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The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder David Papps today announced his intention to redirect oxygenated water through Murray Irrigation infrastructure to create local refuges for endangered Murray Cod and Murray cray and other native fish...

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.

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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.

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An innovative high tech South Australian firm will use $50,000 in State Government funding to develop ground breaking technology.

Gas prices are still way head of last year, while Genex underlines economics of its big solar project.

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.

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Dyesol will work with the CSIRO to continue their development of perovskite solar technology.

The sale of Ausgrid has been hailed in many quarters, but consumers have little to celebrate. The price locks in "gold plating" and may lead to higher fixed charges as more consumers turn to solar and storage and the networks look to protect their revenue streams.

A software platform that mines data and uses machine learning to boost household energy efficiency has taken out top honours at Energy Hack 2016 – a two-day energy and technology brainstorm held in Melbourne over the weekend.

French newspaper says sources confirm Hazelwood brown coal generator will close in April, if not before.

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.

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Battery storage is probably already economic in Australia if the number are done right. But government are receiving out of date advice, and that's making for bad policy.

Adelaide unveils latest zero-carbon strategy, to install 40 electric vehicle charging stations by end 2017 and subsidise installation of private EV charge points.

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 ... ’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Putting a price on carbon would benefit the Australian gas industry, at least in the short term. It is therefore in the interests of gas producers to lobby for the emissions trading scheme proposed for the electricity industry by the Climate Change Authority.

At first a sight this might seem a paradoxical suggestion. Isn’t carbon pricing meant to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels after all?

But with gas prices high, coal-fired generation has been increasing. Coal produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as gas when it is used to generate electricity. This is bad news for our emissions, which have increased in the electricity sector recently.

A price on carbon would help to reverse this trend and enable gas to play the role it sees for itself as a stepping stone to a decarbonised future.

So how might this work in practice?

Less gas means more coal

In Australia, electricity demand is relatively flat, so we are not likely to see an increase in the number of fossil fuel power stations. Nor are we likely to see new gas-fired power stations built to replace existing coal-fired power stations – that makes little economic sense at the moment.

This is where the current price of gas is important. Because the newly-completed liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals in Queensland are sucking up so much gas for export, the domestic price for gas has risen to the point that gas-fired power stations in the eastern states are increasingly unable to compete with coal.

As a result the amount of coal-fired generation has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years while gas-fired generation has been cut back “very substantially”. Some gas-fired power stations have been mothballed. So there is now considerable, unused gas-fired generation capacity.

From the point of view of gas producers, this is therefore a perfect time to introduce a price on carbon, since it will drive up the price of coal-fired power, relative to gas. This will slow to decline in gas use and ultimately reverse it. Gas-fired generators will be able to meet this increased demand from existing, under-used capacity.

In this scenario, gas-fired generators would buy gas at the current relatively high prices. This means that electricity will be more expensive to produce. Whether this means that consumers end up paying higher prices is another matter and depends critically on the design of the carbon-pricing scheme.

Policy hotchpotch

The government’s Climate Change Authority recently proposed a carbon-pricing scheme for the electricity industry, known as an emissions-intensity scheme. It is designed to be as palatable as possible to both sides of politics, so that if implemented it would not suffer the fate of the Labor government’s carbon tax, which the Liberal opposition abhorred and abolished as soon as it gained power in 2014.

One of the features of the Authority’s proposal is that it is not a tax paid to government. Rather it involves a subsidy paid by high-emissions, low-cost generators, such as coal-fired power stations, to low-emissions, higher-cost generators such as gas-fired power stations. This means that gas-fired generators will not need to pass on their full production costs to consumers. This will minimise the impact on electricity prices.

Of course, if the government were to accept the Authority’s recommendations for the electricity sector, it would presumably accept its recommendations for other areas of the economy. This is significant, because gas producers don’t just feed into the electricity sector.

Exported LNG would not be subject to any carbon price in Australia because it is not consumed here. However, converting natural gas to its liquid form consumes a large amount of energy. Indeed, 8% of the gas supplied to LNG terminals is used in the production process. This makes LNG an emissions-intensive industry.

Any price imposed on such emissions would drive up the price of Australian LNG relative to countries with no similar carbon price, to the detriment of Australia’s producers. In short, LNG is a “trade-exposed industry”. In particular, in the language of policy makers, it is an EITE (emissions-intensive and trade-exposed) industry.

The Authority considered the case of EITE industries carefully and expressed sympathy with the submission on this point made by the peak oil and gas producers association – APPEA.

It recommended that policy for EITE industries should include a suite of measures designed to protect them from this kind of competition. The LNG industry therefore has little to fear from the implementation of the Authority’s recommendations in this respect.

The Climate Change Authority did not recommend that existing polices be dismantled and replaced with a single coherent, economy-wide policy. Instead it recommended additions to the patchwork of existing polices, with a particular focus on the electricity sector.

This was criticised in some quarters as unprincipled, but defended by the Authority on the grounds that it was vital that we find a way forward that was as bipartisan as possible, so as to provide maximum certainty for investors. APPEA’s submission to the Authority was clearly against this “hotchpotch” approach.

But the Authority’s proposals offer the best chance for achieving bipartisan support. The government intends to review its climate policies in the coming year. APPEA should be lobbying the government to implement the Authority’s proposals, both in its own interests and in the interest of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Andrew Hopkins has been a consultant to various petroleum companies on ways to reduce major accident risk.