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Bowen announces expert panel led by Tim Nelson to set roadmap for complete rethink of electricity market. Will it be top down for utilities, or bottom up for consumers?

The post Not fit for purpose: Australia energy market rules to be rewritten to keep pace with renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.

California diesel consumption year-over-year (YoY) in August slipped, while gasoline volumes also declined YoY for the twelfth straight month, state data published Monday showed.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this month proposed a rule to authorise West Virginia to oversee CO2 storage wells within the region, potentially positioning it as the fourth state to gain such primacy.

As this year’s COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan concludes with landmark decisions clinching the operationalisation of Article 6.2 and 6.4 carbon markets – with Brazil said to have played a key diplomatic role – expectations for COP30 in Belem, Brazil have highlighted the rise of Article 6 as a priority for the region.

A pair of North American investors announced Monday the finalisation of a $2 million investment in two Montana grassland conservation carbon projects.

The latest survey into farming attitudes to renewables is that relationships with developers could use some work.

The post Farmers plead for happier marriage with wind and solar project developers appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Hundreds of properties flooded and Welsh town hit by landslip as major incident declared in Northamptonshire

Forecasters, environment officials and politicians have been strongly criticised over the warnings issued before Storm Bert and the fitness of flood defences to cope with increasingly common extreme weather.

A huge clear-up is under way across swathes of Wales and England, with hundreds of properties flooded and a former Welsh mining town hit by a landslip from a coal tip, leaving buildings deep in sludge and mud.

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IFS suggests gifts of land before a certain date could be tax-free so that elderly farmers would not be caught out

Ministers should give farmers an inheritance tax holiday for the next few years, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said as it warned that government changes to agricultural taxes risked treating some landowners unfairly.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced in her budget last month that farmers with a business worth more than £1m could be subjected to 20% inheritance tax, prompting a tractor protest outside parliament.

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Experts say financial movements mean poor nations will in effect get billions less in value from £300bn pledge

A failure to factor in inflation means the $300bn (£240bn) climate finance deal agreed at Cop29 is not the tripling of pledges that has been claimed, economists have said.

The international talks in Baku were pulled back from the brink of collapse early on Sunday morning when negotiators struck an agreement in which rich countries promised to raise $300bn a year by 2035. On paper, this is a tripling of the previous climate finance target of $100bn a year by 2020, and has been trumpeted as such by the UN and others.

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COP29 may have given a shot in the arm to future international carbon trade, after countries finally clinched a deal on Article 6, but the voluntary market continued to drift aimlessly over the past week.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called for the launch of a global reforestation initiative at the G20 Leaders’ Summit last week that, under her vision, could boast a $24 billion budget.

Maryland’s environmental commission’s recommendations for climate investment mechanisms looks likely to include implementation of an economy-wide cap-and-invest scheme, as the state could risk missing its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets.

Airlines will need over 500 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent (MtCO2e) carbon credits to meet Phase 2 CORSIA requirements (2027-35), with prices potentially reaching $91 per tonne, according to a new report released on Monday.

Britain wanted much better outcomes on many issues, but seeing the ambition at the conference gives me hope for the future

The climate crisis is all around us. And the world is not moving nearly fast enough. In that context, the Cop process for climate negotiations feels frustratingly slow. Yet it is the best mechanism for multilateral action we have, so we have to use it to do everything we can to speed up action.

The UK went to Cop29 determined to play its part in a successful negotiation because it is in our national interest. As the prime minister said in Baku earlier this month, there is no national security without climate security. That is so clear from the effects of Storm Bert over the past couple of days. If we do not act, we can expect more and more of these extreme and devastating outcomes.

Ed Milband is secretary of state for energy security and net zero

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European truck manufacturers are investing chiefly in battery-electric vehicles to meet their 2030 climate goals, but point to a lack of charging stations on EU roads, urging policymakers to be more ambitious on infrastructure.

A Singapore-based biochar developer plans to generate over 330,000 carbon removal credits through making biochar from waste for applications in buildings, agriculture, and landscaping.

My negotiating team tried in vain to push up support for the global south. Lessons must be learned before the next summit in Brazil

• Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference
• China was willing to offer more in climate finance, says Cop29 president

Nine years after the Paris agreement, and after 11 months of multilateral diplomacy and two weeks of the most intense negotiations at Cop29 in Baku, we have a deal. Under the terms of the Baku breakthrough, the world’s industrialised nations will provide $300bn (£240bn), which, combined with resources from multilateral lending institutions and the private sector will reach $1.3tn in climate financing this year. Cop29 also finalised, after years of failed attempts, a global framework for international carbon markets trading, a critical mechanism for less polluting and less wealthy nations to raise climate finance. A fund for responding to loss and damage – another new financial resource for less developed nations – was brought in shortly before the summit, and funds are already being paid into it.

This deal may be imperfect. It does not keep everyone happy. But it is a major step forward from the $100bn pledged in Paris back in 2015.

Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference

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Study detects synergistic effect making substances more dangerous, raising alarm since humans are exposed to both

Few manmade substances are as individually ubiquitous and dangerous as PFAS and microplastics and when they join forces there is a synergistic effect that makes them even more toxic and pernicious, new research suggests.

The study’s authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of the toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates, and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth.

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Azerbaijan’s Mukhtar Babayev criticises western countries for failing to provide enough money for developing world

• Mukhtar Babayev: I’m glad we got a deal at Cop29

China would have offered more money to the poor world to tackle the climate crisis if western countries had not failed to show leadership, the president of the Cop29 UN climate summit has said.

Cop29 ended early on Sunday morning after a marathon final negotiating session in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, with a deal on finance to developing countries that was widely attacked for being inadequate and a betrayal of trust.

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French data provider Iceberg Data Lab plans to double the coverage of its deforestation, biodiversity footprinting, and climate analysis tools up to 16,000 companies, Carbon Pulse has learned.