Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Chevron spent billions trying to destroy him after he won the largest pollution case in history. It’s time for Biden to end this nightmare It’s a tale as old as time: an underdog fighting for what’s right, and a powerful giant doing everything it can to stop him. Yet in today’s America, the giants don’t lose – they rig the system to crush anyone who dares to challenge them. That’s exactly what happened to Steven Donziger, a well-known human rights lawyer who stood up to oil giant Chevron. After helping Indigenous and farming communities in Ecuador secure a historic $9.5bn judgment against the company for decades of environmental destruction, Chevron retaliated with a vicious legal campaign designed not just to discredit him, but to ruin his life. Jim McGovern is a congressman from Massachusetts Continue reading...

Find is ‘hopeful sign’ the species, one of world’s largest and rarest freshwater fish, is not at imminent risk of extinction Six critically endangered Mekong giant catfish — one of the largest and rarest freshwater fish in the world — have been caught and released in Cambodia, reviving hopes for the survival of the species. The underwater giants can grow up to 3 metres long and weigh up to 300kg. They are found only in south-east Asia’s Mekong River but in the past inhabited the entire 3,044-mile (4,900km)-long river all the way from its outlet in Vietnam to its northern reaches in China’s Yunnan province. Continue reading...

Action helps thwart advance of invasive yellow-legged hornet that can kill 50 bees a day and has devastated honeybee colonies in France and Italy Rapid action against an invasive bee-killing hornet has stopped its spread in the UK despite suitable climate and habitat for the insect, a study has found. Research led by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) looked at how suitable European countries were for the yellow-legged or Asian hornet to become established, and how they might have spread without action. Continue reading...

This blog is now closed Peter Dutton says nuclear ‘will make electricity cheaper’ but critics say Coalition costings a ‘fantasy’ The glaring gaps and unanswered questions in the Coalition’s nuclear plan and costings Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Bowen lashes Coalition plan to keep ageing coal-fired power stations open beyond middle of next decade Under the Coalition’s plan, ageing coal-fired power stations would stay open beyond the middle of the next decade when most of the operators say they’ll have to shut – is that realistic? The biggest threat to reliability in our energy system is coal-fired power now. We are dealing with … outages, breakdown, on a daily basis and that is what is the biggest threat to the reliability of our energy system and it’s a recipe for blackouts to keep ageing coal-fired power stations in the grid for longer. What they have also done is very clearly in their costings of their own policy rejected the CSIRO and Aemo’s work. Now, CSIRO and Aemo have been talking about the cost of nuclear since way before we were in office as being the most expensive form of energy available. Fundamentally what the Coalition is asking the Australian people to believe is this: that they can introduce the most expensive form of energy and it will be end up being cheaper. It won’t pass the pub test. It won’t pass the sniff test because it is just a fantasy. Continue reading...