Announcing a feasibility study, PM says time has come to consider second link after challenge of breakage of existing Basslink interconnector

The federal government has launched a feasibility study into a second electricity connector between Tasmania and the mainland, which Malcolm Turnbull has said is “very likely” to prove its commercial viability.

Speaking in Tasmania on Thursday, the prime minister said he and Tasmania’s premier, Will Hodgman, believed the time had come to consider the second link because the state had “faced a very severe challenge in terms of energy supply with the breakage” in the Basslink interconnector, which is being repaired.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Electric car buyers will receive €4,000 when they choose a purely electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybrid

Germany will subsidise electric car purchases to give a jolt to sluggish growth in the sector and help meet national climate goals with zero-emission mobility, the government said Wednesday.

Car buyers will receive €4,000 ($4,500) when they choose a purely electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybrid, with the cost shared 50-50 between the public purse and car makers.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Farmers signing up for the carbon emissions reduction fund have to meet strict guidelines but there is significant profit and energy savings to be made

This week the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) will hold the third emissions reduction fund auction and farmers across Australia will move to the forefront of efforts to rescue a “clapped-out” country.

Australian farmers have long bought and sold their wares at auction. Sale yards were the hub of country towns and the din of a moleskin-clad auctioneer shouting over the bleating and mooing of fattened livestock has long been a familiar rural backdrop.

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Source: Guardian Environment

The oceanographic explorer and son of Jacques Cousteau has indirectly challenged embattled marine park’s claims that no orca has survived release

Oceanographic explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau has called on SeaWorld to release its captive orcas.

Cousteau’s intervention comes just one month after the embattled theme park company announced it would stop its program of orca breeding in captivity, but would not completely release the animals.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Energy secretary Amber Rudd (Letters, 21 April) clearly has the gift of clairvoyance. She says that no liabilities would fall to the UK taxpayer or consumer should Hinkley Point C be cancelled. Who, pray, would foot the bill to complete the project should EDF withdraw after a few years of construction when cost and time overruns became apparent, as they have with other projects in France and Finland?

And assuming the plant ever began generating its costly electricity, who would be responsible for the waste management costs, the size of which can only be estimated since the location, depth, technical details about cladding, inventory, or even if there will ever be a repository, remain stubbornly vague and could yet result in indefinite storage on site? Spent nuclear fuel from Hinkley C or Sizewell C would be on their respective sites for an estimated 160 years. Who will take title to hundreds of tonnes of spent nuclear fuel if, as is likely, within that time period, EDF disappears?

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Source: Guardian Environment

Martial law in the occupied territories | Pheasant not so shy | Fat-shaming | Letters to the Guardian

The Guardian’s reporting of the recent case of 12-year-old Dima al-Wawi’s conviction under Israeli martial law (Palestinian girl, 12, freed from Israeli jail, 26 April) failed to point out that such a law is, in fact, entirely British. On 7 June 1967, the commander of the IDF in the West Bank, Chaim Herzog, issued Security Provisions Order Proclamation No 3 which imposed such a system of military justice on the occupied territories, which was nothing other than the 1945 Defence (Emergency) Regulations instituted by the British mandatory government in its struggle to defeat Jewish terrorism. This British law has never been revoked or reformed, and still applies in the occupied territories today.
Julian Wilson
London

• The caption to the photo on the letters page (27 April) suggests pheasants are often shy. Not round here. You can ask Phil the pheasant who regularly walks our garden with his two female companions and of whom I have a photo sitting on the second tier of one of our bird feeders while feasting on the fat balls on the one above.
Ken Cordingley
Williton, Somerset

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Source: Guardian Environment

The US president will go to the Michigan city currently battling a toxic water crisis, after Mari Copeny wrote saying a visit ‘would really lift people’s spirits’

Barack Obama will visit Flint, Michigan for the first time next week, to be briefed on efforts to tackle the toxic water crisis that has plagued the city.

The US president will visit Flint on 4 May to speak to residents “about the public health crisis, receive an in-person briefing on the federal efforts in place … and deliver remarks to community members”, according to a White House official.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Scheme offering Indonesian villages that stop illegal logging large discounts on medical care is saving lives as well as the rainforest

As a dental surgeon, a successful career in conservation was not something Dr Hotlin Ompusunggu ever imagined.

But her work in Indonesia, where she has helped save orangutans by providing people with healthcare discounts if their villages stop logging, has clearly paid off. As well as cutting logging and improving health, this week she won second a “green oscar” prize and there are plans to replicate her model across south-east Asia.

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Source: Guardian Environment

The bison will join the bald eagle, the national emblem since 1782, as America’s symbolic animal, in an effort to prevent it from going extinct

The bison, an animal once hunted to the brink of extinction in America, is set to become the first national mammal of the US, putting it on a par with the bald eagle as a symbol of the nation.

Congress has passed legislation, the National Bison Legacy Act, which names the hoofed beast as a “historical symbol of the United States” and establishes it as the nation’s landmark mammal.

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Source: Guardian Environment