The fate of incoming Labour business and industry secretaries seems to be to launch emergency rescue packages for industries that would otherwise face imminent closure. Witness Jonathan Reynolds at last Saturday’s extraordinary parliamentary recall arguing for the legal right to take over the running of British Steel from its Chinese owner, Jingye, in order to save up to 3,500 jobs and Britain’s strategic capacity to make steel. And witness Tony Benn, in 1974, offering a financial lifeline to 3,000 workers forming a cooperative to save motorcycle manufacture at the failed…
Tag: Environment
UK ‘helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine’ via loophole on refined oil imports
The UK has been accused of “helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine” by continuing to import record amounts of refined oil from countries processing Kremlin fossil fuels. Government data analysed by the environmental news site Desmog shows that imports of refined oil from India, China and Turkey amounted to £2.2bn in 2023, the same record value as the previous year, up from £434.2m in 2021. Russia is the largest crude oil supplier to India and China, while Turkey has become one of the biggest importers of Russian oil…
Millions at risk of floods in China’s Guangdong province after heavy rain
Major rivers, waterways and reservoirs in China’s Guangdong province are threatening to unleash dangerous floods, forcing the government to enact emergency response plans to protect more than 127 million people. Calling the situation “grim“, local weather officials said sections of rivers and tributaries at the Xijiang and Beijiang river basins are hitting water levels in a rare spike that only has a one-in-50 chance of happening in any given year, state broadcaster CCTV news said on Sunday. China’s water resource ministry issued an emergency advisory, CCTV reported. Guangdong officials urged…
The killer whale trainers who still defend captivity: ‘I’m an endangered species myself’
Some people spend a long time deciding what they want to do in life. Hazel McBride feels lucky that she’s always known. As a child in Scotland, she watched a VHS tape of Free Willy on repeat. That was the first time she felt a connection with killer whales. The second time was at age eight, on a trip to SeaWorld Orlando in 2000. Shamu was the animal world’s greatest celebrity, and in the US, SeaWorld ads were ubiquitous. Kids wanted to see the killer whales, and after they saw…
World Bank’s funding of ‘hog hotel’ factory farms under fire over climate effect
The private sector arm of the World Bank is facing claims that it contributes to global heating and the undermining of animal welfare by providing financial support for factory farming, including the building of pig farming tower blocks in China. A coalition of environmental and animal welfare groups is calling on the World Bank to phase out financial support for large-scale “industrial” livestock operations. More than $1.6bn was provided for industrial farming projects between 2017 and 2023, according to an analysis by campaigners. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of…
China braced for rise in air pollution deaths
In 2005 Beijing was crowned the smog capital of the world. Concerns about air pollution and athlete health overshadowed preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games and required industry and traffic shutdowns to clean the air during the event itself. Now, a team of researchers at Chinese, German and Canadian universities have tracked the impacts of deteriorating air at that time. They found that particle pollution deaths in China were increasing at about 213,000 a year and peaked at 2.6mn people in 2005. More positively, the impact of rapid improvements in…
Kongjian Yu Has a Plan for Urban Flooding: ‘Sponge Cities’
Cities around the world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway systems and inundating residential neighborhoods, often with deadly consequences. Kongjian Yu, a landscape architect and professor at Peking University, is developing what might seem like a counterintuitive response: Let the water in. “You cannot fight water,” he said. “You have to adapt to it.” Instead of putting in more drainage pipes, building flood walls and channeling rivers between concrete embankments, which is the usual approach to managing…
World’s largest solar manufacturer to cut one-third of workforce
The world’s largest solar manufacturer has slashed nearly a third of its workforce after a cost-cutting drive that included telling staff to only print in black and white fell short and as a chill ripples through the renewable energy sector. China’s Longi is to cut as much as 30% of its workforce, in an acceleration of cost reductions that began late last year, Bloomberg reported. It is unclear exactly how many jobs will be lost at the company, which employed 80,000 at its peak last year, as an internal function…
How the fishing industry abuses workers who catch the fish we eat
Labor groups and government officials are pushing to rein in rampant abuses of workers in the fishing industry, where migrant laborers are frequently subjected to slavery and violence from employers. One out of every five fish is caught through illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in conditions where abuses of workers are common, according to a United Nations estimate. Some 128,000 workers are thought to be currently trapped in forced labor on remote fishing vessels around the world, according to the International Labour Organization. Child labor or forced labor has been…
John Kerry: ‘I Feel Deeply Frustrated’
When former Secretary of State John Kerry stepped into a newly created post as America’s top climate diplomat in 2021, the reputation of the United States abroad was, in his words, “in the crapper,” and the pathway to meeting the world’s climate goals looked, to most, very narrow. Kerry, now 80, is stepping down this week to take a role on the Biden re-election campaign. In the last three years, the climate landscape has changed in two big and contradictory ways: The goal the world set in Paris in 2015…