Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Communities, states and advocacy groups push to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for role in climate crisis Big oil is facing a soaring number of climate-focused lawsuits, a new analysis has found. It’s a sign that more communities are demanding accountability for the industry’s contributions to the climate crisis. For the report, published on Thursday, Oil Change International and the climate research organization Zero Carbon Analytics pulled data from a Columbia University database, focusing on cases in which the world’s 25 largest fossil fuel producers were named as defendants. Continue reading...

Grand schemes, many backed by governments, masquerade as positive action on the environment. They should be disowned Let’s talk about perceptionware. Perceptionware is technology whose main purpose is to create an impression of action. Whether it will ever work at scale is less important, in some cases entirely beside the point. If it reassures the public and persuades government not to regulate damaging industries, that’s mission accomplished. Managing perceptions is an expensive business. Real money, especially public money, is spent on fake solutions. Take carbon capture and storage: catching and burying carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, oil and gas fields, and steel and cement plants. For 20 years, it has spectacularly failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its only clear successes involve enhanced oil recovery: carbon dioxide is used to drive oil out of geological formations that are otherwise difficult to exploit. With astonishing chutzpah, some oil companies have claimed the small amount of carbon that remains trapped in the rocks as a climate benefit. Though it is greatly outweighed by the extra oil extracted, they have, as a result, received billions in government subsidies. Continue reading...

With Sweden issuing permits to kill a fifth of its bears, and Romanian MPs voting to double its quota, the debate over hunting season has become a political issue The forest was unnaturally still when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first picked up the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the hills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists biking and foraging for mushrooms. Fellow hunters who had come face to face with bears had told Supeková the fear had been so great they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with her father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed a few bears, she found herself in a similar state of dread – she was out on that trip expecting to kill deer, and did not want to come on a bear unexpectedly. “Fear permeated me … the smell penetrated to the tip of my bones,” says Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear never appeared. The next morning, the daughter-and-father hunting duo saw its droppings. “We breathed a sigh of relief only in the car.” Continue reading...

David Moot nabs ‘dream’ Cape Cod home next to eroding cliff in imminent danger of crumbling due to climate crisis A man who says life’s too short to resist buying a home that might fall off a cliff in a few years has taken ownership of a house with a beautiful view that’s just 25ft (7.6 metres) from a sandy, crumbling cliff. David Moot paid $395,000 for the house on Cape Cod on the Massachusetts coast and said he intends to enjoy it while it lasts. Continue reading...