Almost half of all children globally are at Extremely High risk of suffering harmful consequences of climate change and other environmental shocks. Frogs and pollinators are at the sharp end of the loss of biodiversity. Fast fashion: first world behaviour with third world environmental and social consequences. Third world?? – bah, who cares?
Peter Sainsbury
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Sunday environmental round up
Take-away messages from the IPCC’s climate science report and what it means for Australia. Environmental battlegrounds in the current session of parliament. Legal challenges to ministerial discretion and little-known threatened animals.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Unlike Australia, the USA is actively supporting a just transition for communities hard-hit by the demise of fossil fuels. The science and politics of solar radiation management. An Australian environmental philanthropist’s tips for doing the unexpected, and coastlines as essential infrastructure.
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Sunday environmental round up – bees like blue.
John Kerry predicts an ‘unlivable tomorrow’ if the Glasgow COP fails to deliver clear plans for the next decade, but are wealthy nations listening? Recommendations for speeding the transition to EVs and making electricity systems more resilient. Bees like blue.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Developing nations issue a ‘last chance’ challenge to rich countries in the lead up to the Glasgow climate change meeting. Exxon’s climate action cynicism exposed by insiders. EU wants all new cars to be EVs by 2035. Alan Kohler calls for more climate change risk analysis. Street art proclaims ‘Don’t Frack the NT’ in Melbourne.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Plants and growth: where to plant 60 billion trees in the USA; climate change destroying kelp forests; burning biomass destroys native forests and fuels climate change; and forbs disappearing from Victoria’s basalt plains. Plus degrowth, of the economy rather than vegetation.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Greta Thunberg accuses world leaders of pretending to tackle climate change. Ecocide gets a legal definition – President Bolsonaro beware! Economic viability of gas power plants justified on false assumptions and lots of reasons why nuclear isn’t the answer either. Australia’s emissions per person not as praiseworthy as the government would have us believe.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Marine algal blooms are increasing but not everywhere, while bottom trawling fishing releases vast amounts of CO2. Earth is trapping even more solar energy than expected: anthropogenic or meteorological? Whichever, every fraction of a degree of global warming wipes out another glacier. Lessons from wartime Canada.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Food farming is an important source of air pollution, no matter how much the industry denies it. Urgent measures needed to ensure that the energy transition has the metals it needs. Thirty years of climate change diplomacy doesn’t seem to have achieved much.
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Sunday environmental round up, 20 June 2021
The harmful health effects of climate change are under-recognised. Calls for a socio-ecological approach to tackling climate change and biodiversity loss together. Trends in the reporting of climate science. ‘Zombie’ fires in northern boreal forests, and LGBQTI+ activists stand up for climate change and human rights.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Ecosocialist advice for the G7’s leaders and encouragement to read a recent P&I article on carbon accounting. The price of solar panels is rising slightly and our sylvan friends are emitting ‘treethane’. Finally, a plea to dog owners.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Chemical pollution is an under-appreciated threat to our oceans. China and the OECD are now running neck-and-neck on greenhouse gas emissions but Australia’s major overseas coal and gas customers place their bets elsewhere as ‘Net Zero’ starts to make a strong run in the 2050 Survival Stakes.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Only a quarter of Earth’s land was ‘wild’ 12,000 years ago. Tropical deforestation increases despite international agreements to stop it by 2030. Plans to save Australia’s 50 most threatened plants, six unburnt forests on the east coast, and WA’s native vegetation.
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Sunday environmental round up.
The International Energy Agency recognises the climate emergency and plots a course to net zero, plus NGOs give world leaders advice on how to ensure Glasgow’s COP26 is a success. An Australian construction company tells a government inquiry that working for Adani is uninsurable. Stunning photo of Earth’s thin, life-preserving air-bag.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Energy use is soaring in 2021 after COVID reduced demand in 2020. Renewables are approaching take-off in the USA, while the Australian government continues to load them with ballast. Call for health care services globally to reduce their large carbon footprint.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Vast foreign debts hobble the efforts of poor countries to pursue climate action. Ways to reduce the embodied carbon emissions in buildings. Traditional owners fight back against Adani. German court forces government to take stronger climate action.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Geopolitics and climate change combine to damage lives and environments in Iraq, but moves to make ecocide a crime. APRA invites comments on its guidance for the financial sector on climate change, while Scotty used emissions per person to mislead the world.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Sharan Burrow paints a picture of an inclusive future. Northern summers getting hotter but Australia’s environment deteriorates. Oil companies greenwashing activities exposed. Lessons from Germany about how to exit coal (if you want to, that is).
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Sunday environmental round up.
‘Net-zero emissions’: is it just greenwashing for business-as-usual? Despite the COVID-induced global economic slowdown, deforestation and the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouses gases both increased in 2020. Limited bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef this summer.
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Sunday environmental round up, 11 April 2021
Factions of the Liberal and National parties continue their coal wars in NSW. Scientists in the USA recommend solar geoengineering research but a community backlash delays experiments in Sweden. Health workers hold up the Adani’s mine development.
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Sunday environmental round up, 4 April 2021
Colonialism and racism’s longstanding and ongoing links to climate change. Six principles for decarbonising industry, VW on Tesla’s tail, and a new, free, online course on climate change.
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Sunday environmental round up, 28 March 2021
Eight tips to save insects from catastrophic (for them and us) decline, followed by articles on a green COVID-recovery and the energy transition, including Do’s and Don’ts for subsidising hydrogen.
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Sunday environmental round up, 21 March 2021
Last chance to have a say on the review of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Increasing temperatures are changing the climate-defining currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Forests being lost to provide wood to burn for electricity and land for agriculture. Hotchpotch of rules govern single-use plastics across Australia.
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Sunday environmental round up.
Threats to human existence – not what you might expect. The lightly tapped potential of energy efficiency (turning off your computer camera helps) and the heavily exploited pangolins. Cormann’s Pauline conversion to climate action on the plane to Paris undermined by sceptics.
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Sunday environmental round up, 7 March 2021
UK’s and Canada’s ‘Powering Past Coal’ promises look hollow, as do many companies’ ‘net zero’ commitments. Ecosystems already collapsing globally and in Australia. EVs and loose leaf tea are better for the environment. And a historical quiz.
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Sunday environmental round up, 28 February 2021
Australia’s rooftop solar is burying coal while chilly Texas provides lessons about the energy transition. Four storey buildings with a courtyard provide the most energy efficient homes. Extinction in six minutes (the facts not the event), and native snails coming back from near extinction on Lord Howe.
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Sunday environmental round up, 21 February 2021
Stories from Guyana, USA and south west Africa illustrate the local dangers of oil and gas developments, while oil companies globally are struggling. Stories from Nicaragua, Cambodia, India and Lizard Island about the effects of climate change on communities and nature.
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Sunday environmental round up, 14 February 2021
Australian coal causes at least 320,000 premature deaths globally every year – six times more people than the industry employs. Coal from a fully operational Galilee Basin will cause approximately 200,000 premature deaths per year. Australia’s whole fossil fuel industry employs only 133,000 people. Electric vehicle prices falling. Sawfish severely threatened.
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Sunday environmental round up. The bells are tolling for coal. Is Fitzgibbon deaf?
Lots about Australia this week: sharks in greater peril from humans than vice versa; bells tolling, albeit still distantly, for coking coal and more loudly for thermal coal; gas industry captures the WA government; evidence that last year’s bushfires were linked to climate change.
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Taxpayers’ $50m gift to gas in Beetaloo Basin sums up the crisis: Environmental round-up Jan 31
Heat causes climate change and climate change causes humans to produce reports: reports documenting the worsening problem and its causes; reports about the actions needed but not being taken; and reports about actions that should be avoided but are taken any way. And through it all, we keep burning coal.