The Guardian

Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Mark Rylance add their voices to Richard Curtis’s Make My Money Matter campaign

Famous names including Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Mark Rylance have joined activists and businesses in calling on the UK’s big five banks to stop financing new oil, gas and coal expansion.

Make My Money Matter, a campaign set up by Richard Curtis, the screenwriter, director and Comic Relief co-founder, has written to the chief executives of HSBC, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and Lloyds to urge these banks to “stop financing fossil fuel expansion”.

And now I’m supposed to use an induction stove like some sort of animal?! It isn’t fair!!

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Study points to ‘substantial reductions in mortality’ and significant health benefits if policies implemented

Reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions in England and Wales by 2050 will lead to an extra 2m years of life, a study suggests.

The UK is legally committed to hitting net zero by 2050. Many of the proposed policies will reduce harmful environmental factors such as air pollution, and encourage healthy behaviours including diet and exercise, but this is the first time researchers have comprehensively modelled how net zero will affect health.

More than 1m households and businesses have signed up to get paid to cut back on power usage

Households were paid to cut back on their electricity use for an hour on Monday evening in the first test of a National Grid scheme aiming to cut energy consumption in Great Britain. The second trial was taking place on Tuesday, between 4.30pm and 6pm.

More than 1m households and businesses have signed up to the live -demand flexibility service.

Briefing notes obtained by FoI reveal minister meeting with Drax CEO was told Greenpeace supported practice

Greenpeace has accused the government of misrepresenting its stance on burning trees for electricity, giving a minister the impression of public support for the highly controversial practice in meetings with the power company Drax.

Greenpeace is firmly opposed to most forms of biomass burning for power generation, and suspicious of claims that the resulting carbon dioxide can be captured.

I love the idea of my boy and his dad peering through a telescope together. But what will light pollution leave for them to look at?

I was saddened to read about how light pollution is rapidly reducing the number of stars visible to the naked eye. In some locations where 250 stars are visible, it is estimated that only 100 will be visible in 18 years’ time.

Growing up in the countryside, there were nights when the skies were so clear that if you were driving you felt compelled to pull over and get out to marvel at them. The only place where I have seen stars clearer than in Snowdonia (Eryri) is on remote Greek islands, where you find yourself gazing upwards, stupefied – an effect that is increased, in my experience, by copious amounts of local booze.

Critics say millions of dollars are being spent by local governments on offsetting when it should be the last resort

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Renewed questions are being asked about Australian councils’ use of international projects to offset local carbon emissions, off the back of a Guardian investigation that found 90% of rainforest credits issued by one leading company were likely worthless.

The research into Verra, a world leader in the rapidly growing voluntary offsets market, found that the majority of rainforest offset credits were likely “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The gecko licks its eyeball seductively: I mean, have you seen my feet?

It is evening, and the world seems to go still for a moment, as though some kind of signal has been lost. You hear a tiny bark. There in the corner: a gecko. If the corner is in an apartment that is in a suburb in a city in Malaysia, you hear a “cicak”, in Bangladesh, “tiktiki”.

Where does this tiny reptile get the confidence to make a sound like that? “Not the hiss or croak for me,” it says. The gecko licks its eyeball seductively: I mean, have you seen my feet?

Brittany beaches polluted by waves of beads believed to be from shipping containers lost in Atlantic

The French government is taking legal action over an “environmental nightmare” caused by waves of tiny plastic beads washing up on the coast of Brittany.

The white pellets the size of grains of rice, nicknamed “mermaids’ tears”, have been appearing on beaches in France and Spain for the last year. They are believed to have come from shipping containers lost in the Atlantic Ocean.

Plastic, a production by Japanese company K-Ballet, draws attention to a global pollution crisis with its unusual set and wardrobe design. Resembling space-age creatures with PET bottles strapped to their bodies, dancers including US guest star Julian MacKay move through a shifting plastic labyrinth

The people of the Hawizeh marshes of southern Iraq have an ancient history living in the world’s most unique and biodiverse wetlands. The region has been reduced to near-desert as a result of the climate crisis, devastated by drought and man-made dams. Thousands of families are having to leave.

Effluent in Gloucestershire river pinpointed by digital map as water companies accused of routinely pumping out waste to rivers

The market town of Fairford, nestling in the Cotswold hills, is perhaps best known for its church, which has the only complete set of mediaeval stained glass windows in England.

But thanks to a more modern phenomenon, an interactive digital map produced by Thames Water, the Gloucestershire town, with its traditional honey coloured limestone houses, is becoming better known for its continuous, gushing, raw sewage overflow.

Exclusive: proportion of green job openings in UK ‘declined significantly’ after 2012, analysis shows

Job opportunities in Britain’s low-carbon economy have fallen sharply since David Cameron’s government decided to cut policies he described as “green crap”, with fewer vacancies now available as a share of the economy than in 2012, a study reveals.

Academics at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment found the proportion of green job openings being advertised in the UK “declined significantly” after 2012.

Prospects for artificial intelligence and green transition fuel sense that the only way is up for the global economy

The world has become hard-wired for pessimism, and there was plenty of it on display in Davos last week.

Much has changed in the 52 years since the World Economic Forum was first held in the Swiss ski resort. At that original WEF summit the global economy was dominated by the rich nations of Europe and northern America, currencies were fixed under the Bretton Woods system, and oil was $2 a barrel. The cold war between the US and the Soviet Union was still raging. It was a pre-digital age; personal computers and smartphones were things of the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) was the stuff of science fiction.

Electric car battery firm planned to build large facility in Northumberland with government funds if it found investors

Ministers were using the electric car battery maker Britishvolt as a prime example of the government’s record for “securing business investment in the UK” just months before the scheme collapsed without any public investment.

The company, once heralded as Britain’s potential champion for battery making, fell into administration last week after the failure of last-ditch talks to find emergency funding to keep it afloat. Its demise has been criticised as showing the government’s lack of industrial strategy, the shortcomings of “levelling up” and Britain’s failure to grasp new manufacturing opportunities in the wake of Brexit.

The government’s hands-off approach meant the odds were against the EV battery startup from the start

An essential pillar of Conservative party thinking has resulted in the collapse of Britishvolt, the electric vehicle battery maker and hoped-for saviour of the UK car industry. With a £3bn factory due to be built at Blyth, lighting up the Northumberland coast, the UK-owned and -run business would, in Boris Johnson’s words, “create thousands of jobs in our industrial heartlands” and boost electric vehicle production “as part of our green industrial revolution”.

Not for this government, nor any of its predecessors since 2010, the careful planning and collaboration with industry that propels investment in Japan, South Korea, China, Germany and the US. Ministers prefer to keep their hands by their sides and wallets firmly closed, in case they might be accused of a return to 1970s corporatism.

More than 3,000 people protest on estate of Alexander Darwall after his court victory ends right to wild camp in England

More than 3,000 people on Saturday joined one of the UK’s largest ever countryside access protests on the Dartmoor estate of a wealthy landowner who won a case ending the right to wild camp in England.

Groups of walkers, families, students and local people arrived by foot, shuttle bus and bike to the small Dartmoor village of Cornwood throughout the morning and then thronged for hours along moss- and ivy-draped lanes up on to the rugged, boulder-strewn moorland owned by the Conservative party donor and hedge fund manager Alexander Darwall.

A young innovator has won a top award for developing software to map the tube routes with the cleanest air

Like most Londoners, Tanya Beri has mixed views of the city’s vast underground rail network that carries millions of passengers every day on its 11 lines and through its 272 stations. The tube keeps London moving, though often in cramped, uncomfortable and unhygienic conditions.

However, Beri believes she has found a way to improve travel for concerned commuters. She has developed a phone app that can direct passengers to routes that offer minimal air pollution.

Exclusive: Alexander Darwall, who said he brought case to improve conservation, is releasing pheasants near protected woodland

The landowner who took Dartmoor national park to court to ban wild camping may be putting a rare beetle at risk by releasing pheasants next to an ecologically important woodland, against the advice of environmental experts.

This is despite him having said he pushed for a wild camping ban in order to “improve conservation of the Dartmoor commons”, arguing that campers damage the national park with litter and disturbance.

Industry body working on new way to reassure customers schemes will protect the environment

New standards should bring greater scrutiny of carbon offsets and give buyers confidence their money is helping protect the environment, leading figures in the carbon credits market have insisted, after an investigation by the Guardian revealed widespread problems with offsetting.

Annette Nazareth, chair of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, which sets nonbinding principles to which sellers of carbon credits can sign up said the body was working on new standards that should reassure consumers.