The Nation’s Largest Commercial Insurance Company Has Ditched Covering Coal. That’s a Big Deal. – Mother Jones

“Chubb’s announcement is a clear sign that coal is becoming uninsurable worldwide.”
This story was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Climate advocates have been pressuring U.S. insurance companies to end their support for the dirty energies driving the global crisis, and on Tuesday they claimed their first big win.
Chubb Ltd., the nation’s largest commercial insurance company, announced it will move away from insuring and investing in coal. It becomes the first major U.S. insurance company to take such action, joining more than a dozen European and Australian insurers that have already adopted similar policies.



Chubb will no longer underwrite the construction of new coal-fired power plants, according to the policy. It will also stop investing in companies that generate more than 30% of their revenues from coal mining or production, as well as phase out existing coverage for mining and utility companies that exceed the 30% threshold.

Continue reading: The Nation’s Largest Commercial Insurance Company Has Ditched Covering Coal. That’s a Big Deal. – Mother Jones

Revealed: How the global beef trade is destroying the Amazon — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Beef every day chops the Amazon away...

The cows grazed under a hot sun near a wooden bridge spanning a river in the Amazon. The quiet was occasionally broken by a motorbike growling along a dirt road that cut through the sprawling cattle ranch.
But the idyllic pasture was on land that the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s environment agency Ibama as a punishment for deforestation. Nearby there were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and fresh salt used to feed cattle — all in apparent contravention of rules designed to protect vital rainforest.
This vast 145,000 hectare ranch is one of several owned by AgroSB Agropecuária SA — a company known in the region as Santa Barbara. Located in an environmentally protected area, Lagoa do Triunfo is more than 600km from the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, on the western fringes of Brazil’s “agricultural frontier” — where farming eats into the rainforest.

An investigation by the Bureau, the Guardian and Repórter Brasil has found that cattle produced by Santa Barbara are being sold to JBS, the world’s biggest meat-packing company. JBS is the single biggest supplier of beef, chicken and leather globally, and exports fresh beef to Europe and about half of the corned beef eaten in the UK. In 2017, JBS said it had stopped buying Santa Barbara cattle, after it was fined $7.7 million for buying cows raised on illegally deforested land — but our investigation shows that is no longer the case.



The investigation found that last year the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch delivered hundreds of heads of cattle to some of Santa Barbara’s other farms for the final stage of fattening. Cattle was then sent from those farms to slaughter in JBS plants. Using GPS and publicly available maps and locations, reporters located cattle and pasture inside embargoed areas at Lagoa do Triunfo.

Continue reading: Revealed: How the global beef trade is destroying the Amazon — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute - BBC News

An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every single minute, according to satellite data.

The rate of losses has accelerated as Brazil's new right-wing president favours development over conservation.
The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming.
A senior Brazilian official, speaking anonymously, told us his government was encouraging deforestation.

How is the forest cleared?

Usually by bulldozers, either pushing against the trunks to force the shallow roots out of the ground, or by a pair of the machines advancing with a chain between them.
In one vast stretch of recently cleared land, we found giant trees lying on their sides, much of the foliage still green and patches of bare earth drying under a fierce sun.
Later, the timber will be cleared and sold or burned, and the land prepared for farming.
In other areas, illegal loggers carve new tracks through the undergrowth to reach particularly valuable hardwood trees which they sell on the black market, often to order.

What does this mean for the forest?

Satellite images show a sharp increase in clearances of trees over the first half of this year, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil, the country that owns most of the Amazon region.
The most recent analysis suggests a staggering scale of losses over the past two months in particular, with about a hectare being cleared every minute on average.



Continue reading at: 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute - BBC News

UK government warned deep sea mining could cause ‘potential extinction of unique species’, documents reveal - Unearthed

Seems that some people want to monetize on everything. At least some things and especially living beings should be left in peace!


The UK’s joint project with American military firm Lockheed Martin is the largest in the world but poses risks to deep sea ecosystems.
Deep sea mining could lead to “the potential extinction of unique species which form the first rung of the food chain,” according to a report commissioned by an arm of the British government.
‘The Subsea Mining Capability Statement’ – obtained by Unearthed using freedom of information rules – was produced by the National Subsea Research Initiative in 2017 and circulated amongst the UK government’s deep sea mining working group at key stakeholder meetings.
The British government has licenses for exploratory mining of polymetallic nodules in the Pacific Ocean as part of a joint venture with UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of US defence firm Lockheed Martin.

The statement’s environmental warnings echo those heard from the scientific community, many of whom fed into the UK parliament’s ‘sustainable seas’ inquiry which concluded deep sea mining “would have catastrophic impacts on the seafloor site and its inhabitants.”

Continue reading at: UK government warned deep sea mining could cause ‘potential extinction of unique species’, documents reveal - Unearthed

Redefining hope in a world threatened by climate change » Yale Climate Connections

Here's what leading thinkers, writers, and educators say about how to keep going in troubled times.

Prerhaps you have read that The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom has decided to use the terms climate emergency, crisis or breakdown instead of climate change in its news stories; and global heating instead of global warming. As social and cultural circumstances alter, words and their power change their meanings and impact, and the public in the end may have to adapt by using new words.
Or sometimes we can try to refine or redefine old words to fit new circumstances. For instance, hope, which as verb and noun has long implied both desire and expectation: “I hope [desire] that we can solve the climate problem” or “I have little hope [don’t expect] that our civilization will survive this existential climate crisis.” But what happens when desire outstrips results, and then discouragement leads to hopelessness, despair, cynicism, paralysis? When hope starts to sound passive and empty?

Here, from some leading thinkers, writers, philosophers, and educators, are a few useful, maybe even inspiring, ways to rethink hope. Click on the links for more good words.

• Amory Lovins: “Many of us here stir and strive in the spirit of applied hope. We work to make the world better, not from some airy theoretical hope, but in the pragmatic and grounded conviction that starting with hope and acting out of hope can cultivate a different kind of world worth being hopeful about, reinforcing itself in a virtuous spiral. Applied hope is not about some vague, far-off future but is expressed and created moment by moment through our choices. … Applied hope is a deliberate choice of heart and head. … Applied hope requires fearlessness.”

Continue reading: Redefining hope in a world threatened by climate change » Yale Climate Connections

Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets

“If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage,” Steve Jobs said to a group in Aspen, Colorado, at the 1983 International Design Conference. Jobs built the world’s wealthiest corporation making computers look great alongside Jony Ive, Apple’s outgoing chief design officer. Jobs and Ive took inspiration from Dieter Rams, the legendary industrial designer renowned for functional and simple consumer products.

Photo by DAMS Library/Flickr.

Continue reading at: Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets

The last migration of the monarch butterflies? | Environmental Action

In the 1980s, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in California. This year? There were only about 30,000.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1990s—monarchs were an important part of my childhood. I want them to be a part of my children’s memories, too.
Seeing a monarch butterfly takes me right back to being a child. Monarchs flew to California every winter season.

The monarch butterflies overwintering in the sanctuary on the coast of Northern California 
I took many trips to monarch sanctuaries in Santa Cruz and Monterey with my classmates, where we learned about their lifecycle, epic migration, and even why they have their color (to warn potential predators that they are dangerous!).
But these butterflies are vanishing. We need all hands on deck if we’re going to save them. Alarmingly, the population of monarch butterflies that spent the winter in California was less than 0.5 percent of its historical size—and this year’s population was down by roughly 86 percent compared to 2017.
Continue reading at: The last migration of the monarch butterflies? | Environmental Action