Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Campaigners condemn North Dakota jury’s ruling as Greenpeace must pay Energy Transfer at least $660m Never miss global breaking news. Download our free app to keep up with key stories in real time. The verdict against the environmental group Greenpeace finding it liable for huge damages to a pipeline company over protests has been described by advocacy groups as a “weaponization of the legal system” and an “assault” on free speech and protest rights. A North Dakota jury decided on Wednesday that Greenpeace will have to pay at least $660m to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in the state in 2016-2017. Continue reading...

The contagious, fatal illness in deer, elk and moose must be taken seriously, say experts as it takes hold in the US and reaches other countries. While it has not infected humans yet, the risk is growing In a scattershot pattern that now extends from coast to coast, continental US states have been announcing new hotspots of chronic wasting disease (CWD). The contagious and always-fatal neurodegenerative disorder infects the cervid family that includes deer, elk, moose and, in higher latitudes, reindeer. There is no vaccine or treatment. Continue reading...

As droughts become more prevalent, corporate control over our drinking water is threatening the health of water sources and the access people have to them. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how foreign multinational companies are extracting billions of litres of water from natural aquifers to sell back to the same communities from which it came – for huge profits ‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water Foreign firms taking billions of litres from UK aquifers to make bottled water Continue reading...

The run-up to 2016 shows ‘common sense’ isn’t enough. Even ignorant, reactionary arguments must be properly countered Kemi Badenoch’s speech on climate this week was not interesting of itself: she said net zero couldn’t be achieved by 2050 “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. She has no expertise in climate science, no background in renewables or apparent familiarity with the advances made in their technology, no qualification in economics – just about the only bit of that sentence she knows anything about is bankrupting us. Yet even if Badenoch can take its particulars and shove them, the fact of its existence is interesting for a number of reasons. First, this attack on net zero has been predicted, not secretly by new-Conservative fellow travellers, though conceivably them too, but by progressives – and for years. Among the first was the Cambridge academic David Runciman, who predicted a backlash against action on the climate crisis as the new galvanising issue on the radical right after it had moved on from Brexit. On his Talking Politics podcast, he was in conversation with Ed Miliband, who took that point but said he hoped Runciman was wrong. He was not wrong. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...