The European Commission has taken Ireland to Europe's highest court over the alleged lack of enforcement of EU rules when it comes to peat cutting. Following years of friction between the Government and the Commission on the issue, the EU’s executive body today referred Ireland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for failure to comply with EU rules on environmental impact assessments. In a statement, the Commission said Ireland had failed to comply with the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive.>

DRIVERS WILL BE offered €5,000 scrappage grant if they get rid of a vehicle over 13 years old and get an electric vehicle. The new €10 million pilot EV scrappage scheme aims to encourage drivers to make the switch to electric vehicles. Transport Minister Darragh O’Brien will bring his plans to cabinet today which will apply the incentive to drivers to dispose of diesel and petrol engine vehicles. The €5,000 grant is addition to the existing €3,500 EV purchase grant, which drivers can already avail of. The new scheme brings the total support for people switching to an electric vehicle up to €8,500 per vehicle.

About the project Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.

Our edible map is not the first of its kind, but it aspires to be the world's most comprehensive. While our users contribute locations of their own, we comb the internet for pre-existing knowledge, seeking to unite the efforts of foragers, foresters, and freegans everywhere. The imported datasets range from small neighborhood foraging maps to vast professionally-compiled tree inventories. This so far amounts to thousands of different types of edibles (most, but not all, plant species) distributed over millions of locations. Beyond the cultivated and commonplace to the exotic flavors of foreign plants and long-forgotten native plants, foraging in your neighborhood is a journey through time and across cultures.

Join us in celebrating hyper-local food! The map is open for anyone to edit, the database can be downloaded with just one click, and the code is open-source. You are likewise encouraged to share the bounty with your fellow humans. Our sharing page lists hundreds of local organizations - planting public orchards and food forests, picking otherwise-wasted fruits and vegetables from city trees and farmers' fields, and sharing with neighbors and the needy.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/energy/p/1407956/wind-farms-provided-41-of-ireland-s-electricity-in-march

The conflict has seen a spike in fuel prices and DoneDeal said there has been a 125% increase in EV-specific searches on its site as drivers “look to insulate themselves from pump-price volatility”.

New measures taken by the government to reduce the cost of fuel took effect yesterday, although the fuel industry’s representative group said customers will not see those cuts reflected at the pump immediately.

Diesel prices have gone up more than petrol because it is harder to refine and DoneDeal said diesel-specific searches have fallen by close to 20% over the same period.

Hybrid searches meanwhile have risen by 43%.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34795810

Public libraries and botanical gardens (and more) may keep seed exchange catalogs. They may also host events for seed exchanges among groups. Search online for seed libraries and seed exchanges near you to locate opportunities for finding free and interesting seeds to include in your garden this year.

Hi! As any gardener knows, February is one of the crucial moments in the year - you start preparing, planning, starting seeds and doing other work around your garden to prepare for a productive year. But what if you don't have a garden of your own? I don't! I do have a small DIY worm bin set up, as there isn't really a lot of reasonable ways to compost the food waste at home, I also grow quite a lot of herbs and some veg in my apartment and in bags in the shared space, but I also found out last year that getting involved in a community garden is a really great thing both to grow some food and to get mental health benefints form it. The community garden I'm a member of, namely Mud Island in Dublin, is ran in a communal, IMO very Solarpunk adjacent way - instead of members having their 'own' plots allotment style, all the things, like planting plan and infrastructure projects are governed by the community, and it is also a very nice space for community events. You can check out Community Gardens Ireland - an island-wide network of community gardens, it can be a good starting point to find one near you to get involved. Do you think you can try and join one this year?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33788424

Solarpunk is often dismissed as a purely aesthetic movement - pretty pictures of skyscrapers covered in vines. But true Solarpunk is political. It is about decentralization.

If we want to become independent of the “Big Three” (US tech, Chinese manufacturing, Russian energy), we need to localize our survival.

Cross posted from https://aussie.zone/post/28875983

For years, countries have told the United Nations how much methane they emit using a kind of bottom-up bookkeeping: Count the cows and oil barrels, estimate the volume of trash, and multiply by standard emission factors. Those ledgers can miss the mark, suggest measurements from aircraft and satellites. But the tools to translate that data into national emissions estimates have largely remained the domain of specialists. A team at Harvard is changing that. In a recent Nature Communications paper, the researchers describe Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI), an open-access system designed to let governments, researchers and civil society independently evaluate national methane claims against what satellites detect in the atmosphere, year after year.

Map generated with the tool described is available here: https://worldwidemethaneemissions.com/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32171077

While hundreds of millions around the world face food insecurity, a tiny South American nation has managed to become the only country that can entirely feed itself. How did Guyana manage it?

Hello delicious friends!

I am very excited to meet you and introduce myself properly - I go by Greenbeard and have been co-opted as a new moderator of this lovely community, and promise will do my best to help run everything nice and smoothly alongside @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Check out new food help resources on the Wiki!

One of the things we started working on together with Quercus is this List of resources on how to stay fed this winter with the weather what it is and economy going to shit, it is important that everyone knows how to access these resources for their own sake as well as their community. And if these are not of use to you, maybe it would be a cool New Year's thing to get involved with them as a volunteer? This wiki is like a community fridge, take what you need and leave what you can, as you can see it is still very much Work in Progress, so if you have an idea to add to it, definitely do so (you can log into the wiki with the same login and password that you use for SLRPNK.NET) or let us know your ideas in the comments here or in the chat.

Yeah, I said chat!

Did you know that you can come over and hang out with us and talk all things solarfood in our brand new chat? Now you know! Again, you can use the exact same credentials as you use for SLRPNK.NET, how convenient is that?!

Say hi!

Also, say hi in the comments, let us know about all the cool and interesting things that you found out about everything and anything foor and/or solarpunk related, or maybe you have an amazing project/plan/idea to do in 2026? I'd love to hear it!

Friends

Also, show some love to a new community here, ![email protected], it is an amazing initiative; I personally was a member of Food Not Bombs collectives in two different cities that I lived, definitely go and give them a look!

BTW, the graphic in this post is "Solarpunk Anarchy" by Sean Bodley at Story Seed Library licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0, definitely go and give him a good look, and some monies if you can!

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/39719516

A LOT OF people believe, understandably, that if they live in a town or city and only have a small garden, a balcony, or a few pots on a windowsill, then they can’t meaningfully help Ireland reverse its biodiversity crisis. It’s an understandable assumption.

When we picture “saving nature”, we tend to imagine sweeping landscapes, vast woodlands, restored bogs, or large farms shifting to more wildlife-friendly approaches.

But here’s something we don’t talk about enough: you absolutely can make a difference, no matter how small your patch of the world is. In fact, the collective impact of thousands of small gardens, balconies, and pockets of green is arguably one of the most powerful — and most overlooked — nature restoration tools we have.

Because when it comes to biodiversity, size doesn’t matter nearly as much as connection.

There are over two million gardens in Ireland amounting to nearly 360,000 acres. That would make Ireland’s largest national park. Yes, farmers and the government are the largest individual landowners, but everyone with some outdoor space can make a collective impact.

Ireland’s wildlife faces the same problem no matter where you look: fragmentation. Our landscapes have been carved into isolated patches of green separated by roads, walls, lawns, concrete, and intensive land use. Animals, insects, and even plants struggle to move, feed, shelter, or find mates when every direction is a barrier.>

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6034090

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6034089

Archived version

Solar panels used widely across Ireland, including in large solar farms, at airports, and on government buildings, were sourced from companies linked to forced labour and environmental devastation in the Xinjiang region of China, RTÉ Investigates has found.

Two Chinese solar panel manufacturers, JA Solar and Jinko Solar, were sourcing a raw material called polysilicon – one of the essential ingredients in the manufacture of panels – from Xinjiang, where China has built a regime of forced labour and repression targeting the region's ethnic minorities, particularly Uyghurs, a system some critics, including the US government, describe as a genocide.

In a landmark 2022 report, the United Nations concluded that human rights abuses in [Xinjiang] were widespread and could constitute crimes against humanity.

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JA Solar and Jinko Solar panels can be found on sites across Ireland, including at a new solar farm at Shannon Airport, opened by Minister for Climate Energy Darragh O’Brien on 28 November, in Wicklow County Council’s car park, and in Ireland’s largest solar farm developments, including at sites owned by ESB.

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The investigation also found that** enormous volumes of coal**, the dirtiest fossil fuel, were being mined and burned in order to process and purify the polysilicon.

This lead to extremely high levels of air pollution in an industrial zone called Zhundong Development Park, one of the most important areas for polysilicon production in China, where polysilicon companies are co-located with vast open-pit coal mines. Three of the world’s top ten polysilicon manufacturers are based in the park.

China's subsidisation of its solar industry has driven down prices and made solar power the most affordable energy source in the world, but critics say this has been done at a human and environmental cost that is too great to ignore.

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China's production of panels ... has vastly overshot demand. It produces twice as many as is needed by the global economy, and the environmental cost has primarily been borne by Xinjiang.

"There are crimes against humanity being perpetrated in the Uyghur region, so we don't see this as a trade issue or even a national security issue," said Patricia Carrier, a human rights lawyer with the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region.

"The Chinese government has purposefully invested heavily in several sectors to ensure that they are concentrated in or reliant on Uyghur forced labour and also very lax environmental standards...so not only is there forced labour being used, but it is also very environmentally damaging."

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Industry bodies say that China's dominance comes at the cost of social and human rights, and has "jeopardised" and "undermined" Europe's commitment to a "fair and resilient energy transition."

"The nexus between forced labour and the unsustainably low prices of Chinese-made solar PV modules and inverters poses a serious threat," said the European Solar Manufacturing Council in a letter addressed to the then taoiseach Leo Varadkar and energy minister Eamon Ryan in January 2024.

"Without EU regulations scrutinizing goods throughout the value chain for forced labour, European PV manufacturers, adhering to higher social and environmental standards, are jeopardised."

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Though allegations of forced labour and environmental issues in China’s solar industry have been known since at least 2020, Ireland continued to import and deploy panels from JA Solar and Jinko Solar.

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BladeBridge is the start-up company formed by Cork, Ireland based researchers from the Re-Wind Network. The purpose of the Re-Wind Network is to develop repurposing solutions for decommissioned wind turbine blades which are environmentally and socially superior to conventional products and disposal methods, as supported by research. The Re-Wind Network is a collection of faculty, staff and students at five academic institutions – Georgia Institute of Technology, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, City University of New York and Munster Technological University – and industry affiliates. If you would like to read more aboout the Re-Wind Network follow here

RE-TURN, THE OPERATOR of the country’s Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), is planning to build a multimillion-euro recycling facility for plastics, which it hopes will be operational by the end of next year.

Re-turn currently exports up to 90% of PET plastic collected through the scheme due to the absence of a bottle-to-bottle facility in Ireland that can process the material needed to produce new drink containers.

After two years, there remain insurmountable impediments to the completion of the transaction, plaintiffs argue A wind farm developer claims that two companies have failed to honour an agreement to facilitate access to privately-owned land in Co Galway where an 11-turbine facility is planned.