Will water soon be a marketable commodity or a priceless public good?
There’s a scene in the film Mad Max: Fury Road where the evil ruler Immortan Joe, gazing down from a cliff upon his parched, emaciated subjects, turns two turbines, and water gushes from three gigantic sluices. The wretched masses surge forward to catch the deluge in their pots and bowls. And as imperiously as he opened the gates, Joe shuts them. “Do not become addicted to water,” he roars. “It will take hold of you.” But, of course, he already has taken hold of them by withholding, essentially, life.
We don’t have to await the dystopian future for the water wars to begin. The struggle over water, between private interests and the public good, the powerful and the weak, is raging now. From Love Canal to Flint, Michigan; Bolivia to Ukraine to Tunisia; budget-cutting, privatization, corporate malfeasance and climate crises are conspiring to create political violence, mass migration, property damage and death.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/15/2025 - 13:30
01/15/2025 - 12:41
Climate activists say they were subjected to degrading treatment during questioning in Brescia on Monday
Italy’s interior minister has been urged to open an investigation into police in the northern city of Brescia amid allegations that seven female climate activists were made to take off their underwear and perform squats during questioning.
The activists were among 22 people brought to Brescia’s main police station on Monday morning after officers interrupted a protest held outside the Italian aerospace and defence firm Leonardo’s factory.
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01/15/2025 - 11:29
Air Resources Board withdraws request for approval of rules to limit pollution from diesel trains and big rigs
California’s efforts to limit pollution from diesel-powered trains and big rigs were stalled in anticipation of pushback from the incoming Trump administration.
The California Air Resources Board said on Tuesday it withdrew its requests for federal approval to implement stricter emissions rules for locomotives and semi-trucks because the US Environmental Protection Agency had yet to approve them. The decision came just days before Joe Biden leaves office.
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01/15/2025 - 10:00
Global heating means atmosphere can drive both extreme droughts and floods with rapid switches
Climate “whiplash” between extremely wet and dry conditions, which spurred catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, is increasing exponentially around the world because of global heating, analysis has found.
Climate whiplash is a rapid swing between very wet or dry conditions and can cause far more harm to people than individual extreme events alone. In recent years, whiplash events have been linked to disastrous floods in east Africa, Pakistan and Australia and to worsening heatwaves in Europe and China.
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01/15/2025 - 10:00
The jobs are highly coveted, offering training and reduced sentences, but face criticism over low wages
As firefighters are battling multiple huge blazes tearing through Los Angeles, California’s prisons have deployed more than 1,000 incarcerated people to battle on the frontlines.
The California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) said that, as of Wednesday morning, 1,116 incarcerated people were embedded with the state’s other firefighters to help slow the spread of the infernos that have killed at least 25 people and devastated neighborhoods across LA county.
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01/15/2025 - 09:57
Luke Evans, whose work has been called ‘breathtakingly new’, says he has lost experimental data and all equipment
A scientist in Liverpool has lost more than a decade of work after the prefabricated building that served as his research lab was destroyed in a suspected arson attack.
Luke Evans, the chief executive of Scintilla CME and a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, was due to submit his work in March. His research centres on advanced fuel cell technology that converts organic waste into clean energy, and could be crucial in the transition away from fossil fuels.
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01/15/2025 - 08:00
Review could lead to bans on plastic chemicals including vinyl chloride, compound at center of 2023 Ohio train wreck
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching a formal review of five highly toxic plastic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, the notorious compound at the center of the East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck fire. The move could lead to strong limits or bans on the substances.
Vinyl chloride is most commonly used in PVC pipe and packaging production, but is also cancerous and highly flammable. For about 50 years, the federal government has considered limits on the substance, but industry has thwarted most regulatory efforts, hidden the substances’ risks and is already mobilizing against the new review.
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01/15/2025 - 08:00
Exclusive: Newly uncovered documents reveal chemicals giant was aware ‘environmentally neutral’ products did not biodegrade
The multibillion-dollar chemicals company 3M told customers its firefighting foams were harmless and biodegradable when it knew they contained toxic substances so persistent they are now known as “forever chemicals” and banned in many countries including the UK, newly uncovered documents show.
From the 1960s until 2003, 3M made foams containing PFOS and PFOA (perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid), synthetic chemicals that can take tens of thousands of years to degrade in the environment and have been linked to cancers and a range of other health problems such as thyroid disease, high cholesterol, hormonal problems and fertility issues.
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01/15/2025 - 07:57
Adventure centre projects will promote interest in natural world, boosting young people’s wellbeing
A £150,000 initiative to tackle the “teenage dip” in nature connectedness will involve the Scout Association introducing rewilding to its adventure centres across the UK.
The funding, announced on Wednesday by the environmental charity Rewilding Britain, will support 11 projects aimed at putting young people at the heart of nature restoration. Several focus explicitly on reversing the sharp decline in young people’s engagement with the natural world during adolescence.
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01/15/2025 - 07:07
The scope of the Cop26 net zero banking alliance may have been limited, but the exodus of six US banks signifies a seismic political shift
Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December. A smaller story, certainly, but the departure of top US banks from the NZBA in the weeks since Donald Trump’s re-election nonetheless speaks to a seismic political shift prompting major financial institutions to turn away from the climate-related commitments they made in the optimistic years after the Paris agreement.
The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. It is part of the umbrella Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which counts among its membership dozens of “alliances” covering the various segments of global finance. For its part, the NZBA requires new members to submit science-aligned targets within 18 months of joining, alongside disclosing plans for and status updates on meeting them.
Adrienne Buller is director of The Break Down and the author of The Value of a Whale: on the illusions of green capitalism
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