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New road user charges sends a very strange signal and will set back efforts to reduce emissions from the transport sector

• ‘We’ll be left behind’: Australia’s electric car inertia is getting it nowhere

The proposed tax on electric vehicles by South Australia and Victoria, and under consideration by other governments of similar proposals, would slam the brakes on their goal of encouraging more drivers to use low-emission vehicles. The proposals are counterintuitive and premature.

Our system of taxes and charges is designed to serve a range of purposes. In this case there are contradictory objectives. On the one-hand, road charges and fuel excises exist in part as a pseudo user-pays levy for the cost of our road network. On the other, tax policies are often designed to change behaviour – to act as either a positive financial encouragement or, conversely and more frequently, a disincentive for a particular course of action. Taxes and charges on electric vehicles must surely be considered in that second category.

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You saw the headlines of a $1.8m meteorite? Here's the real story and it's just as fascinating.

Whether it’s using recycled materials, having a zero-waste policy or supporting specialist artisans, these jewellery brands create pendants with sparkle and an ethical conscience

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Many say herbicide is an essential tool in preserving biodiversity but others say it’s a ‘delusion’ to think weed control is only possible with ‘poison’

Glyphosate – the weedkiller better known by its most-famous brand name Roundup – does not have the best of public profiles.

The subject of multibillion dollar payouts over claims it causes cancer, the world’s most-popular herbicide developed by Monsanto is not known for having too many friends among environmentalists.

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While Boris Johnson pledges to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK by 2030, Australia still has no clear policy

Boris Johnson’s pledge last week that the UK government would lead a “green industrial revolution” seemed, to those dispirited by Australia’s broken climate politics, to be a message from another planet, not another hemisphere.

The Conservatives promised £12bn (A$21.8bn) for a 10-point plan to combat the climate crisis, including building enough offshore windfarms to run every home in Britain, installing 600,000 efficient heat pumps a year to replace dirty old heaters, and developing new small nuclear reactors.

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The statistics may be terrifying – but the UK’s approach to natural habitats is undergoing a quiet transformation

It was the WildEast manifesto that first brought it home to me. An ambitious project bringing together everyone from farmers and landowning peers to ecologists and gardeners, WildEast aims to return 20% of East Anglia’s land – an area the size of Dorset – to nature. The plan will reintroduce locally extinct species such as the great bustard, beaver, pelican and even bison, restore soil health and champion new educational programmes and policies on plastics and food production. Whether or not this exciting vision can be brought to fruition, its scope, urgency and inclusivity are something new.

I’ve been writing a monthly column about nature for several years now, and during that time I’ve witnessed a shift in the UK’s relationship with the environment. While it may take time for its effects to become visible – and time, of course, is in short supply – this change has the potential to affect everything, as disparate groups seek a renewed sense of connection with the natural world.

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It may look like a dog house in space, but Sentinel-6 will make the most precise map of ocean height.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Financial players cut their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) holdings before this week's WCI auction as prices dropped on the secondary market, while regulated entities kept their position roughly unchanged, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

Ministers visited the scene of a huge peat slide on the Tyrone Donegal border.

EUAs climbed to hit €27 on Friday, reversing some of the declines of the previous two sessions, with buyers inspired by a strong auction result as they braced for a potential Brexit deal and an extended period without auctions.

Environmental groups say new regulations on ships carrying polluting oils in the Arctic don't go far enough.

UN body ICAO's Council this week fully approved a new jurisdictional REDD programme to supply carbon credits under the pilot phase of the CORSIA global aviation offset scheme that alongside an update to a previously-recognised standard will see a compliance-based carbon market accept international deforestation reduction units for the first time.

A California watchdog group plans to hold a mid-December meeting on its recommendations for the WCI-linked cap-and-trade programme, including possible automatic supply triggers to address growing concerns about the scheme's allowance surplus, regulatory sources told Carbon Pulse.

The EU’s failure to conclude negotiations on a budget and stimulus package this week could derail efforts to agree an increase the bloc’s 2030 emissions target by year-end, though experts say that lawmakers increasingly linking the two issues could smoothen their passage.

The undercover policing inquiry was on shaky ground before it started, and victims are right to be concerned

The abuse carried out by undercover “spy cops” working in two police units over 40 years took many forms. The deception practised by at least 20 officers who had sexual relationships with their targets – mostly women, at least three of whom had children as a result – was a gross breach of the women’s human rights, as the force acknowledged when it apologised and paid substantial compensation to seven of them. The harm caused to the children of these deceitful unions is still unfolding: last month it was revealed that compensation has also been paid to a man who had his life turned upside down by the discovery in 2012 that the father who abandoned him as a child was a police officer, Bob Lambert.

Others had their trust violated in different ways. The first month of Sir John Mitting’s public inquiry into the work of 139 officers has heard evidence about how they passed details of trade union activists to a blacklisting organisation used by companies to stop them getting work. A leftwing writer, Tariq Ali, was spied on by at least 14 officers, and said he was shocked by their “prurient” reports. For Stephen Lawrence’s family, the discovery that police spied on their justice campaign was a profound insult that has been compounded by the Metropolitan police’s failure over the past six years to release documents about what happened.

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The best of the week’s wildlife pictures from around the world, including baby bears and a stowaway owl

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A government promise to ban gas boilers from new homes by 2023 has been withdrawn from its website.

An allowance price cap in the proposed Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) carbon market may restrain member jurisdictions from reaching the regional US programme’s overarching GHG reduction goal, according to a study published Thursday.

Pork giant Smithfield has settled with North Carolina residents who sued over stench, flies and truck traffic from Kinlaw Farms

A US judge has issued a blistering condemnation of industrial farming practices. The judgment comes as one US meat giant finally settles after a six-year legal battle with plaintiffs who sued the company over the stench, flies, buzzards and truck traffic coming from its industrial swine farms in North Carolina.

J Harvie Wilkinson III, one of the judges in a case that pitted locals against the Smithfield subsidiary formerly known as Murphy-Brown, decried the “outrageous conditions” at Kinlaw Farms, the operation at the center of the lawsuit – “conditions that there is no reason to suppose were unique to that facility”.

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