Feed aggregator

Sandy, Bedfordshire As the birdsongs of day fade out, the bat detector stirs into unheard action

The sun had risen over fields of oats and gone down on a prairie of stubble, yet still the skylarks sang. Though the world beneath their wings had been transformed, they continued exulting or lamenting in twilight overtime. I listened to two, three, or many voices intermingling at the fading of the day, but whether they sang in the sky or gave their evening show from the ground, I could not tell.

Other voices came too, though intermittently. Restless flocks of geese seeking rest crisscrossed between land and lakes. Numbering no more than a dozen at a time, they passed low overhead, their wings making a fuzzy buzz. The birds were muted but not mute; single birds made bleating calls that to me were riddled with anxiety at the approach of night.

Continue reading...

AGL says new coal plants not economically rational; facilities like Liddell will be replaced by wind, solar, batteries, pumped hydro and other firming capacity.

Origin signs 13-year PPA for output of edify Energy's 150MW Daydream Solar Farm in Queensland – one of the state's biggest.

For the first time selected members of the public will have permission to dive to the Japanese midget submarine M24 wreck off Sydney’s northern beaches as part of a ballot. ...

ARENA, AEMO trial testing 100MW Hornsdale 2 wind farm capability to supply grid stabilising services to NEM slated for October.

US EV and battery maker opens new retail store at Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, with show room, service centre and four EV super-charging bays.

AGL's multi-billion investment in coal generators, and the recent investment drought in new wind and solar plants, have delivered windfall gains to the country's biggest generator. It also increased its margins from consumers, despite its offer of discounts.

The carbon neutral team will be presenting at the Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability ‘Towards Carbon Neutrality’ Workshop in Melbourne on 14-15 August 2017.

Solar hot water company Apricus inks distribution deal for US “ice battery” + air-con technology that could cool Australian homes, and cut power bills.

IMF says subsidies to global fossil fuel industry reached $A6.7 trillion in 2015 - or $A18 billion a day, or $A12 million a minute.

Green Energy Trading, Australia’s leading environmental certificate creator, is delighted to announce the appointment of current General Manager, Luke Konynenburg, as Chief Executive Officer.

A new trade analysis reveals the scale of Britain’s role in the international ivory trade

Britain was the world’s largest exporter of legal ivory between 2010 and 2015, a breakdown of records held by the Convention on international trade in endangered species (Cites) has revealed.

Not only did the UK export more ivory than anyone else to Hong Kong and China – which are considered smuggling hubs for “blood ivory” - it also sold on 370% more ivory than the next highest exporter, the USA.

Continue reading...

A controversial new fishing technique is being tested in the Netherlands using electric pulses.

Readers respond to George Monbiot’s recent article and news that the US Department of Agriculture is censoring use of term ‘climate change’

George Monbiot’s call to reconsider how we name things (Forget ‘the environment’. Fight for our living planet, 9 August) is a timely contribution to a confusing world. But one word that both he and the majority of online contributors have ignored is “prosperity”. That, after all, is why humans engage in economic activity: they believe it will make things better. There is, however, a fundamental problem with the way we have arranged our economic affairs. By treating the natural world as an infinite thing, “external” to the economy (except as a never-ending supply of resources) we have built a massive endeavour to take natural resources and make them into things that are then disposed of, generally after a fairly brief period of human enjoyment.

Everyone I speak to readily accepts that under this system the planet must eventually “run out”, but they cannot see an alternative to “prosperity”. The conversation we need to have is not how we name things but how we do things.

Continue reading...

One day, the immunotherapy could free patients from daily insulin injections.

The size of a tennis court, it will shield the vision of the biggest space telescope ever built.

A video tracks the behaviour of the protective atmospheric layer over Antarctica across all of 2016.

New images have been released of wildfires that continue to burn close to the Greenland ice sheet.

Company refutes legal analysis of documents suggesting it ignored risk to human health and environment long after pollutants’ lethal effects were known

Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.

More than 20,000 internal memos, minuted meetings, letters and other documents have been published in the new archive, many for the first time.

Continue reading...

Ramesh Thakur says that the boycott on the US ban the bomb conference was an open act of defiance and disrespect of a multilateral mandated disarmament process.