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New Forest The heather is studded with yellow tormentil, and mixed with dwarf gorse so tight to the turf that it’s knee-high to a grasshopper

A grey minibus pulls up behind me as I’m changing into my walking shoes. Five young people get out and hitch their packs. ”We’ll be there at five,” says the driver, and goes. They set off along the concrete perimeter road of the old airfield, with a two and a half hour walk ahead of them. I cut through some trees and, by the time I’m on the same road, they’re a speck in the distance.

It’s been too dry, and a little early yet, for autumn fungi to show, but a whitish dome in the grass under the trees suggests it will not be long before they do. It’s hot, the car thermometer registers 26°, and I’m hoping to find shade in the Inclosure.

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US scientists find possible new coral species and rare Dumbo octopus on expedition to previously unexplored extinct volcano off Hawaii

Scientists believe they have identified a new species of coral and found a rare Dumbo octopus during an expedition 3,000ft (900m) down in the Pacific Ocean.

Diving in a submersible to the previously unexplored Cook seamount, an extinct volcano at the bottom of the sea 100 miles south-west of Hawaii’s Big Island, the three-person team was hoping to examine the rich variety of marine life that collects around the nutrient-rich volcanic waters.

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‘I'd much rather be growing things than killing things,’ says Geoff Williams on the eve of a deer hunt. ‘I'd love to come down here and just walk around in the scrub, but I spend too many hours chasing these other bloody animals.’

A team of Australian scientists have won a prize to develop a portable 'electronic nose' that may be able to accurately and quickly identify trafficked animals and body parts in the field to assist in law enforcement.

As wildlife poaching pushes animals such as rhinos and elephants toward extinction, representatives from a record number of nations will gather in South Africa next week for a critical wildlife conference.

Environmental groups criticise plan that will allow hunters to shoot up to 47 of an estimated 68 wolves living in wilderness

Norway is planning to cull more than two-thirds of its remaining wolves in a step that environmental groups say will be disastrous for the dwindling members of the species in the wild.

There are estimated to be about 68 wolves remaining in the wilderness areas of Norway, concentrated in the south-east of the country, but under controversial plans approved on Friday as many as 47 of these will be shot.

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Engineer Naveen Rabelli has completed a 6,000 mile journey from India to the UK in a solar-powered tuk-tuk.

My father, Peter Cubbage, who has died aged 91, was a leading gas forensic research scientist. He led a team that was responsible, among other things, for pioneering the flame-release chamber, a safety innovation used in offshore oil rigs and pipelines, which was compared to the miners’ Davy lamp for its significance.

He was appointed by the crown in 1988 to write the report into what happened during the first two seconds of the Piper Alpha rig explosion.

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The Central Everglades Planning Project, hailed as a ‘huge victory’, will redirect water to undernourished Florida wetlands affected by manmade developments

US lawmakers have voiced hopes that the ailing Everglades will start to recover after the Senate overwhelmingly approved a nearly $2bn measure to combat the toxic algae blooms that have devastated Florida’s waterways.

The Central Everglades Planning Project, touted by proponents as landmark legislation, passed the Senate on Thursday as part of a broader $10bn water resources bill by a vote of 95-3. The series of engineering projects are designed to collect water around Lake Okeechobee and channel it south to nourish the Everglades wetlands, America’s largest tropical wilderness, rather than have it run off into the ocean.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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Campaigners hope the operation, that sees plain clothes police on bikes pull over drivers that pass too close, will be taken up across the country

When Mark Hodson gets on his bike in the morning, like many cyclists in the UK, he has come to expect a few close calls. Perhaps drivers will whizz past him too close, or someone will even try a ‘punishment pass’.

Luckily, Hodson is a West Midlands Police traffic officer, albeit in plain clothes, and just yards up the road a colleague in a police car is waiting to pull over drivers that give him less than 1.5m space when overtaking (a distance that increases for faster speeds and larger vehicles).

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A whale shark, Masai Mara migration and wild boar on a seaside visit are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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A BBC team finds rare Java hawks for sale, as environmentalists say more must be done to tackle Indonesia's illegal bird trade.

Flash flooding is a far greater threat to homes, railways and roads than river or coastal floods but is completely excluded from government plans to deal with increased rainfall

Flash flooding, which struck a swathe of southern and eastern England on Friday, is a greater threat to homes, roads and railways than river or coastal flooding. Yet it was completely excluded from the government’s National Flood Resilience Review, published last week.

Worse, the risk of flash flooding is rising, as climate change leads to more intense, more frequent rainstorms: the Met Office has shown that extremely wet days have become more common. On Friday, half a month’s rain was dumped in one day.

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Inexpensive over-the-counter product could help millions of people avoid worst health effects of breathing toxic air, say scientists

An inhaler that protects the lungs against air pollution has been developed by scientists and could help the many millions of people affected by toxic air to avoid its worst effects.

The inhaler delivers a molecule, first found in bacteria in the Egyptian desert, which stabilises water on the surface of the lung cells to form a protective layer. It is expected to be available as an inexpensive, over-the-counter product.

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‘Tremendous loss’ of ice reinforces clear downward trend towards ice-free summers due to effects of climate change

Arctic sea ice this summer shrank to its second lowest level since scientists started to monitor it by satellite, with scientists saying it is another ominous signal of global warming.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said the sea ice reached its summer low point on Saturday, extending 4.14m sq km (1.6m sq miles). That’s behind only the mark set in 2012, 3.39m sq km.

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Paula Kahumbu: The latest satellite tracking technology is helping to keep elephants safe from poachers— and away from farmers’ crops

On a beautiful sunny day in Amboseli National Park, against the backdrop of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, a small group of cars was gathered at a safe distance around the prostrate bull elephant. The elephant lay still in the dust, head on the ground, his enormous tusks and trunk stretched out in front of him. Tension rose among the onlookers as the minutes passed.

Then the huge elephant flapped his ear, got up gently, shook his head vigorously in a vain attempt to dislodge the strange object around his neck, and walked off. We all breathed a sigh of relief. The operation to attach a tracking collar to Tim had gone perfectly.

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Parrtjima festival will see art beamed onto a 2.5km area of the MacDonnell Ranges, raising concerns for a struggling species

Concerns that a light festival in central Australia could affect a vulnerable population of rock wallaby has led to more than a thousand people signing a petition calling for it to be stopped, and to the federal Department of the Environment and Energy examining the festival’s plans.

Parrtjima – A Festival in Light is planned to go for 10 days at the end of September. Each night a four-hour light show will project Indigenous art onto a 2.5km stretch of cliff in the MacDonnell Ranges.

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Local entrepreneur Jenny Paradiso has just been named as a finalist in the 2016 Telstra Business Women’s Awards in South Australia.

The recent battles over the budget of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and before that over the size of the Renewable Energy Target, are the latest skirmishes in a long-running war over support for technologies that harvest Australia’s abundant wind and solar resources.

Perhaps surprisingly, the conflict even predates the popular awareness of climate change, which is generally dated to 1988.

UNSW Australia’s Mark Diesendorf has described how in early 1983 he and his colleagues had identified an ideal site in northern Tasmania for a wind farm. They presented their proposal to Labor’s newly appointed resources minister, Peter Walsh.

We submitted a proposal that the federal government fund a demonstration wind farm and assist in establishing a local wind generator manufacturing industry in the region, which was suffering from high unemployment. The next day, Senator Walsh announced that a northwest Tasmanian wind energy project could be a part of a development package, if the Commonwealth was successful in the High Court challenge to the construction of the Gordon-below-Franklin dam.

The Commonwealth won its High Court battle, but the wind industry did not get its windfall. As Diesendorf recalls:

The federal government did not implement our proposal. It was soon obvious that the coal lobby, which was already very strong in the Department of Resources, had succeeded in turning the minister against wind power.

At the same time, CSIRO, a world leader in several areas of renewables, closed down all of its renewable energy research. In Diesendorf’s view this was brought on by “powerful coal and nuclear energy interests within the CSIRO". In the absence of deathbed confessions by those who made the decisions, Diesendorf’s suspicions can’t be proved correct, but renewables did indeed disappear from CSIRO’s research agenda and annual reports from that time.

Once climate change hit the headlines, things changed – a little. In 1990 the Hawke government established the Energy Research and Development Corporation (ERDC) and launched a National Energy Efficiency Program. Meanwhile, research commissioned by the Victorian government found that renewable energy, paired with energy-efficiency measures, could save A$3.14 billion a year by 2005, create almost 14,000 jobs, boost economic productivity by A$800 million a year, and cut greenhouse emissions into the bargain.

But privatisation took hold in Victoria, and the Keating government in Canberra seemed indifferent at best. In 1994, green groups including the Australian Conservation Foundation called for a carbon levy to provide funds for renewable energy. Their request was ignored.

Renewables back on target

In 1996 the new Howard government disbanded Bob Hawke’s ERDC and energy efficiency program. In late 1997, in the run-up to the Kyoto climate summit, John Howard announced a new Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Greens leader Bob Brown was underwhelmed. He pointed out that the scheme’s A$65 million over five years was less than the A$75 million that had been axed the year before, while the target of an extra 2% of electricity from renewables (making a total of 11% including existing large-scale hydro electricity generation) fell short of the ambition shown by other nations. Britain, for instance, was aiming for 20% by 2010.

The RET finally came into place in 2001, after the fossil fuel lobby succeeded in getting it watered down, and was subjected to constant reviews.

Infamously, at a secret meeting whose minutes were leaked, the then energy minister, Ian MacFarlane, lamented to the chief executives of companies like BHP and Rio that the RET was working too well – renewables were growing too fast.

In the run-up to the 2004 Energy White Paper, the renewables industry had hired well-connected lobby firm Crosby Textor (yes, Crosby as in Lynton Crosby) in a bid to get the RET raised to as much as 10%.

According to Age journalist Richard Baker, a Liberal backbencher warned the renewables advocates that “you guys are stuffed". And so it came to pass – the white paper spruiked carbon capture and storage, not renewables.

In the white paper’s aftermath, CSIRO boss Geoff Garrett announced that the organisation would be reducing its renewables research and instead focusing on “clean coal” technologies such as coal gasification and carbon capture and storage.

Months later, a draft copy of an August 2005 CSIRO report describing solar thermal technology as “the only renewable technology that can make deep cuts in greenhouse emissions” was leaked to The Canberra Times. Before the leak, sources claimed the report had been “passed around like a political hot potato” with no date set for its release. It was eventually released to the public later that year.

Bloody public battles

Since 2007 the battles have been more public and even bloodier. An attempt to harmonise (and perhaps increase) different state and federal targets (all with different baselines, target years and amounts) was a dispiriting process. This was due in part, it seems, to federal bureaucratic intransigence and arrogance.

The major changes have been an increase in the renewables target, split into large-scale (wind farms, solar farms and the like) and small-scale (mostly rooftop solar). That increased target was of course subjected to significant watering down by the Abbott government.

Meanwhile, the two agencies that were set up to support renewable energy have also come under attack. The Greens, whose support was a life-and-death issue for the Gillard government, had managed to insist on the creation of ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Between them, these two organisations were designed to ensure funding both for basic research and development and for commercialisation of the resulting technologies, thereby smoothing the path for renewables to enter the electricity sector.

The attacks on these organisations have helped create investor uncertainty in renewables. Efforts to close them down ultimately failed, so the Abbott government switched to changing their terms of reference. The Turnbull government has continued this, along with salami-slicing ARENA’s budget.

This investment uncertainty, deliberately created, is a kind of “divestment campaign” against renewables. It can also be seen as a way of provoking an “investment strike”.

Whereas the mining industry threatened to take its investment dollars elsewhere while fighting Kevin Rudd’s proposed Resources Super-profits Tax in 2010, in this case, the supporters of the status quo energy system are hoping to dissuade external investors from coming to Australia. Thus do incumbents defend their patch.

Australia is famously the “lucky country”. But of course, Donald Horne meant it ironically, believing that the country was richly endowed with resources but “run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.

Given what we know of the trajectory and probable impacts of climate change, nobody, surely, will be able to be claim surprise as the future arrives.

Marc Hudson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.