What to know about Europe’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles

MIAMI (AP) — Two humpback whales were found dead and another seriously injured this year in huge nets used to collect krill for fishmeal and omega-3 pills near Antarctica, The Associated Press has learned.

The whale deaths, which have not been previously reported, were discussed during recent negotiations between the U.S., China, Russia and two dozen other countries in which officials failed to make progress on long-debated conservation goals and lifted some fishing limits in the Southern Ocean that have been in place since 2009.

Taken together, the whale deaths and rollback of the catch limits represent a setback for the remote krill fishery, which has boomed in recent years and is set to expand even further following the acquisition of its biggest harvester, Norway’s Aker BioMarine, by a deep-pocketed American private equity firm.

AP journalists last year spent more than two weeks in the frigid waters around Antarctica aboard a conservation vessel operated by Sea Shepherd Global to take a rare, up-close look at the world’s southernmost fishery. As part of that investigation, the AP followed the tiny crustacean on its journey from the fragile ecosystem, where it is the main nourishment for whales, to salmon farms in Europe, Canada and Australia, pet food manufacturers in China and a former ice cream factory in Houston that produces 80% of the world’s nutrient-rich krill oil.

Delegates to the annual meeting in Australia of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR, shared with the AP unpublished reports of the whale deaths on the condition of anonymity because the talks, which ended last week, are not open to the public. Officials at CCAMLR, which was established in 1982 to protect the international waters near Antarctica, didn’t comment.

Under a conservation agreement developed almost two decades ago, the krill catch has soared: from 104,728 metric tons in 2007 to 424,203 metric tons in 2023 as larger, more sophisticated vessels have joined the chase. So far this year, the catch has jumped to 498,000 metric tons — the highest on record, according to the unpublished reports.

Although fishing is still below a previously agreed limit and barely 1% of the estimated biomass of 63 million metric tons of krill found in the main Antarctic fishing grounds, direct competition between marine mammals has resulted in whale deaths before.

But following the first ever recorded entanglements of four humpback whales in 2021 and 2022, Aker BioMarine redesigned its fishing nets, which regularly vacuum up to 500 metric tons of krill per day – the equivalent daily diet for about 150 humpback whales. First, it added a rope barrier to repel large mammals and then, last fall, it developed a second barrier to close a still sizable gap that can threaten whales swimming vertically.

The new net had not yet been installed when a juvenile humpback was observed dead Jan. 27 on the Antarctic Endurance, the company’s most advanced supertrawler, according to a report presented by Norwegian negotiators at the CCAMLR meeting.

The reasons behind the second death in May involving another Aker BioMarine ship remain unclear. But two days earlier the ship reported difficulty maneuvering its net and blubber was recovered on the ship’s conveyor belt, suggesting the dead whale had been trapped by the net for some time, the report said.

A third humpback was hauled alive in late January on a Chilean-flagged vessel, the Antarctic Endeavor, using traditional trawling gear. After the ship’s crew struggled for 40 minutes to cut the net tightly wrapped around the 15-meter-long (15-yard-long) male, the whale, with blood on its tail, was dumped back into the ocean.

“Upon release it was lethargic and had some injuries from rubbing with the net,” according to a report by Chile’s delegation to the CCAMLR talks that included graphic images of the capture. Although the whale was observed swimming, the capture was considered a mortality event by CCAMLR scientists because the released whale’s injuries were likely to prove fatal.

Attempts to contact the trawler’s owner, Pesca Chile SA, were unsuccessful.

A minke whale was also found dead after entangling itself in a buoy line belonging to a South Korean vessel targeting Patagonian toothfish, which is also managed by CCAMLR. It was the first ever whale death recorded in the fishery.

Pressure on krill stocks is building as a result of surging demand for omega-3 pills taken as dietary supplements, advances in fishing and rising ocean temperatures due to climate change.

This summer, New York-based American Industrial Partners acquired a majority stake in Aker BioMarine’s feed business with the goal of positioning krill as a premium ingredient for the aquaculture industry, now the source for about half the world’s seafood.

Webjørn Barstad, CEO of the new company, Aker BioMarine Antarctic, said developing new technologies to mitigate risks of whale mortalities is a top priority. Starting next season, he said, its entire fleet will be equipped with special stretch sensors that will alert the crew when a whale has interacted with the mesh front of a trawler’s net. Underwater cameras may also be used, he said.

“Our goal is always zero incidents,” Barstad said in an interview. “Hopefully the net will do the job but we will try something else as well.”

CCAMLR, whose mission is conservation, is tasked with refereeing the fishing industry. But in recent years, progress has stalled due to geopolitical wrangling, especially opposition from China and Russia.

Coming into the latest meeting, hopes were high that delegates would approve a new management plan to further spread the krill catch and finally adopt a California-sized reserve along the Antarctic Peninsula, a highly sensitive ecosystem. Currently, less than 5% of the Southern Ocean is protected — well behind CCAMLR’s target and not nearly enough to meet a United Nations goal to preserve 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

But a tentative deal fell apart over a last minute proposal by the UK and Australia for an even lower catch limit than the one agreed to during talks over the summer, according to one delegate who spoke to AP. China, objecting to the persistent Western demands, then withdrew its support for the marine reserve and refused to renew the existing management system.

The result: a 620,000 metric ton catch limit that for 15 years has divvied fishing into four quota areas can now be concentrated into even smaller krill hotspots, some of them teeming with wildlife, including seals and penguins, some already showing signs of stress from competition with fishing, tourism and climate change.

“The meeting was a huge disappointment, even by the low standards that we’ve come to expect,” said Evan Bloom, who for 15 years, until his retirement from the State Department in 2020, led the U.S. delegation to the annual CCAMLR meeting.

“Krill is the base of the food chain in Antarctica and fishing for krill must be handled sustainably if the entire ecosystem is to thrive,” said Bloom, adding that in the absence of further action by CCAMLR and given the advances in fishing the “prospects for harming the ecosystem have now increased.”

Barstad said the krill industry will consider putting its own voluntary limits in place in the absence of an updated CCAMLR framework.

“Whether it’s a big setback, I’m not so sure,” he said. ”Once you go beyond the emotion and come to terms with the fact that a regulation that had been standing for quite some years now suddenly disappeared, a little bit out of the blue, I think it could create a better atmosphere for discussing how to progress sustainably based on science.”

___

This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Meta Platforms Inc. posted stronger-than-expected results for the third quarter on Wednesday as its advertising revenue continued to grow.

For the three months ended on Sept. 30, the Menlo Park, California-based company earned $15.69 billion, or $6.03 per share, up 35% from $11.58 billion, or $4.39 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Revenue rose 19% to $40.59 billion from $34.15 billion.

Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $5.22 per share on revenue of $40.21 billion, according to FactSet Research.

“We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We also have strong momentum with Meta AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses.”

For the current quarter, Meta is forecasting revenue of $45 billion to $48 billion. Analysts are expecting $46.18 billion.

But the Instagram and Facebook parent company warned that it expects a “significant acceleration” in infrastructure spending next year.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Even for an era of more extreme weather, this autumn has seemingly shifted into yet another gear, especially in a rain-weary Europe where massive and deadly flooding in Spain’s Valencia region is the latest incarnation.

At least 95 people have been killed in flooding that sent cars piling up like flotsam on the beach, while an ocean away much of the United States bakes through a nearly rain-free October that has created a flash drought.

Scientists trying to explain what’s happening, especially with a spate of deadly European downpours, see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe — that spawn extreme weather.

Several climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding is called a cut-off lower pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, for the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

In America, it was a sunny, high-pressure system with no moisture that plunked down like a dome and kept storms away.

“If we’re getting all the dryness, somebody else is getting all the rain,” said Yale Climate Connection meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground.

“The same extremely wavy jet stream that is causing the U.S. drought is also responsible for the horrific flooding in eastern Spain,” said climate scientist Jennifer Francis at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Cape Cod. She’s a pioneer in a theory that attributes a wavier and slower-moving jet stream to climate change because the Arctic is warming so much it’s no longer a lot colder than the rest of the planet. That theory is gaining more acceptance, but it’s not fully embraced by the climate science community.

“Attributions are always tricky. Generally speaking, the jet stream, because of the changes we are seeing due to climate change, is having more pronounced undulations,” said Maria Jose Sanz, scientific director of the BC3 Basque Center for Climate Change. These DANAs happen when there are more undulations, often in the winter, she said.

ETH Zurich climate scientist Erich Fischer isn’t fully sold about the wavy jet stream theory, but then he ticks off the cut-off low storm systems that have doused and flooded Europe this fall: last week in France, twice in Italy in September and October, flooding in Austria and Czech Republic in September. And then there are the October floods in the Balkans, but Fischer isn’t sure they are quite similar enough. Parts of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic got three months of rain in just five days in September, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

“I’ve only been talking about the ones in autumn. We had a whole series in the Alps causing flash floods during summer,” Fischer said. “Starting with Bavaria, southern Germany in June, and then it was something like six events in Austria and Switzerland in the mountains, extreme thunderstorms, and now this autumn. So in terms of heavy rainfall, it was an extremely unusual stretch.”

He said the systems, especially in Spain, France and Austria, got stuck and “the rain did not move” from the same valleys for hours.

“It’s incredible,” he said.

Even without the potential changes to the jet stream, several scientists said they are sure that basic physics are making storms like this wetter.

It’s a core equation in physics called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. It says for every degree Celsius the air warms, it can hold 7% more moisture (4% more for every degree Fahrenheit). The world has warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius because of greenhouse gases, so it’s about 9% to 10% heavier rain, at the least, said Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto. She helps run World Weather Attribution that checks for human fingerprints in extreme weather, sometimes finding them, sometimes not.

“It is very clear that climate change did play a role,” especially in short bursts like what happened in Valencia, Otto said.

That air holding more moisture may be “just for starters,” meteorologist Masters said. When the moisture condenses it releases heat energy, which goes into the storm, invigorates it, increases its updrafts and allows it to pull even more moisture from a larger area, which could boost rainfall as much as 20%, he said.

“It just kind of feeds and you get a vicious cycle,” he said.

Fischer found a similar storm in the same place in 1957. But this year’s storm, with warmer air stoking it, was much wetter. The 1957 storm dumped around 250 millimeters of rain (10 inches), but this week’s had reports of more than 490 millimeters (19 inches) in just eight hours, Fischer said. There could be rain gauge issues involved, but part of this is the atmosphere holding and dumping more water.

And then you add a toasty Mediterranean sea.

It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, with a mean temperature of 28.47 Celsius, said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

“This facilitates a greater uptake of moisture in the air, resulting in more rain when the atmosphere starts to cool in the autumn,” she said. “As things stand, Spain needs to embrace itself for continued heavy rain for the next few days.”

There may be different ways of counting and attributing climate change and the havoc it wreaks, Otto said, but one thing is for certain: “Burning fossil fuels causes climate change and climate change causes death and destruction.”

___

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.