Around The Web

More than 260 installations and airlines operating under the EU ETS, or just over 2% of the total covered, were listed as being in non-compliance with the scheme for 2017, data published by the European Commission on Wednesday showed.

We waste £13bn worth of food each year in the UK, with 71% of that being wasted at home. At the same time, use of food banks has boomed. Is Olio the answer?

I am walking with a woman named Kerry, whom I have just met, to her car. She is in her mid-30s and has a tinge of attitude, as if she came to London to fix it. When we reach her car, she opens the boot. Inside are hundreds of industrial-sized tubs of hummus, enough to power Brighton for a week.

I met Kerry online, not via some kind of hummus-appreciation society messageboard, but on Olio, an app that is attempting to end food waste at home by letting people upload details of the food they would otherwise chuck out, so that others living nearby can take it off their hands. I am trying out the app for a couple of weeks to see if it can reduce my own waste to zero (and to see if I can get some freebies).

Continue reading...

The European Commission has proposed to earmark a fifth of EU ETS auction revenue for the post-Brexit 2021-2027 central EU budget, for which it wants to raise climate-related spending by 5%.

In his last paper, the Cambridge physicist tackles multiple universes and a cosmic paradox.

Women in the US Forest Service love what they do. But they also describe a toxic male environment that tolerates, and even promotes, their harassers

Denice Rice handles things for herself. A more than 20-year veteran of the US Forest Service’s wildfire operations, she’s spent weeks at a time working blazes deep in the wilderness. So she thought she could manage when, in 2009, her new second-in-line supervisor started giving her unwanted attention. “He immediately befriended me and started mentoring me, and from there it just got weird,” she remembers.

For two years she said nothing. “He’d get handsy and then I’d snap and make him back off and it would stop for a while, and then it would start up again.” But in 2011, the two got into an argument and he assaulted her, poking her breasts with a letter opener, as she related in 2016 testimony before a congressional committee examining sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the forest service. The man did it “with a smile on his face in an arrogant way like he could get away with it. And I stood there in shock.”

Continue reading...

One of Australia’s leading climate and energy policy experts has taken up a new role as senior climate and energy advisor to the Victorian state government.

The Aboriginal Carbon Fund has launched a new fund seeking to trade carbon credits that provide additional environmental, social and cultural benefits for indigenous communities in Australia.

If Australia wants to use international carbon credits to meet its Paris target it should start seeking out potential bilateral partnerships now, but may find many governments reluctant to export them, according to observers.

"I can assure you that, unless there's a change of technology, there would be absolutely no way that anybody would be financing a new coal-fired generation plant."

More than 5,000 wet wipes found in an area next to the Thames the size of two football pitches

Wet wipes are changing the shape of British riverbeds, campaigners said after finding more than 5,000 of them alongside the Thames in an area the size of two football pitches.

Thames 21, a London environmental organisation that cleans up rivers and canals, retrieved 5,453 wet wipes during an operation last month in 116 sq m of the Thames embankment near Hammersmith. The haul was an increase of nearly a thousand over last year’s total (which took place on a larger riverbank area).

Continue reading...

The ‘Jilamito Five’ are the latest to be caught up in battles over land and natural resources, that have seen more than 130 defenders killed since 2009

The suspects pray together on a concrete podium opposite the courthouse where they face criminal charges. Their alleged misdemeanour: “land invasion” during a protest against the construction of a dam. A guilty verdict could bring a jail term of up to four years.

If that seems harsh, then it’s because this is Honduras, where hundreds have been jailed and scores killed for environmental activism over the past decade. The accused – a teacher, hardware-store owner, farmers and the newly elected municipal mayor – are opposed to a dam on the Jilamito river in the tropical region of Atlántida. The authorities are hoping a prosecution will enable them to clear a makeshift community blockade in the remote hilly pastures so construction can begin.

Continue reading...

Frydenberg says Labor's emissions reduction target of 45% is "recklessly high," and at "extremes of the debate." He must have missed Macron's speech.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire: I collect leaves of garlic mustard, ground ivy, nettle, dandelion, cow parsley and lords and ladies, roll them into a ball and inhale

Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, has suddenly materialised in the hedgebank: white, cruciform flowers of the cabbage family with skin-like apple-green, dog-toothed, glossy leaves. In the white pulse of spring, with dazzling blackthorn and wild cherry above and an under-flow of wood anemone, wild garlic, white deadnettle (where all the carder bees are), and cow parsley coming, less flashy plants such as garlic mustard are often overlooked. There are the blues of forget-me-not (some of which are also white), ground ivy, bluebell, dog and sweet violet and the yellows of dandelion, cowslip, primrose and the last of the celandines. But spring is not all about colours, it’s also about scent. When touched, the leaves of garlic mustard smell, as their name suggests, of a mustardy garlic. Those of ground ivy, Glechoma hederacea of the mint family, smell somewhere between catnip and cat pee.

The hedgebank is full of the fragrance of verdure. I collect leaves of garlic mustard, ground ivy, nettle, dandelion, cow parsley and lords and ladies, roll them into a ball and inhale their fragrance as if the green grenade of hedge weeds is a rose. It’s not a fragrance that unravels itself into its constituent parts but instead creates something else. The smell is funky and fresh, full of the chemical language of plants, sending signals into the damp spring air to flow and make meaning through the hedges, just like birdsong. This smell is full of the doings of plants that have pushed out of the earth, bringing something of its dark essence into the light.

Continue reading...

A unique view - from the sky - of Australia's accelerating uptake of renewable energy, and rooftop solar in particular.

The promise of blockchain has been to cut out the bloated and inefficient middleman, so it is natural that platforms would emerge targeting the retail value stream.

A new Melbourne hotel will set new design standards in energy efficiency to help cut as much as 25 per cent of its energy consumption, drawing on a $39 million investment commitment from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Western Sydney University is sending its Solar Car Team to the other side of the globe – as the first Australian team to ever compete in the American Solar Challenge (ASC).

Sapphire wind farms turns on 100MW of capacity to help meet ACT 100% renewables target, with more wind and solar to come.

Northumbrian Water signs deal with LightsourceBP to build 10 solar farms and help achieve its goal of being carbon neutral.

A new initiative that allows both renters and landlords to cash in on the benefits of rooftop solar energy has been unveiled for Victoria.