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Members of public accounts committee raise concerns about culture and call for greater examination

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Nuclear whistleblowers who try to draw attention to cultural and safety issues face bullying, MPs have warned.

Members of parliament’s public accounts committee have said they are concerned about the way people who raise concerns about culture and safety on nuclear sites are treated.

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Conservationists voice concern that the Ontario theme park will struggle to find suitable homes for its animals

Canada’s embattled Marineland theme park is to raise money to “expeditiously” remove animals from its grounds, including the world’s largest captive beluga population, as it looks for a buyer. But a lack of available sanctuaries in the country suggests finding a home for stranded whales, dolphins and pinnipeds will be a daunting task.

In February, the park won approval to divide its sprawling property so it can take out mortgages on separate parcels, with the aim of using the funds to keep the park operating and to move the animals. In documents filed to the city of Niagara, Marineland said the financing it had secured “requires the owner to remove the marine animals from the property expeditiously”.

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Equinor says it is sticking to its goal of achieving net zero carbon intensity across its direct and indirect emissions, despite a decision last month to ease off its capital expenditure and targets for renewable energy, according to the Norwegian oil and gas giant's updated energy transition plan.

Flexibility to turn electricity grid power on and off will need to increase fivefold in major European countries in the run up to 2030 amid a ramp up of renewable supply, an energy consultancy has found.

UK carbon prices are likely to end the year around 23% higher when the current front-December contract expires on Dec. 15, but are expected to advance more strongly in 2026 as the market surplus turns in to a shortfall, analysts told a webinar on Wednesday.

More harm than good could result from the proposal by the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi) to allow companies to use carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits to meet their hard-to-abate residual Scope 1 emission targets, a webinar heard Thursday.

European carbon prices handed back some of Wednesday's 3% gain on Thursday morning amid what some sources said was profit taking, magnified by the weakest auction of the year to date, while energy markets also drifted on further reports that Germany and France are seeking to relax gas storage mandates from 2026.

Office for Environmental Protection says targets for water quality likely to be missed, and clarifying rules may help

The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) watchdog has launched an investigation into the UK government over potential failures to clean up England’s rivers under EU-derived laws.

The OEP published a report last year saying that plans to clean up waterways were too generic and did not address specific issues at individual sites. It said plans were being put in place despite low government confidence that their objectives could be achieved.

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Steel and aluminium producers have welcomed announced changes to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to deal with exports, and called on policymakers to move swiftly into gear in order to protect Europe’s industry.

The US is planning to hold up the distribution of $2.6 billion in climate finance to South Africa, raising concerns that the entire funding could be held back, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

South Korea has put out its annual call for proposals that could advance the development of international emissions reduction projects.

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) published guidance on Thursday that aims to help mining companies ultimately achieve net gain or no net loss of biodiversity.

As droughts become more prevalent, corporate control over our drinking water is threatening the health of water sources and the access people have to them. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how foreign multinational companies are extracting billions of litres of water from natural aquifers to sell back to the same communities from which it came – for huge profits

• ‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water

• Foreign firms taking billions of litres from UK aquifers to make bottled water

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Public development banks (PDBs) should contribute to steering the emerging biodiversity credit markets, as giving free rein to the private sector could lead to unwanted consequences, according to an official at the French Development Agency (AFD).

A Japanese carbon accounting firm and a US-based carbon investment manager have partnered to provide companies in the Asia Pacific region with tools to monitor their carbon footprint, implement mitigation strategies, and invest in carbon offset projects.

German energy giant RWE has slashed its green spending by €10 billion over the next five years, citing regulatory uncertainties and increased risks – particularly in the US where President Trump ordered an immediate freeze on permits for new wind energy projects.

The European Commission published draft legislation on Wednesday setting out rules for oil and gas producers who are legally obliged to contribute to an EU-wide target of CO2 storage capacity under the bloc's Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA).

Japan has pledged to utilise the bilateral Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) for its climate ambitions, but the lengthy project development process and changes in the international institutional environment have raised doubts over the programme's ability to generate a sufficient amount of credits, according to observers.

A carbon rating agency has assigned a relatively low score to the first approved project that has transitioned to the new Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) from the Kyoto-era Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The run-up to 2016 shows ‘common sense’ isn’t enough. Even ignorant, reactionary arguments must be properly countered

Kemi Badenoch’s speech on climate this week was not interesting of itself: she said net zero couldn’t be achieved by 2050 “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. She has no expertise in climate science, no background in renewables or apparent familiarity with the advances made in their technology, no qualification in economics – just about the only bit of that sentence she knows anything about is bankrupting us.

Yet even if Badenoch can take its particulars and shove them, the fact of its existence is interesting for a number of reasons. First, this attack on net zero has been predicted, not secretly by new-Conservative fellow travellers, though conceivably them too, but by progressives – and for years. Among the first was the Cambridge academic David Runciman, who predicted a backlash against action on the climate crisis as the new galvanising issue on the radical right after it had moved on from Brexit. On his Talking Politics podcast, he was in conversation with Ed Miliband, who took that point but said he hoped Runciman was wrong. He was not wrong.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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