The Guardian

Climate campaigners dismiss government argument that controversial move will improve food security

Rishi Sunak plans to restrict the installation of solar panels on swathes of English farmland, which climate campaigners say will raise bills and put the UK’s energy security at risk.

Last year, then prime minister Liz Truss attempted to block solar from most of the country’s farmland. The plans were deeply controversial and unpopular, and were dropped when she left office.

The climate’s changing and so is the terminology

Dale Vince says he will concentrate his efforts on getting Tories voted out of government at next election

• Dale Vince: I helped fund Just Stop Oil, but no more

Dale Vince, the green energy magnate, has said he is to stop funding direct action climate groups such as Just Stop Oil and instead funnel money towards getting the vote out for Labour at the next general election.

The Ecotricity founder, who has funded a string of disruptive environmental protest groups, has supported Just Stop Oil since its inception, and has previously said his funding for the group has totalled “some hundreds of thousands”.

Government challenged to explain claim that UK will need 25% of energy to come from fossil fuels in 2050

UK politics live – latest updates

The UK government has “misrepresented” the Climate Change Committee (CCC) by wrongly claiming it said we would need a quarter of our energy to come from fossil fuels by 2050, scientists have said.

In order to justify signing off new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, ministers have said the country will still require a quarter of its energy to come from gas in 2050, the year the UK is supposed to meet net zero.

Study proposes government commission more research into environmental benefits of cattle feed additives

Sweden is one step closer to making the use of methane-reducing cow feed additives such as seaweed government policy after experts recommended further investigation into the area.

A report by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency into reduced methane emissions says development in the field has been “rapid in recent years” and is among “a number of new interesting additives with higher potential”.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including an endangered rhino, a reindeer herd and a roaring stag

Class politics is nowhere more visible than in the protected slaughter of game, with disastrous effects on our countryside

It’s one of the bluntest expressions of class power in the United Kingdom. Like all expressions of class power, it has become normalised until we treat it as a fixed fact of national life. I’m talking about the bronze plague that spreads over the British lowlands every year, wiping out much of our wildlife: pheasants.

This week, the pheasant shooting season began, appropriately coinciding with the Conservative party conference. Killing them requires no physical exertion and a limited skillset, as the birds are driven over the heads of the shooters by people hired to flush them out of the woods. The men (almost all are) with the guns spray shot at the low-flying birds, killing some, wounding some, missing others. One estimate suggests that between 30% and 40% of all the pheasants shot are wounded and not recovered, dying slowly in the woods.

It costs how much?! Seriously?

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Cargill and ADM led push to weaken new protections for threatened ecosystems in South America, report says

Cargill and ADM, two of the world’s leading livestock feed companies, helped to scupper an attempt to end the trade in soya beans grown on deforested and threatened ecosystem lands in South America, a new report alleges.

Soya is one of the cheapest available types of edible protein, and is in huge demand for feed for animals around the world; as our consumption of meat and dairy has risen globally, the need for soya has soared too.

National Trust predicts reversal of last year’s dull October and November, with show starting in Scotland

After a disappointing season last year when the wrong sort of weather at the wrong time made the autumnal colours of the UK’s parks, gardens and woodlands duller than usual, this October and November are expected to be brighter.

The National Trust said on Friday that this autumn, people could look forward to particularly dazzling displays of reds, ambers, butter yellows and russet browns.

The moment has arrived – and the swift parrot has taken the crown for 2023 after the votes for the final 10 candidates

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The critically endangered swift parrot is the 2023 Australian bird of the year.

Voters in the Guardian/BirdLife Australia biennial poll have used this year’s competition to send a message that they want to see the habitat of the world’s fastest parrot protected.

Critically endangered parrot narrowly pips the tawny frogmouth, runner-up for the third time in the biennial Guardian/BirdLife Australia poll

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The critically endangered swift parrot is the 2023 Australian bird of the year.

Voters in the Guardian/BirdLife Australia biennial poll have used this year’s competition to send a message that they want to see the habitat of the world’s fastest parrot protected.

Starting with 50 birds and ending 11 days later, with only 10 left in the running, Lenore Taylor announces the winner of the 2023 Guardian/BirdLife Australia bird of the year. The swift parrot soared to first place in the final round of voting, followed closely by the tawny frogmouth in second place (for the third poll in a row), and the gang-gang cockatoo placed third

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Help BirdLife Australia build a picture of how our birds are faring by joining the Aussie Bird Count. You can’t solve a problem you don’t know you have

• Find all our bird of the year content
• Download your Australian birds poster as a JPEG or PDF file

Recently I visited Tokyo for the first time and was immediately struck by the bird calls I would hear at each train station. In an urban conglomeration of 37 million people, it was a pleasant surprise to think birds were thriving. It wasn’t until I heard the distinctive two-note call of a cuckoo that I became suspicious.

It was then that I discovered that they piped in bird sounds to help visually impaired people navigate around the extremely busy stations. In the vast megapolis itself there were very few birds. With the lack of rubbish on the streets, there were hardly even any pigeons or crows compared with Australian cities.

Artist Georgia Angus has drawn 23 birds from this year’s poll and we’ve created a poster for Guardian readers to download and enjoy. Use it as a desktop background, print it as an A3 poster, a tea towel or a tote bag – the choice is yours

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To celebrate another year of recognising our country’s wonderful birdlife, we are offering readers a glorious A3 poster featuring some of our best-loved avian species – birds that can hopefully unite a divided nation.

Georgia Angus, an artist and the author of 100 Australian Birds, provided all the illustrations which include the highly ranked gang-gang cockatoo, the powerful owl, the Gouldian finch, the tawny frogmouth and many others.

Floods, fires and record-breaking heat demand a response from politicians, as well as Pope Francis

Another month of smashed temperature records has left scientists searching for words with which to describe what is happening. “Gobsmackingly bananas” was the phrase alighted on by Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth climate data project. This was the hottest September on record, following the hottest August and the hottest July. It beat the previous September record by 0.5C, the largest jump in temperature ever seen.

In the UK, where the summer was wet and many people have enjoyed unseasonably warm early autumn days, the disruption has not been anything like as destructive as elsewhere. But floods, fires and exceptionally high temperatures are becoming more and more frequent – with the overflow of Lhonak Lake in India, and the wildfires and baking heat in Tenerife among the latest emergencies.

Former Bank of England governor says businesses prioritise countries with clean power and consistent strategies

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Rishi Sunak watering down the UK’s climate commitments has damaged Britain’s position on the world stage for business investment, according to the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney.

In highly critical comments, Carney indicated that global companies would now think twice about locating their activities in the UK after Sunak pushed back key net zero deadlines and sanctioned new oil and gas drilling.

Rishi Sunak’s risible rhetoric about a divide between motorists and ‘woke’ spoilsports is easy to counter – but Labour shows little sign of wanting to do so

Following hard on the prime minister’s defence of the drivers who are supposedly victimised by London’s Ulez extension, and Penny Mordaunt’s rubbishing of 20mph speed limits in Wales (currently in force in parts of her own constituency), we now have the transport secretary, Mark Harper, denouncing “sinister … so-called 15-minute cities”.

This dismissal of measures that provide safer, pleasanter and more sustainable urban living is being pressed in the name of “freedom”: the freedom of city-dwellers to live unharassed by meddling environmentalist do-gooders; the freedom, in Sunak’s words, of drivers “to use their cars to do all the things that matter to them” – a liberty supposedly under threat from the “anti-motorist” Labour party.

Kate Soper is emeritus professor of philosophy at London Metropolitan University. Her most recent book is Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. Martin Ryle writes about politics and the environment. He is the author of the book Ecology and Socialism

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The sound of ‘super predator’ human voices instils more terror around the waterhole than the big cats’ roar, researchers discover

The lion has long been regarded as the world’s most fearsome terrestrial carnivore, but the “king of beasts” has been toppled by humans, new research shows.

Elephants, rhinos and giraffes are all now more afraid of people than other apex predators, according to a scientific paper that supports the idea that humans are the world’s “super predator”.

Sex determination of sea turtles is temperature dependent, with the proportion of female hatchlings increasing when nests are warmer

Similar numbers of female and male green and hawksbill turtles are hatching in the Coral Sea’s Conflict Islands, new research suggests, despite global heating increasingly leading to “extreme feminisation” of sea turtles.

Sea turtles are particularly susceptible to the effects of global heating because their sex determination is temperature dependent, with the proportion of female hatchlings increasing when nests are warmer.