Around The Web

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

A regulatory review of the US Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) due next year could help spark long-awaited legislative efforts to overhaul the federal biofuels policy, according to a former EPA staffer.

London-based private equity firm Three Hills Capital Partners (THCP) has spent more than €60 million to purchase a minority stake in the environmental and energy commodities trading company ACT Group.

LG to offer Australians an end-to-end energy solution from 2019.

The post LG Electronics unveils its first residential energy storage system appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Greens propose to create up to 30 special renewable energy zones across Australia, backed by a $2.8 billon grid transformation fund to help drive towards 100% renewables.

The post Greens propose 30 renewable energy zones, backed by grid fund appeared first on RenewEconomy.

What would it mean if the global warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is not met? Climate Scientist Tim Flannery joins RN Breakfast.

A combination of tectonic plates, geography and poor infrastructure make Indonesia vulnerable to deadly tsunamis. Anja Scheffers, Professor, Southern Cross University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

European carbon closed lower on Tuesday, ending a three-day streak of gains, after a bullish auction result failed to provide the momentum needed to test recent highs.

Centuries of unsustainable agriculture have squeezed massive amounts of nitrogen and carbon out of soils, but scientists think we can pull about 10% of our GHGs out of the air and inject them into soils just by switching to climate-safe agriculture – a practice that could also increase farmers’ yields and save on fertilizer costs.

Japan's space agency (Jaxa) is about to send a 10kg lander to the surface of an asteroid.

Scientists are investigating why around 70 deep water whales have washed up on Scottish and Irish beaches since the beginning of August.

A group of northeast US states could outline a proposal to regulate carbon emissions from the transportation sector later this year, potentially putting them on the path to have a fully-functional programme by 2021, experts said.

New eco-designs for products such as TVs and fridges are also crucial to Europe meeting its climate targets, say experts

New energy efficient eco-designs for 15 products including fridges, TVs and dishwashers have been delayed, EU diplomats say, even though experts consider them “crucial” to meeting Europe’s Paris climate pledge. The delays are also expected to mean consumers will miss out on lower energy bills.

The design revamps would have saved 62m tonnes of CO2 emissions – as much as Sweden’s annual primary energy consumption – but now look set to be dealt with by the next commission, in which far right parties may be more influential.

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Aviation needs to impose a carbon price as high as $200/tonne to incentivise a switch to cleaner fuels and reach zero emissions without offsetting by 2060 in order to align with the Paris Agreement, an expert group told industry leaders on Tuesday.

Liquefaction has caused buildings to collapse in the city of Palu after last Friday's earthquake. This occurs when the earth takes on the characteristics of a liquid after an earthquake. The death toll from the quake and tsunami has passed 1,200

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‘Last Straw’ installation aims to raise awareness of plastic waste as the firm bans single-use straws from UK and Irish stores

Ikea today symbolically unveiled its last single-use plastic straw in a display at London’s Design Museum, after it stopped serving or selling the items in any of its UK and Ireland stores, restaurants and bistros this week.

The so-called Last Straw installation will be on show to the public until Saturday and aims to inspire consumers to collectively take small steps that will have a positive environmental impact.

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While politicians weigh up climate change, scientists say we urgently need to act. Can we take years or decades to move away from fossil fuels or should we need move immediately to renewable energy?

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to a woman for only the third time since the award began.

Korea’s South Chungcheong province on Tuesday became the first Asian jurisdiction to join the UK- and Canadian-led Powering Past Coal Alliance, a move that will see closing dates for 14 coal plants brought forward by up to five years.

In this historically precarious moment, we need something more fundamental than climate strategies built on shame and castigation

There was a barely stifled schadenfreudian glee echoing across the liberal press through this burning hot summer. Environmentalists could scarcely disguise their we-told-you-so smirks as one suffocating heatwave after another rolled over the globe, wildfires savaged landscapes from Siberia to California and broken temperature records kept piling up.

But yearning for catastrophe is an ugly desire, and it is exactly the wrong way to think about global warming. Disasters always hit marginalised people first and worst, and as tempting as it might be to hope the calamities of 2018 bring new kinds of change, that desire only betrays how badly environmentalism needs to be overhauled.

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