The Guardian

Former special forces personnel are being deployed to ‘hide in the undergrowth’ and catch criminal gangs dumping dangerous waste

Special forces war veterans are being deployed undercover to help tackle the increasingly violent criminal networks moving into fly-tipping and the dumping of dangerous waste.

Former SAS and special reconnaissance regiment (SRR) service personnel, who specialise in surveillance and “close-target” reconnaissance and who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, are being drafted in to collect evidence against organised crime groups that use collusion, corruption and the threat of violence to profit from environmental offences.

Thunberg’s funny exchange is a reminder of the connection between machismo, misogyny and hostility to climate action

On 27 December, former kickboxer and professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.

Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com”.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

Federal courts had thrown out Trump-era rule governing Clean Water Act lifting regulations imposed by Obama administration

The Biden administration on Friday finalized regulations to protect hundreds of thousands of streams, wetlands and other waterways, repealing a Trump-era rule federal courts threw out and environmentalists said left waterways vulnerable to pollution.

The rule defines which “waters of the United States” are protected by the Clean Water Act. For decades, the term has been a flashpoint between environmental groups that want to broaden limits on pollution and farmers, builders and industry groups that say extending regulations too far is onerous for business.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including sharks swimming with a kayaker and a rainbow lorikeet

It’s the potential of individuals to change the world which is at the heart of democratic liberalism – but their actions must be matched by global support

As we farewell 2022, many of the world’s citizens will be hoping for a better new year. It is hard to look back on the past year – indeed couple of years – without a high degree of angst about the direction of our global community.

We have been battered by a pandemic that, while past the peak for most nations, is still disrupting societies and economies. After two years of its hermit-like isolation, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens are now experiencing a nationwide Covid onslaught for the first time with ripples that will not only affect the lives of those in China but the rest of the world linked to the second largest economy.

Branded ‘farmland pests’ and a risk to humans, boar are breathing life back into the countryside

Read the coverage about the wild boar that have made their home in Scotland and you’d be forgiven for thinking the country had become overrun with mutant, dangerous, sheep-eating feral pigs.

According to the Telegraph, they “eat anything” and “attack humans”, and local press in Scotland refers to them as a “farmland pest” that “fights back”. Farming unions have told the BBC that the animals are frequently seen killing and eating sheep, though there has been little evidence of this.

Project has been planting grass to help restore vital peatland but found some of it was not taking

Green sludge pours out of thick hosepipes wielded by two Welshmen in a bog in the north of England. It is not many people’s vision of cutting-edge technology.

But although the goop splattering messily on to bare patches of moorland may not look much, it is the first of its kind – a special type of glue designed to help restore vital peatland, which has been disappearing at rapid rates.

Rachael Talibart captures the ebb and flow of the English coastline through photographs that frame erupting waves and the days surrounding violent storms. Her recent work has culminated in a book Tides and Tempests. These images are best viewed full screen

Everything is plastic, or it’s wrapped in plastic!

Jess Harwood is a comic artist and climate campaigner living on Gadigal land. She is on Instagram @jessharwoodart

The animals were released into Aussie Ark’s 400-hectare Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

In a “globally significant moment” which gives a near-extinct species a second lease at survival, 10 eastern quolls have been released into a New South Wales nature reserve.

The animals were released into Aussie Ark’s 400-hectare Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary in the state’s Upper Hunter region, bolstering a flourishing insurance population of quolls.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

An ash surrounded by gravestones in an ancient churchyard reveals humanity’s urge to tell its own stories through trees

The toppling of a tree, without injury, in a city churchyard would not normally make news headlines, but the mighty ash outside London’s Old St Pancras church was one of the capital’s most venerated natural landmarks and a destination of literary pilgrimage. Encircled with gravestones that it seemed to be absorbing into its root system, the Hardy Tree acquired its name, and its celebrity, from a story that the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, then a young architect’s apprentice in a rapidly growing London, was personally responsible for stacking its trunk with stones cleared to make way for the expansion of the Midland railway line in the mid-1860s.

By Hardy’s time, the literary pedigree of Old St Pancras churchyard was well-established. It was the original resting place of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter Mary Shelley was said to have gone there for secret trysts with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hardy himself wrote of overseeing the exhumations. He was charged with turning up at unexpected times to ensure that the clerk of works was doing a respectful job and not simply dumping the bones, as had happened in previous cemetery clearances.

As Storm Elliott rages and 2022 is declared the UK’s warmest year yet, why are leaders still in denial about extreme weather?

The 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow was based on the idea that the main north Atlantic Ocean current could slow and then reverse, superstorms would flash-freeze the northern hemisphere and a new ice age would abruptly descend. It was dismissed as “profoundly silly”, “a ludicrous popcorn thriller” informed by “lousy science”, and some scientists argued it depicted meteorological phenomena “as occurring over days, instead of decades or centuries”.

Storm Elliott, the “bomb cyclone” that hit the US over the holidays, should have made some of those critics uncomfortable. Temperatures in places plunged in just a few minutes as one of the greatest North American storms ever recorded swept down from the Arctic to Mexico, sometimes at hurricane speed. It brought death, chaos and misery for tens of millions of people.

Milder winter, alternative imports and energy reduction cuts demand after Russian invasion pushed up prices

European gas prices have dipped to a level last seen before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February, after warmer weather across the continent eased concerns over shortages.

The month-ahead European gas future contract dropped as low as €76.78 per megawatt hour on Wednesday, the lowest level in 10 months, before closing higher at €83.70, according to Refinitiv, a data company.

My snapshot of 2022 shows the Amazon burning – but what it doesn’t communicate is the pain

I have covered the Amazon as a journalist for almost 25 years. It started in 1998, with a trip along the Trans-Amazonian Highway. In 2017, I moved to the city of Altamira in Pará, northern Brazil; it is the centre of the deforestation, forest fires and social devastation caused by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. I moved here because I no longer wanted to be just a “special correspondent to the Amazon”, but so I could describe what was happening to the largest tropical forest on the planet from the inside. Despite this long experience, 2022 was the first year in which I watched the forest burn from the window of my home. I didn’t need to go to the fire, as journalists normally do. The fire had come to me.

The photo I’ve chosen, taken by my husband, is from the night of 27 August. Later, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research revealed that it was the worst August for fires in the Amazon since 2010. Fires and deforestation rose considerably under Jair Bolsonaro who, this year, was narrowly defeated in the presidential election by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, as he is better known.

Eliane Brum is one of the creators of the trilingual news platform Sumaúma and the author of Banzeiro Òkòtó: the Amazon as the Centre of the World, which is published in the UK in 2023. This article was translated by James Young

Materials Recovery Facility near Canberra had processed 60,000 tonnes of waste a year which will be moved to other capital cities

• Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates

Thousands of tonnes of waste will have to be transported from the Australian Capital Territory to other metropolitan capitals after a fire at one of the largest recycling centres in Australia.

The fire largely destroyed the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Hume on Monday night – another setback for the nation’s recycling efforts, which have been struggling to keep pace with demand.

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

National Trust’s annual audit reveals a dire year for animals from toads and bats to birds and butterflies

This year’s tumultuous weather – including fierce storms, searing heat, deep cold snaps – has devastated some of the UK’s most precious flora and fauna, a leading conservation charity has said.

The extreme conditions have made survival very difficult for animals from toads and bats to birds and butterflies, and from great trees to meadowland flowers.

Recent legislative action to curtail the power of the gas and coal industry are a glimmer of progress but more needs to be done

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

It has been a tumultuous year for the climate in Australia: from record-breaking weather events to a climate surprise in the election, a new target and a global energy crisis, this year has seen its fair share of change.

In February, the east-coast town of Lismore and the northern rivers region in New South Wales were hit by the worst flooding in Australia’s modern history – the first of what would be a year of terrible floods, against the backdrop of a record third La Niña. Australia’s climate impacts are worsening, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. Many of those being hit by floods now were three years ago battling raging bushfires and drought.

Suit alleges Inhance failed to follow EPA rules involving dangerous PFAS chemicals and asks a judge to halt production

A new lawsuit says many plastic containers used in the US to hold food, cleaning supplies, personal care items and other consumer products are likely to be contaminated with toxic PFAS. It is now asking federal courts to halt their production.

The suit references soon-to-be-published research that found PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances) from HDPE (high-density polyethylene) plastic containers leach at extremely high levels into ketchup, mayonnaise, olive oil and everyday products.

Information on environmental impact can persuade consumers against carbon-heavy food choices, says study

Climate impact labels on foods such as red meat are an effective way to get people to stop choosing options that negatively affect the planet, a study has found.

Policymakers have been debating how to get people to make less carbon-heavy food choices. In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report urged world leaders, especially those in developed countries, to support a transition to sustainable, healthy, low-emissions diets.

Trials are under way to find advanced solutions to a notoriously difficult problem. But could a focus on recycling distract from other issues?

In a warehouse in Melbourne’s south-west, plastic confetti is being liquefied. Amid the whirring and beeping of machinery, a table displays shredded soft plastics – colourful flakes of empty chip packets, bin liners and transparent bread bags. The mound sits beside two jars of oil – that’s what the plastic will become. One is light, like olive oil. The other is as dark as tar.

The goal, says Logan Thorpe, a special projects manager at APR Plastics, is a “closed loop” of advanced recycling. Plastic waste is turned into oils, which are made into clear pellets that resemble granules of rock salt, which can then be used to produce more plastic.