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A recovery from near total collapse has led North Sea cod stocks to be labelled as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council for the first time in 20 years

Fish and chip lovers can now enjoy North Sea cod with a clear conscience, after the fishery was awarded sustainable status by the Marine Stewardship Council on Wednesday.

Stocks of cod in the North Sea were once one of the world’s great fisheries but plummeted by 84% between the early 1970s and 2006. They came perilously close to the total collapse seen in the Grand Banks fishery off Canada in the early 1990s, which has still not recovered.

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Trevone to Padstow, Cornwall From higher land the ocean appears even more azure, like the sky now streaked with cirrus

Beneath the clearing sky, people gravitate from car park and cafe towards the life-guarded beach. By Roundhole Point, kayakers paddle and huddle around their instructor, and further west, low tide reveals the expanse of sand in Harlyn Bay.

Close to the shore alexanders along a track are clustered with an abundance of little stripy snails along the bare stems and among the umbels of black seeds. Perhaps these snails relish the celery flavour and thrive in the mild seaside weather, but (as with the tourists and sun-seekers) their numbers diminish away from the sea.

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Turnbull's recent use of the word "delusional" reminds us that climate denial is still alive and kicking in mainstream Australian politics.

German utility company EWE says it is planning to build the world’s largest battery based on flow technology in a pair of salt caves currently used to store natural gas.

Australian oil, gas and coal mining body, NERA, issues call for cleantech, renewable energy partnerships, says timing is "spot on" for collaboration.

BNEF says building new solar plants will be cheaper than shovelling coal into existing coal generators within 15 years. This will trigger a complete re-make of the energy system, and a share of wind and solar far beyond that contemplated by the Finkel Review.

Frydenberg defends AEMO chief Audrey Zibelman from attacks by conservative commentators.

Australian Greens Senator for South Australia Sarah Hanson-Young has called on Malcolm Turnbull to intervene to end the delay in fixing energy market rules, including the 5-minute rule, to allow battery storage to compete fairly.

Better gender diversity across the renewable energy industry requires leaders from both genders to step up and drive change, the Clean Energy Council said in launching its Women in Renewables Leaders’ Pledge today.

ARENA report shows less than half Australian businesses have tapped renewables. But there's no doubt the idea is starting to catch on.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise, so too does the number of books telling us what the consequences are, and what we can do. Two more have been released in the past few weeks – Anna Krien’s brilliant Quarterly Essay The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock, and the worthy Climate Wars by Labor’s shadow environment minister Mark Butler. Both deserve a wide audience.

Krien, author of Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests has a sharp eye for the right anecdote and a brilliant turn of phrase. Her reportage can be spoken of in the same breath as Elizabeth Kolbert’s seminal Field Notes from a Catastrophe. She has read extensively (I for one was not familiar with the Myxocene – the age of slime) and in researching her latest essay has clocked up thousands of miles as she dives on the Great Barrier Reef and travels inland to areas that will be affected by the proposed coal mine developments in the Galilee Basin.

Krien offers valuable insights into issues such as coal firm Adani’s negotiations with traditional owners, the battles over coal seam gas, and Port Augusta’s rocky transition from coal to – possibly – renewables. She talks to “ordinary” people, weaving their perspectives into the story while not losing sight of the climate deadlock in her title – the ongoing fight within the Liberal and National parties over climate and energy policy.

In one of many telling phrases she writes of the “Stockholm syndrome built on donations, royalties, taxes and threats” that bedevils Australian politics, pointing out that the fate that befell Kevin Rudd still looms large in the collective political memory. In the end, she returns to the Great Barrier Reef, and her final paragraphs pack an emotional punch that will stay with the reader for a long time.

My only quibble with Krien’s fastidious reporting is that, unlike previous Quarterly Essays, there are no footnotes. But maybe that’s only really an issue for nerds like me.

This is Quarterly Essay 66. Number 33 was Guy Pearse’s equally alarming Quarry Vision. In years to come, perhaps Quarterly Essay 99 might explain how we continued not to take action, as the consequences of climate change piled ever higher around us. Or how – alongside unexpected technological breakthroughs – we began finally to race against our nemesis, our own hubris. Time will tell.

Mark Butler is aiming to do something else besides just telling us about climate politics: as a shadow minister he is setting out Labor’s stall for the next federal election, whenever that might be.

Butler was climate minister in Rudd’s second, brief, government. In 2015-16 he undertook extensive consultations with business, community groups, academics and other “stakeholders” (surely everyone in the world is a stakeholder when it comes to the climate?). His book is essentially an extended advert for that process and its outcomes.

Butler’s prose is solid, and occasionally stolid, as he throws fact after report after statistic at the reader. However, he generally seeks to strike a constructive balance between “problem” and “solution”. There are only a few short chapters on the climate policy mess, with the bulk of the book concentrating on what a future Labor government proposes to do about it.

Inevitably, Butler is more critical of his political rivals, the Liberals and the Greens, than of his own party. You wouldn’t know from reading this book that it was Paul Keating’s Labor government who first began to use economic modelling to argue against emissions reductions, or that it was a Labor government who, in 1995, refused to institute a small carbon tax that would fund renewable energy.

Butler is also, oddly, flat-out wrong when he writes that former Labor minister Graham Richardson persuaded Prime Minister Bob Hawke to agree a 20% emissions reduction target before the 1990 federal election. It was actually his colleague Ros Kelly, in October 1990, and the “commitment” was carefully hedged.

These historical details matter, because we need to be able to hold politicians (and even ex-politicians) to account over their climate pledges. But many readers will nevertheless be more interested in what Butler says a Labor government will do, rather than what previous Labor governments didn’t.

Butler obliges, giving us chapters on “Labor’s clean power plan”, “Manufacturing and mining in a low-carbon world”, and “Low-carbon communities”. Occasionally he raises thorny problems (refugees, the coal industry) without really grappling with them. Given the ugly history around these issues (and the political Stockholm Syndrome identified by Krien), this is perhaps unsurprising.

Curiously, both books make a similar omission: they contain very little on the failures of policymakers and social movement organisations in the period from 2006 to 2012. In 2015, at the Labor Party’s national conference, I asked panellists – Butler was one – what had gone wrong during this time, which encompassed Kevin Rudd’s first prime ministership – in light of the fact that we had known about climate change since the late 1980s.

The other panellists gave thoughtful, sometimes self-critical answers. Butler kept schtum. Yet the question is worth asking if we are to avoid history repeating itself, this time as farce. We need smart people – and Krien and Butler are among them – to be asking how citizens can exert sustained pressure on existing governments and to build capacity to keep holding governments’ feet to the fire until they really and truly take climate policy seriously instead of just using it to score points and kill careers.

Ultimately, anyone interested in the future of Australia – and the future of climate policy – should read both of these books carefully. While Krien’s has some immediate use, its greater function will be something we can pull out of a time capsule to explain to young people 20 years hence that we knew exactly what was coming and what we had to do. It will help them understand why we didn’t do it.

Butler’s book will serve well over the next five years, as citizens try to hold a putative Labor government to its fine (if still inadequate) promises on the great moral challenge of our generation.

Dogs were tamed from a single wolf population between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, a study suggests.

The world’s biggest oil producers are starting to take electric vehicles seriously as a long-term threat.

Imagine a future in which every one of Australia’s 537 local government areas, achieve net zero greenhouse emissions. It might sound like a pipe dream, but it could be closer than you think.

Water pours through a sea wall in the Cornish village of Coverack on Tuesday after the area was hit by flash flooding. Emergency workers attempt to clear debris to allow water to flow back down to the ocean. Six people were trapped in a house in the village due to the flood waters but no injuries have been reported

• Homes evacuated as Cornwall hit by flash floods

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The City of Sydney is aiming to get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. HjalmarGerbig/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Imagine a future in which every one of Australia’s 537 local government areas, including all our capital cities and major regional centres, achieve net zero greenhouse emissions. It might sound like a pipe dream, but it could be closer than you think.

A new Climate Council report, released today, tracks the climate action being taken at the local government level. It gives myriad examples of cities, towns and local shires, in Australia and abroad, setting and achieving ambitious goals for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable transport.

In a 2016 Climate Institute survey of attitudes to climate change, 90% of respondents indicated that the federal government should shoulder the bulk of responsibility for action, with 67% saying Canberra should take a leading role. Yet given the current policy paralysis at Commonwealth level it is little wonder that some states seem determined to go it alone on setting ambitious clean energy targets.

Meanwhile, it’s at the local government level where enthusiastic action to embrace a more sustainable future is really taking off.

For some, the inspiration for action was a pledge by more than 1,000 mayors, local representatives and community leaders to move to 100% renewable energy. The promise was made on the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, at an event called the Climate Summit for Local Leaders.

Since then, US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement seems simply to have strengthened this resolve. More than 350 US mayors responded to Trump’s decision by pledging to reach 100% renewable energy for their communities by 2035.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that transforming the way energy is used and generated in cities and towns worldwide has the potential to deliver 70% of the total emissions reductions needed to stay on track for the 2℃ global warming limit set by the Paris Agreement. The IEA has described cities as the key to decarbonisation.

The leaders of some of Australia’s own major cities are certainly no slouches when it comes to climate aspiration:

• Canberra is on track to source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, with zero net emissions by 2050 at the latest.
• The City of Adelaide is aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2020
• The City of Sydney aims to source 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and to reach net zero emissions by 2030
• The City of Melbourne is aiming for 25% renewable electricity by 2018 and net zero emissions by 2020
• The City of Brisbane aims to make council operations carbon-neutral by 2017.

Ambitions are also high at regional and local council levels. One in five councils surveyed by Beyond Zero Emissions indicated they were aiming for “100% renewable energy” or “zero emissions”. Examples detailed in the Climate Council report include, among others:

• Yackandandah, Vic: 100% renewable energy by 2022
• Lismore, NSW: 100% renewable energy by 2023
• Uralla, NSW: 100% renewable energy in 5-10 years
• Newstead, Qld: 100% renewable energy by 2017
• Darebin, Melbourne: zero net emissions by 2020.

Power to cities

To coincide with the report, the Climate Council is also today launching its Cities Power Partnership, a free nationwide program that aims to transform Australia’s energy future from the ground up.

Thirty-five councils, representing more than 3 million Australians (12% of the population), signed up to the program even before it was launched. To join, councils identify five items in the “Power Partners pledge” that they will strive to achieve. These items include increasing the proportion of renewable energy generated within the local area; improving energy efficiency; providing sustainable transport options; building community sustainability partnerships; and engaging in climate advocacy.

The new Cities Power Partnership.

Participants will then complete a six-monthly online survey on progress. In return, the Cities Power Partnership will provide incentives for councils to deliver on their selected targets and to work together to help each other. Members of the partnership will have access to a national knowledge hub and an online analytical tool to measure energy, cost and emissions savings of projects. They will also be buddied with other councils to share knowledge; receive visits from domestic and international experts; be connected to community energy groups; and be celebrated at events with other local leaders.

Ultimately, the CPP is designed to help local communities sidestep the political roadblocks at national level, and just get on with the job of implementing climate policies.

These may be only small projects when considered individually, but the idea is to link them into a network that, together, can make a big difference to one of our most significant challenges. After all, the only way to eat an elephant is to take one bite at a time.

Lesley Hughes is a Councillor with the Climate Council of Australia and one of the authors of the report "Local Leadership: Tracking Local Government Progress on Climate Change".

The European Space Agency turns off one of its most successful ever missions - LISA Pathfinder.

Elephant Action League’s sting operation shows how horns are trafficked from Africa and enter into China via Vietnam, alleging official complicity

Rhinoceros horn can be easily bought in China despite it being illegal since 1993. The rhino horn products in antiques shop are far from antique. They are new and most likely been illegally trafficked from Africa to Vietnam and then into China.

A new report from Elephant Action League (EAL), Grinding Rhino: An Undercover Investigation on Rhino Horn Trafficking in China and Vietnam, shows how rhino horn makes its way into shops in China, the largest illegal market for rhino horn in the world. EAL’s 11-month investigation, called Operation Red Cloud, targeted the supply chain, exposing the players, the networks, and the means by which rhino horn is trafficked into China.

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Demand for cheaper food and lower production costs is turning green fields into industrial sheds to process vast amounts of meat and poultry

• UK has nearly 800 livestock mega farms, investigation reveals
  

Since the days of the wild west frontier, the popular image of American farming has been of cowboys rounding up steers on wide open ranches, to whoops, whips and hollers. Today, the cowboys on their ranches under wide open skies have been replaced by vast sheds, hulking over the plains, housing tens of thousands of animals each, with the noises and smells spreading far beyond their fences.

The US has led the world in large-scale farming, pioneering the use of intensive livestock rearing in hog farms, cattle sheds and sheep pens. There are now more than 50,000 facilities in the US classified as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), with another quarter of a million industrial-scale facilities below that threshold.

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Heavy rain in Turkey’s biggest city have caused substantial flooding on its roads and Metro network. Commuters attempting to get to work captured the scenes as rainwater invaded the city’s underground transport system, submerging rail tracks and rushing down flights of stairs. Rainfall is expected to decrease in the next 18 hours

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