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OPINION The USA, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK which had the moral responsibility to rapidly phase out oil and gas production are responsible for planned expansion from new oil and gas fields for next decade and half. How can these countries advise India to cut on coal consumption? Our greenhouse gas emission is nearly 3 Giga tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually. We are distant third behind the two top emitters China with 14 Giga tonnes and the US with 8 Giga tonnes Among the important outcomes, COP 28 text proposes to triple renewable energy capacity and double the global...

We’re warned that Antarctica’s adjoining Southern Ocean is caught in an irreversible descending spiral, where life is scarce and on the verge of collapse. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the choice is clear: Radically reduce fossil fuels over an aggressive timeline or be complicit in the planet’s destruction. This distortion and selective manipulation of data and its use of public shaming are the tools of inquisitions, not rational scientific inquiry. Contrary to the incessant media barrage that predicts Antarctica’s demise, my personal experience during a three-week visit in November to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island,...

There are wind farms being put up all over the place these days, including in many rural areas of the United States. But the offshore wind farms that have been constructed in the North Sea by various European power companies have created a forest of towers rising up over the waves. But that’s not a problem, right? After all, this is the “clean energy” we were all promised and we’re saving the planet so everyone can feel better about themselves. The Biden administration recently announced plans to accelerate offshore wind farm construction in the name of “environmental justice, biodiversity, and...

A Florida man who filmed himself walking on hot thermals in Yellowstone National Park earlier this month has been officially cited for a violation of federal law and ordered to appear in-person at the U.S. District Court in Yellowstone on July 27. Matt Manzari, who told Cowboy State Daily that he created the video as a joke, broke the law by leaving the park’s boardwalk and walking on the thermal features near Old Faithful on July 1. As has been customary in these cases, the defendant must appear in court in-person. The motivational speaker from Clermont, Florida, previously told Cowboy...

Soil can be considered black gold, and we’re running out it. The United Nations declared soil finite and predicted catastrophic loss within 60 years. “There are places that have already lost all of their topsoil,” Jo Handelsman, author of “A World Without Soil,” and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNBC. The impact of soil degradation could total $23 trillion in losses of food, ecosystem services and income worldwide by 2050, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. “We have identified 10 soil threats in our global report … Soil erosion is number one because it’s...

Not content with overfishing its own coastline in a non-sustainable way, China has now turned to unethical pirate fishing in the territorial waters of less powerful nations around the world. Chinese fishermen turn off their GPS transponders that can be traced electronically, send out false electronic signals, violate U.N. maritime law, enter the sovereign fishing territory of foreign nations, illegally fish with slave-like labor, and then escape to international waters with their catch. Some fishing fleets are so large that they can be seen from space.For China, world fishing is now like the wild west, with a value in billions...

Facebook this week dispatched its high-level executives to ask customers to hang in there. They weren’t, of course, visiting to discuss the Wall Street Journal’s recent exposé of the company’s unsavory practices. But instead, Facebook VPs, including Simon Whitcombe and Graham Mudd, spoke to advertisers about Apple’s anti-tracking initiative, the one thing wreaking immediate harm on the company’s ad effectiveness and its bottom line...Apple is indeed doing more damage to Facebook than any of its rolling series of scandals so far. The changes Apple made in iOS 14.5 — asking people if they wanted to opt-out of apps tracking them...

...The government, they felt, wasn’t doing enough to protect the lake. And so they wondered: What if the lake could protect itself? The idea they hatched that night ultimately resulted in a special election, which had the citizens of Toledo voting Tuesday on a very unusual question: Should Lake Erie be granted the legal rights normally reserved for a person? The measure passed easily, which means citizens will be able to sue on behalf of the lake whenever its right to flourish is being contravened — that is, whenever it’s in danger of major environmental harm...If the stakes felt almost...

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported...

Up to 1,000 non-native fish died in the Lower Santa Cruz River, a retired fish biologist says, because a state contractor diverted river water for an Ina Road bridge construction project. The diversion moved the river’s treated sewage effluent from the west bank to the east bank, away from the towering, shady willow trees along the west bank. It ended Friday, a little more than a week after it started, when the contractor dug a new channel near the bridge site to reverse the effluent’s course back to the west bank. The diversion “was a necessary part of the construction,”...

In these times of ICO’s boom, the various platforms and innovative projects that come to us based on blockchain technology certainly cover all types of areas, ensuring a rapid evolution of the acceptance of this technology in everyday life. In the case of the music industry, blockchain technology makes it possible to realize one of the dreamed premises: decentralizing the omnipotence of the big fishes of the music industry in favor of musicians, composers, and performers. And without leaving aside the fans. On this occasion, we will talk about the Potentiam project and its interesting proposal for the music sector.

The fact is, the mobile purchasing decision for most consumers is now more about buying into, and sticking with, an ecosystem than it is about a particular device -- no matter how well crafted. And Microsoft’s ecosystem can’t yet compete with what’s on offer from Apple, with its iTunes store, Beats 1 streaming radio, Apple TV and other cloud services. Phones that run Google Android, meanwhile, boast more than a million apps and seamless integration with a host of services like Docs, YouTube and Gmail. Microsoft’s problem is that most users in the U.S. already are on Android, which holds...

Four of about 40 pilot whales stranded in the Everglades National Park in southwest Florida have died, news media reported on Wednesday morning. About 30 whales are trapped in the shallow water near Everglades National Park, and about 10 whales are beached on the park’s shore, Reuters reported. Four of the beached whales have died, the news agency said.

When the Democrats adopted the "culture of corruption" meme as their campaign theme earlier this year, we noted that the culture hardly respected party lines. The leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, Harry Reid, took contributions from clients of Jack Abramoff and intervened on their behalf at least four times, and Abramoff hired one of Reid's staffers and started holding fundraisers for the Senate Minority Leader in Abramoff's offices. Now COGirl at Hang Right Politics points us towards a Los Angeles Times report on the "culture of corruption" surrounding Harry Reid and a new real-estate development outside of Las Vegas....

ROME (AFP) – A rush to drill in the gas-rich Mediterranean may do permanent damage to the sea's wildlife as it takes at least a millennium for an ecosystem to grow, the World Wildlife Fund warned Wednesday. Drilling in the Mediterranean's eastern region shared by Turkey, Israel and Egypt, "could cause irreversible damage" to its biodiversity, said Sergi Tudela, head of WWF's Mediterranean Fisheries Programme. The area hosts rare and millennia-old species such as deep-sea sponges, worms, mollusks and cold water corals, and therefore are "particularly fragile and vulnerable to external interference," he added in a statement. Once a deep-sea...

Killer shrimp are invading UK waters and raising concern among scientists. Killer shrimp may threaten the balance of life in fresh-water ecosystems.On Sept. 9, Britain's Environment Agency issued an alert that "killer shrimp" were spotted in a fresh-water reservoir in Cambridgeshire, England. Before you have a 28 Days Later moment, take a deep breath. These tiny crustaceans, the Dikerogammarus villosus shrimp, which can grow up to 3 centimeters (about 1 inch) in length, pose no direct danger to humans. But the killer shrimp is bigger than local species – and more aggressive. The "killer shrimp" eats other shrimp and small...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-foundation-chair-announcement-conference-call Home • Briefing Room • Speeches & Remarks The White House Office of the First Lady For Immediate Release April 01, 2010 Remarks by the First Lady, Senator Bill Frist, Mayor Cory Booker and Dr. Jim Gavin at Foundation Chair Announcement Conference Call Via telephone 11:02 A.M. EDT MRS. OBAMA: Well, good morning, everyone. This is Mrs. Obama. It’s good to have you all on the line. Thank you so much for joining us as we take another very important step forward in the work to address America’s childhood obesity crisis. This...

<p>With its humanlike face, the blobfish is a creature of nightmares, and who knows what terrors it could bring upon us.</p> <p>Federal fish fighters this week are preparing further assaults on the feared Asian carp, with nets, electrified fences, poison — whatever they can do to stop the terrifying beast from entering the Great Lakes.</p>

Animalistic Shakespeares Explored by: Bethany Stotts, February 03, 2009 Not only did the Bard speak to human nature and love, but he also spoke to philosophy, epistemology, and sociology, according to four Modern Language Association (MLA) scholars speaking at a panel arranged by the Division on Shakespeare. They argued at this year’s MLA Convention that Shakespeare used complicated ecosystemic imagery to evoke concepts of Atomism, to delineate a continuum of animals, to explore nature’s indecipherability, and to comment on power struggles between social groups. Hamlet. The reflections of the melancholy protagonist Hamlet reflect the tenets of atomism, argued North Carolina...

BANGKOK, Thailand - It seemed like a good idea at the time: Remove all the feral cats from a famous Australian island to save the native seabirds. But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday. Removing the cats from Macquarie "caused environmental devastation" that will cost authorities 24 million Australian dollars ($16.2 million) to remedy, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and her colleagues wrote in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied...