L'orbite terrestre est jonchée de débris datant des débuts de la conquête spatiale. Pour qu'elle puisse toujours être accessible, des efforts sont entrepris pour désorbiter les satellites en fin de vie. Mais il y a aussi à traiter tous les objets dont la conception n'a pas prévu l'après.

Sector may breach the government’s Jet Zero strategy which pledged not to surpass 2019 CO ₂ figures

Emissions from UK flights are rapidly returning to pre-pandemic levels, with CO ₂ pollution from aviation on track to reach a record high this year.

The increase means the sector may breach a key plank of the government’s Jet Zero strategy , which pledged to not surpass 2019 figures on the way to reaching net zero emissions from aviation by 2050.

Continue reading...

Supreme court ruling left more than 90% of state’s surface waters with no pollution protections, since they don’t run continuously

New Mexico’s rivers, which include the Rio Grande, Gila, San Juan and Pecos, are America’s most threatened waterways, according to a new report. This is largely due to a 2023 US supreme court decision that left more than 90% of the state’s surface waters without federal protections from industrial pollution, according to state officials.

“Virtually all the rivers in New Mexico are losing clean water protections,” said Matt Rice, the south-west regional director of American Rivers, the conservation group that publishes the annual list . “It has the most to lose, and the threat is particularly acute there.”

Continue reading...

When Joy and Jo Banner founded the Descendants Project in 2020, they didn’t expect to be defending their hometown first

When twin sisters Joy and Jo Banner founded their non-profit, the Descendants Project, in 2020, their goal was to protect the Black-founded “freetowns” in Louisiana’s river parishes. Like the Banners’ hometown of Wallace, many of the Black communities that abut the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans were founded after emancipation by people who’d once been enslaved.

Today, decades of disinvestment have left freetowns vulnerable to predatory development, land theft and industrialization. The Banners hoped to reverse those trends. Yet within weeks of creating their organization, their purpose shifted dramatically. Instead of supporting other Black communities, the twins found themselves fighting for their own hometown’s survival. Wallace, population 1,240, was facing an existential threat in the form of the proposed construction of a gargantuan grain-export terminal, the latest in an onslaught of industrial growth along the lower Mississippi River. The terminal would “drain us of all of our resources and all of our quality of life”, Joy said. “The overall goal is to run all of us out.”

Continue reading...

Jakarta hopes the industry is the ticket to becoming a developed nation. But there are fears the toll on the environment – and people’s lives – will be too high

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails , free app or daily news podcast

Standing chest-deep in the Molucca Sea, just outside the billowing smokestacks of the world’s largest nickel industry, Upin adjusts his mask and dives. Members of his people, the Bajau, have been known to stay underwater for more than 10 minutes but Upin resurfaces shortly. He hauls a rugged disc of metal over the side of his dugout canoe.

“Since the factories arrived, there has barely been any fish to catch,” he says and grimaces towards the opaque water.

Above: Upin steers his boat with wife Jenni and son Riski past nickel factories in Morowali. Since the factories opened, their drinking water has been polluted and fish is no longer abundant. – All images by Per Liljas
Below: Open cut nickel mining leads to erosion and sediment sludge in local waterways.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

Thames Water owes hundreds of millions of pounds in debt, and the UK government is concerned about its potential collapse. Helena Horton reports

Thames Water, the UK’s biggest water company, which services 16 million people across the south of England, is facing criticism over its management.

Kemble, the parent company of Thames Water, told its creditors last week that it had defaulted on its debt. Amid fears that the company will collapse, the government is considering options for next steps.

Continue reading...

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Publication by mayor’s office of environmental justice is first comprehensive survey of environmental inequalities

Nearly half of all New Yorkers live in areas with “disproportionate” burdens from pollution, a city report has found. Most affected are communities of color, which are also more vulnerable to impacts from climate change, according to a citywide assessment released on Friday.

“We’ve had the orange sky last year, we’re going to have more recurrent extreme weather events that are going to impact the most vulnerable in our communities,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UpRose, an environmental justice group based in Brooklyn.

Continue reading...

Country needs to speed up environmental response to protect its ageing population, multinational study finds

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.

Continue reading...