Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Campaigners say pheasants and partridges reared ‘on industrial scale’ do not have same protections as chickens The government is considering a crackdown on pheasant shooting in England as part of a consultation on strict new animal welfare laws that would affect shoot organisers. Ministers are already considering plans for the issuing of licences for those who run game bird shoots. The proposals mean anybody associated with wildlife crime, such as the poisoning or shooting of birds of prey, would be banned from hosting shooting events. Continue reading...

US energy department warns of potential for outages in PJM Interconnection, serving 67 million from DC to Chicago The risk ⁠of power outages ⁠is expected to ​escalate across a broad swath of the United States on Wednesday as intense heat will test the capacity of electricity supplies ⁠serving millions of homes and businesses from the midwest through the mid-Atlantic. The US Department of Energy warned of the potential for heightened blackout risks in ⁠the PJM Interconnection, the largest US electric grid, which serves 67 million people in ​a territory stretching from Washington DC to ‌Chicago. Continue reading...

I will calmly read all the threatening letters and await the court case against me. But I will take a stand even if our government won’t I can’t even remember when I decided to stop paying the sewage element of my Thames Water bill. It might have been after reading this headline from the Guardian in July 2025: “Serious pollution incidents by English water companies rose 60% last year,” with the subheading: “Environment Agency records 75 serious incidents among total of 2,800, with Thames Water being worst offender.” Living in London means that my supplier is Thames Water, which makes a profit out of pollution. I decided that if the government wouldn’t act, I could at least do my part and not pay for this travesty. Jenny Jones is a Green party peer Continue reading...

Arthur Downing, author of Power and the People: A History of British Energy, says all-encompassing rapid transition will need a mutualised system Have you ever wondered why it is that most houses in the UK are reliant on gas boilers? Not what’s stopping more people from replacing them with heat pumps, but instead why and how the gas boiler became so ubiquitous in the first place? Arthur Downing, the author of the new book Power and the People: A History of British Energy, can tell you exactly why. “We only have boilers in our houses because of a state-owned enterprise that went into everybody’s home and installed natural gas-suitable appliances at no direct cost,” he says. The nationalised gas industry of the 1940s to the 1980s, which oversaw this huge project, was for three decades one of the “most dynamic, innovative, efficient industries in Britain”, Downing says. Yet few of us would use these terms to describe it as such now. Continue reading...