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In the UK and around the world, those who challenge rich corporations are being hounded and crushed with ever-more inventive penalties, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Link to climate activism is seven times stronger for anger than it is for hope, say Norwegian researchers

Le groupe d'électrolyseurs américain Plug Power prévoit la construction de trois usines d'hydrogène vert en Finlande, pour décarboner l'industrie tout en s'intégrant dans la "dorsale" européenne en cours de constitution autour de 31 opérateurs de réseaux de transport de gaz du Vieux Continent.

Machine learning is producing impressive results, and, for better or worse, researchers are now using it to address the climate crisis, writes Frederick Hewett.

A coal-fired power plant that had been mothballed has become the first of its kind to be put back on to the network in Germany, as debate rages over how Europe’s largest economy will cope without Russian gas. The facility in Lower Saxony, which is owned by the Czech energy company EGH, has received emergency permission to run until April in an attempt to boost energy production.

Climate change is reducing output and raising safety concerns at nuclear facilities from France to the US. But experts say adapting is possible—and necessary.

An all-electric future depends heavily on copper, and looming supply shortfalls could hamper nations’ goals of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, according to a new report from S&P Global. Unless significant new supply becomes available, climate goals will be “short-circuited and remain out of reach,” the report says.

After all, Western economies – and their economic growth – depend utterly on labour and resources from the South...

There’s a simple way to unite everyone behind climate justice – and it’s within our power

Coal plants will be reactivated if Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a gas cutoff, a government official said. That would trigger the second of a three-stage Germany’s gas emergency plan.

Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that forms when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, gasoline and wood.

The cost of decommissioning the UK’s seven ageing nuclear power stations has nearly doubled to £23.5bn and is likely to rise further, the public accounts committee has said. The soaring costs of safely decommissioning the advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs), including Dungeness B, Hunterston B and Hinkley B, are being loaded on to the taxpayer, their report said.

Ce plan vise à réduire la dépendance à l’égard des combustibles fossiles russes et accélérer la transition énergétique par une série d’actions suivant 4 axes :

Countries should move from coal to renewable energy without shifting to gas as a “transition” fuel to save money, as high gas prices and market volatility have made the fossil fuel an expensive option, analysis has found. Natural gas has long been touted as a “transition” fuel for economies dependent on coal for their power needs, as it has lower carbon dioxide emissions than coal but requires similar centralised infrastructure, and gas-fired power stations take only a couple of years to build. Earlier this year, before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Commission angered green campaigners by including gas as a “bridge” to clean energy in its guidebook for green investment.

Le plan « REPowerEU » présenté début mars 2022 par la Commission européenne(1) vise à « rendre l'Europe indépendante des combustibles fossiles russes bien avant 2030 ». Il suppose entre autres « de multiplier au moins par 3 les capacités installées d’énergie solaire photovoltaïque et par 2,5 les capacités éoliennes » au niveau européen, souligne Susanne Nies(2) dans le « briefing » en anglais ci-après, publié le 12 avril par le Centre Énergie & Climat de l'Ifri.

They argue that balancing supply represents just a fraction of nuclear power’s potential contribution to decarbonisation.

When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi’s worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant’s emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete “sarcophagus” that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl’s Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident.

Researchers have been able to cut their carbon footprint by jetting off to fewer international conferences, but physicists working on large-scale experiments may also have to consider the significant environmental impact of the computer power they require. Michael Allen investigates

As head of state-owned oil firm Rosneft, oligarch commands central place in the economy

Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine is an act of aggression that will make already worrisome tensions between Nato and Moscow even more dangerous. The west’s new cold war with Russia has turned hot. Vladimir Putin bears primary responsibility for this latest development, but Nato’s arrogant, tone‐​deaf policy toward Russia over the past quarter‐​century deserves a large share as well. Analysts committed to a US foreign policy of realism and restraint have warned for more than a quarter‐​century that continuing to expand the most powerful military alliance in history toward another major power would not end well. The war in Ukraine provides definitive confirmation that it did not.