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Global sea ice cover hit a record low in February, researchers find

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An MIT-led study confirms the Antarctic ozone layer is healing as a direct result of global efforts to reduce ozone-depleting substances.

Companies can sue governments for closing oilfields and mines – and the risk of huge damages is already stopping countries from passing green laws, ministers say

Edit: I just found a totally relevant article and thought of adding it here, instead of making a new post.

how Wall Street is making millions betting against green laws

Now, however, the sector has found a far larger playground: financing massive arbitration lawsuits launched by companies against governments, where claims can stretch to tens of billions of dollars.

These cases come under a little-known area of international law called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows corporations to sue countries for actions that hurt their profits.

With litigation funders facing no risk of a counterclaim, and potential awards that now average more than $200m (£160m), legal experts warn that the system has become a “gambler’s nirvana” for hedge funds and specialist financiers.

Communities and ecosystems across the globe face heavy environmental damage from intensifying mining operations. A people’s tribunal probed the Canadian mining industry’s impact on the natural world and the people defending it.

A longer article about energy costs, especially heating, and climate adaptation efforts, and how right-wing parties are profiting from fake populism about cheap fossil energy needs.

A relevant snippet:

In times of extremely high living costs, carbon pricing not softened by support measures is of enormous social and political significance: those who can afford to renovate or install renewable energy sources will be less impacted, whereas those who are poor or renting will have to spend much more of their income on heating costs and will furthermore be unable to free themselves of the dependency on CO2. Across Europe, a dispute over carbon pricing has erupted.

“We are currently seeing attempts by the conservative and right-wing factions in the European Parliament as well as by member states and the business community to undo climate efforts,” says Green Party MEP Michael Bloss. “It would make sense to start working now on establishing programmes for the potential revenues so money can be paid out directly from 1 January 2026. Otherwise, there is a risk of the ETS2 becoming a social trap from 2027.”

...

According to Sibylle Braungardt from the Öko-Institut in Freiburg, there are large subsidy programmes in Germany for energy-efficient renovations and replacements of heating systems by more sustainable alternatives. However, it is mostly high-income households taking advantage of these programmes. “It’s problematic if homeowners can renovate and install heat pumps to pay their way out of carbon pricing but renters cannot.”

Climate action is a guilt trip. Let’s make it aspirational instead.

Companies and states most responsible for climate change are also those working hardest to prevent climate action, new Carbon Majors report finds.

The state is pushing ahead on all-electric buildings, but a draft building-code update leaves out recommended rules around batteries, EV charging, and solar.

A closely watched civil trial that began in North Dakota last week could bankrupt Greenpeace and chill environmental activism as the climate crisis continues to deepen. The multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Energy Transfer, the oil corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, claims Greenpeace organized the mass protests and encampment at Standing Rock between 2016 and 2017 aimed at stopping construction of the project. Although the uprising at Standing Rock was led by Indigenous water defenders, Energy Transfer is instead going after Greenpeace for $300 million in damages — an amount that could effectively shutter the group’s U.S. operations. “This case is not just an obvious and blatant erasure of Indigenous leadership, of Indigenous resistance,” says Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA. “It is an attack on the broader movement and all of our First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful protest.”

DemocracyNow original video is here (yes, they host their own videos too): https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/4/greenpeace - you can find a transcript on this page.

Because this is a common misunderstanding, they're talking about scope 3 emissions:

These are Scope 3 Category 11 emissions

That means it includes fuels these firms extract and sell to be burned by others, with much of the "demand" for it being induced by the fossil fuel firms, who explicitly have a cartel which drops prices whenever people start to move away from fossil fuels.

Cyclone Alfred formed in the Coral Sea towards the end of February when sea surface temperatures were almost 1C hotter than usual