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The dystopian picture of renewables painted by the opposition leader is full of inconsistencies, partial truths and misinformation

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The Coalition leader, Peter Dutton, has been trying to paint a picture of what life in Australia will be like if it tries to power itself mostly with renewable energy and without his technology of choice: nuclear.

Towering turbines offshore will hurt whales, dolphins and the fishing industry, factories will be forced to stop working because there’s not enough electricity and the landscape will be scoured by enough new transmission cables to stretch around the entire Australian coastline.

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Sarah Benn is first of three GPs facing disciplinary tribunals this year over climate activism

A doctor who went to jail after a series of climate protests has been taken off the medical register for five months – and still faces being permanently struck off.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) – the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC) – suspended Dr Sarah Benn on Tuesday, having found last week that her fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

Cooper Wallace wore a costume and lunged at some chips in his act at the impersonation contest in Belgium

A nine-year-old boy from Derbyshire has screeched his way to victory at the European championships of a gull impersonation competition.

Cooper Wallace, a gull enthusiast from Chesterfield, competed in the fourth European gull screeching championship in Belgium on Sunday.

Trudi Warner on a year being pursued by government lawyers determined to prosecute her over a jurors’ rights protest

Two days before Trudi Warner faced court under threat of a contempt of court prosecution, she fell off her bike and ruptured the tendons in her hand.

Now the hand is black and blue, tightly bandaged, and requires surgery. It is an indication that 69-year-old Warner, who spent her working life as a child social worker and has committed her retirement to climate action, is not as tough and unflappable as her demeanour suggests.

Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK is hopeful impasse can be overcome at treaty negotiations in Ottawa

As UN talks begin to agree the first global treaty to reduce soaring plastic waste, the chair of the meetings has said he is confident countries will come together to secure an agreement.

Luis Vayas Valdivieso, the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, admitted it would be a challenge to overcome an impasse that has emerged between countries which produce plastic and others that have ambitions to tackle plastic pollution over its whole life. But Valdivieso, who will chair the UN intergovernmental negotiations on a future international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada, this week, said: “We have to face those challenges and work with them. Compromise is an important word that we need to take into account.

Claire O’Neill, a former climate minister, says PM’s move was to ‘try and create political division and dividing lines’

The UK government’s decision to weaken some of its climate commitments was a “retrograde step” that will set back vital cross-party action to cut carbon emissions, Claire O’Neill, a former Conservative climate minister, has said.

O’Neill, who was known as Claire Perry when she served as a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, said the rolling back of emission reduction efforts by Rishi Sunak appeared to be a ploy for political advantage.

International Energy Agency says 17m vehicles will be sold this year, up more than 20% compared with 2023

Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales will jump to a new global record in 2024 despite slowing growth in some markets, according to forecasts from the influential International Energy Agency (IEA).

The Paris-based forecaster said that 17m battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will be sold in 2024, up more than 20% compared with 2023.

Chris Stark says populist response and culture war around the term is inhibiting environmental progress

The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked by a populist response to the net zero label, and he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

Historic hearing will receive submissions from people whose human rights have been affected by climate change

Julian Medina comes from a long line of fishers in the north of Colombia’s Gulf of Morrosquillo who use small-scale and often traditional methods to catch species such as mackerel, tuna and cojinúa.

Medina went into business as a young man but was drawn back to his roots, and ended up leading a fishing organisation. For years he has campaigned against the encroachment of fossil fuel companies, pollution and overfishing, which are destroying the gulf’s delicate ecosystem and people’s livelihoods.

Overseas firms sending key goods to UK would have to show they were paying for emissions or face CBAM

Ministers are under growing pressure to firm up plans for a green levy on imports to the UK before the general election campaign.

The government is consulting on plans to introduce a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) from 2027. Under the system, overseas companies wishing to export key goods to the UK would have to show they were paying for their carbon emissions, or face a levy equivalent to the price paid for carbon by UK manufacturers.

Proposed ‘fast-track’ law could see conservation concerns ignored and projects once rejected for environmental reasons given the green light

New Zealand’s parliament is considering a law that would allow major development projects to bypass environmental approvals – and that should be a cause for extreme alarm.

The proposed Fast-track Approvals Bill emerged from the coalition agreements that enabled a centre-right government to form after last year’s election.

Nicola Wheen and Andrew Geddis are professors of law at the University of Otago.

Europeans are dying from hot weather 30% more than they did two decades ago, report finds

Scorching weather has baked Europe in more days of “extreme heat stress” than its scientists have ever seen.

Heat-trapping pollutants that clog the atmosphere helped push temperatures in Europe last year to the highest or second-highest levels ever recorded, according to the EU’s Earth-watching service Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

From right to roam to anger over polluted rivers, a new breed of activists is pushing back against environmental destruction

Something very interesting is happening in the UK, to do with nature, the expanses of land we think of as the countryside, and where all those things sit in our collective consciousness. The change has probably been quietly afoot for 20 or 30 years. Now, it suddenly seems to be blurring over from the cultural sphere into our politics, with one obvious consequence – the belated entry into the national conversation of issues that have long been pushed to the margins, from land access and ownership to the shocking condition of our rivers.

The prevailing British attitude to nature has long been in an equally messed-up state. From the 1600s onwards, endless enclosure acts pushed people off the land and seeded the idea of the countryside as somewhere largely out of bounds. Britain’s rapid industrialisation only accelerated the process. And despite occasional cultural and political tilts in the opposite direction – the bucolic visions of the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, the mass trespass movement of the 1930s – most of us now show the signs of that long story of loss and estrangement.

Fly away home… You can have too much of a good thing

‘Look, a ladybird!’ This was how it started. My family were staying the night in a bed and breakfast near friends in rural England – we had driven through a landscape the colour of butter to park under a hillside upon which the shadows of clouds passed like curtains closing. I was medicated, pleasantly, can you tell, in a hangover from the most painful migraine of my life, and the clouds reminded me of the visual aura that flickers across your vision just before the headache begins. We put our bag on a chair, and there, inside the window frame, was a ladybird. And then, look, there was another one. The children gathered, by the window ready to be enchanted.

A group of ladybirds is called a “loveliness”, which, to me, sounds suspicious. Sounds problematic even. As if they have named themselves. A “conspiracy” of lemurs, that’s a good one, implies darkness, intelligence. A “bloat” of hippos, relatable. A “destruction” of wild cats, you’ve got a whole story there, beginning, middle, end. But a “loveliness”, please. Perhaps it’s my own must-work-on-it tendency towards tall poppy syndrome, perhaps I am inordinately disgusted by the ladybirds’ cloying self-satisfaction – I find the term embarrassing. However, there it was, a loveliness, crawling all over the window frame.

BBC nature presenter delivers eulogy at protest aimed at ‘scaring people a bit’ about the loss of biodiversity in the UK

The BBC nature presenter Chris Packham has joined hundreds of environmental activists in a mock funeral procession for nature to spotlight biodiversity loss in the UK.

The procession aimed to sound “code red for nature” and highlight the UK’s position as “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, organisers said. It was planned to coincide closely with Earth Day on 22 April.

Chris Stark, head of the Climate Change Committee, says Tories’ decision to dilute key green policies has had huge diplomatic impact

Rishi Sunak has given up Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the fight against the climate crisis and has “set us back” by failing to prioritise the issue in the way his predecessors in No 10 did, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Chris Stark, the outgoing head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that the prime minister had “clearly not” championed the issue following a high-profile speech last year in which he made a significant U-turn on the government’s climate commitments. The criticism comes after Sunak was accused of trying to avoid scrutiny of Britain’s climate policies by failing to appoint a new chair of the CCC.

Keir Starmer must learn from the Tories’ failures and ensure green projects are well planned and resourced

In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That’s the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.

In the UK, 14 years of austerity has left the public sector struggling to make coherent, strategic decisions. When a decision is finally made, it is a panic measure that quickly unravels. The fallout could be that voters become disenchanted with green tech, especially if the dash for net zero leads to higher taxes and higher borrowing while early adopters unwittingly pay for costly mistakes.

Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat-tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim.

Exclusive: Whistleblowers point to broader sewage scandal, with wastewater systems manipulated to divert sewage

Whistleblowers say UK water companies are knowingly failing to treat legally required amounts of sewage, and that some treatment works are manipulating wastewater systems to divert raw sewage away from the works and into rivers and seas.

It is well known that water companies are dumping large volumes of raw sewage into rivers and seas from storm overflows but an investigation by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations reveals that the industry’s “dirty secret” is bigger, broader and deeply systemic.

Video shows trees and shrubs along Western Australia's south-west coastline turning brown after Perth recorded it hottest and driest six months since records began. There were similar scenes in the state's south-west eucalypt forests in 2010 and 2011 – a major die-back event that prompted more than a dozen studies. Drought-hit forests were hit by fire years later