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America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Abolish them | Dana Nuccitelli
While we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, America is giving the fossil fuel industry billions to extract more
Imagine that instead of taxing cigarettes, America subsidized the tobacco industry in order to make each pack of smokes cheaper.
A report from Oil Change International (OCI) investigated American energy industry subsidies and found that in 2015–2016, the federal government provided $14.7bn per year to the oil, gas, and coal industries, on top of $5.8bn of state-level incentives (globally, the figure is around $500bn). And the report only accounted for production subsides, excluding consumption subsidies (support to consumers to lower the cost of fossil fuel use – another $14.5bn annually) as well as the costs of carbon and other fossil fuel pollutants.
Continue reading...NZ Market: NZUs see third day of minor corrections as bull run over for now
Big Butterfly Count 2018 – your best pictures
Naturalists including Sir David Attenborough have been encouraging the public to take part in the largest count of its kind. We asked to see some of the images you took while doing so
The Laos disaster reminds us that local people are too often victims of dam development
NEG discriminates against rooftop solar, makes emissions task more expensive
CEFC helps deliver 1,100MW renewables in 2017/18 – says “considerably more work to do”
Conservatives entrench hard line on energy after poll defeats
Country diary 1918: tragic murder of the caterpillar
2 August 1918 Grubs slowly devoured their host, biting their way through the almost empty skin and pupating alongside the unhappy victim
I have received from a correspondent a small natural packet of little cocoons, each neatly swathed in yellow silk and arranged side by side. He found them alongside the shrivelled skin of a caterpillar, and asks: “What tragedy has happened here?” A tragedy indeed for the caterpillar; a very useful murder so far as we are concerned. The cocoons cover the pupae of braconids, little parasitical wasps related to the useful ichneumon flies; the parent stung the caterpillar with her ovipositor, loading its living body with her eggs. Grubs hatched from the eggs, slowly devoured their host, and when it had no longer energy to feed or even crawl bit their way through the almost empty skin and pupated alongside the unhappy victim. A fresh crop of braconids will emerge from these cocoons.
Related: Caterpillars create 'avenue of ghosts' in Cambridge park - in pictures
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Dizzying array of recycling symbols 'is confusing consumers'
Which? says people often don’t understand various symbols found on packaging
A confusing array of symbols on household packaging is leaving consumers in the dark about what can be recycled, research reveals.
Nearly half of respondents to a survey carried out in the UK by consumer group Which? thought that products stamped with the so-called green dot (a circle of two intertwined arrows) were recyclable, when in fact it means only that a manufacturer has paid into a scheme that supports recyclable packaging and systems.
The ozone hole is both an environmental success story and an enduring global threat
Bulk of timber exports from Papua New Guinea won’t pass legal test
Millions of tonnes sent to China, and from there to other countries as finished wood products, should be considered ‘high risk’
Millions of tonnes of illegally logged timber, felled from forests across Papua New Guinea, are being exported to China and from there to the world as finished wood products, a new report from Global Witness has revealed.
Global Witness’s investigation has found that the majority of logging operations in PNG are underpinned by government-issued permits, which are often illegally “extended” and which fail to enforce laws surrounding logging in prohibited and ecologically sensitive areas.
Continue reading...Arctic cruise ship guard shoots polar bear dead for injuring colleague
Firm operating MS Bremen in Svalbard claims ‘self defence’ as critics online condemn killing and wildlife tourism
A polar bear has been shot dead after injuring a guard working for cruise ship tourists visiting an Arctic archipelago in Norway.
The bear was shot dead by another employee, the cruise company said after the incident on Saturday.
Continue reading...It's a dog’s breakfast
Can you spot dead coral? – in pictures
Coral bleaching is affecting the world’s largest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef, but what does a dying reef look like? These images from the Climate Council and Great Barrier Reef Legacy show the difference in what they should look like and what happens as they move from bleached to dead
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