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Alister Doyle News

06 Nov 2023

In Brazil's Amazon, Cargill Grains Ports Meet Local Resistance

© JR Slompo / Adobe Stock

For centuries, riverside communities, including the "quilombola" descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations and ranches, have shared Xingu Island in Brazil's Amazon Basin.Its inhabitants live in brightly painted wooden houses overlooking rivers where small boats crisscross between islands and Abaetetuba city on the mainland to trade fish, seeds and fruits gathered from the Amazon forest in their backyard.In 2016, however, strangers docked on Xingu Island, in Para state…

10 Jul 2023

Deep-sea Mining: A New Gold Rush or Environmental Disaster?

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration

In the depths of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, trillions of potato-shaped rocks are scattered across the seabed - containing minerals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese vital for new green technologies in the global energy transition.In this ocean region - the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) - an abundance of the rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, is increasingly fuelling debate about the mining of metals needed to produce technology such as batteries for electric…

09 Dec 2020

Wallenius Bets on Wind-powered Cargo Ships

(Image: Wallenius Marine)

Two centuries after the first coal-powered steamships crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a Swedish company is designing a futuristic throwback: a huge, wind-driven cargo ship that could help end the fossil fuel era and limit climate change.Shipping accounted for 2.9% of man-made greenhouse gas in 2018, and the industry’s share of planet-heating emissions has been rising in recent years, according to the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization.One solution may be to turn the clock back to pre-industrial times and again hoist sails to carry cargo around the world.Sweden’s Wallenius Marine AB…

28 Aug 2018

Equinor Explores Floating Wind Turbines to Power N.Sea Oilfields

(Image: Equinor)

Norway's Equinor said on Tuesday it is considering whether to build a pioneering offshore wind farm with floating turbines to supply electricity to two North Sea oilfields as part of a strategy to curb greenhouse gas emissions.The project at the Gullfaks and Snorre oilfields would cost around 5 billion Norwegian crowns ($592 million) and could reduce Norway's emissions of carbon dioxide by more than 200,000 tonnes per year, Equinor said."This could be the first time an offshore wind farm is directly connected to oil and gas platforms," state-controlled Equinor said in a statement.

23 Mar 2018

Near Record Low Arctic Ocean Ice a Boost for Shipping

© Misiurin Viacheslav / Adobe Stock

Winter sea ice on the Arctic Ocean covered the second smallest area on record this year, part of a thaw that is opening the region to shipping and oil exploration and may be disrupting weather far to the south, scientists said on Friday. The extent of floating ice likely reached an annual maximum of 14.5 million square kilometers (5.6 million square miles) on March 17, fractionally bigger than a record set in 2017, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said. Sea ice around the North Pole freezes to its biggest at the end of the winter in March…

20 Feb 2018

Seas to Continue Rising Even if Climate Goals Are Met

© digidreamgrafix / Adobe Stock

Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 metres (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said on Tuesday. Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications. Sea level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London…

11 Aug 2017

Arctic Thaw helps Russian Shipping

Arctic thaw aids shipping most along Russian coast; Russia to start LNG exports from Yamal in late 2017. Russian shipping in the Arctic is benefiting from winds that are driving the oldest and thickest sea ice towards North America, further opening a remote region that is thawing amid global warming, scientists say. The thinning Russian ice could help liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers, due to start exports from Russia's Yamal Peninsula in late 2017, to navigate an icy route east to Asia for more than a planned six months of the year, they said. Almost all attention on Arctic shipping has focused on how global warming is shrinking the extent of ice around the North Pole, opening a summertime short-cut route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

08 Aug 2017

Philippines says China Wanted Non-legally Binding South China Sea Code

China pushed for a maritime code of conduct with Southeast Asian countries that would not be legally binding, the Philippine foreign minister said on Tuesday. Alan Peter Cayetano said some countries wanted the South China Sea code to be legally binding, and China preferred the less forceful "binding". He said all parties realised it was better to drop all mention of it from the framework and move forward. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China hailed the adoption on Sunday of a negotiating framework for the code of conduct (COC) as progress towards preventing disputes. Cayetano cited the framework as an example of how parties that were historically at odds were co-operating…

22 Mar 2017

Arctic Ice Sets New Record Low for Winter

Photo: NOAA

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has set a new record low for the wintertime in a region strongly affected by long-term trends of global warming, U.S. and European scientists said on Wednesday. Sea ice around the North Pole expands to its biggest extent of the year in February or March after a deep freeze in the winter polar darkness and shrinks to the smallest of the year in September, at the end of the brief Arctic summer. Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual maximum extent on March 7…

13 Mar 2017

Arctic Ice Loss Driven by Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind -Study

© z576 / Adobe Stock

Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday. The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode. Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979…

06 Mar 2017

Arctic Sea Ice May Vanish Even If World Achieves Climate Goal

© Andreas Altenburger / Adobe Stock

Arctic sea ice may vanish in summers this century even if governments achieve a core target for limiting global warming set by almost 200 nations in 2015, scientists said on Monday. Arctic sea ice has been shrinking steadily in recent decades, damaging the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and wildlife such as polar bears while opening the region to more shipping and oil and gas exploration. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments set a goal of limiting the rise in average world temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times…

05 Dec 2016

Polar Sea Ice the Size of India Vanishes in Record Heat

© sichkarenko_com / Adobe Stock

Sea ice off Antarctica and in the Arctic is at record lows for this time of year after declining by twice the size of Alaska in a sign of rising global temperatures, climate scientists say. Against a trend of global warming and a steady retreat of ice at earth's northern tip, ice floating on the Southern Ocean off Antarctica has tended to expand in recent years. But now it is shrinking at both ends of the planet, a development alarming scientists and to which a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases…

18 Jul 2016

Ships Worsen Air Pollution Over China, Killing Thousands

Photo courtesy of IMO

A boom in shipping is aggravating air pollution in China and other nations in East Asia, causing thousands of deaths a year in a region with eight of the world's 10 biggest container ports, scientists said on Monday. Often overlooked compared to cars and factories that are far bigger causes of smog, ship traffic has more than doubled off East Asia since 2005 and some pollution from the fuel oil of ships wafts inland, they said. The Chinese-led study estimated that sulphur dioxide…

19 Feb 2016

UN's Climate Chief Figueres to Quit

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is stepping down. (Photo: UN Photo/Sarah Fretwell)

The U.N.'s climate chief said on Friday she will step down in July, at the end of a six-year term, and praised governments for reaching a 195-nation deal in Paris in December to shift the world economy from fossil fuels to cleaner energies. Christiana Figueres, a 59-year-old Costa Rican, said she would not accept any extension of her term as head of the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat after what she called the historic Paris Agreement. "We now move into a phase of urgent implementation…

19 Jan 2016

Statoil Goes Ahead with Arctic Field after Halving Costs

Photo: Statoil

Norwegian oil major Statoil plans to develop its Arctic Johan Castberg oilfield after having cut costs by half, with a decision on investments in 2017, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Worried by high costs of operating in the remote Arctic Barents Sea, the Norwegian oil major last year delayed a final investment decision for Castberg, one of the world's northernmost oil finds. "The investment estimate is almost halved from around 100 billion crowns ($11.29 billion) to between 50 and 60 billion crowns," Chief Executive Eldar Saetre told an industry conference on Tuesday.

21 Oct 2015

Ship Engine Claims add to Volkswagen's Woes

Skaugen seeks about $50 mln from VW marine unit MAN; says MAN sold engines that underestimated fuel use. MAN also has counter-claims against Skaugen. Norwegian shipowner I.M. Skaugen has disclosed it is seeking $50 million in compensation from a marine unit of Volkswagen for rigging performance tests of ship engines produced over a decade ago. I.M. Skaugen alleges that the specifications of the six engines it bought from MAN were misleading and it is seeking compensation for higher fuel use than specified over the expected 30-year lifetimes of the engines. VW now owns 75 percent of MAN Diesel and Turbo SE, although it was not an owner of MAN when the engines were made. MAN supplied the engines to Skaugen in 2002-03 and has legal counter-claims over contracts with Skaugen.

12 Sep 2015

Burning All Fossil Fuels could Thaw Antarctica, Raise Seas-Study

Burning all the world's fossil fuel reserves could thaw the entire Antarctic ice sheet and push up world sea levels by more than 50 metres (160 feet), over thousands of years, an international study said on Friday. Such a melt, also eliminating the far smaller ice sheet on Greenland, is a worst case of climate change that would inundate cities from New York to Shanghai and change maps of the world with much of the Netherlands, Bangladesh or Florida under water. "Burning the currently attainable fossil fuel resources is sufficient to eliminate the (Antarctic) ice sheet," the scientists wrote in the journal Science Advances. Antarctica contains ice equivalent to 58 metres of sea level rise.

19 Aug 2015

ENI to Produce from Arctic Oilfield off Norway in a Few Weeks

Photo: Eni

Italian energy group ENI plans to start oil production from Norway's first Arctic oil development in a few weeks after years of delays and cost overruns. Production from the Goliat field, estimated to hold about 174 million barrels of oil, was originally expected to start in 2013, and the latest deadline was the end of this summer. "We had some delays due to bad weather, but we are planning to start the production in a few weeks," said Andreas Wulff, the spokesman for ENI in Norway.

16 Jul 2015

Russia, US Agree on Arctic Fishing Ban

Five nations set moratorium on fishing near North Pole; no fish there now, but thaw is drawing stocks north. The United States, Russia and other Arctic nations signed an agreement deal on Thursday to bar their fishing fleets from fast-thawing seas around the North Pole, an agreement delayed more than a year by tensions over Ukraine. The accord, also signed in Oslo by the ambassadors of Canada, Norway and Denmark, is a response to global warming, which is melting sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean, an area the size of the Mediterranean. The central Arctic probably has no commercial fish stocks now, experts say, but melting sea ice may draw fish such as cod farther north. Forty percent of the area was briefly open water when summer sea ice shrank to a record low in 2012.

09 Jul 2015

Seas Could Rise 6m Even if Govts Curb Warming -Study

File photo

Sea levels could rise by at least six metres (20 feet) in the long term, swamping coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, even if governments achieve their goals for curbing global warming, according to a study published on Thursday. Tracts of ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted when temperatures were around or slightly higher than today in ancient thaws in the past three million years, a U.S.-led international team wrote in the journal Science. And the world may be headed for a…

28 Mar 2015

Mexico Unveils National Strategy ahead of Paris Climate Talks

Mexico on Friday said it will cap its greenhouse gas emissions by 2026, becoming one of the first countries to formally submit its national climate plan the United Nations ahead of a key climate summit in Paris in December. Mexico's Foreign and Environment Ministries presented the national climate submission in Mexico City, unveiling a strategy to begin reducing emissions by 2026, leading to a 22 percent reduction in greenhouse gases below business-as-usual levels by 2030. Mexico set its targets unconditionally, without requiring financial support from developed countries. After Mexico unveiled the targets, President Enrique Pena Nieto and U.S.

19 Mar 2015

Arctic Sea Ice Sets Record Low Extent at Winter Maximum

Photo courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

Arctic sea ice has set a new winter record by freezing over the smallest extent since satellite records began in 1979, in a new sign of long-term climate change, U.S. data showed on Thursday. The ice floating on the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole reached its maximum annual extent of just 14.54 million square kms (5.61 million sq miles) on Feb. 25 - slightly bigger than Canada - and is now expected to shrink with a spring thaw. "This year's maximum ice extent was the lowest in the satellite record…

12 Mar 2015

Oil Price Fall May Aid Long-term Arctic Exploitation

Photo: NOAA

A fall in oil prices may help long-term exploitation of fossil fuels in the Arctic by averting a short-lived "gold rush" into the vulnerable icy region, Norway's Foreign Minister Boerge Brende said on Thursday. Exploitation of oil and gas required long planning to safeguard the fragile environment, which is heating up faster than the world average because of global warming, he said. "It is safe to assume that Arctic gas will have its day," he said in a speech at an Arctic conference, saying that burning natural gas emitted half the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide as coal.