Around The Web

Crops are wilting in parched fields, lowering the yields of kitchen staples including meat, wheat, potatoes, onions and milk

Staple foods from bread to potatoes, onions, milk and meat may be in shorter supply than usual this year and prices to consumers may have to rise, farmers have said, as they count the cost of the two-month drought and heatwave across the UK.

There will be little respite from the hot weather in many areas of the country, even as thunderstorms and heavy rains spread from the east, as farmers have seen their crops wilt, their fields parched and livestock struggle in the extreme conditions.

Continue reading...

Does coal fired electricity have a future in Australia? Or will we be powered by renewable energy? An expert panel discusses electricity prices, emissions, and where our energy will come from.

The global demand for meat means more animals are moved around the world than ever before. Activists say the conditions they endure are intolerable – and we are all turning a blind eye

At the Kapikule border crossing between Turkey and Bulgaria, Lesley Moffat charges forward, clipboard in hand, marching alongside the parked lorries loaded with live cows and sheep waiting in this no man’s land to be exported from the EU. Sometimes, the animals are left on the lorries for days, stuck inside metallic freight containers barely shielded from the blinding sun as truckers, bureaucrats, importers and exporters haggle over paperwork and fees.

The cows struggle to bring their heads close to the fresh air. Their containers are filled with urine and manure, levels of ammonia steadily rising inside the trailers as journeys wear on. Moffat – the founder of the Dutch-based charity Eyes on Animals – sticks her hand through the grating of one lorry to check the animals’ water supply. “Look at this,” she says, grabbing at the hay stuck into the water trough and pointing to the dung clogging it. “It gets full of dirty straw and shit, and they can never drink from it,” she says. “The drivers need to give them water in buckets.”

Continue reading...

While we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, America is giving the fossil fuel industry billions to extract more

Imagine that instead of taxing cigarettes, America subsidized the tobacco industry in order to make each pack of smokes cheaper.

A report from Oil Change International (OCI) investigated American energy industry subsidies and found that in 2015–2016, the federal government provided $14.7bn per year to the oil, gas, and coal industries, on top of $5.8bn of state-level incentives (globally, the figure is around $500bn). And the report only accounted for production subsides, excluding consumption subsidies (support to consumers to lower the cost of fossil fuel use – another $14.5bn annually) as well as the costs of carbon and other fossil fuel pollutants.

Continue reading...

New Zealand carbon allowances saw a third consecutive session of minor losses on Monday, putting an end to the recent bull run that saw spot allowances set a remarkable eleven records in just over a month.

Naturalists including Sir David Attenborough have been encouraging the public to take part in the largest count of its kind. We asked to see some of the images you took while doing so

Continue reading...

Images of the aftermath of the Xepian-Xe Nam Noy dam collapse in Laos went around the world. But many other dam projects harm locals and the environment in less visible ways. Jason von Meding, Senior Lecturer in Disaster Risk Reduction, University of Newcastle Giuseppe Forino, PhD Candidate in Disaster Management, University of Newcastle Tien Le Thuy Du, PhD Candidate in Geosensing and water management, University of Houston Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

One of the perverse design features of the NEG is that it supports gas-fired generation and old hydro, but excludes rooftop solar.

Year of record investment by Clean Energy Finance Corporation helps deliver 10 solar farms and four wind farms in past 12 months, new report reveals.

Coalition hard-liners to entrench positions on energy following Super Saturday by-election results. Watch the NEG be kicked down the road.

2 August 1918 Grubs slowly devoured their host, biting their way through the almost empty skin and pupating alongside the unhappy victim

I have received from a correspondent a small natural packet of little cocoons, each neatly swathed in yellow silk and arranged side by side. He found them alongside the shrivelled skin of a caterpillar, and asks: “What tragedy has happened here?” A tragedy indeed for the caterpillar; a very useful murder so far as we are concerned. The cocoons cover the pupae of braconids, little parasitical wasps related to the useful ichneumon flies; the parent stung the caterpillar with her ovipositor, loading its living body with her eggs. Grubs hatched from the eggs, slowly devoured their host, and when it had no longer energy to feed or even crawl bit their way through the almost empty skin and pupated alongside the unhappy victim. A fresh crop of braconids will emerge from these cocoons.

Related: Caterpillars create 'avenue of ghosts' in Cambridge park - in pictures

Continue reading...

New Nissan LEAF put to the test in UK’s gruelling National Three Peaks Challenge.

Forget the NEG. The limitations of Australia's ageing grid are threatening to hobble the rapid rollout of new wind and solar projects. It's probably the biggest issue facing the renewable energy industry right now.

Elliott Green Power says 132MW Nevertire Solar Farm, in NSW north-west, in early stages of construction.

Plentiful, cheap and getting cheaper. Report argues cost of wind and solar likely to be well below cost of fossil fuel generation nearly everywhere.

DSO and DER – an important conversation about control of your rooftop solar and battery storage that deserves better acronyms.

Which? says people often don’t understand various symbols found on packaging

A confusing array of symbols on household packaging is leaving consumers in the dark about what can be recycled, research reveals.

Nearly half of respondents to a survey carried out in the UK by consumer group Which? thought that products stamped with the so-called green dot (a circle of two intertwined arrows) were recyclable, when in fact it means only that a manufacturer has paid into a scheme that supports recyclable packaging and systems.

Continue reading...

Almost 30 years ago the world responded to the realisation that our ozone layer was in trouble. The resulting Montreal Protocol was a rare example of global cooperation, but there's no room for complacency. Shane Keating, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Oceanography, UNSW Darryn Waugh, Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Millions of tonnes sent to China, and from there to other countries as finished wood products, should be considered ‘high risk’

Millions of tonnes of illegally logged timber, felled from forests across Papua New Guinea, are being exported to China and from there to the world as finished wood products, a new report from Global Witness has revealed.

Global Witness’s investigation has found that the majority of logging operations in PNG are underpinned by government-issued permits, which are often illegally “extended” and which fail to enforce laws surrounding logging in prohibited and ecologically sensitive areas.

Continue reading...

Firm operating MS Bremen in Svalbard claims ‘self defence’ as critics online condemn killing and wildlife tourism

A polar bear has been shot dead after injuring a guard working for cruise ship tourists visiting an Arctic archipelago in Norway.

The bear was shot dead by another employee, the cruise company said after the incident on Saturday.

Continue reading...