Uniting art and science, the award-winning Dutch photographer’s project has led him all over the world, from ice formations in Greenland to Shark Bay in Australia

Life started with the humble horseshoe crab. Not life itself, but Life: A Journey Through Time, nature photographer Frans Lanting’s multi-year experiment travelling the globe, searching for places and specimens as old as the planet itself. The idea came to him when he was on assignment photographing the horseshoe crabs that gather every spring in a place as prosaic as the New Jersey shore. He realised the scene must have looked much the same aeons ago.

Lanting’s big bang came in 2006 with a book, a documentary, a TED Talk and a Philip Glass symphony all dedicated to the ever-changing peripatetic photo show. Now the project has culminated with an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Annenberg Space for Photography, with added video elements and regular screenings of the documentary, which features interviews with biologists including Harvard professor Andrew Knoll.

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Source: Guardian Environment

The debate around carbon pricing and its implementation is only likely to intensify as COP21 draws nearer. In that context, a new report released by the New Climate Economy (NCE) think-tank provides some interesting data. NCE’s report analyses existing carbon pricing schemes and suggests that far from damaging economic competitiveness, carbon pricing can actually have a positive impact.

In total, the research analysed existing schemes that cover around 12% of global carbon emissions. It found that the nine states in the U.S. committed to carbon pricing grew 0.4% more and cut emissions more effectively than other municipalities. The report also claims that Ireland’s carbon tax, introduced in 2010, raised much-needed revenues, while British Columbia has cut its carbon emission while continue to produce better economic growth than the rest of Canada.

The topic fits into a general narrative around the need for markets to reflect the full, or true, cost of energy and other resources. The findings of the NCE report are in-line with thinking that aligning economic structure with environmental considerations needn’t have negative financial impacts, quite the opposite in fact.

Lead image licensed under CC – credit Flickr user: michaelgreenhill

The post Carbon Pricing Debate: Report Indicates Economic Benefits appeared first on Circulate.

Source: Circulate News RSS

Conservationists hope the US-born rhino will breed with female ‘hairy rhinos’ at the sanctuary and boost population of the critically endangered species

A US-born Sumatran rhino ate leaves and wallowed in mud at an Indonesian sanctuary, as the US formally handed over the animal on Thursday in hopes he will have offspring and help save his critically endangered species from extinction.

The eight-year-old rhino is now in quarantine at Way Kambas national park after traveling more than 10,000 miles (16,000km) from a zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio, to the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

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Source: Guardian Environment

More than 100 green groups warn that changes to tax relief on community solar and wind projects will be the ‘final nail in the coffin’ for their prospects

Efforts by local communities to install their own solar panels and wind turbines will be decimated by Treasury changes to tax relief, more than 100 green energy groups have warned.

In a letter to the chancellor, George Osborne, the groups claim that a move to axe tax relief for so-called “community energy” projects will be the “final nail in the coffin” for their prospects.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Alternative protein sources will be needed for humans and livestock to reduce land and energy use, says UK government’s waste agency

Insects should become a staple of people’s diets around the world as an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, according to a report by the UK government’s waste agency.

But persuading consumers to overcome “the yuck factor” will be a key issue, says the report by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) which assesses challenges to the development of the food system in the next 10 years.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Ground-breaking Energiesprong project is massively scaled back after falling short of funds to provide eco-makeovers for 100,000 British housing association and council homes

A groundbreaking project to give thousands of sub-standard homesa dramatic green makeover has finally won EU approval, but only after a massive downgrading of its ambition.

The Energiesprong project had hoped to provide a wave of 10-day makeovers for over 100,000 British housing association and council homes, installing wraparound insulating facades, solar panels and Ikea kitchens.

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Source: Guardian Environment

There may be appetite for change but without a coherent alternative we must work out how to make capitalism work for us

The capitalist model is under attack on all sides. Yet while there is appetite for change, not even the Occupy movement has come up with a coherent, alternative model. So can capitalism be reformed to operate in the service of society?

At Oxfam, where I was chief executive for 12 years, we believed that the private sector has the ability to help people out of poverty, for example through the creation of jobs or by purchasing products from farmers at a fair price.

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Source: Guardian Environment

French economists moot €180 levy on business class tickets to help vulnerable countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, reports Climate Home

Air travel should be taxed to protect the world’s vulnerable from drought, flooding and sea level rise.

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Source: Guardian Environment

On 5 November 1965 climate scientists summarized the risks associated with rising carbon pollution in a report for Lyndon Baines Johnson

Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted:

Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.

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Source: Guardian Environment