The Guardian

Nature protection rules in proposed investment zones would in effect be suspended

There was little room for doubt about the reaction to the prime minister’s plans to scrap environmental regulations this weekend. “Make no mistake, we are angry. This government has today launched an attack on nature,” tweeted the RSPB, its most forceful political intervention in recent memory.

Liz Truss’s proposals to create investment zones, where green rules on nature protection would in effect be suspended, represented a step too far for some of Britain’s biggest environment charities. “As of today, from Cornwall to Cumbria, Norfolk to Nottingham, wildlife is facing one of the greatest threats it’s faced in decades,” the RSPB went on.

Stars of film about 500-mile trek to Scotland for Cop26 hit the road again for Bristol premiere

There will be no red carpet, no designer outfits and definitely no limousines. In fact, the stars of the film have shunned any sort of mechanical transport and instead walked 135 miles from London to Bristol for the premiere, and are asking their audience to accompany them by foot on their last leg before the screening.

The film, which is being premiered on the harbourside in Bristol on Tuesday evening, is Of Walking on Thin Ice (Camino to Cop26), which tells the story of a group of climate pilgrims who hiked 500 miles from the south of England to Scotland for last year’s climate conference in Glasgow.

For more details and tickets visit the Encounters film festival website.

Super Typhoon Noru tore its way out of the northern Philippines on Monday, leaving casualties, floods and power outages. Government work and classes at schools have been suspended in the capital and beyond

Exclusive: major supplier to brands including KFC and Nando’s used offshore companies allowing them to reduce UK tax payments, investigation suggests

The global megacompanies supplying some of Britain’s most popular meat brands, including KFC, Nando’s chicken and Sainsbury’s organic range, appear to have been using offshore companies allowing them to avoiding paying millions of pounds in tax in the UK.

An investigation by the Guardian and Lighthouse Reports has found that two companies – Anglo Beef Processors UK and Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation (owned by Brazilian beef giant JBS) – appear to have reduced their tax bill by structuring their companies and loans in a way that allows them to take advantage of different tax systems, in what one expert has described as “aggressive tax avoidance”.

THANKS TERMITES! EVEN THE BUGS ARE CLIMATE DENIALISTS NOW

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Movement aims to make the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems a prosecutable, international crime against peace

California winemaker Julia Jackson has long grasped the threats posed by the ongoing global climate change crisis, from more intense wildfires and hurricanes to rising sea levels. But for her, those ideas crossed over from the abstract to the tangible when her home was razed by the Kincade wildfire that devastated her native Sonoma county in 2019.

“I lost everything – all my belongings,” Jackson said. “It shook me to my core.”

The deaths within days of 11 sturgeon, a species unchanged for thousands of years, have puzzled scientists

When the first spindly, armour-clad carcass was spotted in the fast-flowing Nechako River in early September, Nikolaus Gantner and two colleagues scrambled out on a jet boat, braving strong currents to investigate the grim discovery.

Days later, the remains of 10 others were spotted floating along a 100km stretch of the river in western Canada.

Using hydrogen would add about 70% to home energy bills, according to a report by a renewable energy charity

Ministers’ plans to pin the UK’s energy hopes on hydrogen could nearly double the cost of heating a home by the end of the decade compared with natural gas, research has shown.

Using hydrogen for home heating could prove much a more expensive option than natural gas, according to the leading energy analysts Cornwall Insight. Between now and 2050, when the UK is legally bound to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions, using hydrogen would add about 70% to home energy bills compared with using gas, according to the report, commissioned by renewable energy charity MCS Foundation.

Soaring energy prices after invasion of Ukraine have added almost £10 to cost of charging family-sized car, says RAC

The price of charging an electric car using a public rapid charger has jumped by almost £10 since May because of soaring energy costs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The increased price of wholesale gas and electricity has pushed up the price to charge an average family-size car by 42% to above £32, according to analysis by the RAC. That was £9.60 more than in May, and £13.59 more than a year earlier.

From the time it was created, the mechanism has been subject to obfuscation. Labor is about to try and make it work, but it won’t be smooth sailing

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Climate policy can sometimes seem like it is being spoken in a different language. Take the issue of the moment in Australia: the safeguard mechanism.

For people deeply embedded in the mechanics of how governments plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the safeguard mechanism has become a reasonably familiar subject since it was introduced by the Coalition six years ago – even though the Morrison government and its predecessors didn’t like to talk about it much.

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Whatever we may feel about the man, some things are eternal, and in his work he found the words for them

When, 50 years ago, the Department of the Environment commissioned a poem from Philip Larkin, he produced, as a reader recently pointed out to the Guardian, Going, Going, about felled trees, bleak high-rises, spreading shopping centres and parking lots. It is about the erosion, too, of his previous trust that “earth will always respond / However we mess it about”. If he had lived until this year, when he would have turned 100, he would, one suspects, have been disappointed but not at all surprised that we are still chucking filth in the sea. The poem ends the way many Larkin poems do, with a deceptively conversational profundity: “Most things are never meant.” Which doesn’t change the damage done.

Despite a difficult period in the 1990s – after publication of Andrew Motion’s biography and an edition of his letters that revealed his racism and misogyny, not to mention infidelity, porn use and general puerility – Larkin has never gone away, and the poetry is why. Even the most unpoetic recognise the demotic bluntness of “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Or, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) – / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” In recent weeks Keir Starmer in parliament and thousands on Twitter have quoted his lines on Elizabeth II, written for her silver jubilee in 1977: “In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange, / there was one constant good: / she did not change.”

Experts say ditching concrete and creating mini wetlands could help water systems cope better with effects of extreme weather

This year has seen one of the driest summers on record, with most of the country still officially in drought. Millions of people in England are under hosepipe bans because of water shortages, and reservoir and river levels remain low.

The solution to this? People should flood their gardens and create bogs in order to stop the effects of drought and reverse biodiversity loss, according to the head of Natural England.

From fracking to bankers’ bonuses, we know where this government’s interests lie. It must be stopped

The Tory budget on Friday made clear where the party stands: for failed trickle-down economics and for helping the already wealthy get richer.

The cost of living crisis is wreaking havoc, with spiralling energy bills, stagnating wages, and the highest inflation in 40 years. Behind these economic buzzwords are harrowing realities, and families in every city and town having to make impossible choices this winter.

Angela Rayner is MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and deputy leader of the Labour party; Ed Miliband is MP for Doncaster North

Wildlife groups concerned by apparent plans to loosen protections in 38 ‘investment zones’

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Kwasi Kwarteng has tried to play down concerns that ministers plan to tear up a series of environmental regulations in their push for growth, after a furious backlash from wildlife and green groups.

“We’re not going to relax environmental rules,” the UK chancellor told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, arguing the only aim was to reduce red tape.

David Malpass apologises after saying he ‘doesn’t know’ if he accepts climate science

David Malpass, president of the World Bank, faces an uncertain future this week, after the White House joined a chorus of influential figures in condemning his apparent climate denialism.

Malpass remains in post for now but under severe pressure, despite issuing an apology and trying to explain his refusal last week to publicly acknowledge the human role in the climate crisis.

Cargill was taken to court 20 years ago in Oklahoma over the same pollution issue it is now linked to in UK

One of the world’s biggest food giants with a supply chain linked to the ecological decline of the River Wye faced claims over similar pollution scandals in the US, the Observer can reveal.

Campaigners warned two years ago that the clear waters of the Wye, one of Britain’s best-loved rivers, were being blighted by thick green algae blooms linked to poultry production.

Despite the wet weather, the canola fields in southern New South Wales are blooming

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World’s desire to wean off over-reliance on China could be a boon for local producers, according to the Australian PV Institute

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Australia has a golden opportunity to expand its solar energy manufacturing capacity as the industry booms and nations scramble to cut their over-dependence on China, a report by the Australian Australian PV Institute Institute says.

The country is installing 4GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity a year already but meeting just 3% of that from a local supplier, Adelaide’s Tindo Solar. That annual installation tally, though, is predicted to triple by 2050, particularly if Australia becomes a major supplier of hydrogen produced by renewable energy for export.

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RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and National Trust criticise plans to create 38 ‘investment zones’ across England

The government has been accused of launching an “attack on nature” with its mini-budget, which conservationists warn could roll back environmental rules.

Groups including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the Wildlife Trusts and the National Trust have criticised plans, announced on Friday, to create 38 “investment zones” across England.

Defra accused of ‘all-out attack’ on environment by wildlife groups

The government is to scrap the “Brexit bonus” which would have paid farmers and landowners to enhance nature, in what wildlife groups are calling an “all-out attack” on the environment, the Observer can reveal.

Instead, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) sources disclosed, they are considering paying landowners a yearly set sum for each acre of land they own, which would be similar to the much-maligned EU basic payments scheme of the common agricultural policy.