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Scott Pruitt denies basic science that we’ve understood for over a century

The current head of the US Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt does not believe or understand long-known principles of climate science and basic physics. Recently he claimed on CNBC that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So, no, I would not agree that’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

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Seen from a drone’s eye view, the enormous earthmoving trucks, buses and tractors criss-crossing this corner of Somerset look like toy town models. The vehicles are dwarfed by their surroundings at Hinkley Point, where new footage has revealed the full scale of the site being prepared for Britain’s first new nuclear power station in a generation.

• UN asks UK to suspend work on Hinkley Point
  

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The Coalition commits to $110 million in concessional loans to solar tower and molten salt storage project in Port Augusta, as part of last minute negotiations with the Nick Xenophon Party to pass major tax cuts.

Whaling fleet returns to port after slaughtering hundreds of minke whales, in defiance of moratorium on hunting and global criticism

A Japanese whaling fleet returned to port on Friday after an annual Antarctic hunt that killed more than 300 of the mammals, as Tokyo pursues the programme in defiance of global criticism.

The fleet set sail for the Southern Ocean in November, with plans to slaughter 333 minke whales, flouting a worldwide moratorium and opposition led by Australia and New Zealand.

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Shrill carder bee and chequered skipper butterfly are among 20 endangered bugs, bees, butterflies and plants to benefit from £4.6m in lottery funding

Efforts to save some of England’s rarest species, including the shrill carder bee and the chequered skipper butterfly, from extinction are being backed by £4.6m in lottery funding.

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Its stripes are more like a bumblebee's.

Researchers creating virtual maps of coral reefs to precisely model how structure altered by environmental change

Scientists are using 3D printing technology to create prosthetic coral that could be used to help the Great Barrier Reef recover from bleaching and storms.

Researchers at the University of Sydney are creating virtual 3D maps of coral reefs to precisely model how their structure is altering as a result of environmental change.

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Airedale, West Yorkshire The chiffchaffs are already here with their chiming two-step jingle, now we wait for the blackcaps

It’s a time of year for waiting and listening. The chiffchaffs are already here; they turned up mid-March, tumbling in off the Africa-Yorkshire flyway and filling the leafless beech tops with their chiming two-step jingle.

Now I’m waiting for the blackcaps. The bird writer Edward Grey wrote of being “ears a-tiptoe for the first note of a blackcap” in early spring. But it’s not time yet. The blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) that bred and sang and chacked here last year won’t be back from north Africa or the Med until the first weeks of April.

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Ten years ago today, Kevin Rudd spoke at the National Climate Summit at Parliament House, in Canberra, famously declaring climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

One of Kevin Rudd’s most famous quotes.

Rudd, in alliance with Julia Gillard, had toppled Kim Beazley as Labor leader the previous December. This focus on climate change was part of Rudd’s brilliantly executed electoral assault on John Howard, who had spent his period in office kicking climate action into the long grass.

Malcolm Turnbull, then Howard’s newly minted environment minister, was underwhelmed by Rudd’s speech. “It’s all designed to promote Kevin Rudd. I mean, he doesn’t care what the summit says. He’s having his media conference at 10 o'clock. The conference delegates will have barely had their coffee and had the first session,” he sniffed.

On the same day Ross Gittins published a piece titled Carbon trading v taxes — a winner eases ahead in the Sydney Morning Herald. A decade on, it makes for painful, and eerily prescient, reading:

A key question - for advocates of action as well as politicians anxious to keep their jobs - is which instrument would be harder to introduce politically. This, I suspect, is the reason so many governments favour trading schemes. The trouble with a carbon tax is that everyone hates new taxes, whereas a trading scheme doesn’t sound as if it’s a tax.

The dizzying and stomach-churning backflips over the past ten years have been described as a “power failure” and a policy bonfire.

While hopes for bold and timely action in Australia may have bleached like the Great Barrier Reef, the question that Rudd raised - one of climate change ethics, of how we navigate “the perfect moral storm” – remains alive.

Debts to pay

From my point of view, the key questions are: what do we owe to future generations; what do we owe to other species; and how are we living up to those obligations?

The thinker and novelist Alice Walker once described activism as “my rent for living on the planet”.

The celebrated linguist and US dissident Noam Chomsky agrees. In September 1991, during an interview in which he was asked what motivated him in his tireless work decrying US foreign policy and the influence of the mass media on democratic societies, he replied: “Looking in the mirror in the morning and not being appalled.” For Chomsky, intellectuals have a responsibility, “to speak the truth and to expose lies”.

But of course some would say that this is not enough - the point is not to describe the world but to change it.

There are costs, however. Consider this passage from Marge Piercy’s extraordinary novel Vida, about a Vietnam War-era activist on the run from the FBI:

Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because every morning in the Times, every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. They had not done enough, they had not risked enough, they had not tried everything, they had not fought hard enough, they had not, because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. Obviously they had not tried hard enough if the war still went on.

Personally, I have tried activism (and usually done it badly, if persistently). I found that if I stopped altogether I felt worse and “acted out” in silly ways, so now I do just enough to avoid that, but with zero expectation that anything will change

In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht combined the Latin word solacium (comfort) with the Greek root –algia (pain) to create the word solastalgia, which he defined as:

The psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.

That grief and anxiety is catching up with many of us. For a psychoanalytic perspective, see this interview with Rosemary Randall.

What should we do?

So, reader, I’m interested in finding out your coping strategies, since mine are often inadequate and maladaptive. I’ve a few questions:

• Where do you think your environmental concern came from?

• How many of you spent significant time in unstructured play in natural environments before the age of 11 (so-called “significant life experiences”), as I did?

• How do you who try to stay active on this mother of all issues cope with the seemingly uninterrupted flow of ever greater defeats?

• How do you cope with the guilt of having failed (thus far) to have done enough?

• How do you cope with the grief for the things we are definitely going to lose, no matter what (starting with coral on the Great Barrier Reef)?

• And for the climatologists and climate writers out there, how do you cope with the anxiety of knowing that conveying the end of human civilisation is your day job?

Over to you – answers in the comments.

New CEFC head interested in solar, storage and demand response; does not see "clean" coal as investable for "many reasons that will not change."

South Australia is being urged by market operator and private providers to dump its plan for diesel back-up generators, and think smarter on the demand side of the equation.

Australia has no federal policy other than what’s left of the RET. Zero, zip, nada. Perhaps Canberra could learn from the states?

As the boilers cool down, here’s 6 things we’ve learnt this week from Halewood’s closure, and why we've reached point of no return in transition to renewables.

Barwon Water says its 1MW solar array – Victoria's largest – could be built by December, after EPC contract awarded.

Carnegie teams with Samsung, Lend Lease to propose battery storage hub and R&D centre in Adelaide as part of government tender.

Scientists say their discovery shows there are medical secrets still hidden in our oceans.

Lennon Bartlett uses a boat to row to his parents’ house next door in central Lismore after the Wilsons river breached its banks early on Friday morning, flooding the northern New South Wales city. Flood waters caused by the remnants of Cyclone Debbie are still rising and are expected to peak in the early afternoon

• Ex-cyclone Debbie: deaths feared in Lismore – live updates

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CEFC appoints head of Impact Investing team at Social Ventures Australia as its new chief executive officer.

China begins closing down its legal ivory trade, but will consumer attitudes to prized artwork change?

SpaceX flies and lands a Falcon 9 rocket that had already been used on a previous mission.