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The vast majority of the environmental projects most frequently used to offset greenhouse gas emissions appear to have fundamental failings, suggesting they cannot be relied upon to cut planet-heating emissions, according to an analysis.
The global, multibillion-dollar voluntary carbon trading industry has been embraced by governments, organisations and corporations including oil and gas companies, airlines, fast-food brands, fashion houses, tech firms, art galleries and universities as a way of claiming to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint.
It works by carbon offset credits being tradable “allowances” or certificates that allow the purchaser to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent in greenhouse gases, by investing in environmental projects that claim to reduce carbon emissions.
But there is growing evidence suggesting that many of these schemes exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate potential harms.
What did the research find? A total of 39 of the top 50 emission offset projects, or 78%, were categorised as likely to be junk or worthless because of one or more fundamental failing that undermined its promised emission cuts. Overall, $1.16bn of carbon credits have been traded so far from the projects classified by the investigation as likely junk or worthless; a further $400m of credits bought and sold were potentially junk.
Ohio abortion rights activists suffer blow in suit over referendum language
In this year’s only opportunity for US voters to directly weigh in on the right to abortion, an upcoming ballot referendum in Ohio will include language that describes a fetus as an “unborn child”, in a disappointing loss for abortion rights activists in the state who had sued to stop voters from seeing language they say is misleading.
Ohioans are to vote on 7 November on a referendum to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. The outcome could not only determine the future of Ohio’s six-week abortion ban, which is frozen pending litigation, but also for the midwest. The state has become one of the few in the region to permit abortions since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year.
The Ohio referendum’s journey to the ballot box has been a long one. In a special election in August, voters resoundingly rejected a GOP-backed ballot measure that would have required all constitutional amendments to garner 60% of the vote, rather than the simple majority currently required for passage. The measure was loudly denounced as an attempt to stymie the abortion referendum and keep it from passing.
Weeks after Republicans lost that election, the Ohio ballot board met to decide what language should show up on voters’ ballots regarding Issue 1, the abortion referendum.
What did campaigners want the text to say? Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights proposed using the text of the amendment, which includes guarantees that the state cannot interfere with the right to contraception, miscarriage care and abortion up until the point of viability, a benchmark that’s generally pegged to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Olena Zelenska calls for return of 19,000 ‘abducted’ children
Ukraine’s first lady has urged world leaders to help return Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia, where she says they are being indoctrinated and deprived of their national identity, the Agence France-Presse news agency reports.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN general assembly on Tuesday, Olena Zelenska said more than 19,000 Ukrainian children had been transferred by force, or deported to Russia or occupied territories. So far, only 386 had been returned.
In Russia, “they were told that their parents don’t need them, that their country doesn’t need them, that nobody is waiting for them”, Zelenska said. “The abducted children were told that they are no longer Ukrainian children, that they are Russian children.”
Earlier, her husband, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told the UN general assembly that Russia was committing genocide in Ukraine and urged world leaders to attend a peace summit to help stop the invasion and future wars of aggression.
What did Joe Biden say during the event? The US president said the UN gathering this week was “darkened by the shadow of war”, which he described as an “illegal war of conquest without provocation by Russia” against Ukraine. “No nation wants the war to end more than Ukraine,” he said, reiterating US support for Kyiv and its efforts to bring about “a diplomatic resolution to a just and lasting peace”.
In other news …
Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup, Neuralink, said it had received approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting patients for its first human trial. The company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device in a six-year study.
Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a lengthy speech to the UN general assembly, accused the US of fanning the flames of violence in Ukraine, prompting protests from Israel’s representative to the UN. Raisi claimed any Iranian-made drones hitting Ukrainian cities had been sold before the war started.
South Carolina has obtained a drug needed to carry out lethal injections and is ready to perform the state’s first execution in more than 12 years, officials have announced. The state’s supply of drugs it used to kill inmates expired and pharmaceutical companies refused to sell them because they could be publicly identified.
JoAnne A Epps, the acting president of Temple University, died yesterday, shortly after becoming ill on stage during a memorial service, officials said. They described her loss as a “gut punch” and fought back tears as they recalled her near four decades of service.
Stat of the day: Rupert Murdoch thought $787.5m Dominion suit would cost Fox $50m, Michael Wolff book says
In winter 2022, at a hideaway in St Barts, Rupert Murdoch directed “sudden fury” at Donald Trump, who he thought would lose the 2024 Republican presidential primary to Ron DeSantis, but who the media mogul also said was likely to cost him $50m, through a lawsuit regarding Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
The lawsuit was filed by Dominion Voting Systems, over Fox News’s broadcast of Trump’s lies. Settled this April, it cost Murdoch considerably more than he predicted: $787.5m, to be precise. Murdoch’s wildly off miscalculation and his anger at Trump – in conversation with friends at the idyllic Caribbean getaway – is described by the journalist Michael Wolff in his new book, which also details how Murdoch often wishes Trump dead.
Don’t miss this: The sleep secret – how lucid dreams can make us fitter, more creative and less anxious
“A lucid dream is a dream where you know that you’re dreaming as the dream is happening,” says Charlie Morley, the author of Lucid Dreaming Made Easy. “So, you’re still sound asleep but in the dream and you are telling yourself: ‘I know this is all a dream.’ Most people have had a few. If you reckon you haven’t, you might want to think about whether you have ever had a nightmare where you’ve reassured yourself by saying: ‘This isn’t real – I have to wake up.’ That’s also a lucid dream.”
Freud described dreams as windows into our repressed desires. Today, researchers are using them to boost athletic performance and help veterans with PTSD, unlocking huge benefits for us all.
Climate check: Global heating made Greece and Libya floods more likely, study says
Carbon pollution led to heavier rains and stronger floods in Greece and Libya this month but other human factors were responsible for “turning the extreme weather into a humanitarian disaster”, scientists have said. Global heating made the levels of rainfall that devastated the Mediterranean in early September up to 50 times more likely in Libya and up to 10 times more likely in Greece, according to a study from World Weather Attribution that used established methods but had not yet been peer-reviewed. The network of scientists, who were racing to understand extreme weather events as soon as they happen, found people were made more vulnerable to the rain because of factors such as building homes on floodplains, chopping down trees and not maintaining dams.
Last Thing: ‘He swam, hooking my arm with his penis’ – inside the dolphin sex scandal that outraged a nation
When someone mentions the year 1990, you might think of the last days of Margaret Thatcher, The Satanic Verses, poll tax, recession and the IRA. Or, you just might think of a man in the north-east of England getting arrested for masturbating a dolphin. The man in question was the animal rights campaigner Alan Cooper. The whole intriguing story has now been turned into a podcast series.
The podcast, Hooked on Freddie, revolves around one particular incident, during which a boatload of people watched Cooper swimming with Freddie in the harbour and reported an incident to the police. Cooper describes the event on his website as such: “Freddie was his usual self, sometimes hooking me with his penis to the leg or arm – it was all perfectly normal, to me at least. It was only later when I was provided with the police statements that I realised otherwise.”
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