The Guardian

Group claims ministers have failed to check environmental impact of burning gas at site off Aberdeen

Greenpeace has confirmed it will take legal action against the UK government over claims it has failed to check the environmental impact of burning gas from the Jackdaw gasfield off the coast of Aberdeen.

The government gave its approval for Shell to develop the field for gas extraction on 2 June.

Conversationists say judgment is one of the most significant in environmental law since the environmental protection act was introduced in 1999

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Conservationists have declared a win in a fight over Tasmania’s takyana/Tarkine rainforest after a judge found the Morrison government had erred in approving preliminary work on a mining waste dam.

Federal court justice Mark Moshinsky found the then environment minister, Sussan Ley, had failed to apply the precautionary principle before allowing drilling and surveying works for a new tailings dam near the town of Rosebery, on the state’s west coast.

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Change to ensure future emissions reduction targets could only be increased follows talks with crossbench and Greens

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The Albanese government has strengthened its signature climate legislation to make it clear future emissions reduction targets can only increase, as well as bolstering transparency about its response to expert advice from the Climate Change Authority.

The adjustments ahead of the introduction of the bill on Wednesday follow negotiations with the crossbench and the Greens and come as the latest Guardian Essential poll shows 50% of respondents want a bill reflecting Labor’s specific election commitments passed by the new parliament to address the climate crisis.

Travellers on ‘bucket list adventure’ costing $110,000 will emit 20 times more than poor people do in a year

Disney is marketing a $110,000-a-ticket elite package tour that comes with a carbon price tag of 6.2 tonnes of emissions for each guest – 20 times more than a person in a low-income country accounts for in an entire year.

The 24-day “bucket list adventure”, which is limited to 75 guests, takes in 12 Disney resorts in six countries on three continents. Customers will travel on a “VIP-configured” Boeing 757, accompanied by Disney staff “who [will] provide fun and fact-filled stories enabling you to be immersed in every location you visit”.

Government report calls for urgent action including removing barriers in waterways and better water quality

Wild salmon stocks are at their lowest on record in England, a government report has found.

Officials said the number of fish was reaching “crisis point” with urgent action required, including removing barriers in waterways and improving water quality.

Weather balloons rise to 5,184 metres before finding freezing point amid record heatwaves

Switzerland has recorded the freezing point way above its highest summits, smashing a record set 27 years ago, meteorologists have said.

Scientists say human-induced climate change is amplifying the record heatwaves in several parts of the world in recent weeks.

Hosepipe bans could be brought in and farmers restricted from irrigating crops

The UK is facing the prospect of a drought being declared in August, experts have said, warning of potential crop failures after a period of remarkably dry weather and extreme heat.

Hosepipe bans for households could be brought in across the UK and farmers could be restricted from irrigating their crops if the government implements a drought plan.

Campaigners warn of damage as concessions now cover over a quarter of land on both sides of border

Environmentalists on the island of Ireland say they fear a “new carve-up of the island” over coming decades, with mining concessions now covering more than a quarter of all land on both sides of the border.

More than 25% of the total land area of Northern Ireland is covered by mining concessions, according to government statistics, while the figure for the Irish republic has in the past couple of years been even higher at 27%. The prospecting licences covering these areas grant mining companies permission to survey and assess sites, as well as carry out exploratory work that includes digging tunnels, pits, taking rock samples and carrying out chemical analyses.

His latest climate defeat has affirmed what we’ve long feared: that he just isn’t the man for the moment

On Friday, 15 July, Joe Biden acknowledged the death of his signature climate bill, conceding defeat in a war he never truly seemed willing to wage. He did it from a hastily prepared briefing room in Jeddah, where he had spent the previous day shilling for increased Saudi oil production.

It was painful to watch. The fossil fuel oligarchs had him right where they wanted him: his climate ambitions foiled, his rhetoric defanged, his hat in his hand. For their part, they had never been under any illusions that they were waging a war. Over the course of his presidency, they had deployed every weapon at their disposal to protect their profit margins from the public’s desire for a dignified life on a habitable planet.

Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin Books) and a climate activist

Due to climate change they may need to be cancelled again forever

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‘Everything we thought we knew may not actually be true,’ says fish biologist in response to finding

Researchers have made a surprising discovery about the dining habits of whale sharks, handing the largest fish in the sea another world title.

It turns out the ocean giants routinely enjoy a seaweed salad alongside hefty helpings of krill, meaning they have officially dethroned the Kodiak bear as the world’s biggest omnivore.

The time has come to choose: do you trust the people in suits downplaying this emergency, or the activists lying in roads in an attempt to ward off catastrophe?

For the past year or so, I have been repeatedly listening to a critically acclaimed album, Ignorance, released in 2021 by the Canadian band the Weather Station. Its music is graceful, poised and smooth, but it is also an almost conceptual set of songs about the urgency of the climate crisis and the disorientation of living in a culture that still refuses to acknowledge it. According to its chief creator, the singer-songwriter and former actor Tamara Lindeman, many of its songs evoke what happens when “this veneer of ‘everything will be OK’ disappears”. That moment of revelation is perfectly captured in one song I have played over and over again – which is simply called Loss, and finds Lindeman recalling a conversation: “What was it last night she said? At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.”

Amid unprecedented temperatures, fires and the grim pantomime that will eventually end with the selection of our next prime minister, I suspect more people than ever would now understand those words as a matter of direct emotional experience. For millions of us, this summer’s heat is synonymous with an anxiety that is now impossible to shake off, and a renewed awareness of the small transgressions and outright hypocrisies that are required to get through each day. We perform them because of something that Lindeman’s lyrics consummately describe: that very human talent for just about averting our eyes from what is directly in front of us, so as to live a quiet life; and a political culture that just about keeps the “everything will be OK” veneer in place.

Surely last week’s inferno must focus Conservative minds on the one real issue, the climate crisis – mustn’t it?

“Dear Jim’ll. Please can you fix it for me to a) Go all upside down in a Typhoon plane like in Top Gun; b) Go in parliament drunk with my best friend Nadine and shout “boring” at the square politicians; c) Have a massive party with all food in a massive stately home for free; d) Give all my friends lordly old-sounding titles like in Game of Thrones; e) Get Winston Churchill’s autograph. I haven’t heard about any of the bad stuff relating to you by the way, so jog on! Yours Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Wall-Spaff Deep-State Letterbox Johnson (58 years old).” Well done. Now go. Go. Can you just… Just go. Go. Don’t start playing the piano. There are your shoes. Have you got your water bottle? Go. Just go.

I believe it was I who wrote, in this column on 19 August 2018, before the Brexiter foreign secretary Boris Johnson was even prime minister, “Those in positions of power – journalists, fellow Conservative party members wondering how things will pan out, people biding their time on the divided opposition benches, trembling television presenters in search of ‘balanced arguments’ in the face of blatant lies and transparent manipulation – know what this incubus is and what it is doing, and how it is prepared to put our futures at risk to achieve it. And yet they do not hold Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to account. They will not shrink Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to snuff box size and sink him into the black lake of legend where he belongs. They will have to live with their failure. And, sadly, so will we.” Though I take no pleasure in having so conclusively predicted the chaos Johnson would ultimately unleash, I am happy to be paid twice for the same 117 words.

‘This is just proof that every now and then, despite all the trauma and difficulties … some good stuff happens’

Barry Brown wanders out to the headlands of North Stradbroke Island every day with a camera in hand, hoping he’ll capture something special – like a whale spouting or a fur seal resting on a rock.

Last week, Brown was in his usual spot near Whale Rock, at the South Gorge walk on the island south-east of Brisbane, hunting for birds to photograph.

More than 40 houses were destroyed by fires on Britain’s hottest day. Now there are calls for an urgent rethink on building safety laws

Fires that burned in several parts of the UK last week spread in the same way as those that led to the great fire of London and would have been far worse with stronger winds, a fire expert has said.

Fires in Wennington, Uxbridge and Erith destroyed 41 properties last Tuesday, when temperatures went above 40C to make it the hottest day on record in the UK, and fire services had their busiest day since the second world war.

Sale calls into question protection deal signed at Cop26 as expert warns Congo auction could be a catastrophe for wildlife, health and climate

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced it will auction oil and gas permits in critically endangered gorilla habitat and the world’s largest tropical peatlands next week. The sale raises concerns about the credibility of a forest protection deal signed with the country by Boris Johnson at Cop26.

On Monday, hydrocarbons minister Didier Budimbu said the DRC was expanding an auction of oil exploration blocks to include two sites that overlap with Virunga national park, a Unesco world heritage site home to Earth’s last remaining mountain gorillas.

With wildfires, railway tracks buckling and tarmac melting, it’s no longer possible to ignore how broken the world is

Back in late February 2020, in the days before the pandemic, I spent a morning in a taxi listening to the news and wondering what it meant to preserve a moment. There was the slow-motion sensation that life as we knew it might be coming to an end. Still, something whispered in me, experimental rather than fatalistic: you’d better remember it, just in case. So – here is the window-shaped patch of blue sky, here are the people walking along the pavement, here are the trees. All recorded deliberately, eyes wide. Here is your life as you know it, frozen in a single frame on a cold, bright February day – taken carelessly, recklessly, for granted.

Now we are experiencing another crossing over into a before and an after. Tipping points are subjective. People have different thresholds, different ways in which we bury our heads. It’s also easy to get used to things. It’s just a matter of a couple of degrees, after all. Any boiling frog would tell you the same. But the sheer physicality of a wall of heat – malevolent heat, city-stopping heat, deadly heat – is hard to disavow. Heat that has been unprecedented in my lifetime, and will become normal within my lifetime. It’s as good a point as any to accept that the unthinkable is now thinkable.

Sophie Mackintosh is an author. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize

While planting rates have risen in Scotland, carbon capture figures overall have fallen every year since 2009, official data shows

The amount of carbon dioxide captured by the UK’s forests has fallen by millions of tonnes and will remain at historically low rates for over a decade, because of a failure to quickly replace old forest stocks.

Official data shows the amount of CO2 absorbed annually by trees in the UK peaked at just under 20m tonnes in 2009, but has fallen every year since. Millions of mature conifers have been felled but not replaced, reducing the carbon they capture and store.

Labor, the Greens and the teals should be focusing on widening the footprint of support for climate action, rather than preserving product differentiation

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Over the past decade or so, there have been times when I’ve felt more like a war correspondent than a political one. And ahead of the opening of the new parliament on Tuesday, Peter Dutton is certainly not signalling an armistice.

Dutton has locked the Liberal party into voting against Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target because he thinks he can continue to weaponise medium-term climate action against a new government, at a time when inflation is running hot and interest rates are rising.

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Current plans predicated on stable growth seem foolish when we know that shocks such as global heating aren’t going away

Temperatures in Britain hit 40C. Runways melt at major airports. The London fire brigade reports its busiest single day since the second world war as fires rage around the city. The Met Office warns of temperatures so high they “could lead to serious illness or loss of life”.

Meanwhile, inflation grinds inexorably upwards. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of it, but other pressures were already apparent. Staples such as coffee saw price rises as a result of extreme weather disrupting harvests. Even silicon chips have been affected, with droughts in Taiwan putting the hugely water-intensive production of semiconductors at risk.

James Meadway is director of the Progressive Economy Forum