Party’s full caucus endorsed legislation on Monday morning after three meetings, meaning it can go before parliament this week
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Labor’s bid to protect Tasmania’s salmon industry from legal challenge over its impact on the endangered Maugean Skate is one step closer, amid unease about the government’s commitment to environmental protection.
In a sign of internal angst, sources told Guardian Australia that Labor’s environment caucus committee needed three meetings between Friday and Sunday night to finally reach agreement on the legal intervention.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/23/2025 - 21:57
03/23/2025 - 21:26
Energy expert Tony Wood says there is no evidence to support the policy pledge
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The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, has declared energy prices will be cheaper under a first-term Coalition government that plans to increase gas supply, without providing modelling and acknowledging significant “capacity constraints”.
The Coalition has announced it will fast-track the approval of Woodside’s North-West Shelf gas project and offer subsidies to existing gas plants. Unspecified red tape will be removed and the “national interest” test in the environmental approval process would also be amended to give greater weight to economic and social benefits.
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03/23/2025 - 14:05
Measures blocking companies involved in modern slavery from receiving public money could be overturned
Measures that would have blocked companies found to have used forced labour in any part of the state-owned Great British Energy supply chain from receiving public money could be overturned this week.
Labour MPs are being whipped on Tuesday to throw out the clause that was inserted into the energy bill in the House of Lords in February.
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03/23/2025 - 13:30
BYD, a Chinese carmaker once dismissed by Tesla’s CEO, claims to have outpaced western rivals with charging tech that’s as fast as filling petrol engines
Tesla’s boss, Elon Musk, once thought the idea that China’s BYD could compete with his company was laughable. In 2011, he smugly dismissed the Chinese carmaker as unimpressive, its products unattractive and its technology “not very strong”. He’s not laughing now – and not just because Tesla’s stock has plummeted amid a boycott by motorists protesting against his embrace of far-right politics. More pressingly, Mr Musk, like other western carmakers, has been outpaced by BYD.
Last week, the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer unveiled new charging technology that, it says, is capable of delivering 400km (249 miles) of driving range in just five minutes – as quick as filling up a petrol car. The system, released next month, will be fitted in two EVs, priced from 270,000 yuan (£29,000) – comparable to Tesla’s most affordable model in China. Yet BYD claims to quadruple Tesla’s kilometres-per-minute charging rate. Technological supremacy at a competitive price may help to explain why BYD now sells seven times as many cars in China as Tesla.
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03/23/2025 - 09:00
Exclusive: Australia’s top green organisations suspend anti-nuclear power ads to fund campaign against Labor’s move to protect salmon industry
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Australia’s leading environment organisations have abruptly suspended advertising campaigns attacking the Coalition’s plan to introduce nuclear power and are instead funding ads accusing Anthony Albanese of signing “the death warrant” of an endangered species.
The shift from criticising Coalition to Labor policy on the cusp of an election campaign was agreed by the bosses of green groups – including the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace and WWF Australia – at what campaigners described as an emergency meeting on Saturday.
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03/23/2025 - 01:00
MPs claim during her 2022 party leadership campaign she promised them she was committed to green targets
Kemi Badenoch has been accused of breaking a promise made to Tory MPs during her leadership campaign after abandoning the party’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050.
Speaking to the Observer, Chris Skidmore, who served as a government minister between 2016 and 2020, said that Badenoch had made clear to a group of Tory MPs and other Conservatives at a leadership hustings in 2022, when she was seeking their votes in the race to replace Boris Johnson, that she backed the policy.
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03/22/2025 - 14:00
Australia’s world heritage-listed reefs – Ningaloo on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east – are being hit by simultaneous coral bleaching, with teams of scientists on both coasts monitoring and tracking the event across thousands of kilometres of marine habitat. On Western Australia’s Ningaloo reef, waters have accumulated the highest amount of heat stress on record during an extended marine heatwave that has hit coral reefs all the way along the state’s vast coastline
AI-driven weather prediction breakthrough reported
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03/22/2025 - 05:00
Giant blobs along 5,000-mile-wide sargassum belt has killed animals, harmed human health and discouraged tourism
Scientists in Florida believe they have identified a “tipping point” in atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic Ocean they say caused giant clumps of toxic seaweed to inundate beaches around the Caribbean in recent summers.
Previous theories for the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt that has killed marine animals, harmed human health and plagued the tourism industry in several countries include a surfeit of nutrients in the water, such as nitrogen and phosphorus in runoff from intensive farming and carried into the ocean in the Congo, Amazon and Mississippi rivers.
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03/22/2025 - 00:00
Conservationists find critically endangered species thriving on Indian Ocean island of Aride
Record numbers of Wright’s gardenia, one of the world’s rarest and most fragrant trees, have been counted on the tiny tropical island of Aride in Seychelles.
The only place in the world where the critically endangered tree occurs naturally is on the 72-hectare granite island in the Indian Ocean. The tree was once found on other, larger islands in the Seychelles archipelago but its sturdy wood was harvested for firewood, leading to its disappearance from everywhere except Aride.
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03/21/2025 - 18:31
Bird of prey’s violent reign in Flamstead could soon come to an end, according to parish council
It stole two woolly hats from the head of a 91-year-old pensioner. It clawed a jogger’s scalp and left him reeling. It is said to swoop in from behind without making a sound, has a penchant for tall men’s heads and – so far – has evaded capture.
But the violent reign of the Flamstead hawk, which has made men in the Hertfordshire village of Flamstead afraid to go out without covering their heads, may soon be at an end.
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