Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Bill limits type of science used to determine health risks and gives industry major role in chemical review process A new Republican House bill proposes sweeping changes to US toxic chemical laws that would gut protections for consumers, workers and the environment, public health advocates mobilising against the legislation warn. Among other changes to the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), the bill would limit the type of science that is used to determine health risks, stop legally requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure chemicals won’t harm people, give industry a prominent role in chemical review processes, and make it more difficult legally for the agency to ban toxic substances. Continue reading...

Birdwatchers flock to Montréal for rare sighting of ‘vagrant’ bird that has made its home during a bitterly cold winter On a quiet Montréal street of low-rise brick apartment buildings on one side and cement barrier wall on the other, a crowd has gathered, binoculars around their necks and cameras at the ready. A European robin has taken up residence in the neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between two industrial areas with warehouses and railway lines and, a few blocks away, port facilities on the St Lawrence River. Ron Vandebeek from Ottawa, Ontario, is here on a frigid February morning hoping to see the rare bird, which was first spotted at the beginning of January. Continue reading...

Government also offers contracts for record number of solar schemes as it aims to create clean electricity system by 2030 Business live – latest updates The largest onshore windfarm in England in a decade has been awarded a government subsidy among 190 contracts for energy projects, as Labour attempts to hit a goal of creating a virtually zero carbon power grid within four years. The government said it would offer contracts to a record number of solar projects alongside support for onshore windfarms including the huge Imerys project near St Austell in Cornwall. Continue reading...

Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”. A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”. Continue reading...