Majority in teal seats of Mackellar and Goldstein – and Labor’s Moreton and Bennelong – also say industry should not use offsets for emissions
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The majority of voters in several metropolitan areas support stopping new coal and gas projects and believe industrial polluters should not be able to use carbon offsets for all their greenhouse gas emissions, according to new polling.
The progressive thinktank the Australia Institute commissioned uComms to poll more than 800 residents in each of two “teal” electorates – Mackellar and Goldstein – and the Labor-held seats of Moreton Bennelong and Sydney.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/20/2023 - 04:51
03/20/2023 - 03:30
Residents in industry-choked Randolph renew efforts to block the power company’s plans near their fragile town
A handful of weary residents gathered at the windowless Randolph church to mull over the latest effort by an electric utility to expand its power station – a polluting gas-fired plant next door to the community that the state regulator has blocked on environmental and health grounds.
Randolph is a historic Black community in central Arizona flanked by railroads and heavy hazardous industries, a small dusty place where residents are exposed to some of the worst air quality in the state while lacking basic amenities like fire hydrants, trash collection and healthcare.
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03/20/2023 - 03:20
Ofwat says new powers will be used if firms fail to reach performance and environmental goals
The UK water regulator is to use new powers to block companies from shareholder payouts if they fail to hit performance and environmental targets.
Ofwat, which in December heavily criticised some of the country’s biggest suppliers over the size of dividend payments relative to their financial performance, said the new rules would also mean water companies would “maintain a higher level of overall financial health”.
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03/20/2023 - 01:30
As the war in Ukraine sent natural gas prices skyrocketing, liquid natural gas (LNG) plants are springing up all along the fragile Gulf Coast – seriously harming not just local communities but the world’s ability to keep the entire climate crisis at bay
About 30 miles south of New Orleans, a construction site visible from space is rising. Sandwiched between the Mississippi River and disappearing wetlands, the 256-hectare (632-acre) site is visited by a stream of tipper trucks and concrete mixers that stir up dust on Louisiana 23, the state highway that goes down to Venice, the last spot of land before the river’s water flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
The wetlands protect the area from hurricane surge and provide critical habitat for fisheries. But when completed in 2025, the construction site here will host a series of tanks and pipes designed for one purpose: to supercool natural gas into liquid form, so it can be transported on giant tankers to sell around the world to the highest bidder.
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03/19/2023 - 19:57
Tune into this special episode of the Sea Change Podcast to celebrate the spring equinox with Jenna, Portland Poets Society, and a sea of poetry! A special thanks to the contributors from the Portland Poets Society community and beyond for sharing their wisdom and art with us.
03/19/2023 - 06:00
Fiame Naomi Mata’afa pleads for action before landmark IPCC report is expected to issue ‘final warning’
What is the IPCC report and why does it matter?
The world must step back from the brink of climate disaster to save the people of the Pacific from obliteration, the prime minister of Samoa has urged.
On the eve of a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is expected to deliver a scientific “final warning” on the climate emergency, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, Samoa’s prime minister, issued a desperate plea for action.
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03/19/2023 - 04:15
Electric utilities spent billions after 2014’s polar vortex to ensure power plants and the grid could handle extreme cold, but this winter it still wasn’t enough
The warnings to residents in the south-east US came right before Christmas: delay washing clothes or running the dishwasher, and curb hot water use until the bitterly cold temperatures eased up.
It still wasn’t enough for two of the nation’s largest electric utilities.
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03/19/2023 - 03:00
Coton Orchard can literally boast a partridge in a pear tree – but the idyll is threatened by a busway scheme, which campaigners say is totally unnecessary
The Coton Orchard is the eighth largest traditional orchard left in the UK, its owner Anna Gazeley is proud to say. “Not because we’re huge but because 80% have gone since the 1900s,” she said. Commercial fruit trees are smaller and more productive, but this orchard is filled with wildlife, a legacy of Gazeley’s father, who bought the land three decades ago to save the trees from developers.
That may have been a temporary reprieve. The fate of the the trees and farmland west of Cambridge will be decided on Tuesday, when Cambridgeshire county council votes on a £160m scheme to include a bus bypass that would tear through the orchard.
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03/19/2023 - 02:45
Demonstrations at 90 sites are billed as first major action by older activists: ‘It’s not fair to ask 18-year-olds to solve this’
Climate activists across the US will on Tuesday blockade branches of banks that finance fossil fuels, cutting up their credit cards in protest and holding rallies featuring everything from flash mobs to papier-mache orca whales. Unusually for such a spectacle, the protests won’t be led by young activists but those of a grayer hue.
The protests, across more than 90 locations, including Washington DC, are billed as the first set of mass climate demonstrations by older Americans, who have until now been far less visible than younger activists, such as the school strike movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg. In a nod to the more seasoned age of participants, older people in painted rocking chairs will block the entrances to some of the US’s largest banks to highlight their funding of oil and gas extraction.
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03/19/2023 - 02:00
Unusual weather has created the ideal conditions for fungus, delighting foragers and researchers
On a sun-dappled trail in the woods of Calabasas, Jess Starwood narrows her eyes and gasps with glee. Scrambling up a leafy hillside, she points to a small hump in the ground, covered in leaf litter. “That’s a shrump,” she says – a mushroom hump, where a mushroom may be pushing up the ground as it emerges.
There were times when Starwood, an author, naturalist and foraging guide, would walk this trail and consider herself lucky to find even one mushroom. Today, on one of the hikes she regularly leads, we uncover nearly 50 mushrooms of 10 different species pushing up through the ground, growing out of damp logs, or springing from the dark earth.
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