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Guardian Australia’s best photos of 2023 – in pictures
From Eurovision super fans to solar eclipses and star celebrities, here is a selection of the finest work by our photographers
Continue reading...Alex Batty: British teen found in France returns to UK
Israel Gaza: Hostages were carrying white cloth when shot, IDF says
Cop28 has singled out fossil fuels as the main climate problem. But do leaders have the will to act? | Adam Morton
The UN summit’s deal heralds the end of coal, oil and gas. The real test is whether producers back it up with action
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From the start, Cop28 appeared beyond the reach of satire. About 100,000 politicians, diplomats, lobbyists, business people, investors, activists, scientists, policy wonks and journalists from across the globe registered for a two-week climate summit hosted by an authoritarian oil state in a city, Dubai, known for skyscrapers and extravagant, energy-hungry consumerism.
The president of the summit, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is the chief executive of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which is planning a US$150bn oil and gas expansion. The United Arab Emirates is also investing in renewables – its Noor Energy 1 concentrated solar thermal plant is bigger than 6,000 football fields – but a more prominent sight in central Dubai is the world’s biggest gas-fired power plant.
Continue reading...A celebration of birds in Lego and ink – in pictures
Roy Scholten has been interested in birds ever since he can remember. In his 50 Birds series, the Netherlands-based artist and printmaker has created handmade prints of local species including pied flycatchers, skylarks and blue-headed wagtails. Each print is made using Lego letterpress, combining individual building blocks into stamps to recreate the birds’ shapes and patterns, a technique perfected over the past decade by his frequent collaborator, the artist Martijn van der Blom. “Birds are daily reminders of the richness of our natural surroundings. They can fly! How cool is that!” says Scholten. “Sadly most species are in decline, which makes it all the more worthwhile to really look and appreciate them.”
- Works from Scholten and Van der Blom’s book Print & Play are on show at Grafisch Atelier Hilversum in the Netherlands until 4 February 2024
Paris is saying ‘non’ to a US-style hellscape of supersized cars – and so should the rest of Europe | Alexander Hurst
From emissions to road deaths, the trend for ever-bigger SUVs is a disaster. We need regulation to turn the car industry back to smaller vehicles
The United States is in the midst of a full-blown size crisis. No, I’m not talking about the mad rush for Wegovy, which is selling so swiftly that Denmark has to remove data relating to manufacturers Novo Nordisk to measure (the rest of) its economy properly. And no, I’m not talking about … something else. I’m talking about the enormous monstrosities filling up its roads. (Yeah, I see you on the streets of downtown Cleveland alone in your $85,000, 7,000lb Dodge Ram and I can tell you’re not a farmer … maybe that actually says something about the “something else”.)
There are lots of trends, ideas, music and films that cross the Atlantic. Some of them are good. This is not one of them. Neither are the 500 Krispy Kreme “points of access” the American chain is planning to open across France over the next year. (One, OK, fine, for the novelty, but 500 in the next year? In a country that exists in a completely different universe when it comes to pastries?)
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
Continue reading...Big solar farm in NSW approved after widening gaps in solar rows to allow more sheep
Another big solar farm gets planning approval in NSW, despite some strong objections, after agreeing to widen the gap between rows of modules to allow more sheep on the property.
The post Big solar farm in NSW approved after widening gaps in solar rows to allow more sheep appeared first on RenewEconomy.