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Water supplies in western US will become more precarious amid warming climate
Los Angeles should not exist. The explorer John Wesley Powell warned the US Congress 140 years ago that the American west was a harsh arid land and settlements should be limited to conserve scarce water supplies. The politicians rejected his advice and launched a massive programme of dam and canal construction for irrigation and settlements.In a gruelling expedition across North America, Powell had seen a dramatic transition from the lush green prairies in the east to the dry lands of the west, and the frontier of this transition was the 100th meridian, an invisible line of longitude passing north-south through North America.
Continue reading...Turnbull government has applied public pressure on AGL Energy to extend plant’s operating life
Technical work undertaken for the Turnbull government’s national energy guarantee assumes the ageing Liddell power plant will be out of the system by 2023 – a development that will help drive the emissions reduction requirements of the Coalition’s new energy policy.
While the Turnbull government has applied extraordinary public pressure to AGL Energy to extend the operating life of Liddell, including encouraging the Hong Kong-owned Alinta Energy to make an offer for the asset, technical work done for the Neg suggests retirement is already factored into the new system.
Related: Frydenberg refuses to repent as Alan Jones tries to exorcise energy blasphemy | Katharine Murphy
Related: Frydenberg's Neg challenge is like climbing Everest with no oxygen | Katharine Murphy
Continue reading...Shadow foreign affairs minister says Labor will reinstitute climate change ambassador and broaden work in Pacific
The shadow foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, says Labor will beef up international approaches to combating climate change, including with work in the Pacific and with Asean countries, in an effort to restore lost credibility as a consequence of repealing the carbon price.
Wong will use a speech to a climate conference in Melbourne on Tuesday to commit Labor to reinstituting the position of climate change ambassador, and broadening Australia’s work in the Pacific through the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific, the Pacific Islands Forum, the Pacific Community (formerly the South Pacific Commission) and the secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program.
Related: Budget earmarks $500m to mitigate Great Barrier Reef climate change
Related: Great Barrier Reef: 30% of coral died in 'catastrophic' 2016 heatwave
Continue reading...British and US scientists are to examine the risk of the Thwaites glacier collapsing, which is already responsible for a 4% sea-level rise
The precarious state of a vast, remote Antarctic glacier will provide an inaugural mission for the British vessel once dubbed Boaty McBoatface, as scientists from the UK and US set up a new £20m research operation.
Related: Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds
Continue reading...The Republican Party values polluter wealth over public health
Like Donald Trump and the rest of his administration, Scott Pruitt has been caught up in so many scandals that it becomes impossible to focus on any single act of corruption. It’s difficult to focus on the damage Pruitt is doing to the environment and public health when seemingly every day there’s a new scandal related to his illegal $43,000 phone booth, or use of Safe Water Drinking Act funds to give two staffers a total of $85,000 in raises (and lying about it), or his sweetheart deal on a condo rental from a lobbyist’s wife (and lying about having met with that lobbyist), or wasting taxpayer funds on first class air travel and military jets, and a nearly $3m per year security detail, and bulletproof car seat covers, and a bulletproof desk, and so on.
Number of federal investigations into Scott Pruitt has now risen to 11. Reps. Beyer & Lieu say EPA inspector general will take up an inquiry into the $50-a-night condo rental from the wife of an energy lobbyist.
If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.
I do have a bias. I’m all for the coal industry, the fossil fuel industry. Wealth is what makes people happy, not pristine air, which you’ll never get.
People in the fossil fuel industry could see the deterioration. There is some hope we are seeing the economy start to rebound, thanks to you and the administration taking this fight on.
Pruitt should be replaced by a principled leader who will do what the EPA was intended to do: protect America from men such as Pruitt.
Continue reading...The money will help try to save the reef from crown-of-thorns starfish and reduce pollution, Malcolm Turnbull to announce
The Turnbull government will allocate $500m to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.
The funding, to be unveiled on Sunday and confirmed in the May budget, follows a recent study finding that 30% of the reef’s corals died in a catastrophic nine-month marine heatwave in 2016.
Related: Great Barrier Reef: 30% of coral died in 'catastrophic' 2016 heatwave
Continue reading...Speaking at a memorial to the victims of lynching, the former vice-president warned of the disproportionate impacts of global warming
Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned climate change advocate, has warned that the deepening crisis of global temperature and sea level rise – and the consequent spate of natural disasters in America – will increasingly affect black and poor people more than others.
Speaking at the opening of a new national memorial and museum chronicling America’s history of lynching and racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama, Gore said that the US could expect to see many more major disasters of the ilk of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria last summer.
Related: How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people
Related: A civil rights 'emergency': justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump
Continue reading...This week’s Upside series focused in on efforts to rescue the environment, from the polar caps to the tropics - and the ocean depths
This week, The Upside has been focused on hopeful news about the environment, which will be a welcome reprieve for anyone who read Mayer Hillman’s interview in the Guardian in which he concluded that climate change meant “we’re doomed”.
As part of the Arctic Dispatches series, reporting from Alaska, Oliver Milman asked whether the catastrophic melting of Arctic ice could be reversed using an unlikely substance – sand.
Our only strategy at present seems to be to tell people to stop burning fossil fuels. It’s a good idea, but it is going to need a lot more than that to stop the Arctic’s sea ice from disappearing.
Steven Desch, lead physicist
One of the side effects of the introduction of the plastic bag is that it killed off centuries-old crafts all over the world. When I was growing up in Somaliland, every mother (or servant, for the rich) took these beautiful baskets made of wicker-like material to markets every morning. The baskets were reusable and handwoven exclusively by women who made a decent living from their craft.
And then one-time-use plastic came. The art of basket-weaving died off. I don’t think there is a single skilled basket-weaver left in Somaliland today.
Continue reading...EPA administrator blames media and his job’s learning curve as lawmakers grill him over lavish spending and ethical controversies
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has blamed the media and the “learning process” of his job for the flurry of ethical controversies that have engulfed his tenure, during a lacerating congressional hearing.
Pruitt said opponents of Donald Trump, and the media, had sought to “derail the president’s agenda and priorities” by highlighting the questionable use of taxpayer funds for first-class flights, office furniture and 24-hour personal security, as well as his use of a Washington apartment owned by an energy lobbyist’s wife.
Related: EPA insiders bemoan low point in agency's history: 'People are so done'
There’s a pattern of putting personal and special interests ahead of the American people
Related: 'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
Continue reading...We should account for the costs of disease and death from fossil fuel pollution in climate change policies
While the climate policy world is littered with numbers, three of them have dominated recent discourse: 2, 1000, and 66.
At the 2015 U.N. climate summit in Paris, world leaders agreed to limit global warming below 2°C to avoid catastrophic impacts of human-caused climate change. The science consequently dictates that, for a 50% chance of staying below 2°C, around 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (or 300 billion tonnes of carbon) can be emitted between now and 2050, and close to zero thereafter. We’re currently emitting 36 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. However, the potential greenhouse gas emissions contained in known, extractable fossil fuel reserves are around three times higher than this carbon budget, meaning that 66% must be kept in the ground.
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