The Guardian

The commonwealth had state electrical vehicle taxes struck down in court. Now reform is stuck in the slow lane

Tax reform is hard. It creates winners and losers.

But there are some taxes that seek to correct unfairness and share the load more evenly.

On her @brutalistplants Instagram page, Olivia Broome collects photographs that combine the angular shapes of raw concrete with the greenery of the natural world. “I really enjoy the aesthetic of eco-brutalism and tropical modernism,” she says. “I love mezzanines and ziggurats, and when you pair them with plants it softens them up. Brutalism can be this quite harsh, austere architecture style, but with nature involved, it balances it all out.” Now collected in a book, the images bring together buildings from across the globe, from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka, London to Mexico. “It’s a pleasant movement that people can get behind, especially in smaller spaces and modern cities – it’s nice to fill them with plants and nature.”

• Brutalist Plants (Hoxton Mini Press, £20) will be published on Thursday

Fears Climate Change Committee’s advice not to allow carryover from last carbon budget will be ignored

Ministers are considering plans to weaken the UK’s carbon-cutting plans by allowing the unused portion of the last carbon budget to be carried over to the next period.

This would go against the strong recommendation of the government’s statutory climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee.

Climate scientists have told the Guardian they expect catastrophic levels of global heating. Here’s what that would mean for the planet

• World is on edge of climate abyss, UN warns
• Climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target

Global heating is likely to soar past internationally agreed limits, according to a Guardian survey of hundreds of leading climate experts, bringing catastrophic heatwaves, floods and storms.

Only 6% of the respondents thought the 1.5C limit could be achieved, and this would require extraordinarily fast, radical action to halt and reverse the world’s rising emissions from fossil fuel burning.

In a revolutionary approach, scientists are hoping that modifying the marsupial’s genes to resist cane toads’ toxin will save it from extinction

In a laboratory in the University of Melbourne earlier this year, PhD student Pierre Ibri was running an experiment that could prove to be a critical step in an audacious plan to save Australia’s endangered northern quoll.

In plastic trays were groups of tissue cells of another Australian marsupial – the common and mouse-like fat-tailed dunnart – that he was subjecting to the toxin of the cane toad, an invasive amphibian that has cut a swathe through populations of native animals in Australia’s north.

As a scientist, I’m faced with indifference and a failure to understand the reality of the climate crisis every day. We must wake people up

• Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL

Do you find climate breakdown funny? Do you think it’s a laughing matter that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children a planet changed for the worse beyond all recognition? I don’t – and I’m sure the presenters of Radio 4’s Today programme don’t either. But I couldn’t help feeling we were having a bit of a Don’t Look Up moment yesterday, hearing them brush off predictions by top climate scientists that our world will end up at least 2.5C hotter as depressing and “gloomy”. This is not to say that laughter and grim news shouldn’t or can’t go together. I work with comedians to help get the climate crisis message across, but we use humour to aid understanding and to help cope, not to denigrate and mock.

The truth is that most people, including many professional journalists, and most politicians, don’t really “get” climate breakdown. Partly this reflects a heads-in-the-sand attitude, but mainly it flags a poor understanding of just how bad things are set to get.

Group says two women in their 80s took hammer and chisel to protective glass at British Library

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass around Magna Carta at the British Library.

The Rev Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher, targeted the protective enclosure with a hammer and chisel on Friday morning.

Trust builds passes under road bisecting Berkshire commons for increasingly endangered venomous snake

How did the adder cross the road? It didn’t – it was too scared.

Now, however, road-shy populations of the increasingly endangered snake are being given a helping hand with the construction of Britain’s first adder tunnels.

Exclusive: Wopke Hoekstra says EU must press ahead with cutting greenhouse gases and use policy to bring about economic benefits

Europe’s climate chief has warned against politicians trying to use the climate crisis as a wedge issue in the forthcoming EU parliament elections, calling instead for climate policy that will bring wider economic benefits.

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU commissioner for climate action, said Europe had no choice but to press ahead with strong measures to cut greenhouse gases, whoever was in power, but added that more attention was needed to help businesses thrive in a low-carbon world.

NFU’s director of strategy asked for review of EU-derived protections as part of post-Brexit loosening of rules

The National Farmers’ Union lobbied to increase the amount of pesticides allowed in the UK’s drinking water and to allow farmers to spread manure more frequently as part of a post-Brexit loosening of environmental regulations, it can be revealed.

Nick von Westenholz, the director of strategy for the lobby group, met Timothy Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the Earl of Minto, who is the minister of state for regulatory reform, last year and asked him to review EU-derived environmental protections.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Trust aims to boost small pearl-bordered fritillary colonies in Shropshire Hills by planting 20,000 violets this year for their caterpillars

A mass planting of marsh violets across England’s Shropshire Hills is to take place to try to prevent further decline of the small pearl-bordered fritillary or Boloria selene, a rare UK butterfly.

The small pearl-bordered fritillary’s distribution across the UK has plunged 71% since the mid 1970s and the species is now listed as vulnerable, according to the 2022 state of UK butterflies report.

Waste and cost among drawbacks, as researchers say renewables could power UK entirely

In the battle to prevent the climate overheating, wind and solar are making impressive inroads into the once dominant market share of coal. Even investors in gas plants are increasingly seen as taking a gamble.

With researchers at Oxford and elsewhere agreeing that the UK could easily become entirely powered by wind and solar – with no fossil fuels required – it seems an anomaly that nuclear power is still getting the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies to keep the ailing industry alive.

A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children

“I had the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”

Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.

Fresh warnings about polluted rivers from the environment watchdog are shocking but not surprising

A steady stream of stories about the shockingly poor state of Britain’s waterways has turned into a flood. In March, news that competitors in the Boat Race had been warned to stay out of the Thames due to sewage pollution travelled round the world. That the water industry is dysfunctional, and for years has enriched shareholders and executives at the expense of customers, is broadly recognised by the public. Anglers, surfers and swimmers have joined with environmentalists and the former pop star Feargal Sharkey to demand improvements. Polling last year suggested more than half of voters would take the government’s handling of sewage into account when deciding how to vote.

The latest warnings about the situation from Dame Glenys Stacey, the environment watchdog, are thus not surprising. But her data and analysis still have the power to shock. Under the worst-case assessment from the Office for Environmental Protection, just 21% of England’s rivers and other bodies of water will be in a good ecological state by the target date of 2027 – in contravention of the Environment Act.

Farmers ‘on the brink’ after record rains, phasing out of EU subsidies and price volatility

British farmers are considering walking away from their farms as the recent record run of wet weather has left the sector “on the brink”, rural bodies have warned.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and the Soil Association raised concerns over the perilous situations facing many in their industry, with profits being squeezed and extreme weather driven by the climate crisis putting financial and mental strain on farm owners.

Experts issue warning after finding global average concentration in March was 4.7ppm higher than same period last year

The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.

The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period.

Move suggests homes will rely on electricity for low-carbon heating well into the future

A third pilot project to test the use of hydrogen heating in homes has been shelved by the UK government in the clearest sign to date that households will rely on electricity for low-carbon heating in the coming decades.

The government said it would shelve plans to develop a “hydrogen town” to test whether hydrogen could help to heat homes at scale before taking a final decision after 2026.

Fighting spirit helped us achieve the Paris accords in 2015 – and we need it now the world is on course to overshoot 1.5C

• ‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair

• Christiana Figueres was the head of the UN climate change convention from 2010 to 2016

“Hopeless and broken”: that is how a top scientist interviewed by the Guardian described feeling as she and hundreds of other climate experts shared harrowing predictions of the future of the planet this week.

I resonate with her feelings of despair. Even as the former head of the UN climate change convention that achieved the Paris agreement in 2015, I, like many, can succumb to believing in the worst possible outcome. Just after I assumed the role of UN climate chief in 2010, I said to a room full of reporters that I didn’t believe a global agreement on climate would be possible in my lifetime.

Top climate figures respond to Guardian survey of scientists who expect temperatures to soar, saying leaders must act radically

• Climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target

The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world’s foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C.

A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved.