Feed aggregator

All but a few of the power generators regulated under the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA) carbon market hold permits in excess of their compliance obligations, even as CO2 output under the in-state cap-and-trade programme has shot up this year, according to a report published Wednesday.

An Ontario nuclear power generation facility plans to develop a nuclear power offset protocol with a technical advisory firm and registered with a Canadian standards body, the company announced on Tuesday.

Meat-rich wet food causes eight times more emissions, giving some dogs the same carbon footprint as a human

Wet cat and dog food is far more environmentally damaging than dry pet food, according to a new study. It found that wet food results in eight times more climate-heating emissions than dry food.

The analysis found that a wet food diet for a typical dog resulted in an “ecological pawprint” for the animal that was the same as for its human owner. There are estimated to be 840 million cats and dogs in the world and, with numbers rising, the impact on the environment of feeding them is under increasing scrutiny.

Continue reading...

Developing countries demand agreement on loss and damage fund as leaders criticise gaps in climate draft

Continue reading...

Several nations on Thursday launched an alliance of countries developing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects, with participating countries committing to building a 1,000+ tonne a year CDR project by 2025 and vowing to collaborate to share the resulting knowledge and data to help scale the technology.

Environment secretary dashes hopes Sunak government will reverse policy to help reach net zero targets

• Cop27 live – latest news updates

The de facto ban on solar farms will be continued by Rishi Sunak’s government, the environment secretary has signalled.

Thérèse Coffey, fresh from her visit to Cop27, suggested to parliament that she would be continuing with policy plans initiated under the former prime minister Liz Truss, which would block solar power from most farmland.

Continue reading...

The European Commission released guidance to member states this week to help them update their 2021-2030 national energy and climate plans (NECPs), calling on governments to raise their renewable targets and consider the changed global circumstances since the plans were last updated in 2019.

Australia’s carbon offset market is seeing rapid growth, Clean Energy Regulator data showed Thursday, with oil and gas firm Chevron’s pledge to make up for its CCS shortcomings and expected changes to the Safeguard Mechanism the main factors.

Attacking art works that are safely encased in glass does nothing to further the activists’ cause – if anything it makes a case for climate complacency

As an art historian, my job is to look askance at words such as “masterpiece”, and to question the canon of “great art”. In my spare time, I have also sprayed chalk paint on civic structures in protest at the lack of action on climate. So at first I expected to view the latest attacks on art as shocking but justifiable. After all, do these attacks not also reveal the fragility of what we hold dear? Do they not make us think about what we want to save for the next generation? Yet the answer to these questions, I decided, is mostly no. Instead, these attacks feel part of a helpless careering towards climate chaos.

As splash after splash of acidic liquid hits the glass casings of art works by Van Gogh, Monet, Klimt, and now Emily Carr, everyone around the world who sees the photographs and footage is going through the same mental process: an astonished intake of breath, followed by the realisation that everything is actually fine. The art work is safe behind glass, tightly sealed by expert conservators. What looks dangerous is a mere spectacle, not a reality.

Continue reading...

Ansto chief says it may not be able to keep producing nuclear medicine if it runs out of waste storage space at its Lucas Heights facility

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Australia’s peak nuclear organisation has warned it could be forced to cease production of life-saving cancer medicine if a controversial nuclear waste dump, planned for South Australia, is scrapped.

The chief executive of Australia’s Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (Ansto), Shaun Jenkinson, said the federal government organisation would not be able to keep producing nuclear medicine if it ran out of waste storage space at its Lucas Heights facility.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

Communities in NSW have faced flash flooding and heavy rains this week, causing extensive damage in Molong and Eugowra

• ‘We saved the cat’: flood-hit NSW town of Forbes could be divided for days
• ‘Utterly terrifying’: the moment a ‘wave of biblical proportions’ destroyed NSW town of Eugowra
• Why is so much of Australia flooding right now?

Continue reading...

Buyer and seller nations of carbon credits are rushing to develop legislative frameworks, strategies, and broaden their understanding of how best to engage in the Paris Agreement's Article 6.2 international emissions trade provision, despite negotiations floundering at the UN level during the ongoing COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh.

It’s Thursday - Solutions Day - of week two at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, and Carbon Pulse rounds up today's other news and announcements from the summit. Timestamps in local time (EEST, GMT+2).

A group of Web3 companies launched on Thursday at COP27 a new platform that seeks to invest in carbon mitigation projects with the initial goal of offsetting the historical emissions of Ethereum, the world's second-largest blockchain.

World faces ‘stark reality that there is no safe limit of global warming for coral reefs’, says researcher

You don’t have to travel far from the sprawling convention center that’s staging the UN climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to see what’s at stake. This coastal resort town is fringed by an ecosystem seemingly facing worldwide cataclysm from global heating – coral reefs.

As negotiators haggle over an agreement that may or may not maintain a goal to restrain global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the nearby corals face a more brutally unyielding scenario.

Continue reading...

The EU’s top court has weighed in on an Austrian case relating to tax fraud committed via the bloc’s carbon market.

EUA prices on Thursday fell for the third day out of four as buyers remained largely on the sidelines after a weak auction, while energy prices retreated for a second day as the demand outlook remains modest amid extended warm weather in Europe.

'Coral reefs are not just a pretty face,' says Simon Donner, a climate scientist taking a break from Cop27 to go snorkelling with the Guardian in Egypt. 

Reefs provide 'really incredibly important services to people all across the tropics and subtropics, including food, income, but also shoreline protection', he said, adding that without the structure of the coral reef off the coast of many islands, waves and the effects of rising sea levels would be much greater.

The coral reefs off the coast of the resort town are part of a 2,485-mile Red Sea network, with 200 species of coral off Egypt alone. They are considered by scientists to be more resilient to global heating than those found elsewhere in the world, such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which has suffered four mass-bleaching events in the past six years. 

But here, Donner spotted signs of disease and possible heat-related damage to corals that closely hug the shoreline.

• The race to save the world’s reefs from the climate crisis

Continue reading...

New Zealand on Thursday began a consultation process for an intended regulatory overhaul of its ETS to guard against various market risks, including plans to set up a platform to host NZU trading.

A UK-based company specialising in nascent ocean-based blue carbon projects and eyeing up to 1 billion tonnes in annual removals from 2031 has signed an exclusive deal with a crypto carbon venture to tokenise the credits, it announced Thursday.