The Guardian

Former Cop26 chair says emissions cuts must be made elsewhere and ministers must show how they plan to achieve this

Alok Sharma, the former Tory cabinet minister who chaired the landmark Cop26 UN summit in Glasgow, has warned Rishi Sunak that he will now have to find other ways to cut emissions if the UK is to meet its international climate obligations, following last week’s dramatic U-turns on green policy.

In his first comments since Sunak’s announcement on Wednesday, Sharma told the Observer that “rolling back on certain policies will mean we need to find emissions reductions elsewhere, if we are to meet our legally binding near term carbon budgets and our internationally committed 2030 emissions reduction target”.

Australia has three native corvid species, but their unearned reputation for cruelty and an all-too-human cleverness makes them unlikely to win a popularity contest

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Those who have experienced an Australian dawn chorus will know just how special our songbirds are. Within the somewhat discordant mix of melodies are many who will no doubt be favourites for Guardian Australia’s 2023 Australian bird of the year. But will the Corvidae family be in the running, even with the Australian raven on the shortlist? Not likely.

The Corvidae includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, Eurasian magpies, treepies, choughs (though not the Aussie ones) and nutcrackers. Australia has three native types of raven and two types of crow. Being generalists, Australians tend to call them all “crows”. Telling them apart can be tricky unless you’re close enough to see the base of their feathers – crows have white at the base and ravens have grey – or you’re familiar with the differences in their calls.

Group tasked with overseeing initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers was only set up in March

• ‘The worst kind of culture war’: Tories attack Rishi Sunak’s reversal on net zero

The government’s energy efficiency taskforce, charged with reducing the UK’s energy use by 15% by 2030, has been scrapped months after it was established.

The group, which was overseeing an initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers, was announced by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement last year as part of plans to boost investment in energy efficiency.

The prime minister’s attempts to turn the climate emergency into a US-style wedge issue have dismayed veteran MPs who champion green policies

Rishi Sunak’s decision to drive a “green wedge” between the Conservatives and Labour will take the UK into dangerous new political territory and “the worst kind of culture wars”, not seen for more than 30 years, senior Tory figures and political observers have warned.

Reversals and delays to net zero policy announced last week will be just the start of a general election campaign in which the UK’s longstanding cross-party political consensus on climate will be increasingly at stake. Emails sent to journalists from the Conservative campaign headquarters revealed lines of attack on targets including the independent Climate Change Committee and Labour’s proposed £28bn investment in a low-carbon economy.

It’s part of the language of environmental activism in the global south. But living in a UK city, I’d never connected with it

There stood, outside my front room window, until about a month ago, a proud little elder tree. A bough grew entwined with a towering hedge, separating our front garden from next door’s.

Mostly, to be fair, it was an ugly tangle of vegetation, out of place in our posh south London neighbourhood. But it was the perfect hiding place for prowling cats and skulking foxes, and a cosy roost for clumsy wood pigeons and darting songbirds. For years, we watched a saga of urban flora and fauna play out through the window of our living room: the burst of elderflower in the spring; the coming and going of swifts; the fluffy fat robins of winter.

Then, this summer, my children and I went for a few soggy days away in the Peak District, and came home to find our neighbour had had it all ripped out.

“Solastalgia” is a word coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003, in an effort to articulate how people in New South Wales felt about vast tracts of the region being ripped apart by strip coal mining. It refers, he said, to the “distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment”.

Damien Gayle is an environment correspondent for the Guardian

Once a mecca for petrol heads, this fresh incarnation of the car show hopes to meet Australia’s surging demand for electric vehicles

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More than a decade after the Australian International Motor Show was abandoned due to lack of interest, a leading showcase has returned to Melbourne without a petrol engine in sight.

Organisers believe the surging demand for electric vehicles in Australia can help revive showcase car shows – once a drawcard for petrol heads and car nerds, this fresh incarnation feels more like walking into an Apple store.

Six Portuguese young people claim inadequate policies to tackle global heating breach their human rights

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A key plank of the UK government’s defence against the biggest climate legal action in the world next week has fallen away as a result of the U-turn by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, on green policies.

The UK is one of 32 countries being taken to the European court of human rights on Wednesday by a group of Portuguese young people. They will argue in the grand chamber of the Strasbourg court that the nations’ policies to tackle global heating are inadequate and in breach of their human rights obligations.

Exclusive: Poll finds fewer than a quarter of people trust PM to tackle climate crisis after policy U-turn

Only 22% of people trust Rishi Sunak to tackle the climate crisis after his announcement that he will weaken the UK’s net zero policies.

An exclusive poll for the Guardian found that fewer than a quarter of people trust the prime minister to take on the challenge. A total of 53% said they did not trust him, while 19% said they did not know.

This year’s 40th annual survey of the way we think reveals a country that, for all its flaws, is more liberal and more social democratic than before

The problem with modern Britain, said Liz Truss in a recent interview, is that it remains in thrall to social democratic ideas ushered in by New Labour in 1997 and which the Conservatives have not been bold enough in combatting or reversing. This will have been news to much of the public, particularly those who remember the long years of Conservative austerity after 2010 and the Tory party’s self‑expulsion of Britain from the European Union after 2016. Neither of these dominant events of the last 13 years was a flagship social democratic policy last time we looked.

Yet Ms Truss is almost right in one respect. The British public has been moving slowly and steadily in a more social democratic direction in recent years. The publication this week of the 40th annual British Social Attitudes survey provides some of the evidence. It reveals, for instance, that the public does not only want government to fund health care and pensions, it also wants it to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. The public supports further increases in taxes and spending in order to fund public services too, in spite of the fact that taxes are already high by historic standards.

The economics of solar batteries has changed considerably in recent years, and could now reduce your total power bill – and emissions

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For many years, the idea of installing home batteries in Australia was, to put it bluntly, a bad deal.

Salespeople would spin numbers in their favour, conveniently ignoring the 20-plus-year payback period on a battery with just a 10-year warranty.

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Right this way, sir

Exclusive: two PR professionals from national oil firm listed as providing ‘support’ to team running UN climate summit

Senior executives from the UAE’s national oil company are working with the Cop28 team as the country ramps up its PR campaign ahead of the major UN climate summit later this year, leaked internal records show.

Two PR professionals from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) are identified as providing “additional support” to the team running the summit, according to a Cop28 communications strategy document obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the Guardian. It adds to growing evidence of blurred lines between the UAE’s Cop28 team and its fossil fuel industry.

Brazil's supreme court has blocked efforts to dramatically strip back Indigenous land rights in what activists called a historic victory for the South American country's original inhabitants. Nine of the court's 11 members voted against what rights groups had dubbed the 'time limit trick' - an agribusiness-backed attempt to prevent Indigenous communities claiming land they did not physically occupy in 1998

• Brazil supreme court rules in favor of Indigenous land rights in historic win

The prime minister is out of step with voters, who want to see bold action on the climate crisis, leaving an opening for Keir Starmer

On Tuesday, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN general assembly that on the climate crisis, “actions are falling abysmally short” and that leaders should take “drastic steps now”. He also reminded the world that G20 countries were responsible for 80% of greenhouse emissions and that “they must lead”.

But Rishi Sunak was elsewhere, the first British prime minister in a decade to miss this opportunity to show international climate leadership. And just hours after the speech, news broke of his plans to weaken domestic climate commitments.

Campaigners hit out at government for ‘ignoring science’ as it considers allowing use of a toxic neonicotinoid

Bee-killing pesticides have been found at dangerous levels in English rivers, as the government considers allowing the use of one that is banned in the EU.

Environmental groups and farmers are waiting to hear whether a toxic neonicotinoid, thiamethoxam, will be approved by the government for English sugar beet farms for a fourth consecutive year. Wildlife campaigners say it is “unacceptable” that ministers have “ignored the science” and allowed the use of these dangerous chemicals.

Country imposes first total fire ban in three years amid record-breaking September heatwave

Australia has declared the start of an El Niño weather phenomenon, with a record-breaking September heatwave gripping the south-eastern region that has prompted the country’s first total fire ban in three years. The Bureau of Meteorology reported extreme conditions, particularly prolonged heat, across parts of the continent. New South Wales (NSW) experienced temperatures soaring up to 16C above the September average, with Sydney reaching 34.4C, just shy of the all-time September record. NSW had 61 bushfires, 13 of which remained uncontained owing to forecasted strong winds, resulting in catastrophic fire danger.

El Niño typically leads to droughts in Australia, and the World Meteorological Organization had earlier predicted a 90% likelihood of El Niño conditions developing in the latter half of 2023.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including hungry bears, a goliath grouper and a dew-covered dragonfly

There is nothing Australians like more than running over living things in their car

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The cavalier way in which the latest U-turn has been presented reveals a government and a PM scrabbling for survival

After all the turmoil of recent years, you might think British politics had lost its capacity to shock. But a week in which some of the angriest voices raised against this week’s shameful climbdown on net zero come not just from passionate greens, but from car manufacturers and the energy industry? Now we really are through the looking-glass.

What happened this week was the most surreal opening to a long election campaign – for that’s surely what it was – I can recall. For the leader of the erstwhile party of business to water down climate policy and still somehow contrive to end up getting furiously attacked for it by Big Auto is surprising enough. Managing simultaneously to leave Boris Johnson claiming the moral high ground and Liz Truss looking relevant, given she had just called for such a retreat, is something else.

Exclusive: wildfires, once rare in the UK, more than doubled last year to nearly 24,000 with devastating effects on wildlife habitats

Wildfires recorded by UK fire brigades surged in 2022 amid extreme heat and droughts, new figures show, as a growing number of fire services invest in new equipment to deal with the rising fire risk due to climate change.

Figures obtained by the Guardian under Freedom of Information Act requests show the number of wildfires recorded by fire brigades in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland more than doubled last year, reaching 23,699 in 2022, compared with 9,307 the year before.