Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Farmers praised the move, but scientists and opposition parties criticised it as ‘weak’ and ‘unambitious’ Environmental campaigners have accused New Zealand’s government of “full-blown climate denial” after it slashed targets for reducing emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. New Zealand’s right-leaning coalition government outlined plans on Sunday to reduce methane emissions by between 14 and 24% by 2050, compared to 2017 levels. Continue reading...

Europe and Brazil have a rare opportunity, unimpeded by the US, to make a success of Cop30 – and reshape the world order The climate crisis, Donald Trump told the UN last month, is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. With these words the US president rejected the international scientific consensus and evidence that we can all check daily with a basic thermometer. He has also announced he is withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, signed in 2015 by 195 UN countries. The US joins an axis of deniers including Yemen, Iran and Libya, countries that signed the agreement but never ratified it. Paradoxically, Trump’s reversal provides an opportunity for others to advance the climate agenda: to sketch out the blueprint of a possible new world order without the US, even if Washington was the architect of the old one. Francesco Grillo is a visiting fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and director of the thinktank Vision Continue reading...

A 2% blend of low-carbon gas injected into gas grid to fuel Brigg power station in North Lincolnshire is a UK first Energy companies have injected green hydrogen into Britain’s gas grid and used the low-carbon gas to generate electricity, in a landmark development for the UK’s climate ambitions. For the first time in the UK, a 2% blend of green hydrogen was injected into the gas grid and blended with traditional gas to fuel the Brigg power station in North Lincolnshire which generated electricity for the power system. Continue reading...

Rachel Reeves’s drive to speed up development is beginning to treat wildlife and the environment as expendable. Voters want homes built, but not at any cost It began with gastropods. Last Tuesday, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told a conference of tech executives that she’d intervened to help a developer build about 20,000 homes in north Sussex that had been held up, she said, by “some snails … a protected species or something”. She added that they “are microscopic … you cannot even see” them. No one could miss the direction the chancellor was headed in. The snail in question, the lesser whirlpool ramshorn, is one of Britain’s rarest freshwater creatures, found in only a handful of locations and highly sensitive to sewage pollution. But Ms Reeves portrayed it as a bureaucratic nuisance. She then bragged that she’d fixed it – after a friendly developer gave her a call. It’s a bad look for a Labour politician, let alone the chancellor, to boast that green rules can be bent for chums. Continue reading...