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European carbon prices are poised to tumble below €23 to their lowest in at least six months on Monday, traders said, as crude oil crashed and wider financial markets plummeted Sunday night.

Expanded carbon pricing could ensure the UK meets its net zero 2050 emission target while leaving poorer households better off, according to two linked reports published Monday.

Global power sector emissions and coal-fired power generation saw the biggest falls in 2019 since 1990, though maintaining such a trend to limit global warming to 1.5C will be "extremely difficult, a report found on Monday.

Tesla's dominant position in the Australian electric car market continues to grow, as it claims 80% of new EV sales to date in 2020 and Australian EV market climbs to around 17,600 vehicles.

The post Tesla claims 80% of Australian market as EVs near 18,000 mark appeared first on RenewEconomy.

The drought has pushed many trees to the brink, and whole stands are now dying. The ecological consequences are huge. Rachael Helene Nolan, Postdoctoral research fellow, Western Sydney University Belinda Medlyn, Professor, Western Sydney University Brendan Choat, Associate Professor, Western Sydney University Rhiannon Smith, Research Fellow, University of New England Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

By using public money to protect California homes from climate change, the state is transferring wealth from working-class people of color to white property owners

Even by the standards of overpriced San Francisco, the Sea Cliff neighborhood is astronomically expensive. Nestled between two gorgeous parks and with what a realtor might describe as commanding views of the Golden Gate, it could hardly be different. Homes in the area routinely go for more than $10m. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and the payment service Square, recently bought a place here for $21.5m – next door to his $18m present home. The 0.62 acre compound is recessed from the street and perched on a cliff overlooking the beach.

Related: The Clean Water Act was a staggering bipartisan achievement. Now Trump is gutting it | Blan Holman

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President of preservation society says councils are failing in duty to protect heritage as craze for exploring derelict buildings grows

Griff Rhys Jones, the president of the Victorian Society, has urged councils to protect derelict buildings that are of huge importance to Britain’s industrial heritage. His intervention followed a surge in vandalism at such sites, triggered in part by the new-found popularity of exploring abandoned buildings.

Last month it emerged that Shotton steelworks in north Wales – one of the society’s 10 most endangered buildings in 2018 – had been badly damaged. According to reports, vandals had knocked down partition walls, destroyed ornate panelling, and kicked in walls. Several fires had been lit and tiles thrown off the roof.

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Report challenges justification for government underwriting of up to five new gas-fired generators

Australia’s existing gas power plants are running well below capacity, challenging the justification for a Morrison government program that may support up to five new gas-fired generators, according to a new report.

Energy analyst Hugh Saddler, from Australian National University’s Crawford school of public policy, found the combined-cycle gas plants in the national grid – those expected to be available near constantly, sometimes described as “baseload” – ran at just 30% capacity across the past 18 months.

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Pre-eminent Australian wildlife photographer Doug Gimesy has dedicated his career to the protection and conservation of some of the country’s most vulnerable species. He gets up close and personal with exquisite native animals to reveal them in perfect detail. All these species have suffered big losses during the recent drought, bushfires and floods. All captive animals were photographed under close supervision from wildlife experts.

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Feelings of powerlessness and despair for the future are evident in letters written for a six-year ‘passion project’

In 2014, Joe Duggan started reaching out to climate scientists to ask them a question: how did climate change make them feel?

“I was just blown away when I started getting the letters back,” he says.

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Environmental groups fear link between huge ships and spikes in dolphin deaths

Brexit offers the perfect opportunity to ban industrial supertrawler fishing boats from UK waters, according to campaigners.

The factory-sized ships can be hundreds of feet long and have been criticised for indiscriminate fishing as they catch hundreds of thousands of fish in short periods. Environmentalists fear their presence correlates with spikes in numbers of dolphins washing up dead.

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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

EU member states and the UK have distributed more than 70% of the allowances earmarked for free allocation to industrial emitters this year, according to data released late Friday by the European Commission, with three governments having not yet started the annual process.

The Alberta United Conservative Party (UCP) government will increase the carbon charge under the Technology Innovation and Emission Reduction (TIER) regime to C$50/tonne by 2022 in line with Ottawa’s backstop CO2 pricing requirement, a shift from the Canadian province’s previous approach.

Demand from emitters in Germany’s weekly auctions dropped to a 10-month low in January, a government report shows.

A summary of legislative and regulatory action on carbon pricing and clean energy at the US subnational and federal level this week, including developments in Washington, New York, and Hawaii.

A ruling in favour of the Trump administration’s challenge of the California-Quebec ETS linkage could endanger the status of countless US state compacts, including the RGGI power sector carbon market, if the case arrives at the Supreme Court, legal experts said.

Campaigners press chancellor for clear signal UK government is taking Cop26 seriously

Climate campaigners are urging the government to set out a clear plan for a low-carbon future in next week’s budget, despite the chancellor’s decision to pull a major plank of climate policy at the last minute.

The budget will determine much of the government’s work this year, and campaigners fear that a failure to send clear signals on meeting the 2050 net zero emissions target would play badly with other countries looking to the UK for leadership as host of the vital UN climate talks, called Cop26, later this year.

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The pick of the world’s best flora and fauna photos, including swimming cheetahs and an albino orangutan

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Virginia Democrats agreed final revisions to legislation to allow the state to implement its RGGI-modelled carbon market regulation with state-run allowance auctions, putting it on the path to final approval.