The International Energy Agency laid out this week how clean energy is booming in the face of the coronavirus crisis, revealing that auctioned renewable capacity from January to October was a record-breaking 15% higher than the same period last year.
Warning that without a “seismic shift” in how world governments approach the management of wildlife, land conservation, and public health, the planet could be entering an “era of pandemics,” a United Nations-backed report released this week emphasized that the ability to avoid more public health crises like Covid-19 is entirely within human control.
The world’s largest banks, including three Japanese banks, provided more than US$2.6 trillion in loans and underwriting to economic sectors last year that were linked to the global biodiversity crisis, doing little to monitor, let alone curb, damage to life-sustaining ecosystems.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s announcement that the Japanese nation will go net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2050 has been widely welcomed as a step in the right direction by environmentalists and others focused on the growing threat of climate change.
Greenpeace has sounded an alarm over the Suga government’s plan to release stored water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, releasing a new report warning about the presence of carbon-14, which the group says “has the potential to damage human DNA.”
Climate scientists and activists responded with alarm to reporting that this is the latest date in recorded history that the main nursery of Arctic sea ice in Siberia has yet to start freezing, another example of the present-day consequences of human-caused global warming.
Nearly a decade after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the government has decided to release more than one million tons of treated radioactive water, currently being stored at the nuclear plant, into the Pacific Ocean, despite fierce opposition from fishermen and some environmentalists.
In the United Kingdom, teenage climate activists have gone on hunger strikes in order to prevent the construction of the Woodhouse Colliery coal mine in West Cumbria, which would be the United Kingdom’s first deep coal mine in three decades.
The trading company Marubeni Corporation will build Japan’s first large-scale commercial offshore wind farms in Akita Prefecture in an initiative that may help the nation reduce its carbon footprint.
As world leaders are convening at the the World Economic Forum in Davos, critical attention is being drawn to the Japan’s largest financial institutions’ continued investments in coal, one of the main contributors to the climate crisis.
