The Guardian

A new legal order in the high seas must prevent marine riches from being monopolised or privatised

In his 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that resources which do not clearly belong to anyone are likely to be overexploited, since protecting them is in no one person’s interest. That tragedy is unfolding on the high seas – the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond coastal states’ national jurisdiction. This is a commons, where fishing and mining have been opened to all. The result is serious damage to a vital resource that covers almost half the planet’s surface. The high seas are not entirely lawless. Yet only a tiny fraction of these waters are protected from exploitation, despite harbouring the world’s marine wilderness and its unique biodiversity.

Beneath the waves lies a rich prize. Many scientists think the high seas harbour novel disease-fighting chemistry that might lead to new drugs. Until this month, there was no mechanism to prevent nations or companies monopolising the world’s marine genetic resources. One study in 2018 pointed out that BASF, which calls itself “the largest chemical producer in the world”, owned nearly half of the 13,000 patents derived from marine organisms. Mining exploration licences in the Pacific alone span an area almost as wide as the US. If deep sea extraction were permitted to go ahead, many warn, it would lead to biodiversity loss on an enormous scale.

Climate crisis to deliver ‘ongoing systemic shocks’ to production as hot conditions become more frequent, researchers say

Climate conditions that reduce coffee yield have become more frequent over the past four decades, with rising temperatures from global heating likely to lead to “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production globally, new research suggests.

Researchers analysed the impacts of climate factors such as temperature, rainfall and humidity in the top 12 coffee-producing countries globally between 1980 and 2020.

Exclusive: One-fifth of money given directly to fossil fuel industry was to support new extraction and mining

The UK government has given £20bn more in support to fossil fuel producers than those of renewables since 2015, the Guardian can reveal.

The research, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, found that while renewable energy was given £60bn in support over that time, fossil fuel companies were given close to £80bn.

The sinking of oil tanker MT Princess Empress off the coast of Mindoro island in the Philippines has forced the area into a state of emergency, disrupting the marine environment, businesses and more than 15,000 fishers

Read more: What happens when a huge ship sinks? A step-by-step guide to averting disaster

Government needs to introduce new ambitious energy policies before next general election, advisers say

Ministers must take control of the UK’s energy system, removing the barriers to planning permission and problems with the national electricity grid, to build the windfarms and other renewable power needed to meet net-zero goals, government advisers have warned.

Chris Stark, chief executive of the committee on climate change, the statutory adviser, said the task was too urgent to wait until after a general election, expected within the next 18 months. “It would be an enormous mistake to wait until the next general election to introduce new ambitious policy,” he said.

Exclusive: Groups say chancellor needs to kickstart renewed drive to help cut bills and reduce emissions

A coalition of charities and campaigners have demanded the chancellor funnel more funds into making Britain’s leaky housing stock energy efficient at next week’s budget to help cut bills and protect the environment.

In a letter to Jeremy Hunt, more than 20 organisations asked the government to set aside at least £6bn a year over the next decade to support an acceleration in insulating home and installations of heat pumps.

It could be part of the solution to the impasse over the safeguard mechanism. Even if it isn’t, the logic for it should be irresistible

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New Orleans was still awash in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the then prime minister, John Howard, was in climate doubt and delay mode when Anthony Albanese got to his feet in the Australian parliament to argue for a better way ahead.

Then a mid-ranking opposition frontbencher, the future PM gave a nod to the carnage in Louisiana before running through the “profound risks’’ that Australia would face if greenhouse gas emissions kept rising – a now-familiar list including worsening heatwaves, less rain in the south, more rain in the north, more severe bushfires, cyclones, storms and ocean surges.

‘Cleanup is futile’ if production continues at current rate, amid rapid rise in marine pollution

An unprecedented rise in plastic pollution has been uncovered by scientists, who have calculated that more than 170tn plastic particles are afloat in the oceans.

They have called for a reduction in the production of plastics, warning that “cleanup is futile” if they continue to be pumped into the environment at the current rate.

Lead researcher says destruction was similar to process of Antarctic ozone hole forming each spring ‘but at much warmer temperatures’

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Particles in bushfire smoke can activate molecules that destroy the ozone layer, according to new research that suggests future ozone recovery may be delayed by increasingly intense and frequent fires.

A study published in the journal Nature has found that smoke from the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires temporarily depleted the ozone layer by 3% to 5% in 2020.

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Non-native species are now more numerous in wild – with implications for native insects

Half of Britain and Ireland’s native plants have declined over the past 20 years, with non-native species now more numerous in the wild, a major study has found.

Thousands of botanists from the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) have spent the past 20 years collecting data on changes in the British and Irish flora.

Three non-violent Insulate Britain activists have been jailed for telling juries why they were protesting

Restrictions placed on non-violent climate protesters who have been tried in criminal courts were part of a “deeply concerning” “pincer movement” narrowing their rights to free expression, leading lawyers have told the Guardian.

Three Insulate Britain activists are serving jail terms for contempt of court for breaching rulings made by a judge that they were not to mention the climate crisis, fuel poverty or the history of the peaceful civil rights movement to juries.

The controversial decision to approve a new coalmine in Cumbria was met with dismay by UK environmental groups, with many wondering what it meant for a country that has pitched itself as a leader in the green energy revolution. But in the town of Whitehaven where the mine is to be situated, the feeling is very different, with vast support across the political spectrum. The Guardian's Richard Sprenger travels to the Mirehouse estate, a short distance from the Woodhouse Colliery site, to find out what lies behind this positivity in the face of a profound climate crisis

The failure of Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportion, to appear for nearly three weeks recalls the incompetence of Fema during Hurricane Katrina

“Where’s Pete Buttigieg?” someone shouted at a February 15 town hall meeting in East Palestine, Ohio. “I don’t know,” Mayor Trent Conaway replied.

Twelve days earlier, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals had derailed near the town. Three days later, the company announced it was going to carry out a controlled burn of vinyl chloride that would send dangerous gasses into the air, forcing many of East Palestine’s 4,700 residents to evacuate. They returned after receiving assurances that the air and water were safe, but a strong chemical odor clung to the town, and many continued to complain of headaches, nausea, and burning throats. And so several hundred residents had crowded into a local school to demand answers. Conaway said that two weeks had passed before anyone at the White House had contacted him, and the US secretary of transportation still hadn’t materialized.

Michael Massing is the author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

Japan Suiso energy boss says hydrogen project incorporating carbon capture and storage ‘truly a watershed moment’ in decarbonising

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Japan is putting $2.35bn into a project to turn coal from Victoria’s Latrobe valley into “clean hydrogen” using carbon capture and storage technology.

The investment marks the start of the “commercial demonstration phase” of the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project which last year delivered a world-first cargo of liquefied hydrogen to Japan on a purpose-built ship.

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The government is failing to make good on Britain’s net zero pledges to the world

Last summer, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) delivered a 600-page assessment of the United Kingdom’s journey towards net zero targets. The scathing conclusions could be summed up in a single sentence: Westminster continues to talk the talk, but a lack of follow-through means the country is failing to walk the walk.

In too many areas, the CCC found, goals were being undermined by failures in delivery programmes. There was a “shocking gap”, it reported, in policymaking to drive better insulation of homes. Progress on reducing farming emissions had been “glacial”. The bald conclusion was that the “current strategy will not deliver net zero” by 2050, as legally required.

Matthew Tulley, 44, Ben Taylor, 38, George Burrow, 68, and Anthony Hill, 72, were part of a blockade at Bishopsgate in 2021

Four climate activists who blockaded a street in London in a campaign to press the government to insulate homes have been found guilty of public nuisance.

A jury at Inner London crown court found the protesters, who are members of Insulate Britain, guilty on Monday after a four-day trial.

Emissions from food system alone will drive the world past target, unless high-methane foods are tackled

Emissions from the food system alone will drive the world past 1.5C of global heating, unless high-methane foods are tackled.

Climate-heating emissions from food production, dominated by meat, dairy and rice, will by themselves break the key international target of 1.5C if left unchecked, a detailed study has shown.

Sheep are descended from a ‘mouflon’. Yes (yes!)

The wind is blowing: it is the wind that changes the seasons, hot to cold. It blows and blows until the season knows it is time to sit on its suitcase, overstuffed with things that happened, zip it up and travel to the other side of the world.

Sometimes, the season gets trapped for a week, like a little whirlwind of leaves, or one leaf on a small plant going round and round, or moving in a figure eight: an incantation. You get one last period of very cold or very hot. You are trapped, too, like a sheep in its wool: you are in the present, there is no going forward until the season is on its way.

In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy is carrying her luggage up a steep path on a mountain in Spain. “The smell of wood fired in the stone houses below and the bells on sheep grazing in the mountains and the strange silence that happens in between the bells chiming suddenly made me want to smoke.”

What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith [...] Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.

Vast releases of gas, along with future ‘methane bombs’, represent huge threat – but curbing emissions would rapidly reduce global heating

• ‘We don’t feel safe’: US community in shock after record methane leak

More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

As XR shifts away from radical action and the UK government restricts the right to protest, the climate movement is asking tough questions

On a bright, chilly morning in January, seven women – some young, some older, all condemned as guilty by the state – gathered at Southwark crown court.

The group had already been convicted of criminal damage following an Extinction Rebellion (XR) action in April 2021 that involved breaking windows at the headquarters of Barclays Bank: a financial institution responsible for more than £4bn of fossil fuel financing during that year alone. “In case of climate emergency break glass”, read stickers they stuck to the shattered panes. Now they were being sentenced. After a long preamble, the judge eventually handed down suspended terms, sparing the defendants jail for the time being. But he used his closing remarks to condemn their protest as a “stunt” that wouldn’t help to solve the climate crisis. “You risk alienating those who you look to for support,” he warned.