Breaking Waves: Ocean News

ASA says online ads from Aira and EDF Energy omitted key facts about eligibility for government grants Two more “misleading” adverts promoting heat pumps have been banned by the UK’s advertising watchdog. A week after the Advertising Standards Authority banned an Octopus Energy ad that claimed consumers could have a heat pump installed for as little as £500, it has taken action against adverts from the home heating supplier Aira and from EDF Energy. Continue reading...

More than 100 million ‘novel entity’ chemicals are in circulation, with health impact not widely recognised Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned. The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities”, or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer. Continue reading...

Australia’s political landscape is barely recognisable from four years ago. Will Labor abandon its risk-averse past and take an aggressive stance on emissions? Want to get this in your inbox when it publishes? Sign up for the Clear Air Australia newsletter here In 2021, the Labor party was in a bit of a climate crouch. It needed policies that could be presented at the 2022 election as credible steps towards addressing the century’s greatest social and economic challenge after nine years of the Coalition doing next-to-nothing, or less. It also felt it needed to not leave itself exposed to another round of damaging climate scare campaigns from its opponents in the Morrison government, industry lobby groups and the media, particularly at News Corp. It had experienced too many of those, from claims that a lamb roast would cost more than $100 and Whyalla would be wiped from the map, to baseless attacks in 2019 that its policies would cost an economy wrecking $60bn and, ludicrously, stop people enjoying weekends. Continue reading...

Delegates at UN treaty talks must not allow negotiations to be derailed again by fossil fuel interests Plastic pollution has reached the most remote and inaccessible parts of our beleaguered planet. It has been found in Greenland’s ice cap, near the summit of Mount Everest, and in the deepest depths of the western Pacific Ocean. Nature programmes have sounded the alarm over a human-made crisis that has become an environmental scourge and a serious threat to our health. Yet global production of plastics is on course to triple to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060, after increasing by more than 200 times over the past 75 years. This gloomy backdrop should inject a sense of urgency into UN-convened talks in Switzerland this week, aimed at agreeing a binding global plastics treaty. In 2022, when 173 countries committed to work towards such an accord, there was widespread relief that at last a multilateral route was to be taken towards solving a quintessentially global problem. Sadly, as delegates gather in Geneva, there are reasons to be fearful. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...