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Why has it taken so long just to move past the bare minimum needed to support what is now an expanding sector?

Last September, Sylvia Wilson became the second person in the country to drive around Australia in an electric car.

The entire 20,396 kilometre trip took the 70-year-old 110 days in her Tesla S75 and cost just $150.90.

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The journalist and author has claimed climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable, leading his supporters to say he’s telling the terrifying truth and critics to brand him a reckless alarmist. Why is he so worried?

David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic depiction of a world made uninhabitable by climate chaos caused an outcry when it was published in New York magazine in 2017. Based on the worst-case scenarios foreseen by science, his article portrayed a world of drought, plague and famine, in which acidified oceans drown coastal homelands, dormant diseases are released from ancient ice, conflicts surge, economies collapse, human cognitive abilities decline and heat stress becomes more intolerable in New York City than in present-day Bahrain. Critics called this irresponsibly alarmist. Supporters said it was a long-overdue antidote to climate complacency. Whatever your view, it was among the best-read climate articles in US history. Now he is back with a book-length follow-up.

Related: ‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change

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Some put lack of action down to fundamental differences between the two countries

It started with a solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg and has snowballed across the globe.

Schoolchildren demanding action on climate change have played truant and taken to the streets in Australia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and, in their greatest numbers, in Belgium, where 35,000 made their voices heard in Brussels a week ago and a further 12,500 marched on Thursday.

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A decade into the most ambitious program to save the Murray-Darling river system from ecological disaster, hundreds of thousands of dead fish suggest that all is not going to plan.

Australia's national electricity grid has once again buckled under the pressure of a scorching hot summer. Consumers are furious not only about blackouts but rising power bills, too. For decades, politicians have promised solutions they failed to deliver. Reporter Mario Christodoulou investigates the toxic politics of energy.

Australia's national electricity grid has once again buckled under the pressure of a scorching hot summer. Consumers are furious not only about blackouts but rising power bills, too. For decades, politicians have promised solutions they failed to deliver. Reporter Mario Christodoulou investigates the toxic politics of energy.

An understaffed stretch of California coastline has new residents: nearly 100 elephant seals and their pups

During the US government shutdown, understaffed national parks were overrun by careless visitors. But at one spot in California, the absence of rangers meant a takeover by a horde of a different sort: a massive group of boisterous elephant seals.

Related: 'That income is gone': shutdown pain lingers for unpaid contract workers

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I was wilfully deluded until I began covering global warming, says David Wallace-Wells. But extreme heat could transform the planet by 2100

I have never been an environmentalist. I don’t even think of myself as a nature person. I’ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I’ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always thought it was basically a good idea to keep streams clean and air clear, I also accepted the proposition that there was a trade-off between economic growth and cost to nature – and figured, well, in most cases I’d go for growth. I’m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I’m also not about to go vegan. In these ways – many of them, at least – I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change, which is not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced, but a threat of an entirely different category and scale. That is, the scale of human life itself.

A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island also populated by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped in permafrost for many decades. At first, it seemed the news was inventing a new genre of allegory. But of course climate change is not an allegory. Beginning in 2011, about a million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought; in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the west is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants. The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create 10 times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilised by climate chaos – and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia – 140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian crisis.

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The UN wants to cut down on food waste amid rising concerns about obesity. Here's how one hotel is helping out.

Extremes consistent with theories about how emissions could affect weather patterns

Hundreds of thousands of fish have choked during Australia’s hottest month since records began, swathes of the United States is colder than the north pole, new ruptures have been found in one of the Antarctic’s biggest glaciers and there are growing signs the Arctic is warming so fast that it could soon be just another stretch of the Atlantic.

And so the new year is carrying on where the old one left off, with growing signs climate disruption is accelerating at a more destructive rate than many scientists predicted.

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Len Fisher outlines the history of Antarctic governance and says politicians need to be aware of the continent’s importance, and the views of those passionate for Antarctica’s protection.

The UN wants to halve the amount of food we waste. Here's how one hotel in Norway is helping out.

Developed by a team at MIT, the robot uses AI and may be used in industrial automation in the future.

French rugby is currently under a shadow cast by the deaths of four players in the past eight months

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Deficit generation under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) receded during Q3 2018 on the back of stronger electric vehicle numbers, as the Oregon Clean Fuels Program (OCFP) recovered from the market’s first ever quarterly shortfall.

With only one in ten households reported to have direct access to safe water, and 98% of Gaza's water unfit for human consumption, the water situation in Palestine has reached a state of emergency.

Koalas displaced by housing development are finding a new home on a Queensland cattle station; production ramps up at a remote oyster farm off Arnhem Land; performers run away from the circus to become avocado farmers; and an urban farm does a roaring trade in farmgate produce.

Cattle deaths on Pilbara Station; NSW Water minister denies responsibility for second major fish kill; Drinking water delivered to drought-affected far-west NSW; Medical journal calls for food system overhaul to tackle major global issues.

Oregon state lawmakers published draft carbon market legislation on Thursday that would establish an ETS that could link to other North American programmes, with an enlarged Democratic majority potentially enabling the proposal to pass this year.