The Guardian

Labour says UK government ‘asleep at the wheel’ of Cop26 presidency as just 16 of 197 member nations submit new climate action plans

International climate targets could be at risk because only a handful of countries have updated their emission reduction goals since last year’s Cop26 summit, campaigners have warned.

Just 16 out of 197 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have updated their plans for how to meet climate goals – known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs.

Ed Gemmell wants to offer Conservative voters climate-conscious, business-friendly alternative

• Politics live: latest updates

A new political party committed to solving the climate crisis plans to challenge the Tories in more than 100 seats at the next election, targeting climate-denying Tory backbenchers.

Launched as a centre-right, single-issue party, the Climate party aims to provide Conservative voters with a business-friendly, climate-serious alternative to the Tories, whose leadership candidates have been reticent over the party’s net zero commitments as Britain buckled under 40C heat for the first time on record.

The climate emergency has been declared over and over. The future the scientists warned us about is here, now

We are declaring a climate emergency. Everyone can, in whatever place on Earth they call home. No one needs to wait for politicians any more – we have been waiting for them for decades. What history shows us is that when people lead, governments follow. Our power resides in what we are witnessing. We cannot deny that Great Salt Lake is vanishing before our eyes into a sun-cracked playa of salt and toxic chemicals. Nor can we deny that Lake Mead is reduced to a puddle. In New Mexico a wildfire that began in early April is still burning in late July. Last August, the eye of Hurricane Ida split in two – there was no calm – only 190mph winds ripping towns in the bayous of Louisiana to shreds; and 7m acres in the American west burned in 2021. The future the scientists warned us about is where we live now.

The climate emergency has been declared over and over by Nature and by human suffering and upheaval in response to its catastrophes. The 2,000 individuals who recently died of heat in Portugal and Spain are not here to bear witness, but many of the residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan, where Amnesty International declared the temperatures “unlivable for humans”, are. The heat-warped rails of the British train system, the buckled roads, cry out that this is unprecedented. The estimated billion sea creatures who died on the Pacific north-west’s coast from last summer’s heatwave announced a climate emergency. The heat-devastated populations of southern Asia, the current grain crop failures in China, India, across Europe and the American midwest, the starving in the Horn of Africa because of climate-caused drought, the bleached and dying coral reefs of Australia, the rivers of meltwater gushing from the Greenland ice sheet, the melting permafrost of Siberia and Alaska: all bear witness that this is a climate emergency. So do we. Yet the anxiety we feel, the grief that is ours, pales in comparison to the ferocity of our resolve.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer, naturalist, and activist

Heatwaves around world showing clear evidence of climate crisis, experts say

Even cool periods in the UK are now warmer than they used to be, meteorologists have warned, as an assessment of last year’s weather showed average temperatures higher across the country, in sync with rising heat across the globe.

Britain’s record-breaking heatwave last week, when the mercury topped 40C for the first time on record, has subsided into scattered showers and cooler temperatures across much of the country, but forecasters have warned that smaller heatwaves could return in the next month.

The PM spruiked the myth that Australia’s ‘quality’ coal was relatively clean – following in the footsteps of Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison

• Get our free news app, morning email briefing and daily news podcast

Supporters of Australia’s coal export industry have been arguing for the past decade that global greenhouse gas emissions would go up if overseas customers had to source coal from another country.

The rationale is that Australia’s coal exports are higher quality and cause fewer emissions.

Vladimir Putin’s cynical extortion makes as eloquent a case for the clean energy transition as any environmental idealist

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, he gambled that it would be won quickly and that the west would acquiesce in a fait accompli. He underestimated Ukrainian resilience and European readiness to punish Kremlin aggression with sanctions. That forced Mr Putin into a longer game. Now he is betting that European reliance on Russian gas exports will corrode western solidarity, leading to a degrading of sanctions and restored tolerance of Moscow’s territorial aggressions.

To hasten that scenario, Russia has cut the flow of gas through the main east-west pipeline. The Kremlin’s message of strategic extortion is not subtle: go softer on the war and have a cosier winter; stay tough and freeze. European solidarity is just about holding. Earlier this week EU members agreed a deal to cut gas usage by 15% as part of a phased move away from reliance on Russian supplies. But the deal is diluted by opt-outs and exceptions for various countries. Hungary, the EU state that is cosiest with the Kremlin, has not signed up at all.

From Spain to Hungary, output of staples such as corn forecast to fall by up to 9%, adding to impact of Ukraine war on food security

Yields of key crops in Europe will be sharply down this year owing to heatwaves and droughts, exacerbating the impacts of the Ukraine war on food prices.

Maize, sunflower and soya bean yields are forecast by the EU to drop by about 8% to 9% due to hot weather across the continent. Supplies of cooking oil and maize were already under pressure, as Ukraine is a major producer and its exports have been blocked by Russia.

James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, has died on his 103rd birthday. The climate scientist originated the theory that life on Earth is self-regulating. Lovelock often warned the global population of the stark reality of climate change and was committed to his work in his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s

• James Lovelock, creator of Gaia hypothesis, dies on 103rd birthday 

As our brains return, briefly, to room temperature, it’s time to think about what we do next

A week after The Great British Bake In, it’s 13C and drizzling here: North Yorkshire is (temporarily) healing. I have been giddily sending pictures of pewter skies and cagoule sightings to my sister who, unwisely for a red-headed northerner, lives in steamy Paris. The whole business feels like a collective fever dream, but, of course, it wasn’t: as melted roads and scorched verges, drifts of autumnal leaves and warnings of an imminent drought declaration demonstrate, and as thousands of climate scientists testify hourly with weary urgency.

So, as our brains return to room temperature, it’s time to work out how to respond next time. Nationally, structurally, our lack of preparedness for extreme heat is a disaster in waiting, as more wearily urgent experts keep telling us. But, given the far more pressing business of choosing the ugliest possible font for leadership contest materials, and Dominic Raab explaining we should “enjoy the sunshine” shortly before much of the A2 caught fire, it looks like we’ll be thrown back on our own resources.

Plans for the site have got the go-ahead. The knock-on effect for Suffolk’s rivers and seawater will soon be clear

Last week, the government gave the go-ahead for a new nuclear power station to be developed on the Suffolk coast. Providing low-carbon electricity for about 6m homes, Sizewell C will stand alongside two existing stations, Sizewell B and the decommissioned Sizewell A. I live close enough to see the 60-metre tall, white dome of Sizewell B almost every day. When I want to torture myself, I look at developer EDF’s “construction phase visualisations” of the 1,380-acre building site, with its towering spoil heaps and forest of cranes, and wonder if this is what it will take to save the planet.

What might not have been immediately obvious in the coverage of the government’s decision was that the Planning Inspectorate, tasked with assessing such projects, had recommended that permission be refused. The problem, the examiners explained, was fairly simple: EDF couldn’t say exactly where it would obtain one of the main substances needed to make a nuclear power station work, that substance being water.

The scientist was best known for his theory that the Earth is a self-regulating community of organisms

James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, has died on his 103rd birthday.

The climate scientist died at home surrounded by loved ones, his family said in a statement.

Banks’ financing of coal, oil, and gas was higher in 2021 than it was in 2016, the year after the Paris agreement was adopted

Campaigners say question about individual action was irresponsible and too little time spent on subject

A group of environmental organisations and campaigners have written to the BBC to rebuke it for inadequate questioning about the climate crisis during Monday’s Tory leadership debate.

Just one question on the environment was asked in the debate, and it put the onus on individuals rather than leaders to act on the climate.

Cognitive decline in older people more likely to be accelerated by exposure to emissions, finds review of 70 studies

Air pollution is likely to increase the risk of developing dementia, a government research group has said.

The Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants has published its findings after reviewing almost 70 studies which analysed how exposure to emissions affect the brain over time.

Local hosepipe bans considered as Environment Agency officials prepare to declare drought in August

People in England are being urged to curb their use of water as the country faces its driest conditions since 1976.

Officials are preparing to declare a drought in August if dry conditions continue, after months of very low rainfall in the UK.

The UK is witnessing extreme temperatures, prompting public outcry. Yet new proposals to counter this are coming up short

Last week, temperatures crested at 40C (104F) in England, bringing the climate crisis to the fore and spurring a fresh wave of dismay. How is it, despite a steady drumbeat of extreme weather events, a rising tide of public outcry, and growing consensus across the political spectrum, that the world remains so profoundly far from the outer limits of the climate targets considered “safe”?

The answer is increasingly located not in climate denial, but in a proliferation of non-solutions advocated by policymakers and business interests with varying degrees of earnestness and good intention, under the umbrella of “green capitalism”. These are proposals sold as urgent, pragmatic tools for cutting emissions or reversing ecosystem loss, but which in fact deliver neither.

Natural History Museum scientists seek to unlock mysteries of deep sea but some fear activity will disturb diversity of the depths

Humanity has managed to explore most of the world’s surface, cataloguing almost every species in existence, but the deep sea still remains a mystery.

However, soon, we may understand more about the depths of the ocean than ever before as scientists have managed to unearth good specimens of species unknown to science using robot technology.

Exploration of the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 5,000-metre abyssal plain that extends between Hawaii and Mexico, has brought to light megafauna previously unknown to science

• Photographs courtesy of DeepCCZ expedition/Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation & NOAA

PM says if Australia didn’t export coal there would be ‘replacement coal from other countries that’s likely to produce higher emissions’

• Get our free news app, morning email briefing and daily news podcast

Anthony Albanese says Labor will not support a moratorium on fossil fuel projects because doing so would have a “devastating impact on the Australian economy”.

Ahead of the introduction of legislation on Wednesday enshrining Labor’s 2030 and 2050 emissions reduction targets, the prime minister told ABC TV on Tuesday night a moratorium was “the policy of the Greens”.

We can’t keep sitting in school, pretending everything is all right, and studying as if the planet wasn’t on fire

School and university students all over the world are planning to take school strikes one step further and occupy our campuses to demand the end of the fossil economy. Taking a lesson from student activists in the 1960s, the climate justice movement’s youth will shut down business as usual. Not because we don’t like learning, but because what we’ve learned already makes it clear that, without a dramatic break from this system, we cannot ensure a livable planet for our presents and futures.

Why occupy? Because we’ve marched. We’ve launched petitions. We’ve written open letters. We’ve had meetings with governments, boards and commissions. We’ve struck. We’ve filled squares, streets and avenues with thousands and, all together, millions of people in continents across this Earth. We’ve screamed with all our lungs. Some of us have even participated in blockades, sit-ins and die-ins. And just as it seemed the seed for deep and radical social transformation was taking root in the midst of the massive 2019 climate mobilizations, Covid-19 came, and our momentum drastically decreased. What didn’t decrease, however, was the greenhouse gas emissions, the exploitation of the global south and the unimaginable profits hoarded by the fossil fuel industry.

This open letter was written by youth activists involved in End Fossil: Occupy! and signed by organizers and groups around the world