Grants to be used to improve port infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at 55 sites across the country
Joe Biden’s administration is awarding nearly $3bn to boost climate-friendly equipment and infrastructure at ports across the country, including Baltimore, where a deadly bridge collapse killed six construction workers in March and disrupted east coast US shipping routes for months.
The president timed the announcement of the grants ahead of a visit to the city’s main port on Tuesday. Officials say they will improve and electrify port infrastructure at 55 sites nationwide while supporting an estimated 40,000 union jobs, reducing pollution and combating the climate crisis.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
10/29/2024 - 07:31
10/29/2024 - 07:00
Department’s finances were slashed during austerity and campaigners say more cuts will stall progress to meet nature and climate targets
Rachel Reeves has been urged not to cut the government’s environment funding in the budget as analysis shows the department’s finances were slashed at twice the rate of other departments in the austerity years.
Between 2009/10 and 2018/19, the environment department budget declined by 35% in monetary terms and 45% in real terms, according to Guardian analysis of annual reports from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Environment Agency and Natural England. By comparison, the average cut across government departments during the Conservative austerity programme was about 20%. During the first five years of austerity, it was the most cut department.
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10/29/2024 - 05:00
Researchers found 38,000 fewer people – 10 times number of murders – would have died if atmosphere was not clogged with greenhouse pollutants
Climate breakdown caused more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study has found.
Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found 38,000 fewer people would have died from heat if humans had not clogged the atmosphere with pollutants that act like a greenhouse and bake the planet. The death toll is about 10 times greater than the number of people murdered in Europe that year.
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10/29/2024 - 02:06
If unchecked, pest species would burden health system with 650,000 more appointments and more than $2bn in costs each year, expert says
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The federal government’s response to a Senate inquiry into the spread of invasive fire ants has been labelled inadequate with experts saying Labor has “essentially pressed the pause button”.
An April upper house report contained 10 recommendations. The Albanese government on Monday said it supported three in their entirety and three in principle – including calls for funding reviews, more transparency and improved council collaboration.
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10/29/2024 - 02:00
Thousands more people than expected are at the biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, and hotels are full – leading the city’s council to press less orthodox accommodation into service
Robert Baluku, a Ugandan delegate to the UN’s biodiversity summit in Colombia, found himself between a rock and hard place when his team’s accommodation was abruptly cancelled, leaving them stranded before the start of Cop16 in Cali.
The city’s hotels were packed to capacity with thousands of country leaders, scientists, government ministers and UN negotiators, and Baluku was left scrambling for options – until the Motel Deseos (Desires) came to the rescue.
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10/29/2024 - 01:00
Exclusive: Linked accounts on X push petrostate’s posts about climate summit and drown out criticism
Scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit, an investigation has revealed.
The accounts were mostly set up after July, at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan account.
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10/28/2024 - 20:43
It seems reasonable to call the Coalition’s policy what it primarily is: a proposal to expand fossil fuels
Some news you may not have clocked last week while the focus was on important things like a royal tour: 44 of the world’s top climate scientists, including four decorated Australian professors, released an open letter warning that ocean circulation in the Atlantic is at serious risk of collapse sooner than was previously understood.
They said a string of studies suggested the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body backed by nearly 200 countries, had greatly underestimated the possibility that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – or Amoc, a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic west of Britain and Ireland – could in the next few decades reach a point at which its breakdown was inevitable. The cause? Rising greenhouse gas emissions.
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10/28/2024 - 15:43
Amid growing pressure to report on nature-related risks and impacts, an open-source footprinting tool offers a scientific and transparent approach.
10/28/2024 - 15:42
A new study reveals that invasive plants are reshaping soil microbial communities across the U.S., making them more uniform and altering how ecosystems function.
10/28/2024 - 14:56
This blog is now closed
Boy, 11, dies and four other children injured after car crashes into Melbourne school
Australia’s pandemic plans were ‘grossly inadequate’, an inquiry has found. What lessons can be learned?
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Bowen derides Coalition’s ‘nuclear fantasy’
Chris Bowen, minister for climate change and energy, is speaking on ABC Radio National this morning.
If I was the energy minister of another country, I would consider the opportunities that I had in that country – but a country saying to Australia, with our excellent renewable resources, that we should go down the nuclear road when we have no nuclear industry, no nuclear expertise of the scale that we would need for a nuclear power industry, is like us going to Finland or Scandinavia and saying, “Listen, we know [you have] a lot of snow, but you should really try beach surfing.” It just doesn’t make any sense.
We have to play to our strengths in Australia, and we have the best renewable resources in the world, and the opposition wants to stop us using them, and in turn, keep coal in the system for longer. They’re quite explicit about that while we wait for this nuclear fantasy to come on board. That would be terrible for emissions and fatal for energy reliability.
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