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It's been the busiest week for renewable energy misinformers in recent years. Google's new partnership with Sky News is going to supercharge the problem.

The post Google’s Sky News Australia team-up will make it a climate misinformation powerhouse appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A group of 11 trade associations representing banks, asset managers, and investment and pension funds endorsed a CO2 price on Thursday as a strategy to transitioning the US to a low-carbon economy, with growing support for such a policy from the business and financial community.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) remains unable to access Britain’s carbon market MRV system or receive correspondence from big emitters after a major cyberattack targeted the regulator almost two months ago.

The six-wheeled robot survives a hair-raising, seven-minute descent to the surface of the Red Planet.

EUAs made slight gains on Thursday, halting a three-day losing streak as some market participants targeted a rapid return to the record levels of earlier this week.

With their prominent foreheads, low eye position and rounded body, koalas can seem almost baby-like. But is that enough to save them? Kevin Markwell, Adjunct Professor, Southern Cross University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Rivers are biodiversity hotspots but pollution, dams and invasive species have caused havoc

Rivers in which fish populations have escaped serious damage from human activities make up just 14% of the world’s river basin area, according to the most comprehensive study to date.

Scientists found that the biodiversity of more than half of rivers had been profoundly affected, with big fish such as sturgeon replaced by invasive species such as catfish and Asian carp. Pollution, dams, overfishing, farm irrigation and rising temperatures due to the climate crisis are also to blame.

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The outages endured by residents result from the state’s political decisions – but all of us need to think more about ensuring resilience

Though the desperate conditions that millions of Texans have suffered for days were triggered by a powerful winter storm, the underlying issues are the work of human beings. At least 2.7 million households were still without power on Wednesday, and nearly 12 million faced water quality issues. Hospitals ran out of water. Families have burned belongings to keep their children warm.

As bizarre as it may seem that residents of the biggest energy-producing state in the US can be left powerless for so long, these problems were foreseen. While Republican leaders in Texas have blamed a reliance on renewable energy, it was mostly natural gas plants that failed, with a reactor at a nuclear facility also forced offline. The desire to stay free from federal oversight means that Texas has a stand-alone grid, preventing it from importing power. The lack of regulation meant that price competition took precedence over stability of service. The grid’s operator was warned following power outages 10 years ago that equipment needed to be protected against extreme low temperatures, but failed to act. The system prioritised profits instead of the people it was supposed to serve.

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A Texas-based environmental trader has joined a Tennessee-based fuel supplier with obligations in the WCI cap-and-trade market, Carbon Pulse has learned.

The EU’s prospective carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) will likely take the shape of a ‘notional’ emissions market, the 27-nation bloc’s trade chief said on Thursday.

*PREMIUM LISTING (viewable by non-subscribers) – As the Director of Global Reforestation Policy, your efforts will directly impact the strategy we will implement to successfully scale the use of carbon markets to fund reforestation and forest restoration globally and meet our goal of delivering $1 billion to small landowners, NGOs, and communities by 2030.

CF Partners, an established award-winning energy commodity trading firm with a long history in carbon markets, is looking to strengthen the trading team in London through the development of a global carbon origination team. We are looking to hire a project sourcing specialist to lead an origination initiative to identify, acquire and manage carbon project credits for proprietary investment and trading purposes.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Inc. (“RGGI, Inc.”) seeks to hire a Program Associate to be based in New York City.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Inc. (“RGGI, Inc.”) seeks to hire a Program & Communications Associate to be based in New York City.

Morrison government’s inaction is driving away chance to build a new low-emissions economy, industry experts say

Australia risks being left in a “parallel world” with petrol cars as the rest of the world turns to electric vehicles in an effort reduce carbon emissions.

As Ford announced that all its cars sold in Europe would be electric by 2030, industry experts warned Australia faces an uphill struggle to catch up with other nations in preparation for the phasing out of the internal combustion engine.

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From the Komodo’s mouth hang various strands of toxic drool, lightly coated in dust

The goanna wanted an egg. It had climbed a few metres up the trunk of a large cabbage palm and was looking at me: egg. Its nose pointed down, its eyes looked up, like a begging dog, and – distinctly unlike a dog of any kind – it flicked its forked tongue against the bark: egg. Although I was in possession of a carton, I declined the request. I have seen a goanna (Australian for monitor lizard) eat an egg and they have no idea how to do this in a normal way. They crunch the snack whole, a dull look on their faces, as most of the yolk dribbles down the sides of their mouths.

Of course, the best monitor lizard – and champion of disturbing feeding habits – is the Komodo dragon: a big beast that lives on small islands such as Indonesia’s Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang (50,000 years ago, Komodos lived in Australia, too). As the cult internet comic strip Achewood puts it, “Everyone knows that a Komodo Dragon is the biggest, worst lizard of the modern day.”

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UN report offers bedrock for hope for broken planet, says António Guterres

Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said.

Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year.

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Six experts say failure to reform climate finance risks undermining trust in Paris agreement

Taxes on international transport could provide new flows of finance to developing countries to help them reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, a group of climate finance experts have said.

Rich countries are failing on their pledge to provide $100bn a year to help poor countries cope with the climate crisis, and the way in which climate finance is organised needs urgent reform, the six academics argue in an article in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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Increasing land grabs endangering forest communities and wildlife as governments expand mining and agriculture to combat economic impact of Covid

Indigenous communities in some of the world’s most forested tropical countries have faced a wave of human rights abuses during the Covid-19 pandemic as governments prioritise extractive industries in economic recovery plans, according to a new report.

New mines, infrastructure projects and agricultural plantations in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia and Peru are driving land grabs and violence against indigenous peoples as governments seek to revive economies hit by the pandemic, research by the NGO Forest Peoples Programme has found.

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Labels to be attached to posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center

Facebook has said it will start labelling misinformation about the climate crisis in a small trial limited to the UK.

Labels will be attached to certain posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center, a repository of fact-checked claims about the environment.

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