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The road to fuel-efficiency reform in Australia is a bumpy one – and the Albanese government has hazards to negotiate before its proposal becomes law. John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Students win a prize for using AI to reveal the contents of 2000-year-old text for the first time.

Shareholders on all sides want to know where the oil giant stands on renewables, yet Murray Auchincloss opts for ambiguity

If in doubt, throw cash at the shareholders. It’s a safe tactic for a new chief executive assailed on two sides by investors with conflicting grumbles. BP’s Murray Auchincloss seized his debut moment. There will be $3.5bn of share buy-backs in the first half of this year, accelerating to a total of $14bn by the end of next. The shares rose 5%. For a week or two, that might stop people pointing out how BP’s share price has lagged its peers’.

Yet shareholders of all hues – those who want to transition faster out of fossil fuels and those who can’t see the point – surely also wanted to hear a clear statement from Auchincloss on where he stands in the great debate. How will BP prioritise its spending of cash that isn’t going on buy-backs and dividends?

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Reducing the EU's emissions by 90% by 2040 will call for around 280 million tonnes of CO2 to be captured, the European Commission said on Tuesday in its first, long-awaited strategy for capturing, transporting, trading, permanently storing, and using carbon. 

A Los Angeles-based company developing hybrid direct air capture (HDAC) technology capable of capturing both carbon and water simultaneously has closed a Series A funding round, enabling it to grow its team and asset base.

The European Commission on Tuesday recommended that the EU aim to cut emissions by 90% by 2040, but backed away from contentious measures to decarbonise agriculture, as farmers protested on the doorstep of the European Parliament building where the announcement was made.

The recently passed Omnibus Law, introduced by Argentina’s new president, would compromise glaciers and periglacial zones with strong repercussions for biodiversity, a scientist specialising in the subject told local media.

Just under 400 companies have been acknowledged as leaders in environmental disclosure, as part of an annual report from a non-profit, though very few made the top grade.

The EU Commission is withdrawing a divisive bill that aimed to reduce the use of pesticides after months of delay, triggering calls for a new approach to tackling agricultural chemicals.

Repetition has blunted the art museum protests so much that the pumpkin soup assault on the Mona Lisa felt pathetic. More effective tactics are needed

How many of the 38 environmental protests staged in museums in 2022 can you remember? How many of the more recent ones only generated widespread outrage? Did any of them lead to tangible change? The protesters’ cause is serious, the threat is very real, the message is important and urgent. But is it not getting through to the public?

Sixty years ago, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and multiplied Marilyn Monroe screen-prints exposed modern repetition as an ideal of mindlessness – an inescapable capitalist pattern ingrained in the oversaturated modes of production and consumption that distract and overwhelm while nurturing an irreducible sense of modern apathy. How many times is too many? Repetition is a complex phenomenon: it can deepen or hollow out experiences depending on how it is deployed. Repeated ad libitum anything shocking quickly becomes commonplace. Aware of the risk, good artists try not to repeat themselves; instead they strive to constantly reinvent. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mark Fisher, Frantz Fanon, Robert Hughes, and Amia Srinivasan, modern thinkers have dwelled extensively on the all-pervasive pacifying powers of unwitting repetitiveness. The shock of the new quickly melts into the air.

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Move is among bloc’s latest environmental concessions to farmers as protests continue across Europe

The European Commission is shelving plans to cut pesticide use and is taking the pressure off agriculture in its latest emissions recommendations, as farmers around Europe continue protests demanding higher prices for their products and an easing of EU environment rules.

The original proposal to halve chemical pesticide use in the EU by the end of the decade – part of the EU’s green transition – “has become a symbol of polarisation”, said the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. She added that she would ask the commission to withdraw the proposal.

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Swedish state-owned utility Vattenfall reported a significant drop in generation from ETS-covered fossil power in 2023 in annual results on Tuesday, as well as a fall in profit due to sliding electricity prices during what it described as a "turbulent" year.

Proposal is part of European Commission’s aim to become world’s first climate-neutral continent

The EU aims to slash its net greenhouse gas pollution by 90% by 2040 as part of its push to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent, the European Commission has announced before elections in June.

Under a landmark proposal laid out by its executive body on Tuesday, the bloc will have to pump 90% less planet-heating gas into the air by 2040 than it did in 1990, a figure which includes the carbon it removes from the atmosphere.

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BP has ploughed more profits into buying back shares while spending less on clean energy in 2023, the company revealed Tuesday in annual results.

Parisians have voted to triple parking charges for these behemoths. Let that be the start of a much wider crackdown

Paris has developed a taste for better city living. Its vote to begin pricing sports utility vehicles (SUVs) off its streets by tripling parking charges is part of a diet for reversing autobesity – the trend by car manufacturers towards larger, more dangerous and polluting cars.

It’s not difficult to see what has driven Parisians’ ire: the reasons to dislike SUVs form a tailback so long it’s hard to see the front of the queue.

Andrew Simms is an author, co-director of the New Weather Institute, coordinator of the Badvertising campaign and the Rapid Transition Alliance, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility and a research associate at the University of Sussex

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Some SUVs and utes could cost more unless they clean up their act, while EVs could get cheaper under the new standards

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Carmakers are crunching the numbers on the federal government’s new vehicle efficiency standard (NVES) to make plans for what is shaping up to be a very different new car market by the end of the decade.

Some models could be discontinued or get more expensive, while more fuel efficient vehicles and EVs look set to be cheaper – and we’ll almost certainly have a broader range of hybrid and electric models to choose from.

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Biodiversity offsetting is failing to protect nature while enabling companies to carry out environmental destruction and human rights violations, a report has warned.

A carbon management platform has partnered with a biochar developer for the purchase of 4,500 tonnes of removals from a project in India.

North America’s largest carbon project developer will launch a digital marketplace where it will exclusively sell its own carbon credits, the company announced on Tuesday.

Emissions fall 3.5% from 2021 but experts say government not doing enough to reach net zero

Greenhouse gas emissions fell slightly in 2022, new government figures reveal, with homes and transport remaining the highest emitting sectors.

The emissions for the territorial UK were equivalent to 406.2m tonnes of CO2, down 3.5% from 2021 and 50% from 1990.

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