Restoring the grid after a nationwide outage could take as long as two weeks, says Kathryn Porter. So you need to be prepared. Here’s what every household needs – from torches to generators and keeping warm safely.

The post How to Prepare for a Blackout appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Germany and California parade as climate superpowers – yet both import energy, destroy industry and hand supply chains to Beijing. Western virtue, says Tilak Doshi, is made in Chinese coal-fired factories.

The post Beijing’s Useful Idiots: Germany, California and the Green Road to Chinese Supremacy appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The Bishop of Leeds is urging Catholics to 'live simply' to protect the planet. But why are bishops banging on about climate change when they're supposed to be saving souls? asks Roger Watson.

The post Saving the Planet, One Pastoral Letter at a Time appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil […]

The post Big Oil fears the evidence of its deliberate climate lies appeared first on Asia Times.

So, this is Andy Burnham's solution to soaring energy prices: nationalisation and relitigating the 1970s. It's just a shame, says Ben Pile, that energy was far cheaper under Thatcher than in our Net Zero era.

The post Political Spite Won’t Keep the Lights On appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In this tense, riveting first-person excerpt from his new book This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian Story, Evan Gershkovich recounts the harrowing months he spent as a prisoner in Russia, leading up to his eventual release in a complex, multi-country prisoner exchange. Even in the darkness, Gershkovich offers rays of light: care packages from friends, letters by the hundred, and a cautiously blossoming love with a friend in Berlin. We may know the ending, but the details of these days reveal what it takes to get there.

A few hours after my arrival, I heard a cart rolling down the hallway. A guard opened a kormushka — a feeder window in the door about the size of a human head. A man in a chef’s uniform filled my bowl with porridge, placed a piece of rancid-smelling boiled fish on my plate and gave me some weak tea. The reality of my new surroundings slammed into me.

Thoughts ricocheted inside my head. Earlier in the day I’d had a comforting one: they’ve taken me for a swap, I told myself. That’s all this is.

Now, curled up on the bed in my 12ft by 8ft cell, knees pulled to my chest, I thought, what if the FSB really does think I’m a spy and wants to make an example out of me? Maybe they don’t want to swap me at all. Maybe I really will spend 20 years here.

The New York Times and the rest of the legacy media are in mourning after President Trump axed Biden's pro-EV fuel economy standards. But real fuel efficiency shouldn't need a mandate, says Dr Tilak Doshi.

The post Legacy Media Weep as Trump Axes Biden’s Fuel Economy Diktat appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In summer 2023 Dr Colin M. Barron published a book, I Will Never Buy an Electric Car, in which he set out all the shortcomings of EVs. Now, three years later, he says the case has only got worse.

The post Why I Will Still Never Buy an Electric Car appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

At the UN last week, Ed Miliband shared details of a secret "damning" climate spy report. Ben Pile points out that a similar secret report appeared 22 years ago – and not one of its apocalyptic predictions came true.

The post Spies and Their Climate Lies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Climate Week NYC is packing its tent after another week of green grandstanding, empty promises and soaring energy bills, says Dr Tilak Doshi. Same circus, same clowns, same time next year.

The post New York’s Climate Circus: Same Clowns, Emptier Promises appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The 2026 Planetary Health Check – which claims seven "planetary boundaries" are now breached – is the latest report from the doomsters that is wholly detached from the facts, says Tilak Doshi.

The post Doom Never Goes Out of Fashion: The Problem With the “Planetary Health Check” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Five months after the IPCC ruled that the infamous RCP8.5 doomsday climate scenario was "implausible", the Met Office is still whipping up unjustified Net-Zero convenient fear, says Chris Morrison.

The post “Implausible” Met Office UK Climate Projections Still Whipping up Unjustified Net Zero-Convenient Fear appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

What does it mean to live in a disappearing place? For Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, Brad Bolman, a professor of history and environmental studies at Tulane University, writes about New Orleans, the shifting borders between land and sea, and the political and economic forces that continue to shape the city’s fate in a time of climate catastrophe.

If Los Angeles is the city that has been imaginatively destroyed again and again in film and TV, as Thom Andersen argues in Los Angeles Plays Itself, New Orleans is the one that has been destroyed countless times in reality. We have survived worse and rebuilt before, many insisted. We’re staying.

It was a reaction as understandable emotionally as it was disconnected from environmental reality. But that gap is a feature of life in the Crescent City. As I watched my first Mardi Gras parade this spring, junk falling in never-ending torrents from brightly decorated floats, a friend sympathetically interjected, “This must be driving you crazy.” What they meant was that as someone who teaches about environmental history but isn’t from here, I must be especially affected by the throwaway culture of the city’s most famous fête and its tons and tons of plastic beads, made from the same fossil fuels that are causing sea levels to rise around us.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the podium Photographer: Dati Bendo © European Union

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union address on Wednesday (16 September) to make the case for a more independent Europe, confronting war, economic competition, AI disruption and climate change — while proposing Canada become the EU’s first associate member.

Opening her #SOTEU speech with Charles Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times”, von der Leyen described a Union stronger but also more exposed to external threats.

“The state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been,” she said, while acknowledging it could feel “as precarious as it has ever been”. “Europe has chosen to forge its own path. And a stronger, independent Europe is now emerging.”

Competitiveness and energy

Von der Leyen called kickstarting Europe’s economy her “number one priority”, promising faster permitting, less red tape and further integration of the Single Market.

The Commission will propose a new Banking Package and create a European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials to secure supplies needed for chips, batteries, clean technology and defence.

With high energy costs weighing on European industry, von der Leyen called for faster electrification and investment in grids, renewables and nuclear power to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Climate after a 'summer of truth'

After a summer of fires, drought and extreme heat, von der Leyen promised a climate resilience framework focused on 100 of Europe’s most vulnerable territories, alongside a Climate Insurance Alliance, European Heatwave Plan and Water Initiative.

She also floated a future European Firefighting Fleet, declaring that Europe “can, must and will stay the course” on its climate targets.

AI: Opportunity and threat

AI was presented as both an economic opportunity and an emerging security threat. Von der Leyen warned that advanced models could enable hacking “on a level we never thought possible” and pledged closer cooperation with Canada, the UK and others on AI security.

At the same time, Europe will expand computing capacity and push AI into health, transport, agriculture, manufacturing, defence and space. “Above all, we want AI with human agency,” she said.

Jobs, housing and social rights

The Commission plans a Quality Jobs Act before the end of the year and a European Care Deal, alongside measures tackling housing pressures.

Von der Leyen said technological change must benefit workers, while strongly defending women’s rights and Europe’s social model.

PHOTO  European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the podium Photographer: Dati Bendo © European Union

Canada moves closer

One of the biggest surprises came with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the chamber.

Von der Leyen proposed an “Alliance for the Future” spanning technology, defence, energy, critical minerals, AI and the Arctic — before going further.

“I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU,” she told Carney. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world.”

Security, defence and Ukraine

With drone incursions, cyberattacks and sabotage raising security concerns inside the EU, von der Leyen proposed a new European security strategy and an Emergency Security Protocol for incidents falling below the threshold of armed aggression.

She also wants to establish a European Security Council and strengthen joint European defence capabilities.

Ukraine faces what von der Leyen called the “toughest winter of the war”. She promised humanitarian and energy support, stronger air defences and deeper defence-industrial cooperation with Kyiv.

Borders, democracy and children online

The Commission will propose an Emergency Response Framework for exceptional migration crises and strengthen Frontex, while launching a Mediterranean Youth Skills and Jobs initiative.

Von der Leyen also announced an EU KIDS ACT, including no social media for under-13s and restrictions for children under 15, followed by a broader Digital Fairness Act.

Political groups draw battle lines

EPP leader Manfred Weber backed the focus on AI, defence and competitiveness but pushed against restrictive climate policies. “Climate change is a reality,” he said, arguing Europe needed “innovation and not bans.”

S&D leader Iratxe García Pérez demanded that von der Leyen turn “words into action”, backing climate investment, housing and worker protections while warning that simplification must not become deregulation.

Renew Europe leader Valérie Hayer made a pointed appeal for the Parliament’s pro-European majority, as the EPP has increasingly worked with parties further to the right on some legislation. “There’s only one possible majority. It’s our pro-European majority,” she said. “We need to do more. We need more Europe, and we need it more quickly.”

Greens/EFA co-chair Terry Reintke accused EU leaders of failing to respond urgently enough to extreme heat and wildfires. “We are in the middle of a climate emergency,” she said, demanding stronger Green Deal implementation while insisting: “We are not powerless. Europe is strong, and Europe can be even stronger.”

ECR co-chair Patryk Jaki struck a sharply different note, attacking the Commission over bureaucracy, energy costs and industrial competitiveness. Europe, he argued, was “as weak as it’s ever been.”

Von der Leyen closed on the central theme running through the speech: European sovereignty in an increasingly hostile world.

“The fate of Europe,” she said, “must remain in the hands of Europeans.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 14, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

In what environmental advocates describe as “another gift to the fossil fuel industry,” the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.

Power plants are considered the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and account for about a quarter of the nation’s climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 2024, the EPA under the Biden administration used the Clean Air Act to require that many new gas plants and existing coal plants reduce their carbon emissions by 90%, including by installing carbon capture technology, by 2032.

The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.38 billion metric tons over the next two decades, the equivalent of about a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector.

On Monday, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under President Donald Trump, announced an end to this policy at a meeting of energy ministers at the Group of 20 conference in Houston.

Not only will this prevent the enactment of a policy that the EPA has estimated would prevent around 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma cases by 2035. But the administration is also rolling out a proposal seeking to prevent future administrations from regulating carbon emissions as a health risk.

It is an effort that runs parallel to the administration’s rescission of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that they are harmful to human health. That move is also being challenged in court.

Power plants are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act, Section 111, which allows the EPA to regulate facilities that “cause, or contribute significantly to” dangerous air pollution.

But whereas the courts have previously interpreted this statute to regulate the outputs of entire facilities, the Trump administration is asking courts to adopt a novel reading of the statute which says each individual chemical under scrutiny must “contribute significantly” to climate change.

As Meredith Hankins, legal director for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained in a policy memo last week, it likely won’t be easy for the administration to prove that the CO2 emissions from US power plants aren’t a significant driver of climate change.

“Power sector emissions account for a quarter of total US emissions, so if they cannot be counted as significant, it’s hard to conceive of any emissions that would,” Hankins wrote. “In fact, if the US power sector were a nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter after China, the United States, India, and Russia. That’s a pretty ‘significant contribution’ to the problem.”

The effort to gut power plant regulations comes after the hottest meteorological summer recorded in US history and amid a year with one of the largest numbers of climate disasters on record, including widespread drought, destructive wildfires, and repeated flooding and tornado outbreaks.

As the planet has warmed over the last half-century, the US has seen a sharp, near-sevenfold increase in weather disasters costing over $1 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, following news of the EPA’s rollback of power plant rules. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

She added that “the Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”

If successful, the reversal of the power plant rules would be one of the most significant steps in Zeldin’s push to eviscerate the EPA’s authority to combat climate change on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this summer, during a meeting of the National Coal Council, he bragged that “many of the items” on the industry’s “wish list are now done.”

He has put the wheels in motion to roll back virtually every Biden-era regulation on the coal industry, including rules limiting pollution from mercury and toxic metals, controls on toxic wastewater from coal plants, and limits on coal ash.

And while seeking to undermine the legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases, Zeldin’s EPA has also taken a sledgehammer to its practical ability to do so, dismantling offices that collect climate data, erasing information about human-caused climate change from the agency’s websites, and filling research panels with scientists employed by the fossil fuel industry.

Former State Department energy official Alan Eyre noted that on the world stage, the US “has always been obstructionist” when it comes to climate policy. Under Trump, he said, “we’re actively malevolent.”

In Denmark, the sea can’t breathe

For more than four months, Brian, a commercial fisherman in his late 40s, had been waiting for the weather conditions to be right for us to go fishing outside Bagenkop, a small harbor town on the southern tip of the Danish island of Langeland. 

“One more problem has come up,”  Brian told me over the phone in early May. “I have lost my fishing license." He was no longer allowed to sell fish for a living. Instead of preparing his boat to go out to sea and to show me how fishing in Denmark had changed over his lifetime, Brian was now removing the registration number from its hull. 

Across Denmark, coastal fishing communities are shrinking as catches decline. At the same time, warming seas, overfishing and pollution are putting increasing pressure on marine ecosystems. 

“Plenty of fish in the sea”? Not anymore, say UN experts, with 35% of the world’s marine fish stocks being fished faster than they can be biologically replaced. Today, more than half of the fish we consume worldwide comes from fish farms. 

This summer, sea temperatures along Denmark’s beaches reached 28 degrees Celsius, a record high. On September 2, the UN Environment Program warned that the world is likely to cross 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels within the next few years. As the climate warms, the pressure on marine ecosystems grows.

In August, Iceland voted not to restart accession talks with the European Union, in part because of concern that it would lose sovereign control of its fishing industry. While fishing is not as major a part of Denmark’s GDP as it is Iceland’s, the EU’s impact has meant independent Danish fishermen have struggled to survive in the face of corporate competition.

For Brian, though, it’s about more than regulations. It is about watching the ocean he grew up with slowly disappear.

Nets covered in black slime

His story reflects a larger shift happening along the Danish coastline. Coastal fishermen, once a central part of the country’s history, are a vanishing breed.

For Brian, it was never about the money. Even when he was a teenager and he told his father he wanted to be a fisherman, his father said it was a bad idea. But the pull of the sea was irresistible. His life as a fisherman began as a hobby, accumulating experience and knowledge just by spending as much time as possible on water. He learned how to read the currents, the weather, and fish movements through experience rather than education. In 2019, despite the uncertainty surrounding the industry, he bought a commercial fishing boat. “When I started as a teenager, there were fish everywhere,” he said. But over the years, the numbers have dwindled starkly. Every few years, another Danish harbor became economically unsustainable. First Bogense, then Kerteminde, later Nyborg and Spodsbjerg. Each one of them followed the same pattern: fewer fish, declining landings, and growing questions about whether it was possible for small fisheries to continue their operations. 

While working on this story, I spoke to ten small-scale Danish fisheries across the country. Half of them said they do not expect to still be fishing five years from now. In 2019, they said, ten nets could bring in between 150-200 kilos of plaice on a single trip. Two years later, the same nets would return with only two kilos. As the catches became smaller, so did the possibility of keeping a commercial license. Brian no longer caught and sold enough fish to keep his permit.

One day still stands out to him as perhaps the single worst he has experienced at sea. He had three nets in the water. The first one he hauled in looked normal. The second held fewer fish than expected. Then he started pulling in the third — the net was completely empty and covered in thick, black slime. 

Marine biologist Stiig Markager told me that what Brian saw was a tell-tale sign of oxygen depletion. In 2025, around 40% of Danish marine areas were affected by low oxygen levels. Oxygen depletion happens when too many nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture and wastewater, enter the sea. These nutrients fuel large algae blooms. 

When the algae die and sink to the seabed, bacteria begin decomposing them, consuming enormous amounts of oxygen in the process. Climate change exacerbates the problem. “Warmer water contains less oxygen. At the same time, biological processes speed up when temperatures rise.” In practice that means algae grow faster, oxygen is consumed more quickly, and deep waters struggle to recover. Together, these processes reinforce each other. “When oxygen disappears, it damages the seabed ecosystem,” Markager said.

A new global study argues that aquatic deoxygenation is approaching an “unsafe space” and should be considered a potential tenth planetary boundary. The global ocean has lost around 2% of its oxygen over the past 50 years. The consequences for marine life are catastrophic, forcing either flight or suffocation.

Marine biologists have studied oxygen depletion in the Danish seas for decades. But, Brian says, “fishers are often the first people to see the effects of that depletion, directly in their nets.” It is a first-hand experience, fishers say, that is often discounted or ignored. Many independent coastal fishers say they feel increasingly excluded from political conversations about the ocean, despite spending their working lives at sea. 

“It feels like we’re not really welcome anymore,” Brian said. He believes small-scale fisheries like his are being pushed out while decisions about the seas are increasingly made by those on land. “I think they don’t want so many people out there seeing what’s actually happening.”

For years, debates about oxygen depletion in Denmark have become deeply political. Marine scientist Stiig Markager says that the results of environmental research have repeatedly clashed with agricultural and political interests. “There is complete opposition from agriculture and from Venstre (a major center-right political party) to making research publicly available,” he said. “There is a clear political strategy from Venstre that there must be no interference with agriculture.” 

According to Markager, tensions between environmental researchers and agricultural interests intensified during the early 2000s, as scientists linked nitrogen runoff from farming to oxygen depletion in Danish waters. Despite decades of plans and political promises, Markager says, the recovery many researchers hoped for never fully arrived.

For this story, I also contacted both the Minister of Environment and the Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries to ask for an interview about the state of Danish waters and the future of small-scale fishing. Neither had time to answer questions.

What remains is behind glass

One harbor that has felt the impact of the changing nature of Danish waters is Bønnerup Strand, which has transformed from a fishing town into a tourist destination. The harbor now features an ice cream shop, a hot dog kiosk, a seafood restaurant, and  a mini golf course. The iconic blue Danish fishing boats are conspicuous only by their absence. Instead, boats built for leisure, not commercial fishing, are docked at the harbor. 

Along the quay, an outdoor exhibition has been installed behind glass panels. It started last year, created by a local group of volunteers trying to preserve what Bønnerup Strand used to be. The pictures show fishing nets piled high, men in blue overalls, boats unloading their catch, and fish laid out in crates.

Movement. Noise. Purpose. It was a harbor bustling with life. Hans, in his 60s now, was once a fisherman in Bønnerup Strand. He walks past the diorama and tells me that twenty years ago “there were 60 or 70 fishing boats here, now there are two.” Some of the independent fishers chose to leave, their lives no longer making economic sense. Others lost their licenses. The rest have disappeared, not all at once, but gradually. Some left before it was too late, others had their boats seized by the bank when their revenue became too low. “Quite a lot of my colleagues had their boats taken by them," says Hans, referring to banks who repossessed boats because independent fishermen no longer made enough money to pay for them.

You could say that the gradual suffocation of the Danish seas began in 1909 with the invention of the artificial nitrogen fertilizer that transformed global agriculture. Artificial fertilizer rapidly became central to modern-day farming. By 1959, nearly 75% of farms were using fertilizer to increase crop production. At first, the growing amounts of nitrogen entering the sea did not appear harmful. During the 1960s and 70s, the extra nutrients actually increased algae and plankton growth, creating more food for some fish species. “There were actually more fish,” says Markager, the marine scientist, “but by the mid-1980s, the consequences had become impossible to ignore.”

On October 8, 1986, on Danish television fishermen in Gilleleje were seen pulling dead lobsters from the sea. The images became the subject of alarmed national conversation. For the first time, the public saw what oxygen depletion meant for life beneath the surface of the sea. 

Hans, the fisherman from Bønnerup Strand, told me he was part of the television coverage himself. “Fishers had talked about pollution long before the dead lobsters,” he said. “But suddenly people started paying attention.” The public outrage pushed Denmark to act. In 1987, the country introduced its first Water Environment Plan, aiming to reduce phosphorus emissions from wastewater by 80% and nitrogen emissions by 50% within five years. For many fishers and marine scientists, it became the first real sign that the environmental crisis in Danish waters was finally being taken seriously. During the 1990s, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution declined significantly. Water in several fjords and coastal areas became clearer, and conditions slowly began improving. For a moment, it appeared the damage could still be reversed.

But by the early 2000s, many coastal fisheries were once again experiencing declining catches and, with it, a growing uncertainty about the future. Hans was one of those affected. Coming from a family that had fished for five generations, the harbor was never a tourist destination for Hans. It was a way of life. But on a sunny Friday in April back 2005, he sailed out to Kattegat for plaice. He knew it was over. “I said to my employee: “this is the last trip. I start working on land from Monday.”” He had made the decision months earlier, as the numbers of fish dwindled and regulations tightened. 

It wasn’t an easy choice, but he had four children to think of. Climate change had taken away his livelihood. “You can’t do anything about it,” he said. “If you think too much about it, you go crazy.” Researchers describe this kind of environmental grief as solastalgia, the distress caused by watching a familiar environment change beyond recognition. Unlike homesickness, solastalgia happens while still remaining in the same place. For coastal fishers, the sea remains physically present, but the ecosystem they once knew and depended on, is disappearing.

Adapting has always been part of the job, says Hans. “There has always been a species that disappeared and then another one came.” But eventually, nothing was replacing what was lost anymore. 

In 2002, marine scientists Stiig Markager and Peter Bondo Christensen from DMU, the Danish Environmental Research Institute, published research showing that around 75% of Denmark’s nitrogen emissions originated from agriculture through waterways and atmospheric pollution. The findings intensified tensions between marine scientists, politicians, and agricultural organizations about who was responsible for the declining marine environment. 

In response to the worsening marine crisis, Denmark established DMU in 1989 to monitor oxygen depletion, nutrient pollution, and ecological changes beneath the surface. But their findings were inconvenient. By 2007, after nearly two decades as an independent institution, DMU was folded into Aarhus University as part of a wider restructuring of Denmark’s research sector. The decision sparked criticism from several environmental researchers and organizations, who feared the changes could weaken the independence of Danish environmental monitoring. 

“Agriculture succeeded in closing DMU,” former researcher Bo Normander told the media. “Nature has lost.” In 2015, the Danish government introduced the controversial Landbrugspakke, easing environmental regulations on fertilizer use in an effort to increase agricultural production. 

Critics warned that the policy could worsen nitrogen pollution in Danish waters at a time when oxygen depletion remained a recurring problem. In the years that followed, researchers from Aarhus University reported rising nitrogen emissions instead of the reductions politicians had promised. Markager argues that despite decades of environmental warnings, nitrogen pollution reductions largely stalled. While nitrogen pollution in Danish waters declined significantly after the first Danish Water Environment Plans in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers say the reductions have largely stagnated over the last 20-25 years. 

Now, Denmark is trying to reverse that trend. In the first week of September, the country passed a historic new law changing how agricultural nitrogen is regulated. The law will take effect in 2027 and represents a significant tightening of the rules introduced in 2015. 

Under the system introduced in 2015, farmers were allowed to fertilize closer to what was considered the agronomic optimum for their crops, while still operating within nationally defined nitrogen quotas and other rules. The new system moves in the opposite direction. Instead of relying primarily on broad national rules, nitrogen regulation will increasingly take the environmental sensitivity of individual areas into account. 

Where a farm is located will thus matter much more. The requirements will vary depending on factors such as whether fields drain towards vulnerable rivers or coastal waters, and whether they lie above areas important for groundwater and drinking-water protection. For farmers, this means that the amount of nitrogen they can use will become more restricted in areas where the surrounding environment is particularly vulnerable. 

For fishermen like Brian and Hans, the law represents a change they have long been asking for: an attempt to redress the damage done to Danish seas. 

But understanding how the water became polluted is more complicated than it first appears. Much of the pollution data commonly referred to in public debates focuses on point-source pollution, which emanates from identifiable sources like wastewater treatment plants, industrial discharge, and fish farms, and is generally easier to measure. But most nitrogen pollution in Danish waters actually comes from diffuse sources, mainly agricultural runoff carried from fields through rainwater, rivers, groundwater, and the atmosphere. Unlike point sources, diffuse pollution is far harder to measure directly and comes with greater uncertainty in the data. As a result, wastewater pollution can often appear to be the biggest issue, even though agriculture remains the dominant source of nitrogen input into Danish waters.

For Hans, the consequences appear almost irreversible. These days, the fish often do not return. “There are still plaice here, but they’re too thin. They don’t gain weight.” Scientists point to several overlapping causes, and the suggested solutions are just as diverse. Activists call for stricter rules, fishers say there are already too many. Farmers reject blame, and governments insist wastewater is already being purified. Plenty of fingers are being pointed, but the problem remains.

Hans doesn’t expect it to change. “I don’t think we’ll have fish out here ever again.” These days, he’s on the other side of the industry, buying catch from fisheries and selling it to customers. “People have to get used to the fact that we don’t always have everything available on demand. With a changing climate, fish shops may no longer offer cod, salmon, or plaice like we’ve been used to.” Instead, he says, squid is becoming the new normal. 

Still, while independent fisheries disappear, the demand for fish continues to grow. Instead of restoring the ocean, parts of the fishing industry are increasingly moving onto land. 

In northern Denmark, companies like Skagen Salmon are now raising fish entirely inside closed artificial systems, where the water, oxygen, and temperature are carefully controlled. Outside, Skagen Salmon looks like a factory. No windows, just a large grey box near the coastline. 

If the building had windows, the fish inside could look out at the sea. But these fish will never see, taste, or feel those waters. Instead, they are raised in artificial tanks until they reach market size. They are then slaughtered and sold to supermarkets and fish shops across the country.

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 The Chairman was informed that the basic infrastructure development works in Sector C-14.

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