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Badger cull faces review as bovine TB goes on rising
The government is to review the controversial badger cull as part of an inquiry into its strategy to clamp down on bovine TB.
The review raises the possibility that experts conducting it will examine disputed evidence about the cull’s efficacy, potentially paving the way for a change in policy.
Continue reading...World's first 'plastic-free' aisle opens in Netherlands
Green party says Tories' environment rhetoric is dangerous
Caroline Lucas derides ‘fluffy communications strategy’ and ‘inadequate’ action on plastics
The Conservative party’s rhetoric on the environment is a “fluffy communications strategy” when change on plastics could happen in half the time pledged, the co-leader of the Greens has said ahead of her party conference speech.
Caroline Lucas will use her speech on Saturday in Bournemouth to call for petrol and diesel-only new cars to be phased out by 2030 and a deposit return scheme on drinks containers to be launched by the end of the year.
Continue reading...Country diary: flat feet, long in the claw. A warlike creature
Inshriach, Aviemore Tracks revealed the badger and I had been cohabiting all this time. I just wasn’t looking hard enough
The bothy at Inshriach sits alone in a clearing, with a view through the trees across the Spey to the Monadhliath mountains. When I arrive, all this is under a foot of snow: juniper hunched over with the weight of it, silver birch cryptic against its white backdrop, the whole glade swathed in mist. The sunlit uplands to the north are glossy and white like Italian meringue, dolloped on with a spoon.
Continue reading...Body hack
Berta Caceres: Executive held over dam activist's murder in Honduras
Why South Australia has become a leader in renewable energy
Republican-led committee says Dakota pipeline protesters had Russian backing
House lawmakers say Russia helped fund environmentalists and supported them on social media, but evidence is thin
A powerful US congressional committee has alleged that Russia financed major environmental organizations and used social media to support opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline, fracking and fossil fuels.
The Republican-controlled committee claimed in a new report that the Kremlin is attempting to make “‘useful idiots’ of unwitting environmental groups and activists” to further its global agenda.
Continue reading...DNA sheds light on settlement of Pacific
Storm Emma: Weather causes accident and strands trains
Penguins, bee-harming pesticides and a lot of snow – green news roundup
The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox
Continue reading...Arctic spring is starting 16 days earlier than a decade ago, study shows
Climate change is causing the season to start comparatively earlier the further north you go, say scientists
The Arctic spring is arriving 16 days earlier than it did a decade ago, according to a new study which shows climate change is shifting the season earlier more dramatically the further north you go.
The research, published on Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, comes amid growing concern about the warming of Greenland, Siberia, Alaska and other far northern regions, which have recently experienced unusually prolonged and frequent midwinter temperature spikes.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
Olive ridley sea turtles, a sparrowhawk and Europe’s highest sand dune are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...Largest population of penguins found in Antarctic Peninsula
In doomed Alaska town, hunters turn to drones and caribou as sea ice melts
Climate change is forcing indigenous people to find new ways to survive as a remote village of 600 grapples with rapid erosion
At the edge of an imperiled Alaska town, Dennis Davis sent a drone over a patchwork of ice covering the Chukchi Sea.
“Some people think it’s a toy, but a lot of people know that it’s an actual tool,” he said of the $5,000, microwave-sized machine with a camera mounted to a carbon fiber frame. As snowmachines zoomed past, Davis, 39, a resident and former police officer, looked at the pictures that were beamed back.
Continue reading...Mission to giant A-68 berg thwarted by sea-ice
Penguin super-colony spotted from space
'Mega-colonies' of 1.5 million penguins discovered in Antarctica
The discovery shows the remote area is a vital refuge for wildlife from climate change and overfishing and should be protected by a new reserve, say scientists
Huge “mega-colonies” of penguins have been discovered near the Antarctic peninsula, hosting more than 1.5 million birds. Researchers say it shows the area is a vital refuge from climate change and human activities and should be protected by a vast new marine wildlife reserve currently under consideration.
The huge numbers of Adélie penguins were found on the Danger Islands in the Weddell Sea, on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is a difficult place to reach and has seldom been visited. But scientists, prompted by satellite images, mounted an expedition and used on-the-ground counts and aerial photography from drones to reveal 751,527 pairs of penguins.
Continue reading...We must honour lost land defenders by fighting the system which killed them
Two more defenders in Latin America have lost their lives challenging their country’s economic growth model which prizes profit at all cost
As the Guardian and Global Witness revealed that almost four environmental defenders were murdered every week in 2017, War on Want learned of two more killings through our Latin American partner organisations.
On 24 January, Márcio “Marcinho” Matos, involved in the fight for rights of landless peasants in Bahia in north-east Brazil, was shot in front of his son. Three days later, Temístocles “don Temis” Machado, a prominent figure in the struggle of Afro-Colombian communities across the Colombian Pacific, was murdered in his home in the Isla de Paz community.
Continue reading...How America's clean coal dream unravelled
Exclusive: Kemper power plant promised to be a world leader in ‘clean coal’ technology but Guardian reporting found evidence top executives knew of construction problems and design flaws years before the scheme collapsed
High above the red dirt and evergreen trees of Kemper County, Mississippi, gleams a 15-story monolith of pipes surrounded by a town-sized array of steel towers and white buildings. The hi-tech industrial site juts out of the surrounding forest, its sharp silhouette out of place amid the gray crumbling roads, catfish stands and trailer homes of nearby De Kalb, population: 1,164.
The $7.5bn Kemper power plant once drew officials from as far as Saudi Arabia, Japan and Norway to marvel at a 21st-century power project so technologically complex its builder compared it to the moonshot of the 1960s. It’s promise? Energy from “clean coal”.
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