Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale The fire that has just destroyed 500 hectares (1,230 acres) of Dartmoor should have been impossible. It should not be a fire-prone landscape. But sheep, cattle and ponies have made it so. They selectively browse out tree seedlings, preventing the return of temperate rainforest, which is extremely difficult to burn. In dry weather, the moor grass, bracken and heather covering the deforested landscape are tinder. The plume of carbon dioxide and smoke released this week is one of the many impacts of livestock grazing. But several recent films, alongside celebrities, politicians, billionaires and far-right podcasts, seek to persuade us that cattle and sheep are good for the atmosphere and the living planet. This story, wrapped in romantic cottagecore, is now the most active and seductive frontier of climate-science denial. It is heavily promoted by the meat industry, which is as ruthless and machiavellian as the fossil fuel industry. It sows confusion among people desperately seeking to do the right thing in an age of misinformation. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Ørsted cancels fourth stage of Hornsea project off Yorkshire coast, which was set to include enough turbines to power 1m homes The world’s biggest wind power developer has cancelled plans for one of the UK’s largest offshore windfarms in a significant blow to the government’s green energy targets. The Danish wind power company Ørsted said the Hornsea 4 project no longer made economic sense because of soaring costs in the industry’s global supply chain, after it won a government contract two years ago. Continue reading...

Emissions from abandoned coalmines, oil and gas wells globally are larger than any single country except China, the US and Russia Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up. The methane emissions from abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure now exceed those from Iran, and if considered as a country would be the fourth biggest source in the world, behind China, the US and Russia. Continue reading...

Producers promoted chemical recycling – processes used to break plastics into constituent molecules – but knew of limitations Plastic producers have pushed “advanced recycling” as a salve to the plastic waste crisis despite knowing for years that it is not a technically or economically feasible solution, a new report argues. Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, refers to a variety of processes used to break plastics into their constituent molecules. The industry has increasingly promoted these technologies, as public concern about the environmental and health effects of plastic pollution has grown. Yet the rollout of these technologies has been plagued by problems, according to a new analysis from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group. Continue reading...