Mississippi over the next few weeks. "The problem is that a century of long-term industrial pollution held in the soil is being released. A lot of this is being pumped into Lake Pontchartrin. The ecology is definitely being changed," Prof Rouse said. Meanwhile, the American Farm Bureau Federation said farmers had lost more than $2bn (£1.1bn). Katrina flattened sugar cane and rice fields over a wide area in the south, in addition to which farmers in other states are unable to export from the damaged port of New Orleans. Several hundred barges carrying maize and soya are reportedly unable to navigate down the Mississippi, which is the main route for more than 40% of US farm produce exports. Doctors warned that the standing water throughout the region could provide fertile breeding grounds for mosquitoes. According to the centre for disease control and prevention, Louisiana has had 52 cases of West Nile fever and four deaths so far in 2005 - the third highest number of cases reported by any state the this year. | ['world/world', 'us-news/hurricane-katrina', 'us-news/us-news', 'environment/oil-spills', 'world/hurricanes', 'type/article', 'profile/johnvidal'] | us-news/hurricane-katrina | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2005-09-08T23:02:39Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
world/2024/nov/04/sweden-scraps-plans-for-13-offshore-windfarms-over-russia-security-fears | Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears | Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato’s newest member. “The government believes that it would lead to unacceptable consequences for Sweden’s defence to build the current projects in the Baltic Sea area,” Jonson said at a press conference. The proposed windfarms would have been located between Åland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden’s defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden’s west coast. “Both ballistic robots and also cruise robots are a big problem if you have offshore wind power,” Jonson said. “If you have a strong signal detection capability and a radar system that is important, we use the Patriot system for example, there would be negative consequences if there were offshore wind power in the way of the sensors.” A Nato maritime commander said earlier this year that the security of nearly a billion people across Europe and North America was under threat from Russian attempts to target the extensive vulnerabilities of underwater infrastructure, including windfarms, which he said had “system vulnerabilities”. V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.” Sweden’s energy and industry minister, Ebba Busch, said it had been a tough announcement to make, but that security policy was paramount. While many Nato countries are rapidly expanding their wind power, Busch said they were “cleaning up an incredibly messy system”. Nato recently established a centre dedicated to undersea security at Marcom’s UK-based headquarters in Northwood, north-west London. | ['world/sweden', 'world/nato', 'environment/windpower', 'environment/energy', 'environment/environment', 'world/europe-news', 'campaign/email/this-is-europe', 'world/world', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'world/russia', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/miranda-bryant', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-foreign'] | environment/renewableenergy | ENERGY | 2024-11-04T15:31:42Z | true | ENERGY |
sport/2021/oct/27/modern-day-rugby-league-players-at-equal-risk-of-brain-injuries-says-lawyer | Modern-day rugby league players at equal risk of brain injuries, says lawyer | Modern-day rugby league players are in just as much danger of developing serious neurological injuries as a result of playing the game as the group of former internationals that intend to take legal action against the Rugby Football League, the lawyer leading the case has warned. A test group of 10 players including the former Great Britain half-back Bobbie Goulding – who has revealed he has been diagnosed with early onset dementia at the age of 49 – are in the process of launching legal proceedings against the sport’s governing body. They believe a failure to properly protect players against the risks of concussion-based injuries and brain damage results in negligence on the RFL’s behalf. Richard Boardman of Rylands Legal is aiding the players with their challenge, just as he is with around 175 former rugby union players in a similar lawsuit. He has warned that despite the majority of rugby league players involved in the case being retired for some years, the risks for current players are just as high, and changes must be made to the sport now. “There are a lot of young guys like Sam Burgess and Stevie Ward who are speaking openly about this, so it’s happening right now,” Boardman said. “It is our experts’ view that this is still very much a live issue. A study from the Drake Foundation found that 23% of elite rugby players tested had brain damage, and the mean age was 25 years old. That’s around a quarter of guys currently playing now. This challenge is about the guys from previous generations and supporting them, but they want to help current and future generations too.” Boardman said he hoped rugby league and other contact sports would now act to put further preventative measures in place to prevent future generations from being at risk. “Our primary focus is on the retired players we represent,” he said. “We have no real skin in the game in terms of how sports regulate themselves and that’s not our concern. But what we’re hoping is that as a secondary objective, sports do change and some litigation is introduced. “Many experts believe that a return to play period of six days [after sustaining a head injury] is too short and there’s an argument to copy the NFL when it comes to the amount of contact in training. Guys go into the game knowing they may break bones and tear ligaments but when it comes to the brain, there really has to be that heightened duty of care. Guys don’t sign up for brain damage.” In a statement the governing body said: “The RFL takes player safety and welfare extremely seriously and has been saddened to hear about some of the former players’ difficulties. As a result of scientific knowledge, the sport of rugby league continues to improve and develop its approach to concussion, head injury assessment, education, management and prevention across the whole game. We will continue to use medical evidence and research to reinforce and enhance our approach.” | ['sport/rugbyleague', 'sport/rfl', 'sport/concussion-in-sport', 'sport/sport', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/aaron-bower', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/sport', 'theguardian/sport/news', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-sport'] | sport/concussion-in-sport | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2021-10-27T16:18:15Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says | Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says | The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says. The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO2 emissions in 2019 – enough to cause more than a million excess deaths due to heat, according to the report. For the past six months, the Guardian has worked with Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other experts on an exclusive basis to produce a special investigation, The Great Carbon Divide. It explores the causes and consequences of carbon inequality and the disproportionate impact of super-rich individuals, who have been termed “the polluter elite”. Climate justice will be high on the agenda of this month’s UN Cop28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates. The Oxfam report shows that while the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated, air-conditioned lives, their emissions – 5.9bn tonnes of CO2 in 2019 – are responsible for immense suffering. Using a “mortality cost” formula – used by the US Environmental Protection Agency, among others – of 226 excess deaths worldwide for every million tonnes of carbon, the report calculates that the emissions from the 1% alone would be enough to cause the heat-related deaths of 1.3 million people over the coming decades. Over the period from 1990 to 2019, the accumulated emissions of the 1% were equivalent to wiping out last year’s harvests of EU corn, US wheat, Bangladeshi rice and Chinese soya beans. The suffering falls disproportionately upon people living in poverty, marginalised ethnic communities, migrants and women and girls, who live and work outside or in homes vulnerable to extreme weather, according to the research. These groups are less likely to have savings, insurance or social protection, which leaves them more economically, as well as physically, at risk from floods, drought, heatwaves and forest fires. The UN says developing countries account for 91% of deaths related to extreme weather. The report finds that it would take about 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99% to produce as much carbon as the richest billionaires do in a year. “The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price,” said Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser. The twin crises of climate and inequality were “fuelling one another”, she said. The wealth gap between nations only partly explains the disparity. The report shows that in 2019 – the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data – high-income countries (mostly in the global north) were responsible for 40% of global consumption-based CO2 emissions, while the contribution from low-income countries (mostly in the global south) was a negligible 0.4%. Africa, which is home to about one in six of the world population, was responsible for just 4% of emissions. A less discussed but faster-growing problem is inequality within countries. Billionaires are still overwhelmingly white, male and based in the US and Europe, but members of this influential class of super-rich can increasingly be found in other parts of the world. Millionaires are even more dispersed. The report says this is bad news for the climate on multiple levels. The extravagant carbon footprint of the 0.1% – from superyachts, private jets and mansions to space flights and doomsday bunkers – is 77 times higher than the upper level needed for global warming to peak at 1.5C. The corporate shares of many super-rich are highly polluting. This elite also wield enormous and growing political power by owning media organisations and social networks, hiring advertising and PR agencies and lobbyists, and mixing socially with senior politicians, who are also often members of the richest 1%, according to the report. In the US, for example, one in four members of Congress reportedly own stocks in fossil fuel companies, worth a total of between $33m and $93m. The report says this helps to explain why global emissions continue to rise, and why governments in the global north provided $1.8tn to subsidise the fossil fuel industry in 2020, contrary to their international pledges to phase out carbon emissions. Oxfam is calling for hefty wealth taxes on the super-rich and windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies to support the worst affected, reduce inequality and fund a transition to renewable energy. It says a 60% tax on the incomes of the wealthiest 1% would raise $6.4tn a year and could cut emissions by 695m tonnes, which is more than the 2019 footprint of the UK. Oxfam International’s interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, said: “Not taxing wealth allows the richest to rob from us, ruin our planet and renege on democracy. Taxing extreme wealth transforms our chances to tackle both inequality and the climate crisis. These are trillions of dollars at stake to invest in dynamic 21st-century green governments, but also to re-inject into our democracies.” | ['environment/series/the-great-carbon-divide', 'environment/carbon-emissions', 'environment/fossil-fuels', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'news/the-super-rich', 'inequality/inequality', 'environment/environment', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/jonathanwatts', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/topstories', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/carbon-emissions | EMISSIONS | 2023-11-20T00:01:03Z | true | EMISSIONS |
environment/2022/mar/13/environmental-activists-disrupt-bafta-red-carpet-in-london | Environmental activists disrupt Bafta red carpet in London | Young environmental activists have disrupted the red carpet at the Baftas to call for more attention to the climate crisis and for celebrities to speak out about it. Just before 4pm on Sunday, a group of about two dozen activists prepared to storm the entrance to the red carpet VIP area of the Royal Albert Hall in London, but were prevented from getting inside by police and security. Four activists were able to gain access to the red carpet by getting tickets after entering a lottery. They took off their shirts to reveal T-shirts reading “Just Stop Oil”, and chanted: “Just look up, just stop oil,” in a reference to the recent film, Don’t Look Up. The satire is in the running for four awards and the attempt by scientists in the film to warn of impending armageddon due to a comet has been compared to experts’ ignored warnings over the climate crisis. Other activists were able to blockade the entrance to the red carpet area. VIPs had to enter the event on foot after the activists barred the road leading into the cordoned-off area. The action comes weeks ahead of a planned Just Stop Oil campaign, which insiders say has recruited hundreds of young activists to blockade oil and gas infrastructure sites in the UK. Activists from Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain have said they will support the campaign. Protesters said they were targeting the Baftas to urge celebrities to use their platforms to speak out about the climate emergency. Claudia, 23, said: “I am here supporting Just Stop Oil because I am absolutely terrified about our future. Last year, the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser warned us that what we do within the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity. “Yet our government, knowing this, knowing that continuing to support the oil industry is a death sentence for us all, remains determined to drag us down this path of suffering and destruction. And the mainstream media doesn’t care. “So we are asking those with power and influence to use it, to do what is necessary, and use their platform to demand the government just stop oil. We have to act like our lives depend on it, because they do.” Ahead of the action, activists met at Queen Catherine’s temple in Kensington Gardens near to the Royal Albert Hall for a briefing, where they discussed how the action would take place and what tactics they would use. The protesters discussed details such as how to maintain non-violent discipline, whether to “go floppy” when arrested or tackled, and the best ways to apply superglue – “getting your fingertips really close together” to make it more difficult for removal teams to soak solvent between them. | ['environment/climate-crisis', 'film/baftas', 'tv-and-radio/baftas', 'uk/uk', 'culture/awards-and-prizes', 'culture/culture', 'film/film', 'culture/television', 'tv-and-radio/tv-and-radio', 'environment/environment', 'type/article', 'environment/just-stop-oil', 'profile/damien-gayle', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/just-stop-oil | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2022-03-13T18:33:07Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
environment/2008/mar/06/recycling.tech | Local authorities censured over disposal of old PCs | Local councils are giving inadequate advice about recycling to people seeking to dispose of their old computers, a consumer group warns in a new survey today. Computing Which? magazine says that the lack of clear leadership from local authorities on the issue could lead to data falling into the hands of identity thieves. As people upgrade their computers more frequently than ever before, a massive amount of defunct technology is left lying around unused, it claims. For the new report, published today, the magazine contacted 109 councils across the UK to find out what advice they gave about recycling technology. One in seven could not say what would happen to a computer when it was recycled. Only two-fifths of councils who said the equipment would actually be recycled. One council worker said: "They just literally go into the landfill; they get smashed apart." But people do want to recycle their unusual technology. Nearly one-third (32%) of those surveyed said they'd "find somewhere to recycle it"; 28% said they'd "give it away to a friend or family member"; and just 15% said they'd "take it to the tip". Worryingly, the majority of councils did not seem concerned about the safety of personal data stored on old PCs. When asked whether data should be deleted before sending the computer for recycling, responses were vague. One advisor said it "shouldn't be a problem", while another remarked: "You can easily uninstall any information." Computing Which? advises people to remove sensitive information from computers before sending them for recycling. A failsafe, but less environmentally friendly alternative is to remove the hard drive and smash it with a hammer. Sarah Kidner, editor of Computing Which? said: "It's natural to look to local councils for help and advice on getting rid of old computers and monitors; after all they usually take the lead on waste disposal. Yet our investigation shows the quality of advice, and availability of services, vary from one council to the next. Perhaps more worrying is the lack of knowledge and advice on how to dispose of the data stored on your computer. This could mean that the local tip becomes a hunting ground for identity thieves." | ['environment/recycling', 'environment/waste', 'environment/pollution', 'environment/environment', 'technology/technology', 'technology/computing', 'society/localgovernment', 'politics/localgovernment', 'uk/uk', 'politics/politics', 'politics/localelections08', 'technology/data-computer-security', 'politics/local-elections', 'type/article', 'profile/rebeccasmithers'] | environment/waste | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2008-03-06T12:46:21Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
environment/2018/nov/14/wildfire-survival-california-nature-trees | How to survive wildfires: let’s do as nature does | Alistair Smith and Crystal Kolden | California wildfires rarely killed civilians in the 20th century. The Griffith Park fire killed 29 in 1933, while 25 died in Oakland in 1991. Now, for the fourth time in just over a year, California wildfires have become deadly. Within the span of 13 months, nearly 100 civilians have died in wildfires in California, and that devastating number is likely to grow based on the missing persons tally from the town of Paradise. The increasing number of fatalities is occurring globally in so-called Mediterranean climates – regions with mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers. Portugal, Spain, Greece, Chile, Australia and South Africa have all seen civilian wildfire fatalities in recent years, and communities globally are asking themselves the same question: what can we do? How do we stem the soaring number of wildfire fatalities? As fire scientists, we argue that communities should look to the natural world to help identify ways to make our homes more resilient to wildfire. Fire science is very good at understanding the mechanics of the problem: some combination of climate change, population expansion and problematic land management creates a scenario where explosive wildfires become more frequent and deadly. But what we haven’t gotten very good at is identifying solutions that specifically stop people from dying and houses from burning. It’s hard to do, because we can’t create controlled scientific experiments that replicate what wildfires do. What we can do, however, is look at success stories: places where wildfires were expected to be disastrous but weren’t. Montecito, California, was in the path of last December’s Thomas fire. The community sits just east of the city of Santa Barbara and is home to celebrities and many large estates. For the past 20 years, the Montecito fire protection district has been working with residents to reduce their fire risk by creating defensible space around homes, hardening structures with less flammable building materials, removing vegetation next to major roads, creating “fuel breaks” of reduced vegetation in critical areas, widening lanes and driveways, and developing detailed plans for what they would do if a wildfire did occur. When the Thomas fire roared into Montecito, it was during the worst conditions imaginable. Strong, offshore winds, similar to those wreaking havoc on the current wildfires, created extreme fire behavior and huge ember showers. Flaming palm fronds blew everywhere. Heavy smoke blanketed the community, and no aircraft could be used to support firefighters due to the winds. Firefighters were worried they would lose hundreds of homes, and potentially even lives. But when the smoke cleared, only seven homes had been lost, each for a seemingly random reason. More importantly, no one was killed or injured. It was a major success for firefighters. But the preparations also paid off and point to strategies other communities can adopt to reduce the risks posed by wildfire. What the residents of Montecito may not have realized is that they were effectively copying nature on how to live with fire, a strategy known as biomimicry. Some trees have evolved to grow thick bark that serves as armor against the heat of fires. Like these trees, residents used stucco and fiber cement siding, Spanish tiles for roofing, and other less flammable building materials. They placed ember screens over vents and made their houses less susceptible to embers, essentially filling the “chinks” in the armor. In fire-adapted forests, trees are also relatively well-spaced, such that if one plant catches fire, the flames can’t easily spread to neighbors. The residents of Montecito, particularly those along the edge of the wildlands, adopted this principle by creating defensible space around their homes, removing and converting the highly flammable native shrubs to grass or well-irrigated orchards. Communities everywhere can reduce the risk of fire spreading by removing or replacing what connects our houses – flammable yard furniture, landscaping vegetation and bark, and even wooden fences. Selecting yard plants that have evolved to smolder (eg succulents) and not produce many embers would be a smart strategy. Across much of the west, some of the plants most frequently chosen for xeriscaping (eg juniper, palm, and cypress trees) are among the most flammable and potentially deadly for homeowners. The natural world has developed many more ways of surviving and using wildfires that we humans can adopt. Some plants hide all of their most valuable resources underground in their roots, allowing them to regrow quickly after fire. Many animals burrow underground to hide from the flames and birds can fly high and away from danger. Humans could bury power lines (which start many of the wind-driven wildfires) and build underground structures to shelter in place. We already install such shelters in tornado-prone areas of the midwest, where root cellars once saved homesteaders from both fire and funnels. Calls for restricting new construction in fire-prone areas are unrealistic – in the US, we build on earthquake faults, in tsunami zones, in tornado alleys and on coastlines pummeled by hurricanes. Besides, California harbors some of the most expensive real estate in the country, and restricting growth will only serve to further marginalize the poorest and most vulnerable among us, who already suffer the worst impacts of natural disasters. What we can do is build smarter and with wildfire in mind. The Dutch have learned to live with floods rather than fight them. In the US, we need to expect and prepare for fire, rather than relying on firefighters to stop it. Otherwise, we will continue to see our lives go up in smoke. Alistair Smith is a professor of wildland fire science and Crystal Kolden is an associate professor of pyrogeography in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho | ['environment/series/this-land-is-your-land', 'us-news/california', 'world/wildfires', 'environment/environment', 'us-news/us-news', 'type/article', 'tone/comment', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/west-coast-news'] | world/wildfires | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2018-11-14T08:00:10Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2021/oct/05/climate-activists-insulate-britain-roadblocks-kit-malthouse | Climate activists crossed the line with roadblocks, says minister | Climate change protesters “crossed the line” between their right to protest and their responsibility towards the rest of the public when they caused huge tailbacks by blocking three key London roads on Monday, the policing minister, Kit Malthouse, has said. New measures will be announced to crack down on protesters who target road networks and critical national infrastructure, which “is of a different scale of damage than you would otherwise find with a normal protest”, the junior minister said. On Monday, 54 members of Insulate Britain staged blockades at Hanger Lane, Wandsworth Bridge and the Blackwall tunnel at the height of rush-hour. On LBC radio on Tuesday morning, Boris Johnson called the group “irresponsible crusties”. Malthouse, speaking on Sky News, said: “While we obviously all value the right to protest, there is a difference between causing disruption and causing damage. We believe that these protesters and some of the others that we’ve seen in the last couple of years have crossed the line between exercising their right but also their responsibility towards the rest of us, and something needs to be done. “So today we’re going to be announcing a raft of new measures alongside those that are already in the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill that’s going through the House of Lords at the moment that we think will help deal with this problem, specifically recognising the disruption of infrastructure and disruption of the strategic road network is of a different scale of damage than you would otherwise find with a normal protest.” In recent weeks, the home secretary, Priti Patel, has applied for court injunctions to stop Insulate Britain campaigners from bringing motorways to a standstill. The current fines for blocking a highway are up to £1,000. However, breaching such an injunction is not in itself an arrestable offence. At the high court on Tuesday, a return hearing for two emergency injunctions, banning Insulate Britain from blocking the M25 and around Dover, was adjourned for a week so they could be heard together with a third injunction. But the judge refused an application by David Elvin QC, acting for National Highways, to allow serving of injunctions on a list published online and emailed to Insulate Britain. “This is an order which potentially leads to contempt proceedings,” Mr Justice Lavender said, adding that documents could be served to individuals by post. Outside, a dozen or so members of Insulate Britain held banners and spoke to journalists. Some said they had been targeted with threats as a result of their activism. “I’m getting death threats and my name and address published on Twitter,” said Liam Lawton, 36, from London. Tim Speers, also 36 and from London, said: “My name and address is on this injunction. I had someone personally message me the other day saying he’s going to find me and beat me up. It’s dangerous, their releasing this information.” When asked on Sky why high court injunctions were not enough to bring an end to the protests, Malthouse said the “consequences step” had to follow a number of other legal steps, giving protesters a “legal loophole”. “In the meantime, while the police can arrest these protesters and charge them for obstructing the highway, the charge at the moment isn’t severe enough that they can be detained in custody pending an appearance in court. That means that these people in particular are then free to go repeat offend, as we’ve seen. “Eventually, given that they are as far as I can see in breach of that injunction, they will appear in front of a judge and face the wrath of that judge, but in the meantime we need to think about this particular legal loophole to give police more power to deal with this very severe disruption.” At the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Patel was greeted with applause as she vowed to “close down the legal loopholes” exploited by “the so-called eco warriors trampling over our way of life and draining police resources”. “Their actions over recent weeks have amounted to some of the most self-defeating environmental protests that this country has ever seen,” she said, in an apparent reference to Insulate Britain. Penalties for blocking motorways will be increased, a new offence of interfering with key national infrastructure will be created, and courts will be given new powers to stop a “small minority of offenders” from travelling to protests, Patel said. | ['environment/activism', 'world/protest', 'politics/conservative-conference-2021', 'politics/toryconference', 'politics/conservatives', 'politics/kit-malthouse', 'environment/environment', 'politics/politics', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/damien-gayle', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/activism | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2021-10-05T15:26:25Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
environment/2020/aug/05/china-poised-to-power-huge-growth-in-global-offshore-wind-energy | China poised to power huge growth in global offshore wind energy | The world’s offshore windfarm capacity could grow eightfold by the end of the decade powered by a clean energy surge led by China, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). A new industry report has revealed stronger than expected growth for the offshore wind industry, which could reach 234GW by 2030, from a global tally of just over 29GW at the end of last year. The council revised its forecasts up by 15GW in its latest annual report on offshore wind power after the fastest ever growth in 2019, when new wind farms around the world added an extra 6.1GW to the global tally. Ben Backwell, the chief executive at GWEC, said offshore wind was “truly going global” as governments around the world “recognise the role that the technology can play in kickstarting post-Covid economic recovery”. The report found that the offshore wind industry could create 900,000 jobs globally over the next decade, or even more if policymakers use post-pandemic economic stimulus packages to accelerate the sector’s growth. As well as a green economic recovery, the report found that every 1GW of offshore wind helped to avoid 3.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and contributing to the climate crisis. The offshore market has grown on average by almost a quarter every year since 2013, led by a flurry of new projects in European waters, which hold 75% of the world’s offshore wind farms. However, the rate of growth is expected to accelerate in the next 10 years because of a growing appetite for clean energy in countries in the Asia-Pacific region, according to GWEC. “Over the coming decade we will see emerging offshore wind markets like Japan, Korea and Vietnam move to full deployment, and see the first offshore turbines installed in a number of new countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa,” Backwell added. A record 2.4GW of offshore wind power capacity came onstream in Chinese waters last year, the report said, followed by the UK, which installed 1.8GW of offshore wind, and Germany, which added an extra 1.1GW of offshore capacity. The UK held the top spot for the largest market for offshore wind at the end of last year with 9.7GW in operation, followed by Germany with 7.5GW and China with 6.8GW. But by the end of the decade China is expected to host more than a fifth of the world’s offshore wind turbines, equating to 52GW, while the UK tally climbs to 40.3GW. The third-largest market for offshore wind by 2030 will be North America, where there was a modest 30MW of offshore wind capacity in operation at the end of 2019. This is expected to grow to 23GW installed by 2030, according to the report. | ['environment/windpower', 'business/business', 'business/energy-industry', 'world/world', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/environment', 'environment/energy', 'uk/uk', 'environment/green-economy', 'tone/news', 'type/article', 'profile/jillian-ambrose', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/windpower | ENERGY | 2020-08-05T05:01:21Z | true | ENERGY |
media/2010/feb/24/ofcom-climate-change-bedtime-stories | Ofcom to investigate government climate change TV campaign | Ofcom has launched an investigation into the government's climate change TV campaign after receiving hundreds of complaints that it is a form of political advertising. The media regulator has received about 700 complaints about the £6m TV campaign, Bedtime Stories, launched by the Department of Energy and Climate Change last October, with a significant number arguing the ad is a form of political advertising. According to the Communications Act, the government is allowed to run advertising of a public service nature, such as warnings about obesity or drink driving, but is not allowed to run political ads that aim to "influence public opinion on a matter of public controversy". The climate-change campaign is already being separately investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority to see if it breaches the advertising code, after nearly 1,000 complaints. Ofcom's investigation comes after two months of allegations that climate-change scientists manipulated and withheld data. When the DECC launched the ad campaign, part of its Act on CO2 initiative, the department said it was the first time the government had thrown its weight behind the view that scientific evidence now clearly shows that climate change is man made. However, the campaign immediately sparked complaints to the ASA, which has received a total of 938 complaints about the ad. Some of the complaints argued there is no scientific evidence of climate change. Others claimed there was a division of scientific opinion on the issue and that the ad should therefore not have attributed global warming to human activity. The DECC has defended the campaign, and the science behind it, with climate-change minister Joan Ruddick arguing that the campaign was "consistent with government policy on the issue, which is informed by the latest science and assessments of peer-reviewed, scientific literature made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other international bodies". • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. • If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". | ['media/advertising', 'media/ofcom', 'media/asa', 'media/media', 'tone/news', 'uk/uk', 'environment/environment', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/climate-change-scepticism', 'politics/politics', 'type/article', 'profile/marksweney'] | environment/climate-change-scepticism | CLIMATE_DENIAL | 2010-02-24T12:14:54Z | true | CLIMATE_DENIAL |
australia-news/2020/jan/20/scott-morrison-nsw-minister-matt-kean-federal-climate | Scott Morrison says NSW minister Matt Kean 'doesn't know what he's talking about' on climate | Scott Morrison has issued an extraordinary rebuke of the New South Wales environment minister, Matt Kean, for suggesting federal Liberals are pushing the government to increase its ambition on emissions reduction. Asked about Kean’s call for the federal government to abandon its use of Kyoto carryover credits to meet its 2030 emissions target, Morrison told ABC’s AM that “Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet [and] most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was”. “We are dealing with our climate policies in the same way as we took them to the election … we will meet and beat our emission reduction targets,” Morrison said. At a press conference in Canberra, Morrison told reporters he did not regret the remarks. Morrison said although the government will review the possibility of reaching zero emissions by 2050, in line with its Pacific Island Forum commitment, it would not adopt the target if it “didn’t know the cost”. The treasurer Josh Frydenberg backed Morrison’s position, by saying Kean was “wrong” to say cabinet ministers want the government to do more on climate change. After an unprecedented summer season of bushfires which Kean and even Morrison himself have conceded is caused in part by climate change, the federal government is under pressure to do more to fight global heating. At the 2019 election a record number of voters nominated climate change or the environment as their top concern. Morrison has suggested the Coalition could go “even further” than the target of 26-28% emissions reduction by 2030, which was met with a chorus of approval from moderate Liberals but sparked warnings of negative consequences for Morrison by conservative Liberals and Nationals MPs. On Monday, Morrison denied that federal Liberals were pushing to increase emissions reduction ambition, telling broadcaster Sabra Lane that “what is being suggested by your question is that there are others [who want a stronger policy] – that just isn’t the case”. “The government is completely united on focusing on the challenge of the response to the current bushfire crisis and meeting and beating our emissions reduction targets and taking our climate policies forward over the next term of government.” Morrison said the government was still aiming for a 26% emission reduction, and noted that while the government had a target, “I can’t say that for everyone else” – a reference to the fact Labor will announce its target closer to the next election. Morrison ruled out a carbon tax, increasing electricity prices and “[wiping] out resource industries”. Morrison told 3AW Radio he had “no idea” if Labor will aim for zero carbon emissions by 2050 but acknowledged that “we undertook to look at that through the Pacific Islands Forum commitment I gave last year”. “But we need to understand what that means – I mean, people can say that, but what does that mean for jobs? Now I can’t answer that question right now … But I’m concerned it wouldn’t be a good thing. “People who make these commitments need to be able to tell people what it will cost them.” The Pacific Island Forum’s communique committed Australia and other Pacific countries to produce a 2050 strategy by 2020 which “may include commitments and strategies to achieve net zero carbon by 2050”. The federal Liberal MPs pushing for change include Katie Allen, who has said the government is “starting to move in the right direction but we have a lot more to do”, and Dave Sharma and Tim Wilson, who both welcomed Morrison’s comments last week on the need to “evolve” policy. On Sunday Anthony Albanese promised that Labor would “take climate change seriously” and have a “very strong” policy that aimed to be “as ambitious as possible” but did not commit to outbid the Coalition because he hoped the Morrison government would take action before the next election. Albanese confirmed that a 45% reduction target by 2030 is no longer Labor policy and described it as a “mistake” that Labor automatically maintained that target from the 2016 to 2019 election without further shadow cabinet reconsideration. | ['australia-news/scott-morrison', 'australia-news/liberal-party', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'australia-news/australian-politics', 'environment/carbon-emissions', 'australia-news/coalition', 'environment/paris-climate-agreement', 'australia-news/new-south-wales', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/new-south-wales-politics', 'australia-news/labor-party', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/paul-karp', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-politics'] | environment/carbon-emissions | EMISSIONS | 2020-01-19T21:45:41Z | true | EMISSIONS |
environment/2024/feb/16/prince-harry-malawi-elephant-relocation-project-dead-aoe | Death toll rises to seven in Malawi elephant relocation project linked to Prince Harry NGO | Four more people have died after an elephant translocation overseen by two wildlife organisations, including one that was headed by Prince Harry, in a protected area in Malawi. The recent deaths bring the total fatalities connected to the relocated elephants to seven. In July 2022, more than 250 elephants were moved from Liwonde national park in southern Malawi to the country’s second-largest protected area, Kasungu, in a three-way operation between Malawi’s national park service and two NGOs: the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), and African Parks. Prince Harry was president of African Parks for six years, before being elevated to the board of directors from 2023. The movement of elephants was among the largest of its kind ever attempted, the conservation groups said at the time. The groups used images of the 263 elephants being transported for fundraising, and videos of the huge animals being lifted by crane were described as “scenes reminiscent of the Disney classic Dumbo”. In the days after the translocation, however, two people were killed by elephants in the area the animals were moved to, and a third person was killed in September that year. Communities warned of growing problems with human-wildlife conflict with the African mammals, which frequently raid crops. After the move, a community leader accused the wildlife NGOs of caring more about animals than people. An electric fence to protect people on the edge of the park had not been completed, he said, highlighting that the elephants had been moved from a protected area that already had a fence. Ifaw and the Malawian national park service contest that this was a condition of the translocation. African Parks disputed that the movement of the elephants had been rushed. Now, a further four people have been killed by elephants in Kasungu, bringing the total fatalities to seven, with areas of the fence still incomplete. The deaths have left several children orphaned and some families struggling to get by, the Guardian understands. Ifaw continued to raise funds using news of the translocation in 2023. The NGO said its Room to Roam initiative to protect elephants offered a solution to biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. On the Malawian side of the park in June 2023, 31-year-old Masiye Phiri was killed and her two-year-old child was injured when they were charged by a bull elephant in a garden after a group had left the park boundaries. In August 2023, Jackson Banda was killed by an elephant, again after several elephants got out of the park. The next month, Boniface Nkhoma was attacked by elephants at night while walking on a road when the mammals had again gone beyond the park boundaries. On the Zambian side, Andrew Phiri, 65, was killed by a bull elephant in September 2023. The Guardian was told by local sources of a fifth death but could not confirm details. Ifaw said it was aware of seven deaths since the elephants were translocated. Malidadi Langa, chair of an association of villages near Kasungu national park on the Malawian side, who welcomed the elephant translocation as a boost to tourism, called for the creation of an insurance scheme to compensate affected families. He said elephant-human conflict was affecting some of the poorest and most marginalised families. “Although, with hindsight, we wish things could have been done better to prevent and mitigate the negative impact of the translocation in elephant-human conflict, we now want to focus more on finding solutions,” Langa said. “Although good progress is being made on construction of the electric fence around Kasungu national park, such fencing needs to be embedded in policy and legal frameworks as a requirement, given that Malawi’s protected areas are bounded by dense human settlements. “We want the introduction of some form of a human-wildlife conflict insurance scheme to offset losses suffered by victims. This is against the background of our experience with the translocation to date and the reality that human-wildlife conflict is exacerbating inequality since it affects already poor and marginalised communities living in hard-to-reach areas on the edge of the park,” he said. In a statement, Ifaw said it was deeply saddened by each death or injury caused by elephants that have strayed from Kasungu. It said it works closely with the Malawian and Zambian governments to coordinate on human-wildlife conflict, and had been providing community support. It said 57 miles of fencing near the park and been completed and an additional 25 miles would be finished in 2024. “Ifaw operates within the policy and legal framework of the governments of Malawi and Zambia. It is the government’s responsibility to deal with compensation in such matters, although there exists no such legal provision within the law of the two governments. Ifaw is bound to follow protocol in the management of these areas. However, Ifaw works with the governments to support the families tragically affected by human-elephant conflict by providing logistical and financial support – such as food, transport and coffins for the funerals of the deceased,” it said. Malawi’s national park service said there had been a substantial reduction in human-wildlife conflict in areas where the fence had been built. It said more staff had been hired to safeguard the community from raiding elephants, and disputed that the initial translocation was not done safely or without respect for local communities. African Parks, whose involvement with the translocation ended last year, did not publicly comment. It had previously published a lengthy response to media coverage in 2022. The prince was not involved in this translocation with African Parks. Zambia’s national park service did not respond. Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features | ['environment/series/the-age-of-extinction', 'global-development/global-development', 'world/malawi', 'environment/endangered-habitats', 'environment/wildlife', 'world/africa', 'environment/conservation', 'environment/environment', 'environment/mammals', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/patrick-greenfield', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/environmentnews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-age-of-extinction'] | environment/endangered-habitats | BIODIVERSITY | 2024-02-16T07:00:37Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
technology/2015/sep/28/media-streaming-boxes-tv-five-of-the-best | Five of the best media-streaming boxes to turn your dumb TV into a smart one | Want more from your television without having to buy a new one? You need a streaming box. Here are five of the best on the market. Now TV Cost: £15 One of the cheapest and best media streamers around. It is a rebranded Roku 2, which costs £70, with Wi-Fi and ethernet connectivity. The black box, which is 18cm sq, sits on top of almost anything, but needs its own power adapter. It is fast and outputs video in 1080p and audio in Dolby Digital Plus. It requires a Now TV account and is limited to Sky’s excellent Now TV movies, entertainment and sport services, Sky’s pay-per-view store and a select number of catchup services, including BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4 and Demand 5. There is no support for Netflix or Amazon’s Prime Video streaming services. Verdict: excellent value for money, but limited support for streaming services. Amazon Fire TV Stick Cost: £35 or £45 The Amazon Fire TV stick looks like a USB flash drive and plugs directly into the HDMI port at the back of the TV. It is powered by a micro-USB cable, but needs to be plugged into its own power adapter. The remote can be pointed anywhere and the setup is incredibly easy: if bought from Amazon it comes with your details pre-loaded. There’s a simple how-to video when it is first installed too. The interface is slick, it needs an Amazon account and works best with Amazon’s £79 Prime service, which includes a video-on-demand service with a solid selection of movies and TV and a music subscription service with access to 1 million tracks. Other apps are available, including Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Spotify and more from the Amazon app store. The streaming quality is good, there’s a smartphone app for voice searches and if you own an Amazon Fire tablet you can mirror its screen on the TV. It also plays games such as Minecraft, Sonic, Tetris and Crossy Road and supports an optional Bluetooth games controller. Two versions are available, one with a voice-controlled remote and one without, with a £10 difference. Verdict: best for Amazon subscribers, but good value and support for most other services. Chromecast Cost: £30 This takes a very different approach to turning your TV smart. It acts as a receiver for your smartphone, tablet or laptop, using Google’s Cast service across your home network. It beams whatever is on your phone screen on to the TV, then uses the phone as a remote. There is no real interface for the Chromecast without a phone or laptop, beyond displaying background pictures, and so requires compatible apps such YouTube, Netflix and BBC iPlayer to work. Hundreds of Chromecast-compatible apps are available for Android and iPhone. It’s another small stick, which plugs straight into the HDMI slot on the TV, and can be powered by the USB port on your TV, unlike the Amazon Fire TV Stick. Verdict: simple to install and use, but requires a smartphone, tablet or computer. Apple TV Cost: £59 One of the oldest streaming boxes available, the third generation Apple TV is currently available for £60, but a new version will be available in November for around £140 with a motion-control remote, voice search and apps. The current incarnation of the small black box can be controlled using a slim metal remote or via the Remote app on the iPhone or iPad, which makes entering text easier. Built around iTunes, the Apple TV is the only device here that can play movies and music from Apple’s digital store, but also supports Netflix, Sky’s Now TV service, YouTube and a small selection of other services. The Apple TV supports AirPlay, Apple’s version of Google Cast, which streams video using your home network from an iPhone, iPad or Mac and a compatible app, such as BBC iPlayer. Verdict: best for Apple users who want iTunes content on their TV and can’t wait till November. Roku 2 Cost: £70 The same as the Now TV box, but with all the limitations removed. It is the Swiss Army knife of streaming boxes, with hundreds of apps and services called channels available in the Roku store Netflix, YouTube, Google Play movies and TV, Spotify and many more are available, including all the catchup services such as BBC iPlayer, Sky’s Now TV and Sky Store and even the Firefox browser. Apps and games are available, including Pac-Man and Fieldrunners, while local media playback via the microSD card slot on the back is also good. The Roku can play content streamed from a home-media server too. The Roku’s universal search helps you find what you want to play and its movie recommendation service monitors what you watch and suggests other things you might like. The remote feels a little cheap and its reach isn’t very far for infrared, but the interface can be customised and is easy to navigate, even if it isn’t slick. The one thing missing is Amazon Prime video, which is available in the US Roku store but not in the UK. That might change soon. Verdict: the do-it-all streamer. Other reviews Top 5 phablets for early 2015: Which is the best for big-screen smartphone lovers? Five of the best smartwatches for early 2015 | ['technology/gadgets', 'technology/television', 'technology/amazon', 'media/amazon-prime-video', 'media/bskyb', 'technology/google', 'technology/chrome', 'technology/apple', 'technology/apple-tv', 'technology/technology', 'media/media', 'technology/series/tried-and-tested', 'technology/internet', 'media/television', 'type/article', 'profile/samuel-gibbs'] | technology/gadgets | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2015-09-28T11:05:52Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
technology/2022/oct/10/amazon-electric-fleet-investment-uk-europe | Amazon to up electric fleet by thousands across UK and continent | Amazon is investing more than €1bn (£880m) to add thousands more electric lorries, vans and cargo bikes to its sprawling fleet of delivery vehicles across Europe over the next five years. The online retailer said it would invest £300m in the UK, where it plans to have as many as 700 electric HGVs by 2025, up from just five today, and more than triple its fleet of electric vans to 10,000 across the continent. Hundreds of fast charging points for electric vehicles are to be installed at the group’s European warehouses and delivery hubs to allow the new low-carbon fleet to charge in about two hours. The company is also aiming to double the number European cities where it has so-called “micromobility hubs”, which enable deliveries via cargo bike and on foot, from more than 20 at present. The investment plan comes amid a boom in online shopping and deliveries since the Covid pandemic, helping to drive up profits for the American retail company founded by the US billionaire Jeff Bezos. It also comes as soaring fuel costs since Russia’s war in Ukraine pushes firms to look at alternative modes of transport. Amazon said it hoped by taking the step it would encourage other retailers to invest in electric vehicles and help spur the building of more public charging infrastructure. Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon, said: “Deploying thousands of electric vans, long-haul trucks, and bikes will help us shift further away from traditional fossil fuels.” He said that achieving net zero carbon emissions required “a substantial and sustained investment” with the transport network “one of the most challenging areas” to decarbonise. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the UK transport secretary, said she supported Amazon’s move. “Significant investments like Amazon’s today will be vital to reducing emissions and meeting our net zero goals, while supporting growth at the same time,” she said. Earlier this year, Amazon launched a fleet of e-cargo bikes and a team of on-foot delivery staff to replace thousands of van deliveries in London. The firm’s first “micromobility” hub in Hackney, east London, and a fleet of electric vehicles in the capital were intended to contribute to 5m deliveries a year across about a tenth of the city’s ultra-low emission zone districts. The bikes are operated by a variety of partner businesses, not directly by Amazon. The UK government is aiming to encourage small businesses to get on their bikes with the help of incentives and infrastructure, including window cleaners, milk and beer deliverers, plumbers and DJs. Sales of cargo bikes doubled in the first half of this year, according to the Bicycle Association, as both families and businesses have turned to the low-carbon alternative amid soaring petrol prices and concerns about the environment. | ['technology/amazon', 'environment/environment', 'business/business', 'technology/efinance', 'technology/technology', 'environment/electric-cars', 'environment/carbon-emissions', 'environment/ethical-living', 'technology/motoring', 'environment/travel-and-transport', 'type/article', 'profile/sarahbutler', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/carbon-emissions | EMISSIONS | 2022-10-09T23:01:11Z | true | EMISSIONS |
business/2008/feb/27/bp.energy | BP hints at sale of alternative energy business | BP boasted today that its alternative energy business was worth as much as $7bn (£3.5bn), but hinted it could be put up for sale to take advantage of rising values in the renewable sector. In a strategy update to the City, Tony Hayward, the oil group's chief executive, said BP would invest $1.5bn in wind and solar operations over the next 12 months to speed further growth, although oil and gas will see more than $20bn ploughed into it this year. "Taking stockmarket valuations for similar companies, we estimate it [alternative energy] is already worth between $5bn and $7bn," he argued, adding: "As we go forward we will be looking at how best we can realise that growing value for our shareholders." Any disposal would feed mounting concerns among environmental groups that BP is gradually turning its back on the green agenda pursued by Hayward's predecessor, Lord (John) Browne, as it moves into carbon-heavy activities such as the tar sands of Canada. But sources close to the company insisted that BP was as committed as ever to renewables, highlighted by the acceleration of $8bn worth of spending originally earmarked for new technologies. They said that Hayward's commitment to realising value from alternative energy was more likely to mean disposing of a stake in the business to a new partner rather than an all-out sale or initial public offering. But they insisted all these options were "some time off". Vivienne Cox, chief executive of an alternative energy operation recently downgraded from full division to mere business unit, outlined for the first time to analysts that the wind business could be worth as much as $3.9bn and the solar operation $2.1bn. Other operations such as biomass, clean coal and hydrogen could make it up to a potential level of $7bn. BP had assembled a land bank sufficient to build 15 gigawatts of wind generation in the US, including Cedar Creek in Colorado, one of America's biggest wind farms. There was more capacity planned for Europe, India and China while the company was aiming at growing solar sales to 800 megawatts by 2010, she added. The bulk of the City presentation was taken up with details about progress made by the group in turning its financial position around after a fall in annual profits and a slump in the share price despite $100 per barrel oil. BP said it had replaced its annual production by an impressive 112% in 2007 and argued the figure would have been 130% if oil had stayed at $60. Some 2.4bn barrels had been added to resources over the year boosting the total resource base to 42.1bn barrels. Hayward said top management had been slimmed from six executive directors to four, 5,000 other jobs would be cut over the next 18 months and a variety of initiatives undertaken to improve safety and operational performance. "We have made significant progress at BP over the past 10 months, quietly and without fuss, in resetting essential context, in establishing sound practical objectives and beginning to deliver them," he added. Fadel Gheit, oil analyst with Oppenheimer, said he was impressed with the steady progress being taken to rehabilitate BP. "It makes sense to spin off the alternative energy business at some stage rather than having it hidden inside a much larger group," he added. | ['business/bp', 'environment/energy', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/solarpower', 'environment/windpower', 'business/business', 'uk/uk', 'business/oilandgascompanies', 'type/article'] | environment/solarpower | ENERGY | 2008-02-27T17:35:58Z | true | ENERGY |
business/2008/mar/17/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear | British Energy shares jump on takeover talk | Shares in British Energy jumped nearly 12% this morning after the nuclear power station operator confirmed that it was in talks about a takeover or merger. British Energy was the top riser on the FTSE 100 today -- which fell sharply on fears the global financial crisis was deepening -- with the shares up 67p to 638.5p by mid-morning. The company, Britain's largest nuclear power provider, said it was "in discussions with interested parties in the context of its future and its plans to take a pivotal role in any new nuclear programme. These discussions could lead to a business combination or an offer for the company, although there can be no certainty that any offer will be made." The announcement came after speculation over the weekend that the government was considering selling its 36% holding in the group, whose eight nuclear sites generate around a sixth of the country's electricity. According to weekend reports, the government has approached energy suppliers including British Gas owner Centrica, France's EDF, Germany's Eon and Spain's Iberdrola to find out if they are interested in buying the stake. The government announced earlier this month that it was making up to 18 more sites available for the next generation of nuclear power plants as well as signalling an acceleration of its plans for new reactors. | ['business/britishenergygroup', 'environment/nuclearpower', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'profile/juliakollewe'] | environment/nuclearpower | ENERGY | 2008-03-17T10:36:09Z | true | ENERGY |
environment/2012/dec/29/single-men-rubbish-at-recycling | Single men found to be rubbish at putting out the recycling | Men who live alone are the least likely to recycle in the UK, according to a study. As many homes come to terms with a backlog of discarded wrapping paper and empty packaging after Christmas, women will take on the most responsibility for disposing of it in an environmentally friendly way, according to new research. Results showed that single people living alone are less likely to recycle – only 65% did so, compared with 79% of mixed-sex couples. Of those living alone, 69% of women recycled some of their waste or unwanted items, whereas 58% of men were found to do the same. The study forms part of Understanding Society – the UK's biggest panel survey – and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and conducted by Essex University. More than 2,000 single men and women and 3,000 couples were asked about their housework routines, including whether they separated their waste for recycling. Although households are doing much less housework in general than they were 20 years ago, on average women still take on the bulk of domestic chores – especially when they live with a male partner. "Women are probably doing more than their share," says Hazel Pettifor, who led the study. "In the same way that housework tasks are often split with the woman of the house taking on the daily, routine activities, it is likely that women are emptying and rinsing out containers, removing lids and labels and sorting waste, while their menfolk make the fortnightly trip to the bottle bank or put the bins out." Men who are active in sharing housework were found to be just as likely to share in recycling when in a mixed-sex couple. But sharing did not guarantee an equal workload: women are the most committed recyclers, and more willing than men to expend time and energy on recycling. As local councils offer better recycling facilities, people are increasingly viewing it as an essential part of their household routine, rather than a voluntary green act. The UK's governments have set ambitious targets to increase domestic recycling of all waste to 50% by 2020 – currently standing at 41.5% in England and Wales, 37.2% in Scotland and 39.7% in Northern Ireland. The study shows that making men the focus for green messages could be the best way forward. | ['environment/recycling', 'environment/environment', 'environment/waste', 'environment/ethical-living', 'uk/uk', 'tone/news', 'type/article', 'publication/theobserver', 'theobserver/news', 'theobserver/news/uknews'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2012-12-29T23:24:11Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
business/2024/feb/12/thames-water-forecasts-more-leaks-over-next-two-years-than-predicted | Thames Water forecasts more leaks over next two years than predicted | Thames Water expects to leak more water than previously thought, after its ageing pipes were overwhelmed by a deluge of rainfall, it has emerged. Britain’s largest water company has told regulators it now expects to leak 585m litres a day this financial year, up from a previous forecast of 550m litres a day. In an update to its service commitment plan, a document required by the regulator Ofwat which provides information for customers, Thames pushed up its forecasts for the next financial year, too. It expects to leak between 512m litres a day and 530m litres, up from the 507m previously forecast. The revision will pile further pressure on debt-laden Thames Water to invest in its infrastructure, amid public and political anger over its sewage-dumping record. It comes as the government and regulators are attempting to clamp down harder on the water industry. At the weekend, it emerged that ministers plan to ban bonuses for water company bosses who fail to prevent illegal sewage spills. Meanwhile, Ofwat unveiled sanctions for water companies who provide poor service. The updated leakage figures from Thames Water, which serves 15 million customers across London and Thames Valley, show an improvement on the 2022-23 financial year, when it leaked 620m litres a day. The Guardian revealed last year that Sarah Bentley, Thames’s former chief executive who abruptly left, had told the government that hitting its leakage targets would be “very challenging to achieve”. At the time, Bentley blamed the hot, dry weather in 2022, followed by a wet winter, for exacerbating leaks from the network and from customers’ homes. Thames Water said that since then, progress had been undermined by wet weather, including heavy flooding in January which overwhelmed its network. The heavy rains caused flooding in its sewers, even delaying the start of school term at Eton college because the toilets in its boarding houses backed up. Thames said the heavy rainfall, combined with a high water table, had put “huge pressure on our sewers and pumping stations”. The company has argued London’s corrosive soil and the age of its infrastructure – with nearly half of the capital’s mains more than 100 years old – is to blame for its leakage record. However, Thames has been criticised for under-investing in its infrastructure, including during the tenure of its former owners, a consortium led by Macquarie, which completed its exit from the business in 2017. The company is now labouring under a £14bn debt mountain and last year its auditor warned it could run out of cash by April. Robbie Moore, the floods minister, said last week that the government and Ofwat were scrutinising Thames’s commitments on leaks, customer service and polluting Britain’s waterways. A Thames Water spokesperson said: “We have a refocused turnaround plan that aims to deliver for our customers and the environment and are prioritising in a number of areas including improving performance in leakage. “While we were making good progress during the first six months of 2023/24, we have been unable to mitigate the environmental impacts, essentially ‘weather’, experienced during the autumn and winter which has meant that we will out-turn year four higher than our planned forecast. “Alongside this, the health of our assets has been declining over recent decades and is another cause of our current performance challenges.” The Environment Agency told Thames last year that it needed to do more to fix its leaking pipes before projects to take water from the River Thames or from Wales to tackle drought were considered. Its plans to tackle periods when water resources are tight include abstracting millions of litres a day from the Thames and replacing it with treated effluent, as well as taking 155m litres a day from Wales. The company is hiking average annual bills by £15 to £471 from April, and then a further £175 to £611 over the five years from 2025. Over the same period, it hopes to spend £18.7bn, including £4.7bn to improve service quality, and it plans to replace 54,000 lead pipes. | ['business/thames-water', 'business/water-industry', 'business/utilities', 'environment/water', 'environment/pollution', 'business/regulators', 'money/water-bills', 'business/executive-pay-bonuses', 'money/household-bills', 'business/business', 'environment/environment', 'uk/uk', 'uk-news/england', 'campaign/email/business-today', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/alex-lawson', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/pollution | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2024-02-12T16:40:18Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
australia-news/2022/may/13/hundreds-escape-flood-waters-in-queensland-as-state-lashed-by-severe-thunderstorms | Hundreds escape flood waters in Queensland as state lashed by severe thunderstorms | Hundreds of Queenslanders have fled to higher ground or been rescued from flood waters with thousands on alert on Friday night as severe thunderstorms lash the state’s south-east. Intense rainfall has hit Brisbane, Ipswich, the Lockyer valley, Darling Downs, Moreton Bay, Sunshine Coast, Wide Bay-Burnett, Bundaberg and Gladstone, the result of a massive low-pressure trough. More than 170mm has fallen in 24 hours, with some places exceeding 260mm in two days. The unseasonal deluge is Queensland’s sixth deadly flood since December, which scientists have attributed to a second La Niña weather pattern in two years. The Bureau of Meteorology issued major flood warnings for the Condamine, Logan and Bremer rivers and the Warrill, Laidley and Lockyer creeks. On Friday night, the system was moving north over the region between Caboolture and Gladstone, including Maroochydore, Gympie, Bundaberg, Cooroy, Nambour and Rainbow Beach. Laura Boekel, a senior forecaster at the BoM, said on Friday the deluge was an “evolving situation”, with intense rain capable of triggering flash floods and landslides, which could be “potentially life threatening”. More than 700 roads were cut or affected by flood waters, including the Bruce Highway near Gin Gin, with Queensland Fire and Emergency Services conducting 20 flood rescues in 24 hours. Gympie regional council issued a watch and act alert to residents with intense rainfall forecast on Friday afternoon. “This may cause dangerous flash flooding. Residents are urged to stay off roads,” the alert said. The worst flooding was around Laidley, Gatton and Grantham in the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, to the south around Beaudesert, and in Warwick, Cecil Plains, Millerman and Killarney on the Southern Downs. About 300 homes were affected in Laidley where the Lockyer River was gushing down William Street, the main thoroughfare, on Friday. The region had downpours of 260mm in the past 48 hours, Lockyer Valley mayor, Tanya Milligan, said on Friday afternoon. Police knocked on doors and called at least 240 at-risk households, advising them to leave. The Lockyer Valley regional council has eight evacuation centres. Milligan said another 150mm was expected to fall in the next 24 hours, with showers forecast throughout the weekend and into next week also posing the danger of flash flooding. She said that “even the talk of showers” would be “very distressing” for some people in the region who had already been through harrowing flood experiences earlier this year. “It feels really volatile,” she said. “The fact is, that none of us have a crystal ball to give precise locations and how much rainfall, we are actually going to get. But if we were to get a storm cell and have a large velocity, in a small amount of time, to fall on a particular areas, we will be in a whole heap of pain. We are absolutely saturated, this catchment.” Milligan said residents were issued an emergency warning at 3am Friday, with Grantham’s flood siren sounding four times between 4am and 5am, and again at 8am. “It was probably a nasty way to wake people up,” she said. The mayor said more people likely fled their homes and sought shelter with family and friends. As of about 1pm, Milligan said emergency services had executed six swift water rescues, four of which were for people in flood waters, and two of those were medical episodes. Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning South East Queensland UHF Emergency Service Team founder, Shane Barnes, said he had been shocked by the intensity of the weather. “Started my emergency services career and did high schooling in Laidley. Never in my life I would imagine so much water in William Street,” he tweeted on Friday. The Scenic Rim council issued an emergency alert warning that multiple roads were cut by the flooding Logan River. The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said the rain wasn’t as constant and intense as downpours that caused catastrophic floods in February, but it would linger into Saturday. The Brisbane River was not expected to rise above a minor flood level, but the city council opened sandbagging stations and parts of Rocklea and Oxley were inundated on Friday afternoon. Deputy police commissioner, Steve Gollschewski, urged residents to pay attention to flood warnings and to keep in touch with their families and friends. He also said there had been a number of “avoidable rescues” since the rain began, and urged people not to drive through flood waters. “We have lost far too many lives on our roads this year and in previous events,” Gollschewski said. A woman from Calen died in flood waters in the north of the state after her ute was washed away on Wednesday. Two passengers, a 50-year-old Mount Charlton man and a 30-year-old Mount Pelion woman, managed to escape the vehicle. | ['australia-news/queensland', 'environment/flooding', 'australia-news/australia-weather', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/brisbane', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/stephanie-convery', 'profile/joe-hinchliffe', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/flooding | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2022-05-13T08:28:00Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
australia-news/2024/feb/09/woolworths-coles-and-aldi-to-roll-out-soft-plastics-collection-bins-in-12-melbourne-stores | Woolworths, Coles and Aldi to roll out soft plastics collection bins in 12 Melbourne stores | Woolworths, Coles and Aldi will roll out soft plastics collection bins in 12 Melbourne stores, giving customers an in-store option for recycling their scrunchable food packaging for the first time since the demise of REDcycle. A spokesperson for the Soft Plastics Taskforce – made up of the three supermarkets and chaired by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water – said the trial, which begins this week, is possible because of new soft plastic recycling facilities that began operating last week. Coles and Woolworths have continued to sell products in plastic packaging with REDcycle or “return in store” recycling logos but have alerted customers to the incorrect labelling via in store messaging. Formed in 2011, REDcycle was a national soft plastics collection and recycling program. It operated across 2,000 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets and some Aldi stores, with customers able to drop off used soft plastics for processing. Before its collapse in November 2022, REDcycle claimed to collect 5m items a day. Coles and Woolworths said in April 2023 that REDcycle had been stockpiling soft plastics without their knowledge, while the scheme itself claimed it had been holding on to the waste while trying to ride out problems. The taskforce is encouraging shoppers in the 12 Melbourne suburbs to drop off their weekly household soft plastic recycling during their regular shop to “help put the system to the test”. Soft plastics will be picked up from each store by a third party, the taskforce said, which will then bale and transport the materials to recycling partners in the area. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup The taskforce said the plastics would then be sorted, weighed and processed into a variety of products, including an additive for asphalt roads, a replacement for aggregate in concrete and a material for making shopping trolleys and baskets. The partners will be required to provide data on the material they receive and the material they create with it, and site inspections and audits will be conducted to ensure that expectations are being met, the taskforce said. Trial results will be reported to the environment department and the ACCC. “This is an important first step to test the emerging soft plastic recycling industry and ensure the model works on a small scale so we can work towards an industry-wide solution to soft plastics recycling in Australia,” a taskforce spokesperson said. “We know people were let down by REDcycle, and we’re managing this process carefully to ensure that the program which eventually replaces it is one the community can trust. “The biggest challenge still remains – there are simply not enough soft plastic recyclers up and running to allow us to expand collections to supermarkets across the country just yet.” | ['australia-news/business-australia', 'environment/environment', 'environment/plastic', 'business/woolworths-australia', 'business/coles', 'business/aldi', 'campaign/email/afternoon-update', 'type/article', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'tone/news', 'profile/daisy-dumas', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/plastic | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2024-02-08T14:00:13Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
commentisfree/2010/jul/27/history-distrust-overcome | Pakistan and Afghanistan: interdependent, distrustful neighbours | Michael Semple | No one should be surprised that 180 of the leaked intelligence reports sound alarm bells about the involvement of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service in Afghan insurgency. Plenty such alarm bells have been sounded in the public domain already. But it is important that policymakers draw the right conclusions. During the period covered by these reports, I sat in on one of the first national workshops of the Afghan reconciliation commission, headed by former president, Sebghatullah Mojadedi. Provincial police chiefs and governors and other officials split into small groups to discuss the causes of ongoing conflict. Encouraged by Mojadedi himself, every single working group fed back the conclusion that Pakistani ISI interference was the prime cause of conflict in the country. This was more an article of faith than an empirical finding. Assembled Afghan officialdom simply worked on the basis that Pakistan had supported the Taliban, was opposed to the post-Taliban set-up and must be behind any resistance to this new setup. In an even more blatant fashion, while visiting one of the Afghan provinces bordering Pakistan I asked the provincial intelligence chief to explain his role. He described his main function as being to inculcate in the people of the province a belief that Pakistan could never tolerate a stable Afghanistan, so that they would always be on their guard to check ISI interference. The point is that Afghanistan and Pakistan are countries with a complex history of interdependence. Although most of Afghanistan's trade comes through Pakistan and Pakistan was the main place of refuge for Afghan refugees during the 1980s, the most popular way of establishing credentials as an Afghan nationalist has long been to denounce Pakistan as the enemy. Among the 180 reports of ISI interference, most are drawn from informants or briefings from the Afghan intelligence service, who describe in lurid detail direct involvement of ISI officers in trying to wreak havoc inside Afghanistan. The bulk of them can now be dismissed as unreliable either with the benefit of hindsight (they warn of impending disasters which never happened) or on the basis of implausibility (conveying details the source could not have known) and because they fit in with a pattern of disinformation (stories constructed from recurrent themes and familiar characters). One set of informants most likely passed on these reports because they found there was a market for them. More politically motivated informants, such as those Afghan officials who supplied briefings which US personnel later wrote up as intelligence, probably wanted to strengthen US backing by turning the US against Pakistan. If you try and understand the Pakistan-Afghanistan links in the Afghan insurgency without the benefit of the largely concocted reports supplied to the US military, you still conclude that the insurgency depends upon a safe haven in Pakistan. All the commander networks which actually do the fighting in Afghanistan maintain a presence in Pakistan and use this to support their war effort. This is hardly surprising given the length of border, the amount of civilian movement, the tribal relationships and the intricate commercial links, even before you factor in a pre-2001 history of covert actions across the border. The relationship is a lot more complex than described in the crude stories of ISI goons. Most Taliban I have talked to regarding the role of Pakistan make three broad points. They say that they require some degree of official blessing to be able to operate from Pakistan. They say that this blessing is never assured – it is an uncomfortable relationship. And they say that any solution to the insurgency must have Pakistan's blessing. The conclusion I draw from the intelligence controversy is that anyone charged with negotiating an end to the conflict in Afghanistan will have to guard that process from exactly the kind of disinformation we have all been studying. They will need to keep Pakistan, the insurgents and the various parts of today's Afghan establishment on board, and overcome a high degree of distrust which years of disinformation have contributed to. | ['commentisfree/commentisfree', 'world/middleeast', 'world/afghanistan', 'world/pakistan', 'world/taliban', 'us-news/us-military', 'us-news/us-foreign-policy', 'world/world', 'tone/comment', 'world/the-war-logs', 'world/war-logs', 'world/inter-services-intelligence-isi', 'type/article', 'profile/michael-semple'] | world/the-war-logs | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2010-07-27T10:15:37Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
australia-news/2018/nov/02/the-victorian-election-roundup-how-logging-policy-could-fell-labor | The Victorian election roundup: how logging policy could fell Labor | Voters in the key Labor-Green marginal seats of Richmond and Prahran do not support logging of state forests and only one in four think the Andrews government is doing enough to protect forests, a poll has found. The ReachTell poll, produced for the Goongerah Environment Centre, canvassed about 500 voters per seat in Richmond, where Labor only has a 1.14% margin against the Greens; Prahran, held by the Greens on just 0.37%; and Bentleigh, held by Labor on an 0.78% margin against the Liberal party. It put the primary vote for the Greens at 32.1% in Richmond and 21.4% in Prahran, against an ALP primary vote of 40.6 and 34.2% respectively. The Liberal primary vote in Prahran, a three-corner contest, was 31.9%. The Greens have been campaigning heavily against native forest logging as one of its strongest points of difference with Labor. Only 4% of respondents in Prahran said they thought state forests should be a place for logging and wood chipping, compared to 7.3% in Richmond. The key promises The Coalition has pledged to introduce mandatory eight-metre, or two-storey, height controls on developments in the bayside suburbs from Mentone to Franskston, which also happen to be among the most marginal Labor seats in the state. Liberal election flyers helpfully gathered up by Seven News reporter Brendan Donohoe warn that Melbourne suburbs are being “crowded with strangers” because of increased density. The Coalition has also promised to spend $1bn over the next 10 years on improving regional roads. Labor announced it would use some of the $266m Latrobe Valley support package to back a new electric vehicle manufacturing plant that would create 500 jobs. It has also announced a suite of health funding initiatives, including more specialist appointments in regional hospitals and funding for additional paramedics. Guy stays Scott-free There are, reportedly, two major sources of tension in the Victorian Liberal party this week. The first is the apparent avoidance by the opposition leader, Matthew Guy, of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, who campaigned in Victoria on Monday. Guy told reporters he wasn’t avoiding Morrison and would be seen standing beside him before the end of the campaign. He also dismissed a Newspoll that showed the Liberal vote was slipping and saw Labor widening its lead to 54-46. Two down, one out Greens upper house candidate Joanna Nilson has pulled out of the race after the Herald Sun unearthed posts she made in a secret Facebook group called “Bad Girls Club”, which included tips on shoplifting. Nilson has since deactivated her Facebook account and issues a statement saying she regretted the comments, which were made “in jest online, and are in no way reflective of my beliefs or actions”. Labor meanwhile lost two candidates in two days, with Melton candidate Justin Mammarella and Bayswater candidate Peter Lockwood both standing down in what Fairfax Media described as “controversial circumstances.” Both have said they were stepping down for personal and family reasons. The new Labor candidate for Bayswater is Jackson Taylor and the new Melton candidate is Stephen McGhie. Nominations close next week. | ['australia-news/victorian-election-2018', 'australia-news/victoria', 'environment/logging-and-land-clearing', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/labor-party', 'australia-news/australian-politics', 'environment/forests', 'australia-news/liberal-party', 'australia-news/australian-greens', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/calla-wahlquist', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/forests | BIODIVERSITY | 2018-11-01T17:00:07Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
lifeandstyle/2020/nov/19/i-could-make-a-little-difference-in-the-world-but-it-seems-like-a-lot-of-work-is-it-worth-trying | 'I could make a little difference in the world but it seems like a lot of work. Is it worth trying?' | I’ve found a perfect way to make a little difference in the world but I’m not sure I can be bothered. We got letters telling us our apartment building would be part of a new recycling program. It sounded really cool but then it never happened. After a lot of emails, I found out our building’s strata would have to vote on it. I’m a renter, I don’t know my neighbours very well and I’ve never been to a strata meeting in my life. I feel like maybe if I started door knocking or something I could maybe make a difference. But it seems like a lot of work and I don’t know the first thing about it. It might take up a lot of time and energy and be fruitless or worse, cause drama with my neighbours or estate agent. I care about the cause but the politics stuff seems daunting. I’ve always been pretty happy not being involved. How do I decide if it’s worth trying? Eleanor says: I think about a variation on this question all the time: would our lives go better if we did the right thing more often than not? Do good people have a better time than the rest of us? I understand the space you’re in very well. You get all fired up about a cause or an injustice and feel optimistic and galvanised for the first time in a while. And then you discover that this effort, like all others, will involve meetings that could have been emails and joining forces with people you don’t fully understand or like. The effort depletes and if you’re sensitive to comparison, you start to see yourself in an unfavourable light next to all the people who’ve been recycling all their lives – you become convinced that they’re also seeing you in that light. Quite quickly it seems as though putting any thought at all into these sorts of problems makes your life go worse. The selfish urge is to return to the version of your life that felt better, the one where you thought less. The other problem that’s genuinely troubling is that it’s very easy to get suckered into spending your finite world-changing energy on these kinds of individual, small-scale things, that are a vanishingly small contribution to the world’s problems. It’s no good you and I turning off the taps while we brush our teeth if we don’t also do something about the 100 corporations responsible for 71% of global emissions. But it’s worth trying. It’s all worth trying. The point with these sorts of efforts isn’t to measure them by what success they’re likely to have. The point is to practise a way of engaging with the world that takes us out of ourselves and into something bigger. It’s to have a moment of connection to each other, and to a priority that isn’t solely ours, in a world set up to keep us isolated and disconnected. There will be moments when you feel discouraged and out of your depth and foolish. That’s all part of it; the point is simply to be doing rather than not doing. That doesn’t mean doing well 100% of the time, nor doing it without fear or trepidation. It’s just a matter of doing something. You might find that shifting your focus to the process itself – rather than its results, or how well you’re doing – helps restore some of your absorption and thrill. Think of it like yoga or woodwork, where the process can be a destination. You can watch yourself become someone who does something rather than nothing; you can notice how that feels, how it changes over time, without adjudicating it. Any time I feel a sense of resignation or defeatism I ask myself, “Who benefits from me feeling this way?” If the answer is “people and forces that I really disagree with”, you’ll be surprised how effectively it can change your mood. Don’t let yourself be unwittingly enlisted as a foot soldier for systems you disagree with. *********************************** Ask us a question Do you have a conflict, crossroads or dilemma you need help with? Eleanor Gordon-Smith will help you think through life’s puzzles, big and small. If you would like advice from Eleanor, send your dilemma to [email protected] (please don’t send attachments). Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. | ['lifeandstyle/series/leading-questions', 'lifeandstyle/series/self-and-wellbeing', 'lifeandstyle/australian-lifestyle', 'lifeandstyle/homes', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/ethical-living', 'environment/environment', 'environment/waste', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'australia-news/housing', 'world/activism', 'world/philosophy', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/eleanor-gordon-smith', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-lifestyle'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2020-11-18T16:30:49Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
world/2023/jun/21/how-dangerous-the-ocean-can-be-canadian-city-rallies-for-titan-rescue | ‘How dangerous the ocean can be’: Canadian city rallies for Titan rescue | Shortly after sunrise on Friday, a hulking icebreaker departed the protected waters of St John’s, Newfoundland, and ventured into the unpredictable vastness of the north Atlantic Ocean. Onboard the ship was an array of scientific monitoring equipment, cameras and a sleek, 22ft-long submersible named Titan. The passengers onboard the chartered Polar Prince vessel were excited at the prospect of reaching the final resting site of the RMS Titanic, even if it meant cramming themselves inside the hollow body of Titan. But the small carbon fibre craft disappeared on Sunday, nearly two hours after it dipped below the surface, en route to the remains of the sunken ocean liner. The disappearance has prompted a frantic international search, with Canada and the US marshalling all available resources in a race against time. The Titanic never reached its destination of New York City. But along the east coast of Canada, the legacy of the doomed ship still looms large more than a century after it sank. More than 120 victims of the disaster are buried in the Fairview cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia – at the time the city nearest to the sinking with rail and shipping connections. The city’s Museum of the Atlantic showcases artifacts from the ship, including a deck chair, personal effects and wreckage, as well as the white canvas mortuary bags used for the victims. St John’s, Canada’s easternmost city in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, remains the closest city to the liner’s final resting place and has become the launching site for expeditions traveling to the wreck site, nearly 400 miles (650km) away – and more than 12,000ft (3,800m) below the surface of the ocean. On Tuesday, the city, known for its brightly coloured “biscuit box” houses, was blanketed in a thick haze of fog and rain as residents made sense of the news. “To hear that there are people in distress possibly and not knowing where they are and if we’re ever going to find them … it’s heart-wrenching,” said Anne Simmons, operations manager at a local tour company. “The whole world is watching because it’s the Titanic. Everybody knows about it.” On April 1912, the Titanic received warnings of drifting ice in the area of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Hours later, a remote Marconi wireless station on the south-east tip of the island received the Titanic’s first distress call. St John’s is also home to Memorial University and the world-class Marine Institute research centre, which recently announced a partnership with OceanGate, the American company behind the missing submersible. Friday’s mission was the company’s fifth Titanic expedition. Onboard were Hamish Harding, 58, a British explorer and pilot who has previously taken a suborbital spaceflight; British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and Dawood’s son Suleman, 19. “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023. A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow,” Harding posted on Instagram on Saturday. “We started steaming from St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do.” Paul Henri Nargeolet, a deep diver, submersible pilot, former French navy commander and a leading authority on the Titanic wreck site, is also believed to have been onboard alongside Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate. On Tuesday, St John’s harbour was blanketed in a thick cover of fog. Out on the ocean, challenging conditions have hampered the search efforts. “I don’t believe anybody should just be able to build their own submarine and head off into the world without the skills or talents to do so because then you know tragedies like this do happen,” said resident Ashton Quinn. “I feel very bad for the families of the people involved.” As the search intensifies, there is collective hope the vessel can be located. The province is no stranger to disaster – it took in 75 airplanes when airspace was closed during 9/11, an act of generosity celebrated in the hit Broadway musical Come From Away – nor is it a stranger to loss. Generations of fishers have left the rocky shores of the region, only to be lost at sea. “I kind of feel for the people’s family and for what they may be going through right now. It’s really really a tough circumstance,” said resident Bruce Keating. “The natural instinct for everybody here … is just to rally around and provide whatever support they can, [knowing] how dangerous the ocean can be.” • This article was amended on 21 June 2023 to correct the spelling of Suleman Dawood’s name; and to clarify that 75 airplanes landed in Newfoundland on 9/11, not 38 as an earlier version had it. | ['environment/series/seascape-the-state-of-our-oceans', 'world/canada', 'world/titanic-sub-incident', 'uk/the-titanic', 'world/americas', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/leyland-cecco', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-foreign'] | environment/series/seascape-the-state-of-our-oceans | BIODIVERSITY | 2023-06-21T09:05:00Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
technology/2008/jul/22/yahootakeover.yahoo | Internet: Peace breaks out in Yahoo leadership row | The struggling internet company Yahoo has struck a pact with its billionaire critic Carl Icahn by giving the hedge fund activist a minority presence on its board to avoid a potentially tempestuous showdown at a shareholder meeting next month. Facing crumbling support among Yahoo investors, Icahn yesterday abandoned his efforts to overthrow the leadership of the embattled Silicon Valley company and force its sale to Microsoft. Instead, the 72-year-old Icahn & Co hedge fund manager is settling for an offer of three seats on Yahoo's board. One director will stand down and the board will expand from nine to 11 members. Wall Street analysts greeted it as a qualified victory for Yahoo's founder, Jerry Yang, who has pressed hard to maintain its independence and who waged an energetic campaign to discredit Icahn. Roy Bostock, Yahoo chairman, was "gratified" to reach a deal. "We look forward to working productively with Carl and new members of the board on continuing to improve the company's performance and enhancing stockholder value." The pact ends a vitriolic two months in which Yahoo and Icahn have traded stinging accusations. The showdown arose after Yahoo turned down a $47.5bn (£23.8bn) takeover offer from Microsoft, angering investors who have grown impatient with its failure to keep up with Google as a leader in lucrative online searches. Lobbying shareholders for support last week, Yahoo characterised Icahn as a short-term corporate agitator who was merely interested in a quick profit. It dug up remarks from the billionaire last year in which he described technology companies as "hard to understand" and admitted he had rarely focused on them. In turn, Icahn compared Yahoo directors to Alice in Wonderland. He won over high-profile backers, including the oil tycoon T Boone Pickens and star fund manager John Paulson, renowned for making billions by predicting the sub-prime mortgage crisis. As Yahoo's annual meeting on August 1 approached, the prospect of a hastily compiled slate of Icahn's friends running the company appears to have been too much for institutional shareholders. The balance tipped on Friday when Yahoo's second-biggest investor, the fund management firm Legg Mason, decided to support the existing leadership. Scott Kessler, an equities analyst at Standard & Poor's in New York, said the upshot amounted to a defeat for Icahn. "The writing's not only on the wall but on an agreement for all to see," he said. In spite of the deal, Kessler said, there would be pressure for a shake-up in recognition of discontent among a sizeable minority of investors. "Jerry Yang's been back in place for a year and a lot of people think he is not the right person for the job. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some management changes to come," said Kessler. Icahn will take one of the board seats handed to his group under the deal, which is subject to approval by investors. In a statement, the New York-based financier said a sale of the firm or of its core search business should be given "full consideration". But striking a conciliatory note, he continued: "I believe this is a good outcome and that we will have a strong working relationship going forward." By mid-session on the Nasdaq exchange, Yahoo shares had slid 63 cents to $21.82. Microsoft was willing to pay $33 a share and Yahoo has shunned several attempts by it to reignite talks, opting for a controversial tie-up with Google, in which the two pool resources for some online searches and share the ad revenue. This infuriated the advertising industry, which sees it as anti-competitive. Backstory The billionaire hedge fund manager who has been niggling away at Yahoo doesn't own a personal computer. Carl Icahn, 72, whose fortune is estimated at $14bn (£7bn), made his name by seizing control of the airline TWA in 1985. His targets have included Texaco, Time Warner, Nabisco, Motorola and Blockbuster. Brought up in Queens, New York, he runs his Icahn & Co hedge fund from offices overlooking Central Park. He is ruthless, once remarking that there was no place for sentiment in business: "If you want a friend, get a dog." | ['technology/yahoo-takeover', 'technology/yahoo', 'technology/internet', 'technology/technology', 'media/media', 'business/mergers-and-acquisitions', 'business/business', 'type/article', 'profile/andrewclark', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3'] | technology/yahoo-takeover | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE | 2008-07-21T23:01:00Z | true | UNRELATED_TO_CLIMATE |
environment/article/2024/jun/20/uk-among-rich-countries-not-paying-fair-share-to-restore-nature-report-aoe | UK among rich countries not paying fair share to restore nature – report | The UK, Canada, New Zealand, Italy and Spain are among the rich countries contributing less than half their fair share of nature finance to poor countries, a new report has found. Developed nations have agreed to collectively contribute a minimum of $20bn annually for nature restoration in low and middle-income countries by 2025. This money is in addition to the $100bn agreed for climate finance. So far, Norway and Sweden are the only two countries providing a fair amount, while the “overwhelming majority of developed countries do not provide even half of their fair share,” according to the report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank. The UK was providing about 24% of its commitment, while countries in southern and eastern Europe came at the bottom of the ranking, with Greece providing only about 10% of what it should, and Poland 5%. Globally, nations are falling $11.6bn (£9.1bn) short on these financial commitments and must “dramatically scale up”, according to researchers who looked at each country’s progress based on 2021 data, which was the most recent to be released by governments. Some additional pledges have been made in the past three years but they do not “substantially move the needle”, experts say. Rich countries are most responsible for the loss of nature globally over the past 60 years. The payments to poorer countries – which typically have the greatest reserves of biodiversity left and smaller ecological footprints – are designed to compensate for this overconsumption of the planet’s natural resources. The report is the first analysis of how individual donor countries are delivering on their financial commitments made in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at Cop15, where nature targets for the next decade were agreed upon. Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, and for decades nations have failed to meet UN targets to stop this decline. “We hope this report serves as a wake-up call for high-income countries to fulfil their obligations,” said Laetitia Pettinotti, the lead author and a research fellow at ODI. “Failing to reach the target undermines the UN convention on biological diversity and damages trust. But far more importantly, this failure represents a genuine threat to our shared prosperity, livelihoods, economies and health,” she said. The 2022 Cop15 treaty had no details about much each country would contribute to the funding pot. This report calculates that by accounting for countries’ historical impact on nature, their gross national income and population to calculate how much each of the 28 donor countries needs to contribute to the $20bn. Sara Pantuliano, the chief executive of ODI, said: “We are far from reaching this goal and must dramatically scale up our contributions within the next year.” Collective agreements often shield wealthy nations from individual responsibility, she said: “Apportioning responsibility is a necessary step to enhance accountability, transparency and awareness.” Germany and France come close to providing the necessary contributions, as does Australia. Some countries have made financial contributions since 2021, according to an accompanying report by Campaign for Nature, which commissioned the research: 29 countries pledged to give the equivalent of $480m annually to the Global Environment Facility, while Canada, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, Spain and the UK committed to giving $32m annually to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. The report states: “While these are positive developments, it is not expected that these recent contributions substantially move the needle for those countries that are marked as below 50% of their fair share.” The US is not party to the GBF and therefore did not commit itself to contributing to the target. If it were included it would be one of the poorest performers, the report concluded. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said: “The world is already spending $1.8tn each year on subsidising industries that are destroying nature. The pledge of $20bn a year is equivalent to only 1.1%, or about four days, of those subsidies. Wealthy governments have no excuse but to act with greater urgency.” World leaders will come together at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia to review these financial commitments. Dr Nicola Ranger, the director of the Resilient Planet Finance Lab at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said the overall findings were robust. She believes if the report fully accounted for the UK’s outsized impacts through global supply chains and finance for damaging sectors linked to pollution and deforestation, the country’s overall share of responsibility would be larger. “We’ve been turning the world’s nature capital into economic and financial capital for decades,” she said. She added: “To meet our international commitments, the UK would need to accelerate our funding by a factor of four. It is right that the UK takes responsibility and plays its part in protecting biodiversity and meeting these global goals. But it is also squarely in our interests to do so … our economy is highly exposed to nature-related risks, of which half come from environmental damage overseas.” Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features | ['environment/series/the-age-of-extinction', 'environment/biodiversity', 'environment/environment', 'environment/cop15', 'environment/conservation', 'environment/wildlife', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/phoebe-weston', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-age-of-extinction'] | environment/biodiversity | BIODIVERSITY | 2024-06-20T05:00:27Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
news/2014/dec/14/weatherwatch-snowfall-britain-altitude | Weatherwatch: If it’s snow you want – head for the heights | Over the last few days many of us have had our first taste of winter and the white stuff has arrived. But for some the chances of using a toboggan are slim. The UK gets an average of 33 days of snow fall or sleet every year, and 16.5 days of snow lying on the ground, but these statistics hide a huge variation across the country. For those living on the Isles of Scilly owning a snow shovel is sheer folly: on average snow or sleet falls on just two days of the year, and covers the ground for one day approximately every eight years. At the other end of the extreme the Cairngorms in northeast Scotland is the snowiest place in the UK, with 76 days of snow falling every year on average and snow patches still common in August. The main influence on snow is altitude, with approximately one extra day of snow cover for every 15m higher you climb. So central London, which is just above sea level, can expect snowy pavements for just three days per year, while Hampstead Heath, at 134m altitude, is good sledging territory for around thirteen days of the year. For many the big question now is whether it will be a white Christmas this year. If a single snowflake is all you are looking for then your chances are quite high: snowflakes have been recorded on thirty-eight of the last fifty-two years. But Dickensian white Christmas scenes are much rarer: only four of the last fifty-one Christmases have had a widespread covering of snow. | ['news/series/weatherwatch', 'world/snow', 'tone/features', 'type/article', 'profile/kate-ravilious', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2'] | news/series/weatherwatch | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2014-12-14T21:30:00Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
commentisfree/2018/mar/04/plastic-fashion-houses-catwalk-shows | Plastic is so over. So why do some fashion houses still treat it as cool? | Lucy Siegle | At the risk of sounding naively optimistic, there have been days when it’s felt like the enthusiasm to push back on avoidable plastic waste is unquenchable. There are moments when it seems possible that we can ward off the day when there are more bits of plastic in the sea than fish – currently slated for 2050 unless we change our ways. Certainly there’s unprecedented interest in uncoupling our lives from plastic. Since the start of the year, I’ve been reporting non-stop on our changing attitudes. I’ve been shuttling between plastic-free aisles and zero-waste shops, assessing supermarket shelves and going through people’s bins. I’m now such a fixture at the nation’s MRFs (materials recovery facility, pronounced “murf”), I’ve been issued with a business card featuring a picture of a rat. This – it was cheerily explained to me – I should hand to my GP in the case of unexplained illness. Obviously we are aeons away from a solution (or even a strategy) in the UK to correct the fact that we’ve been sending off 70% of our plastic waste for mysterious reprocessing overseas for years. Now that China has shut its doors to most of this waste, our plastic addiction and its effects, particularly on the marine environment, have been thrown into sharp relief. Everywhere we’re looking for possible solutions. This week we’ve had an event at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre on packaging initiatives (OK, probably one for the enthusiast) and the opening of a zero-packaging aisle in a Dutch supermarket. Still much to discuss; but overall we are in the middle of an epic awakening. But not at Calvin Klein or Chanel. To view their recent catwalk shows, you’d think plastic was the great new hope. These shows were awash with see-through capes and souped-up plastic macs accessorised with cloche hats, all made from the thickest, shiniest plastic that positively oozed fossil fuel. Meanwhile, the cult fashion label Off-White has collaborated with Jimmy Choo on shoes and boots with a crackling plastic outer shell. This is described as a “fresh aesthetic” by the brands in question. But given that almost all the plastic we’ve ever created still exists in unedifying forms, the idea of creating more for use in new applications strikes me as more dumb than fresh. Moreover, those brands who have taken to it seem to have a particular thing for PVC, one of the hardest to handle petroleum-based synthetics of all time. It also suggests a tin ear to trends within the luxury fashion industry and its supply chain. I was tipped off to the plastic fantastic trend by a fashion “influencer” who was aghast that Chanel would show so little responsibility by manufacturing a desire for a demonstrably unsustainable material. Compare and contrast with Gucci, where the brand, partly driven by a younger fanbase known to prize sustainable values, has invested heavily in sustainability and ethics. Possibly I’ve missed the point (always a possibility for those of us who hang around more in MRFs than frows). It has been suggested that plastic fantastic collections are a comment on the forthcoming apocalypse, a sort of reworking of the Hazmat suit. If that is the case, it seems perverse to make that point by using a material that can only contribute to the warned ecological Armageddon. • Lucy Siegle is a journalist who writes about ethical living | ['commentisfree/commentisfree', 'environment/plastic', 'tone/comment', 'fashion/fashion', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/oceans', 'fashion/chanel', 'environment/ethical-living', 'environment/waste', 'fashion/gucci', 'fashion/jimmy-choo', 'lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle', 'environment/environment', 'tone/features', 'type/article', 'profile/lucysiegle', 'publication/theobserver', 'theobserver/news', 'theobserver/news/comment', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/observer-comment'] | environment/plastic | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2018-03-04T00:01:32Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
science/2023/oct/24/brazil-amazon-climate-change-rock-carvings-petroglyphs | Ancient rock carvings revealed by receding Amazon waters amid drought | Human faces and other figures etched in stone up to 2,000 years ago have been revealed on Amazon riverbanks as a historic drought in the Brazilian region has brought water levels to unprecedented lows. The petroglyphs, which include animals and other natural forms, have been revealed on the shores of the Rio Negro, at an archeological site known as the Ponto das Lajes, or Place of Slabs. Researchers estimate the markings to be between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. The carvings had previously been sighted during a severe drought in 2010, when the Rio Negro’s water levels dropped to 13.63 metres, then an all-time low. They re-emerged this month, with more markings appearing as the waters receded further. Amid an unusually dry season which scientists attribute to the El Niño weather pattern and warming in the North Atlantic linked to the climate crisis, the Rio Negro has dropped below 13 metres for the first time in its recorded history, with a depth of 12.89 metres recorded on Monday. As well as anthropomorphic faces and depictions of water, some rocks display grooves that suggest the site was also used to produce stone tools. Carlos Augusto da Silva of the Federal University of Amazonas identified 25 groups of carvings on a single rock which he believes was used as a whetstone to sharpen various instruments. “This was an area for the preparation of tools,” the archaeologist told the local news site Amazônia Real. Fragments of ceramics thought to be thousands of years old have also reportedly been found at the site, which was home to large Indigenous villages in pre-Columbian times. Despite being designated an archaeological site, the Ponto das Lajes petroglyphs have not been studied, and researchers are estimating their age based on similar rock carvings in other parts of central Amazonia. “These locations, today archeological sites with black soil, large quantities of ceramics fragments, and rock carvings, tell the region’s ancient Indigenous history and must be treated with respect by all of us who live in Manaus today,” the archaeologist Filippo Stampanoni Bassi told Amazônia Real. • This article was amended on 26 October 2023 to clarify that earlier this week, the Rio Negro dropped below 13 metres for the first time in its recorded history, not for the first time ever, as an earlier version said. | ['science/archaeology', 'science/science', 'world/brazil', 'world/world', 'world/americas', 'environment/amazon-rainforest', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/constance-malleret', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-foreign'] | environment/amazon-rainforest | BIODIVERSITY | 2023-10-24T21:29:48Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
business/2017/feb/08/uk-government-green-energy-subsidies-energy-bills | Lack of transparency over green energy subsidies 'shambolic', say MPs | MPs have criticised ministers for their “shambolic” failure to regularly spell out the impact of government green policies on household energy bills. The Commons public accounts committee said the government had missed its commitment to publishing annual reports on how consumer bills were affected by subsidies to support solar and wind power. The Department of Energy and Climate Change made the pledge in July 2014, but has not given an update on the implications for householders since November that year. Renewable energy subsidies such as the feed-in tariff for solar power are ultimately paid by consumers through government levies on energy bills. “Either they’re trying to hide something or they’re incompetent. It’s not on, because it affects both the [energy industry] supply chain and consumers,” said Labour MP Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair. “If it was taxes, we’d all be looking at it much more closely – but it’s still money out of people’s pockets and it’s not acceptable. It’s just shambolic really.” In a report published on Tuesday, the committee said officials should disclose the costs and savings from the green policies so consumers could decide if they were good value for money. An overspend on renewable energy subsidies – due to so much green energy being deployed – is forecast to push the average household bill £17 higher than it would have been in 2020. The committee said the overspend reflected “a culture of optimism bias” among officials at the department, now part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. A BEIS spokewoman said: “The government is committed to helping ordinary working people keep more of what they earn and supporting households with the cost of living.” Sam Hall, researcher at the thinktank Bright Blue, welcomed the call for greater transparency. “One area where more clarity is needed is the cost to consumers of excluding the cheapest renewable energy sources, onshore wind and solar, from competing for fixed-price contracts,” he said. Hillier said that even if the government acquiesced to the committee’s demand of publishing a report in April, it would only be a partial one. For example, it would not include the £378m consumers will pay via their bills for backup power subsidies next winter. The committee dismissed a BEIS report last November, which it said did not break down the impacts of policies to a household level, and did not show the savings that policies could bring, such as reducing consumers’ exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices. The report came as the energy regulator announced details of an energy price cap from 1 April for about 4m households on prepayment meters. Such coin- and token-operated meters are mostly used in rental properties and for customers who have fallen behind on their payments. Ofgem estimated the cap would save people on prepayment tariffs up to £80 a year on energy, bringing their dual fuel bill down to around £1,067. That would leave those households paying essentially the same as direct debit customers on the worst, most expensive deals, known as standard variable tariffs. Consumer groups and switching sites welcomed the protections for some of the poorest energy users. “For years prepayment meter customers have been paying more for the same gas and electricity as other customers, whilst also receiving a second-class service from their supplier,” said Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice. There are only about 30 prepayment tariffs, compared with about 90 for direct debit customers. Martin Lewis of personal finance site MoneySavingExpert.com said the cap was a “welcome sticking plaster” but suggested people on prepayment meters should be able to access all tariffs if they paid a small surcharge. “All the cheap deals offered are for direct debit, and they can be £300-£400 a year cheaper than prepay prices for someone on typical use,” he said. “That is a national disgrace, because most of the poorest people in our society have prepayment meters – the most potent poverty premium possible.” The price cap, one of the recommendations by the competition regulator after its investigation into the energy market, will stay in place until the end of 2020 when all the UK’s homes are expected to have been switched to smart meters. The limit comes just days after npower raised its prices by £109 for a typical customer, and amid reports that British Gas was preparing a similar rise. A spokesman for the company, the UK’s biggest energy supplier, said it did not speculate on future pricing. Ofgem recently said it saw no excuse for the big six energy suppliers to raise prices. | ['business/energy-industry', 'business/business', 'environment/energy', 'environment/environment', 'politics/politics', 'environment/solarpower', 'environment/windpower', 'type/article', 'uk/uk', 'tone/news', 'profile/adam-vaughan', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/windpower | ENERGY | 2017-02-08T07:01:00Z | true | ENERGY |
australia-news/2018/jul/31/mining-expansion-under-sydney-water-catchment-approved-without-full-data | Mining expansion under Sydney water catchment approved without full data | The New South Wales government ignored warnings from its own independent panel that there was insufficient data to approve the expansion of the Dendrobium coalmine near Wollongong, The government is under fire for approving extra longwalls at the mine without waiting for the panel to complete a much broader study of the impact of mining under Sydney’s water catchment. Mining had been conditionally approved in 2008, but further regulatory hurdles were placed on the company because of concerns from WaterNSW. These included establishing a panel of experts to advise the government on specific mining proposals as well as the broader environmental impacts of continued mining near Sydney’s dams. It now appears the government ignored the advice from the panel on Dendrobium. The advice was released on Monday, following a report in the Sydney Morning Herald saying the new longwalls had been given the green light. The April advice of just two pages, says: “Longwall 14 should not proceed without confirmation that the expanded monitoring network is being implemented. ... Longwall 15 should not proceed without resubmission of plans reflecting the expanded monitoring network.” The panel was particularly concerned that the company had not yet submitted the data and monitoring on longwall 13, which would give a clearer picture on subsidence and its impacts. The government made the decision before the release of another two reports – one on the Dendrobrium mine due on Tuesday and another due later this year, which will explore all the environmental risks and the cumulative impact of multiple mines undercutting the Sydney catchment. A spokesman for the NSW minister for planning, Anthony Roberts, said neither had yet been received. The mining spokesman for NSW Greens, Jeremy Buckingham, said the government had ignored the “neutral or beneficial test for development in the catchment” because of its addiction to coal. “We should not be putting a handful of potential jobs ahead of the safety and security of the drinking water for millions of people in Sydney,” he said. Longwall mining involves digging huge parallel corridors underground along the seam of coal, using a giant excavator that holds up the ceiling above as it works. As the coal is excavated and the machine moves along the face of the seam, the ceiling of the corridor collapses behind, causing subsidence and potentially fracturing of rock layers that can lead to surface water escaping into the mine below. WaterNSW, which manages Sydney’s dams, sounded the alarm about mining under the catchments and close to Sydney’s dams earlier this year, after a study of the Dendrobium mine revealed greater impacts from cracking than forecast by the company. “From WaterNSW’s viewpoint, the single most important consequence ... is that subsidence induced by the Dendrobium mine longwalls is likely to be resulting in significant diversion of surface water which would otherwise contribute to greater Sydney’s water supply,” Water NSW warned earlier this year in a submission. It also warned of environmental degradation and damage to creeks and swamps. A spokesman for WaterNSW said the agency was somewhat reassured by the additional conditions imposed by the planning department in May, when it approved longwall 16, including improved monitoring of long-term groundwater impacts and more comprehensive reporting of outcomes that approach or exceed predicted thresholds. “WaterNSW acknowledges recent reforms implemented by the NSW government in line with actions advocated by WaterNSW. This includes a review of subsidence and groundwater analysis used to predict rock-fracturing resulting from longwall mining, and the establishment earlier this year of an independent expert panel to review mining activity proposals.” “WaterNSW is working with the panel to better understand the extent and nature of impacts which have already occurred at Dendrobium mine, and the risks posed by Longwall 16 and future panels. A spokesman for South 32, which owns the Dendrobium mine, said the company took its environmental responsibilities seriously. “We can confirm that world-leading experts on the independent expert panel on mining in Sydney’s drinking water catchment provided their independent examination and assessment of the Dendrobium longwall 16 management plan prior to its endorsement.” The panel actually said: “Based on the information available to it, the panel does not have any evidence at this stage relating to loss of water that constitutes an exceedance of of the development consent.” “Based on the information currently available to it, the panel is not in a position to reach a confident conclusion [on future compliance].” South 32 has applied for planning approval to extend its Dendrobium mine to the north and west to extract at least 40m tonnes of coal and extend mine operations until 2048. Also in the planning process is a major expansion of Xtrata’s Tahmoor Colliery. Gujarat NRE’s expansion of the Russell Vale mine, near Wollongong, is still on the books. Endeavour Mining has now applied for an exploration licence near Douglas Park, near Campbelltown.e. | ['australia-news/new-south-wales-politics', 'environment/water', 'environment/mining', 'business/mining', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'australia-news/new-south-wales', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/anne-davies', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/mining | ENERGY | 2018-07-30T18:00:36Z | true | ENERGY |
environment/2018/dec/17/climate-change-activists-vow-step-up-protests-around-world | Climate change activists vow to step up protests around world | Civil society groups have pledged growing international protests to drive rapid action on global warming after the UN climate summit in Poland. The summit agreed rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, which aims to keep global warming as close to 1.5C (2.7F) as possible, but it made little progress in increasing governments’ commitments to cut emissions. The world remains on track for 3C of warming, which scientists says will bring catastrophic extreme weather. Many NGOs said national leaders at the summit had failed to address the urgency of climate change, which is already making heatwaves and storms more frequent and intense, harming millions of people. May Boeve, the executive director of the 350.org climate change campaign group, said: “Hope now rests on the shoulders of the many people who are rising to take action: the inspiring children who started an unprecedented wave of strikes in schools to support a fossil-free future; the 1,000-plus institutions that committed to pull their money out of coal, oil, and gas, and the many communities worldwide who keep resisting fossil fuel development.” The school strikes began in August as a solo protest by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg in Sweden. Addressing the summit in Poland, she said: “If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.” Members of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement said there was a rising tide of protest. “We pay tribute to activists, students, civil society and the leaders of vulnerable countries who are rising up all over the world demanding more,” said Farhana Yamin, from XR UK. “We need now to work together to build an emergency coalition focused squarely on tackling climate devastation.” XR branches have been set up in 35 countries, organisers said. US protesters aim to organise a day of action on 26 January 2019, and international activists are planning a global week of action from 15 April 2019. XR protests took place in more than a dozen towns across the UK over the weekend, from chalk-spraying a government building in Bristol to holding a “die-in” demonstration in Cambridge and handing out trees in Glasgow. Patti Lynn, the executive director of the Corporate Accountability campaign group, said: “We will continue to build our movements at home and we will escalate global campaigns to hold big polluters accountable for their role in the climate crisis. The movement to demand climate justice has never been more united, organised or determined. Our day is coming and we will win.” Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “People are fed up, outraged and are taking action to defend their homes and children and pushing their leaders to act These people are the hope of our generation and governments must finally stand with them and give us all reasons for hope.” In the US, Michael Brune, the head of the Sierra Club environmental campaign group, said: “The American people are joined by the rest of the world in signalling that they will not tolerate any more of Trump’s shameful blustering and inaction, and they have taken up the mantle of climate action while Trump abdicates any semblance of global leadership.” He said more than 100 US cities had committed to 100% clean energy, covering 15% of the US population. Stephan Singer, a chief adviser at Climate Action Network, an umbrella group for 1,300 NGOs in more than 120 countries, pointed to the wide range of people taking action and demanding more, including youth and faith groups, indigenous peoples, health authorities, farmers, trade unions, city authorities and some financial institutions. “All these actions and many more have to magnify and multiply in the next years,” he said. | ['environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/activism', 'environment/environment', 'world/protest', 'environment/conservation', 'world/unitednations', 'environment/greenpeace', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'environment/school-climate-strikes', 'profile/damiancarrington', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/topstories', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/school-climate-strikes | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2018-12-17T14:30:38Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
world/2011/apr/29/obama-tornado-aid-alabama-visit | Barack Obama pledges swift federal aid to tornado-hit US states | Barack Obama travelled to tornado-ravaged Alabama on Friday as the authorities struggled to deal with the aftermath of a disaster that killed more than 300 people and wiped an entire neighbourhood off the map. "I've never seen devastation likes this," Obama said as he toured destroyed neighbourhoods in the university town of Tuscaloosa with his wife, Michelle. Two-thirds of those killed in Wednesday's historic storms were in Alabama and Tuscaloosa was among the worst-hit towns. The president announced immediate federal government aid to the state and on Friday he repeated the pledge, telling locals: "We're going to make sure you're not forgotten." As he has during other moments of crisis, Obama tried to use his visit as a healing moment. "What's amazing is when something like this happens folks forget all their petty differences," he said, after meeting the state's governor, Robert Bentley. "When we're confronted by the awesome power of nature and reminded that all we have is each other." News reports described a muted response to the presidential visit from locals more focused on trying to reassemble their lives. But state and local officials warned they faced shortages in everything, including bodybags. Officials in some areas said they were still struggling to describe the enormity of the destruction. "I would classify it as a nightmare," Tuscaloosa's mayor, Walter Maddox, said in a radio interview. At least 38 people were killed in the town, and 900 more were injured. Thousands have been left homeless, and television reports described people wandering the devastated streets pushing their few salvaged belongings in shopping carts. A million homes and businesses in Alabama were without power on Friday. Long lines began forming outside petrol stations, which were forced to operate on generator power. In some towns, the only grocery store had been destroyed. Tuscaloosa lost its entire emergency department. Schools and other buildings were destroyed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it had received 200 reports of tornadoes. The historic storm system – the deadliest since 1974 – swept across six southern states. Some of the tornadoes were a mile-wide and stayed on the ground longer than typical systems, the national weather service reported. At least one, which touched down in Smithville, Mississippi, had winds of 205mph, the weather service said. Alabama was singled out for the worst punishment but deaths and heavy destruction were also reported in Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia. In Tuscaloosa, residents described homes lifted clear of their foundations by tornados, which stretched more than a mile wide, and travelled at speeds of up to 200mph. "This is massive," Maddox said. Officials in several small towns warned resources were being stretched dangerously thin. In Hackleburg, a town of 1,500 that recorded 27 dead in the storms, officials told the Associated Press there were shortages of bodybags, portable showers, tents, and flashlights. There were also concerns for security. The authorities in Tuscaloosa have declared a night curfew, and there was a report of looting from a demolished jeans manufacturing plant. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP | ['world/natural-disasters', 'us-news/alabama', 'us-news/barack-obama', 'us-news/us-news', 'world/world', 'tone/news', 'world/tornadoes', 'type/article', 'profile/suzannegoldenberg', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international'] | world/tornadoes | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2011-04-29T16:43:29Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
business/2021/feb/26/kerbside-scheme-collect-electronic-waste-uk | Kerbside scheme to cut electronic waste could be launched in UK | The UK government is considering nationwide kerbside collection of used electrical appliances and gadgets to help improve the recycling of electronic waste. Local councils in some areas already collect broken washing machines and toasters in schemes funded by waste collection fees that all retailers selling electrical goods must pay. The government is consulting on the best way to implement such schemes across the country and how to fund them. In a response to parliament’s environmental audit committee report on e-waste, the government said it was also considering new measures that would increase the obligation for online marketplaces and retailers, such as Amazon, to take back unwanted or broken electrical goods. The government also said it was considering forcing companies to improve labelling on products to make clear how easy it was to repair an item and whether it contained recyclable parts. Under rules in place since 2014, those selling more than 5 tonnes of electronic and electrical equipment each year must finance the costs of collection, treatment, recovery and recycling of those materials when they become waste. Retailers can do this by paying fees to local authorities to process electrical goods brought back to council-run waste recycling centres, or organising the collection of old items from homes when delivering new goods. Since January, retailers with stores have also had to enable customers to bring unwanted goods back to their outlets. Online sellers and marketplaces are not obligated to take back items themselves, which is more convenient for some shoppers and potentially more costly. Currently they only have to pay fees to help fund council waste centres. MPs say this system is not working as there is too much uncollected or incorrectly collected electronic waste. Philip Dunne MP, the chair of the environmental audit committee, said: “Levelling the playing field for online giants and physical retailers in the take-back of e-waste is important if we are to cut down on the amount of e-waste disposed of incorrectly. “We need to make urgent improvements to the reuse and recycling of such products, and I am pleased that the government has recognised the role online retailers and marketplaces should play in taking increased responsibility for the e-waste streams they help generate.” A spokesman for Amazon said it had “supported” the recycling of 10,000 tonnes of electronic waste in the UK over the past decade and that it would continue working with the government to tackle the problem “Amazon is committed to minimising waste and helping our customers to reuse, repair and recycle their products. We provide easy ways for customers to recycle electronics through pre-paid postal return and home collection services on our Amazon Recycling website,” the spokesman said. | ['business/business', 'environment/waste', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/environment', 'society/localgovernment', 'politics/politics', 'uk/uk', 'society/society', 'environment/ethical-living', 'money/consumer-affairs', 'money/consumer-rights-money', 'money/money', 'business/retail', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/sarahbutler', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/waste | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2021-02-26T07:01:09Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
news/2013/jan/27/weatherwatch-stratosphere-warm-winter | Weatherwatch: Sudden stratospheric warming has reset usual winter pattern | It is shocking to be plunged into freezing winter weather but it can all be blamed on the stratosphere, some 30km high. Around New Year something strange happened in the stratosphere over the Arctic where the usually frigid air suddenly warmed up by around 50C. That warming sent the usual freezing stratospheric air streaming down over Europe which then gradually trickled down into our weather pattern in the lower atmosphere, with biting easterly winds sweeping across from northern Europe. One spectacle to watch out for in these episodes is a glow in the evening sky just after sunset. We saw this in December 2010 when the stratosphere turned so cold over Britain it created fabulous tangerine, pink and yellow afterglows blazing in the twilight sky. These colours came from unusual clouds in the stratosphere that form when temperatures drop to about –80C. That cold stratosphere also led to a great freeze and big snowfalls, when the country was reduced to chaos with Heathrow Airport and Eurostar services shut down. This current sudden stratospheric warming is a major event and left the lower stratosphere badly disturbed as a swathe of cold weather settled across Europe for several weeks. For the UK at least, this cold weather is now over, thanks to a depression of noteworthy proportions which developed in the Atlantic this past weekend. This has reset the usual winter stratospheric pattern which is far more likely to bring mild and very wet weather for the next fortnight. | ['news/series/weatherwatch', 'uk/weather', 'uk/uk', 'tone/features', 'world/snow', 'type/article', 'profile/jeremy-plester', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2'] | news/series/weatherwatch | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2013-01-27T22:30:02Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2019/may/12/melbourne-zoo-hatches-plan-to-save-southern-corroboree-frog | Melbourne zoo hatches plan to save southern corroboree frog | A few days before the United Nations released a report warning that 1 million species, including 40% of all amphibians, could become extinct within decades, staff from Melbourne zoo were nursing chilled containers of frogs’ eggs to be taken to remote areas of sphagnum bog in the Mt Kosciuszko national park. The containers held 1,673 fertilised eggs of the critically endangered southern corroboree frog, a species near the top of Australia’s extinction watchlist. The eggs were packed into sphagnum moss for transport. Half were placed in one of 22 special disease-free areas that had been cleared of chytrid fungus, which is responsible for wiping out much of the wild population. The other half were placed in protected tubs in the wild, out of which the tadpoles will be able to climb once the eggs metamorphose. That will not happen until spring. The tadpoles, which come out of their eggs as soon as they are released into the water, will spend the cold winter months nestled into the moss beneath a layer of snow and ice. It has been a record breeding season for the zoo, and the largest release of eggs since the program began in 2001. In collaboration with Sydney’s Taronga zoo and Healesville sanctuary about 3,000 southern corroboree frogs have been released this year. Melbourne zoo has a breeding population of about 50 male frogs and 70 females, the oldest of which was captured as a tadpole in Kosciusko in 1999. For the past several weeks of the breeding season, carers at the zoo have been gathering the clear eggs and chilling them to slow down their development so they can be released together. “We use the sophisticated equipment of a wine chiller to keep them at a temperature of 8C,” the amphibian supervisor Damian Goodall says. “It’s a lot easier to transport them as eggs than as tadpoles.” Tadpoles, he says, need to be “carried in bags, like fish” which is not conducive to either bumpy 4WD travel or being dropped via helicopter. The release into the water mimics the natural process of water rising in the bogs at the end of summer, Goodall says, so the eggs often begin to hatch as soon as they are released. Conservationists who monitor the site in spring say they have heard the calls of male corroboree frogs in areas where the tadpoles had been released, and which had been bare of wild frogs for years. “If we weren’t doing any of these releases, pretty much this species would be extinct, because a lot of the more crowded sites where there used to be huge communities now don’t have any males calling,” Goodall says. He says the wild population of the southern corroboree frog, the closely related northern corroboree frog and the Baw Baw frog plummeted following bushfires about 15 years ago that burned out their habitat. All three critically endangered species were then crowded out of their traditional habitat by the smooth toadlet, an abundant native species that carries the deadly chytrid fungus. The three frog species are on a list of 21 priority native species for Zoos Victoria, 16 of which are subject to a captive breeding program. All but four are Victorian natives; the others are priority national species such as the Tasmanian devil and Lord Howe Island phasmid. Dr Marissa Parrott, a reproductive biologist, says Zoos Victoria has made a commitment that no Victorian terrestrial vertebrates will go extinct on its watch. “The UN report is terrifying but it’s not going to change what we are doing because we are already there,” Parrott says. “We already know how bad the situation is and we are already fighting extinction for these species that are on the brink.” | ['environment/conservation', 'environment/biodiversity', 'environment/wildlife', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'australia-news/melbourne', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'type/article', 'profile/calla-wahlquist', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/biodiversity | BIODIVERSITY | 2019-05-12T01:19:12Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
society/2005/jan/12/internationalaidanddevelopment.indianoceantsunamidecember20041 | Charity helps 6,000 British tsunami survivors | British Red Cross volunteers have helped nearly 6,000 Britons returning from the Indian Ocean earthquake disaster zone, it emerged today. The aid agency has provided support and first aid to survivors of the Asian tsunami and bereaved relatives at NHS field hospitals set up at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. Virginia Beardshaw, the director of UK Services at the aid agency, said volunteers at the two London airports had dealt with 5,651 Britons returning from the disaster zone. Ms Beardshaw estimated that the total number of travellers helped by the agency, which also has volunteers at Manchester and Stansted airports, was now in excess of 6,000. She said: "As of today we have met 209 flights from the region at Gatwick and Heathrow and helped 5,651 travellers. Of those, 277 have had first aid and 1,253 required clothing, medication and help returning home." Paul Cloves, 20, one of the Red Cross volunteers at Gatwick, said he had seen survivors with wounds ranging from infected cuts to broken legs. Mr Cloves said: "The worst injury I saw was a man who had been cut by glass from head to foot. He'd been thrown through a patio door by a wave and had an astronomical number of stitches all over his body. He still had glass embedded in his arms, legs and chest." The volunteers also provided survivors with clothes, information on where to get ongoing and specialist help, as well as offering them emotional support. Mr Cloves, said: "Some people were quite broken up. Most of them were just grateful we were there, to be honest. "I talked to a guy who was with his mum, dad and girlfriend when the wave hit. His parents and girlfriend were swept out to sea and he's not seen them since. He stayed for over a week, searching for them and helping the rescue operation. It wasn't until he was going through some rubble and pulled out a man who had been severely injured by a piece of glass that he decided to come home. "There is nothing you can say to people who have been through such a traumatic experience. You just sit and listen and let them talk." A helpline set up by the British Red Cross is also taking 30 calls a day from survivors and bereaved relatives. · The Red Cross tsunami support line number is 08450547474 | ['global-development/global-development', 'world/tsunami2004', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'profile/davidbatty'] | world/tsunami2004 | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2005-01-12T17:13:32Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2018/oct/19/benny-the-beluga-whale-forces-firework-display-postponement | Benny the beluga whale forces firework display postponement | It has attracted plenty of spectators during its stay. But Benny the lost beluga whale, who took up residence in the Thames last month, may end up leaving the crowds disappointed after it was announced that a fireworks display would have to be postponed to protect him. About 15,000 people were expected to gather for the annual bonfire night celebrations in Gravesend, Kent, on 2 November to see a display set off from a barge on the river. However, council officials said on Friday that they had been advised to put back the event until the whale, who was first sighted in the Thames more than three weeks ago, left the area. “While we understand this is also disappointing to the thousands of residents and visitors who enjoy our fantastic fireworks display every year, we have to ensure our special visitor is kept safe and well,” said David Turner, the leader of Gravesham borough council. “Keeping Benny safe has to be our priority while he visits us here in Gravesend, thousands of miles from his usual Arctic habitat. I’m sure everyone, while disappointed by this postponement of the fireworks, will understand.” Council officials said the Port of London had advised them that the display should not take place on or over the river and that moving it to another site around the town of Gravesend, which is on the river, would still be likely to disturb the whale. While beluga whales have been spotted around Britain and Ireland before, this sighting is the most southerly. “We’ve never had the opportunity, thankfully, to observe such a situation before, so we really don’t know how long it could remain,” the head of science and conservation at the charity Orca, Lucy Babey, has said. The council said it had been advised that disturbing the whale would be in breach of the Wildlife and Countryside Act and asked residents to “think twice about holding private firework displays” near the river in Gravesend. | ['environment/whales', 'environment/cetaceans', 'environment/environment', 'environment/marine-life', 'environment/wildlife', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/kevin-rawlinson', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/cetaceans | BIODIVERSITY | 2018-10-19T21:18:05Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
australia-news/2022/jul/06/cargo-ship-safely-returned-to-port-in-sydney-after-three-days-stranded-in-wild-seas | Cargo ship safely returned to port in Sydney after three days stranded in wild seas | A ship that had been stranded off the New South Wales coast in wild weather, sparking fears of an environmental catastrophe, has been safely returned to port. The MV Portland Bay, a 170-metre cargo ship registered in Hong Kong, became stranded after experiencing engine failure off Garie beach in the Royal national park, south of Sydney, on Monday morning. Wild seas made it impossible to fix the damage, and threatened to push the ship ashore. But it had been able to anchor safely off Cronulla beach from Monday evening despite breaking free from towing cables attached to tugs which had been attempting to move it further from shore. The ship docked safely in Port Botany about 2pm, supported by a pilot boat and four tugs, the Port Authority of NSW confirmed in a statement. “Port Authority has confirmed all final safety and technical checks [are] complete, and the vessel has been brought into safety at Port Botany. “Protecting the people involved and the marine environment has been the priority through this multiagency response.” The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) had issued a legal direction to the master of a ship and the salvage team to move it to a berth in Botany Bay before more bad weather forecast for Thursday hit. Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning In a statement, AMSA said the tugs helped prevent a maritime disaster. The 21 crew who were onboard throughout the saga were safe. “As always, we want to ensure that the crew are safe and the vessel can be made sea worthy while the next east coast low passes through the region,” Mark Morrow, the AMSA executive director of response, said. “We will continue to work with the NSW Port Authority to ensure this happens as soon as possible. “Those smaller tugs have done amazing work over the past 24-36 hours ensuring the stricken vessel did not drift onto some of Sydney’s most pristine coastline.” AMSA issued a further statement after the ship had docked, saying it would send two inspectors and one specialist lead investigator on board to “assess the vessel’s mechanical safety and compliance”. “While the vessel is berthed at Botany Bay it will be required to undertake all necessary repairs before leaving port. The berthing of the MV Portland Bay follows the legal direction issued by AMSA to the vessel.” | ['australia-news/sydney', 'australia-news/new-south-wales', 'environment/flooding', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/australia-weather', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/nino-bucci', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/flooding | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2022-07-06T06:32:18Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
travel/2022/jul/08/carry-on-wild-camping-and-stay-alert-through-the-night | Carry on wild camping – and stay alert through the night | Letters | Sam Wollaston’s article on camping in Dartmoor (‘Doctors should prescribe it!’: the joys of wild camping – and why it is under threat in England, 5 July) reminded me of our July 1974 honeymoon, partly spent hiking and wild camping on Dartmoor. The walking was invigorating, the views spectacular – and there was excitement. As a local (I grew up in Tavistock on the western edge of the moor), I knew to check at the local police station for any planned military exercises. So I asked, and was told that there were none on the dates in question. We were then alarmed to wake in our tent on the second night to the sound of helicopters overhead, skies lit with flares and the sound of not-too-distant gunfire. Were we on the set of a war film? Were the police misinformed? We never found out, but needless to say, we survived unscathed and lived to tell the tale. The wild camping was blissful, with only the occasional Dartmoor pony to surprise our skinny-dipping in streams. Heather made a fragrant mattress beneath our groundsheet. Enjoy the unique beauty of Dartmoor as you wild camp, but stay alert at night. Alison Clarke Worcester • Your article immediately took me back to the 1960s, when “wild camping” was the norm. We Girl Guides set up camp in a field at the bottom of Easby Moor in North Yorkshire. It was close to a railway line, and the train driver would play Come to the Cookhouse Door on the horn. It rained continuously and a couple of bell tents slithered down the field to the fence, their occupants inside. My most abiding memory was being woken up in the dark in great pain. My hair was being pulled, and a monster was trying to eat my head. A curious cow, munching grass, got more than she bargained for. Val Mainwood Wivenhoe, Essex • I was surprised to read in Sam Wollaston’s article that wild camping is not permitted in Wales at all, and only on Dartmoor in England. In my younger days, after years of doing just that, I applied for training as a mountain leader. My initial training and final assessment, each of two weeks, were undertaken in the Lake District and Snowdonia respectively. The British Mountaineering Council syllabus required a three-day mountain walk with two camps at high level before a certificate was awarded. How can potential leaders be assessed now? Jim Grindle Formby, Merseyside • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication. | ['travel/camping', 'lifeandstyle/walking', 'travel/walkingholidays', 'environment/wildlife', 'lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle', 'type/article', 'tone/letters', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/journal', 'theguardian/journal/letters', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-letters-and-leader-writers'] | environment/wildlife | BIODIVERSITY | 2022-07-08T17:20:01Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
lifeandstyle/2009/jun/27/finders-keepers-furniture-recycling | Finders keepers: The art of 'upcycling' | Suzi Gutteridge It was while she was experimenting with paper cups that Suzie Gutteridge noticed the effect of a plant's shadow on the side. "I began cutting around the image until the cup unravelled, and realised I had created exactly the effect I'd been looking for," the designer says. The finished pieces - wall-mounted sculptures of creeping tendrils - are things of unusual beauty. Her latest piece is a decorative, delicate light box (itself made from discarded wood). "These cups have been discarded en masse," Gutteridge says. "I am giving them a new life and meaning." • New Life wall/floor light, £93, 01722 335416 (suziegutteridge.com). Zoe Murphy The seaside town of Margate, with its faded, down-at-heel charm, is the inspiration for Zoe Murphy's work. Her tables and chests are made by stripping back and re-veneering 50s pieces and screenprinting the tops of them with delicate drawings of the Margate townscape or windbreaks on the beach. Her footstools have bases made from wood offcuts and are upholstered with scraps of fabric and covered with strips of old wedding dresses she finds on eBay. "Each element has almost no value on its own, but put together they become something useful." Functionality is important to Murphy - she can't justify the price tag unless the furniture is both beautiful and useful. "It comes from being a Margate girl." • Margate chest, £900, 07780 574314 (zoemurphy.com). Alexena Cayless Alexena Cayless doesn't just adopt abandoned chairs, tables and cabinets; she reinvents them. "The first thing I do is photograph the piece in situ on the street," she says. "Then I take it home and coat it in resin and fine fabric, and finally incorporate the photograph into the piece as a reminder of its history." The finished works are still functional, but have a sculptural quality that belies their humble origins. Her Fly Tip collection currently consists of a table, chair and cabinet, but Cayless is planning more: "I want to do a set of six dining chairs, but it's getting harder to find the furniture - people aren't leaving quite so much stuff around on the streets these days." • Fly Tip Cabinet, £450, 07747 777576 (alexenacayless.co.uk). L-Living It was a desire to save the wood taken from an abandoned industrial building that led to the founding of Bangkok-based design company L-Living. "The old wood was so beautiful and so full of history, it would have been criminal to let it go," says designer Chalong Ngamkird. They started out making simple picture frames - made with wood found in old homes, schools and barns - which were sold in Bangkok's street markets. These were followed by decorative cupboards, cabinets and home accessories, many printed with intensely coloured floral motifs and all designed to enhance the beauty of the original wood. L-Living now sells through Selfridges: wood once fit for the scrapheap is now inhabiting a chichi home near you. • Floral print art cabinet, £149, from Selfridges, 0800 123400 (selfridges.co.uk). • Zoe Murphy and Suzie Gutteridge are showing at New Designers One Year On, Business Design Centre, London N1, 16-19 July; 08448 480140 (newdesigners.com). | ['lifeandstyle/homes', 'environment/recycling', 'lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle', 'type/article', 'environment/environment', 'tone/features', 'profile/charlotteabrahams', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/weekend', 'theguardian/weekend/features'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2009-06-26T23:01:00Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
environment/2018/nov/12/eu-states-call-for-tough-action-on-deforestation-to-meet-2020-un-goal-amsterdam-declaration | EU states call for tough action on deforestation to meet 2020 UN goal | The UK, France and Germany have called on the European commission to launch tough new action to halt deforestation by the end of the year. A long-delayed EU action plan should be brought forward “as soon as possible”, says a letter to the commission sent by the Amsterdam Declaration group of countries, which also includes Italy, the Netherlands and Norway. To help meet a UN goal of halting deforestation by 2020, the EU should show “a leadership role, mobilising its political and market leverage, and promoting broader international dialogue and cooperation”, the letter says. Actions should be taken to align “economic opportunities” with “responsible management of global supply chains”, says the letter signed by Denmark’s environment minister, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen. Up to 80% of global forest loss is driven by agribusiness, even though research shows that better forest stewardship and natural climate solutions could provide more than a third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030. The EU states moved on the issue as concerns continue to mount over Brazil’s recent election of a far-right supporter of Brazil’s former military dictatorship. Jair Bolsonaro has pledged to designate land rights activists as “terrorists” and pave a highway through the Amazon, potentially spreading deforestation to an area of rainforest larger than Germany. His election campaign was backed by powerful agribusiness interests in Brazil but some industry leaders on Sunday called on him to show restraint. Géraldine Kutas, the head of international affairs at the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association, said the Amazon’s importance to the world – and Brazil – had to be respected. “We are perfectly fine with our current environmental regulations,” she said. “We are really committed to them and we will not support any change that would relax the rules.” Strong EU laws could reduce the ecological footprint of commodities such as soy, palm oil and beef, which drive deforestation in the Amazon, according to Greenpeace. Sébastien Risso, the group’s EU forestry director, said: “Ignoring the problem and delaying action will only move us deeper into catastrophic climate change and a major global species extinction.” EU officials noted that Bolsonaro, who takes office in January, has backtracked on some campaign pledges and said it was too soon to consider tougher due diligence checks for deforestation, despite the president-elect’s statements and initiatives aimed at relaxing environmental regulation in the Amazon. “We had them on our radar during the campaign speeches,” one EU source said. “We will assess whatever decisions are taken, once they’re taken.” | ['environment/deforestation', 'environment/environment', 'environment/forests', 'environment/conservation', 'world/european-commission', 'world/eu', 'world/europe-news', 'world/brazil', 'world/jair-bolsonaro', 'world/americas', 'world/world', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/arthurneslen', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/deforestation | BIODIVERSITY | 2018-11-12T10:49:12Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
business/2023/sep/07/offshore-wind-expecting-to-lose-out-in-auction-for-uk-financial-help | Offshore wind expecting to lose out in auction for UK financial help | Britain’s offshore wind industry is expecting to lose out on financial help for projects toward meeting the UK’s climate goals, because soaring inflation means developers are not able to compete for crucial government support. Ministers are expected to announce the results of the latest auction for financial support contracts this Friday, but energy industry insiders suggest it could be a damp squib in a potential blow to the UK’s climate goals. Sources fear that most offshore wind developers were forced to sit out of the bidding, which took place last month, because the government “ignored” warnings about surging costs in the sector. One said it was possible that only one or two projects had submitted bids, which would jeopardise the government’s target of reaching 50GW of offshore wind by 2030. It may be that no offshore wind developers took part, the source added, which would scupper plans to provide cheap power to consumers and to increase the UK’s energy security. Renewable-energy developers were required to submit sealed bids in the auction in the first half of August, before officials ranked the most competitive proposals over the second half of the month. Only the projects offering the lowest cost to energy-bill payers secure contracts. The government set a maximum price of £44 per MW hour for the auction, a similar level to the previous round. But offshore wind developers are facing soaring construction costs, owing to rising inflation and higher borrowing costs. Earlier this summer such inflationary pressures caused work on a large-scale offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast to stop. The Swedish energy firm Vattenfall said it would cease working on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm, designed to power the equivalent of 1.5m British homes, because its costs had increased by more than 40%, so it was no longer profitable. At the time, industry experts told ministers that unless the government’s financing approach was changed to take into account the steep increase in costs, developers would be forced to scrap or delay their plans. Ana Musat, RenewableUK’s executive director, said the “perfectly avoidable” financial dilemma facing the British wind industry risked removing the UK’s global lead in offshore wind at a time of increased competition from the US, Europe and parts of Asia. “We can’t have a ‘boom and bust’ cycle and expect to maintain investor confidence in the UK and grow our supply chains,” Musat said. “It’s such a shame – we’ve been world-leading in this. But we do need to evolve the tools which brought us here.” The industry group has consistently called on the government to adapt the auction by taking into account the higher costs in the economy. Sam Richards, the founder and campaign director for Britain Remade, which promotes economic growth in the UK, said the offshore wind industry had reduced costs at each consecutive auction over the past decade, to the point that offshore windfarms were nine times cheaper than new gas plants. However, the impact of inflation meant the auction was now “at a level that made it impossible for investors to meet their costs”. “Offshore wind has been a huge success for Britain – we have led the world in deploying offshore turbines, with the four biggest offshore windfarms in the world all off the UK coast,” he said. “Sadly, ministers have ignored warnings from industry that would mean, for a short time, the cost of offshore wind rising – while still likely being significantly cheaper than new gas plants.” Ashutosh Padelkar, a senior research associate at Aurora Energy Research, said the “unprecedented cost pressures” could cause developers to enter only part of their offshore windfarms into the auction while relying on bilateral deals with energy-intensive companies to guarantee the rest of their income from the project. This “hybrid financing” model is relatively unusual in the UK energy market, but the approach could help developers to fix a guaranteed price for their electricity, “increasing the likelihood that a project will reach financial close and, eventually, come online”, Padelkar said. He added that solar developers could “dominate this auction” because their projects were cheaper and less exposed to the increasing costs in the offshore wind supply chain. The blow to offshore wind is expected to be revealed days after the government left onshore wind developers disappointed by changes to the planning laws, which have acted as a de facto ban on onshore wind in England. While the tweaks will make it easier for onshore wind developers to apply for planning permission, they will still be at disadvantage compared with any other infrastructure project. Campaigners say developers may still be wary of investing in windfarms in England because they face greater hurdles compared with other infrastructure applications, or with windfarms in other countries. | ['business/energy-industry', 'environment/windpower', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'business/business', 'campaign/email/business-today', 'environment/energy', 'environment/environment', 'uk/uk', 'politics/politics', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/jillian-ambrose', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/windpower | ENERGY | 2023-09-07T05:00:18Z | true | ENERGY |
music/musicblog/2015/sep/10/love-song-to-the-earth-best-tracks-about-the-environment-open-thread | Earth songs: what are the best tracks about the environment? | Unlike such familiar pop-song tropes as love, hate and dead pets, songwriters face a particularly tricky challenge when it comes to penning an earnest song about the environment. After all, what rhymes with fracking? Morally lacking? Financial backing? Twacking? Perhaps that’s why the rather unlikely writing team of Toby Gad, John Shanks, Natasha Bedingfield and Sean Paul have enlisted some big name artists to provide vocals: Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow and Fergie all appear on Love Song to the Earth, a song written as part of a global campaign to raise awareness prior to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that takes place in Paris this December. At the risk of doing a disservice to the lyrical skill of Sean Paul and Natasha Bedingfield – it takes a special kind of songwriter to celebrate nature or deliberate on climate change without sounding like they’re at a sixth-form poetry slam. Those who have succeeded include Kate Bush (An Endless Sky of Honey), Tim Buckley (Earth Is Broken), Marvin Gaye (Mercy Mercy Me [The Ecology]), The Beatles (Mother Nature’s Son), Nat King Cole (Nature Boy), The Doors (When the Music’s Over) and, depending on how you feel about the lyric “What about elephants? / Have we lost their trust?”, Michael Jackson. So what nature-based song might be better used to save the planet? Let us know in the comments section. | ['music/music', 'culture/culture', 'environment/environment', 'music/popandrock', 'music/michaeljackson', 'music/musicblog', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/cop-21-un-climate-change-conference-paris', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/harriet-gibsone'] | environment/cop-21-un-climate-change-conference-paris | CLIMATE_POLICY | 2015-09-10T15:00:37Z | true | CLIMATE_POLICY |
world/2013/may/21/oklahoma-tornado-moore-search-survivors | Oklahoma rescuers comb wreckage for survivors in wake of savage tornado | Rescue workers were scaling back their search for survivors amid the devastation wrought by one of the most powerful tornadoes in modern US history on Tuesday. Hundreds of US National Guard, police and medical staff spent the day combing through piles of rubble in the streets of Moore, south of Oklahoma City. By the end of the afternoon officials said they were "98% sure" no-one else would be found alive. The tornado lasted just under an hour on Monday, when it tore through farmland, crossed a river and headed into Moore. It destroyed hundreds of homes and shops, wiped out two schools and a hospital and left at least 237 people injured, including many children. "We've experienced one of the most horrific disasters our state has ever faced," said the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin. Authorities in Moore put the number of deaths at 24, including nine children, revising an earlier figure of 51. Officials blamed the higher figure on double-counting in the confusion. The storm was the deadliest US tornado since 161 people were killed in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago on Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon, fire chief Gary Bird said he was "98% sure" there were no survivors or bodies left under the rubble. He said that every damaged home had been searched at least once and that he was hopeful the work could be completed by nightfall. Speaking from the White House, President Obama called the disaster "one of the most destructive tornadoes in history" and promised the full help of the government in both rescue and rebuilding. "There are empty spaces where there used to be living rooms and bedrooms and classrooms. And in time we're going to need to refill those spaces with love and laughter and community," he said. The tornado touched down at 2.56pm on Monday, just 16 minutes after the first warning went out, and traveled for 17 miles. The National Weather Service said the tornado was 1.3 miles wide and upgraded it from an EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale to the highest level, EF-5, based the findings of a damage assessment team on the ground. It loosely followed the path of a previous storm that hit the same region in May 1999 with winds of up to 300 mph. Stories of survival began to emerge on Tuesday. At the hospital in Moore, some doctors had jumped in a freezer to survive the storm. At the Agapeland daycare facility, 15 children survived after being herded into two bathrooms. Even though the roof was ripped off one of the rooms as the tornado passed, staff kept the youngsters calm by getting them to sing: "You are my sunshine." All survived. Outside the regional hospital in nearby Norman, Oklahoma, Ninia Lay, 48, told Reuters she huddled in a closet as the tornado hit. Her house was flattened and Lay was buried in the rubble for two hours until her husband and rescuers dug her out. "I thank God for my cell phone. I called me husband for help," she said. But there were also scenes of tragedy. At local churches, families anxiously awaited news of loved ones as authorities scrambled to work out who was dead, missing or alive. At one church, St Andrews United Methodist Church, the names of surviving children were called out via megaphone in front of a crowd of terrified parents. Much of the attention was focused on the ruins of Plaza Towers elementary school, flattened by the storm. Workers formed lines to remove rubble from the twisted remains of a structure that had had its roof torn off and its walls pushed down by the winds. A few children were found alive in the rubble overnight and were passed down a line of rescue workers to waiting ambulances. But as the search wore on, it became less likely that anyone would be pulled out alive. Seven children died here. Residents of Moore spent much of the day picking through the rubble and looking for relatives. Gage Perkins, 21, walked for miles through the ruined streets, searching for his grandparents. "It's like seeing the end of the world," he said. Rescue workers continued to go from house to house and car to car almost 24 hours after the catastrophe, marking everything they checked with spray paint. Four Red Cross shelter locations and at least eight other church and university facilities available to tornado victims in Moore and surrounding towns. South of Moore, near the town of Norman, the Journey megachurch acted as a hub for relief efforts, with everything from blankets and pillows to paper towels and pet food rranged in neat, labeled piles in the foyer. Used clothes were already plentiful and donations were being declined. Bryan Waldenville, pastor for the Norman campus, said more than 1,000 volunteers were assisting in the relief efforts. "We received roughly 100 victims, including children. Last night, 50 to 60 of those spent the night with us." | ['us-news/oklahoma-city-tornado', 'us-news/us-news', 'us-news/oklahoma', 'world/tornadoes', 'world/natural-disasters', 'world/world', 'tone/news', 'type/article', 'profile/paulharris', 'profile/tom-dart', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/international'] | us-news/oklahoma-city-tornado | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2013-05-21T22:38:00Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
science/2018/sep/21/nasa-new-satellite-ice-melt-ice-sat-2-launches | Nasa launches satellite to precisely track how Earth's ice is melting | The world will soon have a much clearer picture of how quickly humans are melting Earth’s ice and expanding the seas, with data collected by a sophisticated satellite launched by Nasa. Every 91 days, the $1bn, decade-in-the-making creation will orbit over more than 1,000 paths. The satellite, about the size of a Smart car, will point six lasers at ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica. It will then calculate how long the beams take to bounce back. Nasa will be able to more accurately measure the heights of ice sheets and the thickness of remaining sea ice. “With sea ice, we’ve been able to measure the extent (or area) really well since about 1980 … but what we haven’t been able to measure is the thickness,” said Tom Neumann, Nasa’s deputy project scientist for the mission. “Thickness is a key piece of the puzzle because thinner sea ice is broken up more easily by storms. It melts faster. So it gives you some insight into why the area is changing the way it is.” Melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica has increased the global sea level more than a millimeter per year, a third of the overall increase, according to Nasa. Sea-level rise is getting faster, and seas could be several feet higher by the end of the century. The IceSat-2, launched Saturday, replaces an original satellite that has been out of commission since 2009. Between 2003 and 2009, the measured sea ice lost 40% of its thickness, Neumann said. Since then, Nasa has used a plane to take more rudimentary measurements of ice melt for about a month per year in the Arctic and Antarctic. That covered less ground but allowed Nasa to monitor the fastest changing parts of the ice sheets and sea ice. Neumann said it’s possible the satellite will find ice loss beyond what Nasa has measured so far. Gaps in data, including in east Antarctica, could show ice shrinking or growing. The new satellite will provide more complete coverage and measure to within a centimeter. “In the time it takes someone to blink, sort of half a second, IceSat-2 is going to collect 5,000 measurements in each of its six beams, and it’s going to do that every hour, every day … it’s a tremendous amount of data,” Neumann said. While Donald Trump doubts the scientific consensus around man-made climate change and his administration is rescinding standards to stall warming, Neumann said multiple federal agencies want to see the satellite data when it starts coming back in October. The US Geological Survey is interested in the elevation data, and the navy would like to look at how changes will affect shipping channels, he said. With ice melt, new routes are expected to open through the Arctic, significantly reducing shipping times. Nasa has an entire fleet of satellites observing Earth, including for signs of climate change. Trump this year proposed cutting the budget that funds many of the others. Private companies and public interest groups and even the state of California have announced their own plans for climate-related satellites. A collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund and Harvard University is expected to launch in 2021 and as will pinpoint methane leaks from oil and gas operations. Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for EDF, said researchers realized they could build the satellite faster and cheaper than the government. EDF research suggests oil and gas companies in the US leak 60% more methane than environmental regulators estimate. Methane traps far more heat than the more common carbon dioxide. Because it is short-lived, cutting emissions would have a rapid impact on temperatures, Hamburg said. The European Space Agency has a satellite that measures greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t specify in detail where leaks are happening. GHGSat, a private company, expects to launch a second greenhouse-gas-monitoring satellite soon. | ['science/nasa', 'environment/environment', 'environment/sea-level', 'environment/oceans', 'science/science', 'science/space', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/poles', 'us-news/us-news', 'world/arctic', 'world/antarctica', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/emily-holden', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-news'] | environment/sea-level | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2018-09-22T05:00:13Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2016/sep/12/just-10-new-community-energy-schemes-registered-after-tories-cut-subsidies | Just 10 new community energy schemes registered after Tories cut subsidies | The number of new community-owned renewable energy projects of the sort backed by Jeremy Corbyn this week has plummeted after a series of government decisions have made many proposals for wind and solar farms no longer viable. Only 10 new community energy organisations have been registered so far this year, compared to 76 last year, according to new data from the trade body Co-operatives UK. The fall has been directly attributed to policy reforms in the last two years as government ministers noticeably cooled on renewable energy before and after the 2015 general election, with subsidy rates slashed and tax relief ended. These changes stand in stark contrast to the promises made this summer by Theresa May of a windfall for local residents from fracking operations, which could amount to thousands of pounds per household. Corbyn, the Labour leader, has put reversing Conservative energy policy at the heart of his environmental agenda revealed this week. Billed as policies for “the 60 million not the Big Six” energy suppliers, the manifesto included pledges to ban fracking, generate 65% of electricity from renewables by 2030, and to restore the department of energy and climate change. He pointedly emphasised the role of community energy schemes, which he said could help supply the 300,000 new jobs he envisages in green technology. Community energy schemes, many of which are run or partly run by local volunteers and which invite residents to invest, can also benefit schools and other public buildings by reducing their energy bills. But they have suffered from the axing of key tax relief, increasingly complex regulations and the slashing of the feed-in tariffs meant to support the growth of solar panels. MPs told ministers on Friday that key targets for renewable energy by 2020 were unlikely to be met. The revelations come even as polls continue to show strong support for community renewable energy generation, with two-thirds of people surveyed by Co-operative Energy saying they would support community-owned renewable projects such as wind turbines and solar farms, and only 8% objecting. Nearly six in 10 people thought the government should U-turn on the axing of tax relief on investments in community renewable energy, which has been one of the key factors in discouraging new projects. Just over half of people would support a wind turbine within two miles of their home, and 61% would support a solar farm. Co-operative Energy and the Energy Saving Trust calculate that a 25p annual surcharge on consumer energy bills would pay for community renewable schemes to increase from only 200MW of generation capacity today to more than 3GW. Ramsay Dunning, managing director at Co-operative Energy, said: “This poll data shows that the government’s recent hostility to further growth in onshore wind turbines and solar farms is out of kilter with the vast majority of the UK public, including Conservative party supporters. People want to see growth in local community owned projects.” Ed Mayo, secretary-general of Co-operatives UK, the trade body which has 120 community organisations as members, said the government’s changes meant people were being discouraged from schemes that provided a wide range of benefits and enjoy strong local support. “Local communities have put in extraordinary efforts to encourage clean renewable energy in the face of extraordinary barriers put in their way by national politicians,” he said. “This hopeful and grassroots movement [has been] dealt a hammer blow, causing confusion and bringing growth to a virtual standstill.” One example is Chester Community Energy, which aims to put 50kw of solar panels on a council-owned leisure centre. Fortunately for the organisers, they were in time to secure the old higher feed-in tariff rates before they were reduced. Without this boost, the scheme would not have gone ahead. Francesca Moore, a founding director, said: “We would not have done it. We would not have been able to give a return to investors. We might have been able to squeeze one percent but that’s not enough for people and we wouldn’t have been able to generate a community energy fund.” Other proposed projects, including those by established community groups, are also facing financial troubles. Will Cottrell, chairman of Brighton Energy Co-operative which has raised more than £1m, said new projects were not feasible. “January’s feed-in tariff cuts mean that new projects are not financially viable. What’s the point in starting a community energy scheme when you can’t offer members interest [payments on their investment] or community funds?” | ['environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/environment', 'environment/solarpower', 'environment/windpower', 'environment/energy', 'politics/conservatives', 'politics/politics', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/fiona-harvey', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-environment'] | environment/solarpower | ENERGY | 2016-09-12T11:00:28Z | true | ENERGY |
news/2024/dec/05/weatherwatch-why-cooling-white-roofs-cause-neighbours-to-swelter | Weatherwatch: Why cooling white roofs cause neighbours to swelter | Painting roofs white and creating lighter coloured pavements and roads are recognised as ways to reflect heat in urban areas and help combat global heating. However, a new study shows that this geoengineering technique unexpectedly causes temperatures to rise in the surrounding region. Scientists have previously used large-scale climate models to assess the climate impacts of increasing albedo (reflectivity) on land, but these do not pick up changes in small-scale atmospheric circulation. Yu Cheng and Kaighin McColl from Harvard University simulated the localised changes and found that increasing albedo resulted in increased convection at the boundary of the high-albedo area – similar to the breezes found where sea meets land. Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that the increased convection altered cloud cover, resulting in less rain and higher temperatures in the surrounding region, negating the cooling achieved in the high-albedo area. The researchers point out that this could exacerbate climate inequity if wealthy neighbourhoods adopt this geoengineering technique and push additional warming into surrounding poorer neighbourhoods. For example, if a region the size of Trafford, Greater Manchester, installed white roads and roofs then the 1km strip around this region – home to approximately 300,000 people in an urban area – would experience excess heating. | ['news/series/weatherwatch', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/environment', 'type/article', 'tone/features', 'profile/kate-ravilious', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-weather'] | news/series/weatherwatch | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2024-12-05T06:00:35Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
commentisfree/2009/apr/19/quantitative-easing-climate-change-budget | Colin Hines: Alistair Darling should budget for a Green New Deal | Of all the twists and turns employed by politicians for coping with the economic crisis, perhaps the most radical is what sounds like a laxative for central bankers – quantitative easing. For politicians still deluding themselves that their economic problems can be solved by a return to increased consumer spending, this is the last throw of the dice. Cuts in official interest rates and VAT haven't worked, lending levels remain low and real interest rates on such lending are still high. Mervyn King has therefore been forced to experiment with quantitative easing. "Queasing" is the printing of electronic money by the computers at the Bank of England. This process of creating money out of nothing also has the advantage that it is debt free and so does not have to be repaid. This new money is used to buy up bonds from either banks or the commercial sector. The banks get cash in exchange for the gilts (government bonds) that they sell to the government, and this increase in their money supply in theory leads to an increased volume of lending by the banks, who now have more cash. However it is also crucial to bring down the cost of such lending. Queasing achieves this by buying up gilts, which decreases their supply, thus pushing up their price. When gilt prices go up, the yields, ie the rates of return on these government bonds, go down; the importance of this rather tortuous process is that gilt yields determine long-term interest rates for most business lending. On 5 March the Bank of England announced the earmarking of £75bn for queasing, with another £75bn available if needed. The US Federal Reserve followed less than a fortnight later, announcing £210bn would be available over the next six months, and it is now expected that the European Central Bank will be forced to do likewise. Of course this could all go badly wrong because at its heart is the idea that more credit at lower interest rates will help restart the economy. Aside from the increased carbon emissions inherent in such an expected spending splurge, it just will not work on the scale needed. Politicians have failed to grasp the impact of recent economic changes on people's behaviour where savings are concerned. Depositors are already shunning banks and the stockmarket and in the last three months have put nearly £10bn into National Savings. Cuts in mortgage interest rates have resulted in billions being spent not so much in shopping malls, but in reducing the size of mortgages. That too is saving by another name. However there is a way that quantitative easing could be used to really increase long-term, sustainable economic activity and with it a huge growth in jobs and business. That would be for Alistair Darling to announce in the budget that the second £75bn allocated for queasing would be used to fund a "Green New Deal", as called for by Gordon Brown in the run-up to the G20 meeting. These funds could be spent into the economy by investing them in energy efficiency, renewables and a new grid system. This would cut out the "middle man" in the lending equation – and the interest that the banks charge when taking that role. The policy would result in the creation of hundreds of thousands of new green collar jobs as well as the skills and training to create and sustain them. Such a low-carbon energy system could make "every building a power station" as well as creating and training a "carbon army" to work on this vast environmental reconstruction programme. There are historical precedents in times of extremes for governments to generate debt-free money out of nothing to fund massive projects. Abraham Lincoln paid for the US civil war by printing $432m in new "greenback" bills with congressional authorisation. This new interest-free money was used by Lincoln to pay for the troops and their supplies. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the country was in financial ruin. To overcome this he devised an ambitious plan of public works from flood controls to autobahns. The projected cost was fixed at one billion units of the national currency, called Labour Treasury Certificates. These were also issued out of nothing and debt free. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the treasury certificates. This government-issued money was then spent on other goods and services, creating more jobs for more people. Within two years, the unemployment problem had been solved and the economy rebuilt. Of course a civil war and Hitler are not the most appealing poster children for the idea of using government-issued debt-free money to help solve today's credit crunch, climate change and energy security. Yet as a supplier of the upfront money for the massive environmental transformation required, this is the best and most immediate option available, assisted by the fact that the UK form of it, quantitative easing, is actually happening now. Instead of using that money to bail out planets bank and shopping mall, it needs instead to be used to save the real planet by funding a Green New Deal. | ['commentisfree/commentisfree', 'business/recession', 'politics/alistairdarling', 'uk/budget', 'politics/politics', 'politics/economy', 'business/economics', 'world/g20', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'science/scienceofclimatechange', 'environment/green-politics', 'environment/environment', 'business/credit-crunch', 'business/bankofenglandgovernor', 'business/banking', 'tone/comment', 'uk/budget-2009', 'type/article', 'profile/colinhines'] | environment/green-politics | CLIMATE_POLICY | 2009-04-19T10:00:01Z | true | CLIMATE_POLICY |
news/2015/apr/08/weatherwatch-hambling-volcano-ash-glass-lightning-geology-alabama-university | Weatherwatch: Glass globes blown by lightning | The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010, emitting a cloud of volcanic ash which grounded air traffic across Europe for six days. Five years later, researchers led by Kimberly Genareau, of the University of Alabama. have written, that, among the volcanic debris, were glass spherules (small spheres) measuring less than a 10th of a millimetre across, which had been created by lightning. In their paper published in Geology, the team describe how lightning melts ash particles inside the volcanic plume. Molten ash forms a ball like a raindrop before re-solidifying as a glass spherule. The team confirmed this theory by comparing natural spherules with ones created artificially in high-voltage experiments. The quantity of spherules, which made up about 5% of the debris sampled, showed how much electrical activity there was around the volcanoe. “We hypothesize that the ash would need to be very close, likely within the discharge channel, to be affected,” Genareau said. Intense lightning can occur inside a volcanic plume when the ash particles become charged by friction as they are driven upwards by the heat. There are also electrical discharges around the mouth of a volcano during an eruption, which are less well understood. This is the first time that these glass spherules have been studied, and they may provide a novel way of investigating volcanic lightning after the event. The number and size of spherules in debris can show indirectly the amount of lightning in an eruption that occurred many years ago even if nobody witnessed it. | ['news/series/weatherwatch', 'world/volcanoes', 'science/geology', 'science/meteorology', 'science/science', 'tone/features', 'type/article', 'profile/davidhambling', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/weather2'] | news/series/weatherwatch | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2015-04-08T20:30:01Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2014/nov/18/melbourne-councils-band-together-to-buy-100gw-of-clean-energy-direct | Melbourne councils band together to buy 100GWh of clean energy direct | A group of Melbourne councils are banding together to bypass the renewable policies of the state and federal governments and directly appeal to clean-energy providers. In what could evolve into a national initiative to directly boost renewable energy uptake, the City of Melbourne, City of Maribyrnong and City Of Yarra will open a dialogue with clean energy producers ahead of a potential full tender process. The trio of councils have partnered with businesses including Mirvac and Federation Square for the project. Renewable providers, such as solar and wind farms, will be asked whether they can supply the group’s combined 100GWh worth of energy at similar or lower cost than fossil fuel providers. This 100GWh is the equivalent to around 250,000 solar panels or 15 wind turbines. The consortium hopes to find renewable energy projects that are ready to proceed but have been hindered by uncertainty over the renewable energy target, which has seen investment in the sector grind to a virtual halt. Victoria’s renewable energy industry has also been hit by severe restrictions on new wind farm developments, allowing states such as South Australia surge ahead of it in terms of clean energy. By joining together, councils and businesses can offer a reliable demand for renewable providers to allow their projects to proceed, while at the same time potentially driving down the cost for users. The City of Melbourne has a goal of zero net emissions by 2020. This target is supplemented by a goal of sourcing 25% of electricity from renewable sources by 2018. Just 5% of this target has been achieved via rooftop solar panels in Melbourne’s CBD, prompting the council to look to large-scale renewable projects in other parts of the state. City of Melbourne councillor Arron Wood said the new approach will help counteract the “worrying” renewable energy policies of both state and federal governments. “We are literally going out to test the market and find out what the price is,” he told Guardian Australia. “Our hope is that they will be on a par with fossil fuels or cheaper, because then the business case becomes a no brainer because renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in the long-term. “There are certainly some worrying signs over the state government’s attitude to renewable energy. There are genuine business opportunities for the state and we’re saying we’re open for business for renewable energy. “There’s been the removal of the carbon price and uncertainty over the RET, meaning that in quick time a $1bn industry has ground to a halt. We can demonstrate a model that isn’t just a purchase of green energy, it can drive investment in new renewable energy.” Wood said he expected other councils in Melbourne and across Australia to look closely at the concept in order to bolster renewable uptake. The City of Sydney, for example, has a 30% renewable energy target by 2030. “Most metropolitan councils in Australia have a renewable energy target,” he said. “Cities are well set-up to band together for large-scale renewable generation. I feel many of them would be interested in this.” WestWind, a German wind farm developer that has two approved projects in western Victoria, said it welcomed the initiative. Tobi Geiger, managing director of WestWind, said there should be plenty of interest from solar and wind providers. “I’d say there are around 10 projects in Victoria that would go for it, predominantly wind because we are blessed with wind all year round in Victoria,” he told Guardian Australia. “We’ve had to wind back activities quite dramatically because of uncertainty over the future of the RET. We’ve been Abbott-proofing our company by looking at opportunities in renewable energy that don’t require government support. “I think this kind of partnership will do well as long as we have a recalcitrant government. There’s a lack of government leadership so councils are stepping into the vacuum. The more Neanderthals that go back to fossil fuels, the more of these things we’ll see.” | ['environment/renewableenergy', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'environment/solarpower', 'environment/windpower', 'australia-news/melbourne', 'australia-news/victoria', 'australia-news/australian-politics', 'environment/energy', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/oliver-milman'] | environment/windpower | ENERGY | 2014-11-18T16:46:42Z | true | ENERGY |
world/2017/oct/19/donald-trump-puerto-rico-hurricane-response-10-out-of-10 | Donald Trump awards himself 10 out of 10 for Puerto Rico hurricane response | Donald Trump gave his administration’s response to the damage wrought on Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria a 10 out of 10 during a meeting with the governor of the devastated US territory. Nearly a month after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, conditions remain dire: hundreds of thousands of Americans are still without running water. More than 80% of electricity consumers remain without power. A majority of cellphone towers remained knocked down and only a small percentage of the roads have been reopened. But asked to rate the federal government’s recovery effort on a scale of one to 10, Trump told reporters: “I give ourselves a 10.” Speaking after an Oval Office meeting with Ricardo Rosselló, the island’s governor, the president said that the devastation caused by the storm was worse than Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and “in many ways worse than anything people have ever seen”. “It hit right through the middle of the island,” Trump said, chopping the air with his arm as if to indicate the storm’s path. “It hit right through the middle of Puerto Rico. There’s never been anything like that.” Trump has faced criticism for his response to the crisis, including from the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who accused the administration of not doing enough. He visited the island earlier this month and told local officials that they should be “proud” of how few people had died from the storm compared with the death toll during Hurricane Katrina, which he described as a “real catastrophe”. During that visit, he also tossed paper towels into a crowd gathered to see him near San Juan. Trump’s rosy assessment does not reflect public opinion polls, which show a majority of Americans believe the administration is not doing enough to restore electricity and deliver food and water to the island. Rosselló declined to rate the effort, though he was complimentary of the administration’s response. Trump pressed the governor to expand. “Did the United States, did our government, when we came in, did we do a great job? Military, first responders, Fema, did we do a great job?” Trump asked. “You responded immediately, sir,” Rosselló said. He continued: “We recognize that there are some logistical limitations that we have in Puerto Rico. We didn’t have the ports open for a couple of days. We didn’t have the airports open at full capacity until about a day or two ago. So, that was always a great limiting step. “But if you consider that we’ve gotten, even with those obstacles, we’ve gotten about 15,000 DoD [Department of Defense] personnel in Puerto Rico, about 2,000 Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] personnel, HHS [health and human services] and others. The response is there. Do we need to do a lot more? Of course we do and I think everyone over here recognizes there’s a lot of work to be done in Puerto Rico. But with your leadership, sir, and with everybody over here, we’re committed to achieving that in the long run.” Last week, Trump came under fire when he tweeted that Washington could not continue to aid Puerto Rico “forever”. During the meeting, he echoed that sentiment. “At some point, Fema has to leave, first responders have to leave and the people have to take over,” he said. Trump parried a question about Puerto Rican statehood. “You’ll get me into trouble with that question,” he said, suggesting that he would address the issue “at a later time”. | ['us-news/puerto-rico', 'us-news/donaldtrump', 'world/world', 'us-news/us-news', 'world/hurricane-maria', 'world/natural-disasters', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/lauren-gambino', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/us-news'] | world/hurricane-maria | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2017-10-19T20:46:08Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2022/dec/18/sse-begins-work-on-hydrogen-storage-cavern-on-yorkshire-coast | SSE begins work on hydrogen storage cavern on Yorkshire coast | The energy company SSE has begun work to develop an underground cavern in east Yorkshire to store hydrogen, aiming to stockpile the renewable source of power for when the freezing, windless conditions experienced in the last week occur in future. The project will produce hydrogen using renewable energy in a 35-megawatt electrolyser which will be stored in a cavern the size of St Paul’s Cathedral located a mile deep at an existing SSE site in Aldbrough on the Yorkshire coast. The hydrogen will be used to fire a turbine which can export power to the grid when demand is high. SSE hopes the “pathfinder” project, which could cost more than £100m, will demonstrate the technology before bigger projects in the area which would require larger pipelines and infrastructure. The company hopes to receive government money for the project through a fund set up to support low-carbon hydrogen projects. Last week icy conditions led to a surge in energy demand as Britons cranked up their heating. Simultaneously, a lack of wind cut the power available from windfarms, forcing National Grid to pay high prices to encourage operators of gas “peaking plants” into action. Hydrogen is an expensive form of power generation as it requires large amounts of electricity to produce. However, it is seen as important in efforts to decarbonise heavy industries reliant on fossil fuels. Catherine Raw, managing director of SSE’s thermal division, told the Guardian: “Even if hydrogen is expensive relative to other fuels, you’re able to deliver the power exactly when you need it during peak demand and when power prices are justified. So this would be, even as a research and development project, helping to ease that system pressure during periods of peak demand like we’ve just seen.” It emerged last week that Ofgem is pushing for a cap on how much power stations can charge National Grid for backup electricity. Ofgem wants to tighten rules to prevent “excessive” profits and intends to publish proposals early next year. The Grid spent more than £27m paying power stations to increase supplies at short notice as temperatures dropped on Monday last week. Vitol Group’s Rye House gas-fired power station, just north of London, earned as much as £6,000 per megawatt-hour, reigniting a debate over power generators’ profits. Gas-fired power stations were exempted from the electricity generators levy announced by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, last month, as the government cited their role in providing security of energy supplies. SSE has several gas-fired plants in the UK and Ireland. Raw declined to comment on last week’s events but said: “The rising gas price has meant that we’ve had to take risks that we would not normally take, and therefore how do you get rewarded for taking those risks? Our responsibility as a generator of power is to keep the system balanced and SSE takes that very seriously.” SSE, which runs gas-fired power stations alongside hydroelectric plants and windfarms, last month reported a more than tripling of profits thanks to soaring energy prices. SSE hopes to get the project running by 2025, before a larger hydrogen storage project planned for the same site in 2028 in partnership with the Norwegian energy company Equinor. The pair are also developing the Keadby hydrogen power station, planned to be the world’s first big 100% hydrogen-fired power station. SSE has signed a contract with Siemens Energy for design and engineering work on the pathfinder project. Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, has invested in an industry joint venture which will trial using hydrogen at an existing peaking plant at the Brigg station in Lincolnshire. The pilot, which will launch in the second half of next year, is aimed at examining the role that hydrogen can play in producing power. | ['business/scottishandsouthernenergy', 'environment/energy', 'environment/energy-storage', 'environment/energyefficiency', 'environment/environment', 'uk/uk', 'uk-news/yorkshire', 'environment/hydrogen-power', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'business/centrica', 'business/business', 'campaign/email/business-today', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/alex-lawson', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/renewableenergy | ENERGY | 2022-12-18T11:42:24Z | true | ENERGY |
environment/article/2024/jul/08/labour-lifts-ban-onshore-windfarms-planning-policy | Labour lifts Tories’ ‘absurd’ ban on onshore windfarms | The de facto ban on new onshore windfarms has been dropped by the Labour government, to the delight of environmentalists and energy experts. The ban was caused by two footnotes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the rules that govern the building of homes and infrastructure. These footnotes applied only to onshore wind, and no other type of infrastructure, and required such strong proof that there was no opposition locally that they made building turbines impossible, given there is nearly always some local resistance to any building proposal. In Labour’s new draft NPPF, these footnotes have been deleted in their entirety, meaning onshore wind projects are now on an even footing with all other forms of infrastructure. The change, which comes into force immediately, will be confirmed to parliament on 18 July after the Commons resumes sitting. Labour also announced on Monday that it would go a step further and consult on whether to designate large windfarms as nationally significant infrastructure projects, meaning that the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, would sign them off and local councils would not have a say. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced in a speech on Monday that she would end the “absurd” restriction on new windfarms and said decisions should be taken nationally, not locally. In a policy statement, officials wrote: “Delivering our clean power mission will help boost Britain’s energy independence, save money on energy bills, support high-skilled jobs and tackle the climate crisis. “We are therefore committed to doubling onshore wind energy by 2030. That means immediately removing the de facto ban on onshore wind in England in place since 2015. We are revising planning policy to place onshore wind on the same footing as other energy development in the National Planning Policy Framework.” Last September Michael Gove, the then communities secretary, said the ban would be lifted. Rules put in place by David Cameron in 2015 had decreed that a single planning objection could scupper an onshore wind project. However, the offending paragraphs in the NPPF footnote remained, making building new projects almost impossible. Analysis of the government’s renewable energy planning database found that no applications for new onshore wind projects were submitted after Gove’s announcement. The end of the ban was promised in Labour’s election manifesto and trailed by Miliband when he was shadow energy secretary, but campaigners were surprised by the speed at which it has been implemented. Mike Childs, the head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth, said: “By ending the onshore wind ban in England, Labour is making an important stride towards delivering on our climate goals while also paving the way for lower bills, as renewables produce some of the cheapest and cleanest energy available. “In April, research by Friends of the Earth found that utilising less than 3% of land in England for onshore wind and solar could produce 13 times more clean energy that now generated – enough to power all households in England twice over. By harnessing the country’s vast renewable power potential, the new government is staking its claim as a global leader in the green energy transition.” Sam Richards, the chief executive of the pro-growth campaign group Britain Remade and a former environmental adviser to No 10, said: “The only way we are going to see the growth Britain desperately needs is if we make it significantly easier to build the homes and the new sources of clean energy needed to reach net zero. “During the election Labour promised to fix our outdated and sclerotic planning system to just that, and with this speech the new chancellor is hitting the ground running. Lifting the ban on new onshore windfarms in England is something Britain Remade has been campaigning for since we launched, so I am delighted Rachel Reeves has dropped the ban so soon after the election.” Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace’s chief scientist, said: “As the recent gas price crisis shows, this ban was self-defeating for energy security, costly, and lost opportunities to cut emissions. The end of the ban is well overdue.” | ['environment/windpower', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/energy', 'environment/environment', 'business/energy-industry', 'business/business', 'politics/labour', 'politics/rachel-reeves', 'campaign/email/business-today', 'politics/politics', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/helena-horton', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/uknews', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/energy | ENERGY | 2024-07-08T11:14:54Z | true | ENERGY |
world/2017/feb/20/scientists-to-repeat-19th-century-fram-ships-crossing-of-polar-ice-cap | Scientists to repeat 19th-century ship's crossing of polar ice cap | In 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen embarked on a mission of extraordinary boldness and ingenuity. He planned to become the first person to reach the north pole by allowing his wooden vessel, the Fram, to be engulfed by sea ice and pulled across the polar cap on an ice current. Ultimately, Nansen ended up abandoning the Fram and skiing hundreds of miles to a British base after he realised he was not on course to hit the pole, but the ship made it across the ice cap intact and the expedition resulted in groundbreaking scientific discoveries about the Arctic and weather patterns. Now, more than a century on, scientists are planning to retrace this epic voyage for the first time, in the most ambitious Arctic research expedition to date. The Mosaic (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) mission will be the first since Nansen’s to traverse the polar ice cap by ship and will aim to answer big questions about the Arctic, including why the region is warming faster than any other place on Earth. During the year-long, 1,500-mile trip, teams of scientists – protected from polar bears by armed guards – will disperse across the polar cap to take measurements and make reports that have never been possible before. The mission’s co-leader Prof Markus Rex, of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, said: “The plan is to travel in summer 2019, when sea ice is thin and its extent is much smaller. We can make our way with our icebreaker Polarstern into the thin sea ice to the Siberian sector of the Arctic. Then we stop the engines and let the Polarstern drift with the sea ice.” By November the vessel will be encased in solid sea ice, temperatures will plunge to as low as -50C and the darkness of polar night will set in. In these hostile conditions, the scientists will set up an extensive network of research stations, in some cases travelling 50km from the vessel on snow mobiles. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston on Sunday, Rex outlined new details of the €50m (£42m) project, which will involve 50 institutions from 14 countries including the UK, US and Russia. The teams will investigate how rapid warming in the Arctic is altering the polar vortex. Scientists anticipate that as the temperature contrast between low and high latitudes reduces, strong circular winds around the pole will shift to lighter, more meandering patterns. This will allow “more frequent and cold air outbreaks from the Arctic”, causing extreme cold spells on the east coast of the US and parts of Europe. The scientists will release hundreds of helium balloons carrying sensors to take atmospheric measurements of super-cooled water in clouds, a unique Arctic phenomenon. Water droplets in the clouds reach temperatures as low as -10C without freezing, partly due to the pristine Arctic air, which is low in aerosols that would usually seed the formation of ice crystals in such temperatures. Increasing industrial activity in the Arctic could radically alter this process, Rex said. The Northern Sea Route Information predicts that 20 years from now, 25% of container shipping from Asia to Europe will go through the Arctic rather than through the Suez canal. Mission scientists who will work onboard the Polarstern in three-month rotations will also investigate life in melt ponds, small lakes that form on the ice in spring. “Once the sea ice breaks up in spring, there are huge algal blooms and within a few days the ocean is green,” said Rex. “Somehow the phytoplankton and the krill survives under the ice, it’s doing something in mid-winter under the ice.” What happens in the Arctic has a major impact on the weather in northern Europe and North America. Yet the forces at work are not well understood, because gaining access to the region to carry out ground-based studies is so difficult, limiting the accuracy of forecasting and leaving major gaps in what climate models can explain. Recorded levels of Arctic sea ice, which reached the second lowest minimum on record last summer, show a much faster rate of decline than computer simulations predict, for instance. “There are many many really small-scale processes which affect the climate on a regional and global scale in the Arctic which we can’t observe from a satellite,” said Rex. As the polar winter turns to spring, the Polarstern will approach the Fram Strait, the body of water between Greenland and Svalbard where Nansen’s vessel eventually made its exit into open water. “Only the Fram has done this before,” said Rex. The Mosaic team believe the latest mission, while less perilous, could have a similarly revolutionary impact on the scientific understanding of the Arctic. Matthew Shupe, a scientist at the University of Colorado who is co-leading the mission, said: “[The Fram] was groundbreaking in its era and frankly in it’s own way Mosaic will be in this era. It will be this very momentous step forward.” | ['world/arctic', 'environment/poles', 'science/science', 'environment/environment', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'world/world', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/hannah-devlin', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/topstories', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/poles | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS | 2017-02-20T00:01:22Z | true | EXTREME_CLIMATE_IMPACTS |
environment/2016/oct/11/germany-takes-steps-to-roll-back-renewable-energy-revolution | Germany takes steps to roll back renewable energy revolution | Germany is taking steps to curb its booming windfarm sector in what it claims is a necessary move to stop the renewables revolution from undermining its own success. Critics, however, say the step will deal a blow to the country’s reputation as a leader in green energy. According to leaked plans from the German federal network agency, published on Tuesday in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the government has had to halve its original target for expanding its windfarms in the gale-beaten northern flatlands because it cannot extend its power grid quickly enough to the energy-hungry south. When Angela Merkel announced in May 2011 that Germany would seek to phase out its fleet of nuclear reactors by 2022, questions arose as to whether renewable sources of energy, such as wind or solar, could grow quickly enough to meet the requirements of German industry. Yet five years later, windfarms in the northernmost states are producing so much energy that in some cases the state has to pay renewable energy companies to switch off their turbines to stop congesting the power grid. In theory, the manufacturing sector in southern states like Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg would be supplied with green energy from the north. But plans for an ambitious north-south “energy highway” between Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria have stalled, due in part to local protests against proposed “monster pylons”. Revised plans for more costly underground cabling were signed off last October, but the project now runs approximately a year and a half behind its original schedule, leaving Germany’s energy infrastructure lop-sided. In 2015, northern Germany produced 4,100 gigawatt hours in excess energy which couldn’t been transported to the south – enough, in theory, to supply 1.2 million households with energy for a year. Protecting the national power grid from such imbalances is costly: in 2015, Germany paid €1bn, or £912m, towards system security measures, a cost which the federal network agency claims could rise to €4bn by 2022 if current trends continue. Germany’s plans to phase out nuclear energy is creating diplomatic headaches, too. Cheap excess energy produced by German windfarms and coal power stations is often exported to neighbouring states such as Poland, the Czech Republic or Austria, where it plays havoc with local networks and impedes those countries from building up their own sustainable systems. “Germany’s renewables revolution is making it harder to have a renewables revolution in Austria and other European countries,” Austria’s environment minister, Andrä Rupprechter, told Der Spiegel. “Germany produces too much cheap energy, which countries like Austria then have to absorb. With the current prices for energy, investing in hydro or wind energy without state support is no longer competitive.” Some analysts argue that while Germany is right to address grid congestion, doing so by artificially slowing down the wind energy boom risks undermining the country’s credibility as a green leader. Since the start of the Energiewende, or energy transformation project, domestic demand for renewable energy has grown by about 3% per annum. Under revised proposals worked out by the government, the sector’s growth is expected slow to about 1%. “A more forward-looking way to meet the current challenge would have been to shut down old power stations, extend the grid faster or invest more in innovative methods to use excess energy to heat homes,” said Arne Jungjohann, the author of Energy Democracy – Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables. “On the international stage, Merkel enjoys a reputation as a green pioneer. But on the domestic stage she has been quick to give in to the lobbying of energy-greedy industry”. While the German government admits that transforming its energy infrastructure is a more complex undertaking than originally thought, officials insist that it remains on track to meet ambitious goals, including a 50% share for renewables in gross electricity consumption by 2030. • This article was amended on 13 October 2016 to correct a reference from gigawatts to gigawatt hours. | ['environment/renewableenergy', 'world/germany', 'world/world', 'world/europe-news', 'environment/environment', 'environment/energy', 'world/angela-merkel', 'environment/nuclearpower', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/philip-oltermann', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-foreign'] | environment/renewableenergy | ENERGY | 2016-10-11T20:25:21Z | true | ENERGY |
environment/2008/jun/15/ethicalliving.recycling | Ethical dilemma: the key to recycling unusual objects | As a nation we're getting better at recycling the easy things, but what about the anomalies? While kerbside collection schemes seem to be getting simpler, if not necessarily more uniform, there is a host of every day objects missing a virtuous resting place. This column is dedicated to the recyclables that fall - rather literally - outside the box. One reader, Mary, emailed to ask what she could do with a set of keys that have a boomerang quality: 'I put them in my recycling box and nobody takes them. Sometimes they post them back through my letterbox, assuming I've dropped them.' I suggest finding a mixed-metals recycling bin (enter your postcode on recyclenow.com) or send them to keysforkindness.com, which recycles keys and gives the money to charity. Expect to see an alarming (sorry) increase in abandoned electrical alarm clocks. Scuppered by the rise of the mobile phone with its alarm function, they are officially Weee (Waste electronic and electrical equipment) and need to be taken off to the civic amenity point for disassembly. East Anglia-based wombling.org.uk accepts small electricals, which they refurbish and sell on or disassemble for recycling. One of the most frequent Ethical Living questions concerns VHS tapes. There is a snag: while the plastic casing can be recycled, the tape cannot. Keymood (keymood.co.uk), formerly The ReCycling People, will recycle VHS tapes but there is a charge to cover the landfill cost: £15 for up to 50 pieces, £20 for 50-140; DVD and CD recycling is free. As summer approaches you suddenly notice thousands of pairs of tights clogging up your sock drawer. There are very few options, given that you can't really repair non pure-wool tights. Tightsplease (tightsplease.co.uk) collects old and laddered tights for women suffering from fistula in Ethiopia. Send to Ethiopia Tights Appeal, Tightsplease, 2nd Floor Albion Court, 18-20 Frederick Street, Hockley, Birmingham B1 3HE. The nation's airing cupboards are apparently stuffed full of threadbare bath towels and redundant sheets. My stance on any type of textile is that it should be reused as much as humanly possible. We tend to treat cotton as a cheap commodity. Given its environmental and social impact, this doesn't add up. We are still worlds away from reclaiming fibres on a big scale, but LM Barry (lmb.co.uk) takes household textiles as well as clothes. Most sheets and towels will end up being 'ragged' - torn up as strips for recycling as industrial wiping rags. Not a glamorous end, granted, but better than throwing in the recycling towel and despatching it to landfill. [email protected] | ['environment/ethical-living', 'environment/recycling', 'environment/environment', 'lifeandstyle/lifeandstyle', 'environment/waste', 'type/article', 'environment/series/ask-leo-lucy', 'profile/lucysiegle', 'publication/theobserver', 'theobserver/magazine', 'theobserver/magazine/features'] | environment/waste | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2008-06-14T23:01:00Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
environment/2008/oct/05/pollution.waste | Cancer fear over plans for £50m waste plant | A plan to develop a waste-to-energy plant in Aberdeenshire has sparked a massive protest campaign over fears it could cause health problems. More than 4,500 people living in and around Peterhead have signed a petition against the £50million plant which developers Buchan Combined Heat and Power Ltd claim will burn a third of the north-east of Scotland's rubbish and produce enough power for approximately 10,000 homes. Six hundred letters of objection have been submitted against the proposal. Residents are concerned it will spew a deadly mixture of chemicals over the area, causing increased rates of cancer, heart attacks, clinical depression, autism, asthma and coronary heart disease. Their fears have been fuelled by a retired GP from South Wales, Dick Van Steenis, who claims research into similar plants in other parts of the country has demonstrated an alarming rise in serious illnesses in surrounding communities. 'The company's own environmental statement says it will emit arsenic and dioxins which are highly carcinogenic. One of the main things it emits apart from mercury, arsenic, cobalt, and lead is particulate matter,' said John Askey, a father of two who organised the petition. 'Particulate matter are very fine particles. In a smog you get very big particles, but it's the fine ones you can't see that cause an awful lot of illnesses like heart disease, eczema, asthma and cancer. 'Buchan already has the highest cancer, heart disease and stroke rate in the whole of Grampian, so we don't want this incinerator adding to our woes by blowing these fine particles over Peterhead.' Concerns about the plant have also been raised by NHS Grampian and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency which both questioned the suitability of the proposed location of the plant on an industrial site outside Peterhead. In a submission to Aberdeenshire Council's planning department, NHS officials said they were concerned that the incinerator will be located right beside a children's nursery and less than a mile from the small community of Invernettie. However, Buchan CHP insists that, if its plant goes ahead, there will be no significant risk to human health, and its director, Glenn Jones, has insisted that any emissions will be 'no more dangerous than those from a domestic car or a wood-burning stove'. 'All our research and documentation are based on fact and in-depth analysis of the process and the technology,' said a spokesman. 'We would be very interested to see Van Steenis's research papers and analysis and find out where it has been reviewed by experts or peer-reviewed by recognised academics. 'These plants are operating cleanly, safely and effectively in Shetland, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia, among many other places. Contrary to what a handful of objectors are saying, the plant will not use gas to support the burning of waste; ash and emissions from the plant will not affect human health or local water supplies and monitoring of the emissions will be a continual and robust process.' | ['environment/pollution', 'environment/waste', 'environment/environment', 'business/utilities', 'business/business', 'uk/scotland', 'uk/uk', 'science/cancer', 'science/science', 'society/health', 'society/society', 'tone/news', 'society/cancer', 'type/article', 'profile/paulkelbie', 'publication/theobserver', 'theobserver/news', 'theobserver/news/uknews'] | environment/waste | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2008-10-04T23:01:00Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
global/2008/sep/16/wildlife | Prehistoric ant discovered alive in Amazon rainforest | An ancient ancestor of ants has been discovered living in the soils of the Amazon rainforest. The species, named Martialis heureka, or "ant from Mars", because of its unusual features, is a pale-bodied, blind predator that uses oversized jaws to capture prey. Ants evolved 120m years ago from wasp-like ancestors and rapidly adapted to living in soil, trees and leaf litter. Genetic tests on the 3mm-long species show it emerged at the very earliest stages of ant evolution, said Christian Rabeling at the University of Texas at Austin. His study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. | ['environment/environment', 'tone/news', 'environment/wildlife', 'science/science', 'environment/biodiversity', 'science/zoology', 'science/biology', 'environment/insects', 'environment/amazon-rainforest', 'type/article', 'profile/iansample'] | environment/biodiversity | BIODIVERSITY | 2008-09-16T08:09:56Z | true | BIODIVERSITY |
environment/2018/aug/31/peter-melchett-environmental-campaigner-dies-at-71 | Peter Melchett, environmental campaigner, dies at 70 | Peter Melchett, the environmental campaigner and Labour peer, has died aged 70. Lord Melchett, who lived in Norfolk, became the executive director of Greenpeace UK in 1989 and was most recently policy director of the Soil Association. He was revered as a fearless pioneer on environmental issues, and led a colourful life and career. In 1999, Melchett faced criminal damage charges alongside 27 fellow activists after ripping up genetically modified crops. He and his colleagues were acquitted when the jury accepted their defence that they believed the crop would have polluted the environment. Speaking to the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2000, Melchett said: “You can only do it if people support you, and they won’t if what you’re doing isn’t right or if what you’re predicting doesn’t turn out to be true.” In 1985, he tried to cut through the perimeter wire of a US airbase at Sculthorpe in East Anglia as part of an anti-nuclear protest. He told of how he could hear the voice of Olga Maitland crying “Peter, Peter, don’t do it. It’ll ruin your career!” as he cut the fencing. Greenpeace UK’s executive director, John Sauven, said: “Peter will be sorely missed by everyone who loved wildlife and wanted to protect the global environment.” “In Peter’s 12 years campaigning at Greenpeace, he was both fearless in taking on big corporations like BP and Monsanto, but also pioneering in supporting solutions like Greenfreeze refrigeration to save the ozone layer. “We all live a little bit more peacefully with the earth and its animals as a result of his efforts. A true radical and campaigner to the end.” Melchett went from Eton to Cambridge University, where he studied law. He later took an MA in criminology at Keele University, followed by 18 months at the London School of Economics. He was a Labour party whip and a junior environment minister in 1974 under Harold Wilson, then Northern Ireland minister under Jim Callaghan. Molly Scott Cato, the Green party MEP for South West England and a member of the European parliament’s agriculture committee, said Melchett’s campaigning on environmental issues would “stand the test of time”. “I am so saddened to hear of the death of Peter Melchett, a tireless campaigner for a form of farming that worked with nature rather than against her,” she said. “His work with the Soil Association helped establish its international reputation as the leading body on organic farming principles. “By pushing for the highest possible standards of animal welfare and environmental and wildlife protection, his life’s work will stand the test of time.” • This article was amended on 3 September 2018 to correct Lord Melchett’s age. He died aged 70 not 71. | ['environment/greenpeace', 'environment/activism', 'environment/environment', 'uk/uk', 'politics/labour', 'world/protest', 'politics/politics', 'politics/past', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/nadia-khomami', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-home-news'] | environment/greenpeace | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2018-08-31T13:27:10Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
environment/2021/may/21/school-strike-for-climate-thousands-take-to-streets-around-australia | School strike for climate: thousands take to streets around Australia | Thousands of students across Australia walked out of classrooms to take part in the School Strike 4 Climate on Friday, calling for greater action on global heating. Defying pouring rain in Sydney, strikers chanted for climate justice, condemning the gas, coal and fossil fuel industries, and the Morrison government’s recent decision to fund a $600m gas-fired power plant. One of the organisers of the strike, Natasha Abhayawickrama, told Guardian Australia students across the country want to see the government take on a more robust climate policy. “We want some meaningful climate action,” she said. “The government’s decision to put $600 million towards a gas plant, in addition to allocating so much money in the budget towards gas and fossil fuels, will only drive us further into the climate crisis. “Right now we need clean, renewable energy to be funded, for us to have a safe future.” Abhayawickrama said it was a sense of uncertainty that brought together students from across the country. Strikes were held in 47 different places in Australia, from Alice Springs to Launceston, Cairns, Margret River, Bendigo and Port Macquarie. In Sydney, a sea of young people, holding their characteristically clever signs, marched through the CBD in the driving rain. Covid marshals were scattered among the crowd, holding up QR codes for attendees to be able to sign in, and distributing masks and hand sanitiser. Preethika Mathan, from Santa Sabina College in Strathfield, said the huge turnout reflected how strongly young people feel about climate change. “We’ve all heard someone say ‘you’re going to die of old age, we’re going to die of climate change’, and I think that’s the main sentiment here.” “We feel like we’re on the frontline of the climate crisis, in the sense that we’re the first generation who will feel its impacts. We have to live through this, whereas older generations just to survive it.” Charlotte Dillion and Barisha Tashnin, year 11 students at Fort Street High School, said they decided to come to the strike because they felt their voices were not being heard. “Climate change is an imminent threat, and we need to do something about it, and the government’s lack of action is frankly appalling and quite frankly offensive that they don’t care about us,” Tashnin said. “The government is not taking the action it needs to, and it is our future we are fighting for, and we deserve to live in a world where we have the rights where everyone before us did.” MC and organiser Ruby Bron, also from Santa Sabina College in Strathfield, said she felt uplifted seeing all the support for the strike: “It’s truly amazing to see so many people at the rally, we were a bit unsure about our turnout at first, but to see this many people is truly inspiring,” she said. “I’m so glad so many people came out and supported our demands for climate justice.” Bron explained that young people felt the need to be at the forefront of climate activism because they feel it will affect them the most. “It is our future that climate change is going to be affecting, young people are often on the front lines of the climate movement and we know that the continuing impacts of climate change will affect us for generations. “It will affect us and our children, and could prevent us from doing the things that older generations got to enjoy in life.” | ['environment/climate-crisis', 'australia-news/australia-news', 'environment/environment', 'australia-news/sydney', 'environment/school-climate-strikes', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/mostafa-rachwani-', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/australia-news'] | environment/school-climate-strikes | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM | 2021-05-21T07:36:52Z | true | CLIMATE_ACTIVISM |
business/2018/jun/24/energy-minister-faces-questions-as-swansea-tidal-lagoon-plan-left-in-limbo | Energy minister faces questions as Swansea tidal lagoon plan left in limbo | Britain’s energy minister will have to explain to MPs why no decision has been made on whether to support a tidal lagoon in Swansea – nearly 18 months after an independent government review backed the plan. Claire Perry will face the business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee on Monday afternoon to answer questions on the £1.3bn clean energy project, which has been left in limbo. Tidal Lagoon Power, the Gloucester-based firm that wants to harness the power of the tides across the UK’s west coast, has been forced to cut its headcount from 50 to 30 as a result of the delays. Downing Street had said an announcement was due on the clean energy project nearly a fortnight ago but nothing has materialised. Government sources have suggested the scheme will be turned down on cost grounds. A decision could come before the hearing with Perry on Monday but that is thought unlikely. Energy industry figures said the government’s slow process risked the UK losing out as global companies choose other countries in which to invest. “Clearly the more you delay decision-making, the more timetables slip, then the more uncomfortable people feel about making their own business decisions,” Louise Kingham, the chief executive of the Energy Institute, told the Guardian. “There is a danger that investment capital can go somewhere else.” Tidal Lagoon Power last week wrote to the business secretary, Greg Clark, and the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, arguing that the lagoon would contribute more than £2bn to the UK economy over its lifetime. The firm said the project could be built for a guaranteed price of power, known as a contract for difference (CfD), at the same level as that awarded for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset. “Subject to a mutually agreed arrangement with the Welsh government, which is under discussion, the pathfinder tidal range project in the UK requires the same level of CfD support as new nuclear power station Hinkley Point C,” a company presentation said. The government, by contrast, has said it believes the lagoon would be twice as expensive as Hinkley. | ['business/energy-industry', 'environment/renewableenergy', 'environment/water', 'business/business', 'environment/energy', 'environment/environment', 'politics/politics', 'uk/wales', 'uk/uk', 'type/article', 'tone/news', 'profile/adam-vaughan', 'publication/theguardian', 'theguardian/mainsection', 'theguardian/mainsection/financial3', 'tracking/commissioningdesk/uk-business'] | environment/renewableenergy | ENERGY | 2018-06-24T10:05:17Z | true | ENERGY |
sustainable-business/aluminum-can-recycling-novelis-evercan | Can Novelis' 'evercan' boost US aluminum can recycling? | Recycling aluminum is a no-brainer – or, at least, it should be. Producing aluminum beverage cans out of recycled scrap, instead of by mining bauxite and manufacturing new ingots, saves energy, carbon emissions and money. The same is true for the aluminum that goes into cars, planes, electronics and buildings. If businesses and consumers want to get serious about creating a circular economy – where everything, once used, is made into something else and nothing goes to waste – aluminum is a very good place to start. Yet the recycling rate for aluminum cans in the US is a mere 55%. That's below the global average of about 70% and well below rates of better than 90% than Scandinavian countries can boast – or Brazil's 98% recycling rate. The low US rate represents an enormous waste of materials and energy – and a big opportunity. Atlanta-based Novelis is aggressively seizing that opportunity. The $9.8bn firm converts aluminum into flat sheets, most of which is then turned into beverage and food cans. Novelis is already the world's biggest aluminum recycler, and it aims to do more. Its chief executive, Phil Martens, says the company wants to turn its "whole business model from a traditional linear one to a closed-loop one". To that end, Novelis this year introduced a breakthrough product called the evercan, an aluminum sheet for beverage cans that's guaranteed to contain at least 90% recycled content. To learn more, I met with John Gardner, Novelis's chief sustainability officer, who explained to me why Novelis is well positioned to demonstrate, with aluminum, how a circular economy could work. Novelis was created in 2005 when a Canadian firm then called Alcan, an integrated mining and production company, spun off its downstream operations. (In case you're wondering, as I did, Novelis is a made up word that incorporates the ideas of innovation (novel), speed (velocity) and quality (precision). The company is wholly owned by the Aditya Birla Group, a $40bn conglomerate based in Mumbai. Because Novelis owns no mines – unlike, say, aluminum giant Alcoa – it's free to pursue a strategy driven by recycling. Gardner says: "Recycling aluminm is a fantastic thing because you can make exactly the same product again and again. Economically, it makes sense. Environmentally, it makes sense. In terms of resource use, it makes sense." What's more, the capital costs of building a recycling plant are a fraction of the cost of building a primary smelter. Historically, Novelis's global business had been fed by about one-third recycled content and two-thirds new aluminum. It's up to approximately 43% recycled aluminum this year after setting an audacious goal, two years ago, to reach 80% recycled content by 2020. The company is investing roughly $500m to nearly double its recycling capacity. In its 2013 fiscal year, which ended in March, Novelis began operations at a new facility in South Korea, which is the largest fully integrated beverage can recycling system in Asia. It also broke ground in Germany for what will be the world's largest aluminum recycling facility and opened the first can-recycling center in Vietnam. So the seriousness of its commitment is evident. Novelis is pursuing its sustainability strategy "with a great deal more vigor, purpose and creativity than any of its competitors," says Jonathan Porritt, the director of the UK-based nonprofit Forum for the Future, who serves on the company's sustainability advisory council. Says Porritt: "Being 'a little less wasteful' and 'a little more efficient' doesn't hack it; one step-change after another is what's required." The problem is, Novelis needs help – and lots of it. In the US, for example, the subpar recycling rates mean that demand for recycled aluminum content exceeds the supply. To fill the gap, used cans are shipped from Mexico to the US. That can't be smart. Only approximately half of the homes in US have access to curbside recycling, and many people with curbside pickup still toss everything into the trash. To capture more scrap, local governments will need to build more recycling infrastructure and consumers will need to change their behavior. And it's unclear, at this point, who will buy the evercan. Novelis expect to bring the product to market next year, Gardner told me, but neither Coca-Cola nor PepsiCo – the two most obvious buyers – have signed up. In fact, Novelis hasn't announced any customers for the project. Coke has put its resources behind the Plant Bottle, a PET plastic beverage bottle made partly from plants, while PepsiCo has lightweighted its bottles and promoted recycling. Neither company agreed to an on-the-record interview about evercan. It may be that Novelis' first customer will be one of the craft beer companies that has made sustainability commitments. "We've started a dialogue with the brands," is all Gardner would say. "We'll have some [evercans] on the shelves early next year in Europe and the US." Give the fact that the economic imperative and the environmental needs align so nicely around aluminum, closing the loop shouldn't be all that hard. Then again, Gardner has already seen a great deal of progress since he joined the company 27 years ago. When he built the firm's first recycling plant in Warrington, England, in 1990, the recycling rate in Europe was only around 2%. | ['sustainable-business/sustainable-business', 'environment/recycling', 'tone/blog', 'type/article', 'sustainable-business/series/circular-economy', 'profile/marc-gunther'] | environment/recycling | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE | 2013-11-08T18:49:06Z | true | POLLUTION_AND_WASTE |
environment/green-living-blog/2010/aug/19/carbon-footprints-dishwasher-washing-up | It's official: dishwashers are greener than washing up by hand | The carbon footprint of doing the dishes: Almost zero CO2e: by hand in cold water (but the plates aren't clean) 540g CO2e: by hand, using water sparingly and not too hot 770g CO2e: in a dishwasher at 55°C 990g CO2e: in a dishwasher at 65°C 8000g CO2e: by hand, with extravagant use of water When it comes to long-standing green-living debates, washing up by hand versus using a dishwasher is right up there with hand-driers versus paper towels. So here, finally, are some carbon-footprint figures, which hopefully will put the issue to bed for once and for all. As the numbers above show, the most careful hot-water handwashing just about beats a fully loaded dishwasher. This is partly because most people (in the UK at least) do their manual washing up using hot water heated by a gas-fired boiler, whereas dishwashers heat water from cold using electricity. A modern boiler can capture more than 90% of the energy in the gas, whereas most of the energy in the fuel used to generate electricity is wasted in generation and transmission, which gives handwashing an obvious head start. However, according to plenty of anecdotal evidence and at least one study, few people are really careful with hot water when washing up. If instead you leave the hot tap running – as many people do – then the footprint is far higher than using a dishwasher. And even if you do wash up carefully by hand, compared with the dishwasher you still lose out both on hygiene (with nearly 400 times more bacteria left on the dishes after washing) and time (taking nearly four times as long as loading the dishwasher). Overall, then, it's probably fair to say that the dishwasher wins – assuming that you use appropriate cycles and only run the machine when it's full. This is true even if you include (as the figures above do) the energy used in the production of the dishwasher in the first place. The footprint of an appliance's manufacture is impossible to pin down accurately, but a reasonable estimate would be 130g of CO2e per cycle for a fairly expensive "built-to-last" model that you keep for 10 years. As for water consumption and detergent, these aren't included in the numbers given above because they're negligible compared with the impact of heating the water in the first place. The conclusion, then, is get a dishwasher if you want one. Or, if you have one already, don't feel guilty about using it. To maximise the benefits, always choose a model that will last and then look after it. Try to run it fully loaded, use the economy setting when possible and – for maximum green points – use the timer setting to run the dishwasher in the middle of the night. This way, you'll be using the grid at a time of low demand, which means the least efficient and dirtiest power stations won't be running and, as a result, each unit of power will have a slightly lower carbon footprint. See more carbon footprints. • This article draws on text from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee | ['environment/green-living-blog', 'environment/series/the-carbon-footprint-of-everything', 'environment/environment', 'tone/blog', 'environment/carbonfootprints', 'environment/climate-crisis', 'environment/carbon-emissions', 'type/article', 'profile/mike-berners-lee', 'profile/duncanclark'] | environment/carbonfootprints | EMISSIONS | 2010-08-19T06:30:00Z | true | EMISSIONS |
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