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Energy capacity auction shows offshore wind dramatically outstrips nuclear - and ministers must take note

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was conceived in the days when offshore wind cost £150 per megawatt hour and a few misguided souls, some of them government ministers, thought a barrel of oil was heading towards $200.

Successive governments swallowed the line that Hinkley represented a plausible answer to the UK’s threefold energy conundrum – keeping the lights on, reducing carbon emissions and producing the juice at affordable prices for consumers and business.

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Joe Boyd is appealing to public for donations to challenge petrochemicals giant over ‘anti-democratic’ injunction

A second campaigner is challenging a sweeping injunction obtained by a petrochemicals giant against anti-fracking activists that has been criticised for profoundly limiting protests.

Joe Boyd, an anti-fracking campaigner, is going to the high court in London on Tuesday in an attempt to stop the injunction which has been secured by the multinational firm, Ineos. He is appealing to the public for donations as he could face a large bill if he loses.

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Ministers say culls are vital for cutting TB infections in cattle but scientists say there is little evidence to support the policy

Up to 33,500 badgers will be shot this autumn in an attempt to control tuberculosis in cattle, a huge rise from the 10,000 killed in 2016.

The government has announced that 11 new badger cull areas have been licensed, adding to the 10 already in place. Devon now has six badger culls under way, with Somerset and Wiltshire having three each, with others in Cheshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

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A small great white shark was rescued after it was found floundering on a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. The shark was found by beachgoers in shallow waters at Manly beach and was moved to a beach rockpool to be monitored by authorities

• Pool shark: beached great white given temporary refuge in Sydney rock pool
  

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Researchers and LGBT groups clash over facial recognition tech that supposedly spots gay people.

A vaccination programme to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis is also restarting.

The Cassini spacecraft is about to send itself towards destruction in the ringed planet's atmosphere.

AGL debunks Coalition myths on Liddell, saying it is unreliable and costly, and money is best invested in wind, solar, battery storage and other dispatchable generation.

Public pool closed to swimmers after injured marine predator transferred for observation by wildlife experts

A juvenile great white shark was rescued after washing up on a Sydney beach – and given a new temporary home in a nearby public swimming pool.

The shark, which washed ashore on Manly beach in Sydney’s north about midday, appeared to be injured and onlookers alerted marine rescue and lifeguards.

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The Government is negotiating with the owner of Australia's oldest coal-fired power plant to keep it in operation.

A door-opening method that involves using the "wrong" hand should be taught to drivers, groups say.

The aging Liddell power station has become a crucial part of the Government's energy plan, but the Liddell's owner is standing in the way.

Figures from the government are seen as a milestone in the advance of renewable energy.

Green groups say record low price should sound death knell for Hinkley Point C after subsidy auction sets price for windpower below even lowest forecast

Offshore windfarms are to be built for a record low price in the UK early next decade, after developers bid far more aggressively than expected for a multimillion-pound pot of government subsidies.

Industry watchers had expected the guaranteed price for power from windfarms around Britain’s coast to come in somewhere between £70 and £80 per megawatt hour, below the £92.50 for the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

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Hurricanes, like Irma which has just hit Florida, command more attention because they have a strong visual identity and are often given human names and attributes. Reuters/Carlos Barria

The devastating scenes of destruction and flooding in the Bahamas and the southern states of the US have captivated the world for many weeks now. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and Hurricane Jose soon to follow, have stolen headlines around the world, as they break records and provide a deluge of spectacle and image … the main ingredients for tabloid reporting.

Of course, as far as the fatalities they have caused, which are now into the hundreds, they have not been as dangerous as the under-reported monsoons that devastated India, Nepal and Bangladesh a few weeks ago, with death tolls into the thousands. But, in the oligopolised world of the news wires of AFP, Reuters and AP, threats to developed nations push well ahead of tragedy in the third world, an imperialist bias that reflects the global hierarchy of nation states as defined by news services.

But is also true that hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones) command more attention because they have a strong visual identity. Unlike monsoonal rains, they are also endowed with a personality.

For a start, each hurricane is given a name, and often they are referred to as “monsters” that have some kind of personality. “Irma is unpredictable, ferocious, powerful”, and so on. Unlike monsoons, hurricanes are to be feared, almost like they are preying on humans.

But in the US, these same hurricanes have been the subject of ridicule and religious divinity.

In between all of the suffering in Texas and now in Florida, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who broadcasts out of Palm Beach, Florida, had labelled Hurricane Irma a kind of fake news. Limbaugh, a strident Trump supporter, has sought to persuade his listeners that these Hurricanes are wildly exaggerated, potentially endangering those who may not take seriously the official emergency weather warning. He said:

There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it … All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.

Limbaugh claims that hurricanes bring together three unlikely beneficiaries: climate change activists, television broadcasters and retailers, the latter two having a “symbiotic relationship”.

For Limbaugh, TV stations, which receive much advertising revenue from retailers, become fixated with the hurricane, causing panic and mass raids on retail supplies of food, water, batteries and fuel. For the radio shock jock, this creates a vicious circle of interests more important than the hurricane itself.

Of course, Limbaugh is at least partly right. Tabloid television is most at home in covering violent events, whether this is extreme weather, terrorism, or violent crime. The more images it has about these events, the more it will cover them.

However, that these same broadcasters will make any significant link to climate change has not been a trend in either the US or Australia. It may increase audience concern about climate change, but not really their understanding that the more energy you have in the oceans, the more potential there is for powerful storms. Extreme weather is indeed the best time to communicate climate change, but it has to be done in a way that increases audience understanding of the causes, impacts and projections for the future.

It also has to be done in a way that demonstrates what is so different about today’s extreme weather. With Hurricane Irma, for example, what has amazed climatologists, is that it was one of a trio of hurricanes that were threatening land at the same time. Irma itself matched the force of Katrina in terrajoules of energy. Then there are the scenes of Irma literally sucking up the ocean around beaches and changing the shape of coastlines during that period. The forces involved are unprecedented in the modern record.

Yet, it seems that the more extreme the nature of the hurricanes, the more extreme are the reactions of climate denialists. And here we can point to the growing number of television evangelists who are also getting some attention out of the hurricane. Both Harvey and Irma have been hailed as biblical events that have wrought retribution on those who have not followed the path of god. Televangelist Jim Bakker and Pastor Rick Joyner observed last week that “storms don’t happen by accident”. The Houston flood was from God and if, according to Pastor Kevin Swanson, the supreme court would rule abortion and gay marriage to be illegal, Houston would have averted a disaster.

Conservative social commentator Anne Coulter, tweeted to her 1.7 million followers that Houston’s recent baptism was more likely to be payback for having elected a lesbian mayor in its recent past than it was related to climate change.

Doubtless, the fact that Hurricane Irma has spared the southern White House, Mar-a-Lago from a direct hit, will also be comfort to President Trump’s evangelist supporters. The luxurious resort is again in the news, but this time for not answering calls for Trump to open it as a shelter for displaced Hurricane victims.

Oh, and Rush Limbaugh fled from his home in Palm Beach, two days before Irma hit.

Locals blame coca interests for the state’s broken promise on protecting Tipnis national park, biodiversity hotspot and home to thousands of indigenous people

When Ovidio Teco’s Amazon homeland was declared “untouchable” by the Bolivian government in 2011, his war had been won.

The concerns of people like him had been listened to: their beautiful and ancient land would not be carved in two by a 190-mile highway.

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Barnaby Joyce seems to think that switching off a coal plant in 2022 will cause the lights to go out in 2017. Is there any hope that the smart conversations going on behind the scenes will ever be reflected in policy? Don't count on it.

Photon Energy Australia plans to develop 146MW solar farm on outskirts of Bathurst have gone before NSW Department of Planning for approval.

Five companies short-listed to tender for job developing up to 450MW renewable energy hub in Qld coal centre of Gladstone.

Little Bradley Ponds, South Devon Taxonomy tussles aside, spotting any grass snake can be far from easy, and I circled the ponds several times

This small nature reserve was my final stop: a tranquil oasis surrounded by woodland and set back from the road near Bovey Tracey in south Devon. I had spent the morning visiting gardens in search of grass snakes, nosing around compost heaps and scanning the edges of ponds without luck. Reptiles known to inhabit one glorious wildlife-friendly property on the edge of Buckfastleigh had kept out of sight, while nearby locations offered up handsome slow worms, but not the secretive species I was after.

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