Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Deal for Europe’s biggest facility for LNG imports comes as overall UK gas demand fell sharply last year The owner of British Gas has placed a £1.5bn bet on the UK’s future reliance on fossil fuel imports after striking a deal to buy Europe’s biggest gas import terminal. Centrica plans to partner with a US private equity firm to acquire the Isle of Grain terminal in Kent, which can import 15m tonnes of liquefied natural gas a year, even after Britain’s gas demand fell last year to its lowest level since the early 1990s. Continue reading...

Exclusive: 17 sites recorded elevated levels, in some cases thousands of times higher than proposed safe limits, as experts warn of potential risk to drinking water “Alarmingly high” levels of toxic forever chemicals have been detected at English airports – in some cases thousands of times higher than proposed EU safe levels – with experts raising concerns over the potential impact on drinking water sources. Seventeen airports recorded elevated levels of Pfas in the ground and surface water sample on their sites, according to unpublished Environment Agency documents, obtained exclusively by the Ends Report and the Guardian via an environmental information request. Continue reading...

Greenpeace climbers attached a new work, titled Butchered, by the renowned artist Anish Kapoor on to a Shell platform in the North Sea – the world’s first artwork to be installed on an active offshore gas site. After securing a 12-metre x 8-metre canvas to the structure, the activists hoisted a high-pressure hose 16 metres above sea level. They then pumped 1,000 litres of blood-red liquid that seeped into the fabric, creating a vast crimson stain. The work is a stark visualisation of the wound inflicted on humanity and the Earth by the fossil fuel industry, and aims to represent the collective grief and pain over what has been lost, as well as a call for reparation Huge ‘Butchered’ artwork installed on North Sea gas rig by Greenpeace activists Continue reading...

Author Michael Grunwald reckons with the challenge of food-based climate emissions in his new book We Are Eating the Earth Ridding ourselves of fossil fuels has been a tortuously ponderous process and, in the current political era, one that can seem to be in full retreat. But we do have the tools to run our cities, vehicles and industries on clean energy and even through the murk of vested interest, the contours of a post-fossil world are becoming clearer. Our system of producing food, though, is in a relative stone age when it comes to the climate crisis. We continue to raze vast tracts of carbon-rich forests for crop and grazing land thereby creating, by some estimates, as much as a third of all global planet-heating emissions. Continue reading...