Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Electric vehicles reduce exposure to global oil price shocks and shift energy consumption to electricity largely produced domestically, expert says Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Australia could reduce its reliance on foreign fuel by more than 1bn litres a year if we replaced 1m petrol-fuelled cars with electric vehicles, as experts say boosting EV adoption is part of securing the nation’s long-term economic security. Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology and sustainability at the Swinburne University of Technology, said electric vehicles can play a meaningful role in improving Australia’s energy sovereignty, as well as contributing to the national net zero emissions goal. Continue reading...

Food production in many African countries depends heavily on fertiliser imported from the Gulf through the strait of Hormuz Countries in Africa, where farmers depend heavily on imported fertiliser and a large share of household income goes on food, are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East, experts have said. The conflict has drastically disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane not just for oil and gas but also for fertiliser, which is produced in vast quantities in the Gulf. Continue reading...

The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation were allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the civil war, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal, landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen. Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma between 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country. Continue reading...

Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming brick building in a Dallas business park. Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, “de-extinct” via the birth of three new pups. Continue reading...