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Until now, a more expensive type of silicon was used to produce the highest-efficiency solar panels. Now there’s a way to use cheaper raw materials, cutting the cost of solar power for everyone. Bruno Vicari Stefani, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Solar Technologies, CSIRO Brett Hallam, Associate professor, UNSW Sydney Matthew Wright, Postdoctoral Researcher in Photovoltaic Engineering, University of Oxford Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

How the International Space Station is helping to tackle deforestation

Solar and storage developer Genex says no to the overtures of Atlassian co-founder and a private equity fund run by former Macquarie bankers.

The post Solar and storage developer Genex says no to Atlassian billionaire’s bid appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Constraints on wind and solar are at the lowest level in more than three years.

The post Big spinning machines remove constraints on wind and solar appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Labor’s new tax cut is a far cry from what’s needed to meet Australia’s target of 89% new car sales being electric by 2030. Anna Mortimore, Lecturer, Griffith Business School, Griffith University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Determining whether a region or farm is “in drought” is a longstanding and complex problem which remains important to our future drought response. Neal Hughes, Adjunct Associate Professor, Centre for Regional and Rural Futures, Deakin University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

In the first of a new weekly column, Guardian Australia’s environment editor argues the Albanese government will be judged on what it actually achieves to tackle climate change

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Last week was a big deal for anyone who cares about faltering efforts to live up to the Paris agreement and tackle the climate crisis. It’s possible that it will come to be seen as something of a landmark. The major step forward was not in Canberra, where an increasingly circular debate is playing out over Australia’s first piece of climate change legislation in more than a decade.

That’s not meant to dismiss the Albanese government’s climate change bill or the crossbench MPs working to strengthen it. The Australian legislation matters, primarily as a confidence boost for investors looking to get behind clean energy and other climate solutions. It sets minimum targets – a 43% cut by 2030 compared with 2005 and net zero by 2050 – and includes some useful transparency and accountability measures. But the reality is there is barely anything in it.

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By allowing destructive dredging and bottom-trawling, ministers are undermining wider efforts to protect the oceans

Damage to the world’s oceans generally takes place out of sight, meaning it can be even harder to build momentum behind policymaking than it is to tackle other forms of harm to wildlife. But shocking data gathered by marine conservation NGOs, revealing that 90% of Britain’s marine protected areas (MPAs) are still being fished using the most destructive methods, should serve as a wake-up call. The UK government is officially signed up to a target of protecting 30% of our territorial waters by 2030. So far, action is lagging a long way behind words.

With a desperately needed global oceans treaty due to be negotiated in August , the UK government should live up to its pledges. If nations are unwilling to protect the marine environment in their own waters, the chance of reaching agreement over international ones could slip away. The level of protection provided by the designation of MPAs has been exposed as too minimal to be meaningful. Last year, just 10% were not fished using highly destructive dredging or bottom-trawling equipment – which Greenpeace likens to “bulldozing” the seabed.

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Lawns and gardens account for 60% of household water use in arid areas of the US. This is unsustainable

As a heatwave drags across the United States, local and state governments are scrambling to find solutions to the threats brought by record high temperatures. Washington DC and Philadelphia have declared heat emergencies, activating public cooling centers and other safety measures across their cities, while Phoenix and Los Angeles continue to push programs to plant new trees in working-class neighborhoods with little canopy coverage. Many of these short-term solutions rely on water, a dangerous reality given that nearly 50% of the country is experiencing some form of drought, with the amount of Americans affected by drought increasing 26.8% since last month. This looming threat has pushed one state, Nevada, to seek a more long-term solution: the banning of non-functional lawns.

Lawn grass takes up 2% of all land in the United States. If it were a crop, it would be by far the single largest irrigated crop in the country. Nevada has, due to necessity, taken an obvious but large step in alleviating some of the more immediate symptoms of the climate crisis and bought themselves more time for other measures. It is time for the federal government to push all states to do the same and create incentives to ensure that it happens quickly and in a manner that doesn’t force working-class Americans to foot the bill.

Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian

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In Challock in Kent the taps ran dry for six days, causing the school and gastropub to close

John Ramsden surveyed the parched village green, its yellow grass withered in the midday sun, and wondered what lay ahead. “People are worried it’ll happen again.”

The “again” refers to life without a water supply. Ramsden’s village of Challock, perched in the uplands of the Kent downs, has already survived one bout without mains water this summer.

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Critics say Mark Pritchard’s £46,800-a-year role with Linden Energy is ‘highly concerning’

A Tory MP has been urged to quit his second job as a £325-an-hour adviser to a US fossil fuel firm after the company was accused of using “classic climate denial” tactics to delay action on the climate crisis.

Mark Pritchard, 55, Conservative MP for the Wrekin in Shropshire, took on a role providing “strategic communications advice” to Linden Energy Holdings in May, official records show. He will be paid £46,800 a year for working 12 hours a month through his consulting company, Map Advisory.

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Hosepipe ban and compulsory water metering needed, say advisers, as nation braces for drought

A national hosepipe ban should be implemented as a national priority along with compulsory water metering across the UK by the end of the decade.

That is the key message that infrastructure advisers have given the government as the nation braces itself for a drought that is threatening major disruption to the nation. Failure to act now would leave Britain facing a future of queueing for emergency bottled water “from the back of lorries”.

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July saw temperature records broken multiple times and rainfall is down 76%.

‘It’s the global centre of diversity,’ says insect scientist who found 27 species of ant in two days in Kakadu national park

Alan Andersen has been collecting and recording specimens of Australian ant species for 40 years with about 8,000 of them glued to cardboard triangles in a government laboratory in Darwin in the country’s far north.

Each year hundreds of specimens are added to the collection, most of them likely new species that don’t even have formal scientific names.

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Any new coal and gas projects are incompatible with effective climate action. This egregious compromise has to stop now

I’ve never felt more helpless as a parent than I did during the black summer bushfires.

Rushing my two-year-old son to hospital, I was overwhelmed with worry: there was no escape from the toxic smoke, even where we lived in inner-city Sydney. It went on and on. As any parents would be, we were terrified about what the next few days would hold.

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Fewer than 340 North Atlantic right whales remain and vessel strikes are among the biggest threats to the species

Vessels off the US east coast must slow down more often to help save a vanishing species of whale from extinction, the federal government said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made the announcement via new proposed rules designed to prevent ships colliding with North Atlantic right whales.

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Neoen concedes problems with module deliveries at Australia's biggest solar project, but says it should be complete on schedule.

The post Australia’s biggest solar project is still waiting for PV module deliveries appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Queensland sets new output record for large scale solar in middle of winter, but its growth in renewable production has stalled compared to other states.

The post Queensland posts new solar output record in winter, but renewables growth has stalled appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Green sea turtle hatchling was missing a flipper when it was found lying on its back in a rockpool and taken to Taronga zoo

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A baby green sea turtle rescued from a Sydney beach had eaten so much plastic that it took six days for the contents to be excreted, according to Taronga zoo’s wildlife hospital.

The 127-gram hatchling was found lying on its back in a rockpool near Sydney’s Tamarama beach. It was missing one of its four flippers, had a chip in another, and had a hole in its shell.

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The state of environment report is grim reading. Nightmare stuff for those of us who care. But surprising? Not at all

I’m very grateful for the handful of days I spent with a senior Yuin lore man. He taught many of us to live by three virtues: patience, tolerance and respect. Simple to say, but difficult to master and rare to see embodied. The lessons of patience and tolerance came hard to me, for I’m neither by nature. But I’m getting better, Unk, I promise, at least on good days when no one argues with me too much.

A few months before he passed into his Dreaming, I called him. I was worked up about the way fire was being used for hazard reduction burning. The fires I was seeing were hot, exposing the Earth, making her vulnerable to erosion during rains, scorching old trees and causing a germination flush of shrubs and young trees which, ironically, would rapidly replace the forest’s fuel loads.

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