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Haverah Park, North Yorkshire It is an unglamorous fringeland of rush pasture and white moor, yet nature finds a use for it

Neglect has left the wooden barrack-like building looking gaunt and frankly sinister. A sky of torn clouds, a sea of rough, rust-coloured pasture, a few knotty hawthorns and some lonely telegraph poles complete the Yorkshire Gothic ambience; it could be a backdrop to a horror film.

Yet this is Doug Simpson’s preferred patch for a wander. Best known for overseeing the successful reintroduction of red kites to Yorkshire, he looks at this windswept, indefinite area of “unofficial countryside” in Haverah Park, near Harrogate, through the eyes of an ornithologist.

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Australia's electricity grid is no longer fit for purpose. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The public debate over the problems of electricity supply displays a curious disconnect. On the one hand, there is virtually universal agreement that the system is in crisis. After 25 years, the promised outcomes of reform – cheaper and more reliable electricity, competitive markets and rational investment decisions – are further away than ever.

On the other hand, proposals to change the situation range from marginal tweaks to politically motivated mischief-making. The preliminary report of the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market, released last year, canvasses such options as the introduction of capacity markets for reserve power, which have done little to resolve problems overseas.

Meanwhile, the Turnbull government has used recent failures to score points against renewable energy (hated, for obscure historical-cultural reasons, by its right-wing base) and to promote the absurd idea of new coal-fired power stations.

A sorry state

This debate might make sense if the system had worked well in the past. In reality, however, the National Electricity Market (NEM) never produced lower prices or more reliable power for households.

In the early years of the NEM, reductions in maintenance spending concealed this failure. When new investment became necessary in the early 2000s, the result was a dramatic upsurge in prices. This was primarily because the NEM regulatory system allowed rates of return on capital far higher than those needed to finance the system under public ownership.

Until the 1990s state governments owned and controlled Australia’s electricity grids from power stations to poles and wires. The expansion of interconnections between state networks created the possibility of a truly national network. The Commonwealth and the states could have jointly owned such a network, following the highly successful model of Snowy Hydro.

The creation of the NEM broke this system into pieces. Ownership of generation was separated from transmission, distribution and retail, while maintaining effectively separate state systems. The only national component was at the regulatory level, where two separate national regulators (the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Energy Regulator) overlap with the continuing regulatory operations of state governments.

Most state governments have sold their electricity enterprises wholly or partly. Victoria and South Australia fully privatised their systems by the early 2000s. NSW partially privatised its network business after 2015. Queensland privatised the retail sector but maintained public ownership of the network and some electricity generation.

Contrary to the hopes of the market designers, breaking up these integrated systems has delivered no benefits, while incurring huge costs. Power prices have continued to rise.

These costs have been on display, in dramatic form, in recent system failures in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. Everyone has blamed everyone else, and no real change has emerged.

The tragedy is that all this could have been avoided if we had seized the opportunity in the 1990s to build a unified national grid, with a single authority running transmission networks and the interconnectors between them. This would still allow competition in generation, but would abandon the idea of market incentives in the provision of network services.

Electricity networks are considered to be natural monopolies. Unlike other industries, where it makes sense for lots of businesses to compete and drive costs lower, the cost and importance of supplying electricity means it make sense for one business to control the market.

Given this status, this authority should not be a privatised firm or even a corporatised government enterprise. Instead, it should be a statutory authority with a primary mission of delivering energy security at low cost.

This failure was not confined to electricity. Our telecommunications network was also privatised in the 1990s, with the promise that competition would deliver better services. In reality, investment and innovation stagnated. It got to the point where the government was forced to re-enter the market with the National Broadband Network (NBN).

As the NBN example suggests, unscrambling the egg of failed reform will be a complex and messy business. It will have to be done gradually, perhaps beginning with South Australia and Tasmania, the states worst affected by recent disasters. But there is no satisfactory alternative.

Public appetite, lack of political will

An obvious question is whether renationalising the electricity network is politically feasible. While the political class on both sides views privatised infrastructure as an unchallengeable necessity, the general public has a very different view. With only a handful of exceptions, voters have rejected privatisation whenever they have had a chance to do so.

The question of reversing past privatisations is more difficult, and there is less evidence. However, none of the privatisations of the reform era, even those that took place decades ago, commands majority support in Australia.

The question has been addressed by pollsters in Britain, which provided the model for Australia’s energy reforms. The results show overwhelming public support for renationalisation, even though the electricity industry has been in private ownership for decades. Even a majority of Conservative voters support public ownership.

The issue will have its next electoral test in Western Australia, where the Barnett government is proposing to sell its majority interest in its electricity distribution enterprise Western Power. While nothing is ever certain in politics, current polls suggest the government is headed for defeat.

John Quiggin has worked on the issues of privatisation and electricity reform for many years, and has acted as a consultant to unions, state governments and community groups. He received no funding for the work on which this article was based.

As renewables were again, somehow, blamed for an explosion and outages at South Australia's Torrens Island gas plant over the weekend, the Coalition was busy taking its coal power campaign to new levels of stupidity. Facts don't matter any more.

Air pollution is in the news - but how bad is Britain’s air?

Queensland's Palaszczuk government signs support deeds for three new large-scale solar PV projects totaling almost 100MW.

The sharp rise in grid delivered prices provides renewed incentive for distributed generation, so PV installers and battery sellers should be out there doing the rounds.

Trina Solar and EDI Downer named as contractors for FRV's 100MW Clare Solar Farm in north Queensland.

Yet again, an expert – this time, a German – has announced that Germany’s energy transition cannot succeed.

The DC version of the Tesla Powerwall 2 will not be offered Down Under according to Adelaide blogger Ronald Brakels.

Trumps announcement to defund NOAA’s satellites will also hurt weather forecasts, jeopardizing public safety, experts warn.

Hop on board the Roper River taxi service - the only way in and out of Ngukurr during the wet; a feral cat makes a meal of a snake; young cattle handlers put their best 'hoof' forward; and meet Charlie Dunn the pint-sized shearer.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 6 March 1917

How the earwigs, beetle larvæ, and earthworms must hate the Food Controller! When, quite in the fashion, I was breaking up some fresh ground in my small garden, I caused great annoyance and considerable injury to numerous worms and insects which no doubt thought that they were in safe winter quarters. It was the earwigs that I specially noticed, and I was almost sorry for them, for, like birds, they were sitting on their eggs. I had to stop occasionally to watch a half-awake mother earwig, if I did not happen to have damaged her with my spade. She turned up an expostulating and threatening tail, metaphorically rubbed her eyes, dazzled by the unexpected light, and then began to fuss round, striving to gather together those precious eggs. She is a model mother amongst insects, and when the tiny larva – very like her in general appearance – are hatched she looks after them in quite a correct manner, while the babes seem to recognise their nurse and crowd round her like much more highly developed animals, even crawling upon her back for a ride. The earwig is not generally popular, but she has some excellent points, and the really neat arrangement of her beautiful wings, folding like a fan from the centre of their forward edge so that they will tuck safely inside her short elytra, is most wonderful.

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Geli, backed by Shell and Australian government fund, targeting "virtual power plants" in Australia household and business battery storage market.

President Donald Trump is making it less likely the United States will meet the emissions targets it agreed at the 2015 Paris climate conference. These targets are themselves insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement’s overall goal of keeping global warming well within 2℃.

But there is another possibility for those who want action. The idea is called “claim the sky” and it would involve a global movement, working together with the most affected countries, to claim ownership over our atmosphere.

Trump has promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, appointed the former chief executive of oil giant Exxon as his secretary of state, and is planning huge changes to Obama’s Clean Power Plan and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is true that the cost of renewables like solar and wind energy is dropping rapidly. It’s therefore conceivable that economic factors alone will drive the shift away from fossil fuels. But if nothing more is done, and America and other countries continue to dish out billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, it may take far longer than necessary to achieve the goals of Paris, if they can be met at all.

Claim the sky

“Claiming the sky” could help reduce emissions more quickly. At the same time it would assist with adaptation, poverty reduction and public perception, and counter policies of the Trump administration and other countries that support fossil fuels.

It involves establishing a trust to collect fees when damage is done to the atmosphere. That money can then be used to reduce poverty, rebuild communities and restore the atmospheric commons.

After all, the atmosphere is a community asset that belongs to all of us. The problem is that it is an “open access” resource – anyone can emit carbon dioxide with very little direct consequence for themselves, despite the huge cumulative consequences for everyone.

Charging companies and individuals for the damage their emissions cause – for example through a carbon tax or trading system – would encourage lower emissions. However, despite some interesting regional experiments, implementing such a system at a global scale has proved to be next to impossible.

Global civil society could change this, if it claims property rights over the atmosphere. By asserting that we all collectively own the sky, we can begin to use the legal institutions that uphold property rights to protect our collective property, charging those who damage it and rewarding those who improve it.

A public trust

The Public Trust Doctrine is a legal principle that holds that certain natural resources are to be held in trust as assets to serve the public good. Under this doctrine it is the government’s responsibility to protect these assets and maintain them for the public’s use. The government cannot give away or sell off these public assets. The doctrine has been used in many countries in the past to protect water bodies, shorelines, fresh water, wildlife and other resources.

Several court cases have confirmed this responsibility. Just before the Paris talks, a Washington state judge ruled that the government has “a constitutional obligation to protect the public’s interest in natural resources held in trust for the common benefit of the people”. Earlier in 2015, a New Mexico court recognised that the state has a duty to protect the state’s natural resources – including the atmosphere – for the benefit of residents. The same year, a court in the Netherlands ordered the Dutch government to cut the country’s emissions by at least 25% within five years.

The time has come to expand this principle to cover all of the natural capital and ecosystem services that support human well-being, including the atmosphere, oceans and biodiversity.

Creating a trust

Holding climate polluters accountable for their damage is more straightforward than it might seem. Just 90 entities are responsible for two-thirds of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.

I and several colleagues wrote an open letter asking nations to establish an atmospheric trust on behalf of all current and future generations. The proceeds could fund restoration projects or expedite the transition to non-nuclear, renewable energy. In addition, governments could charge for ongoing damage via a carbon tax or other mechanisms.

Many of us already know or have experienced the benefit of a trust. There are private land trusts, such as the Nature Conservancy in America, or water trusts like the Murray-Darling’s Environmental Water Trust in Australia. The Alaska Permanent Fund and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund are examples of trusts that put aside royalties from fossil fuel extraction for public benefit.

Just as governments individually levy fines in the event of an oil spill or other environmental damage within their borders, the creation of a trust is an opportunity to do this on a wider scale. The trust will maintain transparency through the internet, publishing financial carbon accounts of projects funded by polluters.

In addition, all governments need not agree in order to create the atmospheric trust. As all governments are co-trustees in the global atmospheric asset, a subset of nations could create the trust and bring the claims.

But given that governments have not acted on their own, pressure from civil society will be required to compel them to act and to counteract the inevitable corporate resistance. In other words, a concerted effort to “claim the sky” as a public trust on behalf of all of global society, in combination with the solid legal framework provided by the Public Trust Doctrine, may just do the trick.

As US Senator Bernie Sanders has said, “When millions of people stand up and fight back, we will not be denied.” It is time to claim our right to the atmospheric commons and a stable climate.

We need a broad coalition of individuals and groups to claim publicly that the atmosphere belongs to all of us and our descendants, and to demand that polluters pay for damage done and for restoring and maintaining our climate.

The fossil fuel era is coming to an end. The industry is making a last-ditch attempt to sell off its assets before these become stranded, aided by government policies and subsidies. This will cause severe and lasting damage to our atmospheric commons.

But if we can claim the sky, create an atmospheric trust and bring damage claims against the biggest polluters, we can further tip the economic scales against fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. We can speed up the transition to the 1.5-degree world that the Paris Agreement aims for, and that current and future generations of humans claim as our common asset.

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

ANZ, NAB, Commonwealth Bank and Westpac provided three times more for non-renewable than clean energy projects in 2016, says Market Forces

Australia’s big four banks invested three times as much in global fossil fuels as they did in clean energy in 2016, despite pledging to help Australia transition to a low carbon economy.

The banks provided a combined $10bn to projects around the world that expanded non-renewable energy, according to finance group Market Forces.

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The surgeon carried out the first successful liver transplant in 1967 and helped normalise the surgery.

14-year-old Logan is helping monitor his city's air - and the results may change your habits.

US president’s Scotland development is under fire as it seeks to expand its boutique hotel and ditch its ecological monitoring group

The Trump Organization is facing a new battle with Scottish planners and conservationists over the protection of rare dunes and wildlife at its Aberdeenshire golf resort.

Trump International Golf Course Scotland has challenged a key part of the planning permission it won for the resort in 2008 as it pushes ahead with plans for a second 18-hole golf course and an extension to its boutique hotel.

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Choose the right brands if you want to promote women’s rights

Ethical shoppers like me want to think that they always have the sisterhood top of their list when they shop. But in practice I find most can rattle off the five freedoms of animal welfare, but are pretty hazy on enshrined women’s rights, like the right to hold elected and appointed government positions.

Even ethical shoppers are often pretty hazy on women's rights

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David Shukman examines the effect that air pollution has on our bodies.