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EU greenhouse gas emissions fell 10% in 2020 as pandemic restrictions curbed factory and transport output, while renewables overtook fossil fuels for the first time in the bloc’s power mix.

Morrison government projections show Australia's main grid on track for 51 per cent renewables by 2025, and 69 per cent by 2030.

The post Renewables to supply 69 pct of Australia’s main grid by 2030, government projections show appeared first on RenewEconomy.

The UN’s new Emissions Gap Report shows we’re on track to overshoot the Paris target of 1.5℃. If we don’t close this emissions gap, what will Australia, and the rest of world, be forced to endure? Andrew King, ARC DECRA fellow, The University of Melbourne Malte Meinshausen, A/Prof., School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Australia’s business sector has recognised the profits to be made in the hydrogen transition. Acting quickly, and powering the shift with renewable energy, is key. John Mathews, Professor Emeritus, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

The European Commission on Tuesday released its annual report on the functioning of the EU ETS, which covered the market’s developments in 2020 and into 2021.

Former environmental campaigner Steven Guilbeault was named Minister of Environment and Climate Change as part of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new Liberal Party cabinet sworn in Tuesday, only days before the country’s delegation leaves for COP26.

Water companies will have duty to reduce impact of sewage discharges from storm overflows

The government has announced a partial U-turn over the sewage amendment after Tory rebels threatened to scupper an upcoming vote in the Commons.

Under new rules, there will be a duty on water companies to reduce the impact of sewage discharges from storm overflows. This means the organisations will be required by law to show a reduction in sewage overspills over the next five years.

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Faced with extreme weather, voters in the 1970s responded to a government call to move to drier land. The same spirit of innovation is needed today

What should governments – and people – do, confronted by the terrifying force of nature? It is the question of our age. But one answer, found on mainland Europe, serves as a reminder of human ingenuity in the face of adversity. The Netherlands offers perhaps the most astonishing example of government intervention in the 20th century: acting to deal with North Sea surges, which not only cost lives but threatened food production. The project involved the damming of the Zuiderzee – a large, shallow North Sea inlet – and the reclamation of land in the newly enclosed water. What has been created since 1972 is a new region to the east of Amsterdam, called Flevoland, out of the sea in the form of two great polders – essentially flat fields of reclaimed marshland which together are about the size of the English county of Dorset.

These days Flevoland is a busy place: containing the country’s fastest growing city of Almere, the regional capital of Lelystad, and a vast nature reserve, Oostvaardersplassen. Half a century ago, all were submerged metres below sea level. The country’s youngest province is living proof of how humankind can live with the ever-changing elements. Michel van Hulten, one of Flevoland’s architects and a former Dutch minister, says some of the success of the area is down to the collectivist spirit of the early 1970s when voters instinctively trusted government. He points out that there were no tax incentives or state subsidies for people to move to what were then empty new towns. The public simply answered the government’s call as part of a national mission. The Low Countries remain ideologically and historically close to the UK. The problem is that today’s politics is marked by polarisation rather than solidarity.

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Court action from Torres Strait leaders over Australia’s failure to cut emissions comes with an urgency that is impossible to overstate

With the UN climate summit now less than a week away, the Australian government is failing to meet even the exceptionally low expectations on climate action reserved for Australia’s political leaders. Although Scott Morrison’s government has announced a highly qualified net zero target, it has failed to address its manifestly inadequate carbon emissions reduction target for 2030 despite clear warnings from scientists that global emissions need to be halved in the next decade. Meanwhile leaked documents suggest Australian officials have been trying to delete references to phasing out coal-fired power stations from an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

For Morrison, the UN summit and heightened international scrutiny of Australia’s abysmal federal climate policies cannot be over soon enough. However, there will be no escaping accountability for his government’s actions at home, as this week First Nations’ leaders from the Torres Strait have filed a groundbreaking court case challenging Australia’s failure to cut emissions and avert the destruction of their homes and communities.

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Leaked draft reveals environmentally concerning products such as rubber and maize are excluded

An EU plan to limit the scope of a law to tackle deforestation is based on flawed data, according to scientists whose work was used by the European Commission.

In a critique of the commission’s data shared with the Guardian, four researchers say a decision to exclude rubber from the scope of the EU’s upcoming anti-deforestation law may be misguided.

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Fund says it will no longer invest in sector and will sell €15bn of holdings by first quarter of 2023

One of the world’s largest pension funds, ABP, is selling its €15bn-worth of holdings in fossil fuel companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, claiming it had been unable to persuade the sector to transition quickly enough towards decarbonisation.

Corien Wortmann-Kool, the chair of ABP, the Dutch pension fund for civil servants and teachers, said it would no longer invest in producers of oil, gas and coal, and that it would dispense with its current investments in those sectors by the first quarter of 2023.

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Climate Change Committee head Chris Stark explains what needs to happen for Britain to meet its targets

• UK net zero plan achievable and affordable, say climate advisers

Britain can get to net zero but time is short, says the head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee.

“We know enough now to say, confidently, that we can get to net zero and that’s not just a slogan,” Chris Stark, the chief executive of the CCC, told the Guardian by Zoom from Glasgow on the eve of Cop26.

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Climate group makes declaration after transport secretary obtains injunction

Insulate Britain has declared the M25 a “site of non-violent civil resistance” and called for motorists to keep to 20mph on the motorway or avoid it altogether, after a new injunction banned the group from major roads across England.

It comes after Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, announced that England’s roads agency, National Highways, had obtained an injunction banning the group from protesting across England’s “entire strategic road network”.

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National determined contributions (NDCs) will not have enough impact on reducing global GHG output by 2030 to align with Paris Agreement warming goals, a UN report released on Tuesday warned while touting the potential of emissions trading to drive more ambition.

Current carbon-cutting plans from nations would lead the world to climate catastrophe, says the UN.

Report warns countries face disastrous temperature rises if they fail to strengthen climate ambitions

The world has squandered the opportunity to “build back better” from the Covid-19 pandemic, and faces disastrous temperature rises of at least 2.7C if countries fail to strengthen their climate pledges, according to a report from the UN.

Tuesday’s publication warns that countries’ current pledges would reduce carbon by only about 7.5% by 2030, far less than the 45% cut scientists say is needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, the aim of the Cop26 summit that opens in Glasgow this Sunday.

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Our sewage-spewing PM fronts a party that has just voted for literal sewage-spewing. Environmental conference, you say?

To the £2.9m Downing Street briefing room, and a Monday matinee performance by dissolute children’s entertainer Boris Johnson. Johnson always looks nervous talking to kids, as though he’s afraid one of them might ask for a hair sample or his discarded coffee cup. Still, here he is, Climate Santa – holding a Q&A with some youngsters in a show that never felt more than four seconds away from a slurred, “I’m sorry kids, I just threw up a little in my prime minister’s costume.”

We already know that many children live with a sense of powerless anxiety about the climate crisis – and these ones had presumably been handpicked for being particularly committed to the cause. So really, just a very special outreach effort from the PM. Let’s take a look at some of the lowlights. “Recycling isn’t the answer, I’ve got to be honest with you,” the prime minister told their little faces, as the WWF UK chief executive next to him suppressed another thousand-yard stare. “You’re not going to like this. It doesn’t begin to address the problem”; “We need to have municipal toothpaste, something or other, we’ll work this out later”; “We have to encourage [cows] to stop burping”; “It’s going to be very, very tough, this summit, and I’m very worried because it might go wrong. We might not get the agreements that we need. It’s touch and go, it’s very, very difficult … It’s very far from clear that we’ll get the progress that we need.”

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Government to maintain resistance to tougher action against water companies despite backlash

Plans to take tougher action against water companies for pumping sewage into rivers and the sea will once again be opposed by the government, Downing Street has announced.

The prime minister’s spokesperson confirmed the government would retain its resistance to adopting an amendment to the environment bill tabled by the Duke of Wellington, which was passed by the Lords earlier this month but subsequently rejected by the Commons.

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More companies are making commitments to establish net zero emissions targets, although a large share of them seem unwilling in the short term to act on their promises, a survey released on Tuesday suggested.

China’s State Council on Tuesday released an action plan to show how it intends to meet the goal of peaking emissions by 2030, but most of the content was plans already revealed.