The Guardian

Parliamentary committee also recommends cut-off date for sale of diesel and petrol cars

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A Victorian parliamentary committee has recommended the Andrews government consider a ban on gas connections in new homes to help accelerate the state’s transition to renewables.

It also urged Victoria to commit to a cut-off date for the sale of new petrol, diesel and gas-fuelled vehicles.

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Greenwashing ploys cannot mask the pollution wreaked both by cigarettes and new nicotine products

The most common source of plastic pollution in our environment is not bottles, plastic bags or food wrappers, but cigarette butts. Smokers stub out nearly 800,000 metric tonnes of cigarettes every year, enough butts to cover New York’s Central Park. They are in every country on the planet, from city streets to rubbish tips, rivers and beaches.

Cigarettes contain single-use plastics because they are engineered and manufactured that way. Butts take a decade to degrade, releasing more than 7,000 toxic chemicals into the environment. Wildlife is also at risk: researchers found partly-digested cigarette butts in 70% of seabirds and 30% of sea turtles sampled for one study.

Policy failure and lack of enforcement have left Britain’s waterways and farmland vulnerable to ‘forever chemicals’

We have recently woken up to a disgusting issue. Rather than investing properly in new sewage treatment works, water companies in the UK – since they were privatised in 1989 – have handed £72 bn in dividends to their shareholders. Our sewerage system is antiquated and undersized, and routinely bypassed altogether, as companies allow raw human excrement to pour directly into our rivers. They have reduced some of them to stinking, almost lifeless drains.

This is what you get from years of policy failure and the near-collapse of monitoring and enforcement by successive governments. Untreated sewage not only loads our rivers with excessive nutrients, but it’s also the major source of the microplastics that now pollute them. It contains a wide range of other toxins, including PFASs: the “forever chemicals” that were the subject of the movie Dark Waters. This may explain the recent apparent decline in otter populations: after recovering from the organochlorine pesticides used in the 20th century, they are now being hit by new pollutants.

Campaigners report incidents of the cruel practice on several certified boats, amid allegations of a flawed auditing system

The Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fisheries under its blue tick sustainability label, has ordered an independent investigation into allegations of shark finning on tuna vessels in certified Pacific fisheries.

Shark finning is the cruel practice of removing fins from live sharks. A report by the UK charity Shark Guardian with CNS Global Consulting, a sustainable development consultancy, has alleged it took place on board three vessels operating in the western central Pacific that were certified by the MSC, which runs the world’s largest fishery certification programme.

Five projects to receive funding from Defra and Natural England to tackle wildlife loss and improve access to nature

Up to 99,000 hectares of land in England, from city fringes to wetlands, will be focused on supporting wildlife in five major “nature recovery” projects, the government has said.

The five landscape-scale projects in the West Midlands, Cambridgeshire, the Peak District, Norfolk and Somerset aim to help tackle wildlife loss and the climate crisis, and improve public access to nature.

Barnaby Joyce ponders ditching net zero, while Matt Canavan’s claim the climate goal is ‘a failed agenda’ globally dismissed as ‘laughably untrue’

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The Coalition is picking through the entrails, scouring the wreckage and sifting through whatever other analogies we might have missed as it works out how it lost the election.

In postmortem interviews, the Liberals and Nationals are debating what they should do differently on the core issue of the climate crisis after a wave of seats to pro-climate Greens, independents and a Labor party with bolder climate targets.

Wandering salamanders live in the world’s tallest trees and wind tunnel tests show how the amphibians take their ‘leaps of faith’

A new study is shedding fresh light into the incredible world of California’s temperate forests, and the daring survival techniques of one of its inhabitants: parachuting salamanders.

The study, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, shows how salamanders living in the canopy are able to parachute consistently, slowing their speed and controlling their movements.

Other seven locations popular with locals have high concentrations of harmful bacteria due to sewage and livestock

Only one popular river spot for bathing and water sports in and around Oxford has bacteria within safe levels, a survey by a campaign group has found.

The other seven locations in rivers which are regularly used by swimmers, punters, rowers and kayakers, were found to have concentrations of harmful bacteria one and a half to three times above recommended safe levels, a study by the Oxford Rivers Project funded by Thames Water has found.

Commitment to building four-storey bioreactors is gamechanger for cultivated meat industry, says expert

The building of the world’s largest bioreactors to produce cultivated meat has been announced, with the potential to supply tens of thousands of shops and restaurants. Experts said the move could be a “gamechanger” for the nascent industry.

The US company Good Meat said the bioreactors would grow more than 13,000 tonnes of chicken and beef a year. It will use cells taken from cell banks or eggs, so the meat will not require the slaughter of any livestock.

Residents of Jacobabad say loss of trees and water facilities makes record-breaking temperatures unbearable

Muhammad Akbar, 40, sells dried chickpeas on a wheelbarrow in Jacobabad, and has suffered heatstroke three times in his life.

But now, he says, the heat is getting worse. “In those days there were many trees in the whole city and there was no shortage of water and we had other facilities so we could easily beat the heat. But now there are no trees or other facilities including water, due to which the heat is becoming unbearable. I’m scared that this heat will take our lives in the coming years.”

Host of November’s summit wants focus to be on ‘moving from pledges to implementation’

Financial assistance for developing countries must be at the top of the agenda for UN climate talks this year, the host country, Egypt, has made clear, as governments will be required to follow through on promises made at the Cop26 summit last year.

Egypt will host Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in November. The talks will take place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, as well as rising energy and food prices around the world, leaving rich countries grappling with a cost-of-living crisis and poor countries struggling with debt mountains.

Julien Vincent’s Market Forces organisation started with a spare laptop and a spare bedroom before raising the ire of the former Coalition government

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The laptop was second-hand, but Julien Vincent had a spare room and a very, very big idea: could he start a movement to convince Australia’s biggest financial institutions to stop investing the billions of dollars that sustained the fossil fuel industry?

“There wasn’t much to lose really,” says Vincent. “But yes, I was nervous early on because of the significance of the people we were taking on. The banks and the fossil fuel industry … they’ll be as cold and ruthless as they can be.”

Recipients from around world demonstrate power of unified community action

Indigenous activists and lawyers who took on transnational corporations and their own governments to force climate action are among the 2022 winners of the world’s pre-eminent environmental award.

Taking on powerful vested interests is a risky business, and the recipients of this year’s Goldman prize demonstrate the power of unified community action, perseverance and the courts in the battle to save the planet from environmental collapse.

Marjan Minnesma’s legal fight forced the Dutch government to cut emissions, while Chima Williams took on Royal Dutch Shell

The road to a landmark legal victory compelling the Dutch government to take climate action began a decade ago when the 2022 Goldman prize winner Marjan Minnesma received an official letter saying the government did not want to be a frontrunner in tackling the climate crisis.

At the time the Netherlands was one of the world’s worst greenhouse emitters and had a dismal record on renewables that was highly dependent on fossil fuels – a stark contrast with its environmentally friendly image of windmills and bicycles.

Unwanted lockdown goldfish pose a triple threat to native species in UK waterways, study reveals

If that lockdown goldfish is starting to lose its lustre, think twice before throwing it in the river or canal – the creatures may look innocent but their voracious appetite, tolerance for cold and have-a-go habits compared with native species can be catastrophic for local wildlife.

New research shows that goldfish consume much more than comparable fish in UK waters, eat more than other invasive fish and are also much more willing to aggressively take on other competing species.

Time is running out to save 58 resident species, Butterfly Conservation warns

Half of Britain’s butterfly species are now listed as threatened with extinction after five more joined the new “red list” of endangered butterflies.

The increase in the number of species listed as “vulnerable” from nine in 2011 to 16 today is a warning that time is running out to save the 58 resident species, according to Butterfly Conservation, which compiled the red list from scientific monitoring data according to the criteria set out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Climate change is likely to exacerbate the rapid spread of viruses and pathogens as humans encroach on the natural world

In the past three weeks there have been nearly 100 cases and 18 human deaths from a rare tick-borne disease in Iraq; a fourth case of the Ebola virus and more than 100 cases of bubonic plague have been found in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and just two years after Africa was declared free of wild polio, new cases have turned up in Malawi and Mozambique. A dangerous strain of typhus is circulating in Nepal, India and China. There are alarming outbreaks on several continents of mosquito diseases such as malaria, dengue and West Nile virus.

Set against this global context, the so-far very limited monkeypox outbreaks that have started to appear in the last month – including 71 cases detected in the UK – are only remarkable because they are being reported in rich countries.

The ruling, and another crucial court decision this week, will force the company to face charges it lied about global heating

The Massachusetts high court on Tuesday ruled that the US’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, must face a trial over accusations that it lied about the climate crisis and covered up the fossil fuel industry’s role in worsening environmental devastation.

Exxon claimed the case brought by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, was politically motived and amounted to an attempt to prevent the company from exercising its free speech rights. But the state’s supreme judicial court unanimously dismissed the claim in the latest blow to the oil industry’s attempts to head off a wave of lawsuits across the country over its part in causing global heating.

Experts say 35% rise in acreage covered by migratory insects my reflect adaptation to changing climate

Mexican experts have said that 35% more monarch
butterflies arrived this year to spend the winter in mountaintop forests, compared with the previous season.

Experts say the rise may reflect the butterflies’ ability to adapt to more extreme bouts of heat or drought by varying the date when they leave Mexico.

Scientists hope Albanese government addresses extinction crisis as new research shows 63 vertebrates face annihilation by 2041

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More than 40 Australian animals at the highest risk of extinction in the next two decades could be saved – and it would take only a small amount of extra conservation effort to achieve this, according to new research.

A team of Australian scientists has identified the 63 vertebrates they believe are most likely to go extinct by 2041, and found at least 47 can be brought back from the brink.