Breaking Waves: Ocean News

The injunction pauses policy giving senior Trump official direct sign-off on federal clean energy projects A federal judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday struck down several Trump administration actions slowing down development of clean energy, including a requirement that all solar and wind energy projects on federal lands and waters be personally approved by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum. Denise J Casper, chief judge of the US district court for Massachusetts, ruled that a coalition of plaintiffs representing wind and solar developers were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the administration’s actions violate federal statute and would cause irreparable harm if the court did not intervene. Continue reading...

NSW and Queensland governments ‘severely underdelivered’ on promised infrastructure to improve water flows, independent review finds Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Two state governments have drastically underdelivered more than $160m in infrastructure measures to improve river health in the northern Murray-Darling basin eight years since they were promised, a major independent review has found. This includes failure by the New South Wales government to secure any of the private land access needed to improve water flows over floodplains in the state’s Gwydir region where scientists had to scramble to rescue turtles in dried up wetlands last week. Continue reading...

Unwanted vessels left to decay release fibreglass shards into the water, harming marine life. Steve Green – with his trusty van Cecil – is determined to clean things up Steve Green, a boat engineer from Cornwall, was pulled over by the police just before Christmas. He was driving a decrepit-looking VW campervan and towing an even more dilapidated yacht up to Truro. He hadn’t broken any laws, but he admits that Cecil the campervan, which runs on donated chip oil from local pubs and has a crane and a winch on the front, “wasn’t quite what VW intended”. Green (and Cecil) are on a mission to rid the beautiful hidden creeks of Cornwall’s Helford and Fal rivers of 166 abandoned fibreglass yachts, which are leaking plastic and toxins into the predominantly marine waters. Marine biologists have likened the thousands of shards of fibreglass they have found embedded in the flesh of sea-creatures in areas with wrecks such as these to asbestos, a substance known to have a noxious effect on humans. Green uses a detachable crane system at the front of his van to move around bags of plastic after they have been weighed. Cecil is upholstered in recycled denim Continue reading...

It’s crucial to understanding how gender is affecting our ability to rally behind a shared ecological vision Feminist influencer Liz Plank opens her groundbreaking book For the Love of Men with a bold statement: “There is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.” She means it at several levels, from the most intimate: how male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US; to the most macro: how associating “eco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity” is literally killing the planet. This Earth Day, it’s worth reflecting on why this is so and what can be done about it. While it won’t come as news to most that, compared with women, men litter more, recycle less, and leave a bigger carbon footprint There’s something more extreme than simple thoughtlessness causing young men, in a form of anti-environmental protest known as “rolling coal”, to modify the diesel engines on their pickup trucks to deliberately belch large amounts of grey-black exhaust, and then run Priuses and bicyclists off the road. Continue reading...