The Guardian

Accidents and pollution are making road vehicles untenable. With public transport and ride-sharing, their demise can’t come soon enough

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”

John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor

Conservationists say auditor general’s report shows offsets must be ‘last resort’ amid calls for overhaul of biodiversity market

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A New South Wales government environmental offsets scheme is failing to protect some of the state’s most endangered species and ecosystems and is riddled with integrity and transparency concerns, according to a review by the state’s auditor general.

The report, described as “utterly damning” by conservationists, prompted opposition and crossbench MPs to call for an overhaul of the scheme.

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He wanted me to stay when the drains backed up and left the garden submerged in a foul pond. Obviously I still went

I had four teenagers all packed and ready to go to Ramsgate, and I was doing a quick final scout around the house for where the terrible smell was coming from. I love seeing a teenager with an overnight bag. You just know they’ve forgotten the real stuff (toothbrush, pants) and remembered the dumb stuff (crochet hooks, spare headphone case). And they look so proud and independent.

In fact, the smell was outside the house, a backed-up drain that had made a zen-looking but appallingly foul pond of the garden. Mr Z came back from work and identified this, just as we were all leaving. “Do you want me to stay?” I said, with a lot of heavy upwards inflection to indicate that no way on earth was I going to. “Well, yes,” he replied.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

This long-overdue change is good news for households and the planet but much more must be done to future-proof housing

Energy-efficiency standards for new homes in Australia are being upgraded for the first time in a decade. New homes will be required to improve minimum performance from six stars to seven stars under the nationwide house energy rating scheme. Federal, state and territory building ministers agreed on the change last Friday.

The rating will also use a whole-of-home energy “budget”. This will allow homes to meet the new standard in different ways. The standard will come into force in May 2023 and all new homes will have to comply by October 2023.

In behaviour only previously seen in humans, ‘social brain’ helps dolphins form complex alliances to see off their rivals for females

Dolphins form decade-long social bonds, and cooperate among and between cliques, to help one another find mates and fight off competitors, new research has found – behaviour not previously confirmed among animals.

“These dolphins have long-term stable alliances, and they have intergroup alliances. Alliances of alliances of alliances, really,” said Dr Richard Connor, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and one of the lead authors of the paper. “But before our study, it had been thought that cooperative alliances between groups were unique to humans.”

Melting glaciers and torrential rains are wrecking lives. Western governments must step up their response

The harm and distress caused by floods in Pakistan are difficult – if not impossible – to quantify, as a crisis of vast proportions keeps unfolding. They have killed around 1,000 people so far this summer, with at least 119 losing their lives in one 24-hour period last week. The number of those who have lost their homes, or been evacuated, is in the millions, with 300,000 dwellings destroyed. More than 33 million people are affected – around one in seven of the population. The country’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, says the floods – caused by torrential monsoon rains and melting glaciers – are the worst in living memory. Around a third of Pakistan is under water. Vitally important agricultural land will take months to drain.

Hunger, homelessness and the spread of water-borne diseases are among the most immediate problems, and humanitarian aid must be urgently ramped up if further suffering is to be prevented. Supplies have begun to arrive from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, but Pakistan’s government is right to expect more – especially from the rich western nations that bear the greatest responsibility for global heating. Pakistan has more glaciers – 7,532 – than anywhere on Earth outside the polar regions, and is thus one of the countries most endangered by fossil fuel use and the temperature rises and other extreme weather that it causes.

Outgoing PM to warn against focusing on short-term energy solutions in one of his final speeches

Leading green Conservatives have backed Boris Johnson’s call for his successor to invest in renewable energy, amid concern that the Tory leadership frontrunner Liz Truss could rely more on fossil fuels to combat soaring prices.

In one of his final speeches as prime minister, Johnson is set to warn against focusing on short-term solutions and neglecting both renewables and a wider shift towards net zero.

An article in the Nature Climate Change journal argues that non-violent direct action taken by experts is effective

Scientists should commit acts of civil disobedience to show the public how seriously they regard the threat posed by the climate crisis, a group of leading scientists has argued.

“Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis,” the researchers wrote in an article, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

Loss will contribute a minimum rise of 27cm regardless of what climate action is taken, scientists discover

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.

They are our last truly public spaces, but the scale of their neglect by this government is becoming clear

In a summer when even Conservative voters, MPs and publications are suddenly waking up to the realisation that nothing in the UK seems to work and everything seems to be breaking – and they’re all trying very hard to find the guy who did this – crumbling parks infrastructure may be low down the list of priorities, given the desperate state of the NHS, the social care system, our sewage-filled rivers and soaring demand for food banks.

But these are dark times for our parks, which have been devastated by annual Conservative budget cuts since 2010. Last week a Guardian investigation found that local authorities in England are spending £330m less a year on parks in real terms than they were a decade ago. The study found that less affluent parts of the country have been hit the hardest by austerity, with parks in the north-west and the north-east suffering in particular.

Lack of activity has confounded forecasts so far but a cluster of thunderstorms could change that

The Atlantic hurricane season has so far confounded forecasts of an active year, with only three named storms so far, none of which were hurricane strength. In fact, until now this August joins 1997 and 1961 in having no named storms.

However, there are three months left of the season and activity is starting to stir in the tropics. A cluster of thunderstorms in the central Atlantic has the potential to organise sufficiently to become the first named storm since Colin in early July. Should this occur, it may move westwards and approach the Leeward Islands, bringing the threat of heavy rainfall towards the end of this week, but there is little suggestion it will develop into a significant storm at this stage.

Trends are so last season. As the resale clothes market booms, traditional styling is now leading the way over the quick fix

I suppose, in theory, sustainable fashion shouldn’t have any one look. After all, surely the whole point of prioritising ethics over aesthetics is that clothes design should not be all about what they look like, but about how they are made: the raw materials used, the industrial processes undergone, the people employed, the carbon footprint of transportation. But in reality, it does have a look. You can’t take aesthetics out of fashion. Sustainable fashion has style rules, too. Just different ones.

Some of this is simple practicalities. Sequins, being mostly made from non-biodegradable fabrics, are a no-no on environmental grounds. If you jazz up a T-shirt with decorative zips or emblazon it with beading or glued-on trims, you make it much more difficult for the fabric to be usefully recycled or reused. Therefore, streamlined design is favoured. Textile dyeing is one of the most water-intensive elements of the clothes production cycle, so bright colours can be a red flag.

Jess Cartner-Morley is the Guardian’s fashion associate editor

EA ‘shutting down’ calls from public about rivers, says former worker Helen Nightingale, leading waterways to deteriorate

England’s rivers will continue to deteriorate unless the Environment Agency stops “shutting down” the public’s calls about pollution, according to an ex-employee who worked at the agency for three decades.

Officers are told to ignore calls from the public and told not to look at possible incidents if the caller thinks they are lower impact, meaning they fall into so-called category 3 or 4. This has left staff “demoralised” says Helen Nightingale, a catchment planner in north-west Lancashire who left the Environment Agency in April.

The release of vast new areas along the Australian coast for oil and gas exploration is undermining proclamations about creating a cleaner economy

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The Albanese government has a decision to make: does it want people to think it takes the climate crisis seriously? Because at the moment it’s sending mixed messages.

On one hand, it is telling a story of progress. Its ascent to power has, along with the rise of the teals and the Greens, reset the way the country thinks about dealing with the problem.

Across Britain we are witnessing processes that look familiar but are too early and not what they seem. We must use them as a warning to act

Across Britain, the woods are turning orange. Drifts of dry leaves are growing on forest floors and eddying into street corners. Hawthorn and rowan, elder and holly berries are all ripening, and the ferns are fringes of gold. From a distance, it is beautiful. But the air is still warm and summery.

And all of it is two or three months early. Holly berries usually ripen in November or December. Blackberries, traditionally a late August treat, began ripening at the end of June. This turning and leaf fall is not the usual gradual preparation for winter in temperate zones but a stress response by trees trying to conserve water. We are now in a false autumn, caused by heat and drought. And it feels wrong.

Environment Agency chief calls for new attitudes to conserve water and avoid droughts

British people need to be “less squeamish” about drinking water derived from sewage, the boss of the Environment Agency has said.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Sir James Bevan outlined measures the government, water companies and ordinary people should be taking to avoid severe droughts.

Having raw sewage lapping around the UK is a fitting symbol of our freedom from the tyranny of EU red tape

Apparently, you can now see the ring of human excrement surrounding Brexit Britain from space, the raw sewage of Brexit’s environmental fallout lapping at the shores of our sceptic isle. The Chinese astronaut Wang Yaping, whom I befriended at one of Robin Ince and Brian Cox’s Hammersmith Apollo space-comedy events while dancing to Charlotte Church’s indie-pop covers band, contacted me from her sleep pod on the Tianhe space station module to describe the sight. “Oh Stewart! From space, Britain now looks like a beautiful green jade earring, but a beautiful green jade earring that has been dropped in an oyster pail Chinese takeaway box full of dog diarrhoea. Oh Stewart!” Wang sighed, clearly distressed, “no fine ladies will want to wear that filthy earring that is Brexit Britain now. So sad. So sad for you. How is your Edinburgh fringe going? I hear Kunt and the Gang’s Shannon Matthews: The Musical is very good.”

Like me, I am sure you remember reasonable Remainers’ warnings about the incoming non-availability of European manufactured, sewage-refining chemicals being dismissed as “project fear”; like me, I am sure you remember how Michael Gove snorted with haughty delight as he promised us leaving the EU would enable us to enjoy even tighter environmental protections, rather than being swamped with raw sewage. Another Brexit-non-bonus; like me, I am sure you worried that the EU’s fines for water pollution by privatised water companies were all that was saving us from capitalism crapping into every culvert, as big business kleptocrats asset-stripped the water infrastructure and processed the profits abroad; like me, I am sure you realised that the Conservatives’ October 2021 decision to vote down an amendment that would have stopped the dumping of raw sewage into seas and rivers would mean their friends who own the water companies would be free to choke our waterways and coastlines; and like me, I am sure you were more than a little bewildered to find that the most consistent voice of reason in this crisis is former Undertones frontman and keen fly fisher Feargal Sharkey. Who can forget the prophetic hit single, Here Comes the Summer, with its classic couplet: “Keep looking for the girls with their bodies so fit, lying on the beaches all covered in shit”?

Governments urged to plan for emerging technologies that will allow bidirectional charging so vehicle batteries can power homes

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Australia’s first mandate to make new apartment buildings “electric vehicle-ready” should be extended to all new housing, potentially turning entire suburbs into virtual batteries supporting the power grid, the federal science minister said.

Ed Husic helped helm Friday’s gathering of federal, state and territory building ministers in Sydney, where it was agreed to amend the national construction code to require new apartment blocks to be capable of charging cars in all their parking spots.

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If foreign secretary wins the Tory leadership contest she looks set to have to change course on ‘handouts’ despite campaign pledges

For months, everyone in government had known that Friday was energy cap day, and at 7am the bad news duly dropped. Phones pinged as the nation woke to Ofgem’s confirmation that typical gas and electricity bills were to rise by a frightening 80%.

Millions of people would be unable to cope, said charities. Even those on low or middle earnings who had some savings could see them entirely wiped out. It was a full-on national crisis, albeit long predicted.

This fifth round of discussions was meant to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would protect biodiversity in international waters

The latest round of talks at the United Nations aimed at securing protections for marine life in international waters that cover half the planet ended without agreement Saturday.

The fifth round of discussions, which began two weeks ago, were designed to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would set rules for protecting biodiversity in two-thirds of the world’s oceanic areas that lie outside territorial waters.