Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Concerned students press for their high schools – some with $1bn endowments – to reinvest in clean energy A high school in California has decided not to invest in coal, oil or gas, instead pledging to put money into clean energy. It’s the latest win in a new fossil fuel divestment campus campaign launched by high schoolers across 11 countries that is gaining support in the US. The Nueva School, an elite private school outside San Francisco, pledged in spring 2024 to invest a portion of its $55m endowment in renewable power. The commitment followed months of pressure from students. Continue reading...

Big farms rake in record profits when food prices soar, while small farms struggle on razor-thin margins ‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes The income gap between the biggest and smallest farms in Europe has doubled in the past 15 years and hit record levels at the same time as the number of small farms has collapsed, a Guardian analysis of agricultural income data has found. Figures from the European Commission’s Farming Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and Eurostat suggest farmers across the continent raked in record profits when the war in Ukraine sent food prices soaring, boosting a long-running trend of rising average incomes that has outstripped inflation. Continue reading...

Politicians say use of common yet toxic paraquat can’t be justified due to apparent health and environment risks More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease and other health dangers. In a 31 October letter to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a “highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities”. The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October. Continue reading...

More than 200 deaths and widespread destruction in Valencia are the latest sign of danger in a warming world The death toll from floods in Spain’s Valencia region has topped 200. A huge clean-up is under way amid desperate conditions, with severe weather warnings still in place. The storms which caused this devastation – with roads turned into muddy rivers, thousands of homes deluged and cars swept into piles – were unprecedented. The gota fría, or “cold drop”, is a regular occurrence when cold autumnal air moves over the warm Mediterranean, causing dense clouds to form. But this rain, according to the Spanish weather service, was 10 times stronger than a normal downpour. Extreme weather in Spain, and the rest of southern Europe, is more commonly understood to mean dangerous heat, drought and wildfires. The regional government is under attack regarding the lack of sufficient warnings and there is no doubt that the severity of these floods came as a terrible shock. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...