Making sense of Australia’s bushfire crisis means asking hard questions – and listening to the answers

Bushfires plunder lives and landscapes in myriad ways, but they often start the same way. A bright morning suddenly turns to night. Ash flutters down from the sky, propelled ahead of the roaring fire front. An awful red glow slinks over the horizon.

When I awoke in the NSW south coast town of Bermagui on the last day of 2019, I should have twigged straight away. At 8am the sky was a gruesome orange-black, the surrounding bush freakishly quiet. Our mobile phones had no signal. Outside, my car was coated in soot.

We knew fires were burning more than 100km up the coast at Batemans Bay, but Bermagui had seemed a safe distance away. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

Read the story from The Conversation - “Making sense of Australia’s bushfire crisis means asking hard questions – and listening to the answers.” 

Future Drought Fund that formed centrepiece of Scott Morrison's summit passes Lower House

Rain is still not forecast for drought-stricken communities, but there is Federal Government money on the horizon for next year.

The fund will pay out $100 million next financial
year and the same again in 2021.

Parliament has cleared the way for a new Future Drought Fund to be established, to help people prepare for and respond to drought from next year.

The Future Drought Fund was the centrepiece of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's 2018 drought summit.

Money for that fund, which is modelled on the Medical Research Future Fund, will come from the Building Australia Fund, which has sat dormant since the 2014-15 financial year.

Read the story from The Age by Tom Iggulden - “Future Drought Fund that formed centrepiece of Scott Morrison's summit passes Lower House.”

Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why

Tire tracks stretched across the flat lake bed to the horizon. We followed them in a Suzuki 4x4, looking for clues about what’s happened to Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest lake, which has vanished into the thin air of the Andean highlands.

LAKE POOPÓ: The dry, salt-crusted Bolivian lake bed
unfurls into the distance. Boats are stranded; the fish and
 waterfowl are gone. Fishermen who depended on the lake
 are moving elsewhere. It’s a diaspora born of drought.

We were driving on the lake bottom, yet we were more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The spring air was lip-chapping dry. Many of the fishing villages that have relied on Lake Poopó for thousands of years have emptied too, and we drove past clusters of abandoned adobe homes. Dust devils danced around them, spinning in warm winds. In the distance we spotted several small aluminum boats that seemed to be floating on water. As we drove closer, the mirage receded, and we found the boats sitting abandoned in the silt. I stepped out of the vehicle. My shoes cracked the salty crust that had formed jagged lumps, like ice cream in a freezer that has melted and recrystallized.

Read the National Geographic story by Kenneth R. Weiss - “Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up. Here's Why.”

In a Stunning Turnaround, Britain Moves to End the Burning of Coal

Bigger than any medieval castle, with its 12 giant white cooling towers gleaming in the sun, the Drax Power Station dominates the horizon for tens of miles across the flat lands of eastern England. For four decades, it has been one of the world’s largest coal power plants, often generating a tenth of the U.K.’s electricity. It has been the lodestar for the final phase of Britain’s 250-year-long love affair with coal – the fuel that built the country’s empire and industrialized the world.

The Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England.

But no more.

The coal-devouring behemoth, and the endless trains of railroad wagons feeding it with fuel from coastal ports, is suddenly a relic of the past. In one of the greatest and fastest energy turnarounds in the developed world, the country that brought the world the industrial revolution – a revolution founded and sustained by burning coal – has cut the cord.

King Coal is, almost overnight, being banished from Britain.

When Drax opened for business in 1974, Britain got 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal. As recently as five years ago, the figure was 40 percent. But last year, it was 9 percent, and this summer coal supplied less than 2 percent of Britain’s electricity. On April 21, 2017, for the first time since its inception, the British power grid went 24 hours without coal.

Read the Yale Environment 360 story - “In a Stunning Turnaround, Britain Moves to End the Burning of Coal.”