£145 million was earmarked in the March 2021 British budget for environmental spending. Let almost 40 billion is spent on polluting ones. Tax breaks to companies, to encourage investment in projects (that will damage the environment ) along with £4.5 billion lost from the fuel duty freeze (it has been frozen for 11 years).
Continue reading “UK makes a lot of noise about its green spending, unfortunately we are spending more on polluting ones”Use it or lose it rules on airport slots are requiring hundreds of thousands of empty planes to fly around Europe
It is thought that at least 100,000 flights with empty planes have been flown during the epidemic. These are referred to as ghost flights.
These flights have had to go ahead for airlines to retain their landing slots in major airports. The issue, is that these empty flights are thought to have emitted at least 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. These rules by the EU commission must change. It is absurd to suggest that this emissions could not have been avoided.
Continue reading “Use it or lose it rules on airport slots are requiring hundreds of thousands of empty planes to fly around Europe”Large-scale wind and solar power ‘could green the Sahara’
There has been much conversation about how to power the world on green electricity.
One suggestion would be to fill the Sahara with solar panels. This would allow us to generate all the worlds power in a sustainable way (of course the world would need a significant amount of batteries as well for when the sun isn’t shining in the Sahara – it may be one of the sunniest places, but it is still night half the time.
Antarctic penguin washes up in New Zealand
There are species of penguin found in New Zealand. However Adelie penguins are not, they live in Antarctic waters. As such there is some confusion as to how one ended up there.
The Asiatic cheetah species is not closely related to the African one as previously thought
11 years ago a DNA assessment was done on the Iranian cheetah. This cheetah population is the last Asian cheetah population remaining.
It was thought that all cheetah went through a bottleneck 10,000 years ago, meaning that all cheetah were closely related. However this is not as all encompassing as we thought.
UK ministers have once again delayed the point at which a ban on trophy hunting will come in
Despite to much fanfare, announcing that in 2019 during a queens speech their plan to ban trophy hunting, the government has once again delayed this law coming into effect.
Clearly endangered animals such as lions tigers elephants and many more are shot for sport around the world in numbers above 10,000 per year. While some of the meat is often given to local communities, the reason for the hunt was to provide a trophy for the hunter.
I find it disgusting that British politicians announced this policy 3 years ago but have not brought the rule into force. They are attempting to get the global clap on the back without actually having the bring in the law.
There are few to no predators that live in large enough numbers to be able to afford hunting. For me (as well as I suspect many of my readers) hunting is a rather distasteful experience. There are a few areas on the planet where hunting is temporarily justified such as the Selous – but these should be short lived. In the long run making money from wildlife should be done with a camera and not with a gun
Academics fear that if Bolsonaro is re-elected in October, the Amazon rainforest will collapse during his second term
The signs of collapse are getting more and more clear. Fires droughts and land clearances are all pushing the Amazon towards collapse. Yet Jair Bolsonaro is not interested having put his head in the sand. Instead he is busy placating powerful agribusiness lobby and trying to get the global economy to reward his bad behaviour.
The blows to forest protection have come fast in the last year. It is unclear how much of the Brazilian population understands how big the threat is that Bolsonaro is ignoring.
Continue reading “Academics fear that if Bolsonaro is re-elected in October, the Amazon rainforest will collapse during his second term”Do 97% of climate change scientists believe in climate change?
While a 97% agreement rate amongst climate change scientists appears to be a very nice figure and reliable enough to base discussion of the future on, it seemed odd to me that 3% of the scientists disagreed. As such in this article I’m going to look at the study that was done which created this figure. I will also look at another study that was done more recently which suggests a far higher figure. Continue reading “Do 97% of climate change scientists believe in climate change?”
Worlds 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50%
The increase of wealth in a few people is shown by the number of people that it takes to reach 50% of humans wealth reducing over time. in 2016 61 people were needed to reach 50%, in 2017 43 were needed.
Why does this matter? well it means two things. Firstly a large proportion of humanity has few physical resources. When you are living hand to mouth, doing anything else is impossible. The second, is that those few with enormous resources have vastly bigger carbon footprints: this is not just thinking of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their rocket rivalry (it is not hard to make an argument that space could help save us in the future), but 22,000 with private jets and the many millions more who are emitting tens of tonnes of carbon each year.
Those with extreme wealth therefore need to offset a great deal more than just their own carbon footprint. Billionaires should be throwing money at people sequestering carbon – it will protect their own future just as much as the poorest on planet earth
Land speculators are moving into Camps Amazonicos National park
Deforestation has leapt 37% over the last 5 years. Large numbers of people have been moving into this park in the hope that Bolsonaro will loosen its protection, and then their land claims will become legal.
This is unfortunately the effect that often occurs when a new administration doesn’t care about conservation.
In various moves, the current Brazilian government has encouraged these land seizures by not punishing or indeed legalizing the seizure.