Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Richard Tice says voters will turn on government unless energy bills fall A useful enemy? Why Tories and Reform are calling net zero policy into question Labour will back down on its policies aimed at achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions, the deputy leader of the Reform has predicted. Richard Tice, the energy spokesperson for Reform and MP for Boston and Skegness, told the Guardian his party would withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement that tries to limit global heating to 1.5C. Continue reading...

Among the dead in the internationally significant wetland are estuarine snails, shore crabs, baby flounder and ‘a thick stew of polychaete worms’ Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast When South Australia’s algal bloom arrived in the Coorong, it stained the water like strong tea before turning it into a slurry of dead worms. Many had hoped the storm in late May would break up the bloom of Karenia mikimotoi algae, which has killed more than 200 different marine species. Instead, high tides swept the algae into the Coorong, an internationally significant Ramsar wetland at the mouth of the Murray River. Continue reading...

A slew of global leaders met in the south of France to discuss the future of the oceans. There was ‘momentum’ and ‘enthusiasm’, but there were critical voices too The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope … and we are all in the same boat.” So said Jacques Cousteau, the French explorer, oceanographer and pioneering film-maker, who notably pivoted from merely sharing his underwater world to sounding the alarm over its destruction. Half a century later, David Attenborough, a year shy of his 100th birthday, followed Cousteau’s trajectory. In the naturalist’s acclaimed new film, Ocean, which highlights the destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling, he says he has come to the realisation that the “most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea”. Continue reading...

Among other concerns, the US military parade will produce as much pollution as created to heat 300 homes for a year Donald Trump’s military parade this weekend will bring thousands of troops out to march, while dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers roll down the streets and fighter jets hum overhead. The event has prompted concern about rising autocracy in the US. It will also produce more than 2m kilograms of planet-heating pollution – equivalent to the amount created by producing of 67m plastic bags or by the energy used to power about 300 homes in one year, according to a review by the progressive thinktank Institute for Policy Studies and the Guardian. Continue reading...