The Guardian

Centre-right group fail to win enough support to defeat proposals after knife-edge voting

The EU’s flagship environment law to restore biodiversity on land and rivers is hanging by a thread after a rebellion mounted by a centre-right group of MEPs failed to block the proposed legislation from going to the next stage in the parliamentary process.

In a dead heat, 44 MEPs voted in favour and 44 against the nature restoration law that was proposed last year as a fundamental part of the EU’s green deal.

Early data shows June temperatures hitting record highs ahead of El Niño that experts say will have significant heating effect

Global temperatures have accelerated to record-setting levels this month, an ominous sign in the climate crisis ahead of a gathering El Niño that could potentially propel 2023 to become the hottest year ever recorded.

Preliminary global average temperatures taken so far in June are nearly 1C (1.8F) above levels previously recorded for the same month, going back to 1979. While the month is not yet complete and may not set a new June record, climate scientists say it follows a pattern of strengthening global heating that could see this year named the hottest ever recorded, topping 2016.

As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues

Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times.

A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature identifies the “human climate niche”: the range of temperatures and rainfall within which human societies thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many of these places the niche is shrinking. Already, around 600 million people have been stranded in inhospitable conditions by global heating. Current global policies are likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions that ranged from dangerous to impossible.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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The scientific consensus is we need to aim for negative emissions by phasing out fossil fuels, not just removing carbon from the atmosphere

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We’re all in denial, in one way or another. Maybe it’s the only way to get by. But we can’t avoid the evidence, collectively, in the long run.

On key measures, temperatures across the planet this year are off the charts. This is especially the case in the ocean.

Payne is credited for helping save whales from extinction by recording their songs and galvanizing a global movement

Roger Payne, the US scientist who spurred a worldwide environmental conservation movement with his discovery that whales could sing, has died. He was 88.

Payne made the discovery in 1967 during a research trip to Bermuda when a navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines. Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another.

Environmental activists sued EPA to update regulations, after thousands of people sickened from Deepwater Horizon cleanup

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced more stringent rules governing offshore oil spill response, amid continuing concerns about the effects on public health and wildlife from chemical disasters, including BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010.

The federal agency, which announced the update on Monday, had not updated its rule regulating the chemicals used to break up offshore oil slicks since 1994.

Information commissioner had demanded that the water company publish 53 documents last year

Southern Water is refusing demands by the information watchdog to publish internal communications between board members relating to discussions about raw sewage discharges.

The company, which was fined £90m in 2021 for discharging billions of litres of raw sewage into protected coastal waters, was ordered to publish 53 documents by the information commissioner at the end of last year because of the “substantial and weighty public interest”.

As a coal-fired power station is readied to meet the exploding demand for portable units, let’s face it: this is just extravagance

Fifteen years ago, it was the wood burner: an unnecessary middle-class indulgence that, despite causing untold environmental damage, started popping up in homes across the country. They became symbolic of a certain affluence that allows a privileged few to live in optimum comfort at all times.

Now there’s a new kid on the block: the portable air-conditioning unit. As we adjust to a changing climate, with mid-summer temperatures regularly exceeding 25C and occasionally reaching 35C or even higher, this is the new “must have”. Sales of air-conditioning units were up more than 500% during last year’s heatwave and, according to property website Rightmove, searches for homes with air-conditioning tripled over the same period. At between £300 and £1,000 a pop, they’re not cheap – but they certainly make three or four weeks of good UK weather each year easier to handle.

I’ve seen trees around the UK threatened by development, bulldozers and chainsaws. Now it is happening on my doorstep

I live near a group of beautiful, mature trees that spread across a corner of two residential roads; they are a community hub, providing a shady place to sit and chat. They are much loved, all covered by tree protection orders, and provided as a gift in perpetuity to the community in the 1980s as a planning condition for the creation of a business park. Forty years on, none of this seems to matter. Where bricks and mortar and making money are concerned, trees have no voice: they die silently, even amid a climate emergency that now brings extreme temperatures to London and the south-east with alarming regularity.

After years reporting on the battles of ordinary people to protect trees from bulldozers and chainsaws, I find myself in the midst of one. It is an emotionally sapping, frustrating fight against developers who want to destroy the trees and build luxury homes. It does not seem to matter that the council in question, Richmond upon Thames, a Liberal Democrat-run borough with a strong collection of Green councillors, declared a climate emergency in 2019. Nor that it launched its biodiversity action plan with much fanfare at a May 2019 event where the star speaker was David Attenborough, a local resident. The mantra at the time was “think globally, act locally, make a home for nature”. Alongside the launch, the council printed thousands of leaflets headlined “Local Wildlife Needs your Help”, advising residents how they could support wildlife habitats in the urban environment.

Sandra Laville is the Guardian’s environment correspondent

Energy giant proposes monitoring wells for five years, as government says seepage volumes are factored into emissions reduction targets

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Decommissioned gas wells from a Santos project off the coast of Western Australia have been leaking from the seabed for a decade, according to documents published by the national petroleum regulator.

The leaks, first reported by WA Today, are located at the Legendre gas field north of the Pilbara port of Dampier, and were detected by an underwater vehicle in 2013.

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The EPP, the European parliament’s largest group, says it supports climate goals but objects to ‘bad proposal’

EU plans to restore biodiversity on land and sea are hanging in the balance after the European parliament’s biggest political group called for the proposals to be torn up and rewritten.

On the eve of a vote on the nature restoration law (NRL) package, the chairman of the centre-right European People’s party (EPP) said the vote was “50-50” with potential for others to join their opposition ranks on Thursday.

Two male platypuses have been caught on camera fighting for territory in Tasmania, Australia

Thylacine of the sea? That doesn’t make sense

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University of Michigan researchers suggest findings may in future yield benefits for soldiers and healthcare workers

The sight of their dead comrades is enough to drive fruit flies to an early grave, according to researchers, who suspect the creatures keel over after developing the fly equivalent of depression.

For a species that spends much of its life feasting on decayed matter, the insects appear to be particularly sensitive to their own dead. Witnessing an abundance of fruit fly carcasses speeds up the insects’ ageing process, scientists found, cutting their lives short by nearly 30%.

Climate activist says only ‘rapid and equitable’ phaseout will keep temperatures within 1.5C limit

Rich countries are signing a “death sentence” for millions of poor people around the world by failing to phase out fossil fuels, the climate activist Greta Thunberg has told governments.

She warned on Tuesday that with annual greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high, only a “rapid and equitable” phaseout of fossil fuels would keep global temperatures within the scientifically advised limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

As well as defiant stories of empowered kids, we need to offer reminders that the responsibility isn’t theirs alone

When I was in primary school my favourite Baby-Sitters Club member was Dawn Schafer, the environmental crusader. This was the 1990s, when we were all very concerned about CFCs and other greenhouse gases, although not enough to lose sleep over them. I remember carefully spelling out CHLOROFLUOROCARBONS in bubble letters on poster paper for a school project. I had a thing for dolphins and wanted to be a marine biologist. Clean Up Australia Day was still in its infancy.

Our world was smaller then, information thinner on the ground. Dial-up internet was years away from being a fixture in most homes and we collected cardboard circles from chip packets for fun. It’s easy to wearily suggest kids today have it better. But we didn’t feel that we had to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. We watched Captain Planet, recycled, sometimes picked up extra rubbish if we were being punished or feeling virtuous, but we mostly trusted adults had things in hand. There was never any suggestion it might be too late to turn the ship around.

That’s a luxury today’s kids don’t have. They navigate an increasingly complex world, with more awareness than ever before about what is going wrong – and it’s taking a toll. A survey of 10,000 young people in 2021 found 84% were at least moderately worried about climate change, 59% were extremely worried and 45% said it negatively affected their daily life and functioning. The low hum of climate anxiety is building to a roar and it’s having a profound effect on kids’ mental health.

In the summer of 2019-2020, as bushfires raged across Australia, driving species to the brink of extinction and turning air hazardous, it seemed something had finally shifted. This was our wake-up call. The world was taking notice and I was sure things would be different after this. We would recover and mobilise in a unified way. Then came Covid. The air was safe to breathe again, but only if no one else was standing nearby. Disposable masks littered the streets and KeepCups were banned. Along with the rest of the world, I fell into a deep funk. I watched a lot of TV.

One night the screen transported me to a magical place, an icy island halfway between Norway and the north pole, home to reindeer, polar bears and northern lights. On the island was a mountain, its entrance marked by a glittering green art installation. And inside the mountain was a vault filled with millions of seeds. But this wasn’t a fantasy film, it was a real place: the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard – built by the Norwegian government for the good of humanity. More than one million seed samples from almost every country in the world are stored there in case of global disaster, such as war – or climate catastrophe.

This microdose of wonder during a dark time inspired what would become my first picture book. The Garden at the End of the World is about a girl who finds a rare plant near her home and goes on an adventure with her botanist mother to deliver it to the Global Seed Vault for safekeeping. It was the lullaby I needed to get me through lockdown – an ode to nature and wonder and the helpers; the good things already being done. I didn’t realise it would resonate with so many weary kids and parents as well.

Central Asian country has the worst rate of climate-heating ‘super-emitter’ events in the world

The president of Turkmenistan has launched two initiatives aimed at cutting the colossal leaks of methane from the country’s oil and gas industry. Success would represent a major achievement in tackling the climate crisis.

A roadmap will pave the way towards the central Asian country joining 150 others that have already signed the Global Methane Pledge to cut global methane emissions by 30% by 2030. An inter-departmental government commission will also focus on reducing emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas.

A plastics treaty is on the cards – and it could join the rescue of the ozone layer as a landmark success in environmental diplomacy

Plastic production has soared some 30-fold since it came into widespread use in the 1960s. We now churn out about 430m tonnes a year, easily outweighing the combined mass of all 8 billion people alive. Left unabated, it continues to accelerate: plastic consumption is due to nearly double by 2050.

Now there is a chance that this huge growth will stop, even go into reverse. This month in Paris, the world’s governments agreed to draft a new treaty to control plastics. The UN says it could cut production by a massive 80% by 2040.

Geoffrey Lean is a specialist environment correspondent and author

The Sundarbans is the world’s largest mangrove forest and one of the most climate vulnerable locations on the planet. Climate change has taken an enormous toll on the rainforest in recent years, repeatedly uprooting families and decimating the incomes of residents who have traditionally relied heavily on agriculture and fishing for their livelihoods.

Now, repeated natural disasters and environmental changes to the region have created a highly vulnerable population increasingly at risk of participating in or becoming victims of child trafficking.

29 year old Subhasree Raptan started her fight against human trafficking a decade ago. As a coordinator of Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), a non-profit organisation, Subhasree has been educating women and children on dangers of trafficking and is helping police to track down those who have gone missing.

Minister says technology to collect energy and beam it to Earth could help boost UK’s energy security

UK universities and tech companies are to receive £4.3m in government funding to develop space-based solar power.

The technology, which collects energy from the sun using satellite-mounted panels and beams it to Earth, had huge potential to boost the UK’s energy security, the UK’s energy security secretary, Grant Shapps, said.