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The commonest garden bird in Iceland, and no stranger to the Scottish Highlands, this visitor is taking the bunting equivalent to a holiday in the Med

Some birds are simply more compelling than others. Think bullfinches and barn owls, peregrines and storm petrels, gannets and golden eagles. The snow bunting is certainly high in the charisma stakes. I first saw them in 1973, swirling around a shingle beach in Norfolk, caught in a biting wind like flurries of snow. Since then I’ve watched them on their breeding grounds in Iceland, where they are the commonest of the very few “garden birds” found in that northerly land.

Once, I even saw one singing in the car park at Reykjavik airport. And I’ve often come across them in the Cairngorms, where they feed on the crumbs left by passing skiers. But we don’t often get snow buntings in Somerset. So when I heard that one was spending the winter on my local patch alongside the River Parrett, I headed down there as soon as I could.

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Often ignored, the ancient sites in the hearts of towns and villages have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants

There are thousands of wild plant sanctuaries across Britain, many in the hearts of villages, towns and cities, but they’re often ignored and forgotten. Cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds have almost become nature reserves.

Some of the most ancient sites have been around for over 1,000 years, and many grounds haven’t been assaulted with chemicals or intensive management – tighter spending has actually helped even more by cutting back on over-management. And so these sites have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants, including some of our most threatened grassland plants and old trees, mosses, lichens and flowers, as well as wildlife.

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The long view: energy policy needs to stay firmly focused on the horizon. Mattinbgn/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

If you’ve been watching the news in recent days, you’ll know we have an energy crisis, partly due to a gas crisis, which in turn has triggered a political crisis.

That’s a lot of crises to handle at once, so lots of solutions are being put forward. But what do people and businesses actually need? Do they need more gas, or cheaper prices, or more investment certainty, or all or none of the above? How do we cut through to what is really important, rather than side details?

The first thing to note is that what people really care about is their energy costs, not energy prices. This might seem like a pedantic distinction, but if homes and businesses can be helped to waste less energy, then high prices can be offset by lower usage.

The second thing to note is that energy has become very confusing. A host of short- and long-term problems have developed over decades of policy failure, meaning that there is no single solution.

Take gas prices, which were indirectly responsible for South Australia’s blackouts last month. Last week, SA Premier Jay Weatherill responded by unveiling a A$550-million plan including a new state-owned gas power station, while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed to have secured a promise of secure domestic supply from gas producers.

Short-term thinking

It is crucial to keep the ultimate goals in focus, or else our short-term solutions could exacerbate long-term problems.

For electricity, we want to avoid blackouts and limit prices and overall costs. We need to do this in ways that allow us to meet our climate constraints, so we need solutions with zero or very low greenhouse emissions.

For gas, we need to ensure enough supply for local demand, at reasonable prices, and give large consumers the opportunity to negotiate contracts over reasonable time frames.

This means we need to allocate more of our gas to local consumers, because increasing overall gas production would just add to our long-term climate problems.

Peak gas and electricity prices are entangled. In our electricity markets, the most expensive generator needed to maintain supply in a given period sets the price for all the generators. So if an expensive gas generator sets a high price, all of the coal and renewable energy generators make windfall profits – at the consumer’s expense.

So either we need to ensure gas generators don’t set the price, or that they charge a reasonable price for the power they generate.

Quick fixes

Demand management and energy storage are short-term fixes for high peak prices. Paying some electricity or gas consumers to use less at peak times, commonly called “demand response”, frees up electricity or gas, so prices don’t increase as much.

Unfortunately, policymakers have failed to introduce effective mechanisms to encourage demand response, despite the recommendations of numerous policy reviews over the past two decades. This is a serious policy failure our politicians have not addressed. But it could be fixed quickly, with enough political will.

Energy storage, particularly batteries and gas storage, can be introduced quickly (within 100 days, if Tesla’s Elon Musk is to be believed). Storage “absorbs” excess energy at times of low demand, and releases it at times of shortage. This reduces the peak price by reducing dependence on high-priced generators or gas suppliers, as well as reducing the scope for other suppliers to exploit the shortage to raise prices.

The same thinking is behind Turnbull’s larger proposal to add new “pumped hydro” capacity to the Snowy Hydro scheme, although this would take years rather than weeks.

Thus South Australia’s plan, which features battery storage and changes to the rules for feeding power into the grid, addresses short-term problems. Turnbull’s pumped hydro solution is longer-term, although his handshake deal with gas suppliers may help in the short term.

The long view

When we consider the long term, we must recognise that we need to slash our carbon emissions. So coal is out, as is any overall expansion of natural gas production.

Luckily, we have other affordable long-term solutions. The International Energy Agency, as well as Australian analysts such as ClimateWorks and Beyond Zero Emissions, see energy efficiency improvement as the number-one strategy – and in many cases, it actually saves us money and helps to offset the impact of higher energy prices. Decades of cheap gas and electricity mean that Australian industry, business and households have enormous potential to improve energy efficiency, which would save on cost.

We can also switch from fossil gas to biogas, solar thermal and high-efficiency renewable electricity technologies such as heat pumps, micro-filtration, electrolysis and other options.

Renewable energy (not just electricity) can supply the rest of our needs. Much to the surprise of many policymakers, it is now cheaper than traditional options and involves much less investment risk. Costs are continuing to fall.

But we need to supplement renewable energy with energy storage and smart demand management to ensure reliable supply. That’s where options such as pumped hydro storage, batteries and heat-storage options such as molten salt come in.

This is why the crisis is more political than practical. The solutions are on offer. It will become much more straightforward if politicians free themselves from being trapped in the past and wanting to prop up powerful incumbent industries.

Alan Pears has worked for government, business, industry associations public interest groups and at universities on energy efficiency, climate response and sustainability issues since the late 1970s. He is now an honorary Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University and a consultant, as well as an adviser to a range of industry associations and public interest groups. His investments in managed funds include firms that benefit from growth in clean energy. .

If Guardian readers wish to get up close to peregrine falcons (Flying high, 15 March) they need go no farther than their computers where, by typing in “Nottingham peregrines cam” or something similar, they will be able to sit back and watch the comings and goings of the birds to their nest-box high on Nottingham Trent University in the very centre of the city. I did that, entranced, a couple of years ago as I watched the four chicks grow up and fly away.

The cameras are put in each year by Nottingham Wildlife Trust and are proving invaluable for spotting details of behaviour that can only be remarked upon when the subject is under scrutiny round the clock by someone, somewhere.
June Perry
Nottingham

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Once daredevils, cyclists and pedestrians work out just how safe they are with this new technology (Google’s self-driving car avoids hitting a woman chasing a bird, theguardian.com, 17 March), it is easy to imagine how there might be a battle for rights of way. Busy crossings during rush hour could become an unbroken stream of pedestrians as self-driving cars wait helplessly. It is only a small leap from here to imagine the physical measures that may need to be implemented to keep vehicles and pedestrians separate. Fenced in pavements? Raised roadways? This technology could have bigger impacts on our built environments than we are currently anticipating.
Robert Cullen
Gothenburg, Sweden

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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The SpaceX Dragon capsule returns to Earth after its mission to the International Space Station.

We need to learn from the Danish supermarkets, where organic produce is front and centre, not niche

Say you were to swap your weekly shop with a Dane, you’d notice something strange. In Danish supermarkets like SuperBrugsen, myriad organic products are proudly displayed at the front. Try tracking down anything more exciting than an organic carrot in a UK supermarket.

With this in mind our Organic Trade Board wants us to be more Danish and go mainstream organic. There’s some way to go. In 2014, our organic spend here was just £30.60 each for the whole year. Cynics might say that this equates to one organic chicken.

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How a remote community in Guyana is using cutting-edge software and equipment against deforestation.

What do we know about science in Indonesia? We rarely hear about what LIPI is doing — Indonesia's equivalent of the CSIRO. During her time there, Mari Rhydwen discovered the country's different approach to science — and ‘different ways of being’.

How the Guardian reported the grounding of the Torrey Canyon supertanker and what was then the world’s worst oil spill

On 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon, one of the world’s biggest tankers, ran aground between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, leaking more than 100,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea. It was the UK’s worst oil spill to date, causing major environmental damage with more than 20,000 sea birds contaminated. The first Guardian report about the disaster appeared on 20 March.

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The UK’s biggest ever oil spill in 1967 taught invaluable lessons about the response to disasters, toughened up shipping safety and stirred green activism

“I saw this huge ship sailing and I thought he’s in rather close, I hope he knows what he’s doing,” recalled Gladys Perkins of the day 50 years ago, when Britain experienced its worst ever environmental disaster.

The ship was the Torrey Canyon, one of the first generation of supertankers, and it was nearing the end of a journey from Kuwait to a refinery at Milford Haven in Wales. The BP-chartered vessel ran aground on a rock between the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End in Cornwall, splitting several of the tanks holding its vast cargo of crude oil.

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George Orwell wrote a shocking account of a colonial policeman who kills an elephant and is filled with self-loathing. But was this fiction – or a confession? An Orwell expert introduces the original story

British imperialism being a largely commercial concern, when Burma became a part of the empire in 1886 the exploitation of its forests accelerated. Since motorised transport was useless in such hilly terrain, the timber companies used elephants. These docile, intelligent creatures were worth their weight in gold, hauling logs, stacking them near streams, launching them on their way and sometimes even clearing log jams that the foresters could not shift.

In the 1920s a young would-be poet, an ex-Etonian named Eric Blair, arrived as a Burma Police recruit and was posted to several places, culminating in Moulmein. Here he was accused of killing a timber company elephant, the chief of police saying he was a disgrace to Eton. Blair resigned while back in England on leave, and published several books under his assumed name, George Orwell.

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The second man to set foot on the Moon, launches a virtual reality movie detailing his plan to get humans to Mars.

New Forest To some, fallen timber makes for an untidy forest. There was a time when the woodsmen would have cleared much of it away. Not now

We’re standing deep into the trees, looking through an oval porthole constructed from the boughs of a toppled oak. The sun is filtering through the still bare canopy to light up the story of this wood. As we look through the window, we are taken into its past, present and future.

The brown of autumn’s leaf drop mingles with the emerald-green of mosses. To one side, dark-green stems of butchers’ broom promise flashes of ripened scarlet berries in months to come. The stiletto blades of bluebells are just breaking free of the blanket of fallen leaves that has protected their bulbs through the winter months. Already they suggest a scene transformed, as yesterday’s base-brown becomes a wash of blue. Tall, erect trunks stand like sentinels in a painted backdrop, and mid-stage lies a tangle of branches, looking as though some huge beast has shed its antlers.

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 A resin absorbs carbon dioxide when dry, releasing it when wet.

The Arctic is a warming hotspot, showing the fastest warming of any area on Earth, way faster than predicted.

Corals as old as 100 years have been killed.  Bleaching occurred in 1998, 2004 and 2016. Bleaching events are increasing in frequency. Recovery periods for corals are becoming shorter.

A radio-tagged ringtail possum was caught and eaten by a radio tagged diamond python, and then scientists found out that the vulnerable eastern chestnut mouse actually likes a bit of a bushfire. Booderee National Park is full of surprises.

A supercharged week of announcements about energy storage projects mark a turning point in Australia's fractured energy debate.

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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