The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.
It warns that unless the US’s dependence on cars in towns and cities falls drastically, the transition to lithium battery-powered electric vehicles by 2050 will deepen global environmental and social inequalities linked to mining – and may even jeopardize the 1.5C global heating target.
Under the taxpayer-funded sovereign grant, which is now £86.3m a year, the king receives 25% of the crown estate’s annual surplus, which includes an extra 10% for the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.
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The king, who highlighted the cost of living crisis in his Christmas message, has requested that the extra funds “be directed for wider public good”, instead of to the sovereign grant, at a time when many are facing financial hardship.
A giant cane toad, dubbed “Toadzilla”, that was found by rangers in Queensland’s Conway national park on Thursday, is believed to be the largest of her species ever found.
New research by top US government scientists has found that people exposed to the widely used weedkilling chemical glyphosate have biomarkers in their urine linked to the development of cancer and other diseases.
The study, published last week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA.
Glyphosate weedkiller damages wild bee colonies, study reveals
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Oxidative stress is considered by health experts as a key characteristic of carcinogens.
The French government is taking legal action over an “environmental nightmare” caused by waves of tiny plastic beads washing up on its Atlantic coastline.
The white pellets the size of grains of rice, nicknamed “mermaids’ tears”, have been appearing on beaches ranging from Brittany to locations in Spain for the last year. They are believed to have come from shipping containers lost in the Atlantic Ocean.
On France’s north-west coast, dozens of volunteers turned up at the weekend to sift through sand at Pornic in the department of Loire-Atlantique to collect some of the beads, formally called industrial plastic granules (IPG), measuring less than 1.5mm. Environmental activists admit it is a hopeless task.
Cheshire cheese, beremeal and norfolk beefing apples are among the UK foods at risk of vanishing for ever. And it’s not just our palates that will suffer, but the planet
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Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly grows and consumes only nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide about 50% of all calories humans consume. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar to the mix, and you have 75% of all the calories. But diversity within these crops is also disappearing, as we rely on an ever-smaller number of high-yielding varieties.
For a couple of days this month, wind power supplied over half the UK’s electricity. You wouldn’t know it from our bills – or our politicians.
Last week, for two days straight, wind power hit a peak of supplying over half of all the UK’s electricity use. For five months last year, low-carbon electricity sources (solar, wind and nuclear) constituted more than 50% of the country’s electricity use. And unbelievably, the National Grid spends hundreds of millions to billions a year constraining energy supplies, that is, paying renewable suppliers when they’re generating too much power for the grid to handle.
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Research by Nesta, the innovation foundation, has shown that if we meet the offshore wind target set by the government’s energy security strategy – 50GW by 2030 – then on an ideal windy day, that alone would provide almost twice as much energy as we use, before you even factor in onshore and solar. There is a real prospect of limitless cheap energy, some of the time, with windless days covered by, ideally, nuclear as an alternative.
A joint effort of several authors who do find that nobody can keep standing at the side and that “Everyone" must care about what is going on in today’s world.
We are a bunch of people who do not mind that somebody has a totally different idea but is willing to share the ideas with others and to be Active and willing to let others understand how "today’s decisions will influence the future”. Therefore we would love to see many others to "Act today".
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Some View on the World 