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Kenyans producing, selling or even using plastic bags will risk imprisonment of up to four years or fines of $50,000, as the world's toughest law aimed at reducing plastic pollution comes into effect.

US authorities approve a treatment which re-designs a patient's own immune system to attack cancer.

Judge says president Michel Temer went beyond his authority in issuing decree to dissolve Renca, after fury from activists

A Brazilian court has blocked an attempt by the president, Michel Temer, to open up swaths of the Amazon forest to mining companies after an outcry by environmental campaigners and climate activists.

The federal judge Rolando Valcir Spanholo said the president went beyond his authority in issuing a decree to abolish Renca, an area of 46,000 sq km (17,760 sq miles) that has been protected since 1984.

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Critics say authorisation of supplementary culls shows the programme, which began four years ago, is not working

Another 1,000 badgers are set to be killed this autumn and winter in the two UK counties where the controversial cull began four years ago.

Natural England confirmed on Wednesday that supplementary culls had been authorised in Gloucestershire and Somerset.

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Are American lives simply worth more, wonder Lynne Edwards, Peter Williams, and Susan Howe. Plus letters from Bob Pike and Sheila Rigby

While I have the greatest sympathy for those who have lost friends, family, pets or property in the Texas floods (Report, 30 August), I am disgusted at the relative number of column inches and amounts of airtime devoted to its coverage. During precisely the same period huge areas of Bangladesh, Nepal and India are suffering an even greater catastrophe, with 1,200 plus lives lost and millions made homeless. Let’s get some balance here. America is a rich country and will cope, despite inept leadership. Or are we saying that American lives are worth more?.
Susan Howe
Ross on Wye, Herefordshire

• The contrast between the coverage of floods in Texas and floods in South Asia is stark. Live updating of trivia as well as important events from Houston; the odd report from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and elsewhere. There are probably many more people of South Asian heritage in this country than American. The implicit message is that they, and their relatives, are far less important than a pet in Houston. I don’t want Texas coverage reduced, but please take more notice of the rest of the world.
Lynne Edwards
New Quay, Ceredigion

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After being criticised by Canberra, South Australia is leading the race, with ACT and Tasmania close behind, says Climate Council

Australian states and territories are powering ahead, developing policies that will meet the federal government’s internationally agreed greenhouse gas emission targets, with South Australia, the ACT and Tasmania leading the race.

Despite being chastised by the federal government for unilateral action, South Australia is leading the race, with the ACT and Tasmania not far behind, according to a report by the Climate Council.

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Beulah Johnson, an evacuee, films the inside of a shelter in Houston that has been overwhelmed by water in the wake of tropical storm Harvey, forcing about 100 weary people to retreat to bleacher seats with their belongings. Marcus McLellan of Jefferson County sheriff’s office said on Wednesday that the Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur had been inundated overnight, owing to rainfall and an overflowing canal nearby

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates
  

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The order prevents the government from exploiting a protected area bigger than Denmark.

Campaigners urge court of appeal to overturn communities secretary’s decision to allow Cuadrilla to drill in Lancashire

The communities secretary, Sajid Javid, “misunderstood key local and national planning policies” when he gave the green light to fracking in Lancashire, campaigners have told the court of appeal.

Leading judges were urged on Wednesday to overturn a government decision to approve a fracking site at Preston New Road in Lancashire.

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Houston has experienced an unexpected side-effect of the floods that have hit the Texan city – floating islands made up of thousands of venomous fire ants. The naturally aggressive ants are able to survive the rising water by forming rafts with their own bodies, and can survive for weeks before breaking up

Flotillas of fire ants add new layer of horror to post-Harvey flood havoc

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每头大象都是巨大的象群数据库和信息网络的一个神秘入口，让我们守护这份自然的奇迹。

• Elephant 2.0. - nature’s invisible information architecture
  

大象有着一 副如此悲伤的面孔，很难现象任何人会去伤害它们。它们有着苍白的嘴唇和下垂的肩膀；它们的姿态悠长而松弛，眼睛若有深意，可以让罪过者动容。但似乎单凭负 疚感并不能拯救大象。八年前，非洲象和亚洲象的种群总数大约有600万到900万头。如今，大约只剩50万头。日复一日，大象距离灭绝越来越近。

也许我们需要一些新的观念。也许是时候从新的角度考虑我们为什么需要保护大象。对于我们来说，珍贵的或许并不是它们的身体，而是它们共享的记忆和经验。这就是我在这篇文中想要提出的观点。

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Today Malcolm Turnbull met with energy retailers to discuss high power prices, for the second time this month. The retailers agreed to try even harder to inform their customers of cheaper contracts, but they also took the opportunity to call yet again for urgent commitment to a Clean Energy Target (CET).

The prime minister hopes to deliver a CET by Christmas, but has not indicated what the target would actually be.

This is just one more step towards the elusive goal of certainty in the energy market, which politicians, the energy industry and businesses have been calling for with increasing frequency. But underlying the ongoing political scrimmage is the reality that certainty means something very different to each player. It’s particularly difficult to achieve in a time of disruptive change.

Read more: Turnbull to tell power companies: do better by customers

What is certainty?

For politicians, certainty means getting energy prices and policy out of the media, ensuring construction of a new coal-fired power station, or both.

On the other hand, incumbent energy companies want to protect profits by blocking emerging competitors and guaranteeing their revenue.

For emerging energy businesses that sell renewable energy, batteries and smart energy solutions, it’s about opening markets to fair competition and finding a role in a rapidly changing environment.

For business and industry, it’s about access to stable, reliable, reasonably priced energy, so they can get on with their core business.

Households (and voters) also want affordable and reliable energy bills (and some basic respect from energy companies and politicians) but that doesn’t necessarily mean low prices: it can mean low fixed charges, access to energy efficiency programs, and finance for rooftop solar and batteries. Then they can buy less energy while living in comfortable homes with efficient appliances.

The traditional energy system involves large capital investments and long timeframes. This doesn’t sit comfortably with the agendas of many of the people described above, who want quick solutions – which can be delivered by emerging alternatives.

New solutions create new challenges

Any inflexible baseload power station faces the growing problem of the “duck curve”. That is, solar power is reducing baseload demand for energy during the day, but leaving the evening peak-time demand untouched – creating an exaggerated upswing in demand after about 4pm.

Read more: Slash Australians’ power bills by beheading a duck at night

This reduced daytime power use deprives a baseload plant of the demand it needs to keep running continuously. Excess electricity during the day also drives wholesale electricity prices down from traditionally high levels. Daytime sales have comprised a large proportion of revenue for base load generators.

Large scale wind and solar without storage are price takers: they’re paid the going wholesale price at the time they generate. They have benefited from the high daytime prices that solar is now undermining, and from high prices on tradeable certificates for renewable energy, driven by shortages caused by Tony Abbott’s “war on renewables”.

Certificate prices should moderate as more renewable energy capacity is built. Future investment depends heavily on decisions regarding national and state clean energy targets beyond 2020.

Batteries, pumped hydro and other storage rely on the gap between the lowest and highest price each day. Solar is reducing, and even reversing, this price gap in the daytime. But morning and evening demand offers some opportunity, as long as excess storage capacity doesn’t flood the market with electricity and depress prices at those times. In future, they will store cheap daytime excess power for use at other times. And storage will be increasingly important as variable renewable energy capacity grows.

Improving efficiency is ‘the first fuel’

Demand response, where consumers are paid to reduce demand at times of high wholesale electricity prices, is a serious threat to revenue for generators and energy storage. It usually involves smart management of consumption or use of existing backup generators, with little capital cost.

As the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has found, there is a lot of latent capacity. Its call for bids in May for its pilot scheme – originally aiming to provide 160 megawatts (MW) of reserve capacity – has unearthed almost 700MW available by December this year, and over 1900 MW by December 2018.

Our failure to properly manage demand for decades, despite the recommendations of many inquiries, has led to wasteful overinvestment in network and generation capacity that is now exposed to market forces. Now someone will pay for this policy failure: will it be shareholders or consumers?

Energy efficiency improvement adds another unpredictable factor. As shadow environment and energy minister Mark Butler commented at a recent conference, Australian governments have not performed well in this area. But the Finkel Review highlighted its substantial potential and called for governments to do better. The International Energy Agency calls energy efficiency “the first fuel” because it is so big and so cheap.

Our failure to capture energy efficiency is costly for the economy and consumers. When energy suppliers are prepared to invest in projects with risky annual rates of return of 8-15%, energy efficiency opportunities with returns of 20-100% are ignored.

Another complicating element is consumers, many of whom are no longer passively accepting energy market volatility and increasing prices. “Behind the meter” investment in energy efficiency, demand management, storage, on-site renewables and even diesel generators is making increasing sense. Indeed, social justice campaigners are increasingly calling for action to help vulnerable households be part of the future, not victims.

Lastly, there is the elephant in the room: climate change. Fossil-fuel-sourced electricity generation produces around a third of Australia’s emissions. And there is much more scope to cut emissions from electricity than from many other parts of our economy.

Where to now?

No government can provide certainty for all these competing players. Each face their own risks and opportunities, and powerful disruptive forces are at work. Trying to provide certainty for some involves propping up declining business models, at the expense of positioning the Australian economy for the future.

Despite criticism from the federal energy minister states are likely to continue setting their own clean energy targets.

Businesses and households are investing to insure themselves against the policy mess and, in doing so, are transforming the energy system. Local councils and community groups are coordinating action. Emerging businesses are taking risks to capture opportunities. Existing energy businesses are trying to juggle their existing assets while transforming. State governments are trying to win votes and capture jobs in emerging industries. Meanwhile, the federal government’s party room is split over a clean energy target.

The challenge for governments is to nudge this chaotic system in ways that deliver equitable, affordable and reliable energy services.

Disclosure

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. He has shares in Hepburn Wind.

New data gathered by the Cassini probe suggests Saturn's icy bands formed relatively recently.

St Dennis, Cornwall From the moss-coated fort, spoil heaps dominate the view but close by sits the waste energy plant and a bog has become a nature reserve

From the ancient vantage point of Carne Hill, china-clay works dominate the landscape with vegetated spoil heaps, older conical tips and the whiteness of an open-cast pit at Fraddon.

The curved roofs and twin stacks of the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre are close by, and lower down, to the north, rows of pylons slung with cables stretch along the flat expanse of Goss Moor towards the electricity substation.

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Energy policy has become a complete circus as Coalition ignores the real policy decisions, and new reports identify more gaming of the energy markets, and why an ambitious clean energy target will be quickest path to a big drop in electricity bills.

Images of ants swarming together in ‘rafts’ and riding on top of floodwaters alarm Texans

There is a new threat to the millions of people in Texas affected by ex-hurricane Harvey: large “rafts” of fire ants that have been spotted floating in floodwaters.

Displaced by record flooding, the insects have responded by creating rafts built on top of dead ants to stay on the top of water and keep dry.

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CWP Renewables looking to build a 200MW solar farm to partner the 270MW Sapphire Wind Farm under construction near Glen Innes in NSW.

In another sign that the petroleum era is drawing to a close, Denmark is selling off its last oil company with barely a peep.

Most studies on climate mitigation have greatly underestimated the potential of solar power.

Navin75/Flickr, Australian Marine Conservation Society, ANU

The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd has called a halt to its famous missions tracking the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.

For the past 12 years the group’s boats have engaged in annual high-seas battles with vessels carrying out Japan’s self-described scientific whaling program. But Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson has admitted that Japan’s use of military-grade technology such as real-time satellite tracking has left the activists unable to keep up.

Watson also criticised the Australian government over its response to Japan’s whaling program, despite a global ban on most whaling.

Read more: Murky waters: why is Japan still whaling in the Southern Ocean?.

Scientific whaling is technically allowed under the International Whaling Commission’s treaty, and countries such as Japan have the right to decide for themselves what constitutes “scientific” in this context.

Australia is not the only government to be accused of reluctance to stand up to Japan. But in 2014, Japan’s pretext for whaling was finally discredited when Australia won a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. And, for a year, the Japanese whaling stopped.

This episode of Change Agents tells the back story of how that happened through the eyes of two key players, ANU legal academic Don Rothwell and Darren Kindleysides, who was then campaign manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare. They worked on a strategy to provide both the legal argument and the political will for Australia to take on Japan in the courts.

Change Agents is a collaboration between The Conversation and the Swinburne Leadership Institute and Swinburne University’s Department of Media and Communication. It is presented by Andrew Dodd and produced by Samuel Wilson and Andrew Dodd, with production by Heather Jarvis.

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