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Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday guest Yanis Varoufakis attacked the PM's 'incompetence and cynicism'.

With more and more people prepping for Armageddon, the answers to this question are revealing – whether it’s Babybels, cash, crossbows or toilet paper

The author Lauren Groff has become a prepper. “I think everyone should have a go bag right now,” she told National Public Radio (NPR) in the US. “I think every household should have enough food to last through at least two weeks. This is just logical at this point.”

Groff lives in Florida, where dangerously extreme weather has become a fact of life – we’re lucky enough to be spared that in the UK, at least for now. But as a semi-professional catastrophist – one apocalyptic sandwich board short of full doom-monger status – am I missing a trick? Should I have a go bag and what should go in it? Online recommendations include water – one of my least favourite fluids – cereal bars, first aid supplies, spare clothes, medication and paperwork. Practical, but short on bells and whistles (actually, they do recommend taking a whistle).

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The conservation organisation once again faces being infiltrated by climate crisis deniers and oil-funded groups

I love British traditions. Whose heart soars not upon seeing some drunk men chasing a cheese down a fatally steep Gloucestershire hill, or some drunk men burning their faces off carrying flaming tar barrels on their heads in a Devonshire village, or some drunk men dropping an enormous effigy of David Jason into a giant burning boozer made of straw in a Hertfordshire hamlet at midnight? In Spanish fire bull festivals, cruel peasants set fire to animals. Here, outside the EU, we merely set fire to ourselves.

But the nights are drawing in and soon it will be time for one of the oldest, and most enjoyable, British traditions of all. Because it’s that time of year when, in the run-up to the National Trust’s AGM on 11 November, the opaquely funded “anti-woke” pressure group Restore Trust, backed by Neil Record of the Tufton Street climate crisis denial bodies Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch, tries to have its own pod people planted on the board. Sing ye wassail! It’s that time again!!

Basic Lee tour dates are here

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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Former Cop26 chair says emissions cuts must be made elsewhere and ministers must show how they plan to achieve this

Alok Sharma, the former Tory cabinet minister who chaired the landmark Cop26 UN summit in Glasgow, has warned Rishi Sunak that he will now have to find other ways to cut emissions if the UK is to meet its international climate obligations, following last week’s dramatic U-turns on green policy.

In his first comments since Sunak’s announcement on Wednesday, Sharma told the Observer that “rolling back on certain policies will mean we need to find emissions reductions elsewhere, if we are to meet our legally binding near term carbon budgets and our internationally committed 2030 emissions reduction target”.

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Rooftop solar meets all of South Australia's demand at one stage on Saturday, as battery records fall across the grid and coal output hits record low in biggest coal state.

The post Rooftop solar meets all of South Australia demand in major new milestone appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Australia has three native corvid species, but their unearned reputation for cruelty and an all-too-human cleverness makes them unlikely to win a popularity contest

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Those who have experienced an Australian dawn chorus will know just how special our songbirds are. Within the somewhat discordant mix of melodies are many who will no doubt be favourites for Guardian Australia’s 2023 Australian bird of the year. But will the Corvidae family be in the running, even with the Australian raven on the shortlist? Not likely.

The Corvidae includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, Eurasian magpies, treepies, choughs (though not the Aussie ones) and nutcrackers. Australia has three native types of raven and two types of crow. Being generalists, Australians tend to call them all “crows”. Telling them apart can be tricky unless you’re close enough to see the base of their feathers – crows have white at the base and ravens have grey – or you’re familiar with the differences in their calls.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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