Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Though 2,300 people in the US died from heat-related illness in 2023, workers await robust protection laws On 23 June, Shae Parker had to leave her shift early at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina, to go to the emergency room due to heat exhaustion; she wasn’t paid for missing the rest of her shift. The air conditioning at her work has been on the fritz for weeks, she said, and her station heats up easily as the sun beams through its large windows. “I got nauseated, overheated, lightheaded,” she said. “We don’t have free water, we don’t have a water level on the soda machine, the ice machine is broken, so we have to buy water. The last few weeks it’s been extremely hot. It’s very hard to breathe when you’re lightheaded and experiencing dizziness. The fatigue is like 10 times worse because your body is completely drained. I had to get two bags of fluid from being dehydrated even though I was drinking water.” Continue reading...

Corporations and politicians are pushing carbon capture despite big questions over its value as residents in the southern ‘petrostate’ fear the worst It was a muggy morning in late April when a handful of local residents and grassroots organizers huddled in a church parking lot to strategize, before knocking on doors with information about the latest environmental threat facing St Rose, a predominantly Black community in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”. It was not the first time Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh had campaigned for better regulation of the choking sprawl of fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities that surround St Rose – and countless other communities up and down the Mississippi River. Continue reading...

Marking a pivotal moment for the fate of the barely known ecosystems on the ocean floor, 168 nations will decide this week who will head the International Seabed Authority Leticia Carvalho is clear what the problem is with the body she hopes to be elected to run: “Trust is broken and leadership is missing.” Later this week, at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, nations negotiating rules governing deep-sea mining face a critical vote that could impact the nascent industry for years: who should be the next leader of the regulatory body? Carvalho, sponsored by Brazil, is in the running against the current secretary general, Michael Lodge, a British lawyer, who is being sponsored by Kiribati, a small Pacific state. Continue reading...

Hailing the success of carrier bag laws, the Marine Conservation Society urges nations to push forward with plans for other single-use items The number of plastic bags washed up on UK beaches has fallen by 80% over a decade, since a mandatory fee was imposed on shoppers who opt to pick up single-use carrier bags at the checkout. According to the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) annual litter survey, volunteers found an average of one plastic bag every 100 metres of coastline surveyed last year, compared to an average of five carrier bags every 100 metres in 2014. Continue reading...