Breaking Waves: Ocean News

The Canadian prime minister’s reckoning with Trumpism in Davos clashes with his attacks on environmental, Indigenous and labour rights The Canadian prime minister is a hero around the world for his Davos speech that reckoned with a reconfiguration of power in the shadow of Donald Trump. But at home, Mark Carney is mirroring the US president by radically centralizing power within his office and cabinet and taking a hatchet to dozens of laws protecting environmental, Indigenous and labour rights, all in order to enact his economic agenda. Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism research team, a collaboration between critical scholars and Indigenous land defenders across North America Continue reading...

The radical Stern report showed that a low-carbon future is also good economics. But it seems that capitalism needs a reminder Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction. These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on. In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet. Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian Continue reading...

Critics warn of climate danger as president in Texas claims change will save companies and consumers billions Donald Trump said his administration is “terminating” Biden-era regulations holding oil and gas companies accountable for large leaks of planet-warming methane during a rally in Lubbock, Texas, on Tuesday evening. “Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers,” Trump said, lifting what he called “crippling regulations on methane that caused prices to skyrocket” for small oil and gas operators. The change would save consumers and energy producers $45bn and unlock 210m barrels of oil, he said, which is equivalent to about 10 days of US petroleum consumption. Continue reading...

The public accounts committee has said the risk to billpayers is ‘extraordinary’ The government’s plan to fund a multibillion-pound nuclear plant at the Sizewell site in Suffolk represents a “terrible deal” for the UK taxpayer over the rest of the century, according to the government’s spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee (PAC) have warned the government that the cost of the Sizewell C nuclear reactor could spiral to almost £48bn, leaving bill payers on the hook to provide an extra £9.8bn to construct the plant before 2040 and a further £12bn over its 60-year operating life. Continue reading...