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China launches second module for its space station Heavenly Palace
Atlassian billionaire leads takeover bid for solar and storage developer Genex
Atlassian billionaire Scott Farquhar - business partner of Mike Cannon-Brookes - reportedly leading bid for listed solar and storage developer Genex Power.
The post Atlassian billionaire leads takeover bid for solar and storage developer Genex appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Tory death-priests have our lives in their hands | Stewart Lee
Surely last week’s inferno must focus Conservative minds on the one real issue, the climate crisis – mustn’t it?
“Dear Jim’ll. Please can you fix it for me to a) Go all upside down in a Typhoon plane like in Top Gun; b) Go in parliament drunk with my best friend Nadine and shout “boring” at the square politicians; c) Have a massive party with all food in a massive stately home for free; d) Give all my friends lordly old-sounding titles like in Game of Thrones; e) Get Winston Churchill’s autograph. I haven’t heard about any of the bad stuff relating to you by the way, so jog on! Yours Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Wall-Spaff Deep-State Letterbox Johnson (58 years old).” Well done. Now go. Go. Can you just… Just go. Go. Don’t start playing the piano. There are your shoes. Have you got your water bottle? Go. Just go.
I believe it was I who wrote, in this column on 19 August 2018, before the Brexiter foreign secretary Boris Johnson was even prime minister, “Those in positions of power – journalists, fellow Conservative party members wondering how things will pan out, people biding their time on the divided opposition benches, trembling television presenters in search of ‘balanced arguments’ in the face of blatant lies and transparent manipulation – know what this incubus is and what it is doing, and how it is prepared to put our futures at risk to achieve it. And yet they do not hold Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to account. They will not shrink Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to snuff box size and sink him into the black lake of legend where he belongs. They will have to live with their failure. And, sadly, so will we.” Though I take no pleasure in having so conclusively predicted the chaos Johnson would ultimately unleash, I am happy to be paid twice for the same 117 words.
Continue reading...Countryside: Who really has access to the great outdoors?
Climate change: How to talk to a denier
Surfers and angler combine to rescue osprey caught in fishing line off North Stradbroke Island
‘This is just proof that every now and then, despite all the trauma and difficulties … some good stuff happens’
Barry Brown wanders out to the headlands of North Stradbroke Island every day with a camera in hand, hoping he’ll capture something special – like a whale spouting or a fur seal resting on a rock.
Last week, Brown was in his usual spot near Whale Rock, at the South Gorge walk on the island south-east of Brisbane, hunting for birds to photograph.
Continue reading...Low winds stopped what might have been new ‘great fire of London’, says expert
More than 40 houses were destroyed by fires on Britain’s hottest day. Now there are calls for an urgent rethink on building safety laws
Fires that burned in several parts of the UK last week spread in the same way as those that led to the great fire of London and would have been far worse with stronger winds, a fire expert has said.
Fires in Wennington, Uxbridge and Erith destroyed 41 properties last Tuesday, when temperatures went above 40C to make it the hottest day on record in the UK, and fire services had their busiest day since the second world war.
Continue reading...DRC to auction oil and gas permits in endangered gorilla habitat
Sale calls into question protection deal signed at Cop26 as expert warns Congo auction could be a catastrophe for wildlife, health and climate
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced it will auction oil and gas permits in critically endangered gorilla habitat and the world’s largest tropical peatlands next week. The sale raises concerns about the credibility of a forest protection deal signed with the country by Boris Johnson at Cop26.
On Monday, hydrocarbons minister Didier Budimbu said the DRC was expanding an auction of oil exploration blocks to include two sites that overlap with Virunga national park, a Unesco world heritage site home to Earth’s last remaining mountain gorillas.
Continue reading...These soaring temperatures have given Britain a taste of the dystopia to come | Sophie Mackintosh
With wildfires, railway tracks buckling and tarmac melting, it’s no longer possible to ignore how broken the world is
Back in late February 2020, in the days before the pandemic, I spent a morning in a taxi listening to the news and wondering what it meant to preserve a moment. There was the slow-motion sensation that life as we knew it might be coming to an end. Still, something whispered in me, experimental rather than fatalistic: you’d better remember it, just in case. So – here is the window-shaped patch of blue sky, here are the people walking along the pavement, here are the trees. All recorded deliberately, eyes wide. Here is your life as you know it, frozen in a single frame on a cold, bright February day – taken carelessly, recklessly, for granted.
Now we are experiencing another crossing over into a before and an after. Tipping points are subjective. People have different thresholds, different ways in which we bury our heads. It’s also easy to get used to things. It’s just a matter of a couple of degrees, after all. Any boiling frog would tell you the same. But the sheer physicality of a wall of heat – malevolent heat, city-stopping heat, deadly heat – is hard to disavow. Heat that has been unprecedented in my lifetime, and will become normal within my lifetime. It’s as good a point as any to accept that the unthinkable is now thinkable.
Sophie Mackintosh is an author. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize
Continue reading...Giant Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank to become space light show
Wildlife photography: Magic of Skomer's puffins captured
Dip in UK woodland’s ability to capture CO2 as felled trees not replaced
While planting rates have risen in Scotland, carbon capture figures overall have fallen every year since 2009, official data shows
The amount of carbon dioxide captured by the UK’s forests has fallen by millions of tonnes and will remain at historically low rates for over a decade, because of a failure to quickly replace old forest stocks.
Official data shows the amount of CO2 absorbed annually by trees in the UK peaked at just under 20m tonnes in 2009, but has fallen every year since. Millions of mature conifers have been felled but not replaced, reducing the carbon they capture and store.
Continue reading...CP Daily: Friday July 22, 2022
Executive Director, Policy and Engagement, Emissions Reduction Alberta – Edmonton/Calgary
Huge jellyfish swarm surrounds boat in Israel
The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change
Lawmakers in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa pass bill to protect forests, as province eyes carbon market
EU carbon prices to recover to €85-90 in August, analyst predicts
Producers’ CCA length hits 1.5-yr high, speculators trim V22s but scoop up V23s
The best way to Dutton-proof climate legislation is to get it into parliament and get it passed | Katharine Murphy
Labor, the Greens and the teals should be focusing on widening the footprint of support for climate action, rather than preserving product differentiation
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Over the past decade or so, there have been times when I’ve felt more like a war correspondent than a political one. And ahead of the opening of the new parliament on Tuesday, Peter Dutton is certainly not signalling an armistice.
Dutton has locked the Liberal party into voting against Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target because he thinks he can continue to weaponise medium-term climate action against a new government, at a time when inflation is running hot and interest rates are rising.
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