The Guardian

Rachel Notley supports a switch to clean energy to help Canada’s biggest oil-producing province move beyond fossil fuels within a century

The leader of Canada’s biggest oil-producing province has declared she sees no long-term future in fossil fuels, predicting Alberta would wean itself off dirty energy within a century.

In an early reveal of her forthcoming new energy policy, Alberta’s Rachel Notley said she would fight climate change by cleaning up the tar sands, shutting down coal-fired power plants, and converting to wind and solar power.

With a quarter of a million fatalities every year, health organisations are struggling to cope. Now antivenom supplies are also under threat

In the late 1970s, a 50-year-old farmer was working in his fields in the Hausa region of west Africa when was he was bitten on the ankle by a snake, probably a carpet viper. Within two hours his leg was badly swollen. The unnamed man, whose case is included in a report by a group of doctors led by Oxford University tropical medicine specialist David Warrell took herbal medicine but continued to sicken. Six days later he was taken to hospital, where doctors found that his urine was bloodstained and he had suffered intense internal haemorrhages. A day later, he died.

The farmer’s fate was grim, if not uncommon at the time, but now, decades later, deaths from snakebites are still on the rise. Recent evidence shows that hundreds of thousands of individuals are dying every year as a result of encounters with cobras, vipers or kraits.

In the school summer holiday of 1937, the conservationist Ted Smith, who has died aged 95, cycled 14 miles from his home in rural Lincolnshire to Gibraltar Point. The sixth-former took his cheap binoculars to look for terns on this lonely stretch of sand and salt marsh beyond Skegness and, surrounded by sky and sea, he fell in love with the place. He noted three “gaudy new houses” on a road cut into the sand dunes, typical of the unrestrained development then enveloping the British coastline.

A passion for wildlife and its habitats fired Smith for the rest of his life. This unassuming teacher battled against the tides of his time, industrial agriculture, toxic pesticides, the supplanting of ancient woods with conifers, the ploughing of heaths, and urban development, to cajole into existence a national network of 47 conservation charities now known as the Wildlife Trusts. Smith combined practical action – saving the last fragments of heath, meadow and coast (including Gibraltar Point) from destruction in Lincolnshire – with farsighted thinking, stressing the importance of landscape-scale conservation and the need to open the trusts’ 2,300 nature reserves to the public.

The people behind a manifesto for solving environmental problems through science and technology are intelligent but wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation

Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.

On Thursday, a group of people who call themselves Ecomodernists launch their manifesto in the UK. The media loves them, not least because some of what they say chimes with dominant political and economic narratives. So you will doubtless be hearing a lot about them.

In a bid to reduce CO2 emissions in the 90s, Europe backed a major switch from petrol to diesel cars but the result was a rise in deadly air pollution

Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests for diesel cars comes after nearly 20 years of the technology being incentivised in Europe in the knowledge that its adoption would reduce global warming emissions but lead to thousands of extra deaths from increased levels of toxic gases.

Diesel was a niche market in Europe until the mid-1990s, making up less than 10% of the car fleet. Diesels produce 15% less CO2 than petrol, but emit four times more nitrogen dioxide pollution (NO2) and 22 times more particulates - the tiny particles that penetrate the lungs, brain and heart.

A man seeking to be the world’s first climate change refugee has been booked on a flight home to Kiribati on Wednesday, despite his lawyer saying that is a breach of justice, reports Stuff.co.nz

Ioane Teitiota has been in custody in Mount Eden Prison, one of two private prisons in New Zealand, after his bid to claim climate change refugee status was dismissed last week.

He was arrested by police and immigration officials at his West Auckland home on Tuesday morning for overstaying his permit.

Overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue, the Hinkley project needs to be killed off and the money invested into other low-carbon technologies

• Read more: Nuclear supporting environmentalists in call to scrap Hinkley C plans

As committed environmentalists, our conversion to the cause of nuclear power was painful and disorienting. All of us carried a cost in changing our position, antagonising friends and alienating colleagues. But we believe that shutting down – or failing to replace – our primary source of low carbon energy during a climate emergency is a refined form of madness.

Because atomic energy provides a steady baseload of electricity, it has great potential to balance the output from renewables, aiding the total decarbonisation of the power supply. The dangers associated with nuclear power have been wildly exaggerated, all too often with the help of junk science. Climate breakdown presents a far greater hazard to human life. The same goes for the air pollution caused by burning coal.

Green campaigners say recent removal of 500-year-old virgin forest is an ecological disaster and dismiss officials’ ‘patronising’ offer to restore habitat

Campaigners in South Korea have accused organisers of the 2018 winter Olympics of destroying a “sacred” forest to make room for a ski slope, and dismissed official assurances that the site will be restored to its original state after the Games.

Environment groups say the recently-completed removal of tens of thousands of trees from the slopes of Mount Gariwang, including ancient and rare species, amounts to an ecological disaster.

Two kayakers outside the harbour of Moss Landing in California have a narrow escape on Monday after a large humpback whale launches out of the water and lands on them. Fortunately neither of the people on the kayak was hurt and the video from Sanctuary Cruses shows stills of the (fairly surprised) pair after the event

Scientists describe the highly camouflaged Kimberley death adder, native to Western Australia, as one of the world’s most venomous snakes

Related: Snakebite treatment 'will run out next year'

Ophidiophobics should fret not, but Australia has a new species of snake. Scientists have identified a new type of death adder in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

A moneyless economy shows how our lives are intrinsically linked to the great web of life. In this deep ecology, our security comes from our relationships with people and nature

With little idea of what I was to expect, or how I was to go about it, seven years ago I began living without money. Originally intended as a one-year experiment in ecological living, I wanted to explore how it felt as a human being to live without the trappings and security that money had long-since afforded me. While terrifying and tough to begin with, by the end of the first year I somehow found myself more content, healthier and at peace than I had ever been. And although three years later I made a difficult decision to re-enter the monetary world – to establish projects that would enable others to loosen the grip that money has on their lives – I took from it many lessons that have changed my life forever.

For the first time I experienced how connected and interdependent I was on the people and natural world around me, something I had previously only intellectualised. It is not until you become physically aware of how your own health is entirely reliant on the health of the great web of life, that ideas such as deep ecology absorb themselves into your arteries, sinews and bones.

Greenpeace says it has uncovered a large illegal tuna fishing operation in the waters of Papua New Guinea after apprehending a Taiwanese ship with 75kg of shark fins. Irregularities in the ships log book raised activists’ suspicions and they later found that the Shuen De Ching No.888 had no fishing licence for the area

The British countryside is becoming a playground for millionaires. We need more broadcasters that dare to take on wildlife killers like the Countryside Alliance

Chris Packham should wear the Countryside Alliance’s attempt to have him silenced with pride. It’s another indication that, in the eerie wasteland of the BBC’s rural coverage, his is one of the very few voices prepared to tell us what is really going on.

The Countryside Alliance, which represents people who kill wild animals, demands that unless he stops speaking out against the persecution of wildlife, “the BBC’s only answer can be to remove the BBC from Chris Packham’s biography by refusing to employ him any more.”

Biodegradeable water packaging made from seaweed and new way of dyeing clothes have won joint award for new sustainable products

An edible alternative to plastic water bottles made from seaweed has topped the UK round of an EU competition for new, more sustainable products.

The new spherical form of packaging, called Ooho and described by its makers as “water you can eat”, is biodegradeable, hygenic and costs 1p per unit to make. It is made chiefly from calcium chloride and a seaweed derivative called sodium alginate.

With authorities ineffective, the 2,200-strong Ka’apor, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are taking on the illegal loggers with technology and direct action

With bows, arrows, GPS trackers and camera traps, an indigenous community in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.

The Ka’apor – a tribe of about 2,200 people in Maranhão state – have organised a militia of “forest guardians” who follow a strategy of nature conservation through aggressive confrontation.

New work is first in the world to set a national baseline and will detect any rise in earthquakes following an expansion of shale gas exploration in the future

At least three earthquakes strike the UK every year as the result of human activity, according to a new study.

Most of the tremors in recent decades resulted from coal mining, but fracking exploration caused two small earthquakes in 2011. The new work is the first in the world to set a national baseline and will allow the detection of any rise in earthquakes that follows an expansion of UK shale gas exploration in the future.

Queensland scientist Jeff Johnson, who identified species from photos, formally christens combative reef fish Plectorhinchus caeruleonothus

The “blue bastard”, an elusive and uniquely combative reef fish from northern Australia, long known only in fishing folklore, has been recognised officially by science.

Queensland Museum scientist Jeff Johnson, who identified the species from photos taken last year by a Weipa fisherman, has formally christened it Plectorhinchus caeruleonothus – a direct Latin translation of the colloquial name anglers bestowed on a fish famously difficult to land.

Crocodile researcher warns the reptiles face a ‘bleak future’, but Australia’s saltwater and freshwater species have a brighter outlook due to hunting ban

As many as half of the world’s 27 species of crocodilian face being wiped out due to human activity, although the most feared variety, the saltwater crocodile, faces a brighter future, according to a new book by a veteran crocodile researcher.

Land use changes, pollution, culling and feral animal invasions mean that many crocodile species face a “bleak future”, warned Professor Gordon Grigg of the University of Queensland.

They are touted as a free source of clean, unlimited energy to heat your water but the first independent test suggests they are not as efficient as thought

Thermodynamic panels have been touted as “a free source of natural, clean and inexhaustible energy providing 100% of your hot water needs, 365 days of the year”. For around £5,000 to buy and install, they sound too good to be true – and the first independent tests suggest they are.

Thermodynamic panels are similar to air-source heat pumps and work like refrigerators in reverse.

Jean-Luc Kister was one of a team which planted mines on the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, killing photographer Fernando Pereira

A French secret service diver who took part in the operation to sink Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago has spoken publicly for the first time to apologise for his actions.

Jean-Luc Kister, who attached a mine to the ship’s hull, says the guilt of the bombing, which killed a photographer, still weighs heavily on his mind.