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Landscape photographer of the year awards – in pictures
A selection of prizewinning images from the Take a View 2016 photography awards
Continue reading...Environmental water to provide refuge flows in the Edward river to minimise fish deaths caused by hypoxic blackwater
Petrol cars allowed to exceed pollution limits by 50% under draft EU laws
Car industry successfully lobbied for loopholes to dilute EU laws limiting toxic particulates emissions for new cars, the Guardian has learned
New European cars with petrol engines will be allowed to overshoot a limit on toxic particulates emissions by 50% under a draft EU regulation backed by the UK and most other EU states.
Campaigners say that a simple €25 (£22) filter could drastically cut the pollution, but the Guardian has learned that car-makers have instead mounted a successful push for loopholes and legislative delay.
Continue reading...A storybook world growing from a medieval quarry
Barnack Hills and Holes, Cambridgeshire The quarrying has left a strange, toy landscape of ridges and valleys not a kilometre square. Nature has taken it back
Hills and Holes. A name like that, it had to be a manufactured place for kids and dog walkers, I thought. On hearing what locals called it – Hills and Hollows – I decided to look closer at the funny space on the edge of this village near Stamford.
Turns out it was manufactured, but not by anyone we knew. The place with the playground name once built cathedrals. A Jurassic seabed turned medieval quarry, its limestone was used in the extravagant churches of Ely and Peterborough. Now it’s a meadow, and important again.
Continue reading...Innovation funding to help grow high-tech industry and jobs
Know your NEM: Gas prices still 50-70% above last year
Environment group named in WikiLeaks email release responds to attacks
The low-profile Australian group Sunrise Project hits back at coal lobby after being criticised over funding sources shown in hacked US Democratic emails
The head of a usually quiet environmental group in Australia has hit back against News Corp and coal lobby attacks after hacked emails revealed it was partly funded from overseas.
Two emails forwarded to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta – and published by WikiLeaks – show that one of the funders of the Sunrise Project is a large US-based charitable trust, the Sandler Foundation.
Continue reading...Dyesol announces CSIRO collaboration plan on perovskite solar
Ausgrid sale great for everyone, except consumers
Data mining tech wins the day at Melbourne “Energy Hack”
Hazelwood brown coal generator may close in next few months
Victoria's Hazelwood power station to close, French media reports say
Utility company Engie say no decision has been made regarding the future of Australia’s most polluting coal-fired power plant despite reports in Les Echos
French utility Engie has decided to close down Victoria’s coal-fired Hazelwood power station – Australia’s most polluting – at a meeting between the board and executives last week, according to a report in the French newspaper Les Echos.
However the company told Guardian Australia that no decision had been taken so far regarding the future of the plant.
Continue reading...Battery storage: Bad advice about costs is fooling Australian governments
Adelaide looks to boost EV uptake with new charge point incentives
Huge huntsman spider tries to eat a mouse – video
Arachnophobes, look away now. Footage has emerged from Queensland, Australia, that appears to show an oversized huntsman spider with a dead mouse in its clutches. The vision was shot by Jason Womal, who explained on Facebook that he was about to leave for work in the early hours of the morning when a neighbour asked if he wanted ‘to see something cool’. His video has been viewed more than 5.7m times in the 32 hours since he posted it. File it under ‘only in Australia ... ’
Continue reading...Shark attack near Byron Bay leaves surfer with minor leg injuries
Attack on beach between Suffolk Park and Broken Head in northern NSW follows a weekend protest against plan to install shark nets in the area
A man has escaped a run-in with a shark on the New South Wales north coast with just a few teeth marks on his thigh.
He was taken to Byron Bay hospital by a friend about 7.30am after suffering the bite while surfing on a beach between Suffolk Park and Broken Head on Monday morning.
Continue reading...Flood defences 'skewed towards wealthy families and regions'
Press Association study suggests flood protection funding formula tilts system towards richer households and areas
The system for allocating taxpayers’ money to flood defence schemes favours protecting wealthy families and those in the south-east, analysis suggests.
The government has said it applies a strict economic formula to deciding where funding should be spent. But an investigation by the Press Association reveals the methods to determine where funding goes focus on the value of assets protected – which could tilt the system towards richer households and those in parts of the country where house prices are higher.
Continue reading...'Overwhelming' case for Heathrow expansion, says commission chair
Sir Howard Davies, of the Airports Commission lends backing to expanding UK’s largest airport instead of Gatwick
The case for Heathrow expansion is now “overwhelming”, according to the man who led the government commissioned review of airport capacity.
Sir Howard Davies, chair of the Airports Commission, said Brexit underlined the need for a “clear strategic decision” in favour of Heathrow by ministers.
Continue reading...Daylight penetrates deep recesses of the woods: Country diary 100 years ago
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 27 October 1916
Surrey, October 27
Things change more rapidly in their appearance now in one day than they did in two a fortnight ago, but this is seen mostly in the valleys and the greater woods which border the streams. Under the trees you walk ankle deep in fallen leaves, thick-stemmed sycamore and chestnut, that are heavy enough to impede your way; beech in heaps in the remoter parts where a few squirrels, almost disdaining at first to move, presently scurry up a trunk and along the limbs, their bushy tails showing now on this side and then on the other; oaks as green as in September on the top but turning yellow in the bottom branches; ash drooping with the weight of late autumn; and birch becoming bare but silvered to the extremity of its hanging stems. Overhead the change which you most note is that whereas a few weeks ago daylight scarcely penetrated these recesses, misty beams now shoot through. Wood-pigeons, whirring out of the tree-tops, are as blue nearly as the sky. Then clouds come over, and when rain falls it is as if winter had suddenly closed in.
Higher on the heath there is new life rather than decay. The fume bears fresh yellow bloom, scented faintly, and where the full flower is not open there are buds under the green spikes. Red bryony, standing out of the hedges which mark off parts of the downs, has leaf buds too on the lower branches. Chaffinches fly in small flocks, and presently a hare “lops,” as the farmers say, from her form to the higher ground. Her speed increases in higher leaps as she goes, until her white tuft disappears in the tall brown grass which lines the ridge. She has gone into the turnip-field on the other side.
Continue reading...A handsome pest with a taste for aromatic plants
The rosemary beetle arrived in Britain over twenty years ago, and is chewing its way through our culinary favourites – heading north at an alarming rate
If you discover your favourite aromatic plants and herbs are looking chewed this autumn the culprit is almost certainly the rosemary beetle (Chrysolina Americana), an unwelcome new addition to the UK’s gardens – thanks to climate change.
Despite its name, Americana, its original home is the Mediterranean and North Africa, but the increasing warmth of the British climate means it can now survive and thrive here. It was first seen London in 1994 and after a slow start it has rapidly spread in England and now reached Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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