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Call of the wild: planned Dartmoor crackdown ‘will penalise campers’
Move to restrict where people can sleep under canvas will reverse the public’s hard-won right to enjoy the national park
Shamus McCaffery, 53, who lives in the heart of Dartmoor and wild camps there three or four times a month, is among many who are worried about an imminent threat to their freedoms.
Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) has launched a consultation on new bylaws that could reduce the areas where people can legally wild camp in England and Wales by 2,400 hectares, as well as ban activities involving more than 50 people without the agreement of landowners. People caught by the moor’s rangers camping in the wrong spot or gathering in large groups without permission could be fined £500. “Our hard-won freedoms to spend nights on the moor surrounded by nature are at risk,” said McCaffery. “This will criminalise law-abiding users of the countryside.”
Continue reading...Commodities firm Gunvor parts ways with emissions trading boss
The Secret Negotiator: Cop26 must leave the old diplomacy behind
An insider reveals what is going on behind the scenes of the climate conference
So far, all the preparation work we have done has been beating around the bush – not much that is substantial is happening yet. The homework has been done very well, but only on the issues that are not very substantive for this Cop, such as technical issues to do with the Paris agreement. We need to discuss now the issues which are most substantive: ambition, and climate finance.
Ambition means how much we are going to cut emissions, in line with the Paris agreement targets – and that means how much are developed countries and the biggest developing countries going to cut emissions. Since the IPCC report in August, this has become even more urgent.
Continue reading...The climate crisis has made the idea of a better future impossible to imagine | Ian Jack
Despite all the analogies for this possibly terminal emergency, it is unlike anything that has come before
Writing in 2003, the American environmentalist Bill McKibben observed that although “some small percentage” of scientists, diplomats and activists had known for 15 years that the Earth was facing a disastrous change, their knowledge had almost completely failed to alarm anyone else.
It certainly alarmed McKibben: in June 1988, the scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress that the world was warming rapidly and human behaviour was the primary cause – the first loud and unequivocal warning of the climate crisis to come – and before the next year was out, McKibben had published The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a lay audience. But few others seemed particularly worried. “People think about ‘global warming’ in the way they think about ‘violence on television’ or ‘growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all,” he wrote in 2003. “Hardly anyone has fear in their guts.”
Continue reading...CP Daily: Friday September 24, 2021
Can green energy power Africa's future?
Climate change: Whisper it cautiously... there's been progress in run up to COP26
Norwegian Air faces €65 mln bill for EU ETS non-compliance
UK-based fund opens RGGI account before Q4 auction
WCI emitters continue to add to cumulative short position, speculators hold firm
Green groups piloting methodology for assessing VCM project types, standards
An encounter with a wedge-tailed eagle filled me with awe and a sense of danger
Birdwatching reminds Georgia Angus of the importance of appreciating our non-human co-inhabitants of this big spinning rock
• The Guardian/BirdLife Australia 2021 bird of the year poll begins on Monday
Over the past few years, my amateur bird watching has escalated into more of an obsession, one that occasionally pulls me out to more remote areas of Australia. Several months ago on one such trip, I had cause to think about what drew me to birds. On that particular day, I was walking in the Warrumbungles in New South Wales, trekking up a slope toward Mt Exmouth. I rounded a corner to spot an enormous wedge-tailed eagle perched on the ridge above me. It was an adult, with dark, near-black plumage, boxy shoulders and an immense beak. Its sheer mass was striking.
Related: Australian bird of the year 2021: nominate your favourite for the #BirdOfTheYear shortlist
Continue reading...Reintroducing wolves to UK could hit rewilding support, expert says
Head of Scotland’s natural heritage body says there is too much focus on reintroducing apex predators
Demands to reintroduce predators such as wolves and bears could significantly damage public support for rewilding the British countryside, a senior conservationist has said.
Francesca Osowska, chief executive of NatureScot, a government conservation agency, said rewilding could only succeed if it won support from people living in and managing the countryside, including farmers and Highland estate managers who are worried about losing their livelihoods.
Continue reading...Alberta offset prices nudge up post-election, but further rises holding off
Fridays for Future: climate protests kick off with Greta Thunberg in Berlin – video
Thousands of protesters, including Greta Thunberg, rallied outside the German parliament in Berlin demanding stronger climate action from the government ahead of Sunday's national election. Friday's strike marks the return of the climate protests that in 2019 drew more than 6 million people on to the streets, before the Covid-19 pandemic largely halted mass gatherings and pushed much of the action online
- Global climate strike: thousands join coordinated action across world
- Fridays for Future global climate strike – in pictures
US Carbon Pricing and LCFS Roundup for week ending September 24, 2021
Rising EUA prices a factor in energy price rises, not yet impacting headline inflation -ECB
Global climate strike: thousands join coordinated action across world
Rally to demand government action on climate crisis is first worldwide since start of pandemic
Hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries have taken part in a coordinated global climate strike demanding urgent action to tackle the ecological crisis.
The strike on Friday, the first worldwide climate action since the coronavirus pandemic hit, is taking place weeks before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK.
Continue reading...If only we could panic buy prime ministers who know what they’re doing | Marina Hyde
Boris Johnson was in New York this week, trying to dodge awkward conversations and ignore domestic shortages
Is the government’s fabled Nudge Unit on a paddleboard somewhere in Crete? You have to ask, after Downing Street urged people not to panic buy petrol, a piece of behavioural science almost guaranteed to make people panic buy petrol. If only there’d been some kind of rehearsal event last year, when telling people not to fight over bog roll generated counterintuitive scenes of Andrex-fuelled violence in the supermarket aisles.
Having said all that, calls for the army to step in to assist with driving petrol tankers feel like dressing for the Global Britain we are, rather than the Global Britain we want to be. There’s a certain inevitability to a country without a foreign policy deploying highly trained soldiers to sit in traffic between BP forecourts. Is it OK to try and help with nation-building if the nation you’re building is your own? Either way, if you pass any troops gunning a tanker down one of our great highways and byways, make sure to say thank you for your service; or rather, for your service station.
Continue reading...Judge issues protest warning as Paralympian jailed for plane stunt
Disruptive protesters will face serious consequences, says judge in sentencing Extinction Rebellion activist
A judge has warned protesters who disrupt people’s lives they will face serious consequences, as he jailed a former Paralympic athlete who superglued himself to the roof of a British Airways plane.
Judge Gregory Perrins said the Extinction Rebellion activist James Brown, 56, who has been registered blind since birth, “cynically used” his disability and put his own life at risk to carry out the stunt at London City airport on 10 October 2019.
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