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Exclusive: Ed Miliband calls for creation of ‘zero-carbon army’ for eco-friendly industries

• Is Covid-19 crisis the catalyst for the greening of world’s airlines?

Labour is drawing up ambitious proposals to rescue the post-coronavirus economy with a radical green recovery plan focused on helping young people who lose their jobs by retraining them in green industries.

Seeking to seize the initiative on the country’s future direction once the pandemic abates, Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, has called for the plans to include creating a “zero-carbon army of young people” doing work such as planting trees, insulating buildings and working on green technologies.

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We can see and feel the benefits of reduced fossil fuel use: cleaner air, quieter spaces, healthier local environments, and increased walking and cycling. A good time for a carbon fee.

The post Five reasons why now is a good time for a fee on carbon emissions appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Baby orangutans are learning new skills from their human surrogate parents.

Manchester is spearheading a new effort to create space for walking and cycling.

Carlsberg and Coca-Cola back pioneering project to make ‘all-plant’ drinks bottles

Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from “all-plant” bottles under new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership with major beverage makers.

A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.

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Summer holidays abroad look doomed, but there is comfort and reward to be found just by being curious about your surroundings

It’s likely that we will all be spending time in our local areas for the foreseeable future and taking our holidays in our home countries rather than abroad. Could we bring to these experiences the same kind of curiosity we might feel when visiting a different city or landscape? Is it possible to find dynamism and novelty in our parks, streets and woodlands?

During lockdown, I’ve come to know my nearest green spaces – my favourite a wild but urban cemetery – more deeply and gratefully. Instead of becoming bored, as I imagined I might, I’ve found that my local natural areas feel like new destinations each day, even by the hour, for nature is in constant flux. Bird songs are richest at dawn and dusk. The wild garlic smells stronger when the soil is warm. The nettles glow Kermit-green when the sun is low in the sky. The scarlet pimpernel shows itself when light and humidity are just so.

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Birds born in one of three nests at Knepp estate in West Sussex as part of breeding project

White stork chicks have hatched in the wild in the UK for the first time in centuries.

Eggs in one of three nests at the Knepp estate in West Sussex have hatched, the White Stork Project announced.

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Scientists use the precious element to grade the quality of the natural sweetener.

Horticulturists urge better sex mix of city trees to mitigate rising asthma and CO2 pollution levels

Eight years ago Tom Ogren, a horticulturist, was in Sacramento, California, when he noticed that the ground around the State Capitol building was covered in thick yellow pollen.

Scanning the trees along the street with his binoculars, he saw the trees were all deodar cedars (Cedrus deodara) and all cultivated males.

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

Speculators trimmed their length in the California Carbon Allowance (CCA) market as the secondary market trended back towards the WCI floor price, with compliance entities adding to their holdings during that period,US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data showed Friday.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s revised budget proposal released Thursday anticipates reduced revenue from quarterly cap-and-trade auctions in the next fiscal year, with a flexible mechanism to allocate funding based on future ETS proceeds.

The US Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) postponed the final Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for its proposed fuel sector cap-and-trade scheme until this fall in light of the impacts from the coronavirus pandemic, according to an updated timeline released Friday afternoon.

The UK’s first climate assembly is holding its final sessions this weekend.

EU member states and the UK handed out nearly half a million more free EUAs to industry for 2020 over the past two weeks, data released by the European Commission late Friday showed.

The pick of the world’s best flora and fauna photos, including a leaping peacock and deer on a platform of the West Highland Line

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The BDI is the umbrella organisation of German industry and industry-related service providers. It represents 40 industrial sector federations and has 15 regional offices in the German federal states. The BDI speaks for more than 100,000 private enterprises employing around 8 million people.

The European Commission this week quietly published over 12 years’ worth of trading records from the EU ETS emissions registry, offering a comprehensive glimpse of how hundreds of billions tonnes of CO2 were shifted across more than a million transactions.

Low oil and gas prices are no boon for the climate in the short term, but they give us a window into a future of ever-decreasing fossil fuel demand that may deter expansion an opportunity to put in place policies that get us paying to decarbonise the fossil fuels we dig up, argues Eli Mitchell-Larson of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

Military scientists at Porton Down have shown the BBC the work they are doing investigating coronavirus.