Feed aggregator

This symbolic threshold (Carbon dioxide levels bring climate change into a ‘new era’, 25 October) is one of many very real tipping points the world will experience on a path of climate change due to human effects. The tipping points we should also be paying attention to are the mass extinctions, global warming, melting ice and complete habitat changes we are currently seeing worldwide. Soon we will recognise these not as symbolic thresholds but more as points of no return. The Paris and Kigali agreements are both important for slowing down the climate trend wiping out animal and plant species worldwide. But both are just bandages to the real problem of resource management and consumption practices exacerbating the problems to unsustainable limits.
Caroline Hernandez
Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Continue reading...

Benefit cuts | Third runway | Landlines | Charity shops | Football numbers

Both Aditya Chakrabortty (Opinion, 26 October) and Ken Loach in his film I, Daniel Blake highlight the horrors created by the destruction of social security by austerity and bureaucracy. However, they are in danger of recreating the pernicious distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Homelessness, unemployment, ill-health, sanctions and the denial of benefits make some people angry, uncooperative and even violent. Our outrage should not just be on behalf of the nice people.
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset

• I am told yet again that the decision (Heathrow expansion) is “good for business” (Report, 26 October). We have seen big business drive this country’s economy into one of low wages, low skills, and low productivity. Add in rubbish roads, stuffed trains and minimal housebuilding, plus massive financial misconduct and the trashing of people’s pensions, and it may be “good for business” – but it’s not good for most of us.
Ray Chalker
London

Continue reading...

One of the most demonised patients in history - Gaetan Dugas - has been convincingly cleared of reports he spread HIV to the US, say scientists.

Europe may be performing better in EY’s influential rankings, but the UK has fallen to its lowest position yet, reports BusinessGreen

Earlier this year it was starting to look worryingly like Europe was slamming into reverse gear with its clean energy policy. In its biannual report on renewables investment, released in May, consultancy EY reported that countries across the continent were becoming less attractive to investors as the pipelines of clean energy projects slowed following widespread subsidy cuts and a perceived “scaling back” of ambition.

Almost without exception, European markets slipped down the rankings while emerging economies across Latin America, Asia and Africa took their place near the top of the league table thanks to government plans to deploy green energy as a fast, relatively cheap way to develop their grids.

Continue reading...

Countries including US, Europe, Australia vehemently oppose small hunts by coastal communities but Japan says are unjustly barred from a traditional food source

Japan pleaded with the world’s whaling watchdog Wednesday to allow small hunts by coastal communities, arguing that for three decades these groups had been unjustly barred from a traditional source of food.

The issue of “small type coastal hunting” is a key dispute between pro- and anti-whaling nations gathered in Slovenia for the 66th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Continue reading...

A $100m initiative to listen for radio signals from aliens is targeting a star with an unusual dimming pattern.

Government claims oil extraction is causing minimal disturbance to the Unesco biosphere reserve in the Amazon

Ecuador has confirmed that oil drilling has begun under the country’s Yasuní national park, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

But the government claims that there has been only minimal disturbance to the Unesco biosphere reserve in the Amazon rainforest since extraction of 23,000 barrels of oil a day began last month.

Continue reading...

Scientists are planning to release millions of modified mosquitoes in urban areas of Brazil and Colombia, in an effort to tackle Zika, dengue and chikungunya viruses.

State of the Climate report from CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology says human activities have driven ‘significant changes’ to Australia’s climate

Carbon emissions from human activities have driven significant changes to the climate in Australia, including about 1C of warming and an increase in extreme hot days and fire weather, according to the latest State of the Climate report released by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

This year the report includes new information on the cause of extreme weather, pointing the finger clearly at carbon emissions from human activities, as well as the latest findings on warming in the oceans.

Continue reading...

Campaigners say leaked documents show ‘undue influence’ by the food industry after plans to limit acrylamide - found in starchy foods such as crisps, cereals and baby foods - are weakened

The European commission has dropped plans to legally limit a pervasive but naturally occurring chemical found in food, that is linked to cancer, just days after lobbying by industry, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners say that leaked documents revealing the legislative retreat show “undue influence” by the food industry over EU law-making and a “permanent scandal”, although the issue is complex.

Continue reading...

A Dundee-born scientist dies in Antarctica after the snowmobile he was driving fell into a crevasse.

The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, tells BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that building the third Heathrow runway over the M25 rather than tunnelling under the motorway would be a cheaper and quicker way of completing the project

• Listen to the full clip on BBC Radio 4 Today’s website
• Build Heathrow third runway on ramp over M25, minister says

Continue reading...

Millions of pounds are being spent unblocking drains all because of wet wipes being flushed down the toilet.

Syrian refugee Firas el Jasmin struggled to find work in Turkey because of his disability, so took to the streets with his son to collect recyclable material which he sells on to support his family

Continue reading...

Training mums and dads as "super parents" can dramatically improve a child's autism, a study shows.

Six months on from the coral bleaching event, the coral reefs to the north of Port Douglas remain severely damaged.

Victorian government to shift solar feed-in tariffs to time-of-use pricing, in move to better reflect the value of the state’s rooftop solar generation, and their environmental benefits.

Letter to trading standards body calls for manufacturers to remove ‘misleading’ labelling to prevent wipes from blocking sewers and washing up on beaches

Continue reading...

Yale environment 360: New research finds some surprising culprits and shows that fossil-fuel sources have played a much larger role than previously estimated

The stomachs of cattle, fermentation in rice fields, fracking for natural gas, coal mines, festering bogs, burning forests — they all produce methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide. But how much? And how can we best cut these emissions? And is fracking frying the planet, or are bovine emissions more to blame?
Until now, the world has not had a definitive answer to these questions. But in recent months, researchers believe they have finally begun to crack the problem — and the results are surprising.
The amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled in the past 250 years. It has been responsible for about a fifth of global warming. But it has a confusing recent history. The steady rise of emissions stopped in the 1990s. Emissions were stable for almost a decade until 2007, but then abruptly resumed their rise. 

Related: Fossil fuel industry's methane emissions far higher than thought

Continue reading...

Here’s a quick politics quiz. Who said this?

Australia has a major stake in the fossil fuel industries… Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and the fifth largest exporter of LNG. We have just below one-tenth of the world’s known coal reserves. Coal has been a major contributor to our nation’s prosperity and that of many of our trading partners.

And who said this?

Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world… Energy is what sustains our prosperity, and coal is the world’s principal energy source and it will be for many decades to come.

And what about this?

Coal is going to be an important part of our energy mix, there is no question about that, for many, many, many decades to come, on any view.

If you answered Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (in that order), give yourself top marks.

Since John Howard, all Australian prime ministers have faced major challenges regarding the gap between Australia’s role as a major exporter of coal and its fluctuating ambitions to help tackle climate change.

Turnbull has now shown himself to be no exception, with yesterday’s comments about coal being important for decades to come marking a retreat from his previous rhetoric of policy change. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given how bloody the past few years of Australian climate policy have been.

Howard’s end

Howard spent the first decade of his prime ministership denying the urgency of the climate issue, blocking several proposals for emissions trading schemes (for the gory details see Guy Pearse’s High and Dry and Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher).

By late 2006, with the millennium drought and water restrictions affecting not just rural Australia but cities too, and with Al Gore driving a worldwide change in attitudes, Howard performed a spectacular U-turn, commissioning a high-profile review of an emission trading scheme. But it was too little, too late.

Rudd, using climate change to distinguish himself from Howard, memorably labelled the issue as the “great moral challenge of our generation” while still in opposition.

Kevin Rudd declaring climate change was “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Later, he spoke of the “responsibility” that comes with mining fossil fuels. But when his 2009 legislation for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was blocked twice, Rudd failed to call the expected double dissolution election, and the scheme was notably missing from the 2010 budget. Within a month, a weakened Rudd saw his personal approval ratings plummet from 50% to 39%, amid a growing perception that he did not believe his own fine words about climate policy.

His successor Julia Gillard found climate change just as tricky. Her problems began early in the 2010 federal election campaign, with the much-derided proposal for a citizens’ assembly to discuss climate policy.

Then came her infamous interview, three days before the election, featuring the immortal words “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”. (However she went on to say in the same interview that she would be “leading a national debate to reach a consensus about putting a cap on carbon pollution” – in other words, working towards an emissions trading scheme.)

Watch all of Julia’s Gillard famous pre-election ‘no carbon tax’ interview.

Gillard’s fate was effectively sealed by her decision in February 2011 not to challenge the characterisation of her new carbon pricing scheme as a “tax”. In her memoir, Gillard describes this as “the worst political mistake I have ever made, and I paid dearly for it”.

Abbott had declared himself a “weather vane” on climate change, but in late 2009, appropriately enough in a town called Beaufort, he found his new direction.

He challenged Turnbull for the Liberal leadership of the Liberal Party over the latter’s support for Rudd’s CPRS, and won by a single vote (one Liberal, never identified, had spoilt their ballot, with a simple “no”). He spent the next three years crusading against Labor’s “great big new tax on everything”, and repealed it within a year of becoming prime minister.

At least he had remained consistent all along, so it was little surprise when Abbott later declared that “coal is good for humanity”.

Malcolm in the middle

Turnbull is perhaps the most interesting case of all. In October 2009, with pressure building in the wake of the utegate scandal, he declared on talk radio that he would not lead a party that was not as committed to climate change action as him.

His party duly obliged him the following month. Days later, he branded Abbott’s “direct action” climate policy “bullshit”.

In mid-2010, while launching the 100% renewables plan for Beyond Zero Emissions, Turnbull declared that “concentrated solar thermal is a more proven technology than clean coal”.

A very different Malcolm Turnbull on climate and energy in 2010.

While he never set expectations as high as Rudd, and Liberal voters are generally less concerned about climate change than Labor’s, Turnbull’s turnaround puts him in just as perilous a position.

As both Rudd and Gillard discovered, once voters start to think you don’t mean what you say, your personal approval dips and trouble begins to brew. Fine words can land you in a fine mess if you don’t stick to them.

Why does the coal rhetoric never change?

The gap between what the scientists tell us we need to do to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic warming and what is politically possible seems to be growing daily. One way of explaining that is by looking at the power of vested interests.

It’s true that some resource industry advertising campaigns have fallen flat and been mocked. It’s also true that the climate denial lobby, while small, has recently gained some fresh power through the election of One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts to the Senate and the appointment of Craig Kelly as chair of the federal environment and energy committee.

But more important is the broader picture of policy failure and stasis globally. In truth, no country is doing a particularly good job on climate change, and climate change is hardly the only issue that has the gears of Australian governance grinding (along with the teeth of the populace).

Laura Tingle, in two recent Quarterly Essays, has looked at both the contradictory expectations Australians have of their governments, and also what institutional memory exists within the bureaucracies, the political parties and the media. Her conclusions are alarming and depressing.

Perhaps our best hope is that the amnesia deepens, so that in 30 years’ time young people with pitchforks will not remember that we did not act when there was still a chance.

Marc Hudson 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.