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Elecnor wins planning approval for 50MW extension to Queensland's first big solar farm, selling into merchant market and contemplating storage.

Black carbon trapped in the feathers of songbirds gives new insight into historic US air quality.

Key modifications for flight happened as early as 120 million years ago, a fossil discovery suggests.

British Antarctic Survey researchers will study area opened up by loss of iceberg A68, which has been hidden for up to 120,000 years

A team of scientists is planning an expedition to examine the marine ecosystem revealed when an enormous iceberg broke off the Larsen C ice shelf earlier this year.

In July, the iceberg known as A68 broke off the shelf, leaving the area at its lowest recorded extent. Researchers are now hoping the event may lead to novel revelations from their investigations of the area opened up, which had been hidden under ice for up to 120,000 years.

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Home buyers across Australia could face higher energy bills because of a loophole that allows builders to sidestep energy efficiency requirements.

Since the early 2000s, all new homes built in Australia have to meet minimum thermal performance standards. In about 70% of cases, these homes are accredited using star ratings under the federal government’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS). Most new houses have to meet a minimum 6-star rating. The higher the rating, the more energy-efficient the home.

Besides the star rating system, there are three other ways to meet the thermal efficiency standards, including one known as Verification Using a Reference Building (VURB),, which awards a pass or fail rather than stars. It was designed to allow houses with alternative building techniques to comply with the standards.

But some builders are using this approach to accredit houses that fall well short of the 6-star standard under the NatHERS system – a tactic that is legal under the current system.

One consulting engineering firm, Structerre, which is active in Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, has advertised that it has saved builders thousands by adopting the pass/fail approach under VURB. Structerre declined to comment for this article.

A Structerre advertisement showing how a double storey residential building originally rated 4.5 stars using NatHERS and using the VURB pathway was able to meet energy compliance without adding cavity insulation or upgraded glazing. Structerre website

By using VURB, builders can forego installing items that would ordinarily be needed to gain a minimum 6-star rating, such as cavity insulation or upgraded glazing.

Upgrading a home from a 4.5-star rating to 6 stars can typically cost tens of thousands of dollars. It is even more expensive for double-storey homes on narrow blocks with sub-optimal orientation.

Energy uncertainty

It is hard to say exactly how much higher energy bills would be in a home that falls below 6-star standard, because of the many other factors that influence bills. But major Australian house builder BGC Residential estimates that people with a 4-star or 5-star rated home could pay about 30% more than people living in a 6-star home.

A CSIRO study of more than 400 Australian houses built in the past 10 years found that higher-rated homes saved significantly on winter heating costs.

However, a study of 10 homes in Perth found significant variation in energy use between homes with the same rating.

The picture is complicated further by a phenomenon known as the takeback effect, in which some people in energy-efficient homes actually increase their energy consumption.

Misleading standards

Michael Bartier, executive general manager of BCG Residential, one of the first companies to adopt NatHERS 6-star rating as a standard building practice, said the use of loopholes could harm the industry’s reputation and cost buyers money.

“My concern is that there are a large number of homes built in the past 12-18 months that have not achieved the NatHERS 6-star rating, without the owners’ or customers’ knowledge. These homes could be rated as low as 2.7 stars and suffering poor thermal performance, costing the owners significantly more in heating and cooling energy costs and affecting final resale value,” he said.

While universal certificates are generated for homes found to comply with NatHERS, making them easier to track, it’s hard to tell how many homes have been signed off with VURB, as recording is not mandatory for those homes.

Some industry insiders are concerned that, without public scrutiny, the use of this loophole will increase.

A better picture

CSIRO, which owns the software used for NatHERS ratings, has developed a database of new homes’ energy ratings across Australia.

It currently has data for most homes built since May 2016, and is aiming to make its data available to the public. Some preliminary data are shown in the map below.

Average star rating for homes built since May 2016, in a selection of Australian climate zones. It does not show all homes, and in particular does not show homes that met compliance using the VURB pathway. Data courtesy of CSIRO.

Click on the zones to see the average star ratings.

There are more drawbacks besides the potential impact on energy bills. The National Construction Code states that home thermal efficiency standards are also important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2013, Australia’s residential and commercial buildings were responsible for almost a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse emissions.

Several groups have warned about the use of the VURB pathway, including CSIRO, state governments, and the federal Department of the Environment and Energy. But it is unclear whether these warnings will catch the eye of home buyers.

The Australian Building Codes Board is reviewing the system (it is open for public comment until February 2018), and plans to “strengthen the technical provisions” in the 2019 version of the National Construction Code.

Saskia Pickles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Exclusive: Company pledges products will be free from ingredients tainted with controversial herbicide after survey found traces in its European ice-creams

Ben & Jerry’s has moved to cut all glyphosate-tainted ingredients from its production chain and introduce an “organic dairy” line next year, after a new survey found widespread traces of the controversial substance in its European ice-creams.

The dramatic initiative follows a new survey by Health Research Institute (HRI) laboratories which found traces of the weedkiller in 13 out of 14 B&J tubs sampled in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

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• Scott Pruitt says he will sign rule withdrawing policy on Tuesday
• Plan imposed restrictions on emissions from coal-fired power stations

The Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, confirmed on Monday that the Trump administration will abandon the Obama-era clean power plan aimed at reducing global warming.

Related: Trump EPA plan will roll back Obama standards on power plant emissions

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UK scientists will take a ship to explore waters exposed by a huge new iceberg in the Antarctic.

New EU rules that allow car firms to keep their emissions control systems secret from the public risk another dieselgate and should be made illegal, say environmental lawyers

New EU rules that allow car manufacturers to keep pollution control systems secret from the public should be declared illegal, according to environmental lawyers.

The systems can legally cut emissions controls under certain conditions on the road, meaning more pollution is produced. But keeping these strategies secret risks another “dieselgate” scandal, according to ClientEarth lawyers, who announced on Monday that they are seeking to challenge the regulation in the European Union’s court of justice.

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Facility run by E.ON, to be followed by many more, will help UK grid cope with fast-growing amount of renewable energy

One of the first of a new fleet of industrial-scale battery plants will come online in Sheffield this week to help the grid cope with the rapidly-growing amount of renewable power.

E.ON said the facility, which is next to an existing power plant and has the equivalent capacity of half a million phone batteries, marked a milestone in its efforts to develop storage for power from wind farms, nuclear reactors and gas power stations.

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Coal can no longer compete in the free market, so the Trump administration wants to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies

The conservative philosophy of allowing an unregulated free market to operate unfettered often seems to fall by the wayside when the Republican Party’s industry allies are failing to compete in the marketplace. Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently provided a stark example of this philosophical flexibility when he proposed to effectively pull the failing coal industry out of the marketplace and instead prop it up with taxpayer-funded subsidies.

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Ever wondered if cows bore a grudge? This may be the book for you

This meditative little book isn’t new: it came out first in 2003, when it was published by a small farming press. But then a beady-eyed editor at Faber noticed Alan Bennett had praised it in his diary (“it alters the way one looks at the world”, he wrote in an entry on 24 August 2006), with the result that it has now been republished. Its author, Rosamund Young, who lives and works at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment, must be thrilled – or maybe not. Having read her book, which is very sensible but also somewhat dreamy and a bit obsessive, she strikes me as the kind of woman who would rather be standing in a muddy field in her wellies than listening to some eager townie praise her for her wisdom.

Young’s parents began farming in 1953, when she was 12 days old and her brother (with whom she and her husband still run Kite’s Nest) was nearly three; she continues their tradition of treating animals as individuals with varied personalities, rather than as identical members of herds. The Secret Life of Cows, then, is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the many beasts she has hand-reared down the years: bovines, mostly, though there are a few stories about sheep and chickens, too. In a way, it’s like a book for children. Every animal has a name – Araminta, Black Hat, Dorothy – not to mention parents, brothers and sisters. Most have adventures, albeit not massively exciting ones; Young refers casually to their “conversations”, as if cows chat just like humans. After a while, though, you get used to all this, and as a consequence the world does indeed tilt. Or bits of it, at least. This book will change forever the way you see a field of ayrshires or friesians.

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Our readers on their most cherished cycling routes, from remote Scottish islands to Japanese mountain ranges

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Dolebury Warren, Somerset In an iron age hill fort once ruled by rabbits, waxcaps speckle the ground with luminous colour

This shapely hill has steep sides, the sheep-walked turf trodden into neat pleats along the contours. On the ridge, upstanding stony ribs encircle a heart of deeper soil – the iron age hill fort, the Dolebury. In medieval times, when rabbits were tender creatures, a protective warren was built up here, completing the modern name for the place. Nowadays the rabbits look after themselves and the place is often deserted, especially on a ditchwater-dull day like this.

We had come to hunt waxcaps, glistening mushrooms in parrot shades of red, orange, yellow and green. In this peaceful soil their mycelium spreads undisturbed beneath thyme and tormentil (Potentilla erecta). We have been here before, quartering their favourite corners, luckless, only to look back and see them hiding behind a tussock, shining as brightly as lights on a Christmas tree.

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Could Tesla come to the rescue of Puerto Rico's hurricane decimated grid with solar and battery storage? Twitter says, "let's talk."

Tonight former Prime Minister Tony Abbott will be in London to give a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, titled “Daring to Doubt”, in which he will reportedly argue that climate policy is “shutting down industries”. (It’s not clear if he’s bought carbon offsets for the 10 tonnes of carbon that a return flight to the UK will release into the atmosphere.)

Whatever talking points and soundbites he presents will inevitably be interpreted as yet another salvo in the Coalition’s ferocious and interminable war over energy and climate policy.

Read more: Two new books show there’s still no goodbye to messy climate politics

The venue is the same one where Abbott’s mentor John Howard U-turned on his earlier climate policy U-turn. In a 2013 speech, Howard disparagingly declared that “one religion is enough”, despite having belatedly pledged in 2006 to introduce an emissions trading scheme, only to lose to Kevin Rudd the following year.

Who are the GWPF anyway?

The Global Warming Policy Foundation was set up in 2009 by Nigel Lawson, who in the 1980s served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK equivalent of treasurer) in Margaret Thatcher’s government, but is arguably more famous these days as Nigella’s dad.

The foundation was founded just days after the first so-called “Climategate” emails were leaked. But after complaints, in 2014 the UK Charity Commission rejected the notion that the organisation provides an educational resource, concluding that:

The [GWPF] website could not be regarded as a comprehensive and structured educational resource sufficient to demonstrate public benefit. In areas of controversy, education requires balance and neutrality with sufficient weight given to competing arguments.

Ahead of the Commission’s report, the Global Warming Policy Forum was born as the organisation’s campaigning arm, free from the regulations that govern charities.

Despite its loud demands for crystal-clear transparency about climate science, and its repeated claims that scientists are swayed by big fat grants, the GWPF is oddly cagey about its own funding. In a 2012 BBC Radio programme, Lawson said he relied on friends who “tend to be richer than the average person and much more intelligent than the average person”. An investigation by the website DeSmog has dug up some more information.

More recently the GWP Forum has been in the news because it appointed a pro-Brexit oil company boss to its board and because in August Lawson appeared on BBC Radio to attack Al Gore, accusing the Nobel prizewinning climate activist of peddling “the same old claptrap” and adding: “People often fail to change and he says he hasn’t changed, he’s like the man who goes around saying ‘the end of the world is nigh’ with a big placard”.

Read more: A brief history of Al Gore’s climate missions to Australia

Lawson wasn’t done. He also claimed that “according to the official figures, during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined”.

Factcheckers were quick off the mark, and the BBC was chided by, among others, Professor Brian Cox (a year on from bringing his graph to Q&A to try to educate the British-Australian politician Malcolm Roberts).

Days later Lawson admitted that his figures were not from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but from a meteorologist who works for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch.

Abbott the weathervane

Anyway, back to Abbott. Digging around in the archives throws up some amusing surprises about him, as befits a man who has been making headline since 1977. In 1994 an environmental campaign to recreate Tasmania’s Lake Pedder found an unusual ally in the newly minted Member for Warringah, who wrote an article in The Australian that plaintively asked:

If we can renovate old houses and old cars, rejuvenate works of art, recreate forgotten languages and restore degraded bushland, why can’t we rehabilitate the site of a redundant dam?

Abbott seems not to have been particularly exercised by climate policy during the first decade of his parliamentary career. But once the issue hit the top of the political agenda, Abbott was – in his own words to Malcolm Turnbull – “a bit of a weathervane”.

He helped convince Howard to agree to some sort of ETS proposal during the ultimately futile bid to fend off Kevin Rudd in 2007. In July 2009, in a front-page story in The Australian headed “Abbott – we have to vote for ETS”, he was quoted as saying:

The [Rudd] government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears. It’s a plausible means to limit carbon emissions that doesn’t impose any obvious costs on voters.

However, by September 2009, with Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership on the rocks (remember Godwin Grech?), Abbott made a fateful trip to Beaufort in rural Victoria, and discovered that the room loved him saying “climate change is absolute crap”. The weathervane had made an abrupt about-face.

As Paul Kelly notes in his 2014 opus Triumph and Demise, then-Senator Nick Minchin was crucial in convincing Abbott that there was no serious electoral price to be paid in opposing Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Turnbull was on the ropes, and Abbott won the leadership ballot by one vote. As David Marr recounts, the party was almost as stunned as the nation. “God Almighty,” one of the Liberals cried in the party room that day. “What have we done?”

The ensuing years need no extended recap, though two points are worth mentioning. The first is the admission by Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin that the “carbon tax” that was going to be the end of the world… wasn’t a carbon tax.

The second is that former environment minister Greg Hunt recently rebutted the claim that backbenchers prevented further cuts to the Renewable Energy Target under Abbott’s prime ministership.

Backed into a corner

The upshot is that Abbott has, as Philip Coorey recently observed, totally painted himself into a corner on energy and renewables.

Mind you, it may not matter that much to him, given that his apparent aim is not to “do a Rudd” and return to the helm, but simply to drive a wrecking ball through Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership – with climate and energy policy as collateral damage.

Read more: Coal and the Coalition: the policy knot that still won’t untie

As Abbott accepts another pat on the back from a roomful of climate deniers in London, we may wonder how long business interests in Australia will tolerate his wrecking, undermining and sniping. There is bewilderment and dismay at the destabilising effect on policy.

Among the business lobby, BHP has evidently forced the departure of Brendan Pearson as head of the Minerals Council in protest at the council’s similarly backward stance. That much is within their gift. But with regard to the Coalition government, those businesses can do little but despair at the handful of recalcitrant MPs who have nominated climate policy as the ditch in which they will die, in service of the culture war.

The hot air just doesn’t seem to be letting up, any more than our hot summers will in the future.

Australia's CleanTech Index outperformed the ASX in September and in Q1 of the financial year – just as it has over the last three years.

Living in a single-storey unit can lead to much higher air conditioning costs. Author provided

With rising temperatures, surging power prices and an ageing population, there are challenging times ahead in terms of looking after our most vulnerable elderly citizens.

But my research suggests that residential aged care facilities are not well regulated in terms of providing safe indoor temperatures, especially during hot summer months.

Heatwaves have caused more deaths in Australia over the past 200 years than floods or cyclones. People over 75 are more at risk of temperature-related health issues, and some are even more at risk than others. The most vulnerable groups include women, people living alone, people on low incomes, and people with existing health or mobility issues.

Vulnerable subgroups of elderly population. Wendy Miller

By mid-century, more than 2 million Australians will be aged 85 or over, and more than a quarter of these are likely to find themselves living in residential aged care facilities. These communities, often resembling retirement villages, cater to the needs of older people with varying levels of care needs in terms of their health, mobility and independence.

Aged care homes are strongly regulated by national laws governing their terms of occupancy, fees, fire safety procedures, and service costs such as electricity bills. But this regulation does not seem to extend to thermal comfort.

Population distribution of older people. Derived from Australian Demographic Statistics June 2014, ABS Comfortable buildings

My research team has been investigating how buildings at an aged care community in southeast Queensland impact on internal temperatures and occupant electricity bills. Residents in this community are aged 80 or older and most live alone. We measured inside and outside temperatures in 11 apartments and evaluated the electricity bills of all 110 apartments. We also inspected the design and construction of the buildings.

On average, residents used only 80% of the monthly electricity assumed by the Queensland government for low-energy-consumption households. Actual monthly electricity bills (excluding metering and connection charges) ranged between 1% and 6% of the 2015 aged care pension rate.

Read more: How to keep your house cool in a heatwave

Next, we examined the 20 apartments with the highest electricity bills. Eighteen of them were directly exposed to the roof – that is, they were either in a single-storey apartment building or on the upper floor of a two-storey building.

Electricity bills also seemed to be linked to the weather. In some units, winter and summer bills were 60-70% higher than the corresponding bills in autumn and spring. In the most extreme cases, summer electricity bills were four to five times higher than at other times of year. Some units required winter heating, while others did not.

This huge variation in electricity bills suggests that building quality plays a part in determining how much residents have to spend to stay cool in summer. To find out, we next compared the temperatures inside two identical, unoccupied units – one on the ground floor and one directly above – during a run of hot summer weather.

The ground floor unit had a more consistent internal temperature and a lower maximum temperature in every room (bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room). What’s more, all rooms in the ground floor unit had a greater proportion of time in the comfort zone of 20℃ and 26℃, and never got hotter than 28℃.

Temperature comparison of lower floor (left) and upper floor (right) apartments. Wendy Miller

This doesn’t mean that air conditioning wouldn’t be required, but it does mean that cooling costs for the ground floor unit would be significantly cheaper than for the unit directly upstairs.

Building quality – the absence of ceiling insulation in this case – is impacting on the internal temperatures of these apartments and on the occupants’ electricity bills. It’s an important issue considering that air conditioning is typically the biggest factor in these communities’ energy costs.

Impact of heat and housing on elderly people and society. What do we need to do about this?

This is not an accusation of wrongdoing by the developers and managers of aged care communities. But our results do highlight a serious issue in our approach to energy, buildings and health, especially the increasing heatwave risk to our growing elderly population.

With that in mind, a few questions need answering:

• Are building regulations really protecting the health and safety of older people?

• Why isn’t building quality considered as part of the healthcare plan of older Australians?

• Why do we rely so much on air conditioners to pump heat out of the building, instead of first doing what we can to limit the heat getting into our buildings in the first place.

• Why do governments try to control electricity prices but virtually ignore energy efficiency?

• Why aren’t buildings included in the current discussion about the electricity network, reliability and security?

• Why do we continue to focus on subsidising pensioners’ electricity bills, instead of tackling the problem at source by improving the buildings they live in?

• Are the buildings constructed now going to be fit for purpose in the changing climate?

• Will poor-quality buildings end up being stranded assets in the future?

We have a disconnect between our building quality, energy system, electricity costs and the well-being of our elderly citizens. This does not make Australians safe and secure – something that anyone in aged care would surely wish to be.

Wendy Miller receives funding from the Australian Research Council to examine housing innovation and sustainability. No funding was received from the management of the aged care community that was the subject of this research. This community, however, does provide our research team with access to their buildings and energy data.

AFR's Chanticleer column writes article about battery storage so absurd and stupid it beggars belief that it was published. Such is the state of the energy debate in Australia. It's not just politicians and vested interests that are letting consumers down, it's the media.

Coalition had sought to dodge CET because renewables were too costly, now it is arguing they are too cheap. But Frydenberg says renewables without storage are a "costly burden."