Climate activists are increasingly using the courts to challenge development approvals and change the law, but so are action delayers. Access to electricity is increasing worldwide, but fossil fuels still dominate electricity production.
Category: Climate
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Environment: NSW’s environmental assessment process for logging ignores the previous 200 years
Ignoring 200 years of native forest logging underestimates the consequences of current logging. Beware of false solutions for plastic pollution. How to make your garden bird-friendly.
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Environment: Peak oil is close but the descent will be slow
Peak oil is imminent but it will be a long time before we return to base camp. China surging ahead with solar while continuing to burn coal. NATO produces the equivalent of half of Australia’s annual CO2 emissions.
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Environment: hole in the ozone layer: the patient is improving but still needs intensive care
The hole in the Antarctic’s ozone layer is recovering but very slowly. How to eat seafood sustainably, restoring our disappearing mangroves and cemeteries for the living. (more…)
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Five things we learned this week from Ted’s Talk and people who actually know stuff
The Ted Talk: Not reading the room? Chutzpah? Or maybe the Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien was simply unaware that he wasn’t speaking to the local town hall meeting, Sky after Dark or the Institute of Public Affairs.
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Environment: burning wood in power stations doesn’t help the climate
The living, not our forebears, have put most of the CO2 into the atmosphere. Substituting wood for coal in power stations doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions. A little warmth helps bell frogs fight chytrid fungus.
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The gas industry has power and freedom to wreck the world
By now many citizens of our planet recognise that the destructiveness of climate change is moving faster than they imagined, leaving our defences at serious risk and even the money men are concerned about the burgeoning costs and possible economic collapse. (more…)
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Environment: will humans behave like monkeys when climate apocalypse strikes?
Summers right across the northern hemisphere are getting hotter but vegetation can lower the temperature locally. Macaques show humans how to cope with hotter conditions. Poor progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
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Environment: banks still bankrolling fossil fuels
Big banks keep providing big money to fossil fuel companies but it’s time for the Global North to invest for the future and pay its historic climate debt to the Global South. Diminishing Sagebrush is threatening the USA’s Greater sage-grouse.
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Environment: eating responsibly – less bottled water and even less meat
Bottled water is not good for the environment or your health. If you eat meat, eating less is good for both. Governments are unreliable protectors of forests and human rights (but you knew that already).
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Peter Dutton: climate denialist – peddler of danger
Peter Dutton is a charlatan – an inveterate climate change denialist. (more…)
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Environment: Solar gets cheaper but more oil and gas is what we’re promised
As solar panels get cheaper, companies and governments commit to increasing oil and gas production. Community opposition to wind farms funded by fossil fuel interests. Indigenous languages threatened by climate change.
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Environment: Pacific politician calls out Australia’s climate duplicity
The temperature is rising and the world is getting increasingly dangerous, even the rich bits. Former Tuvalu PM slams Australia’s climate policies. Rights of and around rivers.
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How to stop climate change
Bronwyn Kelly interviews prominent science writer and researcher Julian Cribb on key strategies that we will need for dealing with the significant environmental disasters we are facing in the age of climate change. (more…)
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Environment: When will politicians take climate change seriously?
Both the WHO and UN may be starting to take seriously the effects of climate change on health. A global plan to save 1,000 freshwater fish from extinction. Covid reverses life expectancy at birth. (more…)
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Environment: Government delivers climate rhetoric but not emissions reductions
Australia’s emissions reductions have stalled just when we need to be ramping up ambition and action. Concrete’s emissions set to be high for decades.
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Environment: CO2 emissions still increasing
CO2 emissions continued to increase in 2023 with now little chance of global warming staying under 1.5oC. Planting trees is part of the solution but only in the longer term. Even Hollywood is getting the message.
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Environment: Expert calls Australia’s carbon offset scheme a scam
Australia’s carbon offset scheme costs a lot and captures almost no carbon but provides a fig leaf for continuing emissions. Technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal is still a distant dream. Distributed energy resources can be the Swiss Army knife of the electricity system.
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Coral catastrophe signals our own undoing
Five times in the history of life on Earth the corals have perished, swept from the board by conditions hostile to nearly all life. Each time, it has taken them millions of years to evolve anew. Each mass death of corals has been accompanied by the mass deaths of most other species, on land and at sea. (more…)
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Environment: Oil and gas producers underreport methane emissions
How accurately are methane emissions reported and whose estimates can you believe? Who should be the last producers of oil and gas? What are Australia’s commonest birds?
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‘Worst I have seen’: 75% of Great Barrier Reef suffers coral bleaching
“We are really running out of time. We need to reduce our emissions immediately,” one expert warned. “We cannot expect to save the Great Barrier Reef and be opening new fossil fuel developments.” (more…)
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Peter Dutton’s nuclear power policy is a ‘suicide note’
Peter Dutton thinks the Coalition is on a winner by promoting nuclear power but unbiased opinion polls find that support for nuclear power in Australia falls short of a majority, that Australians much prefer renewables, and most do not want nuclear reactors built near where they live. (more…)
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China’s quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy
There is now a policy dispute about the roles of nuclear and renewable energy in future Australian low emission energy systems. The experience of China over more than a decade provides compelling evidence on how this debate will be resolved. In December 2011 China’s National Energy Administration announced that China would make nuclear energy the foundation of its electricity generation system in the next “10 to 20 years”. Just over a decade later China has wound back those ambitious targets and reoriented its low emission energy strategy around the rapid deployment of renewable solar and wind energy at unprecedented rates. (more…)
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Environment: Fossil fuel company profits are delaying grid decarbonisation
Securing a liveable planet and the retail price of electricity are important but current fossil fuel profit margins are slowing grid decarbonisation. Water temperature in the Pacific is influencing methane emissions in the sub-Arctic. Enjoy nature this Easter.
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Environment: Booming oil and gas profits mainly benefit shareholders
The oil market is twice as large as all ten largest metal markets combined. Most oil and gas profits go to shareholders, not reinvestment in the industry. Since 2001 only 5 months have been cooler than the average for 1981-2010. Extinction Rebellion perform at the National Gallery of Victoria.
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Environment: Oil and gas making massive profits now but stormy waters ahead
Shrinking demand signifies rocky times ahead for many individual oil and gas producers but the industry will survive for decades yet. Emissions from farming and forestry aside, Australia’s emissions have been stagnant for 20 years. Feral pigs are destroying our wetlands and rivers.
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Transforming for human survival: a challenge to ACT Legislators
It is not difficult to understand, nor to agree, with the growing numbers of thoughtful people who argue that humanity is on the brink of extinction. And that, without transformational change in the way, we think, and live, our descendants are doomed. (more…)
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Environment: Cryptocurrency using as much electricity as Sub-Saharan Africa
Renewables are about to supply the annual increase in electricity usage globally but cryptocurrency’s power demands are surging. Most industrial fishing vessels are untracked, including those around Australia. Climate change has already caused 4 million deaths. (more…)
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Environment: Putting a price on carbon: is it worth all the trouble?
Economic theory supports a price on carbon but implemented schemes struggle to deliver emissions reductions. China firmly in the EV driving seat. Climate action is failing to meet its targets globally.
