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Three years of daily simulations show that very close to 100% renewable electricity is feasible for Australia’s main grid at reasonable cost, using just several hours of battery storage.

The post A near 100 per cent renewable grid is readily achievable and affordable appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Upgrading Sydney’s bus stops would greatly improve access, equity, comfort and dignity for public transport users – at much less cost than the new rail project. Kurt Iveson, Professor of Urban Geography, University of Sydney Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Without regulatory reforms and proper funding, the country will lack a muscular enforcer to strike fear among polluters

The organisers of the March for Clean Water – that’s Feargal Sharkey and River Action, supported by organisations that range from Surfers Against Sewage to the RSPB to the Women’s Institute – make an excellent point: while it’s nice that the government will bring a water bill to parliament, the initiatives revealed so far “are not nearly extensive enough to address the scale of the UK’s water pollution crisis”.

You bet. None of the four “initial steps” announced by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, last month are likely to cause sleepless nights in any boardroom. The first, to ensure companies’ funding for infrastructure investment is ringfenced, read like a description of how the regulatory system in England and Wales was always supposed to work. One fears that the second, to add the protection of customers and the environment to companies’ articles of association, will be cosmetic; directors can always be fuzzy about how they interpret their fiduciary duties.

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A small-scale carbon project proponent in Argentina has created its own methodology, commissioned an academic verifier, and procured a buyer for its credits at $20 per tonne without a registry listing, having sidestepped the mainstream voluntary market (VCM), noting financial and administrative barriers for similarly sized enterprises in the Global South.

Environment minister says severe drought is ‘aggravating’ factor as smoke engulfs Porto Velho city

The Brazilian government has deployed almost 1,500 firefighters to the Amazon as the most severe drought in decades is turning the rainforest’s usually moist vegetation into kindling and flames.

Despite a sharp decrease in deforestation since the president, Lula da Silva, took power in January 2023, there have reportedly been 59,000 fires in the forest since the start of the year, the highest number since 2008, according to satellite data from the National Institute for Space Research.

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Demand for fuel oil from the maritime sector is expected to peak by the mid-2020s, displaced in large part by LNG and increasingly efficient ships, according to a global energy consultancy.

Green MP tells home secretary sending Just Stop Oil activist to prison is unjust and waste of resources

A 20-month prison sentence handed to a 77-year-old woman for a climate protest on the M25 is disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources, the Green MP Carla Denyer has said.

In a letter to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, Denyer called the jailing of Gaie Delap three weeks ago “an example of an ongoing and serious problem with disproportionate sentencing for climate activists”.

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Just cutting carbon emissions will not prevent climate breakdown, says Susana Muhamad before Cop16 in Colombia

Humanity risks catastrophic global heating if it focuses only on decarbonisation at the expense of restoring the natural world, Colombia’s environment minister has said in the lead-up to the world’s key nature summit later this year.

Susana Muhamad, who will be president of the UN biodiversity Cop16 summit in Cali in October, said that a singular focus on cutting carbon emissions while failing to restore and protect natural ecosystems would be “dangerous for humanity” and risk societal collapse.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

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Monitoring technologies commonly mentioned in biodiversity credit methodologies still have limitations that experts should take into account when engaging in nature markets, a study has said.

Questionable exemptions for developers from England’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) rules are throttling demand for the market, a lawyer at Environment Bank has said.

An Ecuadorian legislative committee’s approval of reforms to the country's environmental code means it has cleared the last major hurdle to legalising carbon markets, according to an industry attendee speaking to Carbon Pulse, hastening a regulated voluntary market and carbon-financed national conservation fund.

A project to divert food waste from landfill and incineration has launched in the US, where the sale of voluntary carbon credits will incentivise grocers to redirect edible waste food to donation centres, according to the developer.

The overlap between humans and wildlife is expected to grow across more than half of land worldwide by 2070, with potentially grave implications for habitat and species conservation, a paper has said.

European carbon moved slightly lower within a narrow trading range on Thursday as much of the recent gas-fuelled volatility appeared to be absent, while a comparatively strong auction helped mitigate early losses.

Indonesia and Japan have agreed to carry out a broad decarbonisation programme for the Southeast Asian country's energy sector, with multiple research projects in the pipeline. 

A multinational energy company has unveiled a new technology that aims to tackle power industry emissions of sulfur hexafluoride, which is 24,300 times more potent than CO2, with an eye on creating a voluntary carbon methodology for projects in the future.

A carbon dioxide removal (CDR) firm has issued a swathe of credits to a series of large US corporations in what it described as a turning point for carbon markets. 

Another Australian company this week announced a decision to look more closely at changing the way it tackles net zero with a plan for only “limited” use of carbon credits and a plan to leave the government’s Climate Active programme.

Testing, testing... South Australian households were given little warning as SAPN conducted tests of its rooftop solar curtailment mechanism on Thursday.

The post Households may lose an hour of solar power as network tests rooftop PV switch-off appeared first on RenewEconomy.

One of China's inland provinces is aiming to secure credits issued under the national voluntary programme from its large-scale afforestation project by the end of this year.