Breaking Waves: Ocean News

As droughts become more prevalent, corporate control over our drinking water is threatening the health of water sources and the access people have to them. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how foreign multinational companies are extracting billions of litres of water from natural aquifers to sell back to the same communities from which it came – for huge profits ‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water Foreign firms taking billions of litres from UK aquifers to make bottled water Continue reading...

The run-up to 2016 shows ‘common sense’ isn’t enough. Even ignorant, reactionary arguments must be properly countered Kemi Badenoch’s speech on climate this week was not interesting of itself: she said net zero couldn’t be achieved by 2050 “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. She has no expertise in climate science, no background in renewables or apparent familiarity with the advances made in their technology, no qualification in economics – just about the only bit of that sentence she knows anything about is bankrupting us. Yet even if Badenoch can take its particulars and shove them, the fact of its existence is interesting for a number of reasons. First, this attack on net zero has been predicted, not secretly by new-Conservative fellow travellers, though conceivably them too, but by progressives – and for years. Among the first was the Cambridge academic David Runciman, who predicted a backlash against action on the climate crisis as the new galvanising issue on the radical right after it had moved on from Brexit. On his Talking Politics podcast, he was in conversation with Ed Miliband, who took that point but said he hoped Runciman was wrong. He was not wrong. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Researchers cite £2.4bn annual cost of flooding and say a third of England’s critical infrastructure is at risk Spending on flood defences will fall off a cliff edge next year, a report warns, calling on the chancellor to commit at least £1.5bn a year in the spending review to protect the economy and the public. Nearly 2 million people across the UK are exposed to flooding every year, which is equivalent to the combined populations of Birmingham, Sheffield and Newcastle upon Tyne. Continue reading...

Labor will push the contentious bill through parliament next week despite concerns about the extinction of the Maugean skate Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Anthony Albanese plans to rush through contentious legislation next week to protect Tasmania’s salmon industry from a legal challenge over the industry’s impact on an endangered fish species. The future of the salmon industry on the state’s west coast has become a sharp political issue centred on whether it can coexist with the Maugean skate, a ray-like species found only in Macquarie Harbour’s brackish estuarine waters. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...