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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

California legislators on Sunday published a raft of climate- and energy-related bills just days ahead of the end of session, with the proposals including a direct emissions reduction goal for 2045 and an extension for the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

The Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation, and Parks (MECP) on Friday published draft regulatory amendments to the province’s Emissions Performance Standard (EPS) in order to align with the updated federal carbon pricing benchmark and output-based pricing system, without any mention of incorporating carbon offsets into the programme for large stationary facilities.

RGGI compliance entities significantly increased their long positions during the second quarter of the year, according to a watchdog report published Monday, though emissions output in the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic carbon  market appears to be outpacing their allowance holdings.

Norway oil giant Equinor buys into three offshore wind projects in NSW with a potential combined capacity of 6GW.

The post Norway oil giant buys into 6GW of Australian floating offshore wind projects appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Listed contractor says it may suffer "significant losses" over three-way dispute over who should bear cost for delays in $277 million solar project.

The post Contractor may face “substantial” losses in dispute with solar farm and inverter supplier appeared first on RenewEconomy.

The first upgrade to minimum energy-efficiency standards in a decade will cut emissions and energy costs for the 5.5 million houses to be built by 2050. Retrofitting homes is an equally urgent task. Gill Armstrong, Senior Project Manager – Buildings, Climateworks Centre Alan Pears, Senior Industry Fellow, RMIT University Margot Delafoulhouze, Cities System Lead, Climateworks Centre Trivess Moore, Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Survey finds consumer confidence at new lows, as bill shock cements perception that Australia's energy market is broken.

The post Consumers lose faith in utilities as fossil fuelled energy crisis hits hip pockets appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Calls for a freeze of the EU ETS have grown louder as European leaders scramble to tackle soaring gas and power prices while climate policies take a temporary backseat, with Poland blaming the bloc's carbon market for worsening inflation and exacerbating energy poverty.

In behaviour only previously seen in humans, ‘social brain’ helps dolphins form complex alliances to see off their rivals for females

Dolphins form decade-long social bonds, and cooperate among and between cliques, to help one another find mates and fight off competitors, new research has found – behaviour not previously confirmed among animals.

“These dolphins have long-term stable alliances, and they have intergroup alliances. Alliances of alliances of alliances, really,” said Dr Richard Connor, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and one of the lead authors of the paper. “But before our study, it had been thought that cooperative alliances between groups were unique to humans.”

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Melting glaciers and torrential rains are wrecking lives. Western governments must step up their response

The harm and distress caused by floods in Pakistan are difficult – if not impossible – to quantify, as a crisis of vast proportions keeps unfolding. They have killed around 1,000 people so far this summer, with at least 119 losing their lives in one 24-hour period last week. The number of those who have lost their homes, or been evacuated, is in the millions, with 300,000 dwellings destroyed. More than 33 million people are affected – around one in seven of the population. The country’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, says the floods – caused by torrential monsoon rains and melting glaciers – are the worst in living memory. Around a third of Pakistan is under water. Vitally important agricultural land will take months to drain.

Hunger, homelessness and the spread of water-borne diseases are among the most immediate problems, and humanitarian aid must be urgently ramped up if further suffering is to be prevented. Supplies have begun to arrive from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, but Pakistan’s government is right to expect more – especially from the rich western nations that bear the greatest responsibility for global heating. Pakistan has more glaciers – 7,532 – than anywhere on Earth outside the polar regions, and is thus one of the countries most endangered by fossil fuel use and the temperature rises and other extreme weather that it causes.

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Outgoing PM to warn against focusing on short-term energy solutions in one of his final speeches

Leading green Conservatives have backed Boris Johnson’s call for his successor to invest in renewable energy, amid concern that the Tory leadership frontrunner Liz Truss could rely more on fossil fuels to combat soaring prices.

In one of his final speeches as prime minister, Johnson is set to warn against focusing on short-term solutions and neglecting both renewables and a wider shift towards net zero.

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An article in the Nature Climate Change journal argues that non-violent direct action taken by experts is effective

Scientists should commit acts of civil disobedience to show the public how seriously they regard the threat posed by the climate crisis, a group of leading scientists has argued.

“Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis,” the researchers wrote in an article, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

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Loss will contribute a minimum rise of 27cm regardless of what climate action is taken, scientists discover

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.

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They are our last truly public spaces, but the scale of their neglect by this government is becoming clear

In a summer when even Conservative voters, MPs and publications are suddenly waking up to the realisation that nothing in the UK seems to work and everything seems to be breaking – and they’re all trying very hard to find the guy who did this – crumbling parks infrastructure may be low down the list of priorities, given the desperate state of the NHS, the social care system, our sewage-filled rivers and soaring demand for food banks.

But these are dark times for our parks, which have been devastated by annual Conservative budget cuts since 2010. Last week a Guardian investigation found that local authorities in England are spending £330m less a year on parks in real terms than they were a decade ago. The study found that less affluent parts of the country have been hit the hardest by austerity, with parks in the north-west and the north-east suffering in particular.

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US controllers struggled to get the rocket's engine cooled down to its correct operating temperature.

Provisions in the US Inflation Reduction Act that tie the extension of clean energy tax credits to CO2 reduction requirements and exempt some oil and gas producers from a methane fee will not hamstring the GHG reduction potential of the landmark climate package, experts told Carbon Pulse.

Greens push for energy transition authority to help communities transition to renewables and counter Coalition scare campaigns.

The post “Workers want a plan:” Greens push for transition authority to manage switch to renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA) has signed two Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) separately with offset standards agencies Verra and Gold Standard as part of the island-state’s efforts to operationalise Article 6 guidelines of the Paris Agreement.

Regional expert on market and non-market approaches to support the implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement at UNFCCC-WGEO Regional Collaboration Center (RCC) MENA and South Asia