Environment groups say Thursday order ignores effort to adopt rules to prevent harmful mining of ocean floor
Environmental groups are decrying an executive order signed by Donald Trump to expedite deep-sea mining for minerals, saying it could irreparably harm marine ecosystems and ignores an ongoing process to adopt international rules for the practice.
Trump’s Thursday order directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to fast-track permits for companies to mine the ocean floor in both US and international waters.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/26/2025 - 07:00
Exclusive: Local authorities have spent less than £40m out of £170m collected since offsetting scheme began in 2016
‘Smart, green thinking’: four innovative London council carbon-offset projects
London councils are sitting on more than £130m that should be funding local climate action, the Guardian can reveal.
More than £170m has been collected through the mayor of London’s carbon offset fund, which developers are required to pay into to mitigate emissions from new projects, since it was introduced in 2016. However, the capital’s 33 local authorities have spent less than £40m between them. Some have said they do not have the resources, expertise or time to decide how to spend it.
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04/26/2025 - 05:00
There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided
John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”
While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.
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04/26/2025 - 00:00
Inadequate record keeping means councils do not know whether former waste sites contain toxic substances
More than 100 old landfills in England that may be contaminated with toxic substances have flooded since 2000, potentially posing a serious safety risk, it can be revealed.
Some of these former dumps containing possibly hazardous materials sit directly next to public parks and housing estates with hundreds of households, the analysis by the Greenpeace-funded journalism website Unearthed , in partnership with the Guardian, found.
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04/25/2025 - 23:00
Developed countries pressed to submit national plans well before Cop30 as time runs out to avoid 1.5C temperature rise
Rich countries are dragging their feet on producing new plans to combat the climate crisis, thereby putting the poor into greater danger, some of the world’s most vulnerable nations have warned.
All governments are supposed to publish new plans this year on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but so far only a small majority have done so, and some of the plans submitted have been inadequate to the scale of action needed.
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04/25/2025 - 13:32
Critical minerals, nuclear power and the ‘weaponisation’ of energy supplies were discussed at international conference
The UK and the International Energy Agency gathered ministers and high-level officials from 60 countries to Lancaster House in London for two days of talks on the future of energy security this week. The EU was out in force, the US sent a top official, but China stayed away. Here’s what we learned.
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04/25/2025 - 10:52
Energy secretary says countries must work together during conference at which US delegate called net zero ‘dangerous’
Britain will find “common ground” with the US on energy and the economy including on nuclear power, despite differences over climate policy, the UK energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has pledged.
He was speaking at the close of a two-day, 60-country conference in London on energy security, hosted by the government and the International Energy Agency (IEA), at which the US delegate Tommy Joyce attacked net zero policies as “dangerous” and “damaging”, and said it was in the interests of “our adversaries”.
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04/25/2025 - 09:00
Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi Remembers captures the grief and resilience of survivors in the Magnolia state
Twenty years ago this August, the United States Gulf coast was irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the country, made landfall. Making landfall as a strong category 3, the storm, which was so vast it stretched the length of the Mississippi Gulf coast all the way into Alabama, hit the Mississippi-Louisiana coastal border before continuing northward.
Since then, superstorms fueled by the climate crisis have become relatively commonplace in the country, but the impact of Katrina endures to this day. Immediately following the storm, the country and world were enthralled by tragic stories out of New Orleans, where the levees failed to a catastrophic effect and the local, state and federal responses were disastrous. But Mississippi, which received the maximum impact from the storm surge, was largely left out of the national narrative around Katrina.
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04/25/2025 - 01:00
The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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04/24/2025 - 23:01
Public confidence in the UK biomass industry is low – robust checks are needed to ensure every wood pellet its power plant burns is sustainable
MPs question value of billions in subsidies granted to Drax power plant
Even government ministers sounded embarrassed in February when they threw yet more subsidies at Drax, recipient of £6.5bn to date, to keep its wood-burning power plant open until 2031. Few people think the biomass industry can survive in the long term unless as-yet-untested carbon capture technology can be installed.
But the bizarre business of importing wood pellets from the US and Canada for incineration in North Yorkshire was given an extension because the UK’s power system, now more reliant on wind and solar generation, also needs firm “dispatchable” power that can be turned on and off in a hurry.
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