Feed aggregator

A capsule carrying rocky debris from asteroid Bennu is about to streak through the sky above Utah.

Group tasked with overseeing initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers was only set up in March

• ‘The worst kind of culture war’: Tories attack Rishi Sunak’s reversal on net zero

The government’s energy efficiency taskforce, charged with reducing the UK’s energy use by 15% by 2030, has been scrapped months after it was established.

The group, which was overseeing an initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers, was announced by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement last year as part of plans to boost investment in energy efficiency.

Continue reading...

The prime minister’s attempts to turn the climate emergency into a US-style wedge issue have dismayed veteran MPs who champion green policies

Rishi Sunak’s decision to drive a “green wedge” between the Conservatives and Labour will take the UK into dangerous new political territory and “the worst kind of culture wars”, not seen for more than 30 years, senior Tory figures and political observers have warned.

Reversals and delays to net zero policy announced last week will be just the start of a general election campaign in which the UK’s longstanding cross-party political consensus on climate will be increasingly at stake. Emails sent to journalists from the Conservative campaign headquarters revealed lines of attack on targets including the independent Climate Change Committee and Labour’s proposed £28bn investment in a low-carbon economy.

Continue reading...

It’s part of the language of environmental activism in the global south. But living in a UK city, I’d never connected with it

There stood, outside my front room window, until about a month ago, a proud little elder tree. A bough grew entwined with a towering hedge, separating our front garden from next door’s.

Mostly, to be fair, it was an ugly tangle of vegetation, out of place in our posh south London neighbourhood. But it was the perfect hiding place for prowling cats and skulking foxes, and a cosy roost for clumsy wood pigeons and darting songbirds. For years, we watched a saga of urban flora and fauna play out through the window of our living room: the burst of elderflower in the spring; the coming and going of swifts; the fluffy fat robins of winter.

Then, this summer, my children and I went for a few soggy days away in the Peak District, and came home to find our neighbour had had it all ripped out.

“Solastalgia” is a word coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003, in an effort to articulate how people in New South Wales felt about vast tracts of the region being ripped apart by strip coal mining. It refers, he said, to the “distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment”.

Damien Gayle is an environment correspondent for the Guardian

Continue reading...

Once a mecca for petrol heads, this fresh incarnation of the car show hopes to meet Australia’s surging demand for electric vehicles

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

More than a decade after the Australian International Motor Show was abandoned due to lack of interest, a leading showcase has returned to Melbourne without a petrol engine in sight.

Organisers believe the surging demand for electric vehicles in Australia can help revive showcase car shows – once a drawcard for petrol heads and car nerds, this fresh incarnation feels more like walking into an Apple store.

Continue reading...

Six Portuguese young people claim inadequate policies to tackle global heating breach their human rights

• Europe live – latest updates

A key plank of the UK government’s defence against the biggest climate legal action in the world next week has fallen away as a result of the U-turn by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, on green policies.

The UK is one of 32 countries being taken to the European court of human rights on Wednesday by a group of Portuguese young people. They will argue in the grand chamber of the Strasbourg court that the nations’ policies to tackle global heating are inadequate and in breach of their human rights obligations.

Continue reading...

Exclusive: Poll finds fewer than a quarter of people trust PM to tackle climate crisis after policy U-turn

Only 22% of people trust Rishi Sunak to tackle the climate crisis after his announcement that he will weaken the UK’s net zero policies.

An exclusive poll for the Guardian found that fewer than a quarter of people trust the prime minister to take on the challenge. A total of 53% said they did not trust him, while 19% said they did not know.

Continue reading...

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

Honduras will target international sales of Article 6-compliant REDD+ credits, due to be issued next year, at a price of at least $25/tonne, the country's environment minister confirmed to Carbon Pulse on Thursday, and is already in discussion with buyers to complete transactions in 2025.

Financial players pared back their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) and RGGI Allowances (RGGI) net length over the week, as Washington Carbon Allowance (WCA) futures and options holdings became available for the first time, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

Proving marine CO2 removal in the field is necessary to scale the nascent technology, but further private sector funding and government support are needed for the development of research, expert panel says.

Legislation outlining regulation of the voluntary carbon credit market passed Paraguay's Senate this week by a significant margin following a number of amendments, and now goes to the country's Chamber of Deputies before it can become law.

EU energy ministers are due to meet on October 17, aiming to get closer to a deal on a divisive reform of bloc's electricity market design that has gotten bogged down partly due to a row over whether to extend capacity payments for coal power. 

This year’s 40th annual survey of the way we think reveals a country that, for all its flaws, is more liberal and more social democratic than before

The problem with modern Britain, said Liz Truss in a recent interview, is that it remains in thrall to social democratic ideas ushered in by New Labour in 1997 and which the Conservatives have not been bold enough in combatting or reversing. This will have been news to much of the public, particularly those who remember the long years of Conservative austerity after 2010 and the Tory party’s self‑expulsion of Britain from the European Union after 2016. Neither of these dominant events of the last 13 years was a flagship social democratic policy last time we looked.

Yet Ms Truss is almost right in one respect. The British public has been moving slowly and steadily in a more social democratic direction in recent years. The publication this week of the 40th annual British Social Attitudes survey provides some of the evidence. It reveals, for instance, that the public does not only want government to fund health care and pensions, it also wants it to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. The public supports further increases in taxes and spending in order to fund public services too, in spite of the fact that taxes are already high by historic standards.

Continue reading...

California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) credit values rebounded on Thursday from a six-month low set earlier in the week after a major electric vehicle manufacturer reportedly stopped selling units.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) must “urgently” consider metrics beyond MSA, an executive at environmental consultancy Ramboll has said, while suggesting that Britain's net gain mechanism offers a more robust approach. 

A carbon credit rating agency has warned against a headlong rush into commoditising carbon credits as the ICVCM prepares to tag the first categories of unit with its CCP integrity label, which is expected to reassure corporates that each credit is worth a tonne of C02.

Malta and Spain have urged the EU to add further foreign ports to a list found to have experienced a jump in activity, ahead of the bloc's inclusion of the shipping sector in the ETS from 2024 in a bid to guard against carbon leakage.

The economics of solar batteries has changed considerably in recent years, and could now reduce your total power bill – and emissions

• Change by Degrees is our new Saturday column offering life hacks and sustainable living tips to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

For many years, the idea of installing home batteries in Australia was, to put it bluntly, a bad deal.

Salespeople would spin numbers in their favour, conveniently ignoring the 20-plus-year payback period on a battery with just a 10-year warranty.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

Right this way, sir

Continue reading...