Climate Emergency

Drax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160

Drax power station in North Yorkshire

A power company that has received £6bn in UK green subsidies has kept burning wood from some of the world’s most precious forests, the BBC has found.

Papers obtained by Panorama show Drax took timber from rare forests in Canada it had claimed were “no-go areas”.

It comes as the government decides whether to give the firm’s Yorkshire site billions more in environmental subsidies funded by energy bill payers.

Drax says its wood pellets are “sustainable and legally harvested”.

The Drax Power Station, near Selby in North Yorkshire, is a converted coal plant which burns wood pellets. In 2023, it produced about 5% of the UK’s electricity. The site has become a key part of the government’s drive to meet its climate targets.

Its owner, Drax, receives money from energy bill payers because the electricity produced from burning pellets is classified as renewable and treated as emission-free.

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Drax helps the UK government meet its climate targets because, on paper at least, the power station is treated as emission-free. This is because international carbon accounting rules state that greenhouse gas emissions from burning wood are counted in the country where the trees are felled as opposed to where they are burned.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160

Continue ReadingDrax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood

Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, last year. Photograph: Gavin John/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.” *

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Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.

“What they’re really trying to do is to whitewash their own history, to make it invisible,” said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil-fuel industry.

A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own role in the climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging.

“The playbook is this: sell consumers a product that you know is dangerous, while publicly denying or downplaying those dangers. Then, when the dangers are no longer deniable, deny responsibility and blame the consumer,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and co-author of the 2021 paper.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

* No, ultimately how you solve the problem is that you don’t create emissions through using sustainable, renewable energy. It’s also not accepted that renewable energy is any more expensive. I’d say that you’re just an evil climate destroyer for profit and fossil fuel BSter.

Continue ReadingFury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

UK a ‘tax haven’ for polluting SUVs, says green thinktank

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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/mar/01/uk-tax-polluting-suv-green-thinktank-environment

The BMW X5 is among the large SUVs with a low vehicle excise duty in the UK compared with other countries in Europe. Photograph: Tony Vingerhoets/Alamy

First-year vehicle excise duty is a fraction of that in countries such as France and the Netherlands

Low taxation on petrol SUVs in the UK compared with much of Europe is inviting a glut of large, polluting luxury cars, according to an analysis by a green thinktank.

The tax paid when buying a new petrol or diesel SUV in the UK is only a fraction of the levies in neighbouring countries, including France and the Netherlands, and lower than many others in Europe, making it a “tax haven” for the bigger, less environmentally friendly vehicles, the report from Transport & Environment (T&E) found.

Britain’s first-year vehicle excise duty (VED) charge does relatively little to incentivise the purchase of less damaging cars, with the difference in buying a petrol SUV or a battery electric equivalent smaller in the UK than under most of Europe’s comparable acquisition taxes.

The first-year VED for a medium-large SUV, such as the BMW X5, costs £1,565 in the UK compared with a €60,000 (£51,400) tax in France, which also has a further surcharge on heavier cars.

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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/mar/01/uk-tax-polluting-suv-green-thinktank-environment

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Decades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it

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https://grist.org/indigenous/decades-after-the-us-buried-nuclear-waste-abroad-climate-change-could-unearth-it/


US military officers watch nuclear waste being dumped on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands.COURTESY OF DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

A new report says melting ice sheets and rising seas could disturb waste from U.S. nuclear projects in Greenland and the Marshall Islands.

Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.’” 

Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the U.S. conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today. 

A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the report says. 

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https://grist.org/indigenous/decades-after-the-us-buried-nuclear-waste-abroad-climate-change-could-unearth-it/

Continue ReadingDecades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it

Chris Packham cleared to challenge Government’s net zero rollback in court

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Chris Packham by Garry Knight from London, England - People's Walk for Wildlife 2018 - 04, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76235680
Chris Packham by Garry Knight from London, England – People's Walk for Wildlife 2018 – 04, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76235680

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/government-chris-packham-friends-of-the-earth-prime-minister-rishi-sunak-b1142894.html

A judge will decide whether it was lawful for ministers to decide to water down the policies, with a hearing to take place later this year.

Chris Packham has been granted permission for a judicial review of the Government’s decision to reverse some of its green policies.

The naturalist and TV presenter sent a challenge to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in October after the Government watered down policies aimed at helping to cut UK climate-warming emissions to zero overall by 2050, known as net zero.

Mr Sunak announced the rollback in September, which included delaying the ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from 2030 to 2035, reducing the phase-out of gas boilers from 100% to 80% by 2035, and scrapping the requirement for energy efficiency upgrades for homes.

The Prime Minister said the UK’s approach to net zero was imposing “unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families”.

In an announcement on Monday, law firm Leigh Day, which is representing Mr Packham, said Mr Justice Eyre had granted permission for the legal challenge to be heard in court.

The legal team said a judge will decide whether it was lawful for ministers to decide to water down the policies, with a hearing to take place later this year.

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Carol Day, a Leigh Day solicitor representing the TV star, said: “Mr Packham will argue that it cannot be lawful for the Government to abandon carefully thought-out policies designed to achieve net zero targets without having other measures in place.

“It would make the Government’s report to Parliament under the Climate Change Act nothing more than a snapshot in time.”

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “We strongly reject these claims and will be robustly defending this challenge.

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https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/government-chris-packham-friends-of-the-earth-prime-minister-rishi-sunak-b1142894.html

Continue ReadingChris Packham cleared to challenge Government’s net zero rollback in court