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Catholic order builds chapel in middle of cornfield in attempt to use religious freedom protections to block Atlantic Sunrise pipeline

Catholic nuns in Pennsylvania are resisting plans to build a $3bn pipeline for gas obtained by fracking through its land by creating a rudimentary chapel along the proposed route and launching a legal challenge, citing religious freedom.

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ order has filed a complaint against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in a bid to keep the pipeline off their land. The nuns’ lawyers argue in court papers that a decision by FERC to force them to accommodate the pipeline is “antithetical to the deeply held religious beliefs and convictions of the Adorers”.

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It was a night with a twist in the 2017 Clean Energy Council Awards, as several projects tied for first place in the Innovation category at the NAB Gala Dinner at the Australian Clean Energy Summit in Sydney.

The wall of Republican climate denial is starting to crack; who will be the Neo that accelerates the process?

Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wants to hold televised ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ climate science ‘debates.’ The idea is that a ‘Red Team’ of scientists will challenge the mainstream findings of ‘Blue Team’ scientists. That may sound familiar, because it’s exactly how the peer-review process works. But climate deniers have lost the debate in the peer-reviewed literature, with over 97% of peer-reviewed studies endorsing the consensus on human-caused global warming, and the few contrarian papers being flawed and failing to withstand scientific scrutiny.

So Scott Pruitt is trying to put his thumb on the scale, giving the less than 3% of contrarian scientists equal footing on a ‘Red Team.’ John Oliver showed how to do a statistically representative televised climate debate (so brilliantly that it’s been viewed 7.4m times), but it’s probably not what Pruitt had in mind:

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Flooding in Cornish coastal village of Coverack described as horrendous, and further deluges possible further north

Much of England and Wales has been warned to prepare for more stormy weather and localised flooding after several people in Cornwall had to be rescued from flash floods overnight.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms caused “devastating” flooding in the coastal village of Coverack in Cornwall on Tuesday, with about 50 homes and businesses affected. Met Office forecasters put in place a yellow warning, the lowest of the three weather warnings, for most of the rest of Wednesday and said that as much as two-thirds of a month’s average rainfall could come down in a few hours.

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Every winter thousands of giant Australian cuttlefish gather to breed in a stretch of shallow, rocky water off Point Lowly in South Australia. The phenomenon, known as an aggregation, is the only known instance of cuttlefish gathering in such large numbers – it is estimated there can be more than 150,000 in a 10km stretch of water – and has become a tourist as well as scientific attraction. This video, taken by mpaynecreative.tv, captures male cuttlefish as they display their brightest pigments in a bid to attract females. It is not known why the giant Cuttlefish aggregate in this area particularly but it is believed they are likely attracted to the shallow rocky area along the coast as it provides optimal habitat to lay their eggs. Video courtesy of mpaynecreative.tv

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Four re-introduced beavers in Scotland engineered a network of dams, canals and ponds that left the landscape ‘unrecognisable’ from the original drained pasture

The extraordinary ability of eager beavers to engineer degraded land into wildlife-rich wetlands has been revealed by a new study in Scotland.

Scientists studied the work of a group of four re-introduced beavers over a decade and found their water engineering prowess created almost 200m of dams, 500m of canals and an acre of ponds. The result was a landscape “almost unrecognisable” from the original pasture that was drained over 200 years ago, with the number of plant species up by nearly 50% and richly varied habitats established across the 30 acre site.

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June 2017 was beaten only by June in 2015 and 2016, leaving experts with little hope for limiting warming to 1.5C or even 2C

Last month was the third-hottest June on record globally, temperature data suggest, confirming 2017 will almost certainly make a hat-trick of annual climate records, with 2015, 2016 and 2017 being the three hottest years since records began.

The figures also cement estimations that warming is now at levels not seen for 115,000 years, and leave some experts with little hope for limiting warming to 1.5C or even 2C.

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A recovery from near total collapse has led North Sea cod stocks to be labelled as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council for the first time in 20 years

Fish and chip lovers can now enjoy North Sea cod with a clear conscience, after the fishery was awarded sustainable status by the Marine Stewardship Council on Wednesday.

Stocks of cod in the North Sea were once one of the world’s great fisheries but plummeted by 84% between the early 1970s and 2006. They came perilously close to the total collapse seen in the Grand Banks fishery off Canada in the early 1990s, which has still not recovered.

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Trevone to Padstow, Cornwall From higher land the ocean appears even more azure, like the sky now streaked with cirrus

Beneath the clearing sky, people gravitate from car park and cafe towards the life-guarded beach. By Roundhole Point, kayakers paddle and huddle around their instructor, and further west, low tide reveals the expanse of sand in Harlyn Bay.

Close to the shore alexanders along a track are clustered with an abundance of little stripy snails along the bare stems and among the umbels of black seeds. Perhaps these snails relish the celery flavour and thrive in the mild seaside weather, but (as with the tourists and sun-seekers) their numbers diminish away from the sea.

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Turnbull's recent use of the word "delusional" reminds us that climate denial is still alive and kicking in mainstream Australian politics.

German utility company EWE says it is planning to build the world’s largest battery based on flow technology in a pair of salt caves currently used to store natural gas.

Australian oil, gas and coal mining body, NERA, issues call for cleantech, renewable energy partnerships, says timing is "spot on" for collaboration.

BNEF says building new solar plants will be cheaper than shovelling coal into existing coal generators within 15 years. This will trigger a complete re-make of the energy system, and a share of wind and solar far beyond that contemplated by the Finkel Review.

Frydenberg defends AEMO chief Audrey Zibelman from attacks by conservative commentators.

Australian Greens Senator for South Australia Sarah Hanson-Young has called on Malcolm Turnbull to intervene to end the delay in fixing energy market rules, including the 5-minute rule, to allow battery storage to compete fairly.

Better gender diversity across the renewable energy industry requires leaders from both genders to step up and drive change, the Clean Energy Council said in launching its Women in Renewables Leaders’ Pledge today.

ARENA report shows less than half Australian businesses have tapped renewables. But there's no doubt the idea is starting to catch on.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise, so too does the number of books telling us what the consequences are, and what we can do. Two more have been released in the past few weeks – Anna Krien’s brilliant Quarterly Essay The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock, and the worthy Climate Wars by Labor’s shadow environment minister Mark Butler. Both deserve a wide audience.

Krien, author of Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests has a sharp eye for the right anecdote and a brilliant turn of phrase. Her reportage can be spoken of in the same breath as Elizabeth Kolbert’s seminal Field Notes from a Catastrophe. She has read extensively (I for one was not familiar with the Myxocene – the age of slime) and in researching her latest essay has clocked up thousands of miles as she dives on the Great Barrier Reef and travels inland to areas that will be affected by the proposed coal mine developments in the Galilee Basin.

Krien offers valuable insights into issues such as coal firm Adani’s negotiations with traditional owners, the battles over coal seam gas, and Port Augusta’s rocky transition from coal to – possibly – renewables. She talks to “ordinary” people, weaving their perspectives into the story while not losing sight of the climate deadlock in her title – the ongoing fight within the Liberal and National parties over climate and energy policy.

In one of many telling phrases she writes of the “Stockholm syndrome built on donations, royalties, taxes and threats” that bedevils Australian politics, pointing out that the fate that befell Kevin Rudd still looms large in the collective political memory. In the end, she returns to the Great Barrier Reef, and her final paragraphs pack an emotional punch that will stay with the reader for a long time.

My only quibble with Krien’s fastidious reporting is that, unlike previous Quarterly Essays, there are no footnotes. But maybe that’s only really an issue for nerds like me.

This is Quarterly Essay 66. Number 33 was Guy Pearse’s equally alarming Quarry Vision. In years to come, perhaps Quarterly Essay 99 might explain how we continued not to take action, as the consequences of climate change piled ever higher around us. Or how – alongside unexpected technological breakthroughs – we began finally to race against our nemesis, our own hubris. Time will tell.

Mark Butler is aiming to do something else besides just telling us about climate politics: as a shadow minister he is setting out Labor’s stall for the next federal election, whenever that might be.

Butler was climate minister in Rudd’s second, brief, government. In 2015-16 he undertook extensive consultations with business, community groups, academics and other “stakeholders” (surely everyone in the world is a stakeholder when it comes to the climate?). His book is essentially an extended advert for that process and its outcomes.

Butler’s prose is solid, and occasionally stolid, as he throws fact after report after statistic at the reader. However, he generally seeks to strike a constructive balance between “problem” and “solution”. There are only a few short chapters on the climate policy mess, with the bulk of the book concentrating on what a future Labor government proposes to do about it.

Inevitably, Butler is more critical of his political rivals, the Liberals and the Greens, than of his own party. You wouldn’t know from reading this book that it was Paul Keating’s Labor government who first began to use economic modelling to argue against emissions reductions, or that it was a Labor government who, in 1995, refused to institute a small carbon tax that would fund renewable energy.

Butler is also, oddly, flat-out wrong when he writes that former Labor minister Graham Richardson persuaded Prime Minister Bob Hawke to agree a 20% emissions reduction target before the 1990 federal election. It was actually his colleague Ros Kelly, in October 1990, and the “commitment” was carefully hedged.

These historical details matter, because we need to be able to hold politicians (and even ex-politicians) to account over their climate pledges. But many readers will nevertheless be more interested in what Butler says a Labor government will do, rather than what previous Labor governments didn’t.

Butler obliges, giving us chapters on “Labor’s clean power plan”, “Manufacturing and mining in a low-carbon world”, and “Low-carbon communities”. Occasionally he raises thorny problems (refugees, the coal industry) without really grappling with them. Given the ugly history around these issues (and the political Stockholm Syndrome identified by Krien), this is perhaps unsurprising.

Curiously, both books make a similar omission: they contain very little on the failures of policymakers and social movement organisations in the period from 2006 to 2012. In 2015, at the Labor Party’s national conference, I asked panellists – Butler was one – what had gone wrong during this time, which encompassed Kevin Rudd’s first prime ministership – in light of the fact that we had known about climate change since the late 1980s.

The other panellists gave thoughtful, sometimes self-critical answers. Butler kept schtum. Yet the question is worth asking if we are to avoid history repeating itself, this time as farce. We need smart people – and Krien and Butler are among them – to be asking how citizens can exert sustained pressure on existing governments and to build capacity to keep holding governments’ feet to the fire until they really and truly take climate policy seriously instead of just using it to score points and kill careers.

Ultimately, anyone interested in the future of Australia – and the future of climate policy – should read both of these books carefully. While Krien’s has some immediate use, its greater function will be something we can pull out of a time capsule to explain to young people 20 years hence that we knew exactly what was coming and what we had to do. It will help them understand why we didn’t do it.

Butler’s book will serve well over the next five years, as citizens try to hold a putative Labor government to its fine (if still inadequate) promises on the great moral challenge of our generation.

Dogs were tamed from a single wolf population between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, a study suggests.

The world’s biggest oil producers are starting to take electric vehicles seriously as a long-term threat.