Feed aggregator

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

An Australian bank has made an equity investment in a local carbon and natural capital investor as part of a successful A$220 million ($147 mln) Series A capital raising, it announced Monday.

A Belarusian group, through former South African President Jacob Zuma, has donated 2 million questionable carbon credits towards Zimbabwe’s nascent emissions trading efforts.

Malawi has ordered a review of all carbon projects in the country, making it the latest African nation to seek more control and possibly a greater share of voluntary credit sale revenues.

Carbon trading scheme for aviation fuel proposed to help Australia meet 70 per cent emissions cuts by 2035.

The post Jet fuels emissions scheme proposed as part of bigger climate target for 2035 appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Earth draws parallels between human impact on climate and volcanic eruptions that ripped through planet’s crust 250 million years ago

The “terror factor” generated by the new BBC series Earth – which re-creates a climate change event that wiped out most species 250 million years ago – could help “spur us on to do something” about the environment crisis, according to its presenter, Chris Packham.

Using the latest scientific discoveries and visual effects, the BBC’s “biography of Earth” shows the parallels between a deadly change in the atmosphere caused by a series of cataclysmic supervolcano eruptions millions of years ago and mankind’s fossil fuel emissions, which Packham explains are “destabilising … with terrifying rapidity” Earth’s protective layer of gases.

Continue reading...

Scheme aims to raise standard of insulation in 19m of the UK’s leakiest homes

Labour has said that job opportunities for almost 4 million workers would be created under its plan to bring 19m of the UK’s leakiest homes up to an acceptable standard of insulation.

While it has previously said that the plan would reduce annual household energy bills by up to £500, the party has set out details of what it said would be a major expansion of the retrofitting workforce.

Continue reading...

Many hoped the economic recovery from COVID would steer global development towards a greener footing. But CO₂ emissions from China, the world’s biggest emitter, are worse than before the pandemic. David Stern, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Khalid Ahmed, Visiting Fellow, Australian National University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Group thanks woman who threw confetti at former chancellor’s wedding but urges people to focus on ‘out of control’ global heating

Just Stop Oil has applauded a woman who threw orange confetti at the wedding of the ex-chancellor George Osborne but denied that it, as a campaign group, was responsible.

The protest took place as Osborne and his bride Thea Rogers left a church in the village of Bruton, Somerset on Saturday.

Continue reading...

Majority of Australia's energy minister reject proposal from the ACT to use the term fossil gas rather than "natural gas" favoured by the fossil fuel industry.

The post Fossil gas: Labor energy ministers reject proposal to rename “natural” gas appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Plastics consumed nationally in 2019-20 created 16m tonnes of greenhouse gases, report says

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

The plastics consumed yearly by Australians have a greenhouse emissions impact equivalent to 5.7m cars – more than a third of the cars on Australia’s roads, new analysis suggests.

A report commissioned by the Australian Marine Conservation Society and WWF Australia has found that the plastics consumed nationally in the 2019-20 financial year created 16m tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

Australia should cut GHG emissions by “well above 70%” by 2035 compared to 2005 levels, according to an industry body’s submission to the Climate Change Authority.

A protester from the environmental group Just Stop Oil disrupted the wedding of the former chancellor George Osborne on Saturday. Footage showed the protester throwing orange confetti over Osborne and his wife, Thea Rogers, as they walked out of St Mary's Church in the Somerset village of Bruton. The protester followed the couple and continued to empty the confetti from a union jack bag over them until she was chased away by a security guard. About 200 people, including well-known politicians and journalists, were attending the wedding

• George Osborne’s wedding disrupted by Just Stop Oil protest

Continue reading...

Governments focus on the climate when they have few other economic worries. That can no longer be the case

First it was the pandemic. Then it was the war in Ukraine. Next it could be the climate crisis.

On Monday last week the world registered its hottest-ever day but the record lasted only 24 hours before it was beaten by an even-more sizzling Tuesday. And while the temperature continues to warm up the global economy continues to cool down.

Continue reading...

Tory mismanagement of public finances will make the party’s task difficult if it wins power, and that is why we won’t pledge what we can’t deliver on

• Read more: Keir Starmer’s Labour is preparing for power

Friday in my constituency summed up for me the state of our country. Local headteachers I respect and admire were in tears as they described the challenges they are grappling with. The owner of a popular local chippy showed me his energy bill, up from £5,000 a quarter to £11,000, as he shared his fears for his business. A parent showed me a photo of his straight-A son beaten black and blue in the middle of his GCSEs and shared his frustration that he has put more work into the investigation than the police.

People are increasingly looking to Labour to get Britain out of this mess. Last week Keir Starmer set out the fifth of Labour’s five missions for government: to smash the class ceiling that holds back kids from working-class backgrounds like mine. Taken together with our ambition to build an NHS fit for the future out of the ashes of the worst crisis in its history, to make our streets safe, to deliver clean power by 2030 and to get our economy racing ahead of the world, with the benefits shared so that we’re all better off, Keir’s missions amount to an ambitious vision of what our country can look like in the 2030s.

Continue reading...

Economists failing to predict levels of inflation is bad enough but it’s deadly when weather forecasters miss the mark

Economic forecasting is not having a good time. Inflation has consistently come in higher than expected and the governor of the Bank of England has admitted “there are big lessons about how we operate”. MPs and others have been highly critical and an external review of the Bank’s forecasting approach has been commissioned.

But it’s not just economists in the forecasting business. Indeed, new research takes the “rubbish forecasts” heat off them by focusing instead on rather more famous forecasters: meteorologists. Predictions of sun or rain, rather than GDP or inflation, are understandably much more important parts of our daily lives.

Continue reading...

The PM acts as if he has some cunning plan, but even his own global heating advisers can’t see how

Rishi Sunak is focused on the big stuff, or what he repeatedly insists are our priorities: boats, economy, boats, hospital waiting lists, boats, inflation, boats. The naysayers would uncharitably point out that he’s failing, to which I repeat the PM’s own words: “I’m totally, 100% on it and it’s going to be OK.”

In this Mr Big Stuff vein on Tuesday it was reported that Sunak and his home secretary, Suella Braverman, would be meeting sports supremos and senior police in an effort to save the great British sporting summer from climate activists. Later that day, three sexagenarian Just Stop Oil protesters brought a couple of tennis matches to a standstill by sprinkling confetti and jigsaw pieces on court. One sporting supremo, at least, was philosophical: ‘‘You don’t want things to be disrupted but at the same time they will really be disrupted with climate change,” said Gary Lineker. Advantage activists.

Continue reading...

Experts are predicting that the developing El Niño is likely to make 2023 the world's hottest year.

Woman empties bag of orange confetti from union jack bag over former chancellor

The wedding of former chancellor George Osborne has been disrupted by a protest from environmental group Just Stop Oil.

About 200 people, including a number of well-known politicians and journalists, gathered in the Somerset village of Bruton on Saturday to mark the 52-year-old’s marriage to Thea Rodgers, 40, who worked as his aide during his time at the Treasury.

Continue reading...

As bankers in the 80s and 90s, we created safe, stock-market-listed companies. Then private equity moved in, but despite many warnings, Whitehall did nothing

As the chair of the Chichester Harbour Trust, one of the most beautiful and important natural harbours in the UK, I witness on a daily basis its now-rapid destruction, caused in large part by an extraordinary deterioration in water quality – thanks largely, in our case, to Southern Water.

I was involved – as a banker in the 1980s and 1990s working for Kleinwort Benson and Lazard – with the privatisation of many of the utilities. In the case of the water companies, most of them were privatised as sensibly capitalised plcs. As local monopolies, they were regulated by Ofwat with a view to protecting customers from monopolistic pricing behaviour.

Continue reading...