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European Commission recommits to 90% emissions cut by 2040, and will support steel and cement in transition
The EU executive has insisted it will stay the course on its climate goals, while setting out plans to help Europe’s most polluting industries reach the green transition and watering down environmental reporting demands on companies.
Publishing its “clean industrial deal” on Wednesday, the European Commission said it had a plan to help polluting industries, such as steel and cement, make the switch to the net zero emissions future, as well as boosting clean tech companies, such as firms making electric vehicle charging points.
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Fossil fuel firm will cut more than $5bn from low-carbon investment plan in ‘fundamental reset’
BP is dropping green goals, ramping up oil and gas production and slashing spending on low-carbon energy as part of a fundamental reset of the troubled company.
The FTSE 100 fossil fuel company has promised shareholders it will increase its target for oil and gas production by 2030 to the equivalent of about 2.4m barrels a day – about 60% higher than the figure in its net zero plan set out five years ago.
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Climate Change Committee issues advice to government on meeting carbon emissions target by 2050
Giving up two doner kebabs’ worth of meat a week will be enough to keep the UK within safe climate limits by the end of the next decade, as more drastic changes in behaviour can be avoided if the government takes action on greenhouse gases from energy, transport and industry, the UK’s climate advisers have said.
People would need to change their behaviour in some ways, such as by eating about 260g less meat each week, but this was likely to happen gradually and in line with health trends. “We are absolutely not saying everyone needs to be vegan. But we do expect to see a shift in dietary habits,” said Emily Nurse, head of net zero at the Climate Change Committee, which on Wednesday published its official advice to the government on meeting the UK’s target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
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Thousands of seafarers are left on board their vessels in foreign waters, unpaid, with scant supplies – and no way of getting home
When Vihaan* set off from his home in Tamil Nadu, south India, to work on a vessel crossing the Bay of Bengal into neighbouring Bangladesh, he told his family he would be gone a few months. After delivering his cargo of stone to Bangladesh’s Kutubdia Island, the marine engineer was due to head home in March 2024 to disembark at Thoothukudi port, India.
But that month, the rusting tug, the Navimar 3, which was being operated by Middle East Marine (MEM), was detained by the authorities in Bangladesh due to unpaid fees. For almost a year, Vihaan has become a virtual prisoner on board, he says, forced to work without pay to keep the vessel safe, amid strong currents where it is anchored off the island in the cyclone-prone bay. His passport and certification documents are being held by a local agent for the Dubai-based company. With no means of getting home, no visa to disembark and without supplies, he has to rely on food and water from charities and unions.
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Northvolt, which claims to run Europe’s first homegrown gigafactory, admits it depends on Chinese suppliers for cathode active material
The Swedish startup Northvolt has admitted that a vital component of its batteries is imported amid claims that the company, which claims to run Europe’s first homegrown gigafactory, depends on Chinese suppliers.
It comes as a documentary programme to be shown in Sweden on Wednesday by the national broadcaster SVT, exposes the company’s failure to build a truly homegrown battery after its attempts to produce its own cathode active material at its Northvolt Ett factory in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, were unsuccessful.
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The Hermitage, Perthshire: One fallen tree I find is more metal than wood, with so many ‘make a wish’ coins pushed in – a tradition that is likely to be harmful to wildlife
It’s a wet, cool day in the woods. Snow shrouds the high ground, but down here among the pine and the larch and the beech, the leaf litter is soaked through like a dropped towel. Here and there, the bodies of fallen trees lie sinking into the mud, the remains of last year’s autumn drifting at their sides, dwindling away into dust.
I know this path well, but for the first time I notice there are several small signposts in front of the largest of the fallen. Memorials, I assume – but no. They are warnings.
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It’s chaos as small jobs become big jobs, tools disappear and distractions lead to furious frustration. Then you spot spring’s first flower...
There’s no such thing as gardener’s block, I once read. This from, I believe, a famous writer who was making the point that if you’ve got writer’s block, you should just go and do something else for a bit. Point taken. There is no such thing as gardener’s block because if you get stuck doing one job, even in the smallest garden, there are roughly 10m other jobs you can be cracking on with. Which is quite right. And this is what makes gardening either the worst thing for you if – like me – you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or possibly the best.
I stride into the garden full of purpose and ambition, with a smile on my face. Invariably, several hours later, I stagger out of there, aching all over, scratched, bloodied, filthy and demoralised, having dug, scraped, cursed and carried myself to physical and mental exhaustion. The clarity of purpose I have at the outset vanishes very quickly, along with my secateurs. In its place, as things that need doing proliferate around me like Japanese knotweed, there comes a confusion of purpose. Lots gets done a little bit, but nothing gets done properly. Nothing is finished. And it all looks a right bloody mess.
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‘The community had 11,000 chickens and every able-bodied person helped out during the two days of butchering’
The Hutterites are an Anabaptist movement – they believe in adult baptism and pacifism. Like the Mennonites and the Amish, they emerged from the Radical Reformation in central Europe in the 1500s, but unlike them they live communally, with all goods and property shared among members of the community. Today, Hutterite colonies mostly exist on either side of the US-Canada border, where there are more than 500 of them.
In 2009, I was driving through Canada’s Manitoba prairies in search of interesting photos for the newspaper I work for, the Brandon Sun, when I spotted some women working in the garden at Deerboine Colony. I knew a little about the Hutterites but not a lot, and pulled over to ask if I could make some pictures. The women were friendly and agreed, and I spent the afternoon chatting and photographing them.
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Analysts and investors have long trumpeted ‘climate-proof’ US communities, but recent disasters show the need for a different way of thinking
A few years ago, while visiting a tiny village, I toured a grand old community hall scheduled to be demolished after a historic flood. Across the street, a phantom row of eight buildings had already come down. Next to go was this beloved structure, built with local lumber by the craftsman grandfathers of the people who still lived there. One of the two local officials escorting me had been married here, she told me. There was a plan to repurpose the six soaring arches, the other official said, gazing towards the ceiling. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down …” he trailed off, emotionally. “I won’t be in town to see that.”
This village isn’t located on the rapidly eroding Gulf coast, or any coast. It isn’t on the edge of a drought-stricken wildland. It isn’t anywhere typically named as existentially threatened due to the impacts of climate change. Forever altered by floods, the village of Rock Springs, in my home state of Wisconsin, is instead located smack in the middle of what’s often been called a “climate haven”.
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Photographs from across the globe capture the impact of people on the climate – and of the climate on people
The word anthropocene has been proposed to denote an ongoing epoch in which human activity is a primary driving force of geological change. Although the word has caught on like wildfire in a colloquial sense, it was ultimately rejected as a descriptive scientific term, not so much because it was inaccurate but because of disagreements over when exactly it would have started – 1945, marking the unlocking of nuclear power; 1610, which may be the first time human activity affected the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; 1964, when the so-called Great Acceleration may have begun – or some other date altogether?
These questions point to deeper challenges in understanding just what the Anthropocene is: do we think of it in terms of nuclear fallout, the composition of the atmosphere, the size of the human population, or so many other worthy metrics? Hoping to help us better understand this substantial concept, the Cantor Arts Center’s new exhibition Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene brings together 44 photographic artists from across six continents, offering breathtaking and provocative looks at what humanity has wrought on this earth.
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