The Guardian
Gas supplies to rise and secret contracts to be scrapped under Coag reform plan
States agree to develop coal seam gas and make deals more transparent in an effort to increase competition and reduce prices
Gas supplies in Australia will be expanded and suppliers forced to publish previously secret prices under reforms agreed to by state and federal ministers at the Coag energy council meeting in Canberra.
All states except Victoria, which has a blanket ban on coal seam gas, agreed to focus on expanding onshore gas activities. The state government in Melbourne agreed to consider its position.
Continue reading...Water voles to be reintroduced to England's highest lake
National Trust will release 100 of the endangered animals, not seen at Malham tarn in Yorkshire dales for 50 years
Britain’s endangered water voles will reach new heights when they are returned to Yorkshire’s Malham tarn for the first time in 50 years.
Around 100 water voles will be reintroduced on Friday to the National Trust estate in the Yorkshire dales, home to England’s highest freshwater lake, in what the trust says is the highest-altitude reintroduction of the species it has carried out in Britain.
Continue reading...High on Kinder Scout, land at the end of its tether
Kinder Scout, Derbyshire Far from being a dismal, greasy world of chocolate peat, the plateau appeared luxuriantly green
There is something littoral about the northern rim of Kinder Scout, the plateau that includes Derbyshire’s highest point. Its start in life was estuarine. Its famous gritstone cap, abrasive icing on a sedimentary layer cake, began as infill of a vast river delta, a Ganges in north Derbyshire. As I picked my way westwards along this narrow shoreline, between Kinder’s summit plateau and the sky, the setting sun emerged below the level of the cloud. The moors to my right – Howden, Alport and Bleaklow – were suddenly bathed in light.
Related: Country diary: Kinder Scout: A silent brooding crowd on the moor
Continue reading...Culling 5,000 brumbies: 41 scientists back controversial Kosciuszko proposal
Academics say plan to slash number of wild horses is needed to protect delicate Snowy Mountains environment
A plan to cull more than 5,000 brumbies in the Snowy Mountains has received the support of leading scientists from around Australia.
Forty-one scientists from 16 universities have written to the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, to support the proposed cull of 90% of the brumby population in Kosciuszko national park.
Continue reading...Conjoined baby turtle saved by Italian marine biologists
Survivor from twin endangered loggerheads is separated by scientists and freed in Mediterranean Sea
Marine biologists in southern Italy have separated conjoined twin loggerhead turtles and released the surviving newborn into the Mediterranean Sea.
The release occurred this week along the beaches of Campania where the endangered loggerheads nest every year.
Continue reading...'Secret' gas contracts hurting competition, Josh Frydenberg says
Coag meeting will agree on a significant suite of reforms, federal energy and environment minister says
• If energy ministers bow to gas industry they’ll be deciding in the dark
A meeting of state and territory energy ministers will tackle secret long-term gas contracts in an effort to make the sector more competitive, the federal environment and energy minister has said.
Speaking to ABC’s AM on Friday, Josh Frydenberg took aim at the opaque contracts’ role in raising the price of domestic gas. Australia had a tight gas market because it was exporting liquid natural gas, he said, raising the domestic price to world levels.
Continue reading...If energy ministers bow to gas industry they'll be deciding in the dark
Coag meeting could spark a run on exploration and development – yet do nothing to increase competition
• Secret gas contracts hurting competition, Josh Frydenberg says
Friday’s meeting of every energy minister in Australia is looking to be at risk of bowing to gas industry demands and sparking a run on gas development around the country to head off a supposed shortage.
If they do that, it will be in the absence of any clear picture of actual gas supplies in Australia.
Continue reading...New online trawler tracking tool aims to help end overfishing
Developers hope the tool, that enables anyone with internet access to track fishing vessels worldwide, will create greater transparency in the oceans
Anyone with internet access and a passion for seafood will soon be able to track commercial fishing trawlers all over the world, with a new tool that its developers hope will help end the overfishing that has decimated the world’s fish stocks.
Millions of people depend on fish to survive, and fish will be vital to feeding the world’s growing population that is predicted to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, the United Nations says.
Continue reading...Honeysuckle climbs for sunlight in the wood's deep shadow
Backstone Bank, Weardale Spring has given way to stillness – the gentle descent into autumn will soon begin
It had been more than four months since we last walked through this woodland. Gone were the songs of wood warblers and blackcaps. Gone too the carpet of spring flowers, of woodruff, sanicle, primroses, wood sorrel and bugle, now hidden under arching fern fronds below a closed canopy of leathery oak leaves.
Related: Icy gales shake the trees above spring’s first new growth
Continue reading...Donations to restore Great Barrier Reef could dry up if land clearing continues, says donor
Exclusive: Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist says private investment to clean up reef ‘doesn’t make sense’ with current land clearing
Private investment in work to restore the Great Barrier Reef is likely dry up if the Queensland government fails to pass tighter land-clearing laws, warns Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist.
David Thomas, who has donated $30m and bequeathed another $30m to environmental causes in Australia, told Guardian Australia that state and federal governments’ drive for private investment in Great Barrier Reef water quality projects would be unsuccessful if rampant land clearing continues.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on the heatwave: still hope on climate change | Editorial
The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.
Continue reading...Tidal energy support ebbs and flows | Letters
Steve Emsley is wrong when he compares tidal lagoons with Hinkley and asks why tidal energy is not even being discussed (Letters, 17 August). The latest estimated cost of the lagoon proposed for Swansea Bay is £1.3bn. Hinkley would produce 65 times as much electricity, all day, every day – true “baseload”. Tidal lagoons would produce variable amounts (four times as much on a spring tide as on a neap tide in Swansea and a bigger difference further up the Severn estuary) and the generation would be intermittent (four three-hour blocks a day) – that’s not “baseload”.
Lagoons could only produce 8% (about 25TWh a year) of the UK’s electricity requirements (a figure challenged by tidal energy experts), if five others followed Swansea, each many times larger and much more costly than Swansea (many times more than £5bn in total). But consent for the next two (huge lagoons further up the Severn estuary off Cardiff and Newport) is most unlikely because of various EU environmental designations (special area of conservation, special protection area etc). As to why no one is discussing them: in fact, Charles Hendry is conducting a review of tidal lagoons to assess, among other things, whether they could play a cost-effective role in the UK energy mix (see www.hendryreview.com). Some think the review was prompted by belated government realisation that the figures bandied around for lagoons just don’t add up.
Phil Jones
Ynystawe, Swansea
The coral die-off crisis is a climate crime and Exxon fired the gun | Bill McKibben
This week we’re staging protests on the ‘crime scene’ of the world’s affected reefs to send a signal that we’re not going to let fossil fuel firms get away with murder
Coral reefs are probably Earth’s most life-packed ecosystem; those who’ve had the privilege of diving in the tropics know the reef as an orderly riot of colour and flow, size and shape.
Which is why a white, dead reef is so shocking – as shocking in its way as a human corpse lying on the street, which still takes the form of the living breathing person it used to be, but now suddenly is stopped forever, the force that made it real suddenly and grotesquely absent.
Continue reading...Visitors rush to the Great Barrier Reef to catch it before it’s gone
Survey finds that 69% of visitors to the world’s largest coral reef system are motivated by the fear that it might disappear, reports Climate Home
In a reversal of the normal travel bucket list, tourists are rushing to see the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.
Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.
Continue reading...A deep sea dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths – video
Guardian environment reporter Oliver Milman joins a group of scientists on an underwater expedition off the Bermuda coast to help chart its hidden depths and gauge the general health of the area’s reef and coral. Travelling in a two-man submersible, Milman and submarine pilot Kelvin Magee go on a journey 500ft below the surface
Continue reading...The deep ocean: plunging to new depths to discover the largest migration on Earth
The deep ocean makes up 95% of Earth, yet only 0.0001% has been explored – the Guardian joined a mission off Bermuda looking deeper than ever before
Video: a dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths
The largest migration on Earth is very rarely seen by human eyes, yet it happens every day. Billions of marine creatures ascend from as far as 2km below the surface of the water to the upper reaches of the ocean at night, only to then float back down once the sun rises.
This huge movement of organisms – ranging from tiny cockatoo squids to microscopic crustaceans, shifting for food or favourable temperatures – was little known to science until relatively recently.
Continue reading...How the fossil fuel industry's new pitch is more like an epitaph than a life lesson
New fossil fuel advocacy group launched to celebrate an industry that’s driving dangerous climate change
Bright and glistening with all the glory of youth and promise, her eyes glance upwards. A jet crosses a cloudless sky.
A field of wheat sways in the breeze. She opens her arms in a wide embrace, open to the horizon.
Continue reading...The Queen and David Attenborough urged to cut ties with charity linked to Finland mining plans
Flora and Fauna International has been hired by a British mining firm to assess the environmental value of a national park in the Arctic circle
Environmentalists and indigenous reindeer herders are calling on the Queen, Sir David Attenborough and Stephen Fry to disassociate themselves from a charity contracted to help a mining operation in a national park in Finland.
Fauna and Flora International (FFI), whose patron is the Queen, has been hired by the British-listed mining company Anglo American to assess the environmental value of Viiankiaapa, a stunning 65 sq km (25 sq mile) habitat for 21 endangered bird species in the Arctic circle.
Continue reading...'We have to stop the bulldozers': swaths of koala habitat lost, say activists
Queensland’s relaxed land-clearing laws have allowed 84,000ha of habitat to be destroyed and must be rolled back, say WWF and Australian Koala Foundation
A relaxation in Queensland’s tree clearing laws led to the destruction of 84,000 hectares of critical koala habitat in the two years after the national icon was listed as vulnerable, according to new mapping by conservationists.
That koala habitat made up about 14% of all land cleared between mid-2013 and mid-2015 was an alarming revelation, WWF and the Australian Koala Foundation said.
Continue reading...Scotland's rare mountain plants disappearing as climate warms, botanists find
Research by the National Trust for Scotland shows rare mountain plants in the Highlands and islands are retreating higher or disappearing entirely
There is clear evidence that some of Britain’s rarest mountain plants are disappearing due to a steadily warming climate, botanists working in the Scottish Highlands have found.
The tiny but fragile Arctic plants, such as Iceland purslaine, snow pearlwort and Highland saxifrage, are found only in a handful of locations in the Highlands and islands, clustered in north-facing gullies, coires and crevices, frequently protected by the last pockets of late-lying winter snow.
Continue reading...