The Guardian

Subsidy available will fall from £2,500 to £1,500 – half the sum available to buyers at the start of the year

The UK government has cut grants for electric vehicles for the second time in a year, provoking the anger of the car industry and prompting a call for car tax to be redesigned.

The grant available for electric cars will fall from £2,500 to £1,500 – half the sum available to buyers at the start of the year. The upper price limit for eligible car models will fall from £35,000 to £32,000, down from £50,000 in March.

Programme to tackle pollution crisis caused by an overload of manure faces fierce opposition from farmers

The Dutch government has unveiled a €25bn (£21bn) plan to radically reduce the number of livestock in the country as it struggles to contain an overload of animal manure.

A deal to buy out farmers to try to reduce levels of nitrogen pollution in the country had been mooted for some time, and was finally confirmed after the agreement of a new coalition government in the Netherlands earlier this week.

But the plan, the first of its kind in the world, faces a huge backlash from farmers who have staged big street protests in recent years over the prospect of tough regulation and farmer buyouts. They fear permanent damage to food production in the country if too many farmers are forced to quit.

Assembly member urges £2bn boost for sewage infrastructure as report reveals poor health of waterways

More than 7m tonnes of raw sewage are being discharged into Northern Ireland’s seas and rivers each year, it has been revealed, and every recorded waterway in the country has been found to be in poor health.

Upwards of 3m tonnes of untreated human waste was found to have been released across the Belfast metropolitan area, in which more than a third of Northern Ireland’s population resides.

North Atlantic right whale calf off Georgia coast is only the second born this breeding season

Ocean experts who are monitoring a North Atlantic right whale that gave birth while entangled in fishing rope say there is little chance of removing two 16-feet lengths attached to her while her calf is young.

The endangered whale, named Snow Cone by ocean observers, was seen in a video filmed off the coast of Georgia earlier this month by the Florida fish and wildlife commission. The video shows the newborn calf at her side and the twin ropes attached to her mouth.

Investigation finds areas of cleared land in Queensland likely to be habitats for threatened species

UK consumers could be eating Australian beef linked to deforestation on the back of a new post-Brexit free trade deal signed in the summer, an investigation has found.

Satellite analysis has identified an area of deforestation over the past three years that is more than twice the size of Manhattan across farms in Queensland, the largest beef-producing state in Australia.

Environmental groups organised tests on store-bought fillets from Tasmania’s biggest producers

• Get our free news app; get our morning email briefing

The Tasmanian salmon industry is facing calls for independent nutritional testing after an analysis by activist groups found far more fat in farmed fish than wild-caught salmon and industry-reported figures.

Environment groups concerned about the impact of salmon farming bought two salmon fillets from a Coles supermarket, an IGA supermarket and a fishmonger in Melbourne to have them tested.

Online retailer disputes figures showing it produced 270,000 tonnes of packaging last year, with about 10,000 tonnes likely to end up in seas

Amazon’s plastic packaging waste soared by almost a third, to 270,000 tonnes, during the pandemic last year, according to a report from marine conservation group Oceana.

Oceana estimates up to 10,700 tonnes of this plastic, including air pillows, bubble wrap and plastic-lined paper envelopes, equivalent to a delivery van’s worth every 67 minutes, is likely to end up in the sea.

Like humanity, wildlife knows no boundaries. Stopping people moving also carves up habitats, driving species to extinction

This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more. The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first to have been named by the UN as likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last. Great cities find themselves dangerously short of water as aquifers are drained. Air pollution kills 10 million a year. Synthetic chemicals in soil, air and water impose untold effects on both ecologies and people.

But it also works the other way round. Humanitarian catastrophes or, to be more precise, governments’ cruel and irrational responses to them, are triggering ecological disaster. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the construction of border walls.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Sit at the kids’ table and radicalise them instead, it’s more effective and lots more fun

• Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published
• Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints

Surprising discovery shows scale of plastic pollution and reveals enzymes that could boost recycling

Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.

The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.

London mayor releases £600,000 funding to help create green rooftops and reintroduce lost species

Hyde Park could be redesigned and lost species including beavers reintroduced to London under ambitious rewilding plans.

The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is working with Ben Goldsmith – a member of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the brother of Khan’s former rival for the mayoral election Zac Goldsmith – to boost nature in the capital, including making the royal parks wilder and encouraging people to plant green rooftops.

Prickly tree beat hundreds of nominations in Woodland Trust contest

A lone, weathered hawthorn, which has stood for at least half a century on the rugged Scottish coast, has been named Tree of the Year for 2021.

Sticking out at an angle over the cockle shell beach at Kippford, with a tangle of broken and twisted branches, the prickly tree beat hundreds of nominations to become the UK’s favourite in the contest run by the Woodland Trust.

Call comes after ambitious early draft of EU energy performance in buildings directive ran into opposition

The EU executive is under pressure to ratchet up green energy standards for buildings, as it prepares a further batch of legislation to tackle the climate emergency.

The European Commission is expected to propose mandatory energy efficiency upgrades for buildings in the EU in legislative proposals published on Wednesday, but MEPs and Green NGOs fear they will not be strict enough.

Report concludes particles are health hazard as London councils set to vote on Edmonton incinerator

MPs are calling for a moratorium on the expansion of new waste incineration plants just days before councils in London vote on awarding a contract to build a huge new plant in Edmonton.

A report by the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution says expansions should be halted immediately to protect human health and cut carbon emissions.

Australian Conservation Foundation report found that climate change was not mentioned for 178 out of 334 critically endangered species and habitats

Conservation documents for more than half of Australia’s critically endangered species and habitats fail to mention climate change according to new analysis that argues there is a significant “climate gap” in the management of Australia’s threatened wildlife.

The report was commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and prepared by the Australian National University’s GreenLaw project, which is led by students in the ANU’s law faculty.

My husband loves them, but I am ideologically opposed. Luckily for us both, a diplomatic taxi driver settled our row

I like to think of myself as a generous person with pockets of tightness, rather than a tight person with a blind spot in pubs. One of these pockets is around grocery delivery services. You know: you need a green pepper, a gale is blowing outside, so you get some poor kid on a bike to go to the supermarket for you and, by some miracle of modern capitalism, your pepper is only 30p more expensive than it would be normally, as long as you also order ice-cream.

It’s not the money that bugs me, just the underlying Marxist truism – that if some of us refuse to do any of our own menial tasks, others will end up doing all menial tasks for everyone. Plus, we live next door to a supermarket and I’m not even exaggerating, except by a small amount.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Heading into the election, all focus should be on the carbon budget and how much we emit before net zero. Everything else is just noise

The election next year will be redolent with spin and obfuscation. Unfortunately, this will be most evident in relation to climate change policy. So let us prepare by outlining the reality of where we are at, and what the future holds.

First the good news: 2021 is on target to be the coolest year since 2014. The latest Nasa figures to October has 2021 on track to be around 1.1C above the late 19th century average.

The 18-month process affirms original finding that Jam Land’s clearing had a significant impact on critically endangered native habitat

• Follow our live blog for the latest updates
• Get our free news app; get our morning email briefing

Jam Land, the company part-owned by the energy minister Angus Taylor and his brother Richard, illegally poisoned critically endangered grasslands and should restore native habitat, a ministerial review of the original investigation has concluded.

The decision, published late Friday, follows an 18-month review of the original determination which ordered Jam Land to restore 103 hectares of grasslands on a property in the New South Wales Monaro region.

Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

Lancaster University researchers say sowing wildflowers alongside panels would have benefits for farmers who rely on pollinators

Solar parks could provide habitats for wildlife – and particularly bumblebees – to flourish, if managed in the right way, benefiting farmers and nature, new research suggests.

There are already 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of solar parks in the UK, in which arrays of solar panels are installed over a large area, and an estimated 90,000 hectares will be needed. Yet the parks have attracted controversy over claims they are ugly, blight productive land and harm nature.

Technique has ‘huge potential’ for monitoring decline in biodiversity, say scientists

Insect DNA has been gathered from the air and for the first time used to detect 85 insect species, according to scientists from Lund University in Sweden.

Bees, moths, flies, beetles, wasps and ants have been identified in a study which raises hopes that airborne environmental DNA (eDNA) could become a useful tool in monitoring insect abundance and declines in biodiversity.